Mandarin Gate (4 page)

The female lieutenant spoke in quick, clipped syllables, and the knob soldiers moved toward the wall. Major Liang shot Shan a warning glance, then followed the squad.

Suddenly Shan was alone with the bodies. He gazed for only a moment as the police retreated around the far side of the chorten, then moved quickly, letting old instincts take over. He knew from experience that such officers could do strange things with the truth of such killings, could make inconvenient murders disappear. Worse still, they could use murders at such a holy place as an excuse to destroy what was left of it. He owed it to Jamyang, to Lokesh, and all the old Tibetans, to understand what had happened.

He ran his fingers over the dead flesh, lifting limbs, testing for rigor mortis and temperature. They had been dead for four or five hours. He stooped over the faceless man, clenching his jaw at the butchery. The face had not been simply sliced off, the flesh and skin at the front and sides of the skull had been hacked away, like bark being chipped off a log.

The pockets of the man with the nearly severed head held only car keys and a package of unfiltered cigarettes. A bird, perhaps a crow, clutching a snake in its talons was tattooed inside his forearm. The savage blows that had nearly taken off his head had ripped apart another tattoo at the base of his neck, a creature with scales that might have been a dragon. Shan saw now the dirt caked on the heels of the man’s expensive shoes, bent to study the direction of the trail made by the heels before it disappeared, stomped away by police boots. The man had been dragged from somewhere near the front of the compound, perhaps even from the gate. He lifted one of the shoes that lay on the woman to examine the dirt embedded in its heel, then felt something more at the ankle and pushed up the pant leg. He paused in surprise. He had not seen an ankle holster for years. It was a subtle, hidden thing seldom seen outside the big cities of the east. There was no subtlety about the use of guns in Tibet. The holster held nothing but a piece of folded paper jammed in the bottom. He glanced back to confirm the police were still out of sight then stuffed the paper in his pocket. He rose and leaned over the body once more, pushing his fingers deeper into the pockets. He tapped the half-empty cigarette pack and felt a hard, unyielding surface. A piece of iron slid out of the pack, an intricately worked trapezoid with Buddhist prayers etched around two large holes in its narrow end. A flint striker. The dead Chinese wearing expensive clothes was carrying a primitive Tibetan tool for lighting fires.

He stuffed the striker back into the pocket then looked more closely at the two hands at the center of the flag. It wasn’t a stone that held them down, it was a weathered fragment from the ruined carvings that had been scattered around the grounds before the restoration had started, an image of one of Tibet’s Eight Auspicious Signs. He bent and saw the lines that represented stacked garlands of cloth. It was the Banner of Victory, which hailed the triumph of Buddhist wisdom over ignorance.

Shan moved hesitantly to the woman, knowing likely he had no more than another minute before the knobs returned. She appeared to have been in her fifties, with a delicate face, though her tattered brown frock and rough hands were those of a farmer. The necklace strand around her neck had been severed, probably when the killer had dragged her body. With two fingers he gently closed her unseeing eyes and murmured a prayer.

Quickly he found the bullet hole in her tunic, over her heart. It was a large, ugly wound, the hole of the bullet’s exit. She had indeed been shot in the back. The bullet’s exit had pushed out threads of other fabrics, red and white. He pried at the fabric and found that her chest had been bound with a length of cotton. A small stiff rectangle the size of an identity card extended from underneath. With a guilty shudder he lifted the cloth and extracted the rectangle, quickly stuffing it inside his pocket without taking the time to look at it. If they knew who a Tibetan victim was, they could make life very uncomfortable for the family, whom they would have always assumed hid information about the dead. He was taking a terrible chance. The knobs would be back at any instant, furious if they found him interfering with the bodies, but he did not trust them with the evidence, and felt strangely unable to leave the woman. He pulled at her frock, awkwardly trying to cover her grisly wound. For the first time he saw that her frock had dried paint on it, in several colors. It was a just a work frock. She had put it on over her dark red dress.

Run,
a voice screamed inside,
flee into the maze of rocks. Lokesh needs you.

