Mandarin Gate (15 page)

“I thought I could hide it,” Chenmo confessed, standing at the corner of the hut.

“You sent me up here to find it,” Shan replied.

“I thought you would just find the prayer flags. I didn’t know what to do with them. A strong wind blew most of the line away. The mountain god could have taken them then if he wanted to, but he left them. It is not for me to destroy them.”

“But you thought I would,” Shan replied. He unconsciously lifted the hair to his nose, then felt a flush of embarrassment and quickly lowered it. “Do the others below know?” he asked.

“I don’t know. I didn’t tell them.”

“It’s obvious to Public Security that the foreigners were friends of the abbess, that they worked with her at the ruins. There aren’t many places foreigners could stay without attracting undue attention. Eventually they will realize that the hermitage must have been their operating base.”

“But it wasn’t. Rutger and Cora understood the risk that would bring to us. They had a camp higher up, just came here sometimes to join the prayers and speak with the nuns.”

“Then why didn’t she go to the camp to hide?”

“She didn’t think it was safe for some reason. She was terrified.”

“Because she was there, at the ruins that day.”

Chenmo nodded. “She knew, she saw the killer. I am sure of it. But she wouldn’t say anything about what happened. She just kept saying that she had to leave, that it had all been a huge mistake.”

“What was a mistake?” Shan pressed. “You mean the ones who died at the convent made a mistake?”

Chenmo shrugged.

“How did you find her after the murders?”

“She knew I often wander on the slopes, looking for herbs, cleaning old pilgrim paths. When she found me the day after the killings she was like some wild animal, nearly out of her mind, covered with brambles, dried blood on her hands. She could barely speak.”

“She speaks Tibetan?”

“Not much. She had a little dictionary but she lost it. Rutger spoke it. He usually translated into English for her. She speaks some Chinese, as I do. But when she found me she was too terrified for words. After dark I brought her here. She cried all night. I held her and she cried, until no more tears could come. The next day we spoke and she made me understand she wanted some scissors. After I understood what she intended I got her the right clothes, taught her some of the mantras we say.”

“You can’t leave the hair here,” Shan said. “It has the scent of a foreigner.”

Chenmo eyed Shan uneasily. “It is of her body. It must be kept safe.”

Shan stared at the woman in confusion a moment, then recalled that Chenmo had been raised among nomads, whose lives were ruled as much by superstition as their religion. Many of them believed that harm could be afflicted on someone by inflicting it on something that had been removed from their body like hair or fingernails.

“Wrap it in a scrap of leather,” he suggested, “then bury it under a rock on the high slope. With those two prayer flags.”

“She has to have her prayers. More than ever now.”

“Then we must move them away from here. I will help do it if you take me to the foreigner’s camp.”

Chenmo frowned, then looked back at the red nylon flags and nodded.

The foreigners had been shrewd in their selection of a campsite. Chenmo led him for nearly an hour up the rugged slope, stopping only briefly at a high, open ledge for Shan to build a small cairn to cover the hair and affix the flags to the top stone. When she finally stopped by a high outcropping Shan thought she was only resting. Then he saw how she studied the wall of stone. She located a narrow gap and disappeared into its shadows.

The blue nylon tent had seen long use in mountain winds. The equipment around it was that of seasoned trekkers. The campsite looked untouched, as if the two foreigners had just left for a short climb on the rocks above.

Shan bent at the entrance to the tent, pulled down the zipper that secured the covering fly, and stepped inside. On one side two down sleeping bags lay open on foam pads, one with a blanket on top. A nylon stuff sack contained women’s clothes, another those of a man. A large backpack held climbing harnesses, pitons, and carabiners. On the other side lay five small, sturdy aluminum cases. He turned to Chenmo, who lingered uneasily at the entrance. “There should be two backpacks. Surely she must have come back.”

“No. I kept telling her, kept pointing up here, saying she would be safer, and she refused. She was terrified of coming back.”

Three of the metal cases had been designed to hold cameras and lenses. But the compartments shaped of black foam were empty. One camera, he knew, had been destroyed by the killer. The fourth and fifth cases held small plastic containers for miniature videotapes and computer memory cards. He quickly lifted the containers, one by one, opening each. They were all empty.

