"He's here," Xu reported. "Came this afternoon, staying at a special Brigade guesthouse. Has boot squad bodyguards."
Shan sighed. "Perfect. Arrest them all."
"Lunacy," she shot back. "You've lost all sense of the bond between the government and its citizens." The words came out forced and hollow.
Shan just stared at her.
"You've been in Tibet too long," she accused him.
"I read something on the bond between the government and its people," he replied. "It's called the Lotus Book."
The words had a strange effect on the prosecutor. Xu seemed to stop breathing for a moment. She looked out over the tombs. "It's not like that," she said after a long time, in a taut voice.
"When you're in prison," he said quietly, speaking toward the horizon, "you always wake up without making a sound. People learn to have nightmares with silent screams, because of what the guards do if there is noise." The woman looking at him now was not the prosecutor. It was someone he had never seen before. The stone in her face seemed to have shattered. "But one day I woke up to the sound of a beautiful bell. Not loud, but true and harmonious, resonating to my bones, a perfect sound. Later I asked a lama who rang the bell. The lama said there was no bell, but at dawn he had watched a single drop of water drop from the roof into my tin cup. He said it was just the way my soul needed it to sound."
"I don't understand," Xu whispered, toward the graves.
"It's only that it changes you, Tibet. It makes you see things, or hear things differently. It marks you, it burns things into your soul." He looked at her. "Or sometimes burns through your soul."
Xu turned to put the sunset wind in her face. "In that book," she started, as if trying to explain something.
"Know this," Shan interrupted, for he would not deceive her. "I read nothing about you in the book." But he remembered the strange look on her face when she had stared at the Kunlun, and how Tibetans worried her.
She seemed relieved for a moment and turned toward the stairs. But when she reached them she sat on the bench again. He worked on the grave a few more minutes, until it was clean, and still she just sat, staring over the weed-bound tombs.
Shan walked out of the graveyard and stepped past her. He was on the first stair when she spoke. "There're three hundred forty-seven graves here," she said, in her whisper again. "I counted them once."
He sat on the stairs. A large bird soared over the graveyard and roosted on a far tomb. An owl. Keeper of the dead.
"I was only sixteen," she blurted out, almost a sob. "We made a truck convoy from Shanghai, gathering more and more cadres as we went. They elected me officer. I never asked for it, but they said I could recite more of the Chairman's verses than the others in my unit. We traveled for weeks. We broke down fences to liberate livestock. We burned schools to liberate children. We burned libraries to liberate knowledge."
The Red Guard, Shan realized. She was talking about the Red Guard and the Cultural Revolution.
"When we got to Tibet they assigned me a district and a quota. Ten percent of all citizens were declared bad elements, and I had to identify my ten percent and submit them to struggle sessions, public criticism, violent criticism. Sometimes fatal criticism. Gompas had to be eliminated. The reactionaries had to be punished. Fourteen times our unit forced children to shoot their parents." She paused and surveyed the graves again as if she were thinking of counting once more. "We were only children ourselves. Sometimes they stripped lamas naked and made them dance in the town square."
"They?"
Xu was silent. She ran her hand over her lips. It trembled. "We," she said at last and pushed a knuckle into her mouth. She took the finger out after a moment and stared at it, as if not understanding what it had done. "I wanted to stop. I wanted to go home. I was tired of the brutality. I was worried about my family. But if you spoke about family you were criticized. Sign of a reactionary, sign of addiction to the tradition of oppression. All I could do was continue. We got awards. A model unit. I kept getting promoted. There was a gompa far in the hills, a big gompa past Shigatse. The Revolutionary Committee came with photographers from Lhasa to watch us do our job. We surrounded the gompa and sang songs of the Revolution. I gave the order to burn it. I thought the monks would come out, they had time to. But they didn't. Some of them stood in the doors and looked at us as they burned. But most just stayed inside, saying their mantras. For a long time we could hear them, louder than the roar of the flames. Afterwards we found the bodies in rows, because they had carefully sat in their sanctuary with their lamas facing them. Rows and rows, like a cemetery. We celebrated and sang our songs again. Three hundred forty-nine. The Chairman sent me a letter of commendation. It's how I got my first job in the Ministry. Because I had the letter from the Chairman. It just said I did a good job, that I was a model worker. It didn't say it was because I had killed three hundred forty-nine monks."
Shan had no words. A history teacher had once told him that the only problem with modern China was that people lived too long, that too many millions lived to old age, when they began to cultivate a conscience. For Xu the nightmares had come early, and her conscience had trapped her. It's not like that, she had said of the Lotus Book. Meaning, It was like that, but now I am a different person. She was as surely a prisoner as those she sent behind wire, self-exiled in the borderlands where she thought she might make a difference.
She seemed not to notice when he rose and climbed the stairs. He passed the car without looking at the bald man at the wheel and walked back to town, the wind throwing sand across the road, his soul so heavy he thought he might never hear a bell again.
Chapter Twenty-One
Sand blew down the streets of Yoktian, obscuring their broken curbs and other imperfections, blurring the cracks in the walls. It was as if the entire town had been airbrushed for a cleaner, more wholesome image. Perhaps on the general's orders. But Shan was not fooled. There were still holes in the street that would break your ankle and fissures in the walls where rats waited.
A cargo truck was at the rear of the restaurant when Shan arrived. Gendun and Lokesh were asleep in the front room under two tables that had been pushed together, as if the Maos expected an earthquake. Jowa sat beside them, lotus fashion, watching them. As the stout woman extended a mug of tea and a bowl of noodles toward him, the truck's engine started.
"Rice camp," she said in response to his look of query, and he bolted out the door, jumping into the cargo bay so quickly that he did not realize until he sat down that the tea was still in his hand.
