“Have you forgotten this is where the medical prison is you transferred my son? I assumed you did it to get rid of me, knowing I would follow.”
A battle raged behind Tan’s black pupils. The animal the knobs had reduced him to fought with something else, the brooding, conscious thing that had been pushed deep inside. His eyes glazed then brightened, then glazed again before a hard, familiar gleam returned to them. “I sign papers for the transfer of dozens of recalcitrant prisoners. I can’t be expected to remember every parasite who transits through my county.”
It was a lie, they both knew, for Shan and Ko had presented persistent headaches to Tan in Lhadrung. “You use the present tense. I admire your optimism.” Shan rose and filled the cup again. As he extended it Tan knocked the cup away with a violent sweep of his arm.
“If they knew who you were, Shan, you’d be in the next cell. Get out or I’ll tell them.”
Shan silently retrieved the cup, filled it again and set it on the stool just beyond Tan’s reach.
“I was there, Colonel, minutes after the murderer left. They found me soaked with one of the victims’ blood. For a few days I was their favorite solution. Then I told them how to find the gun.”
Tan’s eyes flared. For a moment it seemed he was summoning the strength to leap at Shan. He was ten years older but he was all sinew and bone.
“They have only just begun on you,” Shan explained. “You know how it works. They are rewriting the script so they will know exactly what song they need you to sing. Tomorrow or the next day you’ll start seeing new faces, new devices, probably a doctor or two from the prison clinic. It’s what we used to call a half-moon case.”
Tan spat out blood, then with a finger probed the teeth of his upper jaw. “Half moon?”
“A case of vital political implications. It is too inconvenient to have it linger. Worse, it is politically embarrassing. Beijing will insist it be closed in two weeks. And one is already gone.”
“I don’t want your damned help. Go find one of your Tibetan beggars to coddle.”
“I predict a closed trial. Then they will take you to somewhere private, maybe just the cellar of this building, though I rather expect it will be somewhere remote up in the mountains. You will face a small group of senior Party members, probably a general or two. An officer young enough to be your grandson will sneer at you a moment, then slowly draw his pistol and put a bullet between your eyes.
“By the end of the month there will be a new colonel in your office in Lhadrung. All those photos of you on maneuvers, commanding brigades of tanks and missile batteries, presiding over National Day celebrations at town hall- they will take them and burn them. I recall you kept personal journals of your illustrious career. Toilet paper is in short supply. They will probably take your journals to the prisoners’ latrines. The last evidence of your existence on earth will be wiped on the backside of a starving Tibetan monk.”
“Get out!” Tan spat. A thin rivulet of blood spilled down his chin.
Shan looked up at the window high on the back wall, noticing for the first time the crimson splotches on the reinforced glass, then glanced at Tan’s bloody fingertips. The colonel, incredibly, had been climbing up, trying to break the window. “When they stop the torture,” Shan continued in a matter-of-fact tone, “that’s when you know it’s over. They will give you two days to heal, to be cleaned up. When the barber comes, you’re a dead man for certain. They want you to be able to stand up straight, clean and trimmed, ready for final inspection, before they eliminate you and everything you ever touched.”
The light faded from Tan’s eyes. His gaze shifted past Shan and settled on Constable Jin at the end of the corridor. “So you bribed a guard so you could gloat?” Tan muttered. “Maybe take a picture to share with your Tibetan friends in Lhadrung?”
“I came because you are innocent.”
Tan’s eyes turned back toward Shan, though his stony expression did not change. “You don’t know that.”
“Colonel, if you had murdered a minister of the State Council you wouldn’t have run, wouldn’t have tossed away your gun. You would have sat there and waited and berated the arresting officer for his dirty boots.”
With obvious effort Tan pushed himself up against the wall, high enough to grab the cup of water from the stool and gulped it down. His hand began twitching again. He seized it with his other hand, squeezing until the knuckles were white. “I’m not one of your pathetic lamas. I don’t want your pity. I don’t want the help of the likes of you.”
“When was your gun stolen? At the hotel? Have they asked you about the Western woman? Have Western investigators arrived?”
Tan pushed against the wall harder, until he could stand. He staggered a moment then straightened, the ramrod-stiff soldier again. He pulled off the rag Shan had tied around his head and threw it at Shan’s chest. He took a single step forward, raised a battered, bloody hand, and with a powerful blow hit Shan on the chest so hard he was slammed against the bars of the cell door.
“Guard!” Tan shouted toward Jin. “This lunatic has breached security! Get him out! He endangers your murderer!”
Jin led Shan out of the building with a victorious gleam in his eye, leaving him alone on a corner under one of the town’s few streetlights. Shan sat on the curb and stared at the fresh stain on his shirt. Tan’s blood.
Gradually he became aware of someone hovering near the edge of the pool of light. It was a teenage Tibetan, wearing one of the red T-shirts Tsipon gave to his porters, his features tight with fear. It seemed to take all of Shan’s strength to gesture him forward.
“It’s Tenzin!” the porter exclaimed in a terrified whisper. “Kypo said to find you. Tenzin’s ghost was seen in the village, doing the work of Yama the Lord of Death.”
Chapter Four
The arrival of one of Tsipon’s trucks in one of the high villages was usually a cause for celebration. Shan had often watched as children climbed over the visiting trucks while Kypo negotiated for porters and guides, exclaiming as candy and fruit were handed out by Tsipon or Kypo, the matrons of the village just as excited over handouts of household wares. But as Shan eased the old truck toward the edge of Tumkot village, he might as well have been Public Security. In the hills above, a flock of long-haired sheep was being hurried into the maze of rocks at the foot of the high escarpment that curled around to the south. Children were being pulled into the stone and timber houses, several women even jerked closed the shutters of their houses as if one of the violent Himalayan storms had arrived.
Tumkot was not the largest of the hill villages, nor was it the closest to Shogo town. But here the mountain tribesmen were most skilled at high altitude climbing, here the inhabitants were most traditional, here was the one village where people still openly spoke of life before the Chinese arrived. More than once Shan had found time on his village errands for Tsipon to sit in the shadows unnoticed, taking joy in watching the villagers in their simple daily routines, cheerfully hauling water from the well, singing old songs as they carded wool, hauling night soil on their backs in large dogo baskets braced with head traps.
He parked the old Jiefang in the shadow of a stable, its engine still sputtering after he switched off the ignition, then walked slowly along the highest of the streets, looking down on rooftops that were nearly covered with peas and turnips drying for winter stews. He proceeded to the far end of the village, climbed down a flight of stone stairs, cupped from centuries of use, onto the main street, then ventured into the small central square surrounding the hand pump of the village well.