Soul of the Fire (13 page)

“He wanted you to stay. But you left.”

“There were weeks when I thought they had forgotten me, that I could just remain there. They came unexpectedly one day. A black car with a red flag on its fender and two men in suits. They intercepted me in a chapel and pulled me away. They made me take off my robe right there, in the courtyard, and put on a suit as all the monks watched. Togme tried to stop them, and they beat him.” Tuan gestured to the figurine on the shelf. “He pressed that little Buddha into my palm just before I got in the car. I didn't open my hand for an hour. The Buddha had his blood on it.”

“What happened to Togme?”

Tuan clamped his hand over his shirt pocket. “He fell under the influence of the radicals. There was a police outpost by the front gate. Just before dawn one day last summer, the fool sat down outside it as if to meditate, then drank a glass of gasoline and poured a can of it over his robe before lighting it on fire.”

“Why drink it?” Shan asked after a painful silence.

Tuan's voice was a whisper again. “Sometimes those who just douse themselves survive. Living in a shriveled scarred body in a prison ward, screaming in pain, but never getting pain medication. Drinking it guarantees you will die. I saw the report on Togme. When the flames hit his belly, it exploded from within.”

“The authorities knew of your connection to him?”

Tuan looked down at the table, his face clouding. “Of course. I explained how he was an unrepentant reactionary who secretly nurtured traitorous thoughts, that from the first I suspected him of contact with agitators in Dharamsala.”

“You mean the government in exile.”

Tuan kept his hand pressed against his pocket. “They like to call themselves
purbas,
those dissidents still in Tibet. You know, like the ritual dagger that cuts through delusion. But the government prefers the term outside agitators. A well-balanced report sprinkles in other terms to show the writer grasps the subtleties of political discourse. Fugitive traitors. Hooligans from outside the motherland. They like that one. There can't be a Tibetan government in exile when there is no such thing as Tibet.”

They
. Tuan, the energetic agent for Emperor Pao, always kept his distance. “You mean you just write what the officials want to hear.”

Tuan looked up in genuine surprise. “I work for them. They have made my life possible. Otherwise, I'd be herding sheep on some godforsaken mountain no one ever heard of.”

“But you don't tell them everything.”

A mischievous grin spread on Tuan's face. “The Party tells us we live in a socialist economy with market characteristics. I take into account supply and demand. If you tell everything, you destroy your market. Fifty percent, that's my rule. Tell them half.”

“So you told them Togme was an unrepentant reactionary but not that he was a treasured friend.”

Tuan kept staring at the table. He did not object when Shan pulled his hand away from his pocket and extracted the slip of paper inside. Suddenly Shan realized he had missed what may be the most important question. “You could have just put the photos in my file that day. But you added the poems, the poems that are distributed by the dissidents. The poems that don't officially exist. Why?”

When Tuan said nothing, Shan answered for him. “Because you never take a side. Because that monk inside you thinks the poems reveal something else at work in the suicides, just as important as the political side. Because you thought if I was like Xie, I might do something about them.”

“They're getting secretly pinned to walls and bulletin boards all over town,” Tuan said. “All over Lhasa too. Always only in Tibetan. More and more every week. Zhu says nineteen, but it's more.” He cast a self-conscious glance at the Buddha. “I pulled it from his file,” Tuan said as he handed the paper to Shan. “No one else cared about it. I keep asking myself, what if he turned against the government because of me? He was always so calm, but that day because of me he resisted for the first time and they beat him.”

Shan unfolded the paper. It was another death poem.
We are taught not to hate our enemies,
it said,
but no one taught our enemies
.

 

CHAPTER FIVE

The old truck groaned as it crested the last hill before Lhasa, then backfired as the Tibetan driver downshifted, scattering a flock of sheep grazing along the road. The capital spread out before them, the Potala glowing in the early rays of dawn.

“Don't see many Chinese wearing one of those,” the burly driver said, nodding at Shan's chest. “You one of those mixed bloods?”

