Mandarin Gate (3 page)

All this time Lokesh had not stopped whispering the Bardo, mouthing the ancient words as Shan spoke, but now he paused. “The old convent ruins are closer,” he said in a hoarse voice. “Nuns from the hermitage are likely there, working on the restoration.” He lifted Jamyang’s shoulders, and gestured for Shan to take his feet.

*   *   *

Shan eased his truck to a stop by a wide, sloping ledge and quickly climbed to the edge, checking to be sure there were no new vehicles at the abandoned convent, largely destroyed fifty years before. He took one look toward the ruins below and shrank back in alarm. Quickly he retrieved his binoculars and crept back up the ledge, dropping to a prone position as he reached the top.

The site was alive with activity. He had expected to see the truck he had seen from a distance earlier in the day, and perhaps some of the tractors and donkeys used by the local Tibetans. Instead, parked beside the truck by the front gate were an ambulance and three of the utility vehicles favored by the police. Uniformed figures were gathered in the courtyard inside the front gate.

He turned onto his back and gazed toward the southern horizon, toward the distant mountain that marked the gulag camp where his son Ko, his only flesh and blood, was imprisoned. Shan had long ago given up on his life as a high-level investigator, had declined offers to return to Beijing even after serving years in the gulag himself. But he would never give up on his son. He lived in two-week intervals, for the first Sundays of each month on which he was permitted to visit Ko and the midmonth letter he was permitted to write to him. Colonel Tan, the ironfisted military governor of the county, had made it clear that Shan would lose all visiting rights if he stirred up new problems for Tan. He would never give up on his son, but he would also never give up on the old Tibetans.

There could be any number of reasons the police had descended on the ruined convent—the most likely one being that they suspected smugglers were scavenging it for artifacts—but if the officers chose to interrogate any of those helping to restore the old buildings, the frightened Tibetans could well tell them about Jamyang’s shrine. A new and terrible possibility occurred to Shan. If the police found Lokesh with the body and an illegal pistol, it would be the end of the gentle old man, a thought that Shan could not bear. He had to know what the police were doing, had to keep them away from the ridge, had to find a way to keep Jamyang’s irreplaceable relics out of the hands of the godkillers. He slipped down the ledge to his truck and began brushing off his clothes.

Half an hour later he stood in the shadows at the rear of the ruins, having left his truck in the rock outcroppings behind the complex. Quickly he recalled his mental map of the old convent. Although it had been small, it had rigidly adhered to Buddhist tradition in its construction. Below the courtyard was the
dukhang,
the main assembly hall with ancillary chapels arranged along the walls. At the rear had been two
kangtsang,
residence halls, and the small, somber chapels reserved for protector demons, where the restorers had been sheltering some of the most important artifacts recovered from the rubble. In the center of the courtyard was a chorten, one of the ancient relic shrines resembling an onion topped with a steeple, which had been the first structure to be restored. Only a few weeks before, by the light of a rising sun, he and Lokesh had helped Jamyang whitewash the chorten. He ventured a glance from the corner of one of the crumbling buildings toward the front of the compound. Nearly a dozen figures stood on the opposite side of the courtyard, most in uniform, facing away, looking into the shadow of the shining white chorten. He stepped purposefully across the open ground separating him from the closest of the old demon shrines, his heart pounding as he reached the rear of the little stone building. Leaning against the wall, calming himself, he glanced back through the gap in the rubble that used to be the rear gate, wondering whether he should try to rescue some of the artifacts secreted in the building. Anything the police found would be declared property of the state, destined for destruction or removal to some dusty warehouse in the east.

“They say these old ruins are filled with ghosts.”

He spun about to face the woman who had spoken. Her uniform looked freshly pressed, the red enamel star on her cap recently polished.

“More and more all the time,” the Public Security lieutenant added absently as she glanced up at him then returned to scanning the ground near Shan’s feet.

Shan struggled to keep his voice steady. “People lived here for centuries. Lived and died.”

