Mandarin Gate (16 page)

“We climbed quickly, using the road at first,” she suddenly explained. She pointed toward the end of the plain where the land rose steeply into more fields of rocks. “We were nearly at the trail that leads to the high country when we saw them. They were running toward us. There was no time to react.”

Shan’s mouth went dry. “You mean soldiers.”

Chenmo shrugged. “They wore uniforms. They had guns. We had so little time. Uncle Lokesh said the abbess had to escape. Three of us went with the horse, running up the trail. When Lokesh ran out into the open to distract the soldiers, the American followed and ran past him as if to help him. Cora was strong, very fast, too fast. She fell. Uncle Lokesh went to her and Ani Ama ran to the two of them. They tried to carry Cora away but the soldiers caught up with them. We watched from the rocks above. When they were gone I was sent back to tell the hermitage.”

Shan collapsed onto a rock, holding his head in his hands for a moment. “I don’t understand,” he said when he looked up. “Where did the soldiers come from? Where did they go? Did they have trucks? A helicopter? What else did you see? Anything that could help me find where they were taken.”

“But I know where. I watched. I followed. I had seen it before with Cora and Rutger.”

Shan watched, more confused than ever, as the woman hitched up her robe and began to climb over the short, steep slope that led to the crest of the ridge. He did not catch up with her until she was nearly at the top.

“The Chinese think they are so secret,” she declared, “as if we are all blind. Rutger and Cora wanted everyone to think they had come to film the restoration of the convent but this is why they came with their cameras, to show the Chinese that not everyone is blind. I helped them sometimes, and they let me look through their long lenses. Old men and women being beaten with sticks. Monks tethered to poles and left outside with no shelter, even in storms. They started digging graves last month.” She bit her lip again and looked back down on the plain. “My mother used to tell me of a hell where humans were transformed into animals. This is it.” She took the final step to reach the crest and pointed down to the remote valley below.

The sight hit Shan like a physical blow. With a long groan he collapsed to his knees.

The complex lay less than a mile below them, a sprawling labyrinth of crude barracks surrounded by walls of razor wire and short towers that were no doubt equipped with machine guns.

As the numbness left him Shan felt nothing but the desperate, overwhelming need to save Lokesh. The gentle old Tibetan would never survive another term of imprisonment. He had to find him, had to get him away from the wire and the guns. He rose unsteadily and took one step, then another, down the slope, scanning the camp with a prisoner’s eye, looking for soft spots in the security.

He became vaguely aware of Chenmo calling to him, protesting, pleading with him. “The soldiers!” she cried. “They were the guard patrol that sweeps the area. They will see us too. No one is allowed this close.”

He stumbled on the thick grass and when he rose she was at his side, pulling on his arm.

“No!” he cried as he shrugged her off. “Lokesh will die! Everything I have done will be worthless if I let him die like that!”

She was sobbing now but she did not try to restrain him as he took another step. It was only an internment camp, he told himself. Security would not be as severe as at a gulag prison. It would be dark soon. Surely he could find a way through the wire at the rear of the huge camp.

“I saw him last summer!” Chenmo shouted to his back.

Shan kept moving.

But then she spoke again. “I saw Jamyang on the highway from Golmud! He was not a lama then.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

Shan halted and slowly turned toward the nun. “Say that again.”

“Some of us went to the Golmud highway to help with those convoys of relocated shepherds. There was a truck station where they stopped for rest.” Chenmo cast another worried glance toward the internment camp. “We can’t linger here. They will see us and send soldiers.”

Shan gazed forlornly back at the camp but let her pull him back over the crest. “Jamyang was helping with the shepherds too, you mean,” he said when they were out of sight of the camp.

“No. He was in a big black car, like the government uses. He and others, mostly Chinese, got out and went inside for tea. They were wearing suits, like on a business trip.”

He searched her eyes, trying to understand the trick she was playing. “Chenmo, you are mistaken.”

“He had that mark on his cheek. The abbess said it was the sign of the lotus flower, a bud of the flower, and that it must mean he was a reincarnated teacher.” She spoke of the little birthmark over Jamyang’s jaw. The lotus was a symbol of purity. It was believed that those spiritually advanced lamas whose reincarnations could be traced more than hundreds of years, the
tulku,
often had prominent birthmarks to aid their identification as infants.

