Mandarin Gate (12 page)

“You?” the gang leader spat with a cold laugh. “Three competitors jumped my brother once and he sent one to his grave and the others to the hospital. I am Lung Tso. My brother was Lung Ma. People in Kunming quake at the name of the Lung brothers.” Lung studied Shan in silence, taking in his tattered clothes. “A man like you doesn’t take out a Jade Crow.”

“What kind of man does?” Shan asked.

Lung’s hand reached below the table. There was a blur of movement and his fist hammered a dagger into the table an inch from Shan’s hand. Shan did not move. “You were not brought here to ask
us
questions! I want what is ours returned!”

“I am the ditch inspector for the northern townships. You have me confused with someone else.”

Shan braced himself as Lung sprang from his chair. He pulled the dagger from the wood then aimed the point at Shan’s throat. “You may wear the clothes of a ditch inspector and drive the truck of the ditch inspector but I can see your eyes. And you were at the old convent with those bodies. We can see you talking with that damned knob lieutenant. You are no ditch inspector. Why would a ditch inspector be at the murder scene? You’re a fucking informer. Who do you work for? Not the Armed Police, I know that much.”

“I take that to mean the Armed Police told you I was at the convent,” Shan replied. He remembered now, with new worry, that Liang has sent one of the olive-coated men to stand at the gate. Shan had been seen while he had been examining the bodies.

Lung Tso flipped the dagger in the air, catching it by the handle without taking his eyes from Shan.

“I have a certificate of appointment signed by the county governor. Colonel Tan. Surely you are acquainted with him.” Shan could not imagine Tan allowing such immigrants into his county without a personal introduction, to gauge his new inhabitants and demonstrate the tight reins he kept on his county.

Lung winced. “Ironfist Tan they used to call him. The prick came to town and ordered us to stand before him in the square like we were new recruits. He looked old. More like Rusty Fist now.”

“He could still pound you into the ground without even blinking.”

Lung’s nod was so subtle Shan barely saw it. He did not see the stick that slammed into his cheek from over his shoulder. He gasped, unprepared for the stinging pain, and turned to see the youth who had escorted him from town holding a thin length of bamboo. As Shan watched, he reached to a wall hook and pulled down a leather-bound baton that ended in a cluster of wires bent into jagged angles at their ends. Pioneers were not allowed much baggage, but the Kunming settlers had managed to bring their tools with them.

“You met Genghis,” Lung said with a thin smile, gesturing to the youth.

Shan struggled to keep his voice level. “He doesn’t strike me as Mongolian.”

“He just likes the name. A bloodthirsty bastard who made sure everyone in the known world respected his clan.”

As if on cue Genghis slammed the end of the baton against the back of a chair. It splintered the wood. Shan did not bother to wipe away the blood that dripped down his cheek. He watched the wires of the baton. If they hit his face they could take out an eye.

Lung muttered a curt syllable and suddenly hands were all over Shan, pulling him up, searching his pockets, turning down his socks, then dumping the contents of his pockets on the table. His truck keys. His pocketknife. A blue stone he had rubbed smooth during his years of imprisonment. Short sticks of incense. The remaining clay deity he had bought in Baiyun. Lung Tso picked up the figurine, then the stone, studying each for a moment before setting it down. It was as if, Shan realized, the gang leader didn’t know exactly what he was looking for. “Perhaps if you told me what you seek,” he offered.

Lung slapped him. “Who the fuck are you?” he demanded. He slammed his fist down on the little deity, smashing it into dust, then hooked a finger toward the men behind him and strong arms slammed Shan back into his chair. Genghis pulled open Shan’s shirt then paused, lifting out the small gau Shan wore around his neck. It quieted the gang for a moment. A spirit box, many Chinese called such amulets. The people of Yunnan were known to be superstitious.

“There were three bodies in the refrigerator,” Shan stated. He tried to appear unconcerned about his gau. The only thing he had taken from Lung Ma’s body was inside the amulet box.

“I know of only two. I want what is ours returned,” Lung repeated.

