Mandarin Gate (20 page)

“When they find you they will beat you,” Shan whispered when he reached his friend. It had been one of their secret greetings for admission to prison rituals.

“They can only beat my body,” came the reflexive reply, with a flash of a grin. Lokesh gestured him inside and dropped a heavy felt blanket over the entrance behind Shan.

The bunker was in decay, its roof buckling, its air damp and musty. A rodent scurried in the darkness. At first Shan thought Lokesh had only summoned him to speak, but then he saw the low grey shape huddled in a corner.

They said nothing as they sat beside her, Lokesh on one side and Shan on the other, the makeshift lantern on the ground before the woman. She clenched a mala in fingers that trembled. “Ani!” she cried in a hoarse voice. “Ani!” “
Nun
,” she was saying, “
nun
.” Her eyes were wild with fear.

Lokesh reached out and took her hand. With his fingers over hers, he gently moved one bead, then another, slowly reciting the mani mantra, as if he were teaching it to a child, working her fingers in tandem with his own.

The woman, her frightened gaze fixed on the Chinese stranger who had appeared before her, at first seemed unaware of what Lokesh was doing. Then gradually, with nervous glances back at Shan, she began to watch the two hands on the beads. An odd confusion grew on her face, as if she did not understand whose hands they were, and her fingers tightened as if to draw away. Then she focused on the serene face of the old Tibetan and slowly relaxed.

They sat unmoving for several minutes, the only sound that of the quiet mantra and the soft rattle of the beads.

Shan at last spoke, using English. “Lokesh and I would go to the ruins at night sometimes. We would clean up some of the old wall paintings. In the moonlight sometimes it felt like the deities were coming to life.”

The woman reacted slowly, as if not certain she had heard correctly. It had been a long time, he realized, since she had heard her native language. She cast a worried glance toward the entry.

“I attacked a statue of Mao just to be able to see you, Cora,” Shan ventured.

She looked back at Lokesh, who had not ceased his mantra. Slowly she pulled her hand away. Lokesh produced his own mala and continued the mantra.

“Elves,” she whispered. “Rutger and I saw paintings mysteriously cleaned overnight, with little offerings left before them. We joked that there must be magical elves. Once, the abbot and the monks started a sand painting.” The American gazed at her beads as she spoke. “The abbess saw it at the end of the day and said part of it was wrong, that some of the deities had been placed in the wrong order. But the next day they were correct. Some of the nuns said it was a miracle, that the deities must have moved themselves.”

“The miracle,” Shan said with a gesture toward Lokesh, “is that there are those of old Tibet still among us who know the way of the deities.”

The American woman looked up from her beads and studied Lokesh as if seeing him for the first time. “Does he speak English?” she asked Shan.

“No. Lokesh says the most important speaking is done without words.”

The old Tibetan had his eyes closed as he murmured his mantra. As Cora watched him her expression changed from fascination to melancholy. “He was arrested because of me. I fell down when we were being chased. He could have escaped but he came for me. He saw me in a robe. He thought I was a nun. He’s here because of my lie.”

Shan was beginning to glimpse the depth of the woman’s pain. “No. It had nothing to do with the robe, Cora. You fell. You needed help.”

“And he is in this awful prison because of it.”

“Lokesh and I know what a prison is. This is more like a retreat for like-minded people.”

A spark seemed to flicker in the woman’s eyes for a moment, then faded. “People are dying.”

Shan nodded. “You and Rutger were right in wanting the world to know about such places.”

Cora looked up in alarm, seeming about to deny Shan’s suggestion, but then she looked away, back at her beads. A single tear rolled down her cheek. “Rutger was the photographer. I was the artist who sketched faces. I began to do so on scrap paper. I have thirty pages already. I could sketch a whole book of the faces I have seen here.”

“You must do so,” Shan said. “Give them to the world.”

“I was going to wrap them in a cloth and throw them over the wire in the hope someone would find them.”

“That’s not what Rutger would want.”

It was the wrong thing to say. At the mention of Rutger’s name the woman’s face tightened. She pressed back against the wall, seeming to shrink before his eyes. Her knuckles holding the beads were white.

