Mandarin Gate (7 page)

Meng’s hand crushed the bag of seeds. Her face clouded.

“Explain that it changes the entire interpretation of the crime scene,” Shan said. “The flag, the boots pressing down on the woman, the cap covering her short hair was all a pose for police photographers, a ruse of the killer to point suspicion at a dissident. You realize that now because no dissident kills a nun.”

After a long moment she rose and took several steps before lifting the small radio on her belt. The truck of armed police, still waiting in the street, drove away. The men in plainclothes began retreating back toward the grey vehicles.

The lieutenant watched the police drive away before turning back to Shan. “Fine. I have done what you asked. It’s going to cost me several unpleasant hours back at headquarters.”

Shan heard her expectant tone and cocked his head. “Is this a negotiation, Lieutenant?”

“Of course it is,” she shot back. “North. South. West. I need the fourth to go with the others. I’ve heard the prayer horns that mock us from the heights. They sounded again the night after the murders.”

“Now you are speaking riddles.”

“You’re going to tell me about that lama who slinks around the hills like some damned outlaw.”

CHAPTER FOUR

When Shan did not respond, Meng turned and pointed down the dusty street, toward the center of the town. They walked in silence, past another gas station, past a post office in a prefabricated building, then into the small structure that appeared to be Baiyun’s main food store. One of the Tibetan constables sat by the front door. A matronly clerk at the counter saw them and fled into a rear corridor.

Meng led Shan into the same corridor, into the back storeroom. A door leading outside hung ajar. The clerk had not only fled from the counter, she had fled the building. Meng stepped to the closetlike meat locker, opened the heavy metal door, and gestured Shan inside.

The freshest meat lay outstretched on three long tables, with frozen chickens tossed in a pile at the rear of the metal-lined chamber. Two tables were against the walls and the third so filled the center of the locker that Shan barely had room to squeeze between the tables. The bodies were covered with sheets. Adhesive tape around their thumbs identified them only according to their positions at the crime scene.
Bei. Nan. Xi.
North. South. West.

“These should be in a forensics lab,” he said uneasily.

“Don’t be ridiculous. We’re hundreds of miles from a lab. Such a valuable resource would never be allocated to”—she paused, searched for words—“a local crime.”

Shan studied the knob officer. They were both treading on dangerous ground now. “I think we are here, Lieutenant, because you know this is not some local crime. Because you know about special troubleshooters called in from afar, you know their priority isn’t to dig into the truth but to dig into the politics. But can it be possible that you are actually interested in the truth?”

Meng ignored the question. “Nan and Xi died elsewhere and were dragged to the chorten. You were right. The woman Xi died at the wall, where a nine millimeter bullet was recovered. Bei was shot and bled out after being dragged to the chorten. The man Nan had an empty holster but no pistol has been found. He was attacked at the corner of a building by the front gate. His blood stained the wall and pooled on the ground.”

As she spoke Shan stared at the body of the woman. On the sheet covering her lay a sprig of heather. “Who was here?”

“No one,” Meng said. “We are watching the place.” She pushed the heather onto the floor.

Shan glanced at her. She meant the constables were watching the place. Her Tibetan constables.

“I asked you about that lama,” Meng pressed.

Shan returned her steady gaze. “Lamas don’t commit murder.”

The lieutenant frowned, then stepped to the side of the body marked Bei, the faceless man. “That first night the bodies were here Liang came in with a doctor. As far as the major is concerned my job as local liaison means I am his escort, charged with keeping locals out of his way. The doctor was interested only in this one. Liang stepped to his side and ordered me to my station to write a report for him on the local political situation. The next morning I came back. The owner was terrified. He didn’t object when I came back in here. I found this—” She lifted the sheet over the man’s naked thigh. His skin was paler than that of the others. There was an incision eight inches long, closed with fresh sutures.

Shan bent over the incision. There was no swelling, no bruising, no scabbing. He pointed to the ridge of tissue above the incision. “He cut open the dead man’s leg along an old scar.”

Meng silently nodded.

