The Skull Mantra (29 page)

“You will stop your masquerade. I will have a prosecutor's report on the murderer Sungpo. In one week.”

The prisoners began a mantra. They fixed their eyes over the heads of the executioners, staring toward the mountains.

Tan still did not move his gaze from Shan.

Shan's tongue seemed unable to move. He fought a rising nausea. “I will not help to kill an innocent man,” he said in a cracking voice. He shook his head, hard, to clear the pain,
and looked up at Tan with new strength. “If that is what you want, I request to join these prisoners.”

Tan did not reply.

The officers cocked their weapons. Shan sprang forward. Someone grabbed him from behind and held him as they fired. The roar of the weapons echoed down the valley.

When the smoke cleared, three of the prisoners were on their knees, sobbing. The others were still staring into the distance, chanting their mantra.

The knobs had used blanks.

“You breached security at the South Claw!” Tan barked. “Who authorized you to enter a restricted zone?”

Shan met Tan's gaze now. “The murder scene is now off-limits to your murder investigator?”

“You said you were going to the monastery of Sungpo.” Tan narrowed his eyes. “A prosecutor's report against the accused. Do you understand me?”

“Cruelty is never to be understood. It is to be endured.” Shan closed his eyes. He felt something new rising. Anger. “Li Aidang would doubtless like my notes. I am going to tell one of these Public Security officers I need to speak to Li. Then I am going to climb into this truck”—he indicated the prisoners' vehicle—”and return to my work unit.”

Tan lit one of his American cigarettes and moved silently around Feng's vehicle. He paused at the right rear, where the hubcap was missing and a mismatched tire was on the wheel. “Tell me about it,” he growled as he returned to Shan.

Shan watched the prisoners being loaded as he spoke. “I was on the ridge, trying to understand what happened that night. Perhaps the hour was important, the hour he was killed. I wanted to know. There was a strange sound, like a large animal, then shots from the truck. I ran down. Sergeant Feng said there was a demon.”

“Your demon Tamdin,” Tan said tersely.

“He was hysterical. He said the demon was close, that he heard it speak. I was afraid for him. I asked for his gun.”

Tan sneered. “And just like that, Sergeant Feng surrendered it to you.”

“I returned it to him later, at the barracks.”

“I don't believe you.”

Shan fumbled in his pockets. “I kept the remaining bullets, to be safe.” He dropped five cartridges into Tan's hand.

Tan stared at the bullets so long his cigarette burned to his fingers. He flinched and angrily threw the butt to the ground, then studied the dust of the convoy. “Everything's going to hell,” he muttered, so low Shan was not certain he had heard correctly.

When he looked up there was something new in his eyes, something Shan had not seen before. The barest glimpse of uncertainty. “It's all about the same thing, isn't it? The 404th strike and the trial of Sungpo. There's going to be a bloodbath and I am powerless to stop it.”

Shan looked at him in surprise. “Do you want to stop it? Do you have the will to stop it?”

“What do you think I—” Tan began, but stopped as he looked down at the bullets. “Feng was scared. He and I served together for many years. He came to Lhadrung because I was here. I never saw him scared.” Tan clenched his hand around the bullets and looked up. “Jao understood. In criticism sessions he used to say my only mistake was to think the old causes would have the same old effects in Tibet.”

“Old causes have not done well here.”

Tan gazed at the line of prisoners and sighed. “I am going to tell Zhong to allow them to be fed. To let the Buddhist charity in to feed them once a day.”

Shan looked at him in disbelief, then slowly nodded. “It would be the right thing to do.”

“Americans are coming,” Tan said absently, then looked back at Shan. “You're bleeding.”

Shan wiped the blood from his lip again. “It's nothing.”

Tan extended a handkerchief.

Shan looked at it incredulously.

“I never told them to hit you.”

Shan accepted it and held it to his lip, watching as Sergeant Feng appeared at the rear of the truck, stretching and yawning. Catching sight of Tan, Feng leaned back as if to hide, then straightened and solemnly marched to the colonel.

He looked awkwardly from Shan to Tan. “Request reassignment, sir,” he said, dropping his eyes to his boots.