“You need to let me help you, Cora,” Shan said.

She shook her head slowly and began rocking back and forth.

“Please. You don’t understand the danger you face. We haven’t much time. It will be dawn soon.”

She seemed unaware of their presence now. She rocked like a small frightened child. Shan and Lokesh exchanged a worried glance. The risk that they would be discovered by the guards increased every minute.

When the American opened her eyes they seemed to have no focus. Then slowly her rocking stopped and she was looking over the lantern. Lokesh’s hand was facing downward, with his thumb and little finger spread, the middle fingers curled toward the thumb.

“It’s one of those hand prayers,” she said.

“A mudra,” Shan confirmed. “It is the sign of giving refuge, Cora. On the long winter nights when we lay shivering and starving in the gulag the old lamas would light a candle. One would walk with it along the bunks while another made a mudra. It was like a holy thing, like a relic brought to life. They would teach us to focus on it, to forget all else but the mudra of the night. It kept some of the prisoners alive.”

Cora looked back at Shan. “Gulag?”

“Lokesh spent much of his life in prison, because he had been in the Dalai Lama’s government.” Lokesh kept looking at the woman with a serene expression, his hand still in the mudra. “These are his words to you,” Shan said. “He and I offer you refuge. You can sketch all of his mudras. Chenmo will help. He could tell you of the old days, and of prison. It could be your book.”

“Refuge? No one gets out. They just keep adding more and more prisoners.”

“I need you to help me find out about the murders. You can’t do it here. I need you safe, away from Public Security. Then you can tell me about that day. You were there, weren’t you?”

She took so long to answer his question he was not sure she had heard. “I have so many nightmares I don’t want to sleep anymore. The abbess calls to me in the night. Sometimes I wonder which is my nightmare and which is my memory. It’s like I was there and not there.”

“You were there, Cora,” Shan assured her. “And you need to remember. For Rutger’s sake. You saw the one who did it.”

“You mean the monster. The thing.”

“The monster. The killer. Yes.”

Cora seemed to shrink again. Once more she began rocking back and forth. “Rutger says the colors have to be just right. You can’t just paint the old walls red. There’s a special shade like maroon, like good Tibetan soil. The Tibetans have pigments they save for such things. Prayer red, he calls it. I painted a gate with the wrong shade and he wants me to redo it. The abbess will help. She teaches me old rhymes for the rhythm of the brush.”

Shan’s skin crawled. A dry, creaking laugh escaped her throat. “The abbess found a patch of blooming wildflowers above the ruins. We’re going to quit early so we can take a meal there. A picnic, I told them. The abbess repeated the word several times like a mantra. Picnic, picnic, picnic. She laughed.

“She wanted to finish painting the cradle of that old wheel. Rutger was going to help her, though she kept telling him to go to the back of the grounds. Someone was coming, and he might scare the man. I said I would go sketch some of the paintings inside the little chapels.” Cora’s voice trailed away and she began reciting her mantra again.

“A Chinese man named Lung was coming,” Shan said. “Who else?”

But Cora did not hear him. She had gone to a distant, terrifying place. Tears were flowing down her cheeks. “I should never have left. I had decided to carry the food out to the place with flowers. I saw the one come on his bicycle but that couldn’t be the one they were worried about, I thought. I sat in the flowers, waiting. They were taking so long. I went back down. They were praying by the chorten, I thought. That one didn’t see me. He is talking to them now, all angry at them. But they won’t speak back. He was bent over Rutger, I thought to help him somehow. He had a red rag in his hand. I thought they must have spilled the red paint on themselves. Then he turned with Rutger’s head on his knee and I saw what he had done. It was Rutger’s face in his hand. The blood didn’t show on that one because of the color.

“I ran. He called out but I was already at the back wall. I ran. I fell. I ran some more. I didn’t know where I was going. I must have run for hours.”

He did not speak until her tears had dried.

“You have to trust Lokesh and me, Cora. I will get you out. We will take you to a safe place. Not the hermitage, because the nuns are being watched. Perhaps the monks. Lokesh and I will get you to the monastery, to Chegar.”

Cora shrank back. Her eyes filled with fear again. “Don’t you understand? I told you!”