He stared at her warily, sensing a trap. Knob officers were not permitted to be so headstrong. It was unthinkable that one would seek to intrude on the secrets of her superiors. She was only a lieutenant, he reminded himself, when most officers her age were of higher rank. “If you were to cut open these sutures it would be insubordination,” Shan concluded. “So you want me to.”

There was mischief in Meng’s narrow smile, but also a certain nervousness Shan had not seen before.

“Do you have the times of death?” he asked as he lifted a knife from a wall rack.

“Of course. Sometime during the past week, give or take a day. I admire your faith in our abilities. We have their personal belongings, two shell casings and a timber ax that was found with tools stored near the front gate that is consistent with the weapon that severed Nan’s head. No blood on it. Liang took the bullet we dug out of the wall. We’re pretty certain the victims are two males and a female. That, Comrade, is the extent of our forensic investigation.”

“But Liang has resources, access to labs. You said he brought that doctor.”

“As far as I can tell what the major is doing is reviewing the files on every inhabitant of Baiyun.”

The incision was deep, all the way to the femur. Except there was almost no femur. The bone had been shattered long ago, replaced with a prosthetic. As he stared at it Shan felt his chest tighten.

“I don’t understand,” Meng said as she bent to the incision, prying the flesh apart with her hands.

“Titanium,” Shan explained. “This was not done in China.” He quickly moved to the man’s mouth and pried it open. At least half a dozen teeth had been extracted. “Bodies will speak of their home if you look close enough.”

“A foreigner!” Meng gasped.

It changed everything. Her curiosity was gone, replaced by fear. She grabbed the sheet and covered the body, her movements suddenly frantic. “We must leave! Now!”

“No,” Shan replied. “You must leave. Go outside. Forget we were here.” He stepped to the other man, Nan, the Chinese whose head had nearly been severed.

“Not him!” Meng said. “No point.”

He began to pull away the sheet. The second man’s head had been crudely sewn back in place. Even so the man was short, Shan realized. Short and stocky and dark-complected.

Meng paused as she reached the door. “Major Liang is expected today. It won’t matter whom you work for if Liang finds you with a murdered foreigner.”

“All the more reason for you to leave.”

She eyed him coolly, then turned and left without another word. Shan quickly pulled away the rest of the sheet from Nan. The holster on the man’s ankle had been removed, like everything else. He looked at the black bird tattooed on Nan’s forearm. With his expensive clothes the man had seemed like an affluent businessman, perhaps even a senior official. Now, as he returned the sheet, Shan was not so sure. Meng had known him, had seemed oddly dismissive of the man, and of his death. But Jamyang too had known him, and given him a paper with a list of Tibetan towns. He paced slowly along the man, lifting his appendages, even examining his long black hair and scalp, then sniffed at the black deposits under his fingernails. Motor oil.

Meng was nowhere to be seen as he stepped outside. The sleepy little town of Baiyun was coming to life in the late afternoon. Trucks were pulling off the valley’s only paved road into the gas station. The smell of steamed rice and onions wafted from the little tea shop. In the square, two pairs of Chinese men, all older than Shan, were playing checkers. He pulled a newspaper from a waste barrel and sat on a bench, pretending to read as he studied the checker players and the buildings beyond.

Baiyun, in the remote mountains of central Tibet, had nothing of Tibet. It was a Chinese town, or some distant bureaucrat’s notion of what a Chinese town in Tibet should look like. White Cloud town. A pretend Chinese town in a pretend province of China. Someone had tried to plant gingko and plane trees along the edge of the park but the plants were nearly all dead or dying. The park benches that had been placed along the square were falling apart. Some of their planks were missing. The fiberglass statue of Mao, meant to be the focal point of the town square, was already being corroded by the harsh, dusty winds that often roared up the valley. Scores of such statues had been assembled in government warehouses, destined to replace the centuries-old stone chorten shrines that had once been fixtures in Tibetan villages. There was a new political slogan favored by the Party head in Tibet: The Communist Party Is Your New Buddha. When he had first heard it, Shan had actually thought it was some kind of joke. But now the slogan was emblazoned on public walls and banners all over Tibet and offered up for Tibetan schoolchildren to recite like a militant mantra.

