Soul of the Fire (8 page)

“Beautiful dreamer, beckon to me,” the American woman sang softly toward the night sky, then suddenly gasped as she saw Shan.

Judson hesitated only a moment. “Rest easy, Hannah, it's only Comrade Shan. Have a sit, brother, and try some of my bourbon. We can teach you the words of our song.”

Shan declined the extended bottle but stepped to Judson's side. “The songs of Stephen Foster are well known in China. You slipped your handlers.”

“You slipped your handler,” Judson repeated back to Shan, slightly slurring the words.

Shan shrugged. “Ex-convicts are the ghosts of modern Tibet. We are creatures of air and shadow. Once other Chinese know who you are, they tend to look right through you, like they don't even see you. We are not of any substance, and we never last long. We appear and disappear all the time, just a mirage of a person, which can evaporate with the slightest breeze. But when Americans disappear,” he added after a moment, “the entire iceberg can collapse.”

“Iceberg?” the American woman asked. Her voice was hoarse, as if she had been crying, and before she turned to Shan, she dabbed at her eyes.

“I helped organize watcher teams for foreigner visitors in the early days of Westernization,” Shan explained. “We usually had teams of six agents on surveillance for every American. Now it's done only for special cases. Americans serving on a Chinese commission would be very special cases. When your affable hosts go off duty, they report back to a bigger team, who will debrief with them for an hour or two every day. For every one you can see, there will be three or four below the surface.”

Judson seemed unconcerned. “Comrade Tuan is with Religious Affairs, Major Sung wears a Public Security uniform, Madam Choi likes to speak nostalgically about her reeducation in the rice paddies but she got drunk one night and boasted that she had graduated from the special Public Security academy reserved for those expected to become senior diplomats. Kolsang is one of the rare Tibetans with Party membership. Herr Vogel is desperately trying to impress his hosts because he thinks they are going to persuade his bosses back home to make him the next ambassador in Beijing.”

Shan gazed at the American in surprise. “You too have much below the surface, Mr. Judson.”

Judson shrugged. “In China, you learn a whole new way of watching people.”

“What are you doing up here?” Shan asked.

“Taking the air. Watching the sky. We used to watch for the aurora back in the Colorado mountains, but the night sky has a different quality here. We were marveling at how even a gulag prison can become a temple under a Tibetan moon.”

Shan stared at the couple in surprise. “You knew each other before coming here?”

Judson grimaced and stared at the bottle, as if blaming the bourbon for speaking too freely. “We did,” he admitted. “Professional colleagues at the UN.”

“Who went to see the northern lights in Colorado.”

Hannah Oglesby looked up at Shan. “A long time ago,” she said, as if her relationship with Judson had changed. She gestured toward the prison. “What was it like? I mean, before it was Longtou.”

“It
was
a temple, or more like twenty or thirty temples in one compound,” Shan explained. “Sungpa Abbey was one of the largest in Tibet. Two or three thousand monks. It hosted a school of medicine. Its printing press was renowned for its illuminated manuscripts. There was a prisoner in my barracks who had saved a few pages from a book printed there. He had secretly sewn them inside his shirt. On festival days, he would take them out to show us. To the old lamas, they may as well have been relics from one of the ancient saints.”

“Tell us,” the American woman asked in the tone of an eager novice. “Tell us what the pages looked like, what they said.”

Shan considered the two, not for the first time wondering why they had agreed to join the Commission, then he stepped to the edge of the roof, facing the prison for a few heartbeats before he turned and knelt in front of them. “The pages of a
peche,
a Tibetan manuscript, are long and narrow, each printed with a hand-carved wooden block on parchment pages. They are often very simple, with nothing but script, but those from Sungpa were illuminated with beautiful images around the margins. Little yaks playing with tigers,
dakini
goddesses, ritual symbols. The pages we had were all poems of ancient lamas. ‘Who thinks of death,' the first line of one said, ‘until it arrives like thunder.' There was another that spoke of the importance of even the most insignificant lives. ‘The smallest spark can burn down a mountain.'”

