Eliot Pattison - Mandarin Gate

The words raised a cold knot in Shan’s stomach. “Do they have a list of graduates?”

Meng worked at her screen as Shan sipped his tea. “It’s classified,” she said uncertainly. “A secret even within the Bureau. The screen keeps going back to what the Institute calls its internal manifesto.” As she made a movement to turn off the phone Shan grabbed it.

The manifesto was short and to the point: “Tibetans are not born traitors, but taught to live the lie through the influence of ego and prejudice in the religious class. Our goal is to use proven socialist methods to correct the error of their ways, to help them overcome the tyranny of their tradition.” He pushed the phone back and looked away.

After a moment he drained his cup, then took off the lid of the little teapot, a sign that it needed refilling. When the waiter ignored it, Meng rose and carried the pot inside. The instant she entered the building he slipped into the crowd. He needed to be alone, needed to be away from Public Security. Jamyang had lived in this town. He needed to find his ghost. He needed to understand the terrible foreboding he felt about the Peace Institute.

Shan found himself at a bus stop, lingering in a crowd of children in school uniforms. He let the crowd push him as a bus approached, did not turn back even as he found himself going up the steps of the bus. He sat at a window, not seeing at first, not feeling anything except impossibly tired.

When he shook himself awake, the bus, nearly empty, was on the outskirts of town. Tracts of shabby houses were giving way to fields and arid pastures. He got out at the next stop, crossed to the stop on the opposite side of the street and sat on its plastic bench. He heard a laugh and turned, seeing the back of a tall Tibetan with shaggy white hair, dressed in tattered clothes, and for a moment felt the ridiculous hope that it was Lokesh. Then the man turned and saw Shan, lowered his head and hurried away.

The hill on which he sat overlooked the town. Chamdo was Tibet’s third-largest city but it was isolated, so remote that it was seldom visited by outsiders, and even those were permitted only in organized groups. It was the perfect place for the government to conduct operations out of the public eye. He saw the warehouse complex where Jigten was loading the truck, then located the long block of buildings that comprised the Institute, some of the best-kept structures in the city. Jamyang had been there, at the anonymous complex in the anonymous, remote city. He had left in a suit and reappeared in a robe.

An hour later he was back at the bus stop where he had started, studying its city map, tracing the shaded, anonymous square of land that comprised the Institute. He turned for a moment, and realized that he was looking at the tea shop, unconsciously searching for Meng. Another mystery kept nagging at the edge of his consciousness, the mystery of why she so unsettled him. It was not fear of her he felt when he was with her. It was fear of himself.

Retreating from the corner, he followed the side street along the western wall of the compound. A row of well-manicured houses sharing common walls stretched out in front of the wall. At the end of the first block he crossed and walked slowly, studying the houses. They all had the same hardware on the doors and windows. There was no way through them, no way around them. They were just a buffer, like a moat around a fortress.

He glanced down the street, mindful of two men in spotless coveralls leaning on brooms at either end of the block, then approached the nearest door. It was locked. The window by the door was covered by a curtain but he could see through a narrow opening in the middle. The house was empty. Pressing his head close to the glass he saw through a window at the back. Behind the house was another wall, perhaps eight feet tall, not visible from the street. Strung along its top was razor wire.

Shan hurried on, rounding the next corner, to the back of the compound, where the street was busier. He settled onto a park bench under a tree, studying the buildings at that end of the block. Here too were houses that appeared empty, that seemed to serve as outer barriers to the compound, but in the center of the block was a store of some kind, and across from that a small police station. Monks went in and out of the shop. He searched the faces of each, watching for Dakpo. His hand unconsciously pressed against his chest, touching the badge of Yuan Yi, the mandarin bandit.

“It takes up two city blocks,” a voice said over his shoulder. Meng was facing the compound as she spoke. “Nothing but old shops and businesses along the wall on the other side. All with signs saying they were closed for an urban renewal project. Except the paper is all yellowed and dried-up. Like it’s been there for years.”

“The main gate is the only entry,” Shan observed. “Everything else is locked up except for this one shop.”

Meng started across the street even before he rose from the bench.

The shop was dedicated to religious literature and memoirs of the Communist struggle. A poster of Mao’s calligraphy stood over a stand of little Buddhas holding the flag of the People’s Republic. They browsed as if they were a tourist couple, buying a package of the inexpensive prayer scarves that pilgrims left on shrines. At the rear of the store was a room identified by a sign as the library. Inside, a small display case held several artifacts from the original monastery and two larger cases commemorated the Chinese youth brigade that had captured it fifty years before. Their patriotic efforts, the display explained, had liberated more than two hundred monks. It was the uplifting explanation favored by propagandists. It generally meant the monks had been freed of their earthly existence.

A stiff matron sat at a desk at the head of a narrow corridor marked PRIVATE ARCHIVES, tapping the keys of one of the electronic mahjong games that had become so popular in China. During the ten minutes they watched, half a dozen men and women were admitted by the woman after showing identity cards in black leather cases. They were all Chinese, all with cool, arrogant faces.

Meng reached into her pocket and had taken two steps toward the desk when Shan grabbed her hand. “Our bus!” he chided, and pulled her out of the room.

“You fool!” Meng snapped as they reached the street. “I could get in. Those were Public Security identity cards. Somewhere down that corridor is a file with Jamyang’s name on it.”

“That game she had was for show. There was a keyboard on a shelf below the table top. She was recording every officer’s name as they went through. Five minutes after you walked down that hall Liang would have known you were here.”

The anger on Meng’s face changed to relief. “Ah yi!” she muttered. “Thank you.” She looked down and grinned. Shan was still gripping her hand. He flushed and pulled away.

They sat on the bench again. “There’s no need to go inside,” Meng ventured. “We know what they do.”

“Indoctrinate wayward monks.” The words were like acid on Shan’s tongue.

“They redirect those who have strayed from the ever-correct path of socialism.”

Shan would have been repulsed by Meng’s words were it not for the bitter tone with which she spoke them.

He watched a group of four men leave the shop, two Chinese and two older Tibetans in robes. “This is not about political calibration,” he observed. “There are camps that do that. This is different. This is for very special training.” Two limousines pulled up and deposited half a dozen Chinese men near the door.

“It’s like a private club,” Meng observed. As she spoke the group of four who had left the Institute walked by them. A gasp of surprise left Shan’s throat. He shot up and followed, getting closer. The robes of the two Tibetans were loosely belted. Hanging from the belts of each, like trappings of a uniform, were three identical items. A set of red rosary beads, a small ornate pen case, and a bronze wedge-shaped flint striker, identical to that used to kill the Lung boy.