The Skull Mantra (49 page)

In the small library at the back of the corridor he found a thick black binder, its vinyl covers worn through to the cardboard at the edges. He had already located a section entitled
Costumes
when an older woman appeared at the door.

“What is it?” she snapped.

Shan started, then settled back into the chair before looking at her. “I'm from Beijing.”

The announcement bought him another thirty seconds. He kept searching as the woman lingered at the doorway. Ceremonial headdresses. Demon dancer costumes.

“No one informed me,” the woman said with a suspicious tone.

“Comrade, certainly you realize audits are not nearly so effective when advance warning is given,” Shan said curtly.

“Audits?” She paused, then slowly entered and walked around the table.

As she saw Shan's clothing a sharp hiss of air escaped her lips. “We will need identification, Comrade.”

Shan kept studying the books. “They said to leave it at the front desk. We have much work here.” He gestured to a chair. “Perhaps you would like to help.”

The woman spun about and disappeared down the hall.
Tamdin,
the book said, Code 4989. Set One from Shigatse gompa, 1959. Set Two from Saskya gompa, dated only fourteen months earlier. He walked quickly to the corridor and began checking the doors again. The third one opened onto descending stairs.

The basement shelves rose from the dirt floor to the ceiling, crammed with boxes of wood, wicker, and cardboard. They were arranged by inventory number as the girl had explained. He darted down the rows, desperately scanning the numbers at the end of each shelf. Suddenly there was a new sound, the unmistakable sound of running feet on the floor above.

He found the 3000 series, and kept running. Then the 4000. Shan pulled a box from the shelves. It held an incense burner. He began to run, and stumbled onto his knees. There were shouts upstairs. He found a shelf marked 4900. A set of golden horns extended from a box. The mask of Yama. Frantically he checked the boxes. They were on the stairs now, shouting. Another row of lights was illuminated, much brighter. Then he had it.
Tamdin,
the box said.
Tamdin, demon costume, Saskya gompa.
It was empty.

Someone yelled nearby. There was a white index card taped to the top of the box. He tore it off and ran away from the sounds of the searchers. There was a door up a shorter flight of stairs, showing daylight at the bottom.

It was locked. He rammed it with his shoulder and old wood splintered. He fell outward onto the ground. As he lay blinking in the painful sunlight someone jammed a boot into his back, then reached down and placed handcuffs on his wrists.

The first syllable of weak protest was still on his lips when a truncheon slammed into his forehead, spattering blood. “Hooligan shit,” his captor spat before he spoke into a hand radio.

The blood that trickled into his eyes prevented him from seeing how many there were. They were Public Security, he had no doubt, but they seemed confused. From behind him, as he was pushed into a gray van, there were arguments about whose prisoner he was, about his destination. The first two didn't use place names. “The long bed,” one of them
said. “Wires,” argued another. But a third man joined them. “Drabchi,” he said, in the tone of an order, referring to the notorious political prison northeast of Lhasa. Prison Number One, it was formally called, where the high-ranking officials of the Tibetan government had once been held.

It was over. Sungpo would die. Shan would have new wardens. Eventually, if Tan did not abandon him, he might be returned to the 404th, with five or ten years added, but only after a Public Security interrogation and the stay in the infirmary that would follow. Who, he wondered in some remote corner of his mind, would be recruited to express the people's disappointment in his socialist development? I'm a hero, Shan would tell his captors. I lasted twelve days on the outside.

The blood was in his mouth now, and the pain of the wound began to surge through his stupor. The van was moving. A siren erupted, painfully loud. They were on a fast road, accelerating. He blacked out. Suddenly there was a shout, and he heard the sound of breaking wood and chickens squawking in terror. He felt the van slam on its brakes and heard the men in front leap out.

There were furious shouts from the front of the van. Then someone climbed into the driver's seat and the van was moving in a U-turn. The siren was cut and the vehicle made a series of a rapid turns, then it pulled to an abrupt stop. The rear doors were flung open and four hands reached in for him. He was half carried, half dragged into the back seat of a car, which instantly pulled away.

Slowly, with dreamlike motions, he wiped the blood from his eyes and pulled himself up. It was a large car, an older American sedan. The driver wore a wool cap over his head. When they pulled into the broad thoroughfare that led out of town the man dangled a small key over his shoulder. As Shan unlocked the handcuffs the man removed the cap to reveal a head of thick blond hair.

“I didn't know—” Shan began, paralyzed by confusion. He pulled out his shirttail to wipe away the blood. “Thank you,” he offered in English. “Are you Jansen?”

The man shook his head and muttered to himself in a Scandinavian tongue as he drove slowly through the traffic,
careful not to attract attention. “No names,” he replied in the same language. “Please. No names.” On the floor beside him Shan recognized the bag he had carried to Lhasa. The skull from the cave shrine.

“How could you know?” Shan asked after five minutes.

Jansen had sunk into a depressed silence. “I'm just taking you to the highway somewhere. Your friends will be on the highway, they said.”

“Why?”

“Why?” Jansen pounded the steering wheel in anger. “You think I would have done it if I had known? With the knobs as thick as flies? Nobody said anything about knobs. They said for me to be there, that's all. Need to help the gentleman who brought all the information from Lhadrung.” He shook his head. “Nothing like this has happened before. Help with the records, no problem. Give an old man a ride from Shigatse, no problem. But this—” He threw up a hand in frustration.

“The
purbas
,” Shan realized. Somehow it had been the
purbas.
The little man he had seen on the street had not been alone. He had been a
purba,
Shan now understood. “But how could they know?”

“How do they know anything? Like telepathy.”

The knobs had somehow known. The
purbas
had somehow known. Everyone seemed to know everything. Except him.

“Like telepathy,” Shan repeated in a hollow voice. He looked out the window for a fleeting glance of the Potala as it faded into the distance. The precipice of existence.

“Worst they do, they deport me,” Jansen muttered to himself.

Shan lay back on the seat. He found a paper towel and held it to his forehead. “There was an obstruction pushed onto the highway,” Shan said, as though to himself. “A farmer's cart, I think. The knobs got out to clear the path.”

“They told me you need a ride. To wait with my car. Okay, I thought. A ride. I could ask you about the skull shrine. Suddenly one of them runs by. Tosses me a key. For you, he says. Then this Public Security van races down the
alley and they throw you inside. Who are you? Why does everyone want you?”

“For me, he said. Did he use my name?”

“No. Not exactly. He said for the pilgrim.”

“The pilgrim?”

“The name the
purbas
are using for you. Tan's pilgrim.”

No, Shan was tempted to say. A pilgrim moves toward enlightenment. All I move toward is darkness and confusion. But suddenly a tiny flicker of light appeared. “You said you drove an old man from Shigatse? To Lhadrung?”

Jansen nodded distractedly. He was nervously watching the rearview mirror. “His wife had just died. He sang me some of the old mourning songs.”

 

Rebecca Fowler and Tyler Kincaid were waiting fifteen miles out of the city, parked at a flat stretch of highway along the Lhasa River where truckers gathered to sleep. Jansen pulled in behind a decrepit Jiefang truck, from which four young men instantly emerged and escorted Shan to the Americans. Shan turned to thank Jansen, but the Finn just nodded nervously and sped back down the road.

The Jiefang pulled out in front of Kincaid and the driver motioned for the Americans to follow.

Fowler was silent in the front seat. At first he thought she was sleeping but then he saw her hands. They were twisting the road map, their knuckles white.

“It's like free-falling,” Kincaid said, with unexpected excitement in his voice. “A hundred feet a second. Your heart's in your throat. The world's flying by.” He glanced back at Shan. “It's them, right?” he asked with a huge grin.

“Them?”

“In the truck. The real thing. It's gotta be
purbas.”

“I'm sorry.” Shan felt his forehead. The blood was clotting now.

“Sorry? For this day? The whole damn day, it's been like rappelling down a mountain. You just jump off the cliff and let it happen.”

“I never meant for you to be in danger,” Shan said. “You should have just left.”

“Hell, we made it out alive, didn't we? No sweat.
Wouldn't have missed it. We got ‘em good, the MFCs. You sent me to search for what isn't there. Perfect. Playing games with their minds.” He filled the truck with another of his cowboy whoops.

“Dammit, Tyler,” Fowler said. “Get us out of here. It's not over until we're home.”

“What do you mean, ‘seeking what isn't there'?” Shan asked.

“At the Ministry of Ag. Water resources office moved away in a reorganization. All the files were shipped to Beijing five months ago.”

Going to seek what wasn't there. Shan had forgotten the card from the archives. He pulled it from his pocket slowly, as if it would shatter if it moved too fast.

Tamdin,
the card said.
Saskya gompa.
But there was more. On loan, with a date fourteen months earlier, the same date it had been discovered. On loan to Lhadrung town. There was a name, written hastily and smeared. But the chop at the bottom was clear. The personal chop of Jao Xengding. Below it was scrawled “Confirmed,” followed by a final ideogram, the inverted, double-barred Y. The same one he had seen on the note from Jao's pocket.
Sky,
it meant, or
heaven.

Twenty miles past the airport the Jiefang truck stopped on a sharp curve and Kincaid pulled in behind it. A man jumped out, ran to the Americans' vehicle, and whispered urgently with Kincaid, pointing to a side road ahead of the truck. The Jiefang turned around and the
purba
jumped on as it passed by.

Kincaid eased their vehicle into four-wheel-drive and moved onto the side road. “The knobs have road blocks on all roads out of Lhasa, at repeating intervals. They are steaming. They probably have a special reception committee waiting at the Lhadrung County checkpoint. So we have to detour.”

He drove recklessly over the rough route, toward the setting sun, then abruptly stopped as the distant flickering lights of Lhadrung valley came into view. “We could go back, you know,” Kincaid announced to Shan with a meaningful gaze.

“Back?”

“To Lhasa. The road blocks are checking vehicles leaving
the area, not entering. We could do it. You're too valuable to go back to prison when this is over. You know so much. I can help you.”

“Help me how?” Shan sensed the American's
khata
that still hung around his neck.

“Talk to Jansen. We'll calm him down. Hell, he'll want to pick your brain for weeks himself. He knows people who can get you out of the country.”

“But Colonel Tan. And if Director Hu—” Fowler protested.

“Hell, Rebecca, they don't know Shan is with us. He just disappears. I could get that tattoo off. I've seen it done. You could be a free man.”

A free man. They were such pale words to Shan. It was a concept that Americans always seemed infatuated with, but one which Shan never understood. Perhaps, he reflected, because he had never known a free man. His hand drifted to the
khata
and slid it off. “You are very kind. But I am needed in Lhadrung. Please, could you just return me to Jade Spring?”

Kincaid saw the scarf in Shan's hand and shook his head in disappointment.

“Keep it,” he said admiringly, pushing the
khata
back. “If you're going back to Lhadrung, you're going to need it.”

Colonel Tan seemed to read the messages from Miss Lihua and Madame Ko simultaneously, his eyes ranging back and forth from the one in his hand to the one on his desk. In the fax from Hong Kong, Miss Lihua reported that she was urgently trying to book flights for her return, but meanwhile wanted to confirm that Prosecutor Jao's personal seal had indeed been taken the year before. No one had been arrested for stealing the chop, although it was the sort of minor act of sabotage typical of monks and other cultural hooligans. A new seal had been fabricated, and a notice sent to alert Jao's bank.

Madame Ko's note reported that she had made inquiries at the Ministry of Agriculture in Beijing, finding a man named Deng who was responsible for the recordkeeping of water rights. Deng knew who Prosecutor Jao was; they had spoken by phone the week before Jao's death, Madame Ko explained. And Deng had an appointment to see the prosecutor during his stopover in Beijing, at a restaurant named the Bamboo Bridge.

“So one of the monks stole Jao's chop and got the costume. Maybe Sungpo, maybe one of the other four,” Tan asserted.

“Why his personal seal?” Shan asked. “If I went to all that trouble, and wanted to sow confusion in the government, why not steal his official seal?”

“Opportunistic. A monk saw a chance and broke into the office. An open door or window, and the first thing he found was the personal seal. He got scared and fled. Miss Lihua says it was a monk.”