Strangely, the American woman reacted with a contented smile and Judson extended the bottle to her. She refused it, just drew her knees up against her chest and gestured for more from Shan. He searched his memory and offered half a dozen other examples, then spoke further about the artwork on the pages and the halls of monks who produced them.

When he finished, they remained silent. Hannah pointed out a falling star that left a long trail over the mountains. Judson lifted his harmonica and began playing a song that was often heard on sound systems of Chinese trains and buses,
Red River Valley
.

“Why there?” the American woman asked when Judson had finished.

“There?” Shan asked.

“Why did this Tibetan monk who miraculously survived his self-immolation climb halfway up the hill?” She was asking the same question that had nagged at Shan. “If he wanted the whole town to see, he should have gone up higher. If he wanted to obstruct the daily business of the government, he should have done it at the front gate. But he did it there.” She pointed to where the scorched earth lay. “And why graze sheep where the grass is so sparse?”

“I'm sorry?”

“The day before, Mr. Shan—”

“Just Shan.”

“The day before, Tibetan shepherds were at that very spot. Slopes all around, rich with grass, but they chose that spot.”

“Surely not the exact patch where the scorched soil is?”

“Exactly that patch. I have a hard time sleeping here. I watched them from my room just after dawn. They were just to the left of that white boulder where the immolation occurred. They made a little tent out of some blankets. They pounded a stake in the ground and tied a dog to it.”

“Herders don't tie their dogs, Miss Oglesby.”

“Hannah. These did. I grew up on a farm in Virginia. I know what I saw. They pounded in a stake and left it there.”

“There was no stake when we were there today,” Judson interjected.

Shan remembered that Sung had crushed a little mound. “There was a pile of grey ash that did not match the rest. In the center, as if the man had been tied to it.” Suddenly he saw them staring at him in alarm and realized he had spoken his thoughts out loud.

“You mean the man named Kai,” the American woman said. “But surely he did not tie himself to a stake.”

“Comrade Shan is the rarest of creatures, Hannah,” Judson said. “A former Chinese investigator prone to perverse fantasies. He imagines a world in which his government may have switched the victims.”

The American woman looked in alarm at Judson. “You told me Shan thought the man rose up from the dead. I thought you meant Kai should have died but by some miracle survived.”

“It's only a theory of his. The night is too peaceful. We talk enough about death in the daytime.”

Shan studied the two Americans in confusion. He could understand if the two were lovers, but they did not have the intimate mannerisms of lovers. They had gone to Colorado a long time ago. Former lovers, then. Now Judson acted more like an older brother, as if protecting her, though Shan could not believe the spirited woman needed protection.

“But why there?” Hannah asked again. “Even if the shepherds marked the spot, why that spot?”

No one had answers. As Hannah rose and stepped to the half wall at the roof's edge, the breeze freshened, lifting her long hair. “What you mean,” she said after a long moment, “is that we watched a murder. Tied to a stake to die,” she said in a hollow voice.

*   *   *

The sun was rising as Shan reached the patch of blackened earth on the hill. Loudspeakers on the prison walls crackled to life with
The
East Is Red
, the Party's favorite anthem. A squad of guards marched around the outer wall, rifles on their shoulders. The engine of the Zhongje garbage truck, an aging hand-me-down from some eastern city, rattled from the streets below.

He circled the scorched patch again. The crime scene barrier had been removed. In fact, every indication of the incident was gone. A pile of old wood beams and boxes now smoldered within the original scorched patch. The scene had been disguised as a trash fire.

Shan stood at the rear of the patch, faced the window of the Commission conference room, then slowly turned. The landscape fell rapidly away from the spine of land he stood on, one of several that reached out like roots from the main mountain. At the bottom of the next spine, nearly half a mile away, sat a large two-story stone structure that had the appearance of an old farm building, probably a granary. The abbey once would have had many farm dependencies in the surrounding countryside.

