Soul of the Fire (7 page)

Lam cast a worried glance at him. “A dragon with a flag,” she repeated in a whisper. Her hand trembled as she opened the foil. When she saw the pin, the color drained from her face.

“Ai yi!”
Shan gasped. “You recognize it.”

She seemed not to be breathing. He stepped to the side table and poured two cups of tea from the thermos, then set one teacup in front of the doctor before sitting in the chair across from her like a respectful visitor.

He stared at the little dragon with the flag for a few breaths, then realization struck. “The missing Administrator, Deng. The man Sung replaced.”

“You can probably buy these at souvenir shops all over China.”

“Was it Deng?”

“Administrator Deng wore one of those. He disappeared very abruptly, yesterday morning.”

“Who was closest to him?”

“He had four staff. Except for Miss Lin, Sung reassigned them all yesterday, sent them back east.” Her face was dark with foreboding. “You want me to do an autopsy on a little dragon.”

“I want you to use your talents in pursuit of the truth.”

They stared at each other in silence for several heartbeats, then Shan stepped to the window and gazed out into the night. A vise seemed to be closing around his chest. In the span of a few days, a Commissioner had died and the Commission Administrator had been murdered. The Commission not only studied death, it attracted death. It stank of death. He changed the topic. “There must be dozens of Tibetans who work in the prison, more doing menial jobs here,” he said. “Where do they live?”

Her words came out as a whisper. “Just a maze of run-down buildings past the wind fangs.” Then she looked up at Shan, straightened, and corrected her tone. “It's an old indigenous community on the far side of the hill. They say it's haunted by dead monks. Yamdrok, they call it.” She reached for the blood-covered pin and dropped it into a drawer.

“Why wind fangs?”

“After the jagged rocks below the cliff on which the village sits. Where the road curves around the cliff at the edge of the village, a narrow gully empties onto it. A terrible wind blows down the gully from the top of the mountain—a killer wind, people say. Years ago, before Zhongje was here, the government sent in a series of officials to tame the town. The winter can be brutal. Several officials lost their footing on the icy road, and a terrible, sudden gust swept them over the edge onto the rocks below. They say it's how the mountain gods protect the village.” She seemed grateful to be speaking about something else. “The town plays a useful role in providing laborers for the prison and our compound, a place where former prisoners can be left without disturbing society. There is something of an understanding. We don't go there, they come here only to work, or for the open market outside the wall.”

“You've never been there?”

“Once, with a military escort. We handed out food and medicine on the Chairman's birthday.”

“When Tibetans get sick, where do they go?”

“There is a people's clinic there.”

“But this is the most modern medical facility I have seen in Tibet. Surely you provide assistance to them.”

“I have never been asked to do so.”

“And the prison?”

“It has its own infirmary.” She hesitated, nursing her cigarette now. “It would be a severe lapse of security to bring prisoners here. Some of the most important officials in the entire province work in this compound, or come for conferences. They plan things here, for the prison system and the relocation programs. It takes a lot of organizing.”

For a moment, Shan's mind drifted. Memories from prison of skeletal, starving lamas, of monks dying of typhus and imprisoned farmers left with unset broken bones flooded over him. He struggled to keep his voice steady. “Did you treat Commissioner Xie before he died? Perhaps he had a medical complaint?”

“Your predecessor? He was a very sick man.”

“You must have an idea what caused his death.”

She took another cigarette. “His heart stopped beating.”

Shan sipped his tea. It was better this way. He didn't believe information he didn't fight for. “Tibetan prisoners have a saying: Life is their sickness and death is the cure. If they believed in burial in the earth, the words would be chiseled on thousands of tombstones. What was his cure?”

“There was nothing that could be done for him. He had a very weak heart.”

“But you had to list a cause on the official report.”

Lam drew deep on her cigarette, then let the smoke curl back out of her mouth. “You've been in the meetings. He was bored to death.”

“I've seen the photographs, Doctor. He drank some tea—then he stopped breathing. I think if I am sitting in his chair, I should be allowed to see the report. What was in his stomach?”

“It would have been an intriguing report. Xie was very weak. I found him one day gasping in the stairwell from climbing three flights. I knew he had had several government jobs, so I asked for his detailed medical file to be sent from Lhasa. He had severe muscle damage in his heart, two heart attacks in the past five years. He was prescribed digitalis to control the rhythm. I could have listed heart disease as the cause and not been challenged. But there is no report. The only file I had was taken by Major Sung.”

Shan put down his cup. “You mean Public Security took the body because it is still investigating.”

“I had to endure an hour of shouting from Major Sung and then two dozen of his brutes combing every inch of my facility. I would tend to think it was not Public Security.”

Shan straightened. “Not Public Security that did what exactly?”

“I foolishly called a meeting of my staff. One of my damned orderlies declared to everyone that our building is constructed over a mass grave for Tibetan monks.”

He stared at the doctor. This was not the conversation he'd been expecting. “You're saying dead monks were here?”

“My Tibetan assistant announced that you can still smell their incense down around the foundations, reminding us that the dead do not forget. I told them don't be silly, we all know Tibetans believe in reincarnation, that their spirits move on to the next life. But she corrected me in front of all my staff. She said that was not true for those who die violently, without preparation, and that hundreds died that way here. They roam as ghosts, confused and often angry. More and more of my staff are insisting on leaving before dark. Some are showing up with charms they buy from that Tibetan market along the town wall.”

She saw the impatience in Shan's eyes. “Xie's body was wheeled in here at the end of the shift. We confirmed he was dead and called for the body to be picked up in the morning for a detailed exam in Lhasa. But when I arrived just after dawn, there was nothing but an elaborate chalk drawing on the wall. Tibetan ghosts had taken the body away.”

*   *   *

Shan watched from a darkened office near the utility stairwell as the janitors swept the hall, then swiftly followed as they descended the stairs, blocking the shutting door with his foot. He waited until they had disappeared onto the floor below to enter the stairwell.

The stairs narrowed after passing the ground floor. The bottom landing opened into a dim, musty corridor of unpainted cinder block. From somewhere came the muted whine of elevator motors. A pipe dripped into a bucket. He moved warily along a row of mops and pails reeking of ammonia toward the only lit doorway and paused at the half-open door. He waited, then, hearing nothing, slipped inside.

Benches lined two walls, below tattered coats hanging on pegs. Under the benches were wire baskets holding shoes that were as worn as the coats. Here was where the custodians started and ended their shifts. On pegs by the entry hung a clipboard with work assignments and several rings of keys. He studied the clipboard, trying to make sense of what was written. All the names were Tibetan, and the assignments seemed to cover multiple buildings.

Slipping one of the key rings into his pocket, he ventured farther down the hall, testing doors, finding mostly storage rooms holding office furniture and cleaning supplies, though one held medical equipment. He stood in the hall with his eyes closed, trying to decide what it was he sought. Lam's assistant said she could still smell the incense of the dead monks.

At the end of the corridor, he opened the heavy metal door onto an outside landing, where stairs led up to ground level. Holding the door open, he tested the keys to confirm that one of them operated the lock, then ascended the stairs.

Standing by the bike rack at the top of the stairs, Shan visualized the landscape as he had first seen it years earlier. Barley fields and pastures had extended to the horizon, ending in the first of the low, fresh-packed mounds, which was indeed where this building, closest to the old abbey, now stood. The sublevel had been dug deep into the earth. Bulldozers probably just swept the old bones aside.

A great sadness suddenly welled up inside Shan, and he found himself gripping the metal rail around the stairwell for support. It was a new thing, these terrible attacks of despair that seized him like a physical illness, leaving him weak and unsteady. The first time, Lokesh found him on the ground, weeping before an ancient stone Buddha, a favorite shrine in the mountains, whose body had been riddled with bullets by a passing army patrol. Now a dark foreboding gripped him. He needed Lokesh. Lokesh was his anchor, Lokesh was his hope, Lokesh was the one who'd made him understand he was more than a pathetic ex-convict whose life consisted of pitching mud and begging to see his imprisoned son.

He shook his head violently, trying to dispel the self-pity. Zhongje and the Commission were like poisons in his blood, and he had to fight to keep them out of his heart. At last, gazing at the stars, he calmed, took several deep breaths, and stepped back inside.

Lam's assistant would have gone to the sublevel on infirmary business. He moved back to the room with the medical supplies, discovering that it was not so deep as the others. Along the rear wall were upended hospital beds stored on dollies, and the wheels of the center one had repeatedly scored the floor. He tugged at the unit, swinging it outward to reveal a narrow, locked door with a sign marked
MEDICAL SUPPLIES UNAUTHORIZED ENTRY PROHIBITED.
He lifted the ring of keys and began trying them.

When he finally opened the door, the faint smell of incense wafted out. He gazed in mute surprise for a moment, then stepped in and shut the door behind him. The cement floor had been covered with cedar planks, in the fashion of an old country chapel. Along the rear wall was an altar made of packing crates topped with a length of white silk on which a twelve-inch-high bronze Buddha sat, flanked by a flickering butter lamp and an incense holder. Over the altar, on a shelf near the ceiling, half a dozen human skulls looked down. The dead monks of Sungpa Abbey were watching him.

Shan did not know how long he sat before the little Buddha, but when he finally climbed the outside stairs, it was long past midnight. All the way across the courtyard, he clutched the ring of keys, praying the custodians would not suffer if they were found to be missing. He unlocked the sublevel door of the building where his sleeping quarters were and climbed the inner stairway, hesitating for only a moment at his floor before continuing up to the top landing.

For a moment as he stepped into the chill autumn air, he forgot himself, forgot everything. Miles of rolling hills and mountains were washed in silver moonlight, the distant peaks glistening with fresh snowfall. On the highway to the south, the lights of a solitary truck glided over the landscape. Overhead, thousands of stars glittered. It was the kind of night Lokesh savored—a beckoning night, he would call it. The old Tibetan would invite Shan to join him by a small brazier where they would keep their tea warm while counting meteors.

Why was he here? he asked himself for the hundredth time. Who had arranged for him to be snatched from his ditches and thrown into this swamp of politics and violence? Sung had hinted at an answer.
I told them the old dinosaur was crazy,
Sung had said when speaking of Shan's appointment.

He absently paced along the rooftop, watching with a melancholy grin as a falling star shot across the horizon. Then he turned toward the north, and a cold hand gripped his heart. Longtou Prison too was washed in moonlight, but its searchlights slashed into the night, battling the stars.

Lokesh had spent more than half his life in prisons. He knew how to survive, though his instincts often had little to do with survival. In their hard labor camp, he had organized inmates into chanting groups, driving away despair with old mantras and invocations of the earth deities who watched over the dangerous mountain roads where they were forced to work. In those days, when the guards discovered him breaking the rules, they would drag him away to solitary confinement for a month. Today, at a place like Longtou, guards would respond with batons and tasers. Shan had met an old Tibetan who had been repeatedly tortured with electric cattle prods. The man had forgotten his own name, forgotten how to put sentences together, and just sat in a corner, drooling and staring at his beads.

He picked a window at the corner of the largest prison building and pretended Lokesh was behind it, then directed soft mantras toward it. Lokesh had taught him that such mantras should focus him, should calm him, should banish anxiety. But as he chanted, he found his fists clenching. He was angry, he was frightened, he was tormented by the certainty that Lokesh was suffering because of him.

After several minutes, his voice cracked and he fell silent.

At first he thought he had heard a murmuring echo, but when the sound continued, he turned and ventured in its direction.

The two dim shapes wrapped in blankets might have been lost in the shadows were they not silhouetted against the adjoining building. The woman was singing in a low, almost whispering voice. The man was playing a harmonica. Their song became vaguely familiar as Shan approached, but he did not recognize it until he was a dozen feet away.