Eliot Pattison - Mandarin Gate

Shan stared at Chenmo, desperately wanting not to believe the tale but seeing in her eyes that the woman spoke the truth. He gestured her back down the hill toward the truck.

* * *

He did not bother to speak to the manager of Clear Water Camp, who was affixing a poster to the wall of his building as Shan climbed out of his truck. He felt the man’s worried gaze on his back as he marched through the gate.

“This is China’s century, Comrade!” the stout man shouted to his back. It was, word for word, the caption on the poster.

The sparse structure that Jigten shared with his mother seemed empty as Shan pulled back the burlap that shuttered the window. He knocked once on the door, then stepped inside before hearing the shallow, raspy breath and saw that what he had taken to be a pile of grey blankets on the pallet was the old woman, curled up like a sleeping cat.

He silently searched the contents of the main room, raising clouds of dust as he probed a basket of clothing, then lifted a crate used as a stool. Inside the crate a cloth bag had been tacked. It held three small hand calculators and two watches that appeared to be broken.

It was the small closet at the back of the kitchen that held Jigten’s main inventory. On its top shelf, behind a row of empty water bottles he found what he was looking for. He pulled the blue nylon backpack into the light cast by the open door, examining each of its zippered pockets. As he searched the last of them a shadow appeared in the doorway.

Jigten’s expression changed quickly from surprise to resentment as he stepped inside. “You can’t just come in and steal things,” the shepherd said in a deflated voice.

“I will take the truth where I find it,” Shan replied. “Even if it means stealing it.” The pockets of the pack were stuffed with freeze-dried food, the main compartment filled with more food, half a dozen carabiners, and a small gas stove wrapped in a windbreaker. On the inside flap was a name in black ink. Cora Michener.

“Truth.” Jigten spat the word like a curse. “Like the Chinese who dumped us in this camp said they were just interested in our welfare. I remember one prick who laughed as he shot our sheep. He asked if I could feel my chains dropping away.”

Shan extended the pack toward Jigten. “I could take this to Public Security. When they discover it belonged to their dead foreigner they will assume the worst. They are looking for someone to blame the murders on. This would be the only piece of evidence connected to the German.”

The color drained from Jigten’s face. He leaned against the wall by the door, seeming to lose strength, then slowly slid to the floor. “They were gone,” he muttered. “They weren’t coming back.”

“How did you know that?”

“The German was dead. That American was a frightened mouse in a field of cats. If I hadn’t taken the stuff someone else would have.” As he spoke Jigten extracted a small bottle of medicine from inside his vest and looked toward his sleeping mother. “I have expenses,” he whispered.

“How did you know where their camp was?”

“That girl. Sometimes a few of us would go and help at the old ruins. My mother said I should do it, that I needed to gain merit with the gods,” he said with a bitter grin. “Hauling away rubble. Patching and whitewashing that old chorten. She was there sometimes with the nuns. I thought she was a nun at first. She wore an old chuba, a shepherd’s coat, and a derby, like some Tibetan girl. I never heard her speak so I thought maybe she was under some kind of vow. But one day we were resting from hauling heavy rocks and she broke up a chocolate bar and gave us all pieces. I saw the wrapper. It was from America. She tried to respond when everyone thanked her, but her Tibetan was terrible.”

“So you followed her, like you followed Jamyang to his shrine.”

“My grandfather said you always need to know the land. He knew every stream, every rabbit burrow, every wolf den. ‘You can’t be sure of someone,’ he would say, ‘until you know where they sleep at night.’” He glanced up at Shan. “I didn’t follow from the convent. They were usually given a ride in the truck with the monks, to the bottom of the Thousand Steps. I went to the nun’s hermitage and watched. Hell, Westerners like that throw away things that would be worth a month’s wages to one of us.”

Shan fingered the seams of the nylon pack. “Where are the pictures?”

“I never saw pictures.”

“Little cards with cartridges in plastic cases.”

Jigten shrugged. “No good to me. A bunch of plastic. Not real things.”

“So you saw them, and left them?”

The shepherd slowly nodded. “No good to me,” he repeated.

“How many cameras?”

“One for video. One for photographs.”

“Where are they?”

“Gone.”

“Where exactly? Did they have photos stored in them?”

Jigten’s expression hardened. “Who knows? Even if anyone in Clear Water Camp had money to buy such things, no one knows how to use them.”

“So you would take them to Baiyun?” Shan studied Jigten a moment. The exiled professors in Baiyun could hardly afford such luxuries. “The Jade Crows. Lung’s gang. They would know how to move such things on the black market.”

Jigten frowned. “I won’t do anything that gets people in more trouble. Everyone in that town made someone in Beijing angry too, like us. That’s life in Tibet. Everyone in Tibet has someone in Beijing angry at them. All that matters is who’s angry and how deep their anger is.”

It was, Shan thought, the wisest thing he had ever heard Jigten say.

The dropka looked up with a desolate expression. “How mad are you?” he asked.

The words hurt more than Jigten could have known. He gazed at the shepherd in silence, not having the strength to tell him that if the police found out about the cameras anyone who had touched them could disappear. He tossed the pack toward Jigten. “You must get that name off the pack,” he said, then sat on the doorsill. “Cut it off. Don’t just black it out with more ink, for they will have ways to see what’s underneath. Don’t get caught with it like that.”

Jigten looked uncertainly at Shan. “You won’t tell the knobs?”

“I won’t tell the knobs.” Shan hated the fear in the man’s eyes. Had Lokesh been with him, the old Tibetan would have found a way to bring a smile to the man’s face. But alone Shan only brought fear.

“Don’t go,” Jigten said after a brittle silence. “Don’t go to Lung today.”

“They already burned their leader’s body. I saw the pyre yesterday.”

“Not that. One of the young ones, that Genghis, was beaten real bad. By knobs working for that Major Liang. The Jade Crows thought the Armed Police would keep them protected as usual. But not this time, not now, not from Liang.”

Shan hesitated, searching Jigten’s face. “I need to know about the camp on the other side of the mountain, Jigten. The one with razor wire and machine guns. You said you drive supplies there sometimes for the Jade Crows. I want to know about the trucks. I want to know about their schedules.”

Jigten shook his head grimly from side to side. “You don’t talk about demons. It makes them more powerful.”

“I have friends there behind the wire.”

“No you don’t. Not anymore.” Jigten saw the uncertainty on Shan’s face, then glanced uneasily toward his sleeping mother. “There was one of our clan, the son of our headman, who carried on the old ways, learned all the tales of the grandfathers and the songs from hearths before time. He was our strength, the one who made us believe in ourselves. He was always telling us the Chinese were just visitors in our land, that we were the true people, just like yaks and sheep were the true animals of the changtang, and no one in Beijing could ever change that. But he spoke too many times in front of caravans and other travelers. One day they came and took him away to a pacification camp like that one on the other side of the mountain. He wrote us at first, said he was fine, that he would be back in a few months. Then the letters stopped coming. We told his mother, who was blind, that the letters still came, even pretended to read some to her. It would have broken the heart of the old ones to know the truth. Two years later his nephew found him begging in some town.” Jigten glanced back toward his mother. “He could barely walk. They broke his feet. They broke something in his head. He had no more songs, except those party anthems he kept singing under his breath instead of his mantras. No more laughter, no more light in his eyes.”