"You're saying Lau was killed because she was Kazakh?" Shan asked.
"No. But maybe in the end that's what it was. What being Kazkah made her do. The bastards."
"What bastards?"
Marco poured the remains of the vodka into a glass. "Just bastards in general," he muttered.
Shan turned toward the rear corridor. The American was gone. He felt Marco's gaze.
"You'd be wise to be gone yourself," the Eluosi observed in a dangerous tone, wiping his mouth on his sleeve. "It's a bad place to be asking questions."
"If you would talk with him," Jakli suggested, "maybe he wouldn't have to ask so many."
Marco sighed. He stepped behind the bar and retrieved three of the flat nan breads. He tossed one to each of them, then mounted a stool and chewed meditatively on the third as Osman collected glasses from the tables. "It was just before Nikki took the last caravan out," Marco said. "We had to pick up some men. Lau rode in that evening, all excited about something."
"Alone?" Shan asked.
"Alone. Her horse was so exhausted we were scared it would die. Osman stayed with it, rubbing it, walking it, making sure it was copied down before drinking."
"Who did she speak with?"
"No one. Everyone." Marco stared at his crust as he spoke, then looked up with a new sadness in his eyes. "They say she was a healer, but many didn't understand the most important thing she did, the most important healing." He paused to bite off a piece and chew. "There's a little brown mouse in the desert," he said in a contemplative tone. "It collects things, like a pack rat. But where the mouse lives is so harsh that it usually just collects thorns and sharp pieces of crystal and small dried dead things. Lau was like that, with people's troubles. People would tell her their nightmares, their painful memories, their fears, and they would feel better, like she had taken them away, collected them inside herself, so they could heal."
"You're saying people confessed things to her?"
Jakli nodded. "It's true. I keep wondering. What if someone told her something, a secret she wasn't supposed to know? What if they changed their mind later and decided she had to be silenced? People get drunk and talk. She had a way of getting people to talk."
"No," Marco disagreed. "You didn't see her that night. The way her legs were beaten. If you want to stop her from spreading your secret, you just shoot her. If you want to pry out someone else's secret, you beat her first."
Shan took a bite of his bread and looked up. "You mean, you saw her."
Marco stared at his piece of bread. "I mean I found her. Nikki and I. Nikki first, at the quiet place she liked to go to. Only she and Jakli were the ones who usually go." He glanced at Jakli. "Nikki missed you. I think he went there because it reminded him of you. But when he went inside he found her tied to the old statue. He came and got me, with tears in his eyes." The big Eluosi looked down into his hands. "His mother taught him that, that sometimes it is all right to cry." Marco raised his eyes to Jakli, who seemed to be fighting back her own tears.
"I used to see it a lot, when the Red Guard were roaming the land," Marco said with a bitter tone. "They would break bones in the feet with a hammer. If you do it just so, it makes the skin agonize to the touch. Then they hit the feet and shins with a stick. Doesn't take much force to create a lot of pain. Sometimes they just used chopsticks, snap the skin with chopsticks. Do one foot, start with the second if they still don't talk. Afterward, you would see them on the street. The knobs would laugh and call them drunken foot, because they couldn't walk in a straight line anymore. The ones that held out, they did both feet. No one did much walking after that. Her killer, I don't think he intended that she leave the room, no matter what she told him."
Jakli tore away with a sob and ran out the back passageway, followed a moment later by Osman.
"Maybe she didn't talk," Marco suggested. "She was a tough one." He poured them both some tea.
"She talked," Shan said, and told Marco about the bruise on her arm, the place where a syringe had been inserted.
Marco sighed heavily. "What's the point of beating her, then?" he asked into his glass.
Shan looked up into Marco's eyes and knew he didn't have to explain. The injection meant that the killer was someone experienced in interrogation technique. Those who were hardened to it sometimes developed appetites for watching people in pain.
Marco was silent a long time. "We would have seen a knob or a soldier," he said in a low, angry tone.
"Not if he was well trained. Or if he was disguised," Shan suggested, and related what Prosecutor Xu had said to him at Glory Camp, how she had mistaken him for a knob agent.
"God's breath," Marco said, and shifted in his seat to face the empty tables, as if trying to fix in his mind each of the faces of the men who had occupied them. "It's a bad time."
Shan watched the brooding Eluosi. A bad time just because of the treachery, he wondered, or bad timing for the treachery, because of something else?
"Why here?" Shan asked. "You were here. A few others. This settlement here, it's not a big place, not easy to hide in. I think the killer took a big risk, killing Lau here. But he had to, because suddenly it was urgent. He couldn't wait."
"Nothing's changed."
"Not yet," Shan said and saw Marco clench his jaw. "What if the secret she died for was your secret?"
Marco drained his tea in one long gulp and fixed Shan with a stare. "You should go home, Comrade Inspector. I will get the bastards."
"You sound as if you know who did it."
"Not yet. But it's what I do. I get bastards." He spoke in a stark, haunting tone, as if it were a threat against the entire world, including Shan. "My hobby," he said with a thin smile. "I remember. I watch. I make sure others don't forget."
Shan considered Marco. A forgotten man of a forgotten people, without legal travel papers, without hope of ever getting legal papers. Not unlike Shan. Maybe that was all that Shan was about too, about getting the bastards, whomever they were. He recalled what Marco had done to Hoof. He had gotten the bastard.
Marco suddenly appeared very tired. He stretched and lifted his heavy frame from the stool, then moved to the center of the room and collapsed into the overstuffed chair. He shut his eyes and quickly drifted into the deep slow breathing of slumber.
Shan sat silently, trying to make sense of Lau's killing, trying to keep at bay the question that lingered constantly at the edge of his consciousness, the question of Gendun and his safety. From the basket he retrieved the paper that had been wrapped around the ball, flattened it, and sketched on its clean back a rough map of Karachuk, to have a context for the location of Lau's killing, to fix the spot when Jakli finally showed it to him. Lau had not died in this room, or in the nearby huts. He remembered Bajys' words. He had gone to the place of sands to find her, to the lhakang there, the sanctuary place, which, Shan knew, must be the quiet place Marco referred to, the place where Lau's body had been found. But he had been too late. He hadn't found her in Karachuk. He had only found pieces of bodies. She had died tied to a statue in the quiet place, Marco had said. Shan sat on the floor by the bar, in the cross-legged lotus style, contemplating his map, then finally rose and moved out the rear corridor.
The passage led down a curving hall to a small plank door that opened to the east, at the back of the makeshift community, onto a sandy swath, across which stood the rock outcropping that defined the eastern boundary of the ancient city. The sun was low in the sky. A cool breeze was blowing. There was no sign of life, except in the corral, where the horses had been joined by half a dozen camels, including one huge silver creature that seemed to study Shan as he moved.
Shan climbed halfway up the rock, stopping when he was just above the domed building. He sat and leaned against the warm rock, drained mentally and physically. Someone had tortured a woman here, a healer and a teacher. She had been killed for a secret, but in order to find her, her killer had penetrated another secret, the secret of Karachuk. Because she had not been just a healer and a teacher. Lau had lived in many worlds, it seemed, just as Shan had traveled through many worlds to arrive here, at this ghost city in the desert where the gentle Lau had met her violent end.
He pulled out the paper he had taken from the dead American and studied the strange combination of letters. FBP the first line said. Could it be a code for numbers, with F meaning six, for the sixth letter of the English alphabet? He quickly calculated that FBP would mean six, two, and sixteen. Meaning what? An address? A phone extension? Or were the letters geographic abbreviations? FBP could mean Frankfurt, Beijing, and Paris, or a thousand similar combinations. He sighed and took comfort from the knowledge that the paper wasn't for him, not part of the mystery he was meant to solve.
His eyes fluttered with drowsiness. For a moment he saw Karachuk the way it had been, smelled the spices brought by the caravans, heard the creaking of well ropes, the laughter of youths dead all these centuries. It was still an oasis after so many years, it still attracted refugees from a harsh world outside. Perhaps the very fact that its current inhabitants were outcasts from politics and technology meant that they were much like the original citizens of the town. A dog barked from somewhere, whether from his dreams of the past or from the present he could not tell. The wind blew a sheet of sand around the shoulders of one of the stone sentinels on the distant wall, making it appear as though it were wearing a cape that flapped in the wind.
A small sad smile rose on Shan's face as he looked out over the ruins and contemplated not the mystery of Lau's death, but the mystery of life. He closed his eyes and let the timelessness of the place seep through him. A fragrance of spice wafted through his imagined caravan city, like the ginger he always smelled in those rare, perfect moments when he was able to conjure up a vision of his father. But when he opened his eyes to a dusk sky streaked with vermillion, the smell was so pungent that he stood to look for its source. It wasn't spice, he realized after a moment, but incense, and he followed the trail of the scent toward the top of the rocks.
The outcropping was wider than he had thought, easily a hundred feet across at the top, and in a shadow near the center he discovered steps that descended into a cleft in the rock. He followed the carved steps, worn smooth and hollow by centuries of use, and as he descended he heard a woman crying.
Chapter Seven
The gap between the rocks quickly closed up to form a passageway— not a cave, but a structure created long ago by building a roof over the cleft and squaring the walls with plaster. The first thirty feet were deep in shadow. Wary of falling into a concealed crevasse, Shan was about to retreat when the passage curved and he saw the small pool of light cast by a flickering oil lamp. The flame illuminated a dim image on the wall, the head of a bull with angry eyes, wearing a necklace of skulls. A Buddhist image, the shape of Yamantaka, king of the dead. Shan followed the path lit by another lamp ten feet away, then another, studying with reverent awe the paintings of wild animals and landscapes that came into view on the walls. After the fourth lamp, past a patch of naked rock where the plaster had crumbled away, the paintings changed. There was a gentle-looking deer, an image that had grown familiar to Shan in his visits to gompas, the symbol of Buddha's home in India, followed by scenes from the life of Buddha.
The winding tunnel opened into a broad chamber, which he realized had been a bowl in the outcropping that was covered by a roof. A dozen lamps set in wall niches illuminated what had once been a magnificent painting on the walls, a long continuous scene of a journey through an ancient land. To his left were sheep under willow trees, which grew along a road that linked the scene together. The road passed through low wooded mountains, and horses appeared, ridden by archers. The painting faded into the shadows at the back of the chamber, then emerged on Shan's right with scenes of camel caravans moving on sand toward snow-capped mountains.
Beyond a heavy table near the center of the room were several crude benches and sitting cushions arranged on an old carpet. Jakli sat on one of the cushions, staring at a lamp in her hands. She did not seem to notice as he stepped to the table. On it lay six long rectangular sandalwood boxes, plainly but expertly crafted with delicately fitted joints. Pechas, they were called, the Tibetan books that consisted of unbound pages of silk or parchment stacked inside a wooden case. One was open, and several of its pages were arranged in front of it as if it were being read. Behind the books was a bronze statue of Buddha, a foot high, and beside the large figure were several smaller figures of Buddha in gold, none more than three inches high. Below the table was a wooden box covered with dust-caked cloth. Shan pulled up a corner of the cloth. Inside was a jumble of spindles and cylinders, pieces of the prayer wheels used by Tibetan Buddhists.
He sat beside Jakli. "This was the place, wasn't it?"
She was weeping. No longer with the wracking sobs he had heard outside, not even with great emotion, but as she gazed silently into the lamp, he saw two tears roll down her cheeks. She looked up without embarrassment and nodded toward a pallet near the wall, in the darkest shadows of the chamber. He lifted a lamp and stepped toward the pallet. It was drawn up against a large object, covered with a cloth. He pulled on a corner of the cloth and it slowly slid away, revealing a three-foot-high Buddha carved of stone. The plaster just above the Buddha's left shoulder showed fracture lines extending from a single small hole. Down the left side of the statue a rust-colored stain ran to the floor.
