"I lost my way," he said to the woman at the first occupied desk. "The inventory."

"Inventory?"

"Exhibits. Artifacts in storage."

"It's usually the same," she said in a superior tone.

"The same?"

"You know. Two of each piece. One on display, one in storage. In the basement. Parallel collection, the curator calls it. Makes cleaning and examination easier. One upstairs. One downstairs, arranged by their inventory number sequence."

"Of course," Shan said, with renewed hope. "I meant the organization charts. The location of artifacts."

"In notebooks. On the library table."

In the small library at the back of the corridor he found a thick black binder, its vinyl covers worn through to the cardboard at the edges. He had already located a section entitled Costumes when an older woman appeared at the door.

"What is it?" she snapped.

Shan started, then settled back into the chair before looking at her. "I'm from Beijing."

The announcement bought him another thirty seconds. He kept searching as the woman lingered at the doorway. Ceremonial headdresses. Demon dancer costumes.

"No one informed me," the woman said with a suspicious tone.

"Comrade, certainly you realize audits are not nearly so effective when advance warning is given," Shan said curtly.

"Audits?" She paused, then slowly entered and walked around the table.

As she saw Shan's clothing a sharp hiss of air escaped her lips. "We will need identification, Comrade."

Shan kept studying the books. "They said to leave it at the front desk. We have much work here." He gestured to a chair. "Perhaps you would like to help."

The woman spun about and disappeared down the hall. Tamdin, the book said, Code 4989. Set One from Shigatse gompa, 1959. Set Two from Saskya gompa, dated only fourteen months earlier. He walked quickly to the corridor and began checking the doors again. The third one opened onto descending stairs.

The basement shelves rose from the dirt floor to the ceiling, crammed with boxes of wood, wicker, and cardboard. They were arranged by inventory number as the girl had explained. He darted down the rows, desperately scanning the numbers at the end of each shelf. Suddenly there was a new sound, the unmistakable sound of running feet on the floor above.

He found the 3000 series, and kept running. Then the 4000. Shan pulled a box from the shelves. It held an incense burner. He began to run, and stumbled onto his knees. There were shouts upstairs. He found a shelf marked 4900. A set of golden horns extended from a box. The mask of Yama. Frantically he checked the boxes. They were on the stairs now, shouting. Another row of lights was illuminated, much brighter. Then he had it. Tamdin, the box said. Tamdin, demon costume, Saskya gompa. It was empty.

Someone yelled nearby. There was a white index card taped to the top of the box. He tore it off and ran away from the sounds of the searchers. There was a door up a shorter flight of stairs, showing daylight at the bottom.

It was locked. He rammed it with his shoulder and old wood splintered. He fell outward onto the ground. As he lay blinking in the painful sunlight someone jammed a boot into his back, then reached down and placed handcuffs on his wrists.

The first syllable of weak protest was still on his lips when a truncheon slammed into his forehead, spattering blood. "Hooligan shit," his captor spat before he spoke into a hand radio.

The blood that trickled into his eyes prevented him from seeing how many there were. They were Public Security, he had no doubt, but they seemed confused. From behind him, as he was pushed into a gray van, there were arguments about whose prisoner he was, about his destination. The first two didn't use place names. "The long bed," one of them said. "Wires," argued another. But a third man joined them. "Drabchi," he said, in the tone of an order, referring to the notorious political prison northeast of Lhasa. Prison Number One, it was formally called, where the high-ranking officials of the Tibetan government had once been held.

It was over. Sungpo would die. Shan would have new wardens. Eventually, if Tan did not abandon him, he might be returned to the 404th, with five or ten years added, but only after a Public Security interrogation and the stay in the infirmary that would follow. Who, he wondered in some remote corner of his mind, would be recruited to express the people's disappointment in his socialist development? I'm a hero, Shan would tell his captors. I lasted twelve days on the outside.

The blood was in his mouth now, and the pain of the wound began to surge through his stupor. The van was moving. A siren erupted, painfully loud. They were on a fast road, accelerating. He blacked out. Suddenly there was a shout, and he heard the sound of breaking wood and chickens squawking in terror. He felt the van slam on its brakes and heard the men in front leap out.

There were furious shouts from the front of the van. Then someone climbed into the driver's seat and the van was moving in a Uturn. The siren was cut and the vehicle made a series of a rapid turns, then it pulled to an abrupt stop. The rear doors were flung open and four hands reached in for him. He was half carried, half dragged into the back seat of a car, which instantly pulled away.

Slowly, with dreamlike motions, he wiped the blood from his eyes and pulled himself up. It was a large car, an older American sedan. The driver wore a wool cap over his head. When they pulled into the broad thoroughfare that led out of town the man dangled a small key over his shoulder. As Shan unlocked the handcuffs the man removed the cap to reveal a head of thick blond hair.

"I didn't know-" Shan began, paralyzed by confusion. He pulled out his shirttail to wipe away the blood. "Thank you," he offered in English. "Are you Jansen?"

The man shook his head and muttered to himself in a Scandinavian tongue as he drove slowly through the traffic, careful not to attract attention. "No names," he replied in the same language. "Please. No names." On the floor beside him Shan recognized the bag he had carried to Lhasa. The skull from the cave shrine.

"How could you know?" Shan asked after five minutes.

Jansen had sunk into a depressed silence. "I'm just taking you to the highway somewhere. Your friends will be on the highway, they said."

"Why?"

"Why?" Jansen pounded the steering wheel in anger. "You think I would have done it if I had known? With the knobs as thick as flies? Nobody said anything about knobs. They said for me to be there, that's all. Need to help the gentleman who brought all the information from Lhadrung." He shook his head. "Nothing like this has happened before. Help with the records, no problem. Give an old man a ride from Shigatse, no problem. But this-" He threw up a hand in frustration.

"The purbas," Shan realized. Somehow it had been the purbas. The little man he had seen on the street had not been alone. He had been a purba, Shan now understood. "But how could they know?"

"How do they know anything? Like telepathy."

The knobs had somehow known. The purbas had somehow known. Everyone seemed to know everything. Except him.

"Like telepathy," Shan repeated in a hollow voice. He looked out the window for a fleeting glance of the Potala as it faded into the distance. The precipice of existence.

"Worst they do, they deport me," Jansen muttered to himself.

Shan lay back on the seat. He found a paper towel and held it to his forehead. "There was an obstruction pushed onto the highway," Shan said, as though to himself. "A farmer's cart, I think. The knobs got out to clear the path."