Shan glanced from the bureaucrat to the gompa. What landscape? What victory? Then Xie answered his unspoken questions with an announcement that sent a shudder down his back.
“That Cao has not even found this place,” Xie said with a conspiratorial gleam. He was competing with the Public Security Bureau.
“Major Cao,” Shan ventured, “seems overly rigid.”
Xie laughed. He was enjoying his field trip immensely. “A dinosaur. Pretending he can deal with an assassination without severing the root it grew out of.”
Shan’s confusion over Xie’s intention disappeared as they pulled to a stop by the gompa, renowned in the region for its ancient murals. The faces of the Tibetans who climbed out of the truck told him everything. Some scrubbed tears from their faces, others clenched prayer beads or gaus with white knuckles. Jomo tried to scurry away as he climbed out of the cab, but Shan stepped in front of him. The mechanic slowly turned his guilt-stricken face up to Shan. He often worked at the town garage. He would have known when the dump truck, now parked near the trees, had been dispatched, would have known it was pulling a trailer carrying a compact bulldozer. Sarma was the gompa of the fugitive monks.
One of the Tibetan women uttered an anguished cry when the bulldozer roared to life, another clutched her breast as if she had been stabbed. Men in white shirts appeared by the buildings, Xie’s deputies from Lhasa. Several of the Tibetans Jomo had brought from town settled on a knoll by the front gate, folding their legs under them, pulling out their prayer beads.
The sound of the machine plowing through the gate and into the brittle old wood of the temple at the front of the gompa nearly brought Shan to his knees. Shards of painted plaster flew into the air. Splinters of wood popped and cracked over the metallic clinking of the treads as the bulldozer cut a swath from one wall to the next. The wide eye of a god that dropped onto the cage of the operator seemed to take on new expressions-shocked, then terrified-before slipping away to be crushed. The end of an old altar became trapped under one end of the blade and was dragged along until shattering into a dozen pieces. Suddenly the machine emerged from the building, massive holes now in opposite sides of the structure. The bulldozer pivoted on one tread and slammed into one of the standing corners. The building staggered, swayed violently, then collapsed. Two of Xie’s deputies clapped. Jomo fell against the front of the truck, his head buried in his arms.
Shan fought the temptation to race to the machine and seize the key from the ignition, to stand in front of the blade. But nothing he did would change the fate of the serene little gompa, which had withstood storm and strife for so many centuries, sheltered so many prayers, only to be annihilated at the whim of a bureaucrat. Eventually, through his numbness, he realized that half the Tibetans had disappeared. He recalled that the pilgrim path rose up the ridge from the shadows of the trees, past the painted rock face in the rear courtyard. Slowly, inconspicuously, he paced along the front of the compound, seeing movement in the shadows of the trail. There were storerooms in the back, the last place the bulldozer would reach. Some of the Tibetans had come to save what treasures they could.
He returned to Xie’s side and pointed to a building with a fierce demon painted on its wall at the corner farthest from the storerooms, out of sight of the trail. “The gonkhang,” Shan explained, choking his guilt. “The protector chapel should be next.”
Shan watched in silence as Xie gleefully directed the bulldozer into the sturdy little building, saw the demon crumble, the lathe and plaster of the wall burst apart, an odd wooden frame with wooden screw mounts shatter as the blade hit it. The rumble of the machine drowned out the sob that escaped Shan’s throat. He felt his knees giving way, and braced himself against Xie’s sedan. It had not been a protector chapel, it had been a barkhang, a traditional printing press. There had been one old printing press left in the region, Kypo had told him, one place where the reverently carved rosewood sutras could still be used. Shan shut his eyes as dozens of ancient printing plates, each a unique treasure, fell from shelves and were crushed under the tread of the bulldozer.
Xie’s fox-covered head bobbed up and down enthusiastically as he watched the destruction, and he called out to one of his deputies before gesturing for Shan to follow him past his limousine. Several chests had been removed from inside, and were lined up by the dump truck.
“You are the expert,” Xie said as he opened the first of the chests.
“I don’t understand.”
“The cults. The factions. The separate cadres within the church. We will need to inventory everything here for our warehouses. Bur first I need you to tell me what they say about the links between the monks of this compound and others nearby.”
So Xie did know something about the Tibetans he regulated. There were several sects of Tibetan Buddhism and affiliated gom-pas supported each other. The director opened the second trunk, which was loaded with ritual implements. “We have people who know the names of all these artifacts,” he boasted.
Shan slowly walked along the chest, lifting some of the implements as he identified them. “Purba,” he said, as he raised a ritual dagger, then “a dorje, a drilbu, a kangling, a damaru,” indicating a scepter, a bell, a bone trumpet, a skull drum. He looked up to meet Xie’s impatient gaze. “This gompa was one of a kind,” he lied. “It is not affiliated with others here, only some in Nepal and India.” He looked back over the chests, all of which Xie had now opened. Most were only half full. The slow moving dump truck and its heavy load must have been dispatched the day before. The Tibetans in the surrounding hills would have understood. They had already salvaged many of the treasures.
“Still,” Xie observed, “a lost sheep looks for any flock it can find.”
“But the others,” Shan ventured, his voice growing strangely hoarse, “have signed loyalty oaths.” Only one gompa had been targeted for a raid.
“True.”
“Then your mission is successful. You have dealt in a permanent way with those who would not sign.” He gestured to the chests. “You have added artifacts worth several thousand to the government coffers.”
“Still,” Xie said, “this region seems so-” he searched for a word-“fertile.”
Another shudder moved down Shan’s spine.
A deputy jogged up with a small radio unit and handed it to Xie, who stepped out of earshot to speak into it. He handed it back to the assistant then offered a pointed grin to Shan. “Foreigners. Always causing complications.”
“You mean that American Yates?”
“Him? No. He is away, they say, up high scouting advance climbing camps.” The announcement caused Shan to glance up toward the summit that loomed large on the horizon. He had stayed away from the base camp because of the American. “We can’t search the base camp the way we would like. The foreigners have everything out of context; they don’t understand our family matters.”
“You mean they might misinterpret the government putting a bullet in a monk.”
Suspicion rose in Xie’s eyes. “Comrade, my office is responsible for the whole family of Buddhists in Tibet. It does not serve our policies for monks to be shot. The government strives to make them patriots, not martyrs.”
“What are you saying?”
“That fleeing monk wasn’t killed by Public Security. They found his body on the trail.”
The purba in Shan’s hand slid out of his grip, dropping back into the chest. He stared at Xie in disbelief. “Cao knows this?”
“Of course. It is why I was brought in.”
Shan considered Xie’s words. “You mean you are giving cover to Cao.” Xie’s presence assured that everyone assumed the monk was killed for defying the Bureau of Religious Affairs. Otherwise Cao would have another murder to account for, complicating his case against Tan.