The woman, in her midthirties, glanced up again long enough to cast him a cool grin, as if he had made a joke, then bent and studied the patterns of shadows in the dirt around them. “Even a shallow footprint can speak to you when the light is right,” she declared in a professional tone.

As she knelt Shan saw the latex gloves folded into her belt, beside a small automatic pistol. He fought the compulsion to bolt toward the outcroppings, then retreated a step toward the corner of the stucco-walled building and found his hand resting on a faded religious symbol, painted in another century. An all-seeing eye.

“You’ll never lift prints from a wall like that,” the officer said as she rose, straightening her uniform.

“But rough surfaces can snag a fiber from a passerby.” Shan felt a flush of shame that the words of the former Beijing investigator would leap so readily to his tongue. He had forsaken that life, left it far behind after finding his new incarnation in Tibet.

The woman cocked her head at him, assessing him, studying for a long moment his tattered clothes and scuffed boots, then offered a hesitant nod of agreement and reached into one of the deep pockets of her tunic. With a chill he watched as she produced several cellophane bags and handed them to him. Each was imprinted with a single line along the bottom: Public Security Bureau Evidence. “Major Liang is a stickler for procedure,” she stated as he took the bags, then she moved on, scanning the ground again as she disappeared around the corner.

Shan stared with foreboding at the bags in his hand. The woman was not there to destroy the convent, not looking for smugglers. And why had she accepted him so readily? She had assumed, despite his shabby appearance, that he somehow was helping with an investigation. He stepped away from the building to study the figures gathered in the central square fifty yards away. Beyond the cluster of uniformed men, plumes of dust rose from the road. More vehicles were approaching. He wanted to run. He had to run. Then he remembered Lokesh, waiting at the shrine with the body of their friend. Jamyang had seemed unusually interested in the ruins that afternoon. Shan pressed his hand against the eye of the deity again, murmuring a quick prayer, then began a slow, deliberate circuit toward the police gathered in the square.

He feigned interest in the ground as he walked along the stations where large prayer wheels had once been spun by pilgrims, pausing at a pile of carpentry tools left by the restorers, lingering again at a small circle of red paint drops by one of the few remaining wheels where a paint pot had apparently rested. Someone had been painting the cradle of the wheel and been interrupted. On the wall behind it red paint was spattered. A worn brush, its bristles congealed with paint, lay on the ground at the base of the wall. The spatters formed a high arc, except for one patch in the center that was a slightly different hue, the identical color of a small drying puddle six feet from the wall. He covered a hand with one of the bags and used it to insert the brush in another bag, then dropped the brush back into its original position. As he looked up he felt the stare of a Public Security officer sitting on a bench in the shadows by the front gate. His cold, flinty expression did not change when Shan offered him a nod. He kept staring at Shan as a subordinate trotted to his side, kept staring even as he listened to the junior officer and snapped out a curt reply that sent the younger knob retreating like a frightened courtier.

Shan fought a shudder as he broke away from the man’s icy gaze and walked around the end of the chorten. Then he froze at the butchery before him.

He had seen death in Tibet more times than he wished to recall, had seen it that very day, but he had never seen anything like the death that had come to the old convent. Three bodies lay sprawled on the ground in a pool of red. They were arranged in the pattern of a U, the two largest lying beside each other, four feet apart, the third lying perpendicular to them, under their feet. The head of the man farthest from Shan lay against its owner’s shoulder, nearly severed, the flesh chopped and sliced with repeated blows of a heavy blade.

The body closest to Shan had no face. The man’s head had been hacked at, so that his face and the sides of his head were nothing but raw, torn flesh. His skull glinted white between shades of red. Most of the red wasn’t blood, Shan realized. The two bodies were nearly covered in paint. In the center, their hands, one left, one right, were held down by a stone. The worn hiking boots of the closest man lay on the belly of the third body, which Shan now saw was a Tibetan woman wearing a wool cap. The expensive athletic shoes of the second man lay on her legs.

The mechanical click of a camera stirred Shan from his paralysis. Two officers were taking photographs of the corpses. He stepped behind them then circled the bodies, forcing himself to look at the gore. The woman had a bullet hole in her chest. He saw now that it was not simply a pool of red the men lay in, it was a rectangle, and the killer had not just used red paint. In the upper-left corner there was a large yellow-spiked blotch with four smaller ones, in an arc at its lower right. The brown eyes of the man whose face had been sliced away gazed lifelessly at the chorten, a pool of blood under a bullet hole in his neck. The figure whose head hung by a few ligaments lay with his face toward the shrine, locked in a brooding, angry expression. He was Chinese. A Chinese man, a Tibetan woman, a faceless monster; all three murdered in the shadow of the mountain where a lama had just killed himself.

One of the police taking photographs suddenly clutched his stomach and darted away to retch up his last meal. A young officer scolded him and shoved him back toward the bodies. “We must have complete images of the murder scene!” he barked at the cowering policeman.

“Scenes.” Shan had whispered the word to himself, unmindful of the silence in the courtyard.

“You dare to correct me?” the officer snarled. “You…” He studied Shan in confusion.

Shan turned to retreat and found himself looking into the thin face of the female officer he had encountered earlier. She returned his gaze expectantly, then broke away to address her colleague. “I am not sure jurisdiction has been established,” she declared, as if to defend Shan. The officer winced at the words, and for the first time Shan took note of the different uniforms. The young officer who had challenged him wore the olive of the People’s Armed Police, the thugs of Chinese law enforcement. The green apes, many Tibetans called them. The woman wore the grey of the Public Security Bureau. Two other men, both Tibetans, wore the blue of the local constables, still others the light green of medical attendants.

Jurisdiction. The woman was savvy enough to understand that those who wielded the most power in the People’s Republic wore no uniforms at all. It was the slender thread by which Shan’s freedom now hung. He would be arrested in an instant if he were found to be there on false pretenses. Those who impersonated police were shot.

The lieutenant turned back to Shan with a questioning look. He had no choice but to continue with the charade. Shan took a deep breath, then pointed to the man with the mangled face. “Only this one was killed here. He was bleeding from a bullet that pierced his jugular. Only he has a pool of blood under him.” Shan pointed to the woman. “She has a bullet hole in her chest but no pool of blood.”

The woman looked unconvinced. “But it’s all red. How can you know?”

“Look closer. The blood is darker. It dries differently.” He pointed to where the two shades of red met. “The difference is subtle for now but noticeable. In another hour the blood will be nearly brown. The wounds on the other two did not bleed out here. There would have been marks showing where they were dragged from but—” He shrugged and gestured toward the feet of the assembled police. The ground all around the courtyard had been trampled by their boots.

Shan’s gaze lingered for a moment on a pot of red paint at the base of the chorten, then turned back to the red rectangle with its pattern of yellow spots. The killer had gone to a lot of trouble in arranging the scene, as if for a message. A chill crept up his spine as he at last recognized the rectangle constructed under the bodies. It was the Chinese flag, red with one large and four smaller yellow stars in the upper-left quadrant.

“Fools!” the young officer barked at the others, then he quieted at the sound of footsteps behind him, the anger on his face suddenly replaced with fear. The gaunt older officer had risen from the shadows. For a moment Shan thought the man in the green uniform was going to drop to his knees.

“Everyone back!” the older knob growled. “You and your men,” he declared to the officer in the olive tunic, “will have site security. One at the gate, the rest to set up a roadblock half a mile up the road.” What had the knob lieutenant called the senior officer? Major Liang.

The young officer shrank back, then murmured hurried orders to his men. The men in blue, the local constables, retreated toward the gate without another word. As the men in green marched away, two more men in grey appeared out of the shadows. The question of jurisdiction was resolving itself.

“Her hands,” Shan said, gesturing to the dead woman. “That is red paint on them, not blood. She was painting the old prayer wheel by the wall. The paint is spattered in an arc where her brush went flying. Under the arc is a pattern of blood. She was shot there, taken by surprise as she worked, facing the wall. I think you will find that bullet went through her back. It came out her chest and is probably in the wall. Unless the weapon was a revolver there will be a bullet casing on the ground nearby.”