Mandarin Gate (17 page)

In the silence that followed Shan realized the steady breathing from the bed had stopped. The old woman had pulled the blanket over her head but Shan could see her hollow eyes, open, staring at them in horror. She had been listening.

“You will have no more friends there,” Jigten said, his voice strangely hoarse now. “They will be no more. People go in but only hollow shells come out.”

*   *   *

The sun was low in the sky when Shan rose from the tall grass where he had been sitting, watching the Jade Crows compound. There was no sign of sentries. The big trucks were gone. Jigten had explained that twice a week they made long hauls, either to the southern border or up the northern road to Chamdo, Tibet’s third biggest city, even sometimes beyond, into Sichuan Province, to pick up supplies for the camps. The compound seemed nearly deserted except for the solitary figure he had seen climbing to the run-down stable on the slope above the farm. He cast a long, worried glance in the direction of Lokesh’s new prison, then muttered a prayer and began climbing the hill.

There was no door on the little building. For several moments Shan watched the man at the altar of planks and stones, then extracted a stick of incense from his pocket and lit a match against the wall.

Lung Tso spun about, his eyes flaring as bright as the match. “You have a lot of balls coming here, Old Mao,” he spat. His hand drifted toward the dagger Shan knew was in his boot.

“I bring incense to honor your gods.”

The words cut through Lung’s anger. He glanced back at the altar, seeming uncertain how to respond. On one side of the altar sat a simple sandalwood statue of Buddha, on the other a stout, decorated Buddha of the tropical lands. Beside them were two thick candles, a butter lamp, a glass of wine, and a white
khata
scarf, an offering scarf. At the very edge sat a small toy truck with another khata wrapped around it.

Shan wedged his smoking stick of incense between stones in the wall above the altar, murmuring a quick mantra before turning to the new Jade Crow chieftain. “Tell me something, Lung. Did your brother make this altar before or after his son died?” He half expected Lung to pull out his blade, but then he saw there was no fight in the man before him.

Lung Tso watched the smoke of the smoldering stick as he spoke. “After. Even then he kept it hidden. The night we burned his boy’s body he never came back to the house. I found him here, just before dawn, setting out the little statues.” He turned to Shan. “When we were young our mother took us to the temple. People would bring little things like images of houses and money and burn them. Should we burn something?”

“That was a temple of the Taoists,” Shan explained. “The Buddha does not expect it.”

“My brother said he had been having dreams about going to the temple with our mother,” Lung continued. “He said maybe we had been wrong to ignore the gods after she died. Maybe it was wrong to have roughed up all those Tibetans in the hills, he said, just because the police said so. He said our mother had warned him about making deals with demons.”

“You mean he thought his son’s death was some kind of punishment.”

“I told him his son died in a truck accident, that our dealing with the police was just good business, that the Jade Crows always made the best of their situation, it’s how we survived. But he wouldn’t listen. He said bringing the old nun was too late, that he should have done so long before.”

Shan paused. “You were here when she came?”

“The first time she came to us with another nun, right up the stairs as we sat at the table playing tiles. She demanded that we stop raiding the farms. My brother made sure she wasn’t hurt, even stopped the others from laughing at her, but agreed to nothing. When my nephew died he seemed to reconsider things. Lung Wi was a good boy, very smart, very lively. Always laughing. My brother was devoted to him. If we had stayed in Yunnan some of us might have avoided jail but my brother wouldn’t be separated from his son. The others don’t know it, but it’s why we came here, so my brother and his son would be together.

“When the boy’s body was brought back he wept. The only time I ever saw him weep. He pulled out an old box of our mother’s things and sat with them a long time. Then he took them and placed them around his son’s body. After a couple hours of sitting there in silence he left without a word. When he came back that old nun was with him. They washed the boy’s body and they said words together.”

“Your brother and the abbess?”

Lung shook his head. “The abbess and that other nun, the older nun. The monk too, though the abbess was in charge.”

“A monk? What was his name?”

“That Jamyang.”

“The tall lama with the red spot on his jaw?”

