Prayer of the Dragon (29 page)

His handlers were artists. They took pride in never breaking a bone. He could feel the needle that went into his bicep but could not raise his arm to react to it, could only sense the heat oozing up into his shoulder.

ALL AT ONCE he was awake, heart pounding, no longer in his prison of five years earlier but propped against a rock in the central square of Little Moscow. Gao was loading a syringe from a small clear bottle. Over the professor’s shoulder stood a soldier holding a medical kit, nervously eyeing the miners.

“Who was it?” Hostene asked. “Could you see them?”

Shan, unable to speak, shook his head. He leaned and retched, emptying his stomach, then retched again, and again, until nothing came up.

Gao hovered over him with the syringe. Shan held up his hand. “What is it?”

“A painkiller.”

“No,” Shan groaned and, with Hostene’s help, he sat and surveyed the assembly. Bing was calm but the miners looked terrified.

From the lip of the ravine a ladder of small chain links and steel bars hung from the door of the helicopter that had landed. “You’re late,” he said to Gao.

“I’m sorry. The storm delayed me.”

“For the first time in years I was actually happy to see a helicopter.”

Shan pulled Abigail’s note out of his pocket, handed it to Hostene, and fixed Bing with a level stare. “When did she leave?”

Bing’s eyes flashed as he recognized the paper in Hostene’s hand. Before answering he snapped at the gathered miners, ordering them to disperse. Then he said, “I found her wandering, lost, that morning when Thomas was killed. I sent her on her way with a map on a fast mule. She was hysterical. She said she had been knocked unconscious and awakened to find Thomas lying dead beside her.”

“You didn’t try to stop her?”

“Good riddance as far as I could see. I told her how to find the herders’ camps at the base of the first range. They will set her on the right trail to town. She could reach town by this afternoon.”

“And from there?”

“There’s a bus to Lhasa from Tashtul twice a day.”

Shan turned to Gao. “Who else came with you?”

“The pilot, who’s an old friend, and his mechanic, who knows better than to ask questions.”

Shan stood up and took a step, fighting dizziness, then faced Bing again. “I want four gold nuggets. Say half an ounce each.”

“Fuck you.”

“For two men who need to be given a big incentive not to talk.”

Bing eyed Gao, who listened with a curious expression. “It’s a crime to bribe a soldier.”

“Haven’t you heard?” Shan asked. “In the new world order there are no bribes, only business expenses. A reasonable item for your municipal budget. Call it emergency repairs.”

Bing cursed and stepped into the shadows of his shelter. Shan took a step toward the ladder but doubled over in pain. Hostene dropped the gear he was gathering and rushed to Shan’s side. Shan’s raised palm stopped him.

“Go,” Shan said, “climb the ladder. We’ll bring the packs.”

“We?” Gao asked. “You’re in no condition to travel.”

Shan found a familiar face watching uncertainly from the edge of the clearing and gestured toward him. “Yangke will come with us.”

The young Tibetan glanced nervously around the clearing, drawing an unhappy glare from Bing, then gathered up the remainder of the gear and went to the ladder. Shan took three steps before he had to stop, his head swimming.

Bing blocked his way. “No way,” he said.

“There is a way,” Shan said. “Send Hubei with us. You don’t need him to watch the trails once we’ve left.”

Bing stared without expression at his deputy, then slowly nodded. Hubei began retreating into the shadows, then froze as Bing beckoned him. Hubei came forward reluctantly and Bing bent to murmur in his ear, then extracted a folded paper from his pocket and handed it to him. His deputy brightened as he stuffed the pages into his own pocket.

Shan waited for Hubei to climb the ladder, then followed shakily. Gao leaned forward, syringe at the ready. But Shan grabbed the syringe and with an unsteady hand emptied out half its contents before jabbing it into his own arm. Then he headed to the ladder and began climbing.

Once they were on their way Gao asked for the gold nuggets Bing had surrendered to Shan.

