Shan’s mouth opened but he had no words. “Your gompa,” He stated at last, his voice gone hoarse, “has passed on.” He could not bear to meet the puzzled gazes of the three monks.

“Passed on?” asked the oldest.

“The government went back with machinery,” was all Shan could say.

The silence was that of a death rite. Yates cursed. Another anguished cry escaped the throat of the youngest monk, and he squeezed one of his new mani stones until his knuckles were white. With trembling hands, one of the older monks formed a mudra, an invocation of the protector goddess.

Yates stared intensely at the ground, his eyes filled with pain. Shan could see in his eyes that, like Shan, he felt a share of the guilt for the gompa’s destruction.

“That old Buddha,” the older monk said at last. “Does he still live?”

Shan recalled the painting on the rock face at the rear of the gompa. “The last time I saw, he was untouched.”

The monk nodded gratefully and spoke in a serene tone. “Now he will be able to see the mother mountain without any obstruction.”

The American’s face flooded with emotion. He looked at Shan with a mournful, pleading expression.

“I need buttons,” Shan said to him in English.

“Buttons?”

“I need three hundred twenty-four buttons. And some of the thread used to repair canvas tents.”

Yates stood warily, shaking his head but gesturing Shan to lead the way out of the chamber. They searched together in the big chest of tools, then in several smaller plastic chests that contained miscellaneous supplies. When they found the heavy thread but no buttons, Shan asked for washers, but they could only find two dozen, all in the tool chest. He studied the stack of cartons, then pointed to one near the top.

“You want rolls of candy?” the American asked incredulously.

“And a tin plate,” Shan said.

When he returned to the hidden chamber, Yates a step behind, Shan carried the spool of heavy thread and twenty rolls of candy rings. He broke three rolls open, dumping their contents onto the plate. The oldest monk, understanding immediately, reached out with a grin and started tying a red candy circle to one end of the thread.

“Malas,” Shan explained to Yates. “They need to have prayer beads. One hundred eight to the string. In my prison,” he added, “the old Tibetans sometimes made them out of fingernail cuttings.”

They left the monks, working on their makeshift malas, Yates leading Shan in silence back to his makeshift quarters. The American lit his little stove, produced two metal mugs, two black tea bags, and brewed each of them a cup of tea before speaking.

“What the hell do you want, Shan?”

“An innocent man is being held for those murders. I mean to find the truth.”

“That man Tan is a colonel in the army, head of some gulag county, one of those that goes around destroying monasteries. They say dozens of monks have died in his prison. No one would call a man like that innocent.”

“I mean to find the truth,” Shan repeated.

“And you want me to help free a monster like that? Not likely. You were a prisoner yourself once they say.”

“I was his prisoner.”

“My God. Then why would you want him freed?”

Perhaps it was the soothing warmth of the tea, or just his exhaustion, that caught him off guard. The words were out of his mouth as if of their own accord. “My son is in the Public Security mental hospital twenty miles from here. The only chance he has of survival is for me to get him out of there, get him transferred back to the camp he came from. It was my old prison. There I could see that he was looked after. Colonel Tan is in charge of the prison.”

“Christ!” Yates stared into his mug. “China!” he groaned, as if it explained everything, shaking his head back and forth. The American searched Shan’s face for a moment, drank deeply, then gazed back toward the hiding place inside the cartons. “Those monks have to be saved,” he declared.

“Those monks have to be saved,” Shan repeated. He decided not to push Yates into telling him how the monks arrived at his depot.

“Fine. I won’t tell the knobs you helped the monks escape, you won’t tell about me helping them. So finish your tea and get out of here. You depress me. You and I have an understanding, Shan, that’s enough.”

“No, we don’t. The people in the valley will be very upset with you, with all American climbers, when I tell them that you have been stealing their Yamas. The Lord of Death is tough enough on them without someone deliberately affronting him.”

“I don’t think you’ll tell them. I saw what you did with those monks in there. You’re not like that.”

“You weren’t listening. My son is going to die if I don’t get Tan out of jail. You think I am going to be upset about embarrassing some American?”

“You act as if the murders are connected to someone at the base camp, even connected to me. They are not. You are not going to solve the killings here.”

“It’s not the murders I’m looking to solve right now. It’s the mystery of the ambushed bus. The mystery of how that equipment got there, how someone expert in rigging rope set it up.”

The American said nothing. He drained his mug and stood.

“Likewise not connected to the murders.”

“It doesn’t matter if you know they are not. The government believes they are.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“At the scene of the murders they found a statue of Yama.”

Yates seemed to stop breathing for a moment. His brow creased with worry. “I had nothing to do with the murders.”

“Director Xie has begun investigating the monks and those who might help them. The Bureau of Religious Affairs office in Shogo was burned down and a figure of Tara left in the ashes. Even he can see such an obvious pattern. He will soon discover that the other old Yamas are being stolen, then he will convince himself that whoever stole the Yamas committed the murders. When Cao finds out, they will try to pick up the trail of the missing Yamas, interrogating all those innocent people in Tumkot, probably run fingerprint tests on those figures that were returned. In a few days they will declare that whoever stole the Yamas was Tan’s partner in the assassination.”

“The statues I collect are only of Yama.”

“A subtlety that will likely be lost on Xie, and certainly on Public Security.”

Yates’s face drained of color. “Are you saying someone is trying to make it look like it was me, to frame me?”

“I don’t know. Maybe they want to cast suspicion on traditional Tibetans. But once they find the trail of the stolen Yamas. .” Shan didn’t finish the sentence. “Foreigners engaged in crime aren’t always deported. Some disappear into the gulag, though I have never heard of one lasting more than a year or two. If I were you I’d get in my car and not stop driving until I was in Nepal.”

Yates turned his head, back toward the hidden monks. “Those monks have to be saved,” he repeated in a hollow voice.

“Cao and Xie don’t have to wait for fingerprints. They will have discovered by now that a ministry film team was here for two days before the Minister’s visit, collecting background footage. Cao will isolate every frame that contains your red and black ropes, and every person who touched those ropes.”

“We have lots of rope. We are always moving it around, measuring lengths, testing it, cutting out frayed sections. So what if they catch me on film with those ropes?”

“You miss my point. For the knobs, a foreigner is an obstacle, something they just have to work around. They will look for every Tibetan who touched that rope. They will call in Constable Jin and Tsipon, and probably other leading citizens, to connect names to faces. They already have squads out, looking in public places in town.” Shan shrugged. “Tibetan porters faced with Cao know he has the power to send them away for a year, on his signature alone. They will talk, they will remember you driving away with the ropes in your truck, they may even be persuaded to state they saw you on the rocks setting up that ambush on the bus.”