Mandarin Gate (11 page)

“I am called Yuan Guo,” the stranger explained as he waited for his hot plate to boil water. “I raise goats.”

Shan paused a moment. There had been another Yuan, on the tablet in the mountains. “I am called Shan Tao Yun,” Shan replied. “I inspect ditches, which means mostly I dig mud and manure. I didn’t always inspect ditches. You didn’t always raise goats.”

Yuan’s expression began to warm. “In Harbin,” he said, referring to one of the large cities of Manchuria, “I was a professor of history, ever since the university was reopened twenty-five years ago. I decided to join the Pioneer program. The state promises me land rights if I stay five years. And meanwhile”—he gestured about the sparse, cold room—“I get all this.” He lifted a fork and began chipping leaves from a brick of tea. From a room down the darkened hall came the sound of coughing.

“I met an old relative of yours, Yuan Yi. I want to bring him back to you.”

Yuan’s hand froze in midair as he spun about to face Shan. “You mustn’t!” he cried out, then he seemed to collect himself and turned back to silently sprinkle the leaves into two chipped cups before joining Shan at the table. “Please,” he said in a low, plaintive voice. “He must stay on the mountain. He too is in exile.”

Shan waited until his cup was filled, then spoke through the steam of his cup. “Perhaps you should start with Harbin.”

Professor Yuan Guo had lived most of his life in Harbin, he explained, and had been a graduate student at the university there until it had been shut down by Mao, then worked at a locomotive factory until the university had reopened. He had helped establish the Chinese history department and had married another professor, who had worked in a chemical factory during her reeducation. She had died of cancer ten years later. Yuan had raised his daughter alone, then had retired four years earlier and enjoyed a peaceful existence reviewing old manuscripts in the university library until his daughter Sansan had been arrested for antigovernment activity on the Internet. “She faced a few months imprisonment but Public Security asserted what they called aggravating circumstances. She was identified as ringleader in a group of prodemocracy advocates. All were children of the retired professors in our building. There was a meeting, the kind we used to call criticism sessions. We were found to be politically irresponsible. If Mao had still been alive we would have been branded hooligans and paraded in dunce caps.”

Shan sipped his tea. “My family was sent to the rice paddies for being in the Stinking Ninth,” he said, referring to the most reprehensible of Mao’s infamous list of bad elements, the intellectuals.

Yuan grinned, leaned forward, and began his tale in more detail. They were two old soldiers sharing stories of the war. Yuan had specialized in the history of Imperial China, his wife in Western history. Their daughter had graduated from the university with a degree in anthropology and had been working for a Western computer company for two years when she had been arrested at an Internet café. The café owner had been arrested the week before for failing to record the identification cards of all the Internet users in his café and negotiated his freedom by agreeing to help Public Security snare his customers.

“We were told we could have our children sentenced to long prison terms or we could all join the Pioneer program. Each family in our building was told to report to the train station at three
A.M.
with no more than a hundred pounds of belongings.”

“Surely not the entire building?”

“We were a special case, a building of professors or retired professors, with children who had grown up well educated and well versed in Internet democracy.” Internet democracy. It was one of the terms of the new age, for those who practiced dissidence anonymously over the Internet. Except the government had learned ways to make sure no one could use the Internet anonymously. “We were contaminating the educational environment, someone in the Party said. They wanted us gone. From the university. From the city. From Manchuria. Some of my colleagues tend to think it was because a land developer in the Party wanted to level the building and erect a high-rise.”

“Everyone agreed to go to Tibet?”

Yuan offered his sad grin again. “We were put on a train. We had escorts. We had no idea where we were going. Nostalgic in a way. Like old times.” He meant the years under Mao when entire city blocks were simply ordered to the new Chinese cities being built in the Muslim and Buddhist lands of western China.

Shan cocked his head in disbelief. “You’re saying the government kept a cell of dissidents intact and just transplanted them?”

“They knew where we were going. A high-altitude wilderness. Barely enough for us to subsist on. They were confident Tibet would break us. We could do no harm here. And the Party had set ambitious goals for the number of new Pioneer settlements. They were having trouble filling their quotas.”

