Eliot Pattison - Mandarin Gate

“I don’t know,” Yuan said with a worried glance back toward the bedroom. “No. The first were just some of those Armed Police. They ordered us all out on the street with megaphones. They’re not as subtle.”

“Bodies from a murder scene were stolen from the store’s meat locker. The first time they were trying to find them.”

The professor returned Shan’s gaze without expression. He knew about the murders. Shan looked back to the grey vehicles on the street, then surveyed the room again. “The Armed Police were looking for dead bodies,” Shan observed. “But these knobs were looking for a live one.”

The professor said nothing, just frowned, opened the door, and gestured Shan out of his house.

Shan watched the high ridge with worry as he walked back to his truck. The night before, Lokesh had not been at the little house in the hills they had claimed for their home. He should have returned by now. Had his old friend stayed with the flesh cutters to perform more rituals for his dead friend? Or was he back at Jamyang’s shrine now, purifying it after the stain of suicide? Shan prayed that he had stayed with the flesh cutters. The upper valley was overflowing with police. Meng had reported that Liang was already dispatching patrols into the high valleys. The long prayer horns had sounded again at dawn, as if taunting the searchers. They would keep expanding their search. The gentle old Tibetan would be like fresh meat before such hungry dogs.

He was lost in his worries as he opened the door and settled behind the wheel, was not even aware of the youth waiting beside him until the tattooed hand seized his wrist.

“You’re taking me for a ride,” the stranger growled. A long folding knife, a switchblade, appeared in his other hand. He did not bother to open it. “Exactly where I say, Old Mao. No questions.”

Old Mao. It was slang of the Chinese cities, used by street gangs for grey-suited bureaucrats.

Shan turned toward the stranger. He was barely out of his teens, not much younger than his own son, who had once led a street gang. He had seen him before, carrying a sack of rice. “If you raised your sleeve,” Shan asked conversationally, “would I see a black bird?”

The back of the stranger’s hand slammed into his jaw. It was answer enough. Shan shook off the pain and started the truck.

Like so many others in the county, the old farm compound had been abandoned years earlier, a victim of the early campaigns against landowners after the Chinese army had arrived. The fields had gone to brush and small trees, the stone stable at the top of the old pasture above the house had weeds growing out of its roof. A crib for storing grain had been partially dismantled. To one side a tall roof had been raised on poles, under which the cabs of two heavy trucks were parked. A man with grease on his face looked up from an open engine compartment as Shan pulled to a stop.

The house, built in the traditional style with quarters for animals below and humans above, also seemed to have been untouched for years. Its windows were cracked, the protector deity painted on the wall by the entry so faded as to be almost unrecognizable. But inside, a fresh coat of whitewash reflected the light of several hanging lanterns.

Two Chinese youths at the end of the chamber looked up as Shan was pushed toward the staircase. One, with a cigarette dangling from his lips, held a knife in his hand, the other was extracting a knife from the wall. An old cloth thangka , a painting of one of the sacred female dakinis elegantly rendered in shades of blue and gold, had been hung as a target. She was torn and sliced into fragments. They had been throwing their blades at her head. For a moment Shan forgot everything else as he stared at the scene. He fought the temptation to dart forward and pull the painting from the wall. Lokesh would have stood in front of the dakini to protect her.

One of the youths noticed Shan’s expression. His lips curled in a sneer. “ Cao ni mai! ” “Fuck your mother.”

His escort pushed him up the stairs, into what could have passed for a brothel in any eastern city. The plank walls of the upper floor were covered with gaudy silk screen hangings, images of fighting dragons, fighting roosters, fighting serpents, and scantily clad women frolicking with pandas. The scent of onions and steamed rice mingled with incense, not Tibetan ritual incense but a cloying mix of jasmine and cinnamon. A bright lantern was suspended over a table where four men played mahjong.

“They say you know that lama who lives alone up on the mountain.” The man who spoke waved the others from the table. He was in his forties, a compact figure with long black hair and the hard, small face of a jungle warrior.

Shan took a seat across from him before replying. “Since when do the Jade Crows care about hermits?”

“Back home we count monks among our best customers.”

“You’re a long way from Yunnan.” Shan glanced at the other men, who stood in the shadows as if awaiting orders.

“Fresh mountain air. It does us all good.” The man lit a cigarette.

“The lama was a friend of mine. He died.”

The stranger hesitated. “Died? Jamyang died? When?”

“The same day as those at the convent. I didn’t know the others.”

The man’s eyes flattened as he studied Shan, like those of a coiling snake. “You only got to know them after they died. You stood over them at the convent, sought them out in that meat locker, sought out naked dead people. Back home we could arrange for you to do it on a weekly basis. Big money in fetishes.” He exhaled a plume of smoke in Shan’s face. “Except it was my brother you treated like a piece of meat.”

“I do not know what happened to the bodies if that’s what you want to know.”

“The head of our clan deserved better.”

The head of the clan. The dead man had been the head of the Jade Crows. “No one deserves to have their head cut from their neck,” Shan replied.

The words brought a snarl to the man’s face.

Shan glanced at the cold, expectant faces of the men who watched him. Early in his career Shan had pursued an investigation to Yunnan, where much of the population was only two or three generations removed from the warrior tribes who once ruled the province’s jungles. His case had been dropped after his informant had been tortured and killed. Bamboo splints had been pounded under the man’s fingernails before his throat had been slashed. Shan had insisted on seeing the photographs of the dead man, and paid for it with several sleepless nights. “I am not the killer.”

“You?” the gang leader spat with a cold laugh. “Three competitors jumped my brother once and he sent one to his grave and the others to the hospital. I am Lung Tso. My brother was Lung Ma. People in Kunming quake at the name of the Lung brothers.” Lung studied Shan in silence, taking in his tattered clothes. “A man like you doesn’t take out a Jade Crow.”

“What kind of man does?” Shan asked.

Lung’s hand reached below the table. There was a blur of movement and his fist hammered a dagger into the table an inch from Shan’s hand. Shan did not move. “You were not brought here to ask us questions! I want what is ours returned!”

“I am the ditch inspector for the northern townships. You have me confused with someone else.”

Shan braced himself as Lung sprang from his chair. He pulled the dagger from the wood then aimed the point at Shan’s throat. “You may wear the clothes of a ditch inspector and drive the truck of the ditch inspector but I can see your eyes. And you were at the old convent with those bodies. We can see you talking with that damned knob lieutenant. You are no ditch inspector. Why would a ditch inspector be at the murder scene? You’re a fucking informer. Who do you work for? Not the Armed Police, I know that much.”