Soul of the Fire (17 page)

The file, he realized, was not an official one, but one compiled by Tan and Amah Jiejie. Clipped to the left side were articles, one a flattering profile of Captain Lu in the Lhadrung weekly paper, and copies of travel orders signed by Tan. Captain Lu had attended a conference in Beijing, another in Chengdu, even one in Macau. There were group photos from newspapers and Party newsletters. Lu was circled in all of them, but so too was a second man, also in all of them. Deputy Secretary Pao.

Amah Jiejie reached into the cloth bag that carried her knitting. “When we cleaned his quarters, we found these, in a box with his family photographs.” She handed Shan a smaller envelope. Inside were a newspaper clipping, a room key from the Garden Princess Hotel in Macau, an identity card for a young woman whose features looked southern Asian, a copy of a police report, and three business cards. The article was from a Macau paper, and described a police investigation into the death of Sanoh Kubati, a female casino dealer from Thailand. She had been found in an alley two blocks from the Garden Princess Hotel, dead of suffocation after having been raped. He quickly consulted the travel records. The murder occurred the same week that Pao and Lu had been in Macau for an international development conference, at the very hotel where the woman worked. He picked up the business cards. One was for Pao Xilang. The second was for a Sergeant P. L. Neto, a detective with the Macau police, with a series of handwritten digits that looked like a case number and the name Cabral, with the word
wire.
The third business card was for Heinrich Vogel.

*   *   *

Shan walked three times around Yamdrok's clinic before trying the bronze key. The village was winding down for the day, its human and animal population settling under its roofs. A donkey cart was again tied at the side of the clinic building. Nearby, on the ground below a damp spot on the wall, was a tiny white mound. He bent, disbelieving, to touch it. Snow.

The key turned easily in the old box lock on the door. He stepped inside, quickly closed the door and studied the room. In the air was the scent not only of the antiseptics used by Chinese doctors but also the incense used by Tibetan healers. On the chairs for waiting patients were a week-old copy of the
Lhasa Times,
a state-published book of photos celebrating joyful factory workers, and a worn copy of the
Poems of Milarepa.
He opened the government book. Only the glossy cover was Chinese. Inside was a book of photographs depicting life in Dharamsala, the capital of Tibet's exile government.

He stepped into an inner doorway past a chamber that seemed part office and part storeroom, then into the exam room. Curtains hung along the two side walls, flanking a central exam table. He pulled back the first to reveal an empty cot with a stained foam mattress. He hesitated at the second, noticing a puddle on the floor before pulling it back.

Commissioner Xie seemed more content than he had appeared in his photos. His hands were folded over his belly, which was covered by a thin undershirt. His flesh, though pale, was surprisingly well preserved, considering he had been dead for more than a week. The ice packed around him was obviously being replenished.

The coffin he lay in was of crude construction, with the mark of a factory in Guangdong, made for Chinese immigrants. Shan inched along it, trying to understand the man's death, and his life. The Chinese infirmary seemed grateful to have lost the body of the man Choi considered a misfit, the former prisoner the others had shunned. Shan was not looking at Xie, he was looking at himself, alone and abandoned even in death. He took a deep breath and leaned over the body with a businesslike air. Xie's feet were packed in snow. He thrust his fingers into it and pulled out a handful. The outer surface was icy, but inside it was almost powdery. The nearest snow would be around the high peaks to the north, at least twenty miles away.

Xie had a Tibetan wife, long dead. Was this the way a relative paid homage to him, or to her? No, surely putting him in a cold box behind a curtain was not homage.

Shan clenched his jaw and raised the dead man's hands, seeing now that they covered a stained indentation in the thin shirt. “Forgive me,” he said toward the dead man's face, and lifted the shirt, exposing an incision in his belly. The skin over it had been cut, then expertly sutured, though without sign of swelling or healing. Someone had cut into Xie's stomach after his death.

