The Skull Mantra (10 page)

“The Commission was not notified!” she continued. “There is no Religious Bureau posting! I'm calling Wen Li!
I'm calling Lhasa!” Her eyes flashed in anger. Even from twenty feet away Shan saw they were green.

Shan moved around the white truck. It was an American Jeep, a much newer version of the one Feng drove, fresh from the joint venture factory in Beijing. At the wheel was a nervous-looking Tibetan wearing spectacles with heavy black rims. On the driver's door was a symbol, a drawing of crossed American and Chinese flags, flanked top and bottom by the words
Mine of the Sun,
in Chinese and English.

“Ai yi, she's beautiful when she's angry,” someone said over his shoulder. The words were spoken in perfect Mandarin but their rhythm was not Chinese.

Shan slipped to the side to get a look at the man. He was a lean, tall Westerner with long, straw-colored hair tied in a short tail at the nape of his neck. He wore gold wire-rimmed spectacles and a blue nylon down vest with an emblem that matched that on the truck. Throwing an amused sidelong glance at Shan, he turned back toward the woman, pulling an odd rectangular object from his pocket and raising it to his mouth. It was a mouth organ, Shan suddenly realized as the American began to play a song.

He played quite well, but loudly. Deliberately loudly. Many traditional American songs were popular in China, and Shan recognized his tune instantly. “Home on the Range.”

Several of the soldiers laughed. The American woman cast a peeved glance at her companion. But Tan was not amused. As the woman raised her camera and aimed it at the cave, Tan snapped from his spell. He muttered a command and one of his men leapt forward to cover the lens with his hand. The American with the mouth organ kept playing, but his eyes hardened. He took several steps toward the woman, as though she might need his protection. Shan watched as two of Tan's officers quietly adjusted their position, so they remained between the American and the cave.

“Miss Fowler,” Tan said in Mandarin, back in control, “defense installations of the People's Liberation Army are strictly classified. You have no right to be here. I could order your detainment.” It was the most credible of bluffs. Tibet housed more of China's nuclear arsenal than any other region of the country.

The woman stared silently, defiance still in her eyes. The American man lowered the mouth organ and replied in English, though he had obviously understood Tan. “Great,” he said, extending his wrists, “arrest us. That will guarantee the attention of the United Nations.”

Colonel Tan threw a petulant glance at the American man, bent to the ear of one his aides, then offered a hollow smile to the woman. “This is no way for friends to behave. It's Rebecca, isn't it? Please, Rebecca, understand the problem you are creating for yourself and your company.”

Someone grabbed Shan by the arm and pulled him toward the truck where Yeshe and Feng still sat. “Colonel Tan says you must go. Now,” the soldier insisted.

Shan let himself be led to the truck, but at the door pulled away to stare once more at the strange woman. She gave him a fleeting glance, then turned again and locked gazes with him as she realized perhaps that Shan was the only Chinese there without a uniform. Her green eyes had a wild, restless intelligence. A question appeared on her face. Before he could tell if it was directed toward him, he was pushed into the truck.

 

A file was already on his desk at the prison administration office. It had been delivered personally by Madame Ko, and was captioned “Known Hooligans/Lhadrung County.” It was an old file, dog-eared from use, and was separated into four categories.
Drug cultists
was the first. It was a quaint notion, abandoned by the police in China's large cities years earlier, that drug use was driven by fanatic rituals.
Youth gangs.
The fifteen individuals listed were all over thirty years of age.
Criminal recidivists.
The list included everyone in Lhadrung who had previously served time in a
lao gai
prison, nearly three hundred names.
Cultural agitators.
It was by far the longest list. For every name either a gompa or the label “unregistered” was listed. They were all monks. Many had been detained during the Thumb Riots five years earlier. A dozen of the unregistered monks had an added notation. Suspected
purba.
He puzzled over the label. A
purba
was a ceremonial dagger used in Tibetan rituals. He scanned to the end. No list for homicidal protector demons.