With another anxious glance in the direction of the knobs, he bent to study the severed necklace. It had been made of tightly braided yak hair. He tugged on one end, releasing from under her shoulder an ornate silver box. A
gau
. She had been wearing a traditional necklace with a traditional amulet box.

Another siren rose in the distance, rapidly approaching, but still he did not move. With a shudder he pushed off the wool cap on her head and saw the short brush of black hair, then he pulled back the work frock.

A small choking sob escaped his throat as he recognized the maroon cloth. It was a robe. At the ancient, ruined convent, a Buddhist nun had been murdered and placed under the feet of two Chinese men. He grabbed her gau and fled.

CHAPTER THREE

He drove the truck wildly, over low ridges, up narrow tracks that were little more then dry washes, sliding to a stop where it intersected the old pilgrims’ path. Even after stopping he gripped the wheel tightly, knuckles white, head bent low, unable to control the dry sobs that wracked his chest. The day that had begun so reverently, so serenely, had turned into a waking nightmare. Jamyang had not simply died, he had killed himself, a grave sin for the devout. The old convent that had become a symbol of hope for the battered Tibetans had been turned into a butcher’s ground, and was in the hands of the knobs.

Jamyang had died. Then the nun and two men had died. No, he forced himself to admit, the bodies he had seen had been dead at least four hours. Those at the convent had died first. A new wave of despair swept over Shan as he considered the horrific possibility that Jamyang had done the killing then had been driven to suicide by his guilt. He frantically tried to reconstruct the day, hour by hour. The murders had occurred perhaps two hours before they had seen Jamyang on the slope chasing the thief. He recalled now that Jamyang’s appearance there had been unexpected, even perplexing. If he had been chasing the limping thief all the way from his shrine the lama should have caught him long before reaching the slope.

Shan climbed out of the truck and stepped to the ledge where Jamyang had lingered, strangely emotional, hours before. Shan had thought he had stopped to gaze on the sacred mountain, but there were many overlooks that afforded a view of the mountain. What made this one unique was that it also overlooked the old convent. Jamyang had asked whether Shan could see signs of visitors there.
No,
a voice inside shouted,
it was impossible.
The lama had spoken prayers, had prostrated himself before the mountain, and gone back to clean the offerings. Shan had tried to ignore the melancholy tone in his words. Jamyang had been saying farewell to the deities. He had somehow known about the murders.

Lokesh was alone with the lama’s body when Shan reached the hut, sitting at Jamyang’s head, still intoning the words of the death rite. He fed the coals in the small brazier and made tea, then placed a cup at his friend’s side, dropped some juniper on the brazier, and waited.

When at last the old Tibetan paused in his recitation, he had trouble rising, as if his grief were too big a burden. Shan helped him to his feet and handed him his tea. The hot brew revived Lokesh, and as he sipped it he cocked his head this way and that at the dead man, as if listening for something from Jamyang. He was, like Shan, still totally perplexed about what had happened at the shrine.

“We can’t stay with him here for three days,” Shan said, referring to the traditional period observed by most Tibetans for the rites. “There are police in the valley. There will be many more.”

Lokesh nodded solemnly. “Shepherds were here.” His voice was dry as sticks. “They will return with horses and a mule before midnight. It is nearly a day’s ride to the bone flats,” he said, meaning the clearing secreted high in the mountains where the
ragyapa,
the traditional flesh cutters, readied bodies for consumption by the vultures. The ancient tradition of sky burial, reviled by the government, had, like so many other Tibetan practices, been pushed into the shadows.

“You must go with them,” Shan said. “Stay up there to finish the rites.”

But Lokesh was not listening. He was wiping at the bullet hole in Jamyang’s forehead. “It isn’t the way of things,” the old Tibetan said, wiping again, watching the wound expectantly. “We should send for some of the wise ones. They would know how to call him out.”

Shan studied his old friend, who had been an official in the Dalai Lama’s government before the Chinese invasion. Lokesh communicated more in not speaking than any man he knew, and when he did speak it often seemed to be in riddles. As he watched Lokesh cup some of the fragrant juniper smoke and hold it over the bullet hole he finally understood. The old Tibetans believed that when a man died his soul lingered inside the lifeless husk, confused, and eventually found its natural path out through a tiny hole on the crown of his head. Old lamas would often pluck hairs from the top of a dead man’s head to clear the way. But Jamyang’s skull had two new, and unnatural, holes.