As Lung nodded Shan recalled he had seemed to know Jamyang’s name on his first visit. “Not as good as the nuns,” the gang leader added.

“What do you mean?”

“He disrupted things, stopped the prayers. He ran out like he couldn’t bear to be with the dead. What good’s a monk who is scared of death?”

Shan stared at the gang leader in confusion. “Where was the boy going when he died?”

“Jade Crow business,” was Lung’s only reply. He turned back toward the altar. “Do you have more of that incense?”

Shan found himself settling down in front of the altar. He absently handed Lung his last stick of incense. The gang leader lit it and stared at the little Buddha in the exotic garb, his head cocked, as if trying to understand how to speak to it. The last rays of the sun reached into the stable, bathing the altar in a golden glow.

Shan reached into his pocket and extracted the folded piece of paper he had found in Lung Ma’s holster. “This is what you wanted. This is what I took from your brother’s body.”

Lung Tso seemed not to hear for a moment, then he slowly turned and accepted the paper. His brows knitted in confusion as he read it. He looked up at Shan and gestured him closer to the little Buddhas. “My mother said in front of the gods no man can lie. This was it, this was all you took?”

“I swear it to you. These were the words that brought him to the convent that day.”

“Just dates and towns?”

“Certain dates. Certain towns, towns on the border, where things get moved out of China. And at the bottom that address in Chamdo. It was written by Jamyang.”

“This is why my brother died? I don’t think so.”

“A man cannot lie in front of the gods, Lung. Were the Jade Crows smuggling things across at those towns? Things like the cameras of those foreigners?”

Lung’s nod was so small as to be almost imperceptible.

“Where are they, where are the cameras?”

“Gone. Probably in some Katmandu market by now.”

“Look at the last two entries, Lung. One town, with two dates that were in the future when Jamyang gave these to him. One passed a few days ago. You’re planning operations there, to smuggle across the Nepali border on those dates. Someone is watching you.”

Lung’s eyes widened, as realization had finally hit him. “Fuck me.”

“Your nephew died,” Shan slowly declared. “Your brother and the abbess and Jamyang met here, because of his death. Then they and the German all died.”

“Fuck me,” Lung murmured again, repeating it several times. It had the tone of a prayer, the Jade Crow mantra.

Wind began to rustle the grass outside. They both stared at the little altar. The candles flickered. A nighthawk called.

“I want you to make a burnt offering after all,” Shan said at last. Lung looked up. “I want you to burn a truck for your brother.”

CHAPTER NINE

He waited in the shadows for nearly an hour, watching through the windows before walking in the side door of Baiyun’s little police post. “The German was an agitator for democracy,” he said to Meng’s back as she sat at her desk. “You knew that.”

Meng went very still, then slowly turned to face him. “He was a foreigner,” she replied, as if it were the same thing.

“You knew he was watching the new pacification camp.”

“A foreigner known for making documentary films who is traveling illegally in a district with one of the highest concentrations of detention camps in all of China. It would be a reasonable surmise.”

“For you.”

“And for Major Liang,” she shot back.

Shan hesitated a moment, confused at the flicker of uncertainty he saw in her eyes. “I need to get into that camp.”

“Don’t be a fool. Impossible.”

“Arrest me.”

Meng brushed a strand of hair from her face. Shan noticed for the first time her disheveled, weary appearance. She gestured toward the computer on her desk. “I spent two hours today trying to figure out who you are, Comrade Shan. Public Security has so many secret operations Beijing can’t even keep track of them in any systematic way. And you’re not really the Public Security type, are you?”

Shan did not reply.

“One of the green apes from that new pacification camp came in to run a request about a
lao gai
registration number. It was yours, Shan.”

He had forgotten that Lung Tso had taken his tattoo number, though not his discovery that the Jade Crows sometimes acted like surrogates for the Armed Police.

“But that’s all there was,” Meng continued. “Just your name, and an admission date over seven years ago. The Four hundred and fourth People’s Construction Brigade. Nothing else. One of Colonel Tan’s most famous prisons. Tan doesn’t lose records. It has to be a legend, the officer said, a deep cover. I didn’t bother to tell the fool that no one creates deep cover with empty files. But on the other hand, no convict would be so clever as to find a way for Tan to destroy his file and then be so foolish as to keep using the same name and stay in Tan’s county.”

