“A bribe from you?” Shan said. “Not credible. It needs to come from an unrepentant criminal.” He palmed the nuggets and went forward into the cockpit.
Five minutes later he settled into a small nest of military blankets built for him by Hostene as the machine roared to life and began to rise. Hubei had already found another pile of blankets at the rear of the hold and appeared to be sleeping.
“Where is the pain?” Hostene asked.
With a forced grin Shan pointed to the bottom of a foot.
“There is the only place it doesn’t hurt. He was no expert. Professionals go for the soles of the feet.”
The landscape began to roll past the narrow portholes.
Yangke rose to sit beside Shan. “I have no papers,” he said anxiously. It was a crime in itself to be without citizen registration papers. They were the first thing police asked for when they encountered strangers.
“Nor do I. Nor does Hostene for that matter, not for this region. We won’t stay in town long. Just overnight.”
“It will take us days to make our way back on foot.”
“I gave the pilots two nuggets today, one for each of them. They get the second installment when they pick us up in the morning.” Together, the little yellow rocks represented at least half a year’s pay for the officer, far more for the soldier.
“Why do you think I can help with-”
“You know Chodron,” Shan interjected. “We need to find Abigail. But we also need to track Chodron’s connections in town.” He glanced at their companions. Gao had put on a set of headphones that allowed him to speak to the pilot. Hostene was looking out a window on the opposite side of the ship, as if searching for a woman on a mule. “But first we need to talk about your partnership with Tashi.”
Yangke’s face clouded. He began fidgeting with a cargo strap that hung along the side of the fuselage. “Tashi is dead.”
“If you don’t wish to speak of Tashi, then how about the explosion at the old mine?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Chodron keeps very thorough records. Careful records of the miners, careful records of his village administration. But there is no record of your stealing anything from him. By my calculations, the day he locked the canque around your neck was the day after the old mine blew up. Tashi and you were friends. Tashi knew the miners.”
Yangke absently ran his finger around the rim of the porthole. “He said he could get me to India, to start a new life. He knows. . he knew a monastery in the south I could join. Otherwise, without his help, it takes a lot of money to cross the border when you have neither papers nor passport. I’m an outcast monk. What do I know about making money?”
“Why didn’t you join the miners?”
“The gold on this mountain is not meant to be taken away. What Tashi was doing was different. He told me about the professors seeking old deities. I figured they could make better sense of the past than I could. He offered me a bargain. He knew I had a secret I had kept since I was a boy, even from him.”
“You mean they didn’t discover the old mine,” Shan said after a moment. “You told them where it was.”
“I told Tashi where it was. Tashi told the professors. None of the gold had ever been taken down the mountain. In exchange, Tashi promised to get me across to India. He said he had a foolproof way, that I could ride with gods all the way.”
Shan closed his eyes a moment. He had been so blind. “It had never been taken down the mountain,” he repeated in a hollow voice.
“I had searched when I was a boy, spoken with all the old ones, considered how poor our village had always been. They never used it in the temple, except for a couple small statues. Abigail and Professor Ma made rough calculations based on what they saw at the mine. Tashi told me they thought maybe two tons of gold had been mined. Two tons.”
“But someone else found out about it?”
“Tashi got drunk. Sometimes with Bing. Thomas had started selling liquor. That boy had everything he could want but he had to come across and throw alcohol on our smoldering fires.”
They gazed out at the landscape in silence.
“So Tashi told Bing, and then the mine blew up,” Shan said. “Then Chodron put the canque on you. Because,” he suggested after a long moment, “he was furious that you kept the secret from him all these years.”
“No,” Yangke said in a slow voice, “it wasn’t like that. The explosion was huge. It shook the ground all the way to the village. Chodron came up the slope immediately, demanding an explanation. Bing was already on a bike, riding down to explain. He said that some of the miners’ works had been blown up, had been sabotaged. And there was only one person who hated the miners and Chodron enough to destroy their claims. He told Chodron that someone had stolen explosives out of the stores at Little Moscow the night before. Chodron never goes to Little Moscow. He stays away from the miners, and only speaks with Bing. So, of course, he believed Bing.”
Shan let the words sink in a moment. “Bing didn’t want Chodron to know there were two tons of gold waiting to be found somewhere higher on the mountain. And he couldn’t take the chance of someone finding the old mine and reaching the same conclusion.” He looked at Yangke. “But didn’t you deny blowing up the mine?”
More mountains sped by their window.
“You didn’t,” Shan concluded. “You didn’t contradict Bing.”
Why would Yangke protect Bing, he almost asked, then realized that for Yangke there was perhaps a more important question. “Why did you let Chodron put the canque on you and condemn you wrongly as a thief in front of the whole village? Why did you keep it on? You could have run, you could have hidden, you could have gone to Tashi or even Rapaki.”
“At first, it was to protect Tashi and our plan. Because if I had run then, Chodron would have tried to find me and he would have discovered Tashi’s secret camp,” came Yangke’s simple reply. “But later. . I realized I deserved it. I should have understood that the only possible way to save the old things is to keep them away from the new world. I knew that, but when Tashi said he could get me to India, where I could be a real monk, I was tempted and I succumbed,” Yangke added.
Shan closed his eyes, letting the painkiller do its work. But he did not sleep. He had learned in the gulag that there was a part of the brain that drugs never reached, the part that kept repeating Yangke’s words until, as the helicopter began to descend, he found himself looking at the young man again, understanding the full depth of his pain. Yangke had accepted the canque because he had betrayed the secret of the mine. He had worn it because he believed, as Shan now did, that the secret he had disclosed to Tashi was the reason his friend had been murdered.
Like most older communities in Tibet, Tashtul was two towns, the efficient concrete-and-steel construction Beijing had erected and the traditional Tibetan market town that survived. As they walked from the weed-thatched, crumbling soccer stadium where the helicopter deposited them, Shan found his eyes drawn not to the two- and three-story block structures that dominated the low skyline but to the diminutive, decaying buildings that dated from earlier centuries, a wooden stable here, a crumbling chorten there, a stone tower where Buddhist banners would have been displayed during festivals that had been banned decades earlier.
They stood for several minutes at a rusting war memorial by the entrance to the stadium, Beijing’s monument to the fierce battles that had taken place in the region, Chinese divisions pitted against small brigades of Tibetan resistance fighters.
“I take it,” Gao said reluctantly to Shan, “you are about to propose that I lead this fragile expedition.” As he spoke he cocked his head toward the street. Hubei was running away.
“It would be suspicious for a man of your renown not to be,” Shan suggested. “Not to mention that we have neither money nor friends here. Not even a street map.”
“A street map,” Gao replied, “is one thing you don’t require in Tashtul.” He pointed to the squat block structure two hundred yards away, in front of which a tire was being changed on a decrepit bus by means of a cable slung over a tree limb, pulled by a tractor. “The transportation center.” He pointed to an open-air pavilion beside a row of buildings with glass storefront windows, then to a four-story building, the highest in town, that sported a Chinese flag and a dozen antennae. “The center for food and the center for authority.”