“His spirit was well focused,” Shan offered.

“No,” Lokesh replied slowly, with great conviction. “He killed himself. Which means something had taken over his spirit. Something wrapped around it like a serpent. It is still there. We have to pry it off.” His fingers gently touched the side of Jamyang’s face, lingering over the birthmark on his jaw that looked like a lotus blossom, one of the sacred signs.

Shan opened his mouth to argue, to find some way to comfort Lokesh, but he knew that no matter what he said his friend would suffer this anguish for weeks to come. And perhaps Lokesh hit close to the truth in suggesting an evil spirit had possessed the lama. Certainly something evil had tormented him, had driven him to his abrupt suicide. Evil had also swept over the ancient convent that day, and now four people had suffered violent deaths. The logical part of Shan told him it was impossible that the events were connected. But the instincts of the former inspector said they had to be.

“More police in the valley?” Lokesh suddenly asked, as if just hearing Shan’s warning.

Shan closed his eyes a moment. He was not sure he could summon the strength to tell Lokesh what had happened at the old convent, wanted more than anything to not add to the pain the old Tibetan already felt.

He realized his friend had stopped his ministrations to the body and was staring at him. “You were going for the nuns,” Lokesh said pointedly.

Shan felt a great weight bearing down on him. “I went to find help at the convent. Instead there were bodies.” The words seemed to tear at his throat as he spoke them. “Three people were killed there.”

Lokesh did not speak, only stared with moist eyes at one of the little bronze deities by Jamyang’s pallet as Shan described what he had found at the convent. Lokesh and the oldest lamas had always been pools of serenity amid the horrors of the gulag, had told new prisoners that the inhuman conditions at their prison were nothing more than a test of faith, had stood like rocks against the torture and deprivation. But even stone can crack against a torrent that lasts for years. For the first time since Shan had known him, despair clouded his friend’s eyes. He still had no words when Shan had finished, only lit some incense on Jamyang’s little altar and took up the death chant again. Shan’s heart broke as he watched the old man, seeing the tremor in his hand where none had been before, hearing him falter in remembering words he had recited countless times before.

The moon was high overhead when the shepherds arrived. They would not speak with Shan, would not accept his help in rolling Jamyang’s body into a shroud and tying it to the back of the mule. Lokesh had withdrawn deeper and deeper inside himself. He had become an aged, frail creature who needed help in mounting the horse the shepherds offered to him. He made no reply to Shan’s words of farewell.

Shan found a perch on the ridge above the hut and watched the forlorn caravan as it traversed the moonlit valley then looked toward the stars, struggling to control the emotions that raged inside. Eventually he curled up on a blanket outside the little hut but found only fitful sleep, beset by hideous dreams. Truckloads of troops were pouring into the valley in response to the murders. Farmers were being violently ejected from their homes. He awoke with a groan as a baton hovered in the air, about to slam into Lokesh. Shan gave up on sleep and stared into the sky. By dawn he was back at Jamyang’s shrine.

The mystery behind the suicide began with the mystery of the pistol. He set the weapon on a flat rock in a pool of sunlight. It had been painted, not just with a lotus flower but also with images of a sacred conch shell and a fish. But why? Had Jamyang really meant to pacify the weapon somehow, as Shan had first believed, or to sanctify it for its intended mission? It was a small semiautomatic, the kind issued to police officers and soldiers. Private possession of such a weapon was a serious crime anywhere in China but a Tibetan who possessed one would be treated not just as a felon but a traitor. It seemed impossible that Jamyang would encounter such a weapon without being arrested by its owner, just as impossible that another Tibetan would have given it to him. It was almost as unlikely that he would know how to use it, yet in the last instant of his life he had lifted the gun with the alacrity of one trained in weapons, flipping off the safety and pulling the trigger in one fluid movement. Shan lifted the pistol and released the magazine. It was empty. Jamyang had kept only one bullet.