He paced along the high ground, then knelt as he saw color among the dark rocky soil. He picked up a light brown kernel, rolled it between his fingers before dropping it on his tongue. Barley. He saw another kernel, and another. Tibetan herders had been there. Except Tibetan herders didn't tie their dogs and didn't scatter precious barley when good grazing was available nearby. These had been Tibetans masquerading as herders. He walked several steps down the steep slope, then paused again, this time to study the prison. He had descended far enough to be out of sight of the guard patrols, and for most of the day, the little depression would be in shadow, obscured to the guard towers. From this side of the narrow ridge, access to the immolation site was along a blind spot. Not just a blind spot, he decided as he studied the high cliffs that otherwise surrounded the stone building, but the only point where the stone building could easily be observed or approached without being seen by the prison or using the Zhongje road. He climbed down to the bottom of the gully and descended along its shadows.

After following the first long trough between ridges, he began to cross over into the next, then froze at the sound of heavy engines. He dropped behind an outcropping as an army truck appeared on a gravel track, then another, followed by a black utility vehicle. Two military transport trucks were being escorted by Public Security.

Shan waited several minutes after the vehicles disappeared behind the ridge before climbing onto an outcropping that gave a view of the granary, now barely a hundred paces away. From a distance, it appeared abandoned, and the exterior of the large stone building had indeed been kept in disrepair. But the high razor-wire fence around it was new. It had been cleverly built along shadows cast by the ridge so as to be nearly invisible from a distance.

Suddenly the stillness was broken by an angry shout, then the trill of a whistle. A Tibetan man wearing the fleece vest of a herder ran around the corner of the building, followed by two uniformed knobs. As Shan watched, one of the knobs expertly threw a baton at the man, striking his head. The herder stumbled to his knees and his pursuers were instantly on him, knocking him flat before kicking him with their heavy boots.

 

CHAPTER FOUR

The Commission studiously reviewed files all morning. Madam Choi, but no one else, took notice of Shan's late arrival, and he accepted her chastizing glance without responding. Tuan, seated as usual along the wall, stared at him peevishly. The stack of files at each Commissioner's chair was several inches tall, and Choi was determined that each would be reviewed with maximum efficiency. Her remarks were rote variations on the same themes, with certain phrases being repeated every few minutes as if in rehearsed rotation. Shan gave the other Commissioners as much attention as the files themselves. The patterns were not only in Choi's words.

Judson tended to so often watch Hannah Oglesby, who peered out the window toward the blackened circle of earth, that Shan began to wonder if she saw something he had missed. The German Vogel kept pace with Madam Choi, affirming his agreement with her observations with nods and utterances of “Of course” and “Just so” between furtive glances at the demure Miss Lin. Miss Zhu, seated between the two Co-Chairmen, spent much of her time fastidiously recording notes when she was not translating. The middle-aged Tibetan Kolsang seemed to examine each file in detail though seldom spoke, and never before nervously looking at Tuan and Major Sung. Each of Emperor Pao's puppets seemed to have his or her own script.

“I am pleased to present for the record the statement of the victim Kai,” Vogel suddenly announced. “He regained consciousness last night long enough for the team to obtain his evidence.” The German lifted a sheet and began to read. “‘I apologize for my irresponsible act against my country,'” Vogel said in a loud stage voice. “‘On reflection, I know now I allowed myself to drift from the motherland. My family were poor farmers. When criminals came from India and offered money, I was weak. I had failed to attend the citizenship classes that would have prevented my lapse in judgment. Reactionaries poisoned my mind and made me their instrument.'” Shan and Judson exchanged a glance, and as Vogel finished, the American leaned forward to ask a question.

Madam Choi interrupted by raising another file and speaking up. “Korchok Gyal, age thirty-seven,” she recited, introducing a new case. Judson shrugged at Shan. “Employed as a forest warden,” she continued. “Assembled a pyre of logs, soaked it in gasoline, then climbed on top and lit them. There had been rumors of corruption in the management of his forest.”