“Told me what?” Shan asked.

“I didn’t see all the blood because it blended with the robe. Take me to the monastery and I will die! The butcher was a monk.”

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Ani Ama refused to cooperate with Shan’s plan. She raised a hand, cutting him off. “My place is here,” the nun said. “There are the sick. Now wounded are being brought in, from riots somewhere.” It was the middle of the night. She sat beside a dead woman as two other women worked a canvas shroud around the body.

“What if you could do more for them on the outside?” Shan asked. “What if there was a way to make the world see what was going on here? Once there was even a hint that international representatives may visit you know there would be real medical care, real food.”

“No,” she insisted. “Do not pretend that I have such power.”

“The American and German governments have such power. They will show it, when Cora arrives home with stories of the camp, and the story of a murdered German and a murdered abbess.”

The old nun stood up and placed a hand on the dead woman’s brow, murmuring a blessing before the shroud was pulled over her head. “Nothing to do with me,” she said to Shan.

“The abbess has been calling out to Cora,” Shan said to her back. “There is only one way for the abbess to move on to what she deserves.”

Ani Ama halted. “You don’t think I pray for that every night?”

“One of the young monks of Chegar said he hears her moaning, echoing across the hills in the darkest hours. The abbess is wandering lost, unable to understand what has happened to them.” The nun slowly turned toward Shan as he spoke. “A terrible shadow is falling on all those who wear robes in the valley. Help me find the truth. The American was there, at the convent. Leave with us and we will find the killer together.”

“The truth about the murders is with those who died.”

“If we know how to listen we can still hear it. You have part of it already.”

“Nonsense. I wasn’t there.”

“Jamyang died that day too. It was no coincidence. You went with the abbess to prepare the body of the Lung boy. Jamyang was there. What happened? Why was he frightened by the body?”

“I don’t think it was death that frightened him.”

“Then tell me, Ani Ama. Why did he flee that day?”

Ani Ama sighed and looked out over the camp. “I didn’t want to be abbess. I wanted to spend my last years in some quiet place at a loom. My mother was a weaver, and her mother before.” She watched the body as it was carried away, then began explaining. When Lung Tso had arrived to ask the abbess to help, Jamyang had been with her. He had asked questions of Lung Tso, shown great concern that one so young had died. He accepted the invitation of the abbess to join them. “The lama knew about the old ways,” Ani Ama explained, “and knew how to receive deities. As soon as we arrived at that old stable he began cleaning it, murmuring the right words, then lit incense for the gods before turning to the body. He was so reverent, so patient in cleansing the boy,” the nun said. “But then as he got to the neck he gasped, then frantically worked the skin, pushing it one way and another. The abbess asked what was wrong but he seemed not to hear.”

“What was it?” Shan asked. “What was on his neck?”

“Just a mark. A long straight mark like a deep bruise over the throat. The boy had died when his truck went off the road and crashed down a steep hill. His father said the mark was where the steering wheel had smashed against the boy’s neck before crushing his ribs. But Jamyang wouldn’t listen. It was like he was suddenly possessed. He left without another word to us. We didn’t see him for more than a week.”

“When was that?”

“He came back one night and sat with the abbess, alone. There were strong words, which was unlike either of them. Voices were raised. A day later she sent messages to the monastery.”

“Messages? What messages?”

The nun slowly shook her head. “I didn’t understand. She first sent Chenmo, who told me later. Only one word, Dharmasala, to be left on the desk of the monastery office. Later that day she sent another, with a shepherd who was passing through. A day after that she left by herself, saying no one was to follow. But I watched. At the bottom of the stairs the foreigners joined her.”

“To the convent,” Shan suggested.

“To go to die, yes,” Ani Ama said in an anguished voice.

It had begun with the Lung boy, Shan was certain now. But what had happened afterward? What had Jamyang been doing in the days before he returned to the abbess? Why would he have summoned Lung Tso to go to the convent at the same time, but not gone himself?

“That night Jamyang and the abbess spoke,” the nun said, “I dream about it. I understand now. The words they spoke were the ending. They didn’t know then but they were tying off the knots of the tapestry that had been their lives.”