The Skull Mantra (47 page)

 

Tyler Kincaid seemed highly amused. As they cleared the security checkpoint at the county border, he accelerated the truck and made a whooping sound, the kind Shan had only heard before from cowboys in American movies. Rebecca Fowler turned and pulled away the blanket that covered Shan. He climbed up from the floor and sat in the back seat.

“They never really check,” she said in a taut voice. “Just a wave.”

“Like some big MFC,” Kincaid cracked. He tried to look at Shan, who was rubbing the circulation back into his legs. He had been lying on the floor for nearly two hours, since they had left Yeshe with a stack of photo maps at Jade Spring. “Someone said you were a big man in the Party once. Said you took on the chairman and lost.”

“Nothing so dramatic.”

“But that's why you're here, isn't it? You took on the MFCs. They're the ones who put you in prison, right?” Kincaid asked, in the same lighthearted tone.

“Someone must be living a very unfulfilled life, to waste time talking about me.”

Fowler glanced back with a grin.

“And you, Mr. Kincaid, is your injury healing?”

The American held up his arm, still covered with a long bandage. “Sure. Good as new soon. High-altitude healing, it's great conditioning for the climb up Chomolungma.”

“We should do Gonggar first,” Fowler suggested. They were going to drop off brine samples at the airport for shipment to Hong Kong. Behind Shan sat two large square wooden crates, each holding twelve stainless-steel cylinders. The crates were their cover.

“There's a jacket,” she explained. “With a mine logo. Put it on. At the airport just help with the crates like you work for us.”

“But afterward,” Shan asked, “do you have authority to go to Lhasa? I could find a ride with a truck driver.”

“And how do you get back? How many truck drivers are going to risk hiding a stranger without papers at the checkpoint? We'll just go see Jansen at the UN office. I want to talk to him about the skull shrine.”

“It's just that you shouldn't be involved, shouldn't be at further risk,” Shan said. “You're risking too much already.”

“I want this thing over,” Fowler said with a new tone, almost pleading. “If you get caught it may never be over.” She turned toward the back seat. The haunted countenance Shan had seen after she returned the demon's hand was there again. “They came last night. I guess that's what you were trying to warn me about.”

“Who came?”

“Public Security. Not the major. Tyler called the major to complain. It was a squad of technicians, seemed like. All they did was search the computers. Looked at every hard drive and disk.”

“Big MFC show,” Kincaid observed with a small, sour smile. “Just to keep us scared. Routine. They know we help Jansen. We know they know. We know they want it to stop. They know if they push too hard the UN could get really interested, call out the watchdogs.”

“The UN has watchdogs?”

“Human rights investigators.”

Shan stumbled on the words. Human rights investigators, he repeated to himself. The Americans used the words so casually. They didn't come from another part of his world. Surely they came from a whole different planet. He looked out the window and sighed. “What did the major say when you called?” he asked.

“Couldn't get through,” Kincaid replied. “Busy with preparations for the American tourists.”

“One of them talked a lot,” Fowler continued nervously. “He kept going at me, taunting me like he hated Americans. Asked if I knew the penalty for espionage. Said it was death, no matter who you were.” She looked at Kincaid. “No one would stand up for us then. Not the UN. Nobody.”

Kincaid felt her gaze and turned to her, strangely affected by her tone. “It's all right,” he said uncertainly. “We'll be okay. You know there's no damned spies. Just their damned
games.” His hand moved across the console and rested on her leg.

“I don't know,” she said, speaking to the window. “I've been so jumpy. I get scared for no reason. Premonitions.”

“About what?” Kincaid asked.

“Nothing. I mean, nothing, exactly. Like smelling something rotten for a second, then it's gone, something in the wind.” She pushed his hand away.

“Everyone's jumpy,” Kincaid said. “Ever since the knobs arrived. They killed a man at the prison.” Shan noticed that the American was wearing a piece of heather in his pocket.

“They can't do that, can they?” Fowler asked. There was a small tremble in her voice. “At the prison. Luntok said they're on strike, and the knobs have machine guns. He says it's like the old days. He's scared. Is that where you—?”

Why was it so hard for him to talk with Fowler about the 404th? He broke away from her green eyes and looked out the window. They were following a wide river lined with willows. “I'm scared, too,” he said. Kincaid was right. Everyone was jumpy.

They passed fields lush with barley. Near the river there was enough water for irrigation. “Why do you do it?” Shan asked. “Why did you start helping them, looking for the artifacts? Just running the mine, wouldn't that be enough?”

“Because it has to be done,” Fowler said without hesitation.

“There're others who could do it.”

“But we're the ones who are here.”

“It's one of the things that scares me,” Shan said quietly. “I fear you don't understand the danger.”

Fowler took offense. “You think we do it for a lark?” Her voice grew louder than Shan had ever heard it. “What, so we can brag about it when we get home? That's not it, dammit!” She looked down, as though taken aback by her own outburst. “I'm sorry,” she said quietly. “It's just that Tibet gets inside you. It's real here. More real than anything back home.”

She had used the word before, Shan remembered, to describe the moment when she had returned Tamdin's hand and the beast had howled. Real.

“It's important here,” Fowler concluded.

“Important?” asked Shan.

She twisted in her seat and looked back at him, her eyes moving as though searching for the right words, but she did not speak.

“We make a difference here,” Kincaid continued, as if he and Fowler had discussed the topic many times before. “Back home the world sits and watches MTV. Buys cars. Buys houses. Has one-point-eight kids.”

“MTV?” Shan asked.

“Never mind. Life is wasted back there. There, they just live
on
the world. Here, you can live
in
the world. The Buddhists, they have eight hot and eight cold hells. But there's a whole new level in America. The worst one. The one where everyone's tricked into ignoring their souls by being told they're already in heaven.”

“But you must have important things at home. Family.”

“Not much,” Kincaid quipped brightly, as though he were proud of it.

Not much, Shan considered. What was it Fowler had told him? That Kincaid would be running the company, that he would become one of the wealthiest men in America.

“My parents and I don't speak much.”

“No brothers or sisters?”

“Had a dog,” Kincaid said whimsically. Shan envied the American his ability to be so carefree. “The dog died,” Kincaid concluded with a wide grin.

“But you're rich at home,” Shan offered clumsily.

Kincaid shot Fowler an exaggerated frown, as though to chastise her for talking too much. “Not anymore. Gave it up. My father's rich. Guess I'll be rich again. I try not to let it upset me. Rich doesn't make a home. Rich doesn't give you peace of mind.” He cast a sideways, hopeful glance toward Rebecca Fowler. “Hell, in Lhadrung, I feel more at home than I ever did in the United States.”

Fowler gave him a weak smile. “The poor lost soul finally finds a roost.”

“Don't make it sound like I'm the only one,” Kincaid chided, still grinning.

Shan saw Fowler stiffen, then hesitantly turn toward him,
as though she owed Shan an explanation. “My parents divorced fifteen years ago. I lived with my mother, who now has Alzheimer's disease. Destroys the memory. She hasn't recognized me for over four years. And I haven't seen or heard from my father in eight years.” She looked out the window. “I guess I needed a new world, too.”

It didn't explain anything for Shan. It just made him sad. Maybe in the spirit realm Lhadrung was another kind of catching place, where lost souls collected and were battered about until, worn and hard as old stones, they were safe in the world again.

Shan closed his eyes, and his mind drifted toward what he had seen in Colonel Tan's service record. Service in Manchuria, Inner Mongolia, and Fujian. But nothing in Tibet before 1985. He stared out the window at the desolate landscape. Everything was wrong. Everything he had assumed had been mistaken. He had thought the key had been Director Hu, but he had been wrong. He had thought it had been about the skull cave, but then he found Yerpa. He had hoped it had merely been a battle between looters, but a looter didn't kill over one shrine to protect another. He had thought perhaps it had been only Li, then Li and the major, but neither had any connection to Tamdin. He had thought it could never be Sungpo, yet who but a monk would have reverently arranged the dislocated skull in the cave? He had thought the
Lotus Book
provided the answers, the motives, but the
Lotus Book
was wrong. They were all pieces of the puzzle, but the shape of the puzzle eluded him, and he had no idea how many more pieces he needed before they began to make sense.

To know of not knowing is best, Tsomo had reminded him. He had to begin again, erasing it all, assuming he knew only of not knowing. There was so much he did not know. He did not know who had the Tamdin costume. He did not know who had given the
ragyapa
the stolen military supplies. He did not know why the
purbas
would have recorded lies in the
Lotus Book.
He did not know why Jao was interested in water rights on a remote mountainside. He felt no closer to an answer than he had the day they found Jao's head. If he did not find answers in Lhasa, he would have no
hope of finding the true killer, no hope of saving Sungpo. No hope of saving himself, or the 404th, when he refused to write the report condemning an innocent monk.

They drove to a warehouse at the far end of the airport, where a sleepy customs officer waved them through and two freight handlers waited for Fowler to hand them each a ten renminbi note before unloading the crates and wheeling a dolly bearing a rack of empty cannisters to the truck. In less than fifteen minutes they were on the road to Lhasa.

 

An hour later they passed the familiar blocks of low, slate-colored barracks that Beijing built for urban workers all over China. The paths along the highway began to fill with figures in gray and brown clothing. Carts pulled by haggard ponies hauled plastic barrels of night soil out of the city. Farmers carried cabbages and onions in huge net bags. Chickens and small pigs were trussed on sticks balanced on bicycles. Grandparents walked to market with children. The streets seemed more Chinese than Tibetan, and with a pang of sorrow as sharp as a blade Shan remembered why. Beijing had “naturalized” the city by shipping in a hundred thousand Chinese to join the fifty thousand Tibetans already living there. As far as he could see, Lhasa, which in Tibetan meant the dwelling place of God, had been converted into one more of the gray, smoky urban tracts that comprised modern China.

“There should be something more we can do,” Fowler said as Kincaid eased the truck to a stop in front of the drab two-story building that housed Jansen's office. “You want the water permit records. But they won't let you see them. Not without identification.”

“I may find a way. I know how the bureaucrats speak.” Shan stepped out and turned away from the truck, facing the old city for the first time.

“No. Tyler will go. It's perfectly normal. They won't say no to him, asking to see his own permits.”

But Shan could not reply. For there it was, on top of the small mountain that dominated the city. Or rather, it
was
the mountain that dominated the city. Its huge lower walls, brilliant white and sloping steeply upward, gave the main structure
the appearance of a vast, golden-roofed temple floating above Himalayan snows. The precipice of existence, Trinle had once called the walls in a winter tale, so high, so rigid, so alluring that they recalled for him the path to Buddha-hood.

Never before in his life had Shan been afraid to look at something. He felt unworthy to stare at the building. He had been wrong. Something did survive of the dwelling place of God. He gazed down at his feet a moment, wondering at his sudden flood of emotion, then, unable to stop himself, his gaze moved back to the Potala.

“What are you doing?” Kincaid asked suddenly, his hand reaching out as though to catch Shan.

Shan realized that he had unconsciously dropped to his knees. “I guess,” he said, still in wonder, “I am doing this.” And he touched the ground with his forehead, the way a pilgrim might on first seeing the holy building.

Most of the old yaks had their own names for it, or were fond of reciting the many appelations given the structure in Tibetan literature. The Seat of Supreme Being. The Jewel in the Crown. The Sublime Fortress. Buddha's Gate. One of the younger monks had proudly reported that in a Western magazine he had seen the Potala listed as one of the wonders of the world. The old yaks had all smiled politely at the news. Now Shan knew what they had all been thinking: The Potala wasn't of this world.

Maybe five years before he could have visited Lhasa and seen the structure as a tourist might, as a massive stone castle, impressive for its size and age and historic role as the Buddhist Vatican. But Shan had not seen it five years ago, and now he could see it only through the eyes of those who told the winter tales.