Shan had not realized his hand was gripping his prayer amulet. “Just another pilgrim,” he replied, and saw now the little plastic Buddha glued in front of the speedometer. The burly driver had at first refused his request for a ride when Shan approached him at the highway teahouse, reminding Shan of the Public Security rules against hitchhiking. When Shan handed him a twenty-renminbi note and told him he was a paying passenger, the driver assumed a businesslike air, even producing a small cushion to cover the torn seat.

“Five more if you drop me at the hospital,” Shan ventured. The Governor of Lhadrung County was on medical leave in Lhasa, his office had reported.

“Old one or new one?”

Shan thought a moment. “The new one.”

The driver dipped his head in affirmation, then pounded his horn to hurry along the yak that was crossing the road.

Half an hour later, Shan stood on the top floor of the small, modern hospital, watching nurses finish their rounds. In a washroom off the lobby, he had changed into the white shirt and tie he carried in a plastic bag, then lifted an unattended clipboard and begun his own rounds. China was a land overflowing with inspectors and auditors, and it was the simplest of disguises.

The equipment and furnishings on the top floor were much more expensive than those on the levels Shan had explored below. The private rooms they served were almost unheard of in China. Here too was another enclave reserved for the upper class of the classless society. He moved slowly along the corridor, listening to voices in the rooms, glimpsing inside those with open doors, then his gaze settled on a corner suite. He moved quickly when the corridor cleared, opening the door and shutting it behind him.

A tall, sinewy man was in a robe, standing at a window. He said nothing for several long moments.

“Shit,” he finally muttered. “This is supposed to be a secret. Security is a joke here.”

Shan tossed the clipboard on a chair. “If challenged, I would just say I am a high-ranking Commissioner, with an armband to prove it. But you know all about that.”

Everyone trembled in the presence of the infamous Colonel Tan, the attack dog Governor of Lhadrung County and overlord of its infamous labor camp network. The Tan he knew was accustomed to expressing himself with fury and often violence, and Shan had braced himself for the inevitable tirade. But this man was a scarecrow of Tan. He replied with only a thin, challenging smile and watched as Shan read the report hanging at the end of the bed.

“They took a lung out,” Shan observed.

“I had two. I could call security. I could make it go badly.”

“For me or for Lokesh?”

Tan frowned. “It's the flavor of the season. Collateral manipulation, they're calling it now. Don't aim directly at the target. Go for the family of the target. You're a tough son of a bitch, Shan, but touch the old man, and you crumble.”

“They've already started on him. Why have you done this to us?”

Tan shook his head in disgust. “Blind and ungrateful as ever. Any sane man would consider it an honor. Perform well, and there will be rewards. A promotion, even.”

“You mean I could aspire to senior ditch inspector?” Shan shot back.

Tan's grin had no warmth. It was a complicated equation that defined their relationship. Shan had helped Tan solve a series of brutal murders and in return was unofficially released, meaning he had no official identity, keeping him in Lhadrung, where he needed Tan's protection to survive. He had been released from one prison into a broader prison. When more crimes occurred, Tan had lured Shan out of his mountain retreat by transferring Shan's inmate son into his former prison, the 404th. When Shan saved Tan from being executed for murder the year before, Tan had given him a job, with a legal though negligible identity.

Tan walked unsteadily to the window and opened it, wheezing from the effort. From around his neck he pulled a key on a lanyard and unlocked a military trunk braced on two chairs along the wall. He extracted a pack of cigarettes and a lighter, lit a cigarette, and locked the trunk again before stepping back to the window. He blew a long plume of smoke against the glass. “If you drop a viper into a barrel of monkeys, there won't be so many monkeys left when the viper leaves.”

“I am a poor excuse for a viper.”

“You are the best of snakes. The invisible one. Look at you. Those Party pricks don't even see you. You're just a body they urgently needed to fill out an armband for a few weeks. You're more dangerous than a viper to them. But the wonderful thing is that only you and I know that.”

Tan glanced at Shan's hand. He had forgotten he was holding a bag. He dropped it on the bedside table. Tan warily upended it, spilling out a cellophane sack of hard candy.