“A bribe from you?” Shan said. “Not credible. It needs to come from an unrepentant criminal.” He palmed the nuggets and went forward into the cockpit.

Five minutes later he settled into a small nest of military blankets built for him by Hostene as the machine roared to life and began to rise. Hubei had already found another pile of blankets at the rear of the hold and appeared to be sleeping.

“Where is the pain?” Hostene asked.

With a forced grin Shan pointed to the bottom of a foot.

“There is the only place it doesn’t hurt. He was no expert. Professionals go for the soles of the feet.”

The landscape began to roll past the narrow portholes.

Yangke rose to sit beside Shan. “I have no papers,” he said anxiously. It was a crime in itself to be without citizen registration papers. They were the first thing police asked for when they encountered strangers.

“Nor do I. Nor does Hostene for that matter, not for this region. We won’t stay in town long. Just overnight.”

“It will take us days to make our way back on foot.”

“I gave the pilots two nuggets today, one for each of them. They get the second installment when they pick us up in the morning.” Together, the little yellow rocks represented at least half a year’s pay for the officer, far more for the soldier.

“Why do you think I can help with—”

“You know Chodron,” Shan interjected. “We need to find Abigail. But we also need to track Chodron’s connections in town.” He glanced at their companions. Gao had put on a set of headphones that allowed him to speak to the pilot. Hostene was looking out a window on the opposite side of the ship, as if searching for a woman on a mule. “But first we need to talk about your partnership with Tashi.”

Yangke’s face clouded. He began fidgeting with a cargo strap that hung along the side of the fuselage. “Tashi is dead.”

“If you don’t wish to speak of Tashi, then how about the explosion at the old mine?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Chodron keeps very thorough records. Careful records of the miners, careful records of his village administration. But there is no record of your stealing anything from him. By my calculations, the day he locked the canque around your neck was the day after the old mine blew up. Tashi and you were friends. Tashi knew the miners.”

Yangke absently ran his finger around the rim of the porthole. “He said he could get me to India, to start a new life. He knows . . . he knew a monastery in the south I could join. Otherwise, without his help, it takes a lot of money to cross the border when you have neither papers nor passport. I’m an outcast monk. What do I know about making money?”

“Why didn’t you join the miners?”

“The gold on this mountain is not meant to be taken away. What Tashi was doing was different. He told me about the professors seeking old deities. I figured they could make better sense of the past than I could. He offered me a bargain. He knew I had a secret I had kept since I was a boy, even from him.”

“You mean they didn’t discover the old mine,” Shan said after a moment. “You told them where it was.”

“I told Tashi where it was. Tashi told the professors. None of the gold had ever been taken down the mountain. In exchange, Tashi promised to get me across to India. He said he had a foolproof way, that I could ride with gods all the way.”

Shan closed his eyes a moment. He had been so blind. “It had never been taken down the mountain,” he repeated in a hollow voice.

“I had searched when I was a boy, spoken with all the old ones, considered how poor our village had always been. They never used it in the temple, except for a couple small statues. Abigail and Professor Ma made rough calculations based on what they saw at the mine. Tashi told me they thought maybe two tons of gold had been mined. Two tons.”

“But someone else found out about it?”

“Tashi got drunk. Sometimes with Bing. Thomas had started selling liquor. That boy had everything he could want but he had to come across and throw alcohol on our smoldering fires.”

They gazed out at the landscape in silence.

“So Tashi told Bing, and then the mine blew up,” Shan said. “Then Chodron put the canque on you. Because,” he suggested after a long moment, “he was furious that you kept the secret from him all these years.”

“No,” Yangke said in a slow voice, “it wasn’t like that. The explosion was huge. It shook the ground all the way to the village. Chodron came up the slope immediately, demanding an explanation. Bing was already on a bike, riding down to explain. He said that some of the miners’ works had been blown up, had been sabotaged. And there was only one person who hated the miners and Chodron enough to destroy their claims. He told Chodron that someone had stolen explosives out of the stores at Little Moscow the night before. Chodron never goes to Little Moscow. He stays away from the miners, and only speaks with Bing. So, of course, he believed Bing.”

