Jake turned and regarded Julia. He watched her as she gently placed her hands on her stomach. A protective gesture, like a beautiful quattrocento Madonna in a painting. Shy, yet subtly determined. Destined, yet gracious. He made one more attempt.
“Julia, you know the killer will also be going to Balagezong. To find Fishwick.”
“Yes.”
“So go home?”
“No.”
The plane trundled to a stop at Kunming Airport. Red-and-yellow Chinese flags hung limply from a large arrivals building, in mild sunlight. Chinese script jangled everywhere, with no English translations.
“We’d better run, we need to run, we connect in a few minutes—”
They made it, with six minutes to spare, sweating their way aboard. The next flight was even bumpier. A Dragonair prop, a fragile domestic plane. Half the passengers were red-cheeked, eyes slitted against upland wind, laughing and drunk; half wore furry hats: these were Tibetans, mountain people, businessmen trading timber and yak meat and caterpillar fungus from the Himalayas.
Their destination was Zhongdian, way up in the wilds. Jake stared out at scenery of remorseless ruggedness, vast gorges, abrupt Manhattans of mountains, and then deep, wide, pristine cold lakes, chips of blue crystal embedded in rumpled green baize.
Julia was asleep; a talkative Chinese man in a cheap suit and nylon shoes on Jake’s right was keen to practice his English.
“Only build airport last year!” said the man. “Before build airport take many, many day to go Zhongdian. Five day by truck. Now one hour plane good! It is good, yes. New China!”
The man did a thumbs up at Jake. Then he added: “You American?”
“No. English.”
The Chinese man frowned cheerfully.
“English bad. You sell us many opium. But now we are friends, make money, yes!” He laughed. His laughter was tanged with some rancid alcohol, but it was slightly cheering, amid the unalterable terrors.
Jake had already noted the cheeriness of the Chinese, on the planes, in Kunming Airport, chattering and smiling and smoking and spitting, like nouveau riche Italians with tuberculosis: a whole nation making money, a whole nation winning the lottery of capitalism. There was no sense of cynicism, just wide-eyed amazement at their own good luck.
This was not the menacing Chineseness evinced by the stories of Balagezong and the experiments. And yet this cheerful, friendly, nakedly capitalist China was also the China of the concentration camps, and Tiananmen Square, and Tibet, and the tens of thousands in slave labor, and the live harvesting of organs from prisoners. And what else? What weird surgeries? What weird surgeries right now being done to Chemda, her face sliced open from the nose up, to get at her conscience, to slice out her personality?
Swallowing his overpowering fears, Jake took the chance to show the strange address to the Chinese man. He frowned.
“Ba… la… ge… zong? Hnh.” The man spelled out the syllables audibly and slowly. “Yes. Bala… ge… zong! Shangri La gorge, Sichuan border, I think. Very, very difficult reach, beautiful but much difficult and danger.”
“Why?”
“Big mountains. Road bad. Many… Gra… Gra…”
The man was trying to find or pronounce a word.
“I know how say… not. River ice. Not move.”
“Glacier?”
“Yes! Many. Like Deqen. Deep, deep valley, people no speak any language you know. Danger, danger. See there!”
The Chinese man pointed a gold-ringed finger at the looming landscape as they descended. The greenery of southern Yunnan had given way to higher altitudes, to brown vistas, brown plateaux and gray-bluish lakes and glittering peaks of frosted ice. Jake could see wooden houses and emptiness and strange wooden structures draped with drying fodder and barley sheaves, dotting the cold, sunlit, hardened tawny fields.
“This place Zhongdian — no law, no government till 1960! Not even Tibetan law. No army. Unexplored. And this place”—he stabbed the same beringed finger at the slip of paper—“Balagezong. Even worse! You must be careful… get guide take you. One road only. So danger.”
Zhongdian Airport was an incongruous outpost of angular modernity in the empty Tibetan-Yunnanese plateau: pyramids of glass and steel surrounded by shivering lakes and shallow dun valleys. As soon as the door of the plane opened and the air breezed in, Jake was hit by it: the heart-pumping altitude. They were at 10,000 feet, abutting the true Himalayan plateau. From here it was a level but fifteen-day crow’s flight to Lhasa. The altitude was an insistent pain, he could already feel it in his skull, the headache. His body screaming to adjust, like a car engine burning the wrong fuel.
“Christ,” said Julia.
“We’re at ten thousand feet. Are you OK?”
She smiled, but in a fragile way.
“I spent a summer in the Rockies, as a student. You get used to it. Kinda.”
Jake carried Julia’s bags as well as his own, and he felt like he would collapse with the effort. But they had to endure, they had to find Chemda: right now she could be under the knife, being mentally amputated, truncated, severed.
It might already be too late.
Sharply bright air greeted them at the exit. The parking lot was full of Tibetan families with wide fur hats and cherry-rose cheeks and slope-eyed smiles, squinting in the dazzle of the cold, harsh sun. Jake was reminded of the upland brightness of the Plain of Jars, the contrast of high altitudes and subtropical latitudes. This was even more severe. The sky was a soaring, virginal, Saint Lucy blue.
He saw his mother staring at a stained-glass window. The image was too painful.
A Chinese man with gold teeth and bright red sneakers approached them in the sun-stark parking lot.
“Taxi?”
“We need a hotel?”
“You go hotel, hui!”
“Then we need to go to this place.” Jake gave up on conversation and showed the man the slip of paper, with Balagezong written in Mandarin and in English.
The man frowned.
“But very difficult. Guide. Taxi take Zhongdian. Hotel. Guide maybe help. Difficult.”
The highway from the airport to Zhongdian was empty, apart from a few taxis and farmers’ jeeps and a yak in the middle lane and some very sleek black Mercedes with tinted-black windows, traveling in speedy convoy, all swerving carefully around the yak.
“Government,” said the driver, then he rolled down his window and spat. Ahead of them was the grubby high-altitude city Zhongdian. The Baimang Snow Mountains loomed beyond, absurdly clear in the clear, cold air, a row of somber patriarchs in white churchlike hoods. An inquisition.
The drive was fast.
They entered the concrete laterals of New Zhongdian, a grid of Chinese banks and dusty government offices and PLA troop trucks and running raw rivers that passed under broken concrete bridges. The place had a frontier feel, wild, lawless, full of men in gangsterly dark glasses and Tibetan women in red-and-purple headscarves, stepping over potholes, heading for the Many Wonder supermarket. Cantonese pop music warbled from loudspeakers, deafening entire street corners. Yak shit and noodle packets littered the pavements.
They checked as swiftly as possible into the biggest hotel, seeking anonymity. The hotel boasted a fake lake in an atrium with fake cement storks sitting on fake islands.
No one knew anything about Balagezong. It was as if the place didn’t quite exist, not like real places. Julia packed two small bags for them to take along, as Jake inquired about their destination. But it was useless. No one spoke English, some of the staff didn’t even speak Chinese, just dialects of Tibetan. But then, as they hoisted their bags to step outside, a brisk and small Chinese man arrived at their side with a noiseless smile, and he glanced at the now very creased piece of paper and said in his unexpectedly good English: