Mandarin Gate (21 page)

“Only the beginning of the end,” Shan said. “Those knots are still untied.”

Ani Ama replied with a somber nod. She studied the hills for a long moment as if searching for a sign of the dead abbess. “We can’t just walk out of this place,” she said, a hint of invitation in her voice.

“No,” Shan agreed. He looked back at the shrouded body. “First you have to die.”

*   *   *

The guards escorting the burial detail wanted nothing to do with the bodies. They kept their distance, watching with revulsion as Shan and half a dozen others loaded the dead onto the wheelbarrows, then opening the back gate and quickly stepping aside. The dead were infected with disease.

Lokesh had explained that sometimes as many as half a dozen were dying each night. Shan, pushing the last handcart, gave silent thanks that there had been only two deaths that particular night, so that adding three more bodies had not attracted notice. He nervously watched the pair of guards pause to light cigarettes and looked back toward the little warehouse where Lung’s trucks were due. He breathed a sigh of relief as one of the guards split away toward the tractor that was used to push earth into the trench. Shan saw the blur of dust that signaled the arrival of Lung’s trucks. Then suddenly the second guard lifted his baton and thumped it down on the first body. Shan’s heart leapt as the guard approached the second.

“The organs of state must practice democratic centralism!” Shan suddenly shouted as the guard took a step toward the second cart, then darted forward with his cart toward the pit. “Today is chapter seventeen! Quickly! We forgot there is an early review session of Chairman Mao’s
Quotations
! We cannot shame the Great Helmsman!” He mouthed a prayer, then hastily pitched his barrow sideways, letting the body he carried roll into the pit. He expected the guard to aim his baton at him, but the few moments of hesitation caused by Shan’s outcry had been enough. The man cocked his head toward the road. Lung’s trucks were at the warehouse, and someone was frantically shouting from the loading dock. Then suddenly Shan saw the movement on the road. A grey utility vehicle was speeding toward the camp, its red lights flashing. The knobs were coming, the knobs who hated to dirty their hands with the business of the People’s Armed Police.

With a sinking heart he watched the knob’s car slide to a stop at the front gate. In desperation his gaze shifted back and forth from the knobs climbing out of the vehicle to the warehouse. Dark smoke began pouring out of the engine compartment of the nearest truck. The men at the warehouse shouted, even louder, pointing at the truck, and were running away from it as it suddenly burst into flames.

The guard near Shan shouted for the other prisoners to dump their shrouded loads as the second guard, on the tractor, leapt off the vehicle and ran toward the fire. Shan gestured urgently to his companions, who emptied their carts, dumping the shrouds containing Cora, Ani Ama, and Lokesh onto the ground by sheltering rocks. The three rolled quickly away, pushing off the shrouds, and disappearing into the rocks as Shan threw the shrouds into the pit. The Tibetan who had carried the bucket of lime emptied it into the pit, then took Shan’s cart as planned and headed back toward the gate. But Shan stood frozen, watching as the three scrambled out around the nearby outcroppings. He heard Lokesh’s urgent whisper, calling him to join them as they had planned. Shan looked back at the knobs. He knew why they were there, knew that if he were missing when they searched for him in the camp that the hills would soon be crawling with troops.

“
Lha gyal lo,
” he called in a low voice to the three who watched from the rocks, pointing toward the high ground, then he turned and marched back to the gate.

*   *   *

Major Liang was standing at the window in the interrogation room at the Public Security district headquarters when Shan was shoved inside. He glared at Shan, crushed out his cigarette, took two steps, and slapped Shan in the face with the back of his hand.

“You think you can mock me!” he shouted. “You think you can interfere with my investigation without my knowing! By the time I am done with you, you will be begging for the bullet I will put in your head!”

Shan lowered himself into a chair at the table and stared out the window.