Shan looked back at the statue. The only Tibetan writing he had seen anywhere in Baiyun was inscribed along the top edge at the front of its pedestal:
PRAISE THE GREAT LEADER TO WHOM WE OWE OUR LIVES AND PROSPERITY.

He gazed absently at the words as he forced himself to reconstruct the grisly scene in the store’s refrigerator. Liang’s special doctor had opened Bei’s leg up, and extracted his teeth. They had suspected him of being a foreigner but finely worked teeth were becoming less reliable an indicator of foreign origin in modern China. The titanium rod was unquestionable proof. They had closed up the scar then pulled the teeth for good measure. He looked up, surveying the streets again. He still had the sense of something unnatural about the pioneer town, and not just because it was one of Beijing’s prefabricated formula settlements.

Folding the paper under his arm he wandered around the square, sitting again, closer to the checker games that had been set out on upturned crates. Once more he surveyed the park and the modest windblown houses beyond it. There was another slogan on the back edge of the pedestal, in Chinese. It was faded, barely legible even though the statue was probably no more than a year old. He found himself rising again, trying to read the words. They were carefully written, in a very light hand that gave the impression of an official inscription that was weathered. But it was no official slogan:
Superior leaders are those whose existence is merely known
.

He stared at the words in disbelief, reading them again. It was the first verse of the seventeenth passage of the
Tao Te Ching
, written more than two thousand years earlier. The chapter explained how the best leaders were those barely known to their people, the worst were those who interfered with daily life. They were words that Beijing would choke on, the words of dissidents, though not of Tibet.

As he turned back toward the checker players he sensed movement, as if they had all been watching him. He slowly walked among them. Curiously, the players all had books beside them. A book of European history, in English. A book about the bone oracles of early China. A book of rites from the last dynasty. All but one of the players glanced up, nodding absently at Shan. The fourth man, an older, refined-looking gentleman wearing a grey sweater vest and wire-rimmed spectacles, seemed to studiously avoid acknowledging Shan. In his lap was a book of Sung dynasty poetry.

Shan moved on, pausing under one of the trees to look back. There were professors in Baiyun, Jigten had explained. He had been taking Jamyang’s spirit tablets to sell to a professor. A young man walked by, carrying a cloth sack of rice on his shoulder. He was compact, his skin almost olive-colored. Most of the town’s inhabitants were tall, long in the face, with prominent features, people of the distant northeast, of Manchuria. This man had the features of China’s tropical southwest, not far removed from the tribes of the rain forest. Shan watched the figure as he disappeared into an alley. He had seen the features before, on the tattooed dead man.

He looked back at the men in the square, trying to understand his odd discomfort, feeling more than ever the urge to flee, to find Lokesh and take him to safety. But he also felt a growing need to understand this strange, unreal town with three bodies in a refrigerator.

A cry of pain broke him out of his paralysis. Low, rushed voices rose from the alley off the square. A woman cursed from the shadows, then gasped. Figures ran away, between buildings.

Meng was on her knees when Shan reached her, retching onto the ground.

“I’m all right!” she growled when Shan put a hand on her shoulder.

“You’re not all right,” Shan said. “You were attacked. I should find a doctor.” He quickly scanned the shadows. Rice kernels were scattered around her, the bag they had been in on the ground a few feet away. He looked warily about. A figure in the shadows turned and ran as Shan took a step toward him.

“No doctor!” Meng snapped. She leaned over, shaking the rice from her hair, then, bracing herself on the building, rose unsteadily. Her hand went to her upper lip. Blood was dripping from her nose. “I’m prone to nosebleeds,” she said. “You know, the altitude.”

“You were just attacked, Lieutenant.” He handed Meng her hat. “A Public Security officer was attacked.”

“Nonsense. We … collided,” Meng said weakly. “Not looking where I was going.”

Shan looked up the alley, out to the square. “You were watching me. Following me.”

“I strive to learn from my elders. Like I said, you are wise in the ways of Beijing.”

He stared at her. The more he interacted with Meng the more of an enigma she became. There should be urgent radio calls, plans for a sweep of the town. People were sent to prison for years for lifting a hand against a knob officer. He considered her words. Which ways of Beijing worried her?