He knew of only two. Meng had been attacked and the constables had come running to her, leaving the bodies unguarded. If he sought something belonging to a murder victim the first place to look would be with the body but Lung knew it was not with the body.

“I don’t care what kind of arrangement you have with the Armed Police. Those bodies are the concern of a special Public Security squad. They will declare war on the Jade Crows if they think you have their bodies.”

Lung stared in silence.

“And there
were
three,” Shan repeated. “Your brother. A nun. And a foreigner. Find out what they had in common and we will find their killer.”

“We?” Lung spat.

“I told you. My friend also died that day. He is dead because of those murders. He died unsettled. I told him I would find a way to resolve things.”

The men holding Shan released him and backed away. Lung shot a nervous glance toward them. The dark, thick forests of Yunnan were famous for their ghosts. “You told him?” he asked uneasily. “He’s dead.”

“In Tibet the spirits of those who die violent deaths wander forlornly until there is resolution.” His captors did not object as he began to return the items on the table to his pockets. “They are called
jungpo.
Hungry ghosts. They like the night. They like to hound those who owe them something.”

The words brought another long silence. Genghis cursed under his breath and retreated another step.

Only Lung seemed unaffected. “A Chinese helping some dead Tibetan? I don’t think so. More like a goddamned informant scavenging for loot.”

“My friend Jamyang. The abbess. Your brother. They’re all jungpo now. The old convent isn’t so far from here. Lung Ma will probably wander back this way looking for you. What will you tell him when he asks why he had to die? What will be your promise when he demands his killer be found?”

Lung glanced again at his men. Shan’s words had clearly unsettled them. The dagger in his hand shot forward again, embedding in the table against Shan’s hand, raising a trickle of blood. “It’s you my brother will come after if you keep interfering,” he growled, lifting the blade. Shan went very still as the point touched his wrist and pushed up his sleeve as though searching for a blood vessel. It stopped at the tattooed number on Shan’s forearm. A cruel grin split Lung’s face.
“Lao gai?”
he asked, using the term for hard-labor punishment, the worst of Lhadrung’s prisons.

Shan silently nodded.

“How long?”

“Five years.”

“Where?”

“The Four hundred and fourth People’s Construction Brigade. Thirty miles south of here.”

Lung grinned. “Perfect. Good as an admission that you are a killer and a thief.”

Shan watched in surprise as Lung withdrew the blade then produced a pencil and scrap of paper and wrote down the number. “If you had something to do with my brother’s death I will see that you take days to die,” he growled.

Lung tucked the paper into his pocket, then tilted his knife and sliced a long, wide splinter off the edge of the tabletop, and then methodically cut it into five smaller, flat splinters that he lay in front of him. As he did so one of the men behind him gripped Shan’s wrist and forced it open, spreading his fingers on the table. “This is what I will tell my brother we are doing if he comes asking. This is how Jade Crows deal with informers.” He looked back to Genghis. “Vodka,” he barked, as if settling in for the evening’s entertainment.

The gang leader stared at Shan until the youth brought him the bottle and poured him a glass. He downed half of it in one swallow before speaking again. “The sun has gone down. We have all night. First,” Lung said in a matter-of-fact tone, “you will tell me where it is, what that damned lama gave my brother.” He opened the drawer in the table, extracted a small hammer and lifted one of the long splints, then paused, looking up in confusion. One of the hangings with the dragons was pulsing with red light.

Genghis pulled the hanging back to expose a window. He cursed. “The knob bitch!”

Lieutenant Meng was leaning against her car when they brought Shan out, a police radio in her hand, held like a weapon. Over her shoulder a portable police strobe was flashing. Another car, with two constables, waited down the lane. Genghis shoved him toward Meng and retreated.

“Follow me,” was all she said.

*   *   *

His hand shook so badly he had trouble inserting the key into the ignition. He sped out of the farm compound, fishtailing in the gravel. As the farm disappeared behind a hill he stopped, clenching the wheel, and a sob escaped his throat. Jigten was right. He did not understand what had been happening in Tibet. The Tibet he knew did not have Chinese gangs living in remote valleys, did not have Chinese intellectuals living in tracts of shabby cottages. Like his Tibetan friends he had lived on the fringes too long, trying to ignore the long convoys of immigrants, the opening of the rail line to Lhasa that was bringing in colonists by the thousands. The Tibet he had come to know was occupied Tibet, with millions of Tibetans controlled by small armed pockets of Chinese, where there had been no doubt that Tibet could step forward with its own culture once those pockets had been removed. But that Tibet was being consumed from the inside out.

