Prayer of the Dragon (19 page)

Shan went to the center of the circle. “These men are not murderers. They are scholars, each in his own way.”

Bing’s grin showed he was warming to the entertainment. “You are a newcomer to this mountain. You have no notion of what these men have done. This isn’t some prosecution to be dressed up for the propagandists. We are practical men here, we deal with practical facts.” He aimed something in his hand at Hostene’s head. With a momentary stab of fear Shan saw a brilliant spot of red light appear on the Navajo’s forehead. One of the mayor’s tools for keeping social order was a laser pointer. “This one, Inspector, not only was found near the two murdered men, he steals gold from hard-working miners, creeping about in the night like some wild dog. I have sent this information to Chodron. No doubt he would have kept him chained in that stable had he known.”

Hostene flushed and glanced up at Shan.

Bing directed the pointer at Thomas. “And this one treats us like laboratory rats, observing us when he thinks we don’t know, playing the peddler so he can get acquainted with his victims. Sometimes”—Bing strolled along the front of his audience, pausing for effect—“sometimes the young ones like this kill because they have discovered they are incapable of being men. So they express their lust in another way.” He paused again, smiling at Thomas’s expression, raising his brows as he delivered his punch line. “He can’t make his sword work, so he picks up an ax.”

Hostility was growing on several of the faces before Shan. “This man, named Hostene,” he said, indicating the Navajo, “was nearly killed by a blow to his head.” Shan lifted Thomas’s pack, opened the front zipper, and pulled out the photos he had asked the youth to print for him. Thomas’s whispered news had been about the photos and also about the demons on the far side of the mountain. “Here Hostene is some time after the murders. The real killer put him there, then painted signs on the rock with blood.”

“You don’t know that,” Bing growled. “He could have been injured fighting his victims, then used their blood to paint those signs before he collapsed.”

“I do know it,” Shan said. “We all know it because the picture tells the truth.” He walked along the ring of miners, holding the photo out to them at eye level. “Because the bloodstains on his shirt and the bloodstains on his boots run across onto the rock and the grass, in perfect alignment. He was unconscious while someone else painted the images in blood.”

“Which means,” Bing shot back, “that the boy did it. This young lunatic turned on his partner in crime. The boy was the one with the ax. Chodron knows what to do with lunatics. The sharpened spoon, but not for the eyes! You put it up the nose and twist.” A man in the back burst out laughing. But not all the men agreed with Bing. Shan saw several studying the photo, looking worried.

“The boy did it,” Bing insisted, “then murdered the other one, the farmer, yesterday. Once the killing sickness starts, it becomes like a beast that has to be regularly fed.”

There was a kettle on a brazier at the edge of the fire ring. Shan picked up two cups from Thomas’s blanket, filled them with lukewarm black tea, and handed them to Thomas and Hostene. He walked along the line of miners then lifted the ax from the blanket, handed it to Bing, and stepped out of the circle to a place where two large rock slabs had fallen, forming a right angle. He pointed to an eighteen-inch slab at the front of a nearby lean-to that was serving as a table. “Move that,” he instructed Bing’s deputy.

“Do it, Hubei,” Bing said in an amused tone.

The man leapt to action, lifted the stone, and placed it where Shan directed, one foot from the wall.

Shan paused, studying the short man a moment. He was Bing’s deputy and the one who had claimed Hostene’s campsite. He pulled another photo from the stack in Thomas’s pack and handed it to one of the miners, who looked it over and passed it around the circle. “You can see the slaughter ground where the two bodies were found. Two rock walls close together, just like here, a flat rock below.” He asked Hubei to lie on the ground, then Shan lifted his arm. “It’s just after dawn. I drag my victims in here. The young one, Tashi, is unconscious but alive. I have to remove his hands for some reason. I chop them off on this rock, in the left corner of the little chamber, just as the picture shows. See how the blood spurts onto the rock wall, but not onto the chopping slab.”

