“And you were lord of the crows.”

“Deputy lord of the crows,” Tan corrected, and lit another cigarette.

“You had a different kind of cigarette back then,” Shan observed as Tan exhaled a plume of smoke.

Tan winced. “She called it a symbol of class struggle. At one struggle session with old monks she rolled up prayers and forced them to smoke them like cigars. After a while it became something of a habit. She passed them out to everyone on the tribunals.”

“When you arrived at the hotel, she wasn’t receiving any visitors, so you found a way to make sure she knew it was you. Why did you want to see her?”

Tan shrugged. “It had been over thirty years.”

“You could have had lunch together. Instead you sent her a rolled-up peche page and met in her room.”

Tan faced the window. “She sent me a letter last year, saying she had never married, that she and I had been married to the People’s Republic. I thought she might have changed, mellowed.” He glanced back at Shan. “I seem to recall you were married once.”

“My wife started out mellow. Then she married the government.” Shan saw the beginning of one of the cold grins he had often seen on Tan’s face but it ended in a grimace.

“She had covered her lamp like some teenager. There was a bottle of wine. She always expected tribute. In the last year of the brigade she started demanded payment from villagers to spare their homes from destruction.” Tan shrugged again. “As soon as I saw her, she began rattling off statistics, of the number of employees she had in her ministry, her budget, the foreign exchange earnings her work brought in. She began drinking, urging me to join her. I told her I needed to go. She unbuttoned her blouse. She said we should play like the old days, like we had learned to do in this very town. I told her I was tired from the long drive. That’s when she took my pistol, to play with. She used to carry one of those heavy American pistols we captured from the rebels, using it as a gavel at the tribunals, and for executions when the Hammer and Lightning Brigade took prisoners. She put it under her pillow and said I would have to come back for it the next night when I was rested.”

Tan paused and inhaled deeply on his cigarette. “Why did he do that, that monk in the cell? Why would he leap out to take the blow meant for me?”

“It was his way of acknowledging the truth. He knew you didn’t deserve it. And he doubted if you could take many more blows.”

Tan shook his head. “The fool.”

“What happened in the end?” Shan asked after a long silence. “How were the rebels finally beaten?”

Tan turned back toward the window, his face clouding. “Damn you! What are you doing to me? I don’t talk like this to people.”

“We used to talk about death all the time in prison, not with fear but with curiosity. It was among us all the time, it was like an old companion. A herder in our barracks told us that when a man senses death getting close a door opens inside his spirit and releases the most interesting surprises, that old forgotten truths will find their way out. When he lay dying, he kept talking about a white yak he had seen as a boy, said that he could see it flying down from a cloud to take him away. He had half the barracks watching the sky, trying to spot it.”

Tan watched Major Cao, who paced along the sidewalk. Cao began yelling at a Tibetan boy approaching on a bicycle, ordering him into the street. When the confused boy did not comply Cao kicked the bike as it passed, catapulting the boy over the handlebars, smashing the bike into a light pole. The boy pulled himself up, glanced at Cao with terror in his eyes and ran into the night.

Tan clenched his jaw. “I don’t want him touching my body afterward.”

“I don’t expect to be invited to the occasion,” Shan observed.

“They usually have a cleanup squad,” Tan said in a distant voice. “They take a picture before they dispose of the body. It’s the last thing that goes in the file.”

“I could notify your family. A brother? A cousin? An old neighbor?”

“There is no one. There’s you.” He glanced at Shan self-consciously. “Not that you’re a friend,” he hastened to add. “It’s just that you’re. . reliable. An honorable enemy.”

“What happened in the end?” Shan tried again. “Where the rebels were finally defeated.”

“We wore them out. The American government stopped supplying them. If a village supported the rebels we bulldozed it. If a herder gave them food we machine gunned his herd. That Tibetan leader in India summoned them across the border, sending a tape of a speech asking them to lay down their arms.”

“You mean the Dalai Lama,” Shan said. The name was taboo to officials in Tibet.

“The Dalai Lama,” Tan agreed in a whisper, then repeated the name with a perverse, oddly pleased expression. The two men had entered new territory, someplace they had never been. “There was a last group,” Tan continued, “the core, the best fighters, maybe twenty or thirty men and women. Wu hated them. She was impatient for her final victory, for the destruction of the big monastery here in town because the monks there continued to hold public ceremonies in defiance of her orders. She kept asking me when I would have their bodies for her to display in the town square. But they always retreated high into the mountains, into their eagle nests. They had hiding places, where they disposed of the bodies of their comrades so we would never know the effects of our bullets. None of the Youth Brigade would join me, they were getting scared. They knew so little of real fighting that they were often killed when they tried to engage the rebels. But by then there were border commandos being deployed here. I was given two companies of real soldiers. Finally we reached the rebels through the back door.”

The words hung in the air. “Are you saying,” Shan asked, “that there was a traitor?”

“Officially,” Tan replied, “someone made a heroic conversion to the socialist cause.”

Shan’s mind raced. It was, he realized, the link to all the pieces of his puzzle. “Who was it?”

“No idea. Wu brokered the deal. By then she and I were not so close. I had started sleeping in the army barracks when the infantry moved to town. She gave me directions, where we could find them, with a very specific hand-drawn map, showing a secret path. There was a village that was not to be touched. It wasn’t easy to find their hiding place. Two of my soldiers died on the climb. But we surprised them as they ate breakfast, killed half right away, and chased most of the others across the border. They officially named me a hero, took me back into the army, made me a real officer.”

“A village?”

“Tumkot. We were not to touch it, just march through without a word. The next morning we took truckloads of food up to it, and in the afternoon lined up howitzers and began leveling the gompa here in town.”

“As if there had been a trade,” Shan suggested after a moment. “The village for the gompa.”

“As if there had been a trade,” Tan agreed.

“Wu was going to order all the monks inside, to trap them there when the shells fell. But the bastards beat us to it. She was furious.”

“You mean,” Shan guessed, “that they didn’t have to be ordered inside.”

“Right. Most of them went inside as soon as they saw us getting the guns ready. Later I realized they had been expecting it for months. They locked the doors from the inside and a monk went up the wall over the gate to throw the key down as the shells starting landing. We probably killed them all in the first half hour but she kept the barrage up for half a day.”

They sat in silence, watching the stars over the town.

“A crow picking at the bones of starved, scrawny eagles,” Tan said in a near whisper.

“I’m sorry?”

“It’s not what I set out to be.”

It was the most extraordinary thing Tan had ever said to him. A dozen replies occurred to Shan. It was the opening for the kind of conversation Shan had with lamas, in the night. But then he studied Tan and reconsidered. “Where were you, Colonel, the day the minister died?”