He realized that Meng’s car had also stopped, waiting for him. The Tibet he had known also did not have Public Security officers who helped him. He pressed his hands on the wheel, calming himself. “When the world has turned upside down,” Lokesh had once told him, “just turn a somersault and find a new way to stand.” He wiped the blood from his hand and put the truck back into gear.

Meng led him back to town, into the gravel lot beside the police post. “How did you know I was there?” he asked when they climbed out of their vehicles.

“One of the constables said that Genghis was in your truck. He’s the little prick Lung sends to summon people.” She took a step and pointed him toward the teahouse on the corner that served as the town’s sole café.

“I need a map of Tibet and a flashlight,” he said, reaching to open his gau.

She frowned, not hiding her impatience, then stepped back to her car and handed him a map and a light.

Shan quickly located the towns on Jamyang’s list, the paper Lung Tso had meant to torture him for. They were all border towns, on roads that led across the Tibetan border to Nepal, India, and Bhutan. When he looked up, Meng was standing at his shoulder. “I’ve been ordered to arrange for more pressure in the hills,” she declared in a tight voice as she gestured again toward the teahouse.

“Pressure?”

“Reconnaissance in force they call it. Anyone who does not cooperate gets detained. The owner of the teahouse has been held for questioning.”

“Why?”

“Failure to maintain a complete record of those who use the Internet connections at his tables. New patrols are going out. Someone is knocking down the new road signs in Chinese. Yesterday an Armed Police patrol stopped a farmer and when he couldn’t produce his papers they shot the yak he was taking to market.”

“Those four-legged splittists are particularly troublesome.”

Meng frowned again. “The constables were ordered to go out and bring it back, for the kitchen at district headquarters. They reported that they couldn’t find it.”

Shan stepped to the beat-up sedan parked beside Meng’s car, the vehicle used by the constables. He ran the flashlight beam along the body of the car, then plucked a tuft of long black fibers from the seam where the trunk met the body. Meng said nothing as he raised the hairs in the beam of light, then let them drift away in the wind. She had known the constables had found the yak, and probably returned the meat to the farmer. She had known and wanted him to know she knew.

For a few heartbeats they stared at each other, then she nodded toward the rear door of the teahouse. “And I have been ordered to find those who are playing those damned horns in the hills. We have decided they are unpatriotic.”

Shan hesitated as they reached the building. “And ordered to find me?”

Her answer was to open the door.

The little café was dark except for a single table in the center, under a naked lightbulb hanging from the ceiling. Major Liang sat in front of a file on the table, staring at the ember of his cigarette. Meng settled into the chair across from the major and looked up at Shan.
He should run. He should find Lokesh and hole up in a cave for few months’ meditation.
With every instinct screaming against it, Shan sat down.

“I only get assigned to very special projects,” Liang declared, speaking to his cigarette. “Three years ago a monastery went on strike five days before a scheduled visit by some foreign diplomats. The monks thought the visit gave them some leverage over us. They tore up their loyalty oaths, put up a picture of their damned splittist leader. So I was called in. By the end of the first day, the monks were en route to ten different prisons, never to see one another again. By the end of the second, bulldozers had leveled the monastery. By the end of the fourth day, all the rubble was hauled away and I had new highway maps printed showing a blank space where the monastery had been. When we intercepted the dignitaries we apologized and explained there had been a foolish mistake, crossed wires in the planning. We showed them the empty map and took them to a tame monastery where the monks greeted them by singing patriotic songs. After everyone was gone I brought in ten truckloads of salt and covered the old site. Nothing will grow there for decades.” He finally looked up at Shan. “I got a medal and a promotion for that.”

“Surely a man of your talents belongs in Beijing,” Shan observed in a flat voice.