Hubei emitted a nervous laugh as Shan pulled back his shirtsleeve and arranged his arm on the stone slab. “The arm was held down for the cutting stroke, right at the edge of the slab. Give the boy the ax,” Shan instructed Bing. The mayor of Little Moscow silently complied, then pulled Thomas to his feet.

“Come, cut off his hand, Thomas,” Shan invited. The man on the ground cursed and began to rise, but a moment later was pinned down by a pole in his ribs. Bing, at the other end of the pole, gestured for him to spread his arms again.

“Show us,” Shan encouraged Thomas. The man on the ground squirmed, the color draining from his face. Bing pressed harder on his pole.

Thomas advanced reluctantly to the man on the ground, paused, began to kneel, and paused again as he bent. Then he straightened, tried to step over the man but stopped, realizing he could not fit into the small space between the stone and the rock wall. He looked up to Shan with a puzzled, pleading expression.

“He can’t do it,” Shan declared, “because he is right-handed.” He bent, positioned the man’s arm again, and demonstrated how the chopping blow was delivered. “The killer was left-handed. Neither Thomas nor Hostene is left-handed.”

In the silence that followed, Shan paced along the row of miners again, stopping in front of one who wore a soiled wool cap. “How many murders have there been?” he asked abruptly.

The man glanced at Bing, then gazed at his feet without replying.

“How many murders?” Shan asked the next man.

“Some die,” the man said, “some get rich.”

The next, an older man, gazed at Shan uneasily. “Why the hands?” he asked in a hollow voice, as if Shan should know. “A man’s hands are the proof of his life.”

Shan turned back toward Bing. “Keep hiding the truth and someone else will die.” He swept his arm along the line of miners. “Maybe one of you. There are three dead this year for certain. The young miner at the painting of a blue bull, then the two at Hostene’s camp. There were two more last year. The farmer yesterday would make five. Between the first two murders it was, what, ten months? Then the killer took only a month to strike again. If we count the farmer yesterday, the interval was less than two weeks this time. If that’s a pattern, then in five or six days there will be another murder. One of you may be next. Or perhaps it will be a woman who is missing.”

Hostene did not appear to hear Shan’s reference to his niece. He was staring at the rock slab on the ground where Shan had reconstructed the dismemberment of his friends.

Shan turned back to Bing. “Or is she dead already?”

Bing too seemed to be contemplating Shan’s performance. “A woman,” he muttered at last, “wandering alone isn’t safe.”

“Her uncle has to find her,” Shan said. “We all need to find her, for she may have witnessed the murders of her two colleagues.”

No one spoke. Shan studied the ragged group of miners again. Why weren’t they out working their claims? They were worried, Shan realized, even frightened. It was indeed likely that one of them would be the next victim. But it might be as likely that one of them was involved in the killings. He reminded himself that someone had tried to destroy their little party only the day before with explosives. Every man in front of him was an expert with explosives.

“The best chance you have of solving these murders,” Shan said, “is to let us go. And to help us find the woman. Do you have any idea what will happen if an American is reported missing on this mountain?”

“American?” It was one of the older miners who replied. “Impossible. Tibetan. Nepali, perhaps.”

Shan leaned over Hostene, whispering in his ear. The Navajo unbuttoned his shirt pocket and handed Shan something blue and flat.

“She is a professor,” Shan said in a loud voice. “She is famous.” As he lifted the object in his hand, a nervous murmur swept through the crowd. The little blue object was like one of the old charms used in Tibet and China to cast a spell on those who beheld it—a United States passport.

“Shall we speak of what happens when it is discovered that this famous professor is missing? Have you ever wondered how many soldiers can fit in the belly of one of those big planes? Shall we guess how long your secrets will last?”

It was as if a festering sore had been lanced. There was no more resentment, only worry. He walked along the row of miners, catching bits of their conversations. A man with a shaved head spoke of satellite surveillance. Someone else mentioned a movie in which the sky had been darkened with American parachutes.

