Soul of the Fire (24 page)

Sung lit another cigarette and glared at Shan. “You think you are here to bargain?” he asked at last.

“I want Lokesh released, all record of his having been in custody destroyed.”

The smoke drifting from Sung's open mouth choked away with a laugh. “Based on your wild speculation.”

“Based on three facts. That signature for Deng's cremation, forged on Pao's orders. You know Pao is perfectly capable of doing what I suggest. He's the new warlord of Tibet. Secondly, you know too many of his secrets. If you weren't involved in Xie's death, you were complicit in it. You are well aware of how he manipulates the Commission. If it fails, you will be the perfect scapegoat. The overambitious, envious Public Security officer who destroyed Pao's good work. Pao is a meticulous planner, the kind of man who addresses every contingency.”

The anger left Sung's face. He snuffed out his cigarette. “You said three.”

“I know where your car is.”

*   *   *

The sun had set behind the city wall by the time Shan led Sung along the edge of the municipal maintenance building, then into the open-faced garage that housed road equipment. The staff was gone for the day. The only movement was a shifting thread of smoke from the incinerator. Shan retrieved a small crow bar from the cargo bay of a truck before guiding Sung through the shadows to the garage marked simply
FIRE CREW.

“It's odd they would lock this building,” Shan said, pointing out the padlock that secured the door.

“Fire trucks are expensive,” Sung muttered.

In reply, Shan turned and pointed behind the incinerator building. In a short alley behind the building, hidden from the street, was the town's fire truck.

Sung angrily grabbed the bar from Shan and popped the hasp. The sturdy black sedan inside was years old, but there was still a certain prestige in driving one of the cars traditionally favored by senior Party officials.

The major quickly closed the door, switched on the garage lights, and climbed behind the wheel. He cast an impatient frown at Shan, then froze as he gazed at the seat beside him. With the care of a seasoned investigator, he lifted a pocketknife in his fingertips. The largest blade was extended, and stained with blood.

“This is mine,” he growled. “It was in my office. I leave it on my desk, to open envelopes.” He wiped the blade with his handkerchief, then dropped it into his tunic pocket.

Shan opened the rear door. Bloody towels lay on the floor. Sung reached past him to lift them, exposing a laminated identity card underneath. “Deng's!” he spat, and threw it back into the towels. “No one could possibly believe I would be this careless. No court would accept this!”

“I don't think there would be a trial,” Shan observed, then opened the trunk. They instantly recognized the sharp biting scent. Inside were more bloody rags and a container of aviation fuel.

Sung said nothing for several breaths.

“Deputy Secretary Pao is a man who plans for every contingency,” Shan offered again.

“Get out!” Sung growled.

“I can help you clean this up.”

“Fuck your mother!” Sung lifted the can of fuel. “And if you ever breathe a word of this, you will be sharing a cell with the old man!”

Shan waited near the street. The sun had set. When the garage exploded into flame, it silhouetted Sung in the courtyard, lighting another cigarette.

 

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Shan lowered himself onto a park bench as the crowd gathered to watch the fire. The municipal crew that manned the fire station arrived and stared in confusion. The street by the compound swelled with onlookers. Soon what seemed like nearly half the population of Zhongje turned out to watch, many apparently amused by the fire crew's befuddlement over how to douse a fire in their own station.

He finally spied a solitary figure leaning against a lamppost at the edge of the crowd. Tuan looked up forlornly when Shan approached, then fell in beside him as Shan motioned toward the quiet end of the street. “How the hell do I explain this?” the Religious Affairs officer groaned.

They entered the town's small warehouse district, empty now except for the feral grey terrier that padded along the opposite side of the street, watching them.

“The Deputy Secretary has a blind spot,” Shan began. “He assumes that all those beneath him will behave like trained monkeys. He neglects the human variable.”

Tuan shook his head with a sour expression. “There is no variable. Oppose him and he crushes you. Two hundred years ago, he would have walked around with swordsmen who would instantly take the head off anyone who crossed him.”

