Shan dashed past him. Kohler grinned, opened his hand, and let the wind seize the paper on his open palm. “Gao knows I have business in India. Gao knows I have girlfriends.”
“You dispatch trucks from Tashtul to India. It would take a special driver, and special papers. There would be fees to pay, bribes even. Customs officials are notorious. A lot of trouble for some little trinkets.”
“It’s the new world order. Converting Western appetites into Eastern cash.”
Kohler did not follow when Shan started down the trail. After ten steps Shan looked back. The German was astride one of the high boulders, looking toward the smudge of color on the southern horizon, the distant Himalayas, the white sands of India beyond.
In Shan’s absence Hostene had used the spirit feathers, placing them in a semicircle against the rock to encircle the place where he sat with Abigail. Abigail had begun a transformation back to the woman Shan had first met at Gao’s storehouse, washing away her third eye, removing the jewelry and ceremonial vestment that had covered her denims. Gao was sleeping. Yangke, his blindfold bandage still in place, was working his beads with a low murmur.
Kohler said nothing when he returned. He helped with the camp work, then sat on a rock beside Gao when the older scientist awoke, speaking of the weather, their company business, of arrangements for Thomas’s burial, of suggestions for the boy’s funeral service. He had made a bowl of tea for the older man, offering some of his spare clothes to cushion Gao’s seat on the rocks.
“Heinz, look!” Gao suddenly exclaimed with ridiculous hope in his voice as he pointed upward. “It’s Albert and his father! The young one is flying!”
The announcement seemed to jar Kohler. He paused, then raised a hand, squinting, pointing like an eager boy as the two birds disappeared toward the western slope. “It would take days for us, but they can get home in five minutes,” he said. He exchanged an awkward smile with Gao. But something seemed to have broken inside him.
Their strange, otherworldly day was coming to a close. They were finishing their domestic chores, stacking fuel for the night fire, arranging what blankets they had around Abigail and Yangke, when Shan saw a solitary figure pacing around the fissure. He caught up with Gao, and walked with him silently for several minutes.
“You never did answer my question,” Shan said eventually. “About where Kohler spent his time in rehabilitation.”
Gao paused, bent, and picked up a tiny yellow stone that had fallen at the edge of the fissure. He held it between his fingers, examining it intently for a moment. “It’s just a bunch of molecules that were randomly arranged this way because they happened to be in the right place at the right time in some pool of magma four billion years ago.”
“Maybe that’s what’s at the bottom of the abyss,” Shan observed. “A pool of magma, to give the gold a chance to become something useful, like iron.”
“In Tibet, even molecules can be reincarnated to a higher form,” Gao said with a sad smile, and tossed the little nugget into the hole. They walked along the edge. Stars were coming out.
“It was a misunderstanding,” Gao said suddenly. “Heinz attended a symposium in Japan. His expenses were submitted for reimbursement twice. There was an investigation, which found half a million dollars missing from laboratory funds. There could have been many explanations, we had a large staff. But he was responsible for the ledgers, so he was accountable. The clerk who worked for him was killed in an accident early in the investigation so there was no hard evidence. But someone had to pay. Heinz was sent to a reeducation labor camp.”
A reeducation camp was the softest form of punishment. Which meant that Gao must have interceded.
“His first month there he had a misunderstanding with a Public Security officer, who had to be hospitalized. Before I knew about it they had shipped him away. It took me a month to locate him.”
“A hard-labor prison,” Shan suggested. “A gulag camp.”
“It never should have happened. You know how it goes. A man like Heinz attracted abuse in the gulag.”
“He was sent to western Tibet,” Shan ventured. “To Rutok.”
In the dim light Shan could barely see Gao’s stiff nod. They walked in silence, continuing around the fissure. Two of the cairns they passed had human bones lying before them.
“What did the hermit think he was going to find?” Gao asked eventually. “Where exactly did he think he was going?”
“The bayal? It’s always warm there. He would land on a soft rainbow, surrounded by flowers and birds. Fountains of sweet water. Compassion and wisdom. His uncle went there forty years ago. He has gone to join him.”
“Ah,” Gao said, as if understanding now. Shan realized that Gao too had had a nephew in search of something.
“My father used to write to his grandfather and send him letters in smoke.” It was an ancient Chinese practice, to write letters to the dead, burn them, and let the smoke carry the message to the heavens. “My father died when I was a boy,” Shan said. “But sometimes, in the old tradition, I write to him.”
Gao and Shan watched the moon rise, then began speaking of gold, and India, and of three men who met at a Tibetan prison camp near Rutok, each with his particular skill. Tashi, the artist forger. Bing, with his military training. The third with his command of a small but conveniently placed company. Eventually Shan left, returning with a piece of paper torn from Abigail’s journal, one of her ink pens, and one of the old butter lamps that Shan had lit.
“I don’t know what to say to him,” Gao said in a hoarse whisper.
“When I write my father, sometimes I just speak of my life,” Shan confided. “Sometimes I say I am sorry for not being all that he would have expected of me. Sometimes I explain that once in a while I can still sense him walking beside me. Once,” he said, his voice cracking, “I confessed that of all the mysteries that are sent my way, the ones I know I will never solve are those of the human heart.”
Shan left Gao then, and wandered up the trail they had arrived on that morning. He watched the camp from a distance, then retrieved two leg bones from one of the cairns, and set to work. When he finished he found a perch a short distance from where Gao still sat, writing. Shan looked into the blackness of the fissure, then at the sky. A dark shape fluttered across the face of the moon. It could have been a cloud. It could have been a dragon.
The explosions came in rapid sequence, jolting Shan from a fog that was almost sleep. Lightning, shouted a panicked voice in the back of his mind. No, worse, he realized. Gunshots. Three closely spaced gunshots, from the place where he had left his three companions.
Chapter Fifteen
Gao had already taken several unsteady steps toward the shots when Shan grabbed him, pointed in the opposite direction, and ran.
His quarry was moving slowly, far less confident about rushing through the night landscape than Shan. The ghost on the trail stopped him. Shan, watching from the shadows, tossed a pebble against the ghost to make it move. It had been a rushed job, building a four-foot cairn in a shadowed section of the trail, joining the two bones into a rough cross frame with the yak-hair rope, then arranging his white undershirt on it, topped by a face made from another sheet of paper from Abigail’s journal, pierced by two round eyeholes. But on this mountain, on this night, it was enough to make anyone pause.
Shan made no attempt to conceal his presence as he approached. Kohler spun around at the sound of his boots. The German let one of the two staffs he carried drop against the tall rock beside him as his hand went to the small of his back. He turned sideways so as to be able to see both Shan and the ghost. More gravel rattled on the path behind Shan.
“Did you hear the shots?” Kohler blurted out as he saw Gao. “She’s crazy. She talks to herself half the time. She helped the lunatic monk tie me up yesterday. We can’t wait to go down together. I have to get help right away. God knows what she’s done.”