“You have a hard-labor tattoo on your arm,” Liang said to his back. “Do you know how few of those are seen in the reeducation camps? Those who survive hard labor are usually model citizens. If a number shows up in the camps a message is sent to Public Security for follow-up. Except no one can follow up your number. Impossible, I said, there has to be a record. I searched the data myself. It’s a Lhadrung registration number but Lhadrung has no record of you. An empty file. When I did a broader search I came up with a famous investigator from Beijing with the same name who disappeared years ago. The only real entry shows you as a ditch inspector for Lhadrung County. A ditch inspector who impersonates a senior investigator. Did you kill the real Shan, the one from Beijing?”

When Shan did not reply Liang stepped to the opposite side of the table and slammed his fist on it. “You’re not a mere criminal! You showed your true colors when you attacked that statue in the park. You are a traitor. You mock the motherland! You shame the motherland!”

Shan kept staring at the unfamiliar landscape out the window. The headquarters complex was in a crossroads village miles north of Lhadrung County. “There are three hundred forty miles of ditches in my district,” he declared as Liang paced around the table. “I keep the water flowing by removing mud and trash. You’d be surprised how big a job it is.”

His only warning was a blur of movement at the corner of his eye. The blow slammed into his cheek with a sharp stinging pain. Liang reappeared at the other side of the table, holding a wooden ruler.

“Who took the bodies?” Liang demanded.

“They did you a favor, Major. The political construct of murder can raise so many dilemmas. With no bodies there can be no murders.”

Liang slammed the ruler down again, this time on the back of Shan’s hand. “Who took the bodies?” he repeated, his voice shrill now.

Shan blinked away the pain. “I forgot. You have the third body still, the most troublesome one. But you have a plan for that one. A climbing accident. Or is it to be an unfortunate car crash in the mountains? Better have the car explode so you can report the body was destroyed. It might seem negligent to lose a foreigner’s face.”

Liang’s anger was like an evil creature twisting inside him. The knob officer seemed to squirm, his mouth twisting into a snarl, his hands folding and unfolding into fists. He dropped into the chair opposite Shan and opened a shallow drawer. “Do you have any idea what this is?” he growled as he extracted a printed sheet of paper.

A shudder passed through Shan as he recognized the form. An order for imprisonment. He did not reply.

“As a senior Public Security officer I can send you away for a year without any further authority. No messy hearings. No appeal. I have a favorite prison in the Taklamakan Desert where they keep a few bunks reserved for me to fill. So cold in the winter a man can lose an entire foot to frostbite in one night. The sand gets so hot in the summer you can get blisters through your shoes. Last year’s mortality rate was nearly twenty-five percent. It will be months before anyone even knows where you are. When your year is up the warden will tell me and I will destroy the original order and I will issue a new one for another prison. And the year after that and the year after that. Every year my new signature. Until I retire. But you won’t last that long.”

Liang lit a cigarette as he let his words sink in. “You have one night to think it over. I’ll instruct them to give you a notepad. Write down everything you know and we can forget the desert. You’ll have to be punished for what you did to that statue but I’ll just turn you over to the Armed Police for that. You know the system. Have a political epiphany. Confess your sins. Lead a Tibetan choir that sings Party anthems. You could be out in a few months.”

As he was led to the cinder block cells at the rear of the compound Shan passed a small storage building. He recognized it from Meng’s description as the place where the German’s body had been taken, and broken with a hammer. He glanced back at Liang, gloating in the window of the headquarters. Shan began to wonder if Liang’s brutal beating of the corpse had just been in spite.

Like every cell block Shan had ever entered, the air was acrid with the scent of urine, vomit, and bleach. His escort led him silently past a table with a chalkboard at its side, and shoved him into the center cell of a row of three empty cells.

It was just another of Liang’s lies, Shan tried to tell himself as he stared at the imprisonment order the major had stuffed inside his shirt, one of the tactics Liang used to bully possible informers. But he had seen the hate burning in the major’s eyes. There had been no pretense in them. He despised Shan for having deceived him and wanted him to die a slow death in the desert. He sank onto the cell’s flimsy cot, elbows on his knees, his face buried in his hands. He tried to think only of Lokesh, of his friend wandering down one of his beloved pilgrim paths but Liang’s threats kept echoing in his mind. The Taklamakan. He had spent weeks in one of the desert’s prisons before being sent to Tibet. The buildings, and the prisoners, had been etched with the hot blowing sand so that even the newest and youngest had an aged, corroded appearance. Sandstorms kept shifting the dunes, exposing ruins and turning barracks into sand-bound bunkers overnight. In his nightmares he still saw one of the common graves from years past that been gouged out by the wind. Protruding from a wall of sand had been the skeletal feet of a hundred prisoners.

