The fight went out of the knobs. They gazed at Major Cao as Shan pulled Jomo out of their grip. But it was not Major Cao who spoke.

The silent Madame Zheng finally found her voice, the cool, peremptory one of a woman who would brook no discussion of her commands. “The American is bleeding, Major. Get your medical kit.”

Cao glared at Shan, seemed about to strike him again, then retreated as Madame Zheng stepped to Shan’s side.

Shan spoke matter-of-factly to the woman from Beijing as he watched Cao jog away. “I want to see Colonel Tan,” he stated. “Now. I want him to have a meal, a real meal, sitting in one of the front offices with a window onto the street.” Zheng gazed at Shan attentively without responding. “I want the major to stand outside the window, under a streetlight, where Tan can see him.”

Chapter Fourteen

Tan did not notice Shan at first when they brought him into the office, washed and wearing tattered but clean prisoner denims. Although the guards had removed the chains on his feet, he moved into the room with the half steps of the prisoner accustomed to hobbles. He halted, looking down his feet, then saw Shan. His face flushed and he looked away.

“The barber came today,” Tan announced in a flat tone as he reached the window and, as Shan knew he would, as every prisoner did after days in a cell, looked up at the sky. After a moment he gestured to the plate and steaming cartons of food on the desk. “I thought I would be allowed to select my own last meal.”

“Consider this a dress rehearsal,” Shan said. He studied the colonel. Although he stood almost straight, something in his back was preventing him from reaching his usual ramrod posture. A finger was splinted and taped. The tips of four other fingers were covered with bandages. The left side of his face was gray-green with old bruises.

Tan sat with a ceremonial air, letting Shan dish out the food as his left hand squeezed his right, to stop it from twitching. Shan watched him eat, wary that his words might ignite the colonel’s instinctive rancor. After several minutes of ravenously consuming the chicken, noodles, and vegetable rolls Tan paused and, without looking at Shan, pushed the container with the remaining rolls toward him. Shan lifted the container without a word and ate.

When Shan finally found his tongue he spoke into the empty container. “I was only a boy when the Red Guard first appeared,” he said in a low voice. “They started with those sound trucks cruising along the streets, shouting out the Chairman’s verses or demands for people to assemble for political instruction. Sometimes they ordered everyone to surrender things. Books. Anything made in a foreign country. Any correspondence from abroad. Photos of foreigners. I remember an old man down the hall who had a wooden figure of a horse maybe ten inches high, his pride and joy, sent by a cousin who had gone to live in America. They had a trial for that horse in the street, condemned it as a reactionary and beheaded it with an ax. I kept wanting to laugh but my mother was crying. She put her hand over my mouth. After that whenever the soundtrucks came, my mother burst into tears.”

Tan’s hand absently went to his shirt pocket and came away empty. Shan stepped to the door, spoke to the guard, and a moment later a package of cigarettes and matches were tossed onto the desk.

“I wasn’t supposed to be one of them,” the colonel said after he lit a cigarette. “I was just a soldier, a corporal at one of the new nuclear test facilities, at the edge of the desert north of Tibet. They came through in convoys of trucks, with orders from Beijing to go south and construct a new socialist order in the land of the Buddha. It was like they were going on an extended vacation, a party on wheels. They sang songs about the Chairman, held rallies that went on for hours. They scared the hell out of the officers but we were under orders from the Chairman himself to cooperate. They got anything they wanted. Food. Blankets. Weapons, and men who knew how to use them. I was told to escort them to Lhasa. They stopped in towns along the route, organizing processions of old men and women and encouraging their children and grandchildren to throw eggs at them. They forced people into town squares and renamed all their children with Chinese names or conducted struggle sessions with landlords. When I started to turn back in Lhasa their commanders told me the army was for old men, that I could be part of the past or part of the future, that I could be one of the anointed of Mao if I chose.”

He turned and faced the window, still speaking in a wooden voice. “They were more organized by then, with brigades and a command structure. The commander of my brigade demanded the most difficult assignment, so we could prove our love for the Great Helmsman.” Tan’s hand twitched again, flinging ash against the glass.

“Tingri County.”

Tan nodded. “It was a wilderness, a wild frontier. No maps. No real organized government. Vicious yetis and snow leopards that swallowed men whole, if you believed the stories. A reactionary with a gun behind every rock. The town was nothing like this,” he said with a gesture toward the street. “It was mostly just the monastery and a few shops. Army patrols came through sometimes, often with wounded men, sometimes with trucks stacked with the dead from an ambush. They wouldn’t stay. Our Youth Brigade scared them as much as the reactionaries did.

“We settled in, took over the main halls of the monastery. But we didn’t touch the monks, not at first. Our commander was too smart for that. If we had attacked the main monastery first the local people would have wiped us out. She knew we had to do things in stages. Destroy the small fish and the big ones have nothing to feed on, she liked to say. We moved into the ranges.” Tan paused, fidgeting with the frayed cuff of his denim shirt. “I thought you said I’d have my uniform in the end.”

Shan knew this was the only reason Tan was talking. He was certain he was going to die. “It has to be cleaned.”

Tan nodded.

“So Commander Wu began to engage the rebels,” Shan suggested.

“I don’t recall saying it was Wu.”

“I’ve seen the old records, Colonel.”

Tan shrugged. “After the first year we got more equipment, had soldiers assigned to us. No one would say no to her. She had the energy of wildcat, she was smart, she was beautiful. She made me a lieutenant, in charge of her military operations, enticed me into her bed. We would go into the mountains and make the local people dismantle their own religious buildings, every shrine, every little monastery, and organize new cooperatives, hold struggle sessions with all the senior monks and landowners, discipline anyone who resisted. We were gods, she would say to me at night when we lay together.”

Tan took a long draw on his cigarette, exhaling slowly. “We were children,” he said in a whisper, then looked out the window, his gaze lingering on the figure of Major Cao, who leaned against a car on the opposite side of the street. Shan did not miss the subtle relaxation in the muscles of his jaw, the reaction he expected when Tan saw his interrogator was outside the building. “Who would have thought that she and I would come back after all these years to die here?”

“Were there foreigners in the mountains?” Shan asked.

Tan shrugged again. “Foreign equipment. There were always rumors that Americans were coming, that Americans were being diverted from Vietnam and would parachute onto every mountain. She got film footage of the war in Vietnam and made us watch it, again and again, so we would know the imperialist enemy.” He drew deeply on his cigarette, blew the smoke toward Cao outside. “I never saw any foreigners. It was bad enough with just the rebels. They were magnificent. Four Rivers, Six Ranges, they called their army. They were eagles swooping down to engage fields of crows. Disappearing into their secret mountain nests. Climbing like mountain goats. Coming out of snowstorms like ghosts. But we could always call in more troops, always shoot more Tibetans on suspicion of collaboration. An eagle might defeat the first hundred crows, and the next hundred, but when the hundreds keep coming eventually they will be picking eagle bones.”