The Old Boys (13 page)

One of the guests, seated across the fire from me, was the Episcopalian. He sounded as if he were in the middle of another philosophical discussion. The Episcopalian paid absolutely no attention to us. Time passed. The feast and the whiskey took effect. Conversation dwindled to a murmur. Quite soon most of the men had stretched out on the rugs and fallen asleep. I, too, lay down and closed my eyes. What dreams would a man have in this place?

I was on the edge of sleep when a hand squeezed my arm. Zikkar. He beckoned, pointing to my parka. David was already on his feet, zipping up his own jacket. Zikkar put a finger to his lips, then led us outside. The wind had died. An inch or two of snow lay on the ground. More was falling through milky moonlight, forming a scrim between village and mountains. Boots creaking in the snow, we followed Zikkar to a small stone building at the far end of the village. It was surrounded by snow-covered animals. None of these ghostly beasts paid any attention to us except for a camel that swung its ponderous head toward our disagreeable scent and spat.

It was pitch-dark inside the hut. David entered first, and as I bent double to go through the empty door frame I heard him utter an explosive
oof!
A knife? A club? I dropped to my hands and knees and went inside like a defensive tackle—a slow one, but I still had bulk—and encountered two pairs of legs. One pair, wearing corduroys, belonged to David, the other pair, clad in rough wool, belonged to another man, who seemed to be holding my friend in
a death grip. I was about to strangle the attacker when David, sounding as though the breath had been knocked out of him, gasped, “Horace, wait! It’s okay.”

A flashlight—Zikkar’s—winked on and I beheld David in the embrace of a brawny tribesman. It was obvious that murder was the last thing this gentleman had in mind. He was delighted to see David. The man was dressed like the Kyrgyz I had seen at the buz kashi, and the language he spoke sounded different from Tajik.

“Good grief,” David said in English. “It’s Askar.”

“Who?”

“Askar. He was Filibuster stroke one. We worked together on the frontier in the ’80s.”

Filibuster was the code name for David’s infamous operation to encourage a Muslim uprising on the Sino-Soviet frontier. Askar’s designation, Filibuster stroke one, meant that he had been the principal agent—commander of the Islamist network the Chinese supposedly had rolled up fifteen years ago. How could he still be alive and walking around, a free man?

Zikkar’s flashlight went out. A lamp was lit. By its milder light Askar turned out to be a grayhead with bristling white eyebrows and a wiry pepper-and-salt Islamic beard. In the past David had given Askar hundreds of thousands of American dollars—I knew, because as chief of station I had signed off on every penny—but the affection the man was displaying toward his old handler could not possibly have been bought with money.

David introduced me to Askar in true name. There was no reason to do otherwise. Askar shook hands firmly, like a Westerner. “I know who you are,” he said in slow Mandarin. “We were told to expect you.”

I said, “Told by whom?”

“By the other American,” Askar replied. “The one you’re looking for. He said you would come and try to find him.”

“When did he say that?”

“Not long ago.”

“Where is he now?”

Zikkar
shrugged. Exasperation washed over me. David put a hand on my arm.

“You’ll get nowhere with direct questions,” he said. “Step back. Let them talk. That’s why they brought us here, to tell us something. Just listen.”

Zikkar crooked a finger. David and I followed him to the back of the hut, where a large squared-up stack of thick felt—a folded yurt?—stood against the wall. He moved some of the material and I saw that the stack was hollow. Zikkar moved another bale or two and beckoned us closer. He shone his flashlight into the hollow space, revealing a bright-orange Suzuki dirt bike.

“This belonged to the other American,” Zikkar said in Mandarin.

They had swapped Paul some food and two horses for the bike, Zikkar told us. He said no more than that. Zikkar hid the motorcycle again, then spread a carpet on the dirt floor. We sat down in a circle. David fished a pint of whiskey and three packs of American cigarettes out of the pockets of his parka.

As the tribesmen smoked and drank, Zikkar and the Episcopalian talked at length in their own languages. When they were through, David asked a question or two, then turned to me.

“Do you want to hear this now, or wait?” he asked.

“Now,” I said. “The short version.”

“Okay,” David said. “One day Paul turned up on his motorcycle. Not here—higher up in the pastureland, because it was still summer and they were out grazing their herds. He spent a few days with them, long enough for them to get to like him. Apparently he had already picked up some of the language and was soon speaking it pretty well. Was he that quick?”

“Yes. A sponge.”

“He said he was looking for his mother. He told them the story of her disappearance. This touched their hearts. As I said, there was something about him they liked, but they wanted to be sure he was for real. So he told them about his life, that he had spent all those years in a Han prison. Some of these people have served
time, too, and he knew all the details of prison life under Mao. They’d heard about the ditch he dug.”

“So?”

“So they almost trusted him, but at the same time he was a stranger in the wrong place. They were afraid that the Han would show up at any moment and they’d all be in trouble. They wanted to help him. They also wanted to get rid of him. Some of the old people knew a story about a European woman, not a Russian, who came to live with the Kyrgyz. She came when she was young. She lived among the Kyrgyz until she was very old. The last they heard, she was still living. They told him this.”

“Was this story the truth?”

“They don’t know. But it was enough for Paul. He asked directions and took off at once with the two horses he’d swapped the motorcycle for. He left one of the horses by the ravine with his belongings—the stuff Zhang showed you—in the saddlebag. Then he disappeared, riding west. The Han came up from Ulugqat and took the horse and saddlebag.”