As Shan rearranged the lifeless hands, he saw for the first time a thread of ink on the inside of each wrist. One line ended below the palm with a tiny inked lotus flower, the other in a small set of intercrossed lines, the endless knot of Buddhist ritual. The faint lines continued up the back of each arm, disappearing under the shirt. Bracing himself, he lifted the cold torso, then pulled up the back of the shirt and gasped, dropping the body as he stepped backwards.

When his heart stopped pounding, he stepped back to the coffin and lifted the shirt again. Much of Xie's torso was covered with an elaborate protective charm. Written underneath the charm on his chest was a mantra.
OM AGNAYE MAHA TEJAH, OM AGNI.
It was an invocation of Agni, the fire god.

The discovery was more disturbing than he might have expected. He retreated, leaning against the central table as he stared at the dead man. Xie had known the secrets of those in the hills around Zhongje. Perhaps more importantly, or more fatally, he had known the secrets of the Commission.

Run,
a voice said,
leave the town and never return.
This was a new kind of ground, more treacherous than he had ever known. If Lokesh were there, he would have pulled Shan away and found a chapel for a purification ritual. Shan pushed back his fear and continued his examination.

He had thought the intricate pattern was a tattoo, but as he looked closer, he saw fading, smudged segments. He gave up all effort at being covert and switched on an exam light over the coffin, then forced himself to rub the ink. The line blurred. Someone had used a heavy marker to put the charm on Xie's body.

Shan finished examining the body, finding no evidence that the man had died from anything other than a heart seizure, then extinguished the light, straightened out the shirt, and returned Xie's arms to their original position. He found it difficult to look away from the dead man. Xie was not just his predecessor, he was Shan's warning too, perhaps his destiny. He reached into his pocket, extracted a little cone of incense and lit it. Moments before, he had so desperately wanted to leave. Now he wanted to stay. He owed this man something. There was magic at work in Xie's remains, Lokesh would have said, something reaching from the next world into this one. More likely, Shan told himself, there was something violent at work, between the Chinese world and the Tibetan world.

Xie, like Shan, had been one of the rare bridges between the Chinese and Tibetan peoples, a man of neither world who understood both. Xie was the Commissioner who was going to make a difference, the one Tibetans relied on to see that the truth was served. Shan was the replacement Xie. Xie had been murdered, then Deng had been murdered. The sequence was wrong. It would have been more logical had Deng been killed in an attempt to stop the Commission, then Xie extinguished by the knobs as a message to Deng's killers.

He found his gaze settling on a worn copper basin on a chair by the curtain. He lifted it. It had a look of antiquity about it, its dents and scratches giving it a very Tibetan appearance, something pure and simple whose battering only gave it more character. It was one of the old things, one of the true things, Lokesh would say.

“I brought it here for the cleansing,” came a soft voice from behind him. Shan spun about to find Dolma standing at the entry. “The basin has been in my family for years, used to clean our newborns and our dead for at least ten generations.”

Shan set the basin back on the chair. “When I was a boy, my family was sent to a reeducation camp,” he found himself saying after a long moment. “The first winter, there was never enough food, never enough blankets. When people in our barracks died, the Party zealots in charge would just drop the bodies in muddy holes. But in the early days, when she had the strength, my mother would always wash them first. She would use our water ration for the day to make the dead clean, so they would be presentable to their ancestors, then stay up all night in vigil with the bodies even though she would be caned for not making her quota the next day.”

Dolma opened the curtain and with gentle strokes began straightening Xie's hair. “Xie had a very big heart. He was wise in the Chinese ways, but it was our traditions that guided his life. Everything for him revolved around his family. It is rare for a former convict to rise to government office. Bureau of Religious Affairs. Head of his Township Committee.”

“You knew him?”

She hesitated as if considering how much to share. “For years, he made his home near his wife's family, deep among the snow peaks. There is an old shrine with magical properties there, above the Shetok monastery, in a high, remote valley called Taktsang. It means the ‘Tiger's Lair.' Tserung and I took a pilgrimage there years ago. Xie let us sleep in their house. When the Commission came to Zhongje, he sought us out. He asked to sleep in our house some nights, saying he felt uncomfortable in that government town. Sometimes I would wake in the middle of the night and find him at the altar, praying.”

