Mandarin Gate (24 page)

Sansan slowly broke her gaze from the altar. “Yes. It surprised me. I didn’t expect him to understand about computers. But that night he showed me differently.”

“What else happened?”

“He asked where I could get access to the Internet in town, if there was any place other than my house. I explained that sometimes I connected in the café, that sometimes the owner, another old professor, left the circuits on without controls when he left at night, and that he always kept the shop unlocked.” She cast a pointed glance at Shan. Beijing required those who provided public access to the Internet to record the identity of every user.

“Sansan, surely you don’t mean Jamyang wanted to use your computer.”

“That’s exactly what he wanted. And he knew about security controls. He said he would be able to conceal whose computer it was.”

Shan stared at the woman in disbelief. He wanted to shake her, to tell her to stop concocting such tales. But he saw her eyes, and knew she understood the weight of her words. Jamyang’s ghost was not the lama Shan had known.

“What did he do?”

“It was after midnight. I took him to the tea shop and started to wait outside but he told me to go. Like an order. He was not like a lama for a moment. More like … I don’t know. A soldier. He said he would leave the computer on the workbench here. I found it the next morning, with one of those khata scarfs wrapped around it, like it had been blessed. The owner of the café found another scarf hanging on his counter, with a little Buddha drawn on a napkin.”

The ache in Shan’s head was growing again. He had a sense of slipping away. Every truth he clung to was becoming an untruth. “Sansan, the owner of the teahouse was detained by Major Liang, for failing to control Internet usage.”

“But he’s back, Shan, everything’s fine.”

He looked at her in alarm. “That only means he cooperated, that he spoke about an unknown user who left a prayer scarf. It means Liang obtained what he was looking for, and it was not about the murders.” Shan looked back at the screen, at the disturbing image of the chorten and hammer. Nothing made sense.

There were times, Lokesh had told him, when the only way of knowing was not knowing.

*   *   *

Shan touched the side door of the police post, then withdrew his hand and sat on the step instead. He needed to see Meng, he wanted to see Meng, but didn’t know what to say to her. He could not stop worrying about Lokesh and Cora, knowing the grave dangers they faced, knowing how innocent each was in their own way.

He stared into the night sky and suddenly was with Ko again. It was the previous autumn and on arrival he had been taken to the prisoners’ infirmary, which was just another barrack lined with single cots instead of double and triple bunks. His son had a fever, an undiagnosed and untreated fever, with a violent nausea that let nothing stay in his stomach. Ko had been too weak to speak, and all Shan could think when he saw him was that this was the last time, that by his next visit the guards would have thrown his son into an unmarked grave and wouldn’t even be able to tell him where it was. For the entire visit Shan had just held his son, rocking back and forth with tears streaming down his cheeks.

He became aware that Meng was sitting beside him. He did not know how long she had been there. “If you hadn’t called Tan—” he began.

She raised a hand as if to cut him off. “He is not particularly pleasant on the telephone,” she said with half a smile as she extended one of her bags of sunflower seeds to Shan.

“The evidence from the murders,” Shan asked. “Is it here?”

“Locked in my file cabinet.”

“In the pocket of Lung Ma there was a metal object. I want to see it.”

“You know there are rules about handling evidence. I would have to make entries in the log.”

“Such rules are for taking evidence to trial, Lieutenant. There is never going to be a trial. You know that.”

Meng looked into the bag, as if searching for something. “I was a captain once,” she said. “I had a driver, access to special facilities for senior officers.”

He hesitated, not for the first time wondering about the part of Meng she always kept hidden. “I’m sorry. You’re right. I can’t ask you to put your career at risk.”

His words seemed to hurt Meng. “A triple homicide was committed in my district,” she replied. “I have a file.”

“You have a file,” Shan underscored. “Does Liang? The major came all this way but I am beginning to think the only file he has is on that American woman. You said he took the bullet. But I doubt you’ve seen a test on it. He doesn’t deal in evidence. He deals in fear and manipulation.”

“If all he wanted was a political victory,” Meng said in a hollow voice, “he could have declared that dead lama the killer, like you suggested. But he didn’t. He stayed despite telling us about his urgent business elsewhere.”