“But the life of a retired professor in Harbin…” Shan’s voice trailed away. Both men knew what he meant. Professors labored their entire careers at low pay because of the privileges they were assured at the end, the comfortable housing, the open access to university resources, the ability to study and write what they wished, the appointment to prestigious committees.

“My daughter Sansan has always been frail. She never would have survived prison. Now we have daily walks in the fresh air. The goats give us milk. She gets stronger every day.”

“Professors and Jade Crows. Quite the socialist experiment.”

“More than ninety percent of us are from Harbin. The others are from the jungles of Yunnan Province.”

“Criminals who bribed their way into exile instead of prison,” Shan suggested.

A sliver of a smile creased the professor’s face. “We prefer to think of them as a tropical social club with wanderlust. The prisons of Yunnan are quite overcrowded I hear.”

“But already they have begun to—” Shan’s words were cut off by new shouting in the street. Yuan darted to his front window.

More police were visible now, pushing apart a stack of trash cans, opening the backs of vehicles. As an officer in grey began walking toward his front door, a small gasp escaped Yuan’s throat. He quickly stepped to his dining table, grabbed a roll of paper, and sank into one of the two easy chairs in the room, hiding the roll in the small of his back as he picked up a book to read. As he did so a thin woman in her late twenties ran out of what Shan took to be a bedroom. A computer screen lit up at her touch and keys rattled as Yuan’s daughter quickly worked the keyboard, then withdrew what Shan took to be a memory card and darted back into the bedroom.

The knob sergeant did not bother to knock or announce himself. He threw open the door and glared at the professor, his eyes full of challenge. “Our house is open to you,” the professor said as he looked up from his book, then went back to reading.

“Of course it is,” the officer spat, then gestured two companions inside and down into the other rooms. He began roaming the main chamber, lifting books, pulling back cushions stacked against a wall. Faint martial tones rose from the darkened corner. Sansan had brought up one of the patriotic Web sites of the Party, where soldiers and factory workers paraded twenty-four hours a day.

The officer opened the closet by the door, then kicked up a corner of the carpet as if he might discover a trapdoor. As he stepped into the kitchen he tapped walls, even opened the refrigerator. “It’s broken,” he announced, lifting out a box of salt crisps and a book.

“It’s never worked,” Yuan said cheerfully. “But it’s a great status symbol. Tibetans never have them.”

The officer nodded his approval. His men appeared. As the three marched out the kitchen door, the officer gave orders to search the little toolshed at the rear of the yard.

“They searched your house twice today,” Shan observed as Yuan stepped to the door, watching the knobs as they entered the shed then, moments later, left his yard. “Was it Public Security both times?”

“I don’t know,” Yuan said with a worried glance back toward the bedroom. “No. The first were just some of those Armed Police. They ordered us all out on the street with megaphones. They’re not as subtle.”

“Bodies from a murder scene were stolen from the store’s meat locker. The first time they were trying to find them.”

The professor returned Shan’s gaze without expression. He knew about the murders. Shan looked back to the grey vehicles on the street, then surveyed the room again. “The Armed Police were looking for dead bodies,” Shan observed. “But these knobs were looking for a live one.”

The professor said nothing, just frowned, opened the door, and gestured Shan out of his house.

CHAPTER SIX

Shan watched the high ridge with worry as he walked back to his truck. The night before, Lokesh had not been at the little house in the hills they had claimed for their home. He should have returned by now. Had his old friend stayed with the flesh cutters to perform more rituals for his dead friend? Or was he back at Jamyang’s shrine now, purifying it after the stain of suicide? Shan prayed that he had stayed with the flesh cutters. The upper valley was overflowing with police. Meng had reported that Liang was already dispatching patrols into the high valleys. The long prayer horns had sounded again at dawn, as if taunting the searchers. They would keep expanding their search. The gentle old Tibetan would be like fresh meat before such hungry dogs.

He was lost in his worries as he opened the door and settled behind the wheel, was not even aware of the youth waiting beside him until the tattooed hand seized his wrist.

“You’re taking me for a ride,” the stranger growled. A long folding knife, a switchblade, appeared in his other hand. He did not bother to open it. “Exactly where I say, Old Mao. No questions.”

Old Mao. It was slang of the Chinese cities, used by street gangs for grey-suited bureaucrats.

Shan turned toward the stranger. He was barely out of his teens, not much younger than his own son, who had once led a street gang. He had seen him before, carrying a sack of rice. “If you raised your sleeve,” Shan asked conversationally, “would I see a black bird?”

The back of the stranger’s hand slammed into his jaw. It was answer enough. Shan shook off the pain and started the truck.

Like so many others in the county, the old farm compound had been abandoned years earlier, a victim of the early campaigns against landowners after the Chinese army had arrived. The fields had gone to brush and small trees, the stone stable at the top of the old pasture above the house had weeds growing out of its roof. A crib for storing grain had been partially dismantled. To one side a tall roof had been raised on poles, under which the cabs of two heavy trucks were parked. A man with grease on his face looked up from an open engine compartment as Shan pulled to a stop.

The house, built in the traditional style with quarters for animals below and humans above, also seemed to have been untouched for years. Its windows were cracked, the protector deity painted on the wall by the entry so faded as to be almost unrecognizable. But inside, a fresh coat of whitewash reflected the light of several hanging lanterns.

Two Chinese youths at the end of the chamber looked up as Shan was pushed toward the staircase. One, with a cigarette dangling from his lips, held a knife in his hand, the other was extracting a knife from the wall. An old cloth
thangka
, a painting of one of the sacred female dakinis elegantly rendered in shades of blue and gold, had been hung as a target. She was torn and sliced into fragments. They had been throwing their blades at her head. For a moment Shan forgot everything else as he stared at the scene. He fought the temptation to dart forward and pull the painting from the wall. Lokesh would have stood in front of the dakini to protect her.

One of the youths noticed Shan’s expression. His lips curled in a sneer. “
Cao ni mai!
” “Fuck your mother.”

His escort pushed him up the stairs, into what could have passed for a brothel in any eastern city. The plank walls of the upper floor were covered with gaudy silk screen hangings, images of fighting dragons, fighting roosters, fighting serpents, and scantily clad women frolicking with pandas. The scent of onions and steamed rice mingled with incense, not Tibetan ritual incense but a cloying mix of jasmine and cinnamon. A bright lantern was suspended over a table where four men played mahjong.

“They say you know that lama who lives alone up on the mountain.” The man who spoke waved the others from the table. He was in his forties, a compact figure with long black hair and the hard, small face of a jungle warrior.

Shan took a seat across from him before replying. “Since when do the Jade Crows care about hermits?”

“Back home we count monks among our best customers.”

“You’re a long way from Yunnan.” Shan glanced at the other men, who stood in the shadows as if awaiting orders.

“Fresh mountain air. It does us all good.” The man lit a cigarette.

“The lama was a friend of mine. He died.”

The stranger hesitated. “Died? Jamyang died? When?”

“The same day as those at the convent. I didn’t know the others.”

The man’s eyes flattened as he studied Shan, like those of a coiling snake. “You only got to know them after they died. You stood over them at the convent, sought them out in that meat locker, sought out naked dead people. Back home we could arrange for you to do it on a weekly basis. Big money in fetishes.” He exhaled a plume of smoke in Shan’s face. “Except it was my brother you treated like a piece of meat.”

“I do not know what happened to the bodies if that’s what you want to know.”

“The head of our clan deserved better.”

The head of the clan. The dead man had been the head of the Jade Crows. “No one deserves to have their head cut from their neck,” Shan replied.

The words brought a snarl to the man’s face.

Shan glanced at the cold, expectant faces of the men who watched him. Early in his career Shan had pursued an investigation to Yunnan, where much of the population was only two or three generations removed from the warrior tribes who once ruled the province’s jungles. His case had been dropped after his informant had been tortured and killed. Bamboo splints had been pounded under the man’s fingernails before his throat had been slashed. Shan had insisted on seeing the photographs of the dead man, and paid for it with several sleepless nights. “I am not the killer.”