“She didn’t come back because she knew someone else was coming here,” Shan declared. “Someone who dumped cameras and the contents of these cases into the second pack.” He saw how Chenmo nervously watched the narrow entrance to the campsite. She was frightened.

He probed the sleeping bags and lifted the blanket. It was of cheap grey fabric. He had seen a similar one at Clear Water Camp. “What else is missing?” he asked.

The novice paced slowly around the site. “A little stove that cooked with canisters of gas. Food. Dried food, that they heated with water.”

“Who else knew of this place?”

“The abbess came with me to visit Rutger and Cora.” The novice gestured toward a circle of flat rocks. “They made a meal there. The abbess asked about their worlds.”

Shan studied the rock walls. There were chalk drawings on the stone, some artful, some very primitive. A Buddha. A dog. A yak. A heart. The foreigners had felt safe here. It had been their sanctuary. Pacing along a wall, he saw now a fish and a lotus and realized he knew the artist. “Jamyang was here.” It was a statement, not a question.

“Not that I ever knew,” Chenmo replied uncertainly.

He lifted a small plastic Buddha from a cleft in the rock. “This was theirs?”

She took the Buddha and studied it with a confused expression. “They give these away at Chegar. But no monks came here. Cora and Rutger were careful to stay hidden from everyone but the nuns and Jamyang.”

Shan surveyed the camp with new worry. “The American didn’t come back to her secret camp but a thief did.”

Chenmo backed against one of the walls, as if suddenly frightened.

“Where is she, Chenmo?” he asked abruptly. “She is in grave danger.”

“A message came,” the novice said. “The abbess would be waiting for us on the old road behind the ruins.”

“You mean her body, after it was stolen from Public Security.”

“Stolen? The abbess was ours.”

“Public Security considers the body evidence in a criminal investigation.”

“Her body is evidence of her saintly life.”

“So the nuns went to retrieve it.”

Chenmo slowly nodded. “But the old uncle had come the night before. He said—”

Shan’s heart leapt. “Lokesh?” he interrupted. “You saw Lokesh?”

“Yes. Uncle Lokesh. He came after dark and asked if he could sleep in our stable. He asked about you, said he was going to Jamyang’s shrine the next day and then he would find you. But when he heard about the abbess’s body he changed his mind. He said the body must go up the mountain, back with Jamyang, that it would be what she wanted, that it shouldn’t be left for the police to find again. He said he would show us a way that would avoid the roads.”

“To the flesh cutters.”

“The
ragyapa,
yes.”

“Ani Ama was the one who was to carry the whisk, to take over for the abbess. She agreed. She said she would go, just four of us. I realized it was Cora’s chance. By the time they reached the road there were five.”

“You mean the American joined them.” Shan let out a sigh of relief. Lokesh and the American were safe. Public Security hated the flesh cutters, loathed even having contact with them.

“A message should go to them,” Shan said. “The American should stay there. Lokesh should stay with her.”

“Lokesh is with her,” Chenmo said in a tight voice. “But not at the flesh cutters.”

“What do you mean?”

Pain was filling the novice’s eyes. She seemed unable to speak.

Shan studied her and thought he understood. “I am sorry. I ask too much. If you were found to be helping me you would not be cleared to wear a robe.”

Chenmo took a long time to answer. “One of those purbas, one of the free Tibetans who came across from India, explained something to me the last time I saw him. The government is not giving robes to those without families. They rely on families as hostages, make them sign guarantees saying they will not allow their son or daughter or brother or sister to engage in disloyal acts. If the monk or nun is disloyal, the families are put in prison. He said an orphan like me will never be given a robe registration.”

Shan had no words of comfort. “I ask too much,” he said again. “Just tell me where to go to find out what happened.”

Chenmo bit her lip. “I don’t think I can. I will have to show you.”

