Eliot Pattison - Mandarin Gate

The colonel exhaled two sharp columns of smoke from his nostrils. “It has to do with the murders up here.”

“I don’t think they’ve been officially recognized as such.”

Tan ignored him. “With your unofficial meddling in these unofficial murders. Damn you, you can never leave things alone. It’s a Public Security matter. You know I have no authority.”

Shan recognized the ice in the colonel’s voice, knew the heat of his temper could burn hotter than any taser. He took an unsteady step and lowered himself onto a boulder. “A dead German. A missing American. If you are lucky you have maybe two or three weeks before foreigners are all over your county. First the embassies. Then the reporters.”

Tan inhaled deeply on his cigarette. “How many years does he have left?”

Shan’s heart sagged. Tan knew ways to torture him that Liang could never dream of. “Ten years. Ko has ten years left.”

“With one short message I could have him shipped to another prison. Manchuria. The Gobi. The jungle. If you started right away, you probably wouldn’t even locate him in ten years. But then you have no papers so you’d probably be picked up too.”

“I have the work papers you gave me.”

“Exactly. They would call my office. Everytime I hear your name I will have your son transferred again. When he’s released he will have no idea where you are. The two of you will grow old trying to find each other, wandering around China. Like one of those old tragic operas.”

Shan struggled to control his pain, and his despair. Liang would invent threats, just to intimidate those he questioned. Tan never made idle threats. He would do it. He would consider it his duty to do so. “The murders happened in Lhadrung County,” Shan said. “When the foreigners arrive, they will start with you.”

“We will not permit them to come.”

“You know those foreign reporters. They will just get in a car and start driving. Refuse them and they just get more persistent. You can’t imprison them. Turn one away and two come back. Someone will ask why the locals call the districts in the northern county Tan’s Hellhole. How many prisons do you have now? Ten? A dozen? They will discover your penal colony. Better hope some American politician is caught with a mistress that day, or you’ll be on every front page in the West.”

“Public Security knows how to deal with such things.”

“You of all people expect Public Security to find the truth?”

Tan frowned. “I said they would deal with it.”

“Liang is one of those who searches for the most convenient solution. You are familiar with the type if I am not mistaken.” The year before Shan had saved Tan from another overzealous knob who had jailed him for murder. Tan owed Shan his life, and hated Shan for it.

Tan gazed at him in silence, took a long draw on his cigarette, and flung the butt over the ledge. “I will leave you at the clinic in Baiyun. If you trouble me again I won’t even give you a chance to say good-bye to your son.”

* * *

The nurse who managed the clinic shook her head as she studied Shan’s hand. Every time she straightened his fingers they curled back, digging into his palm.

“There’s nerve damage,” she declared. “You should go to Lhasa for a scan. Who knows what damage there is to your brain.” She had cleaned the oozing burn on his scalp where Liang had pressed the taser.

“I thought perhaps a couple of aspirin,” Shan said.

“Does it hurt?”

“Like a blade is in my skull, twisting back and forth.”

The Chinese woman frowned. “You must rest. Take a week off. You could kill yourself if you push hard.”

He heard the door open behind him. The assistant in the office had been furious when Tan’s guards had shoved Shan in ahead of the half-dozen patients waiting there.

The nurse frowned and handed him an unlabeled bottle of red pills. “Go home. Let your family nurse you.”

“An excellent suggestion,” came a voice behind him.

Shan turned to see Professor Yuan at his shoulder. “Shall we go, Xiao Shan?” the professor asked with a sweep of his hand toward the door. Xiao Shan. It was how an uncle might address the younger members of his family.

“I can’t…” Shan murmured.

“You can,” Yuan insisted, and pulled him up from the exam table. “You will. We have a dilemma we need you to resolve.”

Shan followed in a fog of pain and fatigue. A quarter hour later he collapsed on a bed in the professor’s house, having swallowed a bowl of broth and two of the red pills.

When he awoke it was dark. A candle burned by his bed. He looked out at the moon. He had slept for at least ten hours. The scalding pain in his head was gone, replaced with a dull ache. He extended his fingers. On one hand they stayed straight, on the other they instantly curled back up. He tried to stand, and fell back on the bed. For a long time he stared at the floor as memories of his imprisonment returned, then he reached inside his shirt and straightened the wad of paper he had retrieved from the wastebasket. It was a blank prisoner assignment form. Meng had not thrown out his letter. She had performed a charade for the surveillance camera to save his letter to Ko.

From the sitting room he heard gentle laughter and the sound of several voices speaking in Chinese. With a strange awkwardness he approached the door, then hesitated, looking about the room as if for the first time. There was a dresser with framed photos of a much younger Yuan with his wife and daughter Sansan, several of Sansan alone. There were three sheets of graceful calligraphy pinned to the wall, lines from ancient poems, beside pegs hung with clothing.

He steadied himself on the back of a chair, fighting a new wave of emotion. This was how the home of a family looked. Never in Shan’s life had he had such a place, such a home, and he knew that he probably never would. He forced himself to look away, then opened the door, stepped out, and froze.

Four men and a woman, all in their late sixties or seventies, sat around the table. A pall of tobacco smoke hung over the candlelit room. A bottle of cheap rice wine and glasses were on the table, in the center of which were several dice and a bundle of sticks. It was a scene of his youth, when the older inhabitants of his block stayed up into the small hours of the morning, tossing numbers to consult the I Ching. It was a timeless scene, a fixture of Chinese villages for centuries.

Professor Yuan looked up from the table. “Xiao Shan! Please come sit with us! We are eager for your advice.”

As the professor introduced Shan to his companions Shan realized he had seen most of them before, playing chess or checkers in the town square.

“The hero of the hammer,” proclaimed the oldest of the men, a nearly bald man with thick horn-rimmed glasses. “You know, they wrapped a white canvas around the statue afterwards. In the moonlight he is the ghost of Baiyun.” He lifted his glass of wine to Shan. “They will replace him eventually. But because of you we will always see it as just another ghost. A noseless ghost,” he said with a wheezing laugh. “We salute you for being brave enough to do what each of us has dreamed of doing ever since they put that damned statue up.”

Shan silently accepted a glass of wine and sat beside the professor. “You mentioned a dilemma?”

“Our little society strives to better understand the old ways. I know you are well versed in tradition.” Yuan gestured to a long scroll of paper opened and weighed down with books at each end. The elderly woman was painting with watercolors on the thick parchment. The images progressed from skyscrapers and city blocks shaded with trees to trains and mountains, then yaks and donkeys. With a flash of excitement he realized she was recording the story of the Harbin exiles in the scroll painting style that had been used to chronicle events during the imperial reigns. He had seen the scroll before, when Yuan had hidden it behind his back to keep the knobs from discovering it. “We have been debating a point of court ceremony,” Yuan explained.