“On what grounds?” Tan asked gruffly.

“On the grounds that I'm an old fool. I failed to remain vigilant in my duty. Sir.”

“Comrade Shan,” Tan said, “did Sergeant Feng lose vigilance at any time last night?”

“No, Colonel,” Shan observed. “His only fault perhaps was being too vigilant.”

Tan began to return the bullets to Feng, then reconsidered and handed the bullets to Shan, who handed them to Feng. “Return to duty, Sergeant,” Tan ordered.

Sergeant Feng accepted the bullets sheepishly. “Should've known,” he muttered. “Can't shoot a demon.” He saluted the colonel and wheeled about.

Tan looked again at the dust of the convoy. “There's too little time.”

“Then help me. There's too much to do. I have to try to speak to Sungpo again. But I also have to find Jao's driver. Help me. He's the key to everything.”

 

“Not a bowl touched. Not a kernel,” the guard announced as Shan entered the cell block. There was a strange pride in his voice, as though his prisoner's starvation was a personal victory of some kind. “Nothing but tea.”

Sungpo did not seem to have moved since Shan had seen him three days earlier. He sat erect and alert, wearing his thousand-mile stare.

“My assistant,” Shan said, looking around the cellhouse. “I thought he would be here.”

“He's with the other one.”

“You have a new prisoner?”

The man shook his head. “Climbed the fence. Lucky bastard. Ten minutes earlier, ten minutes later, the perimeter patrol would have shot him down.”

“An escapee?”

“No. That's the joke. He was trying to get in. Had to be taught that citizens may not freely enter military installations.”

Shan found Yeshe in the building next door. He was wringing out a towel in a basin of blood-tinged water. Shan watched for a moment, noticing something different in
Yeshe's face. He looked calmer somehow. It wasn't peace of mind he had found, but maybe a new deliberation.

Shan followed Yeshe into the interrogation room. At first he did not recognize the figure sitting on the table. One side of his face looked like a melon that had fallen off a speeding truck.

“Plenty hot good, eh?” the man said, raising one of his big pawlike hands in greeting. “He sent for me. I found him.”

It was Jigme.

“What do you mean he sent for you?”

“You came, didn't you?”

“How could you be here so soon? You drove?”

His battered eyes somehow were able to twinkle. “I fly through the air. Like the old ones. The spell of the arrow.”

“I've heard of it,” Shan said. “I also remember seeing logging trucks on the road out of your valley.”

Jigme tried to laugh but the sound emerged as a hoarse, hacking cough.

Shan and Yeshe pulled him to his feet and, one at each shoulder, half dragged, half carried him out of the building. They were stopped on the stairs by a furious officer.

“These prisoners belong to Public Security!” the officer roared.

“This man is part of my investigation,” Shan said matter-of-factly and turned his back on the officer. Once inside the cell block, Jigme pulled himself away and straightened his clothing. He limped down the corridor alone and dropped to his knees with a cry of delight as he reached the last cell.

The guard at the cell door rose in protest. Shan cut him off with a gesture to open the cell.

Sungpo acknowledged Jigme with a nod which lit Jigme's bruised face. The gompa orphan closed the door behind him and surveyed the untouched bowls of rice. “Everything okay now,” he said with a grateful smile to Shan.

“We need to speak with him.”

Jigme seemed to think Shan had made an excellent joke. “Sure,” he grinned. “Two years, one month, and eighteen days.”

“He doesn't have that long.”

Jigme soured and moved back to Sungpo with one of the bowls of rice. With small, affectionate strokes of his hand he began brushing the straw off Sungpo's robe.

“We have to speak with him,” Shan repeated.

“You think he's scared to throw off a face?” Jigme shouted, suddenly defiant. “You people from the north, you're a fly on his shoulder.” Shan saw a tear rolling down Jigme's cheek as he spoke. “He's a great man. A living Buddha. He'll die easy, no bother. He'll throw off a face and laugh at all of us in the next life.”

 

They sat in an unused stall at the rear of the market and watched the sorcerer's shop. No one entered, no one exited. The market began to fill with vendors' carts piled high with spring greens, the early leaves of mustard and other plants that elsewhere on the planet would have been considered weeds.