The novice said nothing as they descended in a more direct path to where Shan had left his truck, then only pointed at intersections, leading him on a narrow gravel track that took them in a wide arc around the convent ruins and into the field of rock outcroppings behind it. He slowed as a line of hoofprints merged with the track, then again as they passed a set of truck tire tracks that swerved onto their road from behind a huge boulder. The route the truck had followed into the rocks was little more than an old farm path. He considered the low hills it disappeared into, realizing he had seen them from the opposite side. The path led to the farm used by Lung and the Jade Crows.

“Here,” Chenmo said abruptly as the truck entered a small clearing in the rocks. The tracks he had been following had entered the clearing and gone no farther.

Chenmo seemed to withdraw into herself, and he left her in the truck as he explored the flat circle. He needed no further explanation of what had happened, for the soil told the story. A small horse accompanied by several people had entered the clearing from the south, from the direction of the nun’s hermitage. One of the footprints was that of Lokesh, a peculiar barred impression left by strips of rubber glued on the soles of his boots by a cobbler the year before. Two or three figures wearing expensive athletic shoes had emerged from the truck. The horse had gone on to the north side of the clearing, its tracks deeper from a load that had been added.

When he returned to the truck Chenmo was holding his map, biting her lip again. She was pointing to a new destination, a road he did not know that climbed in steep switchbacks out of the valley, cresting the high ridge before continuing over a long plain into the unknown hills of the next county. She looked up expectantly.

“Not until you speak to me,” Shan demanded. “I want to know who was in the truck with the body.”

“Some of those Chinese men from that farm. Rough men. They scared me. Most of us stayed in the shadows. Ani Ama spoke with them.”

“Did Ani Ama know the men? Did she seem acquainted with them?”

“Yes, she knew them. She had been to the farm with the abbess.”

“What words were spoken?”

“Not many. Those men were frightened of the body. They had wrapped the abbess in a sheet tied with rope. On the rope they had fastened some kind of a charm with drawings of black birds and snakes on it. Ani Ama started to get angry, saying they should take it off, that it was an evil charm. Then Uncle Lokesh stepped out of the shadows. One of them, the oldest, asked how to clean the body of the dead, and Lokesh explained how we do it. Then he pulled away the charm and just folded it into his pocket and thanked them. He whispered a few more words and they backed away as if scared. I asked him what he had said. He told them they had not brought death with them, but a cocoon from which a beautiful butterfly would emerge. After they left he had us lay the body on a blanket, then he lit incense and led us in prayers. Only then could we tie the abbess to the horse for her journey. He kept patting her as we tightened the ropes, as if to comfort her, speaking the death rites. The abbess may have been close to the deities, he said, but she had not been ready to die that day.”

Shan studied the map again, tracing with his finger an alternate route, a detour that would connect with Chenmo’s mysterious track farther up the slope. He turned the wheel and followed the tracks left by the truck that had brought the abbess’s body.

“No,” Chenmo protested. “Please, Shan. Those men scare me.”

“Just a quick look, that’s all,” Shan assured her.

When he pressed on she began saying her rosary.

At last the truck crested a hill overlooking the Jade Crow compound. Chenmo gasped. A column of dark smoke was rising from the farm. He eased the truck back, out of sight from below, and darted to the crest with the binoculars.

A sentry was posted on the road leading to the camp, armed with what looked like a pitchfork. The little stone stable above the compound had something new, a solitary prayer flag fluttering from its roof. The little grain crib Shan had seen in ruin was entirely gone now. Its salvaged timber had been used for a new structure of crossed planks, from which the smoke now rose. At least half a dozen figures were arranged in a circle around the intense fire. The Jade Crows were burning the body of their leader.

*   *   *

The sun was low on the horizon by the time they reached the long grassy plain that straddled the two counties. Shan looked uncomfortably behind him. At the crest of the ridge above them was the county line, where the meager protection he enjoyed would disappear. On the other side he would just be an ex-convict without travel papers.

Chenmo had stopped speaking. She simply pointed onward, toward the crest, more than two miles away.

They had nearly reached the top of the ridge when she signaled for him to stop and jumped out of the truck, running up the slope. She was standing on a ledge that overlooked the wide plain behind them when he caught up with her, looking out over the grassland with fear in her eyes. She pressed a fist against her mouth as if to stifle a cry. A chill began rising up Shan’s spine. What was it that so terrified her?