The Skull Mantra (32 page)

The man sighed. “The charms are not for here.”

“Then where? Who? You mean you are selling them to someone else?”

“These are not things to speak about.” The man wiped the blade again, as if in warning.

“Are you selling them?” Shan repeated. “Is that how you will pay for her shop?”

The man looked up at the circling birds. A
ragyapa
village would be the perfect place for murder, Shan realized. Like shooting your own officer on a battlefield because you
hated him. One body here would quickly become indistinguishable from the others.

The man did not respond. He looked down into the village and saw the men staring at him. He barked at them and they began working on the tools again. Yeshe, strangely, was still tumbling about with the children.

Shan looked at the man again. He was not only older than most of them, he was apparently the headman of the village. “I just want to know who. Someone must be too embarrassed, or too scared, to ask for the charms directly. Is it someone in the government?” The man turned away from Shan. “My questions may occur to someone else,” Shan said to his back. “They would have other means of persuasion.”

“You mean Public Security,” the man whispered. Certainly the Bureau would be more interested than Shan in his daughter's work papers. His face seem to crumble with the words. He stared into the dirt at his feet.

Shan told the man his name.

The headman looked up in surprise, unaccustomed to such a gesture. “I am called Merak,” he said tentatively.

“You must be very proud of your daughter.”

Merak stopped and considered Shan. “When I was a boy,” he said, “I never understood it, why none of the others would let me near. I would go to the edge of town and hide, just to watch the others play. You know who my best friend was? A young vulture. I trained him to come to me when I called. It was the only thing that trusted me, that accepted me as I was. One day when I called, an eagle was waiting. It killed my friend. Snatched him right out of the air, because he was watching me, not the sky.”

“It is hard to be trusted.”

“We're vultures, too. That's what the world thinks of us. My father used to laugh about that. He'd say, ‘That's the advantage we have over everyone else. We know exactly who we are.' ”

“Someone has asked you to buy a charm. Someone who thinks they offended Tamdin.”

Merak swept his hand toward the buildings below. “Why would we need them?”

“The
ragyapa
do not believe in demons?”

“The
ragyapa
believe in vultures.”

“You didn't answer my question.”

“First you tell me.”

“Tell you what?”

“You're from the world,” Merak said, nodding toward the valley. ‘Tell me you don't believe in demons.”

The sound of scuffling arose farther up the trail. Shan looked up, and instantly regretted it. Two vultures were engaged in a tug of war over a human hand.

Shan gazed down into his own hands a moment, his fingers rubbing his calluses. “I have lived too long to tell you that.”

Merak gave a knowing nod, then silently led Shan back to the village.

“The American mine,” Shan told Feng. There was another
ragyapa,
he remembered, one who climbed the high ranges that were the home of Tamdin.

Yeshe, in the back seat, extended a child's sock toward Shan as if it were a trophy. “Didn't you see?” he asked with a meaningful grin.

“See what?”

“The missing military supplies I had been cataloging for Warden Zhong. The hats, the shoes, the shirts. And everyone wore green socks.”

“I don't understand,” Shan confessed.

“The lost supplies. They're here. The
ragyapa
have them.”

 

“No,” Shan said as they turned from the highway onto the access road to Jade Spring. “The American mine.”

“Right,” Sergeant Feng said. “Just one stop. Not long.”

He pulled up next to the mess hall and, to Shan's surprise, opened Shan's door, waiting. “Not long,” he repeated.

Shan followed, confused, then remembered. “You were talking to Lieutenant Chang.”

Feng grunted noncommittally.

“Has he been reassigned? He isn't spending much time at the 404th.”

“In a lockdown? With two hundred border commandos camped there? What's the point?”

“What did he want?”

“Just talking. Told me about a shortcut to the American mine.”

In the mess hall soldiers were gathered in small groups, drinking tea. Feng surveyed the room, then led Shan toward three men playing mah-jongg near the rear.

“Meng Lau,” he called out. Two of the men jerked their heads up and stood. The third, his back to them, laughed and set down a tile. The others fell back as Feng put his hand on the man's shoulder.

Startled, the man cursed and turned. He was young, a mere boy, with greasy hair and hooded, lightless eyes. Headphones, turned upside down under his chin, covered his ears.

“Meng Lau,” Feng repeated.

The sneer on the man's face faded. He slowly lowered the headphones. Shan unbuttoned his pocket and showed him the paper provided by Director Hu. “You signed this?”

Meng glanced at Feng and slowly nodded. There was something wrong with his left eye. It drifted, unfocused, as if perhaps it were artificial.

“Did Director Hu ask for it?”

“The prosecutor came and wanted it,” Meng said nervously, rising from the table.

“The prosecutor?”

Meng nodded again. “His name is Li.”

“So you signed one for Li and one for Hu?”

“I signed two.”

So it was true, Shan realized, Li Aidang was compiling a separate file. But why go through the trouble of providing Shan a duplicate statement? To ensure that he finished as quickly as possible? To deceive Shan? Or maybe to warn him that Li would always be one step ahead?

“They said the same thing?”

The soldier looked at Feng uncertainly before he answered. “Of course.”

“But who put the words on the paper?” Shan asked.

“They are my words.” Meng took a step back.

“Did you see a monk that night?”

“The statement says so.”

The words seem to deflate Feng for a moment. Then anger grew on his face. “You damned pup!” he barked. “Answer him straight!”

“Were you on duty that night, Private Meng?” Shan asked. “You were not on the roster.”

The soldier began to fidget with his headphones. “Sometimes we switch.”

Feng's hand came out of nowhere, slapping the soldier across the mouth. “The inspector asked you a question.”

Shan looked at Feng in surprise. The inspector.

Meng looked at Feng vacantly, as if he were used to being hit.

“Did you see a monk that night?” Shan asked again.

“I think because I'm a witness for the trial I am not supposed to speak with anyone.”

Anger rose again on Feng's face, then quickly faded, though not before the soldier had seen it and stepped further back. “It's political,” he muttered, and bolted away. Feng stared after him, looking no longer angry, but hurt.

 

The sergeant drove moodily, roaring through the gears, barely braking at the crossroads, until they began the long climb up the North Claw toward the American mine.

“Here,” he mumbled finally, pulling a cellophane bag from his pocket. “Pumpkin seeds.” He handed the bag to Shan. “Good ones, not the moldy shit from the market. Salted. Get them at the commissary.”

They chewed the seeds slowly and silently, like two old men on a Beijing park bench. Before long Feng began leaning forward, watching the shoulder of the road.

“Chang said it would save an hour,” Feng offered as he swung onto a rutted track that seemed little more than a goat path. “Back in time for evening mess this way.”

In five minutes they were following the track toward the crest of a sharp ridge. To the right, barely three feet from their tires, the path fell away over a nearly perpendicular cliff face, ending in a tumble of rocks several hundred feet below.

“How could this reach the Americans?” Yeshe asked nervously. “We'd have to cross this chasm.”

“Take a nap,” Feng grumbled. “Save your energy for all that work back at the 404th.”

“What do you mean?” Yeshe asked, alarm in his voice.

“Like you asked, I talked to the warden's secretary. She said no one is doing the computer work. Warden said just stack it up, someone's coming in two weeks.”

“It could be someone else,” Yeshe protested.

Feng shook his head. “She asked one of the administrative officers. Said the warden's Tibetan pup was coming back.”

There was a tiny moan from the back. Shan turned to find Yeshe nearly doubled over, his head in his hands. With pain, Shan turned away. He had already told Yeshe. It was time for him to decide who he was.

Suddenly Shan held up his hand. “There—” he said as Sergeant Feng slowed down, pointing to a set of fresh tire tracks that veered from the path and disappeared over the crest of the ridge.

“So we're not the only ones who use the shortcut,” Feng said with a tone of vindication.

Lots of people, Shan thought—like Americans searching for old shrines.

Shan opened the door and carefully eased around the truck, mindful of the sheer dropoff. He picked a stem of heather from the tire tracks and handed it to Feng. “Smell it. This was crushed not even an hour ago.”