Fat Mao, sitting in the shadows behind the cab, was not happy to see him. A quick trip, he said, to pick up the order for the next week's food delivery, although Shan knew better. They were going because of Red Stone clan, because the next afternoon the clan would be disbanded, because Akzu and Fat Mao had a plan they would not explain. But Shan did not care. He was going for the waterkeeper. There was nothing else to do except wait for the dawn, wait for the meeting at Stone Lake, for the final confrontation where the killers would come to collect their last prize, where Shan had to be before the knobs, to whisk the boy away if he and the herders guarding him eluded the Maos, who would be trying to intercept the boy on the roads leading to Stone Lake.
The adminstrative compound at Glory Camp was deserted. The gatehouse itself was empty and the gate locked. But Ox Mao climbed out of the driver's seat and quickly unlocked the padlock. They parked by the warehouse and a woman followed the big Kazakh out of the front seat— Swallow Mao, wearing a severe-looking business suit. The woman carried a large envelope and marched toward the administrative building with an air of authority.
Shan stood by the inner wire, studying the barracks with the holding cells, inside the prisoner compound. He had no plan, no idea, no confirmation even that the lama was in the barracks. Even if Swallow Mao could find his hut assignment the Maos could not risk entering the second wire, which was where the real security started. He bent to a small clump of dried asters that had managed to survive in the sandy soil at the base of the inner wire. Plucking one of the stems, Shan tied it to the wire at the closest point to the holding cells. Maybe, he thought sadly, he had come just to say goodbye. The old Tibetan would not last long once Bao, or Rongqi, discovered he was a lama. He looked back at the administrative building and slowly, reluctantly, turned his head toward the small shed where he had found Nikki, then the boilerhouse.
He started walking, without conscious effort, and found himself under the boilerhouse roof. From twenty feet away he could feel the heat of the furnace and he stood there, the image of the spirited blond youth by the boiler door burning through his mind. Not much older than his own son. He walked out the far side of the building and stopped at the edge of the cemetery. In the dim light of the cloud-covered moon the graves seemed endless. With small, uncertain steps he started toward the far end, where the freshest mounds of earth had been.
Then he saw the animal. A low shadowy hulk, it moved along the graves as though following a scent. Shan looked down for a spade, a stick, anything he might use as a weapon. The creature lingered at one of the freshly dug piles of earth. With a pang of fear Shan wondered what he would do if it began to dig for the dead. Scavengers preferred rotten meat. Feebly, he stepped forward. The beast paid him no attention. It pawed idly at the earth in long motions that gave the impression of a great and reckless power.
After a moment the animal leaned back and sat up on its rear haunches. As the moon appeared from behind a cloud Shan gave a half-choked cry. The animal was Marco Myagov.
He stood in silence for a long time before venturing a step forward. Marco tensed and seemed about to pounce on him, then eased back as he recognized Shan. Shan spoke no word of greeting but instead began to range among the graves himself, surveying the mounds, trying to remember how they had looked on his first visit. After a few minutes he stopped at a group of three fresh graves. "Here," he said. "This is where he would be."
Marco seemed to require great effort to rise. He wiped his hands, caked with soot and the dirt of the cemetery, and joined Shan.
"He is—" Shan struggled to find words. "He is with many good men." Despite their miserable deaths in a forgotten wasteland, many of those laid to rest before them were men who defied the dictators, who had been true to their beliefs.
Marco gave no sign he had heard Shan's words.
"I thought you were—" Shan offered tentatively. "I saw the flames, I thought you had died." What if this was not Marco, he thought with alarm, what if it was some frail shadow of Marco, some wraith left after he had lost his soul that night?
But then the man spoke, and Shan sighed with relief. "She burned," Marco said in a hoarse voice. "God's breath, how she burned."
"But why are you—"
"I have had talking to do with my Nikki."
"Then what?" Shan asked after a moment.
"I told you before. I get bastards. It's what I do."
The words somehow made Shan sad. "They need you. The Americans still have to get out. They're in great danger."
Marco looked at Shan, with an expression of confusion, as if he had not thought of it before.
"They'll kill you here. There're soldiers. You won't have a chance."
Marco did not reply. He selected the middle of the two graves and sat on the earth by it, then patted the soil beside him as though gesturing for Shan to join him. Shan knelt by the end of the mound.
"I would not fear to stay here with Nikki," the Eluosi said, almost brightly. "I have nothing left. I have no country. I have no family. I have no home."
"But what would Sophie do without you?"
Marco's eyes rested on a patch in the darkness, in the shadows of the knoll by the camp. He sighed heavily and pulled something out of his pocket. In the moonlight Shan recognized it. The Russian medal he had seen in Nikki's room. The medal from the Czar.
Marco scooped loose soil from the head of the grave and buried the medal, then spoke in Russian for a long time, looking first at the grave, then at the sky.
When he finished Marco shifted his gaze toward the compound. His eyes had a new, sharp glint, a warrior's eyes. Suddenly he rose and began jogging toward the boilerhouse.
By the time Shan caught up, he was at the open boiler, rapidly shoveling in coal. He motioned toward the loaded barrow at the front of the shed, and Shan pushed it toward him. Soon the boiler was packed with fuel, almost overflowing with coal. The heat was nearly unbearable before Marco closed the door. The Eluosi darted to the tool bench and returned with a long spike and a pair of pliers. He jammed the spike through the holes designed to hold a padlock on the door when not in use, and bent both ends so the door could not be opened. He quickly studied the simple controls above the door, then shut off the relief valve, opened the air intake to maximum, and smashed the temperature warning gauge. He turned away, then paused and turned back, pulling something out of his pocket and placing it on the top of the door. Shan recognized it. The plain steel ring that Nikki had worn.
