“Drango village is on the official list,” she added.
“But what is its official population count?”
“Thirty,” she admitted, her voice cracking.
Shan had seen more than double that number of people in the village. So Chodron could collect taxes from everyone and pocket the difference. The village might appear on the official rolls but half its taxes never reached the government. No one would have complained. The villagers who realized would have considered it protection money, a fee for keeping the government away. An antitax.
Shan studied the woman, refilled her glass for her, began casually asking about her office, about her superiors, about where she and Chodron kept their bank accounts, whether she traveled with Chodron at Party expense. These were tedious queries that Shan could propound by rote, and which any experienced bureaucrat would expect to be included in such an interview.
“Where do you sell the gold?” he asked abruptly.
“I don’t know what you are talking about.”
Shan gave an indifferent shrug. “If you won’t speak about it then you just give him the opportunity to do so first, to use the information for negotiation. It will be an interesting dilemma for the prosecutors, who to make their primary target. The attractive, well-educated Chinese bureaucrat versus the Tibetan farmer. Except the farmer is a revered Party member.”
Jiling no longer fidgeted with her identity card. She was squeezing it so hard it began to dig into her flesh, drawing a thin line of blood. She calmly stepped to the sink and washed her wound.
“Who are you if you are not with Major Ren?” she asked from the counter.
“Perhaps you should look outside.”
Jiling studied him uncertainly, then went to the front window. She pulled the drapery cord, opening the curtain only a few inches. When she finally focused on the brown sedan parked outside she pressed a hand against her heart.
Shan approached the window. Gao was leaning against the car smoking, though Shan had never seen him with a cigarette before. The woman from the factory office now sat in the driver’s seat, strangely transfixed, eyes forward, hands on the wheel.
“Some people said he was dying in his castle in the mountains.” Jiling spoke in a whisper, as if fearful Gao might hear. “Others said he went back to Beijing to live in a palace. They call him the chairman’s chief sorcerer.”
“When Chodron is here, who is he exactly?” Shan asked.
There was another car, a black utility vehicle, parked fifty feet behind Gao’s. “Do I need to invite him inside?” he continued when Jiling did not answer. Then his mouth went dry. Two men in gray uniforms got out of the utility vehicle and began walking toward Gao.
“Chodron has offices in the county Party administration,” Jiling told him. “He used to be termed the chief Party representative for the rural proletariat. Now they call for ethnic diversity in the Party leadership. The last title they gave him was secretary for indigenous agrarian workers.”
That explained how Chodron managed to come and go as he pleased, an official without portfolio, though if he spent too much time in town with his Chinese mistress he might jeopardize his standing.
Jiling had gone silent. She was looking at his feet. Shan had forgotten his tattered boots.
“Undercover work,” he asserted. He motioned her toward the table. She hesitated, glanced from Shan to the men outside.
“If I need to summon them I will,” Shan said. “But I assure you I will try not to involve you further. Write down what you have told me. When Dr. Gao comes to the door, hand him the statement.”
“Where are you going?”
“To interview the groundskeeper,” Shan ventured.
“He’s nobody, some old Tibetan.”
Shan pointed to the table. She looked at his boots, then at Gao and the knobs outside, then retreated to the table and began writing.
Shan quietly slipped through the rear door and scanned the yard. The groundskeeper was sleeping against a tree, his chin propped on his chest. Shan removed his lanyard, pushed it into the pile of plucked weeds near the man’s feet, and entered the shadows at the back of the yard. The small strip of forest behind the row of houses gave him cover until he reached the street, two hundred yards from Chodron’s house.
His eyes stayed on the town’s tallest building but his feet, as if by an instinct all their own, went in the other direction. In a small park consisting of a derelict playground and a grove of trees, he settled onto a bench made of cinder blocks and weathered planks. His ribs were aching from his beating at Little Moscow. He lowered his head into his hands. He had not felt such despair since the early days of his exile and imprisonment in the gulag. His life was spiraling out of control. The lives of everyone close to him were threatened by dark destinies-prison, a firing squad, cancer. Murderers who hacked off hands were loose on Sleeping Dragon Mountain and he could protect no one. He needed to rest. He needed to meditate, to expunge the despair from his mind, to expel the pain from his body. He needed to do what Gendun called taking himself out of himself.
As if from a great distance he watched three children play on a broken swing, hanging on the side chains, chinning up the support poles. Once he would have been warmed by such a sight. He had spent years learning from the old Tibetans how to savor the simple joys of life. Now, after ten days with Chodron, Gao, and the faceless killer, the sight of the children only brought sorrow.
He did not know how long he stared at the cracked dirt at his feet, or when exactly he looked up at the children again. They had stopped playing and were gazing at a patch of sunlight in the trees in which a man stood. The man was at least twenty years older than Shan, a Tibetan, wearing clothes that were patched and threadbare.
His legs and arms were in constant, though very slow, motion, his hands like the heads of two swans on long graceful necks. He was performing a combination of Tai Chi and Buddhist meditation exercises. Shan found himself walking toward the man. Loose threads hung from his frayed pants over his bare feet. His serene smile showed he was missing most of his teeth. His thin wispy hair was mostly gray. He was oblivious to Shan, oblivious to the children who watched. They shrank back, awe in their eyes, as the man began to jump in great arcs until one of his leaps placed him under the swingset. He grabbed the overhead pole and propelled himself upward. He kept his grip, working his legs to gain height, so that soon he swung in nearly a half circle, his face lit with joy.
Shan watched as if in a trance. Though he could not explain why, as the old man swung, his despair lifted. Finally, he turned his gaze toward the government tower and began walking to it. At the edge of the park he turned for a moment. The serene old Tibetan was still swinging.
When he reached the building he studied it, walking circuits around it, noting the unmarked Public Security vehicles behind it, the steps at the rear that descended to a heavy metal door, the small slits of windows just above ground level covered with thick wire. As he watched, the rear door opened and a man was carried out on a stretcher, his feet in chains. From behind a truck, Shan dared a glance at his contorted, swollen face. Too old for Yangke, not old enough for Hostene.
He ventured into the reception area, searching for video surveillance equipment. Seeing none, he went to the building elevator. Public Security had offices on the third floor. There was no listing for the basement.
Out front he noted three gray utility vehicles, bearing license plates for Lhasa. He circled the building. A dented, unwashed van pulled up in back of it. The driver, a plump, middle-aged man in a white shirt, opened the back doors and began lifting out shiny metal buckets and plastic containers. The instant Shan smelled the steamed rice he emerged from the shadows. Then he extended one of the remaining gold nuggets to the deliveryman.
He carried two buckets of steamed rice, walking one step behind the deliveryman. The guard inside the door, more interested in the food than its porters, waved them toward a sterile-looking room at the end of a row of cells. At a table in its center sat another guard, working on documents. Shan set a small container of soup onto the table too close to the edge. Some of its contents spilled onto the papers.
“
As the cursing guards bent over this new mess, the deliveryman shouted for Shan to bring rags from the van. Instead, Shan darted down the dimly lit row of cells. A teenage boy sat in the first, his arm in a sling. In the next