“So?”

“So I'm going to follow this fresh trail. Your road curves around that rock formation to the crest. I'll meet you on the other side.”

Feng frowned but began to inch the truck forward.

Moving up the slope, Shan tried to piece together the geography. The skull cave was less than a mile away. Was this the Americans' back door to the skull cave? Had Fowler and Kincaid been so foolish as to return to the shrine? As he neared the top he heard a peculiar sound. Like bells, he thought. No, drums. A few feet farther he realized it was rock and roll music. As he reached the crest he crouched
and dropped back. There was a truck, but it was not the Americans'. It was bright red.

Calming himself, he edged his head above the rocks. It was the big Land Rover that Hu had been driving, but the figure at the wheel, tapping in time to the music, was too tall to be Hu.

It made no sense to park there. There was no one else to be seen, no one to wait for. There was not even much landscape to survey, for the rock outcropping cut off much of the view down the ridge.

Slowly, unconsciously, Shan's curiosity forced him to rise. There were fresh mounds of dirt behind the rear wheels, and a huge five-foot boulder in front of the vehicle, balanced precariously close to the lip of a bank that dropped sharply down to the road. Suddenly the man inside straightened and looked intently at the track below. Their own truck was coming into view. The figure inside the Land Rover raised his fist as though in victory and gunned the motor.

“No!” Shan screamed, and ran toward the truck. Its wheels were spinning, throwing more dirt into the air. The boulder was beginning to move.

He launched himself through the cloud of dust, pounding violently on the driver's window. The man turned and stared dumbly. It was Lieutenant Chang.

Shan could see him reaching for the gear shift. The truck seemed to ease back as Chang fumbled with the controls, then lurched forward. In one violent heave the boulder and the truck both flew over the bank.

As if in slow motion Shan watched Feng stop, then jump out of their truck with Yeshe just as the boulder hurled past them and disappeared over the edge. The Land Rover, airborne, struck the bank on its side and began to roll down the precipitous slope, glass popping, metal groaning, its wheels still whirling. It hit the road in the middle of a roll and landed on the driver's side in a cloud of dust, with the front half hanging over the chasm.

Shan, breathless, reached the road just as an arm rose through the shattered passenger's window. Chang, his forehead smeared with blood, appeared in the window and began to pull himself up. The music was still playing.

Lieutenant Chang stopped moving and shouted for Feng, who stood ten feet away. As he did so there was a groan of metal and something gave way. Chang screamed as the vehicle sank another foot over the edge and stopped.

Anger grew on Chang's face. “Sergeant!” he bellowed. “Get me—”

He never finished. The Land Rover abruptly tipped and disappeared from view. They could still hear the music as it fell.

 

Not a word was spoken as they backtracked down the ridge and onto the main road. Sergeant Feng's face was clouded with confusion. His hand shook on the wheel. Try as he might, Shan knew, in the end Sergeant Feng would not be able to avoid the truth. Chang had been trying to kill
him,
too.

As they finally cleared the ridge above the boron mine, Shan signaled for Feng to stop. There was a shrine he had not seen on their first visit, on a ledge three hundred feet above the valley floor. Prayer flags were fluttering around a cairn of rocks. Some were just bits of colored cloth. Others were the huge banners painted with prayers that the Tibetans called horse flags.

“I want to know about that shrine,” he said to Yeshe and Feng as they parked the truck. “Find a way up there. See if you can tell who built it, and where they're coming from.”

Yeshe cocked his head toward the shrine with an intense interest and began moving toward it without looking back. Feng contemplated Shan with a sour look, then shrugged, checked the ammunition in his pistol, and jogged toward Yeshe.

The mine office was nearly empty as Shan entered. The woman who served tea was asleep on a stool, leaning against the wall. Two men in muddy work clothes huddled over the large table. One offered a nod of acknowledgment as Shan approached. It was Luntok, the
ragyapa
engineer. The red door at the rear was closed again. There were voices behind it, and the low whir of electronic equipment.