Yates had not stumbled upon the rhythm of the mountain, Shan explained as they pulled into the dusty truckers’ compound in Yates’s red utility vehicle, but the pulse of the Friendship Highway. Shogo was strategically situated on the truckers run between the Nepalese border and Lhasa.
“It’s the natural break point. Drivers can get food and gas, then they sleep in their trucks or buy a cot in the back of the teashop. At dawn they pull out and reach their destination before nightfall. The regular drivers turn around the next morning and repeat the trip.”
“Putting them here every two days,” Yates concluded.
“Gyalo said the men who attacked him were strangers. He knows nearly everyone in town. Everyone else seems to think they were Public Security soldiers. But if they weren’t knobs,” Shan said, “they were transients.”
“So now we’re looking for murderous truck drivers? How many theories are you allowed before you admit failure?”
“Gyalo said someone watched from the shadows as he was beaten. Wu’s killer had help. Two men in black sweatshirts. Most truck drivers would know how to operate a bulldozer, and could arrive at the base camp in a small supply truck without raising suspicion. More than a few are former soldiers.”
They watched until dark, studying every truck that entered the compound, watching for those few that had pairs of drivers, then ventured inside after Yates found a hooded windbreaker to cover his features. The American uttered a low choking sound as they opened the door of the cafe to a powerful scent of grease, cabbage, cigarettes, motor oil and burned rice, then followed Shan to a table in the back corner, where they pushed aside dirty dishes and sat with their backs to the wall.
They ordered noodle soup, which was not as bad as Shan expected, and momos, which seemed to be made of cardboard.
“This is your plan?” Yates muttered. “Sit and wait for two drivers to walk up and confess?” He poked at his stale momos. “Of course they might prefer jail to these dumplings.”
“The plan,” Shan said as he spotted a familiar face exiting the cafe, “is for you to stop speaking English and sit here.” Shan grabbed a newspaper from an empty table and tossed it in front of Yates. “Pretend you read Chinese. I’ll be back.”
Shan stayed in the shadows as he exited the building, following the path that led to the latrine at the rear of the complex then stealing around the parked trucks until he reached the mechanics’ workshop at the far side of the complex. The man under the hood of a small truck was too engrossed in his work to notice Shan enter and lean against the workbench behind him.
“Last I saw him,” Shan declared, “your father was sleeping. I think he will make it.” Jomo’s head jerked up so fast it hit the lifted hood of the truck.
“They don’t allow visitors in the garage,” he groused, pulling an oily cloth from his pocket to wipe his hands.
“When I said it wasn’t Public Security who attacked your father you didn’t seem surprised.”
“I can’t afford trouble. I did a year in prison when I was younger. It still could have been the knobs. They hire people sometimes.”
“As informers, yes. But not for that kind of work. For sake of argument, let’s say it was strangers, like your father said. This is the local market for strangers, you might say, full of Tibet’s new nomads. Men looking for a little extra money, who wouldn’t be recognized.”
“Last spring when an avalanche covered one of the roads they put a sign up here and quickly hired twenty drivers for a couple of days.”
Shan nodded. “What was your year away for?”
“A disagreement over the sky.”
“The sky?”
“All my life I walked the town at night and watched the stars, would sit right in the town square and count meteors. Then someone decided to install street lights, those ugly orange vapor lamps. No more stars. I used to spend summers with shepherds when I was a boy. I have always been good at throwing stones.”
“Civic pride,” Shan suggested, “can take many forms.”
Jomo forced a slow, uneasy grin in reply.
“What if I had a special job, no questions asked? What if I wanted two men in black sweatshirts who weren’t afraid of bending the rules?”
The Tibetan turned to the bench, began sorting through a pile of wrenches. “You are the only one in town interested in saving that Chinese colonel.”
“That Chinese colonel didn’t kill Tenzin or Director Xie.”
Jomo shrugged. “Tenzin was from Nepal. And no one cries over Religious Affairs bureaucrats.”
“When the real killer finds out your father is still alive those two men will probably be sent again. If they can’t find him they will start with you.”
The Tibetan lifted a wrench and looked at Shan, as if considering whether to use it on him or the engine. “I have work to do,”
he complained, then bent over the engine again.
“If you don’t choose a side,” Shan said, “others will choose it for you.” He retreated, though only around the two vehicles in the bays, where he watched Jomo from the shadows.
After several minutes the Tibetan paused and straightened, looking toward the parking lot. He glanced around the garage, then disappeared behind a crude plank door into what no doubt was a tool storage closet. Shan gave him another minute before he followed.
The door of the closet was ajar. Shan hooked a finger around it and silently pulled it open. Jomo stood between two walls on which tools hung, facing a small workbench that had been cleared of all tools. On it sat a small Buddha, a cheap steel casting with streaks of oil on its face. The Tibetan was placing pieces of sweet biscuits in front of the Buddha, as offerings.
“I was still young when the Red Guard became active,” Shan said to his back. Jomo’s breath caught at the sound of his voice but the Tibetan did not move. “They came to my school and made the students gather up every book in a foreign language. They made us put them in a big pile in the courtyard and said we would have a beautiful cleansing fire the next day. That night I went back to school. I pulled out twenty books of history and poetry and replaced them with twenty books of the Chairman’s essays I took from the classrooms.”
“Did they find out?” Jomo asked in a whisper.
“No. But years later, after we returned from reeducation camps in the country, they found my father with Western books he had kept hidden. Some were those I rescued that day. He died from the beating they gave him. He died holding my hand, smiling at me. I always felt somehow responsible.”
“It’s hard to know the right things to do,” Jomo said, speaking toward the Buddha. “It’s hard to know how to be.”
Shan waited for the rest of the sentence then realized there was no more. “It’s hard to know,” he agreed.
“An old shepherd knew my father,” Jomo said, “before. . before everything happened. As a boy I used to run away every month or two when my father got really drunk, because he would beat me, and the shepherd gave me shelter. He told me about my father the monk, said he had been a good man who came to the herding camps each spring to bless the new lambs. He would sit at their campfires and recite sutras and the old poems for hours, then sing songs with the herding families. He said no matter what my father did, that was the man I should see in my mind, that he had been a very holy man, probably would have become the abbot when he got older, that the holy man was just lost inside him somewhere.”
“I have a friend who is a lama,” Shan whispered. “He says the holy things are still everywhere, just harder to see. Consider it a test, he says.”
They stared at the little steel Buddha. Shan found a walnut in his pocket and put it with the other offerings.
“It’s a green truck,” Jomo suddenly declared. “One of the big heavy ones. Some of those with two drivers keep going through the night, switching drivers. But when those two stop for gas they usually park with the rigs that spend the night here. Sometimes they pay for women in the back where the cots are. Sometimes they walk down the road as if to meet someone. Sometimes their rig stays parked for twenty-four hours. They’re due tonight.”