Feng, still nervous from the night before, rubbed his palm over the handle of his pistol.

“I need fifty fen,” Shan said.

“Who doesn't?” Feng cracked.

“For food. You have expense money.”

“Not hungry.”

“We had no breakfast. You did.”

The announcement seemed to pain Feng, and Shan wondered if he was still stinging from the discovery of his nickname. Feng's eyes moved back and forth from Shan to Yeshe. “One of you stays here.”

Yeshe, taking the cue, leaned back against the wall as though settling in.

Shan extended his hand and took the money.

Feng made a vague gesture toward the stalls in front of them. “Five minutes.”

Shan lingered at a vendor selling writing supplies, then found a woman selling
momos.
He bought two for Yeshe, then moved to the first stall and quickly bought two sheets of rice paper, a writing brush, and a small ink stick.

“The first charm was requested a few days ago,” a voice from behind suddenly declared.

Shan began to turn. An elbow pushed into his back. “Don't look,” the man said.

Shan recognized the voice. It was the
purba
with the scarred face. He saw tattered felt boots behind him. The man was dressed as a herder.

“They're always looking for a chance,” the
purba
said over Shan's shoulder. “Witches like Khorda, he'll take their money. They have steady money. Business is always good for their kind.”

“I don't understand.”

“This one, she works in a bookstore. Asked for the Tamdin charms about a week ago. Yesterday she asked for one against dogbite.”

“She?”

“Daughter of a flesh monkey.”

“A
ragyapa?
”

“Green Bamboo Street,” came the reply.

Shan turned. The
purba
had disappeared.

 

Twenty minutes later Shan and Sergeant Feng watched from across the rutted gravel track on the north side of town as Yeshe ventured into the book shop. A short, swarthy woman could be seen inside as he entered. As he spoke to her she pointed toward the rear of the store, then looked up and down the street before pulling the door shut.

Yeshe darted out of the store ten minutes later, a glimmer of triumph on his face. “She's there,” he announced. “That was her at the door. Says she's from Shigatse but she's not.” He said that he had asked for the owner, explaining he was conducting a quick audit of working papers. When the man had begun to question his authority, Yeshe had pointed out the window. Seeing an official-looking vehicle and a soldier at the wheel, the man had quickly revealed his enterprise license and the girl's work papers. “Showed she was from Shigatse nearly a year ago. But on the way out I asked if she liked climbing the walls of the old fortress at Shigatse. She said she did, said she liked to take picnics there.”

“There's still a fortress there?” Shan asked.

“A fortress, in Tibet? Of course not, the Communists blew it up forty years ago!” He put his hands together as he
spoke, then threw them apart, like an explosion. “No more walls.”

“So she's not from Shigatse.”

“Impossible. She lives in the back, but the owner says she leaves almost every weekend. A store clerk would never make enough to travel two hundred miles to Shigatse so often.”

“Then her family is nearby,” Shan said. A family of flesh-cutters. In the mountains. Where Tamdin the fleshcutter lived. “That's where she is going with the charms.” He looked expectantly at Yeshe.

Yeshe's face darkened. “No,” he protested weakly.

“Her home shouldn't be hard to find,” Shan suggested. “In Lhadrung there is an active market for death.”

 

Tan handed him several sheets of paper clipped with a pin at the top. “I found her,” he said, with the exhilaration that progress brings.

“Her?”

“Miss Lihua. Prosecutor Jao's secretary. On leave in Hong Kong. The Ministry of Justice tracked her to her hotel. She went to the local Ministry office and used the fax. Reports that Assistant Prosecutor Li drove her to the airport, before Jao left for dinner with the American woman. I know her. Young, very dedicated. Great memory for details. Gave me Jao's schedule. His calls on the day of his murder. She faxed it all. No one called about a meeting.”

Miss Lihua was honored to be able to assist the colonel, the first fax said. She was stricken with grief over the loss of Comrade Prosecutor Jao and felt she should return immediately. Tan had declined the offer, provided she would cooperate by fax.