“What about the body they were supposed to have carried down to Ulugqat?”

“These people don’t know anything about that.”

David and Askar exchanged a few sentences in Kyrgyz.

Then David turned to me and said, “He says this European woman married his uncle. She had blue eyes and fair hair. She carried some sort of strange glass container with her wherever she went. He says she’s still alive, living with her son.”

“Paul found her?”

“Not that son,” David said. “Askar’s cousin, the child she had with his uncle. His name is Tarik.”

“Does Tarik’s mother have a name?”

“Yes,” David said. “In Kyrgyz she’s called Kerzira.”

Askar told us the rest of the story, or as much of it as he knew. Fifty years before, Lori had appeared out of nowhere into another nowhere, arriving in a Kyrgyz encampment on a stallion, leading two mares. She gave the headman an admission fee in gold when
she arrived. She lived with the headman’s family. Despite her wealth—gold aside, the stallion and mares eventually grew into a large herd—she worked as hard as any other woman. The headman’s wives liked her and taught her Kyrgyz household skills. Even in the beginning she spoke enough Kyrgyz to make herself understood. Before long she was fluent, and in tribal dress looked like a light-skinned, gray-eyed Kyrgyz. When Russian or Chinese police or soldiers came around, depending on which side of the border the herds happened to be, she veiled her face and withdrew along with the rest of the women. After a while she married the headman’s youngest brother, putting up five colts and gold as a dowry. Soon afterward she had a child, and after that no one bothered to remember that she was not born a Kyrgyz unless reminded by one of her peculiarities, such as her refusal to be separated from her heavy glass tube and a habit of going for long, unwomanly gallops all by herself. No one knew where she had come from, though she had been wearing Persian dress and riding a Persian horse when she arrived. No one questioned her desire to live the wild bygone life of their mountain tribe. Who in the world would not wish to do so?

Snow continued to fall in big wet flakes. The jagged rocks that had made the landscape so beautiful yesterday were now softly rounded white globes. The snow was shin deep. Zikkar decided that it would be unwise to remain where we were.

“He says we won’t be able to get up the hill and out of the valley even with chains if it snows much more,” David translated. He was hoarse, poor fellow, from the long night of turning three difficult languages into English.

After tea and more naan and cold mutton, we were on our way. Our Han minders reappeared, wrapped in sheepskins. We hadn’t seen them since arrival. They had been too thinly dressed to go looking for us in a snowstorm, and the one who did the talking launched into a tirade as soon as he saw us. David decided to pretend that he did not understand, and I really couldn’t follow what the man was shouting. He was standing in eight inches of snow in cloth shoes. Midway through the outburst Zikkar took back the sheepskins, so it was a short tantrum. Both Han immediately leaped into the 4Runner, shuddering with cold. It was impossible not to take pity. Before getting into the car I stripped off the thick tight-knit Guernsey sweater I was wearing and handed it over. It was big enough for both of them, and by golly both of them got into it. Quite soon, thanks to the mingled heat of two scrawny
bodies wrapped up in good English wool, they were warmer and quieter.

But no happier. The talker started trying out his cell phone as soon as we reached the crest of the hill above the valley. He had to operate it one-handedly because the other hand was trapped beneath my Guernsey sweater. There was no transmission tower for miles, so naturally the phone didn’t work, but he kept on trying as Zikkar, barely in control of the creeping 4Runner, battled skids and spins and narrowly escaped going airborne over the brink of one precipice after another.

At last we arrived at the bottom, and as we rode through the outskirts of Ulugqat, our chief minder finally made contact with his headquarters. First the polytonal burst of his report, then silence while he waited for instructions, then the instructions, then the Mandarin equivalent of a very enthusiastic
ja wohl!

He clicked off the phone and pulled out a pair of handcuffs. “You are under arrest,” he said.

In any other country I would have smiled at the wondrous absurdity of being manacled by what appeared to be Siamese twins wearing the same baggy sweater. Not so in Xinjiang, whose prisons had swallowed so many people alive. We were loaded into a government car and driven straight to Captain Zhang’s office in Urümqui. This time, the captain was not alone. Two muscular cops stood behind us with drawn truncheons. Nor was Zhang the relaxed customer I had met the last time I was in this office. He wore his jacket and military cap and did not smoke a single cigarette. He asked us no questions and issued no recriminations. We were meant to take this as a signal that he knew all he needed to know about our nefarious purposes, and more than we could ever guess.

“Passports and air tickets,” he said peremptorily.

We handed them over. Despite the manacles, we had not been relieved of our personal belongings or even searched.

Zhang examined the passports page by page as if seeing them for the first time, then wrote something in each of them and stamped them. He handed them back, but kept our air tickets.

“I
have made a note in your passports that you are never again to be admitted to the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region,” Zhang said. “Do you understand?”

We nodded and kept quiet. This was a serious matter—especially for David because it meant losing some of his extra income, among other unforeseeable complications—but not so serious as awaiting trial in a prison camp in the forbidden zone for twenty or thirty years or however long it took a man to die.

Zhang said, “A plane leaves for Alma Ata in two hours.” He handed two new air tickets to one of his thugs. “These men will accompany you to the airport and see you safely aboard your flight,” he said. “I advise you to be cooperative.”

We followed his advice religiously. But our banishment complicated matters tremendously. We had been tantalized in Xinjiang, but not enlightened, and now we could never come back to follow up our suspicions.

In theory.