Shan stepped forward and scooped some snow into his fingers. “Deep in the mountains,” he repeated. “Where there is ice and snow.”

“The higher you go, the closer you are to the gods,” the former nun said.

He turned to face her. “Why protect his body with that old charm?”

“You are mistaken,” Dolma explained with a melancholy smile. “The charm wasn't put on after he died. He asked us to put it on two days before he died.”

 

CHAPTER SEVEN

Amah Jiejie was waiting outside in Colonel Tan's old Red Flag limousine, accompanied by two hard-bitten members of Tan's elite security squad, all of whom were selected from the colonel's former mountain commando brigade. The driver was the sergeant who had driven Shan from Tan's hospital back to Zhongje. Beside him was a lieutenant who had served with Tan for so many years, his own face held a hint of the silent snarl that was Tan's defining feature. Amah Jiejie had adorned her severe grey business suit with three military medals. She did not hesitate at Shan's proposal when he had called her, did not even suggest any need to contact Tan.

As Shan slipped into the rear seat beside her, there was a flurry of movement and the door swung back open. Judson and Hannah Oglesby climbed in, pushing down the jump seats, expectant gazes fixed on Shan. He quickly introduced them to Amah Jiejie, who had laughed when he explained his proposal for getting inside Longtou. The Deputy Secretary himself had expressed the wish that the Americans could visit the showcase prison, and no prison would refuse a request from Colonel Tan, a renowned prison overseer himself, for a special delegation to visit. Tan's word would get them past the walls, and the visiting American dignitaries would be Shan's cover once they were inside.

*   *   *

The prison guards responded like obedient sons as they escorted Tan's senior civilian aide and her guests through the three separate security gates leading into Longtou Prison. Tan's two soldiers brought up the rear, part of Amah Jiejie's own cover, and looked in great curiosity at the smoldering hulk of a military truck that had apparently caught fire near the inner gate.

The Deputy Warden was a small, round man with a puffy face who seemed well accustomed to hosting visitors. Beijing had reacted to Western criticism of its prison system not with reform but by establishing public affairs units at the more conspicuous prisons, managed by well-trained senior officers. “Ours is a state-of-the-art facility,” the Deputy Warden boasted after tea had been served in a reception hall lined with overstuffed chairs. “All the modern techniques are practiced here.” Shan's eyes were on the chamber, not their host. The large room had been painted and fitted with the usual framed posters of joyous factory workers waving wrenches and hammers, but the walls spoke of a time before the prison. Large stains reached up from a line four feet high. The room had once been lined with altars, and the residue from their lamps was seeping through the paint.

As the stout officer delivered his well-rehearsed speech, he fixed each of his visitors in turn with a hollow smile, pausing uncertainly over the two mountain troops. “We have the honor of being responsible for the rehabilitation of fourteen hundred and fifty fellow citizens who have accepted the need to adjust their relationship with the motherland.” As the words slipped off his tongue, the Deputy Warden's gaze kept returning to the Americans.

“The role of Longtou in helping to reshape reactionaries is one of Tibet's shining beacons,” he continued. “Our facilities excel in cleanliness, on-time production, and participation in voluntary patriotic activities.”

Longtou, Shan knew, held what Public Security called high-value prisoners, prisoners who might cause particular discomfort for the state if they escaped, so no work details left the prison grounds. And no one would escape through the three perimeters of barbed wire, razor wire, and high stone wall.

Shan discovered that Amah Jiejie was staring at him. She held his gaze for a moment, then turned to their host. “Surely we will be able to witness the wonders of your facility. You must be aware that Colonel Tan's camps in Lhadrung have the highest inmate count in all of Tibet. No doubt you can teach us valuable lessons.”

“Of course!” The Deputy Warden beamed. “We will be showing you our crown jewel, the pride of the entire correctional system. Afterwards, there will be a luncheon.” He stood and gestured his visitors to a door at the end of the chamber, then escorted them down a long corridor with windows that opened onto the prisoner exercise yard. Rows of frail men in faded grey prison uniforms waited for the orders that would allow them to walk in turn their assigned rounds of the yard.