“He barks a command, and thousands of Tibetans suffer for it. Doesn't that ever trouble you?”

“Like I said on that first day, you have me confused with someone else.” Tuan paused to look back at the crowd. The scene was pulsing now under the blinking lights of the fire truck. A siren rose in the distance. “How the hell do I explain this?” he repeated.

“Sung's car was one of those built on old Soviet designs,” Shan suggested. “Prone to electrical fires.”

Tuan brightened, extracted a notepad, and quickly scribbled a note.

“But don't confuse that with the truth. I worry that you actually believe the lies you tell.”

“Nobody cares what I believe.”

“If I told Sung you had arranged to put his car in that garage, what do you think he would do?”

Tuan lowered the pad. “I just implement details. It was like a prank. Move the major's car to the garage without his knowledge. It never left town.”

“And put aviation fuel and bloody rags in the trunk. And padlock the door so not even the firefighters can get in. How did you manage to get the fire truck out?”

“I just told them the major ordered it, that the bastard was so picky about his car, he wanted the best garage in town. I didn't do the rest. Look, no one was hurt. Like you said, that car needed replacement. It was just some kind of message.”

“No. Sung understood. If Pao senses that the Commission is being derailed, Sung will become his scapegoat within the Party. It would be one of those secret arrests, when men in black cars take someone away and they aren't seen again. Later on, the news of his tragic suicide will be released.”

An owl swooped down and disappeared into the darkened alley beside them. Shan saw that the dog had stopped near his feet and was staring up at him. “Do you still have that poem from Togme?”

Tuan hesitated, then slowly nodded.

“Take it out. Hold it over your heart.”

“I don't understand.”

“The beginning of consciousness, a lama once told me, comes when you learn to parse the truth out of the delusions of the world. Do it.”

Tuan extracted the tattered paper and pressed his hand against his chest.

“Did you put the fuel and rags in the car?”

“No.”

“Did you put the car in the garage?”

“Yes.”

“Did you arrange for the fire truck to be moved?”

“Yes.”

“All on Pao's orders?”

Tuan just nodded.

“Did Pao have Xie killed?”

Tuan swallowed hard. “Of course not! He is the Deputy Secretary!”

“Did he have Deng killed?”

“He's the Deputy Secretary,” Tuan repeated. He followed Shan's gaze to his hand, which had dropped from his chest. His face clouded. “He sends messages—that's what a leader does. But he's explained it: What he does isn't against the law. It can't be. He is the law.”

“What was the message about Xie?”

Tuan stooped and patted the dog as if he had not heard. “There was a meeting,” he said to the dog. “Pao had been reading transcripts of the Commission sessions. He was furious about Xie, said he was impeding the Commission's progress by asking so many questions. He had already complained about him, but that day, he said Xie was as good as a traitor himself. He was furious with us, said we were incompetent, an embarrassment to the motherland. He asked did he have to send a little girl to fix the problem.”

“A little girl?” Shan asked uneasily.

Tuan lowered himself onto the curb, looking now at the death poem in his hand. “That's what he said. You know, like a child could do better than us.”

Shan sat beside him, the dog between them. Tuan put his hand on the dog. “This one only comes out at night. He tried to bite me once, but look at him, like a little kitten when he is with you.”

The dog licked Shan's hand. “His name should be Tonte,” he said.

Tuan nodded. “‘Ghost.' Like you. It fits.”

“Who was in that meeting with Pao?”

“Me. Deng. Choi. Zhu. That woman Wu from Religious Affairs headquarters.”

Shan recalled the petulant director who grilled him about absolution of sins. “The one on the task force seeking the
purba
leader. Why would she be there?”

“I'm not a monk,” Tuan said, still staring at the poem. “I didn't want to be a monk, not really.”

“Why was she there?” Shan pressed.

“That was the first time Xie was called a traitor. Two days before he died. He wasn't a bad guy. We ate meals together and talked about history.”

