The old Tibetan did not acknowledge him, but did not resist as Shan half dragged, half carried him back to his pallet. His breath was harsh and raspy. His shirt clung to his body in patches of red where several wounds had reopened. Shan worked silently, stripping off the shirt, washing the wounds, gently pushing back the hand that now tried to stop him, ignoring the whispered curses in Chinese and Tibetan, gradually becoming aware that the curses had been replaced with a rambling soliloquy made up of snippets of drinking songs, lonely shepherds’ ballads, and mantras to the Tibetan gods.

When he finished and Gyalo was wearing one of Shan’s old shirts, Shan sat a few feet away on the floor and listened, watching the flame of the nearest lamp, until he himself slipped into a mantra, the prayer for the Compassionate Buddha. He did not know when the cadence of the old man’s words changed, but became aware that Gyalo was sitting upright against the wall, chanting in unison with him, staring at the same flame. Shan lowered his voice. Gyalo kept up the chant, pausing several times to look into the shadows and interject louder words of gratitude to Rinpoche. The old Tibetan, Shan realized, was back in a temple of his youth, chanting with the novice monks as they took lessons from a lama.

After several minutes Gyalo’s eyes flickered. As he looked up and focused on Shan his words faltered, his face flushed with embarassment and he grew silent.

Shan extended the photo he had taken from the library, holding it a few inches from the Tibetan’s face.

Gyalo seemed to take a long time to grasp what he was looking at. Then a shuddering moan rose from his throat. His shoulders sank, his chest sagged.

“They were here,” Shan said. “The Hammer and Lightning Brigade lived in your gompa before they destroyed it. But what did they do in the mountains?”

“They died.” Gyalo spoke in such a low whisper Shan was not sure he had heard correctly. “They whimpered like children and died.” The Tibetan pulled the photo from Shan’s hand and held it closer to the lamp, his eyes growing round.

“These were the ones,” Shan said, “the ones who-” he painfully searched for words-“who took away your robe.”

Before he could react Gyalo began ripping the photo. By the time Shan had seized it he had torn off a long strip, two inches down the left side. The Tibetan jerked free, then slowly turned and set the strip upright in a little chink in the rock wall that had been made to hold a small deity figure. Emotions filled the old man’s face as he gazed at the strip, emotions Shan had never seen there, emotions he could not name.

Shan lifted the lamp and held it close, seeing that a single figure was framed in the strip Gyalo had claimed, that of a sturdy, plain looking Chinese girl wearing a military tunic.

It took a moment for Shan to understand, then he looked away in shame. Gyalo had saved the image of the Chinese wife who had been forced upon him to break him as a monk.

Constable Jin had his feet up on his desk, staring so intently at a dog-eared Western travel magazine in his lap that he did not even notice Shan until he put his hand on Jin’s telephone. He muttered a quick curse, dropping his legs to the floor.

“I need to make a private call,” Shan declared.

“You can’t just-”

“Someone tried to kill Gyalo. His son is convinced it was Public Security.”

Jin shrugged. “Two officials have been murdered.”

“It wasn’t the knobs. Whoever did it never asked a question about the killings. They had no interest in detaining him. They left him for dead in the pit, then rifled through his old things. Things from the first uprising.”

The constable dropped the magazine onto his desk, opened to a photo of young men and women surfing along a white-sand beach lined with palm trees. “One of those Western climbers read this article to me at base camp,” Jin announced, gazing at the photo. “It says some of the experts imagine the water is snow and they are riding down a mountainside. I could do that,” Jin declared in an oddly dreamy tone. “I know how to sled.”

Shan closed the magazine.

Jin seemed not to notice. “I have a cousin who was able to get across the border without getting shot. He got a job in Thailand, in a restaurant. He says they do this there, this water riding.”

“Surfing.”

“This surfing. He says he could get me a job too if I ever got permission to leave the country.”

Shan covered the magazine with his hand. “Like you said, two officials have been murdered. Why aren’t you in the field?”

“I asked Tsipon about getting a visa to live in Thailand, or India maybe,” Jin continued in a hollow voice. “He just laughed. He said no one in law enforcement gets permission to emigrate, because we know too many secrets about the government. Tell me it isn’t true.”

“You collaborated with the American Megan Ross,” Shan declared, pushing the tone of a government prosecutor into his words. “You divulged that the mountain road was being closed for the minister, that she was going to drive alone in a car ahead of the prison bus. We could probably find a witness who will recall seeing you give her a ride to the hotel the night before.”

The blood seemed to be draining from Jin’s face.

“Revealing a secret vital to state security- to a foreigner no less.”

“It wasn’t exactly. .” Jin murmured. “I didn’t. .” He looked forlornly at the magazine.

“In this country,” Shan continued, “law enforcement officials who breach state security have been executed. When Megan Ross comes down off her mountain you’d better start running.” If he couldn’t use the American’s death to find the truth then maybe he too should start pretending she was alive.

“I can arrest you, Shan. I can ship you away.”

Shan smiled and stopped pressing. He didn’t want Jin paralyzed, just focused on their mutual problem.

“Gyalo was attacked by two men in black clothes. Hoods over their heads. Strangers. Who were they?”

“Public Security does things differently since the last uprising. They still don’t mind hauling off an entire village or gompa. But if they have to deal with an individual Tibetan, they do it in private, in the shadows.”

“Why would they want to punish Gyalo?”

Jin seemed to see an offer of hope in Shan’s words. “Last week, after Wu was murdered, he got really drunk, stinking drunk. I walked in to see him strutting along the top of the bar like a soldier, pretending to be shot, and dying, again and again as customers tossed coins. I tried to get him to stop, because I knew soldiers were coming into town soon. He laughed when I pulled him down, said he wouldn’t want to be a soldier in the mountains now, with all the ghosts coming out.”

“Ghosts?”

“He said the only demons that ever frightened the Chinese were the ones from forty years ago, the ones who had been dead all these years. He said soon they would be swarming down out of the mountains, riding on the backs of yetis.”

Shan caught the scent of smoke on Jin, saw for the first time soot stains on the shoulder of his tunic. “You haven’t said where you’ve been.”

“There was a fire. Nothing big. That cottage Tsipon loans to foreign climbers. We saved the structure, but most of the gear was lost.”

“Whose gear?”

“Tsipon’s new American customers used it when they stayed in town.”

Shan stepped to the window. He knew the little one-room cottage behind Tsipon’s depot, had helped clean it several times. He leaned toward the glass to glimpse the large building at the southern edge of town. There was indeed a thin column of smoke rising behind it.

“Who did it?”

“We are allowed to report only so many crimes, so we’re calling it an accident. Those climbers get sloppy, keeping matches and fuel canisters together.”

“Who did it?” Shan pressed.