He picked up the phone. Madame Ko answered on the third ring. “Tell the colonel there will need to be more autopsy work.”

“Autopsy?”

“He'll need to tell Dr. Sung at the clinic about it.”

“Wish I had known,” she sighed. “I just got back from there.”

“You went to the clinic?”

“He had me make a delivery. I just walked over there. All wrapped up in newspaper and plastic bags. Said he wanted her cabbage to stay fresh.”

Shan stared at the receiver. “Thank you, Madame Ko,” he mumbled.

“You're welcome, Xiao Shan,” she said brightly, and hung up.

Xiao Shan. The words brought a sudden loneliness. He had not heard them for years. It was what his grandmother called him, the old-style form of address for a younger person. Little Shan.

He found himself staring out into the central office at a worker sharpening pencils. He had forgotten about sharpening pencils and the thousand other tiny acts that made up a day on the outside. He clenched his jaw, fighting back the question that no prisoner in the gulag dared ask: Was he capable of ever having a life on the outside again? Not
would
he be released, for every prisoner had to believe he would someday be released, but who would he be when he was released? Everyone knew stories of former prisoners who never adjusted, who were too scared to leave their beds, or who stayed bent forever as if chained, like the horse, which, once hobbled, never tries to run again. Why were there never stories of prisoners who succeeded after release? Perhaps because it was so hard to understand what success was for a survivor of the gulag. Shan remembered Choje's last words to Lokesh, after thirty years of sharing a prison hut. “You must teach yourself to be you again,” Choje had said, as Lokesh cried on his shoulder.

He opened his notepad. They were still there, on the last page. His father's name. His name. Without thinking he drew another character, a complex figure, beginning with a
cross with small slashes in each quarter pointing to the center. Thrashed rice, these first lines meant. They connected to the pictograph of a living plant over an alchemist's stove. Together they meant
life force.
It had been one of his father's favorite ideograms. He had drawn it in the dust of the window the day they came to take away his books. Choje had taught him its counterpart in Tibetan characters. But Choje always referred to it differently: the Indomitable Power of Being.

There was a movement in front of the desk. He slammed the notebook shut, his hands reflexively covering it. It was only Feng, standing as Lieutenant Chang approached.

Chang pointed at Shan and laughed, then leaned toward Feng and spoke in a low voice. Shan stared past them out into the office, watching the monochromatic figures move through their paces.

Opening the pad again, he remembered Passage Twenty-one of the Tao Te Ching and wrote it at the end of his investigation notes.
At the center is the life force,
it said.
At the center of the life force is truth.

He propped the pad upright in front of him, open to the verse, and studied it. Every case has its own life force, he had once told his own deputies, its essence, its ultimate motive. Find that life force and find the truth. At the center there was a murdered prosecutor. Shan tilted his head and stared intensely at the verse. Or perhaps at the center was the 404th and a Buddhist demon.

He became aware of a small noise in front of him. “What are you doing?” Yeshe asked with a self-conscious glance back at Sergeant Feng. “I've been standing here for five minutes.” He was holding a plate with three large
momo
dumplings. Beyond him, the office outside was empty. It was dark.

The
momos
were the only food Shan had seen all day. He waited until Feng turned his back and stuffed two into his pocket, then gulped down the third. It was rich, with real meat inside, prepared by the guards' kitchen. In the prisoners' mess the
momos
were stuffed with coarse grain, with a heavy portion of barley chaff always mixed in. His first winter, after drought had shriveled the fields, the
momos
had
been filled with the ground corncobs used to feed pigs. Over a dozen monks had died of dysentery and malnutrition. The Tibetans had a word for such deaths by starvation, which had claimed thousands in the days when almost the entire monastic population of Tibet had been imprisoned. Killed by the
momo
gun. After the drought the Tibetan Friends Association, a Buddhist charity, had won the right to provide meals twice a week to the prisoners. Warden Zhong had announced it as a gesture of conciliation, and done so so cheerfully that Shan was confident that the warden was pocketing the money that would have otherwise fed the prisoners.