He paced the cell with a prisoner’s eye, counting the steps in a circuit, noting a mouse hole under the cot, gleaning a piece of chalk that had rolled across the floor and lodged against the iron bars. Finally he lifted the pad and pencil left on the stool by the cot, staring at the blank paper for a long time. Xiao Ko, he wrote at last. Young Ko. His son. He was due for a visit with Ko in two days, a visit he knew now he would never make. They were both to be in the gulag now, in what the prisoners often called the belly of the dragon. He traced his son’s name with trembling fingertips. The wrenching sentences formed in his mind but his hand was unable to move the pencil.

I am going away to the Taklamakan. The next time you see me I will be in the row of skeletons emerging from the dune. It wasn’t supposed to end this way, Ko. We were going to build a little cabin in the mountains with Lokesh and forget all the miseries of the world below. But the dragon ate me after all.

A hard black thing seemed to grow inside, until he felt only a cold emptiness. A Tibetan prisoner, a middle-aged man, was shoved into the cell beside him. The man began weeping.

*   *   *

The Tibetan prisoner cried until the middle of the night, then he sat in the center of his cell and stared at the round drain plate in the cement floor.

“Om mani padme hum,”
the man intoned in a sorrowful voice.

Shan stepped to the bars and extended his prayer beads toward the man. The Tibetan gazed at him in surprise then silently rose and accepted the mala. He returned to his place on the floor, sat down, and slowly began reciting the beads. As he spoke a new strength entered his voice.

Shan watched for a long moment, then turned to the little stool where he had left the paper and began writing.

I saw a hawk today flying high overhead, rising in the wind until he was a speck in the southwest sky. I realized at that moment that he could see both where I sat and where you sat. Maybe you saw him too.

Ko, it will be a long time before you hear from me again. It could be that they will move you to punish me. But know that as soon as I am able I will start searching for you and I will not stop until I find you. Meanwhile listen to the guards. But first, always, listen to the lamas.

He wrote on only half the sheet, so he could fold it twice, making its own envelope.
Shan Ko
, he wrote on the outside.
404th People’s Construction Brigade.

In the early morning hours he awoke. There was no light but the dim reflection cast from the entryway light. A silent shape sat at the interrogation table, masked in shadow, facing Shan. The silhouette, a figure in a stiff uniform with a high-brimmed cap, told him it was one of Liang’s lackeys, no doubt there to underscore Liang’s message. Shan took the stool to the front of the cell and sat, facing the knob. It was a prisoner’s game, and he was alarmed at how readily it came back to him. The fear may ravage your gut, may hollow you out, but you can never let them see it.

He lost track of how long he stared at the shadow figure. Moonlight moved across the floor. The Tibetan prisoner murmured on, his mantra sometimes coming out in sobs. Shan wasn’t staring at another knob, he was staring at a wraith, at the dark soulless phantom that was his government.

He was so fatigued, so caught in the spell, that he gasped when he suddenly realized the wraith had risen and was moving toward him. The light was so dim its face was unclear until it stopped in front of him. It was no wraith, it was Lieutenant Meng, a pale and brittle Meng in a starched uniform with her hair tightly tied behind her head.

Meng opened her mouth but her tongue found no words. Shan pulled the folded letter from his pocket and shoved it through the bars. She hesitated, as if scared of the paper, then with a quick motion grabbed it and stuffed it inside her tunic. She did not look at him, but spun about and marched back to the table, where she made a show of opening the drawer and pulling out another paper. She crushed his letter, threw the wad into the trash can, and then walked back, tossing the new paper into his cell before leaving. Another prisoner assignment form.

Shan stared in confusion as Meng disappeared into the compound. He sighed, then turned back to sit on the cot. After a long time he rose, picked up the piece of chalk and whispered to the Tibetan.