At last Shan rose and stepped to the pail, splashing cold water on his face before stepping away, out into the cool wind, lifting his face toward the sky. The souls of the purest lamas were said to ascend toward the sky in a rainbow stream of light. But there would be no rainbow for Jamyang. At the end of his pure life he had committed a grave sin, an impure act that would condemn his soul to be reincarnated among the lowest of life-forms. In their prison the old Tibetans had called it “taking four,” finding release from the agony even though it meant reincarnation as a four-legged creature. Shan choked away another sob. What had been Jamyang’s agony? He had had so much to live for. Impossibly, inexplicably, Jamyang had taken four.
He had to push his fear and grief away, he knew. There was much to be done, and grave risks to be taken.
“The farmers and shepherds could come anytime,” he said to Lokesh. “It will be impossible to hide this.” Word of an unregistered monk dying of a bullet in his head would attract too much attention. “The knobs will learn of it,” he said, referring to the dreaded Public Security bulldogs, the elite of Beijing’s many enforcement arms. They both knew that if the knobs discovered that one of the monk outlaws had been living here protected by the local Tibetans they would use it as an excuse to round up two or three dozen and ship them to one of Beijing’s new pacification camps.
Lokesh looked up from his task with query in his tear-soaked eyes.
“We have to carry him to the hut so he can be cleaned,” Shan continued. “I will go and bring back help from the hermitage.” The hermitage of nuns, five miles away, was tiny but he knew its inhabitants had shared Jamyang’s secrets. “We have to remove him quickly, before word leaks out. If the knobs discover the shrine they will destroy it.” Shan looked at the little bas-relief deities with new torment. Only a week ago Jamyang had said they had to treat every such shrine as if it were the last in Tibet, the last in all the world, for someday one of them would be. Beijing did not abide such secret places of worship. The knobs had special teams, godkiller squads, who used dynamite, even portable air hammers, to destroy them. “Jamyang would not want that. He was the opposite of a godkiller.”
All this time Lokesh had not stopped whispering the Bardo, mouthing the ancient words as Shan spoke, but now he paused. “The old convent ruins are closer,” he said in a hoarse voice. “Nuns from the hermitage are likely there, working on the restoration.” He lifted Jamyang’s shoulders, and gestured for Shan to take his feet.
* * *
Shan eased his truck to a stop by a wide, sloping ledge and quickly climbed to the edge, checking to be sure there were no new vehicles at the abandoned convent, largely destroyed fifty years before. He took one look toward the ruins below and shrank back in alarm. Quickly he retrieved his binoculars and crept back up the ledge, dropping to a prone position as he reached the top.
The site was alive with activity. He had expected to see the truck he had seen from a distance earlier in the day, and perhaps some of the tractors and donkeys used by the local Tibetans. Instead, parked beside the truck by the front gate were an ambulance and three of the utility vehicles favored by the police. Uniformed figures were gathered in the courtyard inside the front gate.
He turned onto his back and gazed toward the southern horizon, toward the distant mountain that marked the gulag camp where his son Ko, his only flesh and blood, was imprisoned. Shan had long ago given up on his life as a high-level investigator, had declined offers to return to Beijing even after serving years in the gulag himself. But he would never give up on his son. He lived in two-week intervals, for the first Sundays of each month on which he was permitted to visit Ko and the midmonth letter he was permitted to write to him. Colonel Tan, the ironfisted military governor of the county, had made it clear that Shan would lose all visiting rights if he stirred up new problems for Tan. He would never give up on his son, but he would also never give up on the old Tibetans.
There could be any number of reasons the police had descended on the ruined convent-the most likely one being that they suspected smugglers were scavenging it for artifacts-but if the officers chose to interrogate any of those helping to restore the old buildings, the frightened Tibetans could well tell them about Jamyang’s shrine. A new and terrible possibility occurred to Shan. If the police found Lokesh with the body and an illegal pistol, it would be the end of the gentle old man, a thought that Shan could not bear. He had to know what the police were doing, had to keep them away from the ridge, had to find a way to keep Jamyang’s irreplaceable relics out of the hands of the godkillers. He slipped down the ledge to his truck and began brushing off his clothes.
Half an hour later he stood in the shadows at the rear of the ruins, having left his truck in the rock outcroppings behind the complex. Quickly he recalled his mental map of the old convent. Although it had been small, it had rigidly adhered to Buddhist tradition in its construction. Below the courtyard was the dukhang, the main assembly hall with ancillary chapels arranged along the walls. At the rear had been two kangtsang, residence halls, and the small, somber chapels reserved for protector demons, where the restorers had been sheltering some of the most important artifacts recovered from the rubble. In the center of the courtyard was a chorten, one of the ancient relic shrines resembling an onion topped with a steeple, which had been the first structure to be restored. Only a few weeks before, by the light of a rising sun, he and Lokesh had helped Jamyang whitewash the chorten. He ventured a glance from the corner of one of the crumbling buildings toward the front of the compound. Nearly a dozen figures stood on the opposite side of the courtyard, most in uniform, facing away, looking into the shadow of the shining white chorten. He stepped purposefully across the open ground separating him from the closest of the old demon shrines, his heart pounding as he reached the rear of the little stone building. Leaning against the wall, calming himself, he glanced back through the gap in the rubble that used to be the rear gate, wondering whether he should try to rescue some of the artifacts secreted in the building. Anything the police found would be declared property of the state, destined for destruction or removal to some dusty warehouse in the east.
“They say these old ruins are filled with ghosts.”
He spun about to face the woman who had spoken. Her uniform looked freshly pressed, the red enamel star on her cap recently polished.
“More and more all the time,” the Public Security lieutenant added absently as she glanced up at him then returned to scanning the ground near Shan’s feet.
Shan struggled to keep his voice steady. “People lived here for centuries. Lived and died.”
The woman, in her midthirties, glanced up again long enough to cast him a cool grin, as if he had made a joke, then bent and studied the patterns of shadows in the dirt around them. “Even a shallow footprint can speak to you when the light is right,” she declared in a professional tone.
As she knelt Shan saw the latex gloves folded into her belt, beside a small automatic pistol. He fought the compulsion to bolt toward the outcroppings, then retreated a step toward the corner of the stucco-walled building and found his hand resting on a faded religious symbol, painted in another century. An all-seeing eye.
“You’ll never lift prints from a wall like that,” the officer said as she rose, straightening her uniform.