“If I let you go, I will never see you again. That’s what convicts do in Tibet. Disappear.”
Shan lowered his head into his hands. His body was fatigued. But his spirit was beyond exhaustion. “How many years did it take,” he asked, “to find the old dzong you live in?”
Gao did not reply.
“When they come,” Shan continued, “they will also find out about the gold. Not even the army will be able to stop what will happen then. Maybe it could have twenty or thirty years ago, but not today. Economic development is Beijing’s new mantra. The first year or two they will just send survey teams. There will be helicopters coming and going overhead. Geologists will drill and blast. After that, they will build roads, with bulldozers and more dynamite. They’ll assign a gulag crew to do the work for a year or two, maybe three or four hundred prisoners, so they’ll probably build a prison camp right here at the village site. A new town will go up, built of metal and concrete. A depot, a garage, dormitories. Then the real work will begin. Scores of miners. More dormitories. Huge trucks to move the material as it is blasted loose. After they deplete the seams and have sluiced the dust in the streams, they’ll pick a small valley in which to heap the soil they strip from the slopes, then spray it with sodium cyanide to leach out the ore. They won’t stop until there is nothing left but bare, sterile rock. Once they start, a Tibetan mountain lasts about a dozen years.”
Shan never heard the angry words forming on Gao’s lips. Chodron had appeared, accompanied by two of his men. The headman pointed at Shan. “He’s mine. He has already been arrested by the civil authority. I released him on his parole, to assist me.”
“Already arrested?” Gao asked, suppressing his rage. “On what charges?”
Chodron swallowed hard and pressed on. “Interfering with municipal government. Violations of the Ax to Root directive.”
“Ax to Root is a campaign,” Gao pointed out, “not a criminal law. A campaign against Tibetans. Shan is not Tibetan.”
“He has no government registration. He is nothing, an escaped convict. Leave him with me and we will find the bastard who did this to your nephew. I have already started an investigation. I know what to do with men like Shan.” Gao’s silence was making Chodron nervous. “Do not blind yourself to the truth, sir.”
“What particular truth am I missing, Comrade Chodron?” Gao asked.
“Your nephew would still be alive but for Shan. He may have been a Beijing investigator once, but not now. Once a criminal, always a criminal. People like you and me are his enemy. He stirs things up, he breeds instability. He cares nothing about the laws of Beijing anymore. He does not intend that the murderer be sent before a Chinese judge.”
“Deny these things,” Gao demanded of Shan.
Shan looked toward the distant mountains. “I am not your enemy,” he said.
“Would my nephew still be alive if you had not gone up the mountain?”
“I don’t know,” Shan’s voice dropped to a whisper. “Probably. I went up the mountain to find answers. The killer was feeling pressured. If Hostene and I don’t go back, his niece will certainly die.”
Chodron said, “Shan may have murdered your nephew.” He leaned toward Gao. “I could easily write a report for Public Security. Shan was in the area, had access to heavy blades, had a simple motive. He had been found out. Was this killing an unreformed convict’s last desperate attempt to keep from spending the rest of his life in prison? Was there a conspiracy between Shan and this Hostene? Perhaps Shan took a bribe to cover up the evidence that Hostene killed his two companions. Then he had to silence your nephew because he was conducting his own investigation and had discovered the terrible truth. A convict and an illegal foreigner-the kind of solution Public Security welcomes.”
Chodron turned to Shan. “A simple confession will prevent unnecessary suffering by your two old goats.”
Shan searched Chodron’s face. He saw movement behind the stable. Two of the headman’s men were carrying Gendun, who was limp as a sack of rice.
Shan took a step toward the lama.
“The other one, Lokesh,” Chodron added, “his turn comes next. I recall that he was quite rude to me that night you arrived.”
Shan was unable to speak. He jerked the chain tight between his manacled wrists, his fists clenching and unclenching. He had thought when he discovered Thomas’s corpse that things could not get worse. But now he stood in chains as Chodron demanded that he confess to murder to save Lokesh and Gendun.
Someone moved between Shan and Chodron. Gao. “We will allow Shan and the American to go up the mountain again,” the scientist declared. “They can have seven days, no more. Put the manacles on the two old men who are his friends. Treat them as prisoners awaiting Public Security.
“If anything happens to me or to Kohler, or if they are found on the eastern side of the mountain again, or if Shan does not return in a week, the two old men are to be surrendered to Public Security. Major Ren is touring the district. He is responsible for Ax to Root in this region. He will know what to do with them.”
“Ren,” Chodron muttered with a grunt that seemed part satisfaction, part fear.
Gao did not look at Shan as he continued. “When Shan returns, he will be given a choice. He can surrender to me and I will send him to Beijing, where he belongs, to learn how to serve his government once again. Or he can surrender to you and return to prison.”
Shan’s throat went dry as a stone. “You won’t call Public Security for a week?”
“Not unless Kohler or I am endangered.” Gao exchanged a glance with the headman. “Or Chodron.”
A delicate, treacherous bargain was being struck between Chodron and Gao. Shan was the prize.
“No,” Shan said.
“No? It is not
“I will not sign a confession. And I will not go after the killer unless Lokesh and Gendun are unchained and put under Dolma’s care and provided with whatever she says they need. And no more tamzing.”
Shan braced himself as Chodron swung back his open hand. But Gao caught the headman’s arm. “It will take a criminal to catch this criminal,” he said.
Chodron replied, “The manacles stay on the lama. A guard stays at the door. They may not leave Dolma’s house.” He glared at Shan, then accepted the key extended by Gao. “Three sessions of tamzing are sufficient for now,” Chodron added with a satisfied air as he released Shan from the handcuffs. “Come back without the murderer and there will be three more sessions.”
Shan gazed at Gendun. Three more sessions would kill the old lama.
Chodron announced in a suddenly cheerful voice, “In another week, we celebrate the annual harvest festival. This year’s is our best harvest ever. We will also celebrate the solution of the murders. We will celebrate the compassionate power of our elders in Beijing.”
Gendun lay on a pallet, Lokesh at his side, as Dolma heated tea on a brazier by the open window. Gendun’s cheeks were discolored in several spots, his forehead was creased, a sign of the lama’s silent battle to control his pain. He seemed weak and fragile. He appeared, Shan realized, with a wrench of his gut, exactly like the Tibetan prisoners he had lived with in the gulag, the old lamas who had slowly withered before his eyes. He had buried so many of them he had lost count.
“Chodron found two shepherds counting prayer beads,” Dolma reported in a tormented tone. “A family had mounted an old rusty prayer wheel at their front door. He was furious. He burned the beads, smashed the wheel, then dragged Gendun out into the street, saying it was all his fault.”
As Shan lowered himself beside the lama his hand reached out of its own accord and cradled Gendun’s, a chain around it now. He recalled with a numbing sense of defeat the way his father had lain dying after he had been beaten by the Red Guard. Shan had sat helplessly, squeezing his father’s hand for hours, until with a terrible rattle that still echoed in his nightmares the professor had breathed his last.
“We are brewing teas used by the old healers,” Dolma said with a nod toward Lokesh, who chanted a mantra for the medicine deity. The widow busied herself among the small crocks and jars that lined a shelf below the window. At first Shan thought her preoccupation was with the teas, then saw that she fidgeted with a cleaning rag, twisting it in her fingers, casting nervous glances out the window. Shan rose and stepped to Dolma’s side. “I need to understand your nephew, Tashi,” he said in a low voice. “What did he do when he left the village?”
She scrubbed her eyes with her apron. “He was a good boy, Yangke’s best friend. Ten years ago, Yangke came back from the Chinese school Chodron had sent him to. He had many problems there, always being
