Beautiful Ghosts (51 page)

Shan froze, still in the shadows, understanding now the reason for his sudden nervousness. He could not see Ko. Then the figure with the sledgehammer turned and Shan saw his face. His son was smashing the ceramic artifacts. But there was no sneer on his countenance, no derision in his eyes for the Tibetans. He worked with a sober, almost angry expression, working the sledge with an easy, experienced rhythm. The rhythm of a prison laborer.

As Corbett appeared in the sunlight in front of the building the soldier stood, straightened his uniform. The action caught Ko’s eye, and he lowered the hammer, turning to gaze at the American. He took a step forward, peering into the shadows where Shan stood. As Shan stepped into the open yard Ko met his gaze a moment, showing no emotion, no greeting, then lowered his eyes and swung the hammer again.

When Shan approached, Ko shifted the hammer behind him, as if somehow embarrassed by it.

“Yao said you went to the other side of the world. To America,” Ko said, looking at the shards at his feet.

“For a short time.”

“Why would you come back?” Ko asked, disbelief in his tone.

Shan took another step forward, so that he was but an arm’s reach away.

“It rained a lot.” Shan reached into his pocket and extracted a roll of hard candy and a chocolate bar. He could not understand why he had such difficulty speaking. “I brought these for you, from the United States.”

Ko stared at the candy, emotion suddenly coloring his face. “I thought they were taking me back. But then Yao came and stopped them.” Ko picked at a callus on his palm. “Once on National Day,” he said abruptly, “family visitors were allowed into our camp. Some of them gave candy to their husbands or sons or fathers.” He looked up and slowly lifted the candy from Shan’s hand. “Candy is a good gift for a prisoner.” He shrugged, pushing the long hair from his face.

They stared at the shards beneath Ko’s feet. Shan struggled for words, any words. He was having a conversation with his son. “Are you well, Xiao Ko?” he asked clumsily, and chastised himself for using the familiar form of address, which his son hated.

He took a halfstep toward his son and shards broke under his foot. He had broken the head off a little clay Buddha.

“One of those Tibetans told me that after the prayers are taken out of these things, that they become only objects again,” Ko said, “that it doesn’t matter what happens to them.” Shan looked at his son in surprise, and Ko grimaced, as though regretting his words.

Shan bent and fixed the head back on the little Buddha and leaned the little figure at the base of the wall. As he did so, Ko swung the hammer again. “It’s just a bunch of clay,” his son said. “Dirty old clay. When I’m done I’m supposed to dump all the pieces in the parking lot and rake them into the gravel.”

“We’re going back into the mountains, Ko,” Shan said. “I want you to come with us.”

His son looked at Shan uncertainly. “Not inside the mountain,” he said, worry in his voice.

“Probably,” Shan admitted. “You have to tell me you won’t try to escape. No soldiers. Just Yao and Corbett and me.”

Ko put both hands on the hammer handle, twisting them. “Do you remember her face when she was in that man’s arms, Khan’s arms? Looking at us like a child, not understanding she was being killed, not knowing enough to struggle. It wasn’t her anymore, it was just something that had been her. Every time I try to sleep I see her face like that, alive but dead. Will he be there? The Mongolian?”

When Shan nodded, Ko clenched his jaw and nodded. He looked back at the wall, then dropped the hammer and picked up a large flat rock, which he leaned in front of the little broken Buddha. He was protecting it. “I am a prisoner,” he said, looking at his hands now, as if not understanding what they had just done. “Why should I promise not to escape?”

“Being a prisoner is just something other people do to you,” Shan said. “Being a thief or a liar, or becoming a fugitive, that is something you do to yourself.”

Ko slowly stood and searched his father’s face a moment, then looked away again. “They have many cars in America, I hear. Fast cars. Did you see fast cars?”

Shan was not sure he understood. “I saw fast cars. I drank coffee. They drink much coffee there.”

Ko nodded solemnly then lifted the hammer to his shoulder again. “I have never drunk coffee,” he said in a distant tone.

“I saw planes bigger than an army barracks,” Shan said. “There was a little white box that opened cans by electricity.”

A tiny smile flickered on Ko’s face a moment, then, with the look of a weary old man, he began pounding the shards again.

