Eliot Pattison - Mandarin Gate

Shan was beginning to glimpse the depth of the woman’s pain. “No. It had nothing to do with the robe, Cora. You fell. You needed help.”

“And he is in this awful prison because of it.”

“Lokesh and I know what a prison is. This is more like a retreat for like-minded people.”

A spark seemed to flicker in the woman’s eyes for a moment, then faded. “People are dying.”

Shan nodded. “You and Rutger were right in wanting the world to know about such places.”

Cora looked up in alarm, seeming about to deny Shan’s suggestion, but then she looked away, back at her beads. A single tear rolled down her cheek. “Rutger was the photographer. I was the artist who sketched faces. I began to do so on scrap paper. I have thirty pages already. I could sketch a whole book of the faces I have seen here.”

“You must do so,” Shan said. “Give them to the world.”

“I was going to wrap them in a cloth and throw them over the wire in the hope someone would find them.”

“That’s not what Rutger would want.”

It was the wrong thing to say. At the mention of Rutger’s name the woman’s face tightened. She pressed back against the wall, seeming to shrink before his eyes. Her knuckles holding the beads were white.

“You need to let me help you, Cora,” Shan said.

She shook her head slowly and began rocking back and forth.

“Please. You don’t understand the danger you face. We haven’t much time. It will be dawn soon.”

She seemed unaware of their presence now. She rocked like a small frightened child. Shan and Lokesh exchanged a worried glance. The risk that they would be discovered by the guards increased every minute.

When the American opened her eyes they seemed to have no focus. Then slowly her rocking stopped and she was looking over the lantern. Lokesh’s hand was facing downward, with his thumb and little finger spread, the middle fingers curled toward the thumb.

“It’s one of those hand prayers,” she said.

“A mudra,” Shan confirmed. “It is the sign of giving refuge, Cora. On the long winter nights when we lay shivering and starving in the gulag the old lamas would light a candle. One would walk with it along the bunks while another made a mudra. It was like a holy thing, like a relic brought to life. They would teach us to focus on it, to forget all else but the mudra of the night. It kept some of the prisoners alive.”

Cora looked back at Shan. “Gulag?”

“Lokesh spent much of his life in prison, because he had been in the Dalai Lama’s government.” Lokesh kept looking at the woman with a serene expression, his hand still in the mudra. “These are his words to you,” Shan said. “He and I offer you refuge. You can sketch all of his mudras. Chenmo will help. He could tell you of the old days, and of prison. It could be your book.”

“Refuge? No one gets out. They just keep adding more and more prisoners.”

“I need you to help me find out about the murders. You can’t do it here. I need you safe, away from Public Security. Then you can tell me about that day. You were there, weren’t you?”

She took so long to answer his question he was not sure she had heard. “I have so many nightmares I don’t want to sleep anymore. The abbess calls to me in the night. Sometimes I wonder which is my nightmare and which is my memory. It’s like I was there and not there.”

“You were there, Cora,” Shan assured her. “And you need to remember. For Rutger’s sake. You saw the one who did it.”

“You mean the monster. The thing.”

“The monster. The killer. Yes.”

Cora seemed to shrink again. Once more she began rocking back and forth. “Rutger says the colors have to be just right. You can’t just paint the old walls red. There’s a special shade like maroon, like good Tibetan soil. The Tibetans have pigments they save for such things. Prayer red, he calls it. I painted a gate with the wrong shade and he wants me to redo it. The abbess will help. She teaches me old rhymes for the rhythm of the brush.”

Shan’s skin crawled. A dry, creaking laugh escaped her throat. “The abbess found a patch of blooming wildflowers above the ruins. We’re going to quit early so we can take a meal there. A picnic, I told them. The abbess repeated the word several times like a mantra. Picnic, picnic, picnic. She laughed.

“She wanted to finish painting the cradle of that old wheel. Rutger was going to help her, though she kept telling him to go to the back of the grounds. Someone was coming, and he might scare the man. I said I would go sketch some of the paintings inside the little chapels.” Cora’s voice trailed away and she began reciting her mantra again.

“A Chinese man named Lung was coming,” Shan said. “Who else?”

But Cora did not hear him. She had gone to a distant, terrifying place. Tears were flowing down her cheeks. “I should never have left. I had decided to carry the food out to the place with flowers. I saw the one come on his bicycle but that couldn’t be the one they were worried about, I thought. I sat in the flowers, waiting. They were taking so long. I went back down. They were praying by the chorten, I thought. That one didn’t see me. He is talking to them now, all angry at them. But they won’t speak back. He was bent over Rutger, I thought to help him somehow. He had a red rag in his hand. I thought they must have spilled the red paint on themselves. Then he turned with Rutger’s head on his knee and I saw what he had done. It was Rutger’s face in his hand. The blood didn’t show on that one because of the color.

“I ran. He called out but I was already at the back wall. I ran. I fell. I ran some more. I didn’t know where I was going. I must have run for hours.”

He did not speak until her tears had dried.

“You have to trust Lokesh and me, Cora. I will get you out. We will take you to a safe place. Not the hermitage, because the nuns are being watched. Perhaps the monks. Lokesh and I will get you to the monastery, to Chegar.”

Cora shrank back. Her eyes filled with fear again. “Don’t you understand? I told you!”

“Told me what?” Shan asked.

“I didn’t see all the blood because it blended with the robe. Take me to the monastery and I will die! The butcher was a monk.”

Ani Ama refused to cooperate with Shan’s plan. She raised a hand, cutting him off. “My place is here,” the nun said. “There are the sick. Now wounded are being brought in, from riots somewhere.” It was the middle of the night. She sat beside a dead woman as two other women worked a canvas shroud around the body.

“What if you could do more for them on the outside?” Shan asked. “What if there was a way to make the world see what was going on here? Once there was even a hint that international representatives may visit you know there would be real medical care, real food.”

“No,” she insisted. “Do not pretend that I have such power.”

“The American and German governments have such power. They will show it, when Cora arrives home with stories of the camp, and the story of a murdered German and a murdered abbess.”

The old nun stood up and placed a hand on the dead woman’s brow, murmuring a blessing before the shroud was pulled over her head. “Nothing to do with me,” she said to Shan.

“The abbess has been calling out to Cora,” Shan said to her back. “There is only one way for the abbess to move on to what she deserves.”

Ani Ama halted. “You don’t think I pray for that every night?”

“One of the young monks of Chegar said he hears her moaning, echoing across the hills in the darkest hours. The abbess is wandering lost, unable to understand what has happened to them.” The nun slowly turned toward Shan as he spoke. “A terrible shadow is falling on all those who wear robes in the valley. Help me find the truth. The American was there, at the convent. Leave with us and we will find the killer together.”