Shan let the words sink in a moment. “Bing didn’t want Chodron to know there were two tons of gold waiting to be found somewhere higher on the mountain. And he couldn’t take the chance of someone finding the old mine and reaching the same conclusion.” He looked at Yangke. “But didn’t you deny blowing up the mine?”

More mountains sped by their window.

“You didn’t,” Shan concluded. “You didn’t contradict Bing.”

Why would Yangke protect Bing, he almost asked, then realized that for Yangke there was perhaps a more important question. “Why did you let Chodron put the canque on you and condemn you wrongly as a thief in front of the whole village? Why did you keep it on? You could have run, you could have hidden, you could have gone to Tashi or even Rapaki.”

“At first, it was to protect Tashi and our plan. Because if I had run then, Chodron would have tried to find me and he would have discovered Tashi’s secret camp,” came Yangke’s simple reply. “But later . . . I realized I deserved it. I should have understood that the only possible way to save the old things is to keep them away from the new world. I knew that, but when Tashi said he could get me to India, where I could be a real monk, I was tempted and I succumbed,” Yangke added.

Shan closed his eyes, letting the painkiller do its work. But he did not sleep. He had learned in the gulag that there was a part of the brain that drugs never reached, the part that kept repeating Yangke’s words until, as the helicopter began to descend, he found himself looking at the young man again, understanding the full depth of his pain. Yangke had accepted the canque because he had betrayed the secret of the mine. He had worn it because he believed, as Shan now did, that the secret he had disclosed to Tashi was the reason his friend had been murdered.

LIKE MOST OLDER communities in Tibet, Tashtul was two towns, the efficient concrete-and-steel construction Beijing had erected and the traditional Tibetan market town that survived. As they walked from the weed-thatched, crumbling soccer stadium where the helicopter deposited them, Shan found his eyes drawn not to the two- and three-story block structures that dominated the low skyline but to the diminutive, decaying buildings that dated from earlier centuries, a wooden stable here, a crumbling chorten there, a stone tower where Buddhist banners would have been displayed during festivals that had been banned decades earlier.

They stood for several minutes at a rusting war memorial by the entrance to the stadium, Beijing’s monument to the fierce battles that had taken place in the region, Chinese divisions pitted against small brigades of Tibetan resistance fighters.

“I take it,” Gao said reluctantly to Shan, “you are about to propose that I lead this fragile expedition.” As he spoke he cocked his head toward the street. Hubei was running away.

“It would be suspicious for a man of your renown not to be,” Shan suggested. “Not to mention that we have neither money nor friends here. Not even a street map.”

“A street map,” Gao replied, “is one thing you don’t require in Tashtul.” He pointed to the squat block structure two hundred yards away, in front of which a tire was being changed on a decrepit bus by means of a cable slung over a tree limb, pulled by a tractor. “The transportation center.” He pointed to an open-air pavilion beside a row of buildings with glass storefront windows, then to a four-story building, the highest in town, that sported a Chinese flag and a dozen antennae. “The center for food and the center for authority.”

They walked past half a dozen barracks that had been converted to school rooms, behind which were five or six blocks of residences, a mix of old wooden structures and stucco bungalows. Shan did not miss the way Gao, finished with his orientation lesson, gazed back at the flagpole on the government center. Below the flag waved a long red-and-black banner, an unfamiliar ornament, the kind traveling armies used to fly.

“Where should we—,” Yangke began. Then Hostene decided the question for them. Without a word he began jogging toward the bus station. Shan clenched his jaw against the pain in his ribs and followed as quickly as he could. By the time he caught up, the Navajo was already in the station, extracting a photo of his niece from his wallet, gesturing toward it as he approached people waiting on benches, the sleepy vendor at the news kiosk, a wide-eyed girl selling dumplings from a steaming bucket.