Bing, looking weary now, picked up the kettle and offered Hostene more tea.

Many years earlier Shan had visited Dunhuang, where mountains honeycombed with caves had once been home to scores of Buddhist teachers and hermits, in which they had sealed away treasures of ancient texts and paintings. The honeycombed caves of Little Moscow had been in use for what Shan guessed to be at least a dozen years and had their own artifacts and shrines. Shan wandered past the miners, who were conversing among themselves, and absorbed, then slipped down a long ravine to examine some of the town’s shrines more closely. He passed a heap of rusty cans and broken tools near the mouth of the gully, under a stripped tree trunk from which dangling ropes and pulleys extended over the lip of the ravine—a boom for lowering heavy objects. He paused at a shelter marked with placards bearing curses, warnings to stay away. Then he peered inside it. A red bike was parked within. Beyond, the soft shale under several overhanging ledges had been chipped away, creating small caves with a domestic appearance. Several bore Chinese names painted on wooden slabs hanging from poles. One pole held a two-year-old calendar with the image of a naked blonde woman posing with auto tires. A wind-frayed photo, torn from a magazine, of a gleaming silver pickup truck, dangled from another. Still another held an advertisement for a casino in Macao. This was how a sacred mountain entered the new age.

Shan glanced back toward the town square, considering what Thomas had whispered to him on his arrival after telling him he had brought the photographs as Shan had requested.
If Shan were
to set foot on the other side of the mountain, Gao had ordered him shot
on sight.
There never seemed to be answers on Sleeping Dragon Mountain, only more fear, more riddles.

From the shadows he absently watched the two mah-Jongg players set up a new game, stacking small piles of cash before them. Cash. The miners couldn’t turn their gold into cash until the end of the season, until they left the mountain for the year. He would have expected them to spend their money in the spring, on equipment and supplies. He watched how the other miners glanced jealously at the pair. These two had enough to gamble with, as if the end of the summer had come early for them.

He walked past a den with a canvas front decorated with images of the heads of tigers, then bent and picked up a pebble before studying the next piece of municipal art, a glossy advertising photo of a robot holding a tray of cocktails, pinned above a can full of cigarette butts. On a rock beside the can was an army helmet, painted black with yellow stripes.

A rough voice announced from the shadows within, “Captain Bing has a rule. Anyone caught in another man’s cave is tied to a rock and caned.”

Shan bent and squinted, meeting the gaze of the scarred man in the quilted jacket. “It is you I came looking for. I saw you slip down this alley. Hubei, is that what they call you? After the province?” He had known many criminals who took the name of their homes to hide their real names.

“You played me for a fool once today. Don’t make the mistake of trying it a second time.”

“I was only protecting the boy,” Shan said as he began tossing the pebble from one hand to the other. “If I had seen your arm before, I would have used someone else. Were you imprisoned in Tibet?” Shan had noticed the tattoo on the man’s exposed arm during his earlier demonstration.

“Military prison. Xinjiang,” Hubei replied in a surly tone, referring to the vast area north of Tibet known for its deserts and massive prison camps. “Five years. The first month I was there I thought we would all die of the heat. But it was winter that did the government’s work. In January and February we stacked bodies like firewood.”

Shan rolled up his sleeve and revealed his own tattoo. “404th People’s Construction Brigade,” he explained. “Sometimes when men died, the guards made us bury them right in the roadbed. The bodies were usually still warm.” He looked away for a moment, fighting a sudden ache in his heart. He had never really left the gulag. Unpredictably, abruptly, the tormenting memories resurfaced, so vivid it seemed he was there, the dusty wind in his face, old monks being beaten with batons for mouthing forbidden mantras.

The wiry miner was staring at him, perplexed, and Shan realized the man had been speaking. “I asked, why seek me out?”

Shan said, tossing the pebble again, “I need to know if you and Bing saw the American woman and what she was doing.”

“No one takes gold out of the streams for us,” the man complained. “We don’t have time to wander about watching pretty butterflies.”