As Shan turned, Ko spoke to his back, in a small anguished voice. “I gave him a piece of gold, one of those little statues, gave it to that Khan,” he said. “Just before he killed her I gave him gold. He laughed when he took it and said I was just like him.”

Shan turned to look at his son but Ko would speak no more, would not bring his head up from his work. He kept smashing the shards, not looking anywhere but the ground in front of him.

*   *   *

Inside, Shan found Corbett sitting with Yao at the conference table, explaining what had happened in Seattle.

“Dolan called Ming from his plane,” he heard Yao say as he sat beside them. “By the time Dolan got here Ming had more equipment organized. He sent half his workers home, most of the others deep into the mountains to get them out of the way. A truck came from Lhasa with small machines in boxes. By the time Dolan arrived there was an official greeting party, an agenda. You would have thought the Party Secretary was coming.”

“Agenda?” Shan asked.

Yao grimaced and handed each of them a sheet of paper, with words in English and Chinese.
Arrival at the Museum Compound,
it said first, then
Welcoming Ceremony in Town,
followed by speeches and a presentation by Dolan.

“Presentation of what?” Corbett asked.

“He gave a check to Punji McDowell’s clinic. Ten thousand American. He said he was very sorry to hear that Miss McDowell was missing in the mountains, that he knew her and had long admired her work.”

Yao sighed. “When they arrived back here there was a helicopter waiting. They were in the mountains before dusk yesterday.”

“All we can do is be driven into the foothills,” Shan said. “With packs, it will be another few hours to Zhoka.”

Yao nodded. “I’ve done what I could to prepare, without being conspicuous.”

“I want Ko to go with us,” Shan said.

“It’s too dangerous,” Yao protested.

“He won’t do anything to hurt us,” Shan insisted.

“Lu and that Khan are up there. They know we were eyewitnesses to McDowell’s murder. You, Corbett, me. And Ko.”

“But you filed a report,” Shan ventured, wary, remembering what the informer had told him. “You explained everything. Corbett can testify that the phone call by Lu was to Dolan, that Dolan told Lu to kill her.”

“We don’t know that for certain,” Yao said in a tentative tone, as if experimenting with a new version of his report. He sighed and stared into his hands. “I have heard nothing since my report was filed. Ming is nervous about Dolan being here. Dolan called people in Beijing. Ming heard from the Minister himself. Afterwards he was on the phone with Public Security, saying they had to find Surya. Then when Dolan arrived and Ming showed what he had found in the valley tomb Dolan was furious. I couldn’t hear everything. They were in the meeting room, behind a closed door. I think Dolan was upset Ming told people about what he had found, that the newspapers knew about the old robe and that jade dragon.”

“Because he wanted them for himself,” Corbett said in a bitter voice.

Shan had only half heard Yao’s description of the argument. “Surya. Did they find Surya?”

“I think soldiers are still searching.”

*   *   *

Thirty minutes later Shan was watching the cluster of nightsoil sheds from across the street. Half a dozen of the haulers had returned from their morning circuits and were unloading huge clay jars into rusty metal tanks on wheels, which would be driven to the fields south of the town. A woman in tattered clothes approached, walking along the rutted road, holding the hand of a small boy, three or four years old. When she reached the sheds the boy started pulling away, hand to his nose, but she scooped him into her arms and, with nervous glances toward the men at the tanks, stepped into the cluster of sheds. Shan followed, feeling the harsh stares of the men unloading the jars. When he reached the little courtyard in the center of the buildings no one could be seen. There was something new since his last visit, a hint of incense that mingled with the fetid odor wafting from the jars. He stepped into the stone-walled stable, pausing, unable to see into the dim interior. There were sounds of soft voices, and the incense hung more heavily in the air, but bundles of straw and a heap of broken clay jars were all that he could see in the dim light cast from the door.

Suddenly someone clenched his arm from the side. “What is your need?” a stern voice asked. He twisted about to see one of the older soil carriers, a man with a wrinkled face and cracked spectacles.

“I came because of the holy man,” Shan said after a moment. The man’s grip tightened.