“I have compiled notes of our interview with Dr. Sung,” Yeshe said stiffly, and pushed two pages of typed text across the desk.

“That's all you have been doing?”

Yeshe shrugged. “They're still working on the supply records. They had trouble with the computers.”

“The lost supplies you mentioned?”

Yeshe nodded.

Shan considered the notes and looked up absently. “What kind of lost supplies?”

“A truck of clothing. Another of food. Some construction materials. Probably just some bad paperwork. Somebody counted too many trucks when they left the depot in Lhasa.”

Shan paused to make a note in his book.

“But it's nothing to do with this,” Yeshe protested.

“Do you know that?” Shan asked. “Most of my career in Beijing I spent on corruption cases. When it involved the army, I always went to the central supply accounts first, because they were so reliable. When they counted trucks, or missiles, or beans, they didn't do it with one man. They assigned ten, each counting the same thing.”

Yeshe shrugged. “Now they use computers. I came for my next assignment.”

Shan considered Yeshe. He wasn't much older than his own son, and, like his son, was so smart, and so wasted. “We need to reconstruct Jao's activities. At least the last few hours.”

“You mean talk to his family?”

“Didn't have any. What I mean is, we need to visit the Mongolian restaurant in town where he had dinner that night. His house. His office, if they let us.”

Yeshe had his own notepad now. He feverishly took notes as Shan spoke, then spun about like a soldier on drill and departed.

Shan worked another hour, studying the lists of names, writing questions and possible answers in his pad, each seeming more elusive than the last. Where was Jao's car? Who wanted the prosecutor dead? Why, he considered with a shudder, did Choje seem so perfectly assured that the demon existed? How is it that the prosecutor of Lhadrung County had appeared to be a tourist? Because he was preparing to travel? No. Because he had American dollars in his pocket, and an American business card. What kind of rage did this killer possess, to carefully lure his victim so far just to decapitate him? Not an instantaneous animal rage. Or was it? Could it have been a meeting turned sour, escalating to a fight? Jao was knocked unconscious and in a panic his assailant picked up—what, a shovel?—to finish the job and destroy Jao's identity in a single grisly act. But to then carry the head five miles to the skull shrine? Wearing a costume? That was not animal rage. That was a zealot, someone who burned with a cause. But what cause? Political? Or was it passion? Or had it been an act of homage, to lay Prosecutor Jao in such a holy place? An act of rage. An act of homage. Shan threw his pencil down in frustration and moved to the door. “I have to go back. To my hut,” he told Sergeant Feng.

“Like hell,” Feng shot back.

“So you and I, Sergeant, we are going to spend the night here?”

“No one said anything. We don't go to Jade Spring until tomorrow.”

“No one said anything because I am a prisoner who sleeps in his hut and you are a guard who sleeps in his barracks.”

Feng shifted uneasily from foot to foot. His round face seemed to squeeze together as he gazed toward the row of
windows on the far wall, as though hoping to catch an officer walking by.

“I can sleep here, on the floor,” Shan said. “But you. Are you going to stay awake all night? That's what you would need orders for. Without orders the routine must stand.”

Shan produced one of the
momos
he had saved and extended it to Feng.

“You can't bribe me with food,” the sergeant grunted, eyeing the
momo
with obvious interest.

“Not a bribe. We're a team. I want you in a good mood tomorrow. And well nourished. We're going for a ride in the mountains.”

Feng accepted the dumpling and began to consume it in small, tentative nibbles.

Outside, the compound was gripped in a deathly silence. The crisp, chill air was still. The forlorn cry of a solitary nighthawk came from overhead.

They stopped at the gate, Feng still uncertain. From the rock face came the echo of a tiny ringing, a distant clinking of metal on metal. They listened for a moment and heard another sound; a low metallic rumbling. Feng recognized it first. He pushed Shan through the gate, locked it, and began running toward the barracks. The next stage of the 404th's punishment was about to begin.

 

Shan offered the remaining
momo
to Choje.

The lama smiled. “You are working harder than the rest of us. You need your food.”