Shan dropped his head into his hands a moment. He was so blind not to have seen it. “You mean you were Xie's watcher too.”

“Sure.” Tuan folded the poem and returned it to his pocket. “One night we drank beer and he got a little drunk. He said he wished he had a son like me. The old fool. He looked all around to make sure no one watched, then showed me a key chain, like it was some secret treasure. It had a little frame with a picture of snowcapped mountains. I assumed it was one of those trinkets from the Himalayas, but then he pulled me closer and told me to look. Then I saw it said ‘Rocky Mountains,' in English. That's when he told me his daughter had spent a year in the United States, in a place called Colorado. He never put that on his personal history statement. He should have done so. It would have kept him off the Commission, and he could have lived.”

Shan looked up at the stars appearing over the town. “The leader of the task force looking for the
purba
leader suddenly comes to Zhongje and Xie is called a traitor. Why?”

“He received a letter.”

“And you intercepted it.”

“What do you think? I can't ignore a letter. Others would have seen it in his box. It enclosed a new death poem, burnt around the edges. She said things were too dangerous. She begged him to flee until things were over, told him she could keep him safe in the mountains.” The soil by the curb was loose and sandy. Tuan drew an oval with a crescent shape intersecting its upper right side. “She drew the sign of Agni below her name. But that wasn't the most important thing. It was on that same rough paper as the poems. That paper from Shetok monastery.”

They sat in silence. The owl hooted from a rooftop. Police cars with blinking lights arrived at the far end of the street.

“Did he get the letter?” Shan asked.
Until things were over.
The words had an ominous sound, as if the
purba
leader were speaking of something other than the Commission.

“Sure. The major has one of those little machines that reseals envelopes without any evidence of tampering. I gave the letter to him the next morning. Sung insisted.”

Xie would have known his mail was screened, would have known his daughter had been too reckless in trying to protect him. That was the day he had his body covered with charms.

When Shan looked up Tuan was gone. He stroked the dog for several minutes before rising. He was exhausted and ready to collapse in his quarters, but as Shan passed the municipal yard, he discovered three familiar figures sitting at an outside table at a closed café, watching the huddle of policemen and firemen. Miss Zhu and Miss Lin acknowledged him with cool nods as he joined them. Heinrich Vogel saluted him with a finger against his temple. Lin gestured to the sooty smoke hovering over the street. “Terrible for the complexion,” she declared, forcing a smile toward Shan as she stood. He did not miss how Lin ran her hand along the German's arm as the two women departed.

Vogel seemed so engrossed in the scene that he did not speak for nearly a minute. “I haven't seen Sung,” he said. “I hear it was his car.”

“The major survived the inferno without a scratch,” Shan assured him.

The worry on Vogel's face faded as he nodded at Shan. “I've been wanting to speak with you, comrade,” he said, as if he had sought Shan out.

“Just Shan. I prefer Shan.”

Vogel frowned. “Yes, well. That's part of it. Your political insolence.”

“Sorry?”

“I went through the same turmoil, Shan, when my country disappeared. It can be hard to see how the world has been reshaped, especially for one like you who has removed himself from it. There are so many subtleties, so many forces and trends that can be difficult to perceive from the lower ranks.”

“And I had given up hope of a
tamzing,
” Shan said, wondering if the German knew about struggle sessions.

Vogel smiled. “That's what we need, a good old-fashioned round of self-criticism. Salve for the socialist soul. We had sessions like that all the time back home before the GDR fell—even more afterwards, though they just called them staff alignments. Part of the vetting to see who could stay in government. Political therapy, some of us called it. The capitalists thought they were teaching us about the benefits of their system. But look at them today. They embrace communism, just under different names. There's entire towns from the old GDR living on payments from the government, more than we could ever have offered in the old days.”

“As you say, I am lost in your subtlety.”

“The government, Shan. You do everyone a disfavor by denying the inevitable. This country rises to greatness. Tibet will never go back to what it was. But it remains a stubborn mule stuck in the mud. You deny the future.”