“He was the one who gave him the brush that day,” a woman’s voice said from the darkness, and the man released Shan. He sensed motion in the shadows, and the darkness in front of him seemed to open. It was a heavy felt blanket hung from wall to wall, obscuring the back half of the stable, which was filled with Tibetans of all ages, some seated on pallets of straw, some on the dirt floor. A cone of incense burned on an upturned bucket to the left, a small makeshift altar with seven cracked porcelain bowls stood at the far wall. Between the incense and the altar was Surya, painting. The stable wall had been plastered once and now the plaster was nearly covered with Surya’s vivid images.

“See, it’s the white Tara,” he heard a woman whisper. It was the woman he had seen with the boy. She was pointing at the central figure on the mural, whose delicate face held a third eye in her forehead. “It’s been many years since Tara visited Lhadrung,” the woman whispered, excitement in her voice. The boy’s eyes were wide with wonder.

“You know him from another town?” the old man asked Shan over his shoulder.

“Another town?”

“They say he just does this, all over Tibet, that he goes from town to town, hauling night soil and carrying deities. It is the way some of the old saints lived, someone said.”

Shan turned to study the old man’s inquiring face, then looked at Surya and slowly nodded. “Like a saint.”

“He sat there every night for a week, staring at his brush and the wall, never speaking, leaving each morning with us to haul the soil, barely eating, just coming back to stare as if the wall had something alive in it. My wife says she thinks the wall must be left from the old gompa that was in Lhadrung. People had left him some money when he was begging. One day he came back with some paints and began. He talked a little more after the painting started, like something had been released inside. He said it just needed to be done, that he was just giving color to the deities that resided here. He carries night soil from dawn to noon. He said if he did not carry night soil he would not know how to paint.”

An old woman pushed past them and bent at Surya’s side. “My wife makes him eat twice a day. Otherwise I think he would forget to eat at all.” The woman took the brush from Surya’s hand and helped him to his feet. As he let her lead him away the other Tibetans leaned closer to the painting, and Shan heard a mantra start, the invocation for Mother Tara.

Shan found Surya in the courtyard, eating a bowl of tsampa. He was chewing absently, looking toward the sky with a distant expression, when Shan sat beside him, and he took a long time to notice his visitor.

“I know you,” he said in a raspy voice, and Shan’s heart leapt. “You brought me a brush, a very good one. How did you know?”

“Surya, it’s me, Shan.”

The absent expression returned to the old man’s eyes.

“Surya, you must listen carefully. I know now what happened on the festival day at Zhoka. I saw the man who is paying the thieves. I went inside the underground palace, I was on the ledge above the little chapel where you found the body. You discovered the looters, and they made you angry. You knew they were up above, on that ledge, trying to chip through a tunnel, trying to cheat their way inside. When you saw that they had stolen a fresco your anger made you take the old ladder that led up to the ledge. You took it and threw it in the water, so it went into the chasm. And when you came back you found that man dead, in a pool of blood. You thought you had killed him, that he had tried to step down onto the ladder but it was gone and he had fallen to his death with the chisel, which pierced his body. But you didn’t. He was attacked on the ledge above, with a chisel, because he was trying to stop those who were breaking into the mandala temple.” Shan still saw Dolan’s wild eyes, when he had refused to leave the thankga with the American. Using monks doesn’t stop us. We proved that, it didn’t stop us from pushing the right buttons. No doubt Dolan had ordered Lodi killed, from Seattle, just as he had ordered McDowell killed, by pushing the buttons of his phone.

“Then he was thrown down, left there to die. You had nothing to do with it.”

Surya’s expression did not change.

“You’re listening,” Shan said. “Something in you is listening, I know that. You didn’t kill a man, you can go back, you can put your robe back on.”

The old Tibetan looked into his hands a long time, then gazed with sympathy into Shan’s face. “You have a kind face,” he said. “I am sorry for your friend who moved that ladder.” He sighed. “But you know souls aren’t killed by physical action. A soul isn’t burned away by the killing itself, but it can be by the fire of hate that precedes it, even by discovering a long life has been wasted.”

Abruptly Shan recalled the words Brother Bertram had written. Death is how deities are renewed. As he gazed into the old man’s face he realized at last that it wasn’t his old friend who sat there, that Surya had indeed gone away, that the fire that had raged through the old Tibetan’s spirit had burnt away much of the memories, the humor, the lightness that had made up Surya, leaving a strange innocent reverence, leaving a deity that was Surya and not Surya, a new artist who had to paint different gods, in a different way. And that, Gendun would say, was miracle enough.