“He has to stay, because of the American.”

“He said he had to go to Rutok.”

“He said he had to go because of unrest over another monk who immolated himself. I haven’t actually heard of such a suicide. Usually the Tibetans are quick to speak of such things wherever they happen. It wouldn’t be hard for you to check.”

Meng said nothing. After a long moment she rose and retreated into the building. Shan finished the seeds in his hand before following.

The evidence, scant as it was, lay across her desk. Three bundles of clothing in plastic bags. The severed yak hair necklace of the abbess. The ankle holster worn by Lung, with his keys, cigarettes, and the piece of metal that had been with them. Shan took a pencil and lifted the tapered piece of metal through one of its two holes. He had seen it in the cigarette pack. It had a newly wrought feel to it, though it was clearly made to look old. The edge was tapered but not sharpened as a blade.

“Some old Tibetan thing,” Meng suggested. “The Jade Crows sell artifacts on the black market. He must have picked it up in the ruins.”

“A Tibetan thing, yes. It is a fire striker. Tibetan shepherds carried these for centuries, to use with flints. Lung Ma brought it with him. But it’s not old, not from the ruins.”

“You mean it is like a souvenir, something for tourists.”

“Something like that,” Shan said uncertainly.

“But why would the chief of the Jade Crows carry such a thing?”

Shan grabbed the fire striker and inserted his fingers into the holes. They fit perfectly. He made several strokes with his hand, as if striking a flint. Then he pushed the metal farther down his knuckles and made a different motion, an upward cut with the edge of the striker pointing out. “Did you see the body of the Lung boy who died in the truck?”

“I went out with the constables, for a death report.”

“He had taken a severe blow to his windpipe.”

Meng nodded. “The steering wheel crushed it, then his ribs.”

Shan slowly shook his head as he stared at the striker. “No. Either the windpipe takes the impact or the ribs, not both.”

“I saw his neck, Shan. It was crushed. It had a terrible bruise.”

Shan spanned the edge of the striker with his fingers then raised them, keeping them spread. “About that long?”

The color drained from Meng’s face. “It was an accident. Everyone said it was an accident. Routine. I saw the ruined truck. I just had to—”

“Overlook a murder?”

Anger lit her eyes, but just as quickly it faded into shame.

“They wouldn’t let you have the body,” Shan said, as if to console her.

“That’s no excuse,” she snapped. “I could have taken it.”

“From the Jade Crows? The Lung brothers would have loathed you for coming that day. They could have planned any number of distractions while they stole the bodies but they decided to assault you in that alley. If I hadn’t been there it would have gone even worse for you.”

“No excuse,” she said again, and lowered herself into her chair. “Why?” she asked. “Why would someone kill that boy?”

“Right now,” Shan replied, lifting the striker in his fingers again, “I am more interested in why his father had the murder weapon.”

*   *   *

Lung Tso was sitting at his table with a glass and a bottle of vodka when Genghis escorted Shan up the stairs. “I spent half a day with some damned officer from the internment camp explaining why the trucks they gave us were death traps, how the damned Armed Police had themselves to blame for that truck exploding like that. I told him it was just a matter of luck that the truck was only carrying some bags of rice and not a squad of his thugs.”

Shan stared at him in surprise. “You said that?”

“I said it was my patriotic duty to point it out. He wound up providing another truck, a better one he said. Instead of a thirty-year-old piece of shit I have a twenty-year-old piece of shit.” Lung studied Shan. “But I could just as easily been thrown inside the wire if someone had seen me ignite the oily rags I put in the engine, or if they had been organized enough for head counts to show they were missing prisoners. We’re finished, Shan. No more favors. Get out. Don’t make me show you my blade again.”

Shan ignored the threat. “You were ready to torture me because you thought I took something from your brother’s body. What did you think it was?”

Lung drained his glass. “I don’t know. That lama gave him something. I wanted it, to understand what happened. It can’t just have been that piece of paper. Sure, it showed someone was tracking our smuggling but that wasn’t enough to transform him. It was like the lama worked some kind of damned magic, the way he changed my brother.”

“When did Jamyang come back?”