“It's just from the shop downstairs,” Shan said uneasily.

Tan lifted the candy with a confused expression. It seemed to deflate him. He gave a reluctant nod, then quickly hid the bag in a bedside drawer.

“Somebody connected to the Commission has upset you, and you want them punished,” Shan suggested.

“Don't insult me. Once I was the best in the entire army at hounding a regiment of armored infantry across mountainous terrain. Now I run the most efficient hard labor camps in the country. If there is anything I excel at, it is punishing people.”

Shan weighed his words. Even in his weakened state, Tan needed no help with problems that were solved with brute force and authority. “You don't like what the Commission is doing,” he ventured.

Tan drew deeply on his cigarette and said nothing.

Shan tried again. “You want the Commission to fail.”

Tan's only acknowledgment was a flicker of his eyebrow.

When the Commission finished its business, Tibetans would be punished, which had never bothered Tan before. But the colonel, Shan well knew, was a complex man. He was a fervent patriot who enforced the policies of Beijing with an iron fist. But he despised corruption and loathed the new breed who earned power not with blood and toil as he had but with schemes and coddling of bureaucrats in Beijing.

Tan paced silently along the window, invigorated by the tobacco, then halted and stared at Shan. Shan hated the bond between them but could not deny it. He was Tan's weapon, but he had no idea what he was being aimed at. The Commission was being used as another way of repressing Tibetans, but the colonel had never been shy to do that himself.

When Tan spoke, it was in a hoarse whisper. “Justice is a blind bitch who grew fat and lazy in Tibet.”

Shan returned the icy stare, breaking off only when the door behind him was abruptly thrown open.

“Ai yi!”
a nurse screeched as she hurried into the room, balancing a tray of sterile instruments. “I knew I smelled tobacco! Do you have a death wish, you old fool?” she barked at Tan. She extended one hand from the tray of instruments to grab his cigarette. Tan deftly stepped to the side and tripped her. As she landed sprawling on the floor amid the syringes and tubes, Tan flicked his cigarette out the window and climbed into his bed.

*   *   *

By early afternoon, Shan was back with the Commission, listening to Choi's recitation of another case. “Kunchok Norbu, age thirty-four, in Qizang Autonomous Prefecture, died in an immolation along the road in front of the factory where she worked. Tibetans reported her death an act of protest despite clear evidence to the contrary.”

Shan looked up. This was the first time he had heard Choi even mention the word “protest.”

“In fact,” the Chairman continued, “the woman was engaged in a sexual affair with a coworker. When her husband found out, he fought with his wife. She threatened him with a knife. He pushed her away—she struck her head and died. He burned her body that very day, for fear the police would think him a murderer.”

Shan found himself drawing an oval intersected by a crescent, the symbol Pema had sketched in the prisoner wagon, the symbol drawn on several death poems. It could be a pictograph. Chinese characters all evolved from images of natural objects that had become more and more abstract over the centuries. But all he could see were a moon and an egg.

When the doors opened, he assumed Miss Lin was leading in her squad of attendants with fresh tea. But then a chair was pulled from the table and a frightened Tibetan man sat, with Lin and a knob standing behind him.

“The victim's husband, Tenzin,” Choi announced, “is here to explain in his own words how the public reports were distorted.”

Shan stared in disbelief. The man called Tenzin exchanged a long silent glance with Kolsang, then turned to Vogel, the senior foreigner. “My wife and I married late,” he intoned in a flat voice as Zhu translated. “We wanted children but none came. We argued. I would get drunk and she would leave me alone at night. When I discovered she was going to the house of a man she worked with at the factory, I became blind with rage. We struck each other. She fell and hit her head. I never meant for her to die.” He finally noticed his hands were shaking and removed them from the table.

“I panicked. I was too scared to report her death to the police. I had some gas from the old tiller we use. I burned my wife. Later, monks came and put a piece of yellow, blue, and red cloth and a poem by her and called it a protest.”