He struggled to focus on what she said, considering the meaning of her words. “You told the abbess about seeing him?”

“There was no point. She spoke often about how such a tulku had to be treasured by all of us. She would not have believed me. I am just a novice. She liked to say I still had the wildness of my clan in me.”

“But you are certain?”

“I was at a water spigot filling some of the cans from the back of the trucks. A can spilled and splashed water on one of the Chinese men, who cursed at me and raised an arm like he was about to strike me. This tall Tibetan with him rushed forward and calmed him, saying it was only an accident, then picked up the can for me. He helped me refill it. He laughed when he got splashed himself, then he squeezed my hand and offered a prayer before he rushed to the others. I saw his face plain, saw that mark. When I looked into my hand there was a folded currency note in it. Ten yuan. I bought incense to put in the back of each of the trucks so the gods would follow and know where those poor shepherds were going. It was Jamyang, Shan, I know it was.”

Shan stared at Chenmo, desperately wanting not to believe the tale but seeing in her eyes that the woman spoke the truth. He gestured her back down the hill toward the truck.

*   *   *

He did not bother to speak to the manager of Clear Water Camp, who was affixing a poster to the wall of his building as Shan climbed out of his truck. He felt the man’s worried gaze on his back as he marched through the gate.

“This is China’s century, Comrade!” the stout man shouted to his back. It was, word for word, the caption on the poster.

The sparse structure that Jigten shared with his mother seemed empty as Shan pulled back the burlap that shuttered the window. He knocked once on the door, then stepped inside before hearing the shallow, raspy breath and saw that what he had taken to be a pile of grey blankets on the pallet was the old woman, curled up like a sleeping cat.

He silently searched the contents of the main room, raising clouds of dust as he probed a basket of clothing, then lifted a crate used as a stool. Inside the crate a cloth bag had been tacked. It held three small hand calculators and two watches that appeared to be broken.

It was the small closet at the back of the kitchen that held Jigten’s main inventory. On its top shelf, behind a row of empty water bottles he found what he was looking for. He pulled the blue nylon backpack into the light cast by the open door, examining each of its zippered pockets. As he searched the last of them a shadow appeared in the doorway.

Jigten’s expression changed quickly from surprise to resentment as he stepped inside. “You can’t just come in and steal things,” the shepherd said in a deflated voice.

“I will take the truth where I find it,” Shan replied. “Even if it means stealing it.” The pockets of the pack were stuffed with freeze-dried food, the main compartment filled with more food, half a dozen carabiners, and a small gas stove wrapped in a windbreaker. On the inside flap was a name in black ink. Cora Michener.

“Truth.” Jigten spat the word like a curse. “Like the Chinese who dumped us in this camp said they were just interested in our welfare. I remember one prick who laughed as he shot our sheep. He asked if I could feel my chains dropping away.”

Shan extended the pack toward Jigten. “I could take this to Public Security. When they discover it belonged to their dead foreigner they will assume the worst. They are looking for someone to blame the murders on. This would be the only piece of evidence connected to the German.”

The color drained from Jigten’s face. He leaned against the wall by the door, seeming to lose strength, then slowly slid to the floor. “They were gone,” he muttered. “They weren’t coming back.”

“How did you know that?”

“The German was dead. That American was a frightened mouse in a field of cats. If I hadn’t taken the stuff someone else would have.” As he spoke Jigten extracted a small bottle of medicine from inside his vest and looked toward his sleeping mother. “I have expenses,” he whispered.

“How did you know where their camp was?”

“That girl. Sometimes a few of us would go and help at the old ruins. My mother said I should do it, that I needed to gain merit with the gods,” he said with a bitter grin. “Hauling away rubble. Patching and whitewashing that old chorten. She was there sometimes with the nuns. I thought she was a nun at first. She wore an old chuba, a shepherd’s coat, and a derby, like some Tibetan girl. I never heard her speak so I thought maybe she was under some kind of vow. But one day we were resting from hauling heavy rocks and she broke up a chocolate bar and gave us all pieces. I saw the wrapper. It was from America. She tried to respond when everyone thanked her, but her Tibetan was terrible.”

“So you followed her, like you followed Jamyang to his shrine.”

“My grandfather said you always need to know the land. He knew every stream, every rabbit burrow, every wolf den. ‘You can’t be sure of someone,’ he would say, ‘until you know where they sleep at night.’” He glanced up at Shan. “I didn’t follow from the convent. They were usually given a ride in the truck with the monks, to the bottom of the Thousand Steps. I went to the nun’s hermitage and watched. Hell, Westerners like that throw away things that would be worth a month’s wages to one of us.”

Shan fingered the seams of the nylon pack. “Where are the pictures?”

“I never saw pictures.”

“Little cards with cartridges in plastic cases.”

Jigten shrugged. “No good to me. A bunch of plastic. Not real things.”

“So you saw them, and left them?”

The shepherd slowly nodded. “No good to me,” he repeated.

“How many cameras?”

“One for video. One for photographs.”

“Where are they?”

“Gone.”

“Where exactly? Did they have photos stored in them?”

Jigten’s expression hardened. “Who knows? Even if anyone in Clear Water Camp had money to buy such things, no one knows how to use them.”

“So you would take them to Baiyun?” Shan studied Jigten a moment. The exiled professors in Baiyun could hardly afford such luxuries. “The Jade Crows. Lung’s gang. They would know how to move such things on the black market.”

Jigten frowned. “I won’t do anything that gets people in more trouble. Everyone in that town made someone in Beijing angry too, like us. That’s life in Tibet. Everyone in Tibet has someone in Beijing angry at them. All that matters is who’s angry and how deep their anger is.”

It was, Shan thought, the wisest thing he had ever heard Jigten say.

The dropka looked up with a desolate expression. “How mad are you?” he asked.

The words hurt more than Jigten could have known. He gazed at the shepherd in silence, not having the strength to tell him that if the police found out about the cameras anyone who had touched them could disappear. He tossed the pack toward Jigten. “You must get that name off the pack,” he said, then sat on the doorsill. “Cut it off. Don’t just black it out with more ink, for they will have ways to see what’s underneath. Don’t get caught with it like that.”

Jigten looked uncertainly at Shan. “You won’t tell the knobs?”

“I won’t tell the knobs.” Shan hated the fear in the man’s eyes. Had Lokesh been with him, the old Tibetan would have found a way to bring a smile to the man’s face. But alone Shan only brought fear.

“Don’t go,” Jigten said after a brittle silence. “Don’t go to Lung today.”

“They already burned their leader’s body. I saw the pyre yesterday.”

“Not that. One of the young ones, that Genghis, was beaten real bad. By knobs working for that Major Liang. The Jade Crows thought the Armed Police would keep them protected as usual. But not this time, not now, not from Liang.”

Shan hesitated, searching Jigten’s face. “I need to know about the camp on the other side of the mountain, Jigten. The one with razor wire and machine guns. You said you drive supplies there sometimes for the Jade Crows. I want to know about the trucks. I want to know about their schedules.”

Jigten shook his head grimly from side to side. “You don’t talk about demons. It makes them more powerful.”

“I have friends there behind the wire.”

“No you don’t. Not anymore.” Jigten saw the uncertainty on Shan’s face, then glanced uneasily toward his sleeping mother. “There was one of our clan, the son of our headman, who carried on the old ways, learned all the tales of the grandfathers and the songs from hearths before time. He was our strength, the one who made us believe in ourselves. He was always telling us the Chinese were just visitors in our land, that we were the true people, just like yaks and sheep were the true animals of the changtang, and no one in Beijing could ever change that. But he spoke too many times in front of caravans and other travelers. One day they came and took him away to a pacification camp like that one on the other side of the mountain. He wrote us at first, said he was fine, that he would be back in a few months. Then the letters stopped coming. We told his mother, who was blind, that the letters still came, even pretended to read some to her. It would have broken the heart of the old ones to know the truth. Two years later his nephew found him begging in some town.” Jigten glanced back toward his mother. “He could barely walk. They broke his feet. They broke something in his head. He had no more songs, except those party anthems he kept singing under his breath instead of his mantras. No more laughter, no more light in his eyes.”