“I could draw you a map of all the roads I helped build with the Four hundred and fourth. Arrest me,” he said again.

“Why not change your name?”

He paced along the front of the detention cell that adjoined the office, touching each bar as he passed it. “The Four hundred and fourth People’s Construction Brigade. It’s how they know me there. It’s how I get inside.”

“You’re making no sense.”

Shan gripped the bars of the cell and spoke into its shadows. “I have a son named Ko,” he explained after a long moment, “my only flesh and blood. He has nearly ten years left on his sentence. Former inmates are not allowed back, but Tan and I have an arrangement. He lets me see him on the first Sunday of each month, and lets me send one letter a month.”

In the long silence that followed they could hear the bleating of sheep in the marketplace paddock.

He turned to her. “I have a friend behind the wire of that new camp. His name is Lokesh.”

“There’s talk of setting up a visitation program.”

“How soon?”

She shrugged. “A few months. By the end of the year if the Tibetans stay quiet. They were blowing that damned horn again last night. Someone made a bonfire of Chinese road signs at one of the crossroads. Another monk burned himself in Sichuan.”

“And if they don’t?”

She shrugged again. “Then there will be another six camps just like it. There’s a new policy. For every Tibetan arrested in a strike or protest two family members will also be arrested.”

Shan dropped into the chair across from Meng’s desk. “I need to be in there, Lieutenant. All I have in the world is my son and that old Tibetan inside that camp’s wire. Please.”

Meng grew still again. Somehow the contemplative look on her face unsettled him. “You’re lucky to have a son,” she said quietly. “I never had a child.”

The silence between them took on a strangely awkward air.

“I think I liked it better when you called me a fool. Arrest me,” Shan pressed.

“It’s administered by the Armed Police. They could arrange for you to slip inside for a few hours.”

“Never. The prisoners would smell a plant.”

Meng glanced at him, then away, several times, as if not knowing how to react. Finally she looked out the window. “I’ve been there. It’s no hard-labor camp, but the detainees are treated like livestock. Typhus has started. I was being given a tour when a tractor finished digging a wide trench behind the camp. The guards laughed when I asked if they were putting in a foundation for a new building, laughed again when the first bodies were thrown in, said they ran the best camp in all Tibet, because pacification at their camp was permanent.”

You’re a Public Security officer,
Shan almost rejoined,
stop pretending you care.
But then he saw the way she bit her lower lip. There were times when Meng seemed like just another girl adrift in the bitter sea of China.

“Meng, I know how to survive in such places. I speak Tibetan.”

When she did not respond he rolled up his sleeve and thrust his forearm in front of her. She stared at the gulag registration number.

“They dig the needle in deep when they do it,” he said in a near whisper, “use a scalding needle to cauterize the blood vessels that get severed. I wanted to scream, but I was the only Chinese prisoner and I thought I should set a good example.”

She looked away, out the window, as if she didn’t want to listen.

“I was never sent in to spy, Meng. I went too far in an investigation, into the top ranks of the Party. Certain ministers in Beijing wanted to bury me alive. They sent me to the prison with the highest fatality rate in China. But I survived, because of Lokesh and men like him. Five years, Meng. I was in five years. I know the diseases. I helped dig mass graves.”

When she looked back, her face had hardened. “Do you have any idea how many agencies there are that run secret intelligence agents?” she asked. “At least a dozen that are widely known, as many more that can’t be named. Agents routinely invest years in their cover. There are schools run for the purpose. They are dead to their prior lives. They live their cover every hour, every minute, never confiding in anyone, going for months or even years without surfacing for those who run them. There is no sacrifice too great for the motherland.”

Shan’s mouth went dry.

“An agent could get such a number on his arm, even build a cover no one understands but him and his handlers. The best of those agents could even endure five years in a prison to earn the trust of his targets. If you were such an agent, what would you tell me?”