Eliot Pattison - Mandarin Gate

Shan stared at him in surprise. “You said that?”

“I said it was my patriotic duty to point it out. He wound up providing another truck, a better one he said. Instead of a thirty-year-old piece of shit I have a twenty-year-old piece of shit.” Lung studied Shan. “But I could just as easily been thrown inside the wire if someone had seen me ignite the oily rags I put in the engine, or if they had been organized enough for head counts to show they were missing prisoners. We’re finished, Shan. No more favors. Get out. Don’t make me show you my blade again.”

Shan ignored the threat. “You were ready to torture me because you thought I took something from your brother’s body. What did you think it was?”

Lung drained his glass. “I don’t know. That lama gave him something. I wanted it, to understand what happened. It can’t just have been that piece of paper. Sure, it showed someone was tracking our smuggling but that wasn’t enough to transform him. It was like the lama worked some kind of damned magic, the way he changed my brother.”

“When did Jamyang come back?”

“The day before my brother died. They went up to that shrine of his in the old stable. They were there for an hour or more, then my brother stayed up there another hour after the lama left. When he came back in he had something small wrapped in a piece of felt. He wouldn’t show me, wouldn’t talk with me.”

The fire striker gave a metallic ring when Shan dropped it on the table. “That’s what it was. The police had it.”

Lung picked the striker up and leaned with it closer to the lantern. “It’s some kind of monk thing.”

“No, just a Tibetan thing that happens to have prayers on it. It was used to kill your nephew.”

Lung Tso went very still. Shan returned his cold, steady gaze until he broke away to pour more vodka. He drained his glass again. “Tell me.”

Shan demonstrated how the striker could be used as a weapon to crush a windpipe as he explained. “He was murdered,” he concluded. “The killer staged the truck accident afterwards.”

“That fucking lama.”

“No. Jamyang somehow recognized the killer’s blow, somehow identified the killer, somehow got his hands on this striker. Tell me something. Why didn’t your brother go to the monks when his son died? Why the nuns?”

“You don’t ask a favor of those you do business with.” Lung’s eyes flared. “That damned lama.”

“Jamyang was helping your brother. Jamyang connected everything. He came and told your brother, told him to go to the convent the next day because he arranged for his son’s killer to be there. Just like he told the abbess of treachery at Chegar gompa. The killer wore a robe but it was not Jamyang.”

A small gasp from the stairway broke the silence. Jigten stood there, carrying a tea thermos, his eyes wide. He backed down slowly, into the shadows.

* * *

You don’t ask a favor of those you do business with. Like some distant echo, Lung’s words came back to Shan as he drove up the mountainside. The dead gang leader, the smuggler, had been doing business with a monk, and a monk had killed him. He pulled the truck into a small grove of trees off a rough, remote track, then sat in the shadows, beginning a half-hour vigil to make sure he was not followed before he ascended the narrow goat trail that led to the small valley above. As he waited the questions came like a flood. The few pieces of the puzzle he had found only seemed to make the puzzle impossibly more complex. What were the favors Lung had done for the monks? Why would Jamyang have sent both Lung and the abbess to confront the killer? How could Jamyang have possibly found the weapon that had killed the Lung boy? He would never know what had happened at the convent on the day of death until he knew the truth about Jamyang.

The American woman was sleeping on a pallet inside the small hut when Shan finally arrived. It was one of the remote, unused shelters that Shan and Lokesh had discovered when looking for lost shrines. The old Tibetan had a mysterious ability to trace what he called the spirit fixtures of such places, pointing out the thin stain along a wall that was the sign of incense having been burned beneath over many years, prying up what looked like random stones along foundations to show Shan the prayers that had been inscribed on them, discovering the rotted ends of twine around a branch or peg that had secured prayer flags in another century. He would clean off the old mani stones and renew such places with new incense and new prayer flags, even if it meant ripping up his shirt to make them. Then he would offer hours of mantras so the deities that dwelled nearby would know they had not been forgotten.

In his uncanny way, Lokesh had seemed to expect Shan. A pot of soup sat at the edge of the small brazier by the door. He did not ask about Shan’s imprisonment, did not offer an account of his travails since escaping out of the death pit, but simply handed Shan an old wooden bowl and poured in the soup. The old Tibetan laid another blanket over Cora, then lit a stick of incense in the brazier and stuck it in the stones of the wall above her before sitting beside Shan.

“I know a cave,” he said after a long silence.

Shan’s chest tightened. It was a conversation they had had before. Lokesh wanted him to leave everything, to go on a meditation retreat.

“I will go with you. We could take the American. Just two or three weeks. You walk too close.”

Too close to the edge, Lokesh meant. Other friends might speak of the physical dangers Shan faced, the torment he had endured as Liang’s prisoner, but not Lokesh, never Lokesh. He meant Shan was perilously close to tumbling from the true path, the enlightened path, the Buddhist path. Lokesh believed in finding the truth but also fervently believed Shan went too far when he interfered in events, when he became an actor in an unfolding mystery. Rescuing a lamb showed respect for lower animal spirits. Manipulating events and deceiving the government showed disrespect for his own spirit.

“Jamyang told us his story,” Lokesh continued. “It is but for us to understand it. He left us the sutra of his life. We simply need to learn how to read it.”

“It is what I am doing, old friend, in the only way I know how.”

“No. You ride with police. You speak with those who raid our farms. You attack statues. You invite Public Security to beat you. You have learned other ways, Shan. From where you stand if you lose your footing you lose all chance of being human again.”

The words tore at Shan’s heart. They were the words of a gentle Tibetan father to a son who had become so wayward he was in danger of losing his family. They were perhaps the harshest thing Lokesh had ever said to him. Human existence was a precious thing, won only after thousands of incarnations in lower forms, and those who abused it, for whatever reason, would sink to the bottom of that cycle.

Shan had no reply. He only stared into his now empty bowl.

After a long silence Lokesh gestured outside. “There will be meteors,” the old Tibetan said and, seeming to sense Shan’s weakness, extended a hand to help him up.

It was a rare evening, with a gentle breeze stirring the fragrant junipers, the stars shimmering in a cloudless sky. Shan lay back on the blanket Lokesh had stretched over the grass for him, longing for a chance to at least share another meteor shower with his friend, but unable to resist the fatigue that wracked his body. As his eyes fluttered closed he heard the faint murmur of a new mantra. He seemed to hover in the warm suspension just before sleep and a sad smile settled onto his face. This time, he knew, Lokesh was praying for him.