“The day before my brother died. They went up to that shrine of his in the old stable. They were there for an hour or more, then my brother stayed up there another hour after the lama left. When he came back in he had something small wrapped in a piece of felt. He wouldn’t show me, wouldn’t talk with me.”

The fire striker gave a metallic ring when Shan dropped it on the table. “That’s what it was. The police had it.”

Lung picked the striker up and leaned with it closer to the lantern. “It’s some kind of monk thing.”

“No, just a Tibetan thing that happens to have prayers on it. It was used to kill your nephew.”

Lung Tso went very still. Shan returned his cold, steady gaze until he broke away to pour more vodka. He drained his glass again. “Tell me.”

Shan demonstrated how the striker could be used as a weapon to crush a windpipe as he explained. “He was murdered,” he concluded. “The killer staged the truck accident afterwards.”

“That fucking lama.”

“No. Jamyang somehow recognized the killer’s blow, somehow identified the killer, somehow got his hands on this striker. Tell me something. Why didn’t your brother go to the monks when his son died? Why the nuns?”

“You don’t ask a favor of those you do business with.” Lung’s eyes flared. “That damned lama.”

“Jamyang was helping your brother. Jamyang connected everything. He came and told your brother, told him to go to the convent the next day because he arranged for his son’s killer to be there. Just like he told the abbess of treachery at Chegar gompa. The killer wore a robe but it was not Jamyang.”

A small gasp from the stairway broke the silence. Jigten stood there, carrying a tea thermos, his eyes wide. He backed down slowly, into the shadows.

*   *   *

You don’t ask a favor of those you do business with.
Like some distant echo, Lung’s words came back to Shan as he drove up the mountainside. The dead gang leader, the smuggler, had been doing business with a monk, and a monk had killed him. He pulled the truck into a small grove of trees off a rough, remote track, then sat in the shadows, beginning a half-hour vigil to make sure he was not followed before he ascended the narrow goat trail that led to the small valley above. As he waited the questions came like a flood. The few pieces of the puzzle he had found only seemed to make the puzzle impossibly more complex. What were the favors Lung had done for the monks? Why would Jamyang have sent both Lung and the abbess to confront the killer? How could Jamyang have possibly found the weapon that had killed the Lung boy? He would never know what had happened at the convent on the day of death until he knew the truth about Jamyang.

The American woman was sleeping on a pallet inside the small hut when Shan finally arrived. It was one of the remote, unused shelters that Shan and Lokesh had discovered when looking for lost shrines. The old Tibetan had a mysterious ability to trace what he called the spirit fixtures of such places, pointing out the thin stain along a wall that was the sign of incense having been burned beneath over many years, prying up what looked like random stones along foundations to show Shan the prayers that had been inscribed on them, discovering the rotted ends of twine around a branch or peg that had secured prayer flags in another century. He would clean off the old mani stones and renew such places with new incense and new prayer flags, even if it meant ripping up his shirt to make them. Then he would offer hours of mantras so the deities that dwelled nearby would know they had not been forgotten.

In his uncanny way, Lokesh had seemed to expect Shan. A pot of soup sat at the edge of the small brazier by the door. He did not ask about Shan’s imprisonment, did not offer an account of his travails since escaping out of the death pit, but simply handed Shan an old wooden bowl and poured in the soup. The old Tibetan laid another blanket over Cora, then lit a stick of incense in the brazier and stuck it in the stones of the wall above her before sitting beside Shan.

“I know a cave,” he said after a long silence.

Shan’s chest tightened. It was a conversation they had had before. Lokesh wanted him to leave everything, to go on a meditation retreat.

“I will go with you. We could take the American. Just two or three weeks. You walk too close.”

Too close to the edge, Lokesh meant. Other friends might speak of the physical dangers Shan faced, the torment he had endured as Liang’s prisoner, but not Lokesh, never Lokesh. He meant Shan was perilously close to tumbling from the true path, the enlightened path, the Buddhist path. Lokesh believed in finding the truth but also fervently believed Shan went too far when he interfered in events, when he became an actor in an unfolding mystery. Rescuing a lamb showed respect for lower animal spirits. Manipulating events and deceiving the government showed disrespect for his own spirit.