Eliot Pattison - Mandarin Gate

It wasn’t simply that Shan had once misunderstood Jamyang. He was misunderstanding him again and again. First, Shan had known him as only a solitary, reverent hermit. Then he had grown to consider him as a lama in some mysterious exile, or a pilgrim doing penance. But he had also been a bureaucrat with a robe, an official who was fluent with computers. One of the agents trained to consume Tibet from the inside out. He had been all and none of those things. Shan had assumed his movements in his last few days had been actions to implement some plan, but they had all been reactions. He had missed the empty place, missed the phantom that gave everything meaning.

The realization had come slowly, a small dark thing gnawing at his gut since leaving Jamyang’s village. Some of the old lamas fervently believed that souls made sounds, that old hermits who suddenly found realization howled long syllables that could shake mountains. For Shan, the sound had come first, Dakpo’s anguished gasp before Jamyang’s aunt. He understood now that the monk’s reaction had changed everything. Dakpo had suddenly known, and collapsed, when Leshe had spoken of a man carrying a silver bell.

Shan had missed the phantom, the shadow that was always a step ahead, never there. It was time to use what was not there.

He rose and found the American by the little fire they had made to cook their evening meal. “I understand your need for silence, Cora,” he began. “But it must end. I want to help you but now you have to help me.”

The American woman struggled with her reply. There were still days, Lokesh said, when she did not speak at all. “There is no way out for me,” she said at last. “There is no one I can trust except Lokesh and Chenmo. And we can barely speak with each other,” she added with a bitter smile.

“And me, Cora. We can talk together. Together we are going to stop the murderer. Together we will get you home.”

“I should have been dead. I know that old Tibetans talk about not arguing with your fate, about embracing it. I was supposed to die that day.”

“No. You were supposed to live. You were supposed to become the way we stop the killer, the way word reaches the outside.”

“I’m always so afraid.”

“There are many things I have learned in Tibet,” Shan said to the American. “One is that your life isn’t about what others do to you, it is about what you do to yourself.”

“The killer wants me dead, doesn’t he?”

“I won’t lie to you. But Lokesh and his friends have taught me that you can’t let your decisions be determined by the cruelty of others.”

“I don’t know who the killer was. Just a monk.”

“It’s a puzzle, Cora. I know some of the pieces. You know some of the pieces. We have to fit them together. I should have asked you a question long ago. Did Jamyang come to you and Rutger sometime just before the killings?”

The American woman stirred the dying embers with a stick. “Two weeks before. With Chenmo. It was strange because he had always kept his distance, like he was very shy. Stayed away even from the other monks. Rutger said it must be because he was a hermit, that he had taken some kind of vow of isolation.”

“He came to your camp?”

Cora nodded. “He was no hermit that night. He said he understood we had taken pictures of the restoration. He wanted to know if they were the kind he could see on our camera screens. So we showed him. Rutger had been trying to get Chenmo to ask Jamyang to help name some of the old images on the walls and artifacts. A goddess playing a lute. A three-headed Buddha. A lion-headed god. We thought he came for that, and he did answer our questions. But what he wanted to see were photos of the monks who had come to help at the convent. He asked if we knew any of their names, and we explained we did not, that we kept our presence secret.”

“What happened? Did he show special interest in any of them?”

“He took the camera and scrolled through the pictures. He stopped at one and went very still. It was like he was scared by something he saw.”

“What was it? What photograph scared him?”

Cora shrugged. “Monks. Monks,” she repeated. “We came around the world to help monks. But now I know we must fear monks.”

“Did Rutger tell the abbess about this?”

“The abbess came to Rutger later. She was excited about what we were doing, about our photographing the internment camp. She encouraged us, gave us information about what went on in the camp, asked if she brought people who had been prisoners whether we would put them in our cameras. That’s how she said it. ‘Put them in our cameras.’ She said we needed to know what happened in those camps.” Cora broke off, biting her lips, looking into the embers. For a moment Shan thought she was going to weep again. She had seen for herself what went on in such a camp, had been tied inside one of its death shrouds.

“The day before Rutger died, she came back. She said there was something new, that he could film a different secret of Beijing. Rutger thought she meant he should go to the convent to film someone who had suffered at one of those gulag camps.” She pushed the embers and watched the sparks fly into the darkening sky.

“What did Jamyang ask you to do with the photos he saw?”

“He said we must keep them safe.”

“Did you?” Shan asked. “Did you keep them safe?”

“Sure. Rutger has special aluminum cases. Waterproof, even fireproof.”

Shan recalled the empty cases he had found at the campsite. They had not been demon proof.

* * *

“ Om mani padme hum, ” Meng intoned as she gave the prayer wheel a shove. “Isn’t that what they say?”

Shan nodded. He was not certain why she had asked him to go with her to the convent ruins. The things they needed to say were not for the police post but they had not needed to drive several miles to find a private place. “It invokes the compassionate Buddha,” he explained, and showed her how the words were inscribed in raised script along the rim of the bronze cylinder. “It makes a new prayer each time it spins.”

She replied with a strangely somber nod and spun the wheel again, then again. “I’ve been in Tibet for years,” she said, “and I have never tried to learn about such things.”

The police cleanup squads had been thorough. There were no more yellow police tapes cordoning off crime scenes, no more red paint and blood. A pile of fresh sand had been dumped by the front gate, with buckets and tubs beside it. A trail of footprints showed where the sand had been hauled and raked around the chorten. Even the loose stone at the base of the chorten had been pushed back in, though it seemed to be working its way out again.

“It was here,” Meng said, “here was where the abbess was killed. The first to die that day.” The lieutenant ran her hand along the wall, as if trying to remind herself where the arc of paint had been, then placed her palm at its center, where the blood had stained the wall. The surface had been scrubbed clean and painted. Everyone in the valley was doing their best to eradicate the murders.

“Lung Ma was the first to die,” Shan corrected her. “He was the most dangerous. He carried a gun.”

Shan led her to the rear of the compound and positioned himself at the crumbling gate. “The monk parked his bicycle outside, hidden in the rocks,” he said in a slow voice, considering the landscape as he spoke. “He took his time, watching at every step. The abbess had sent him a message, saying she wanted to speak of Dharamsala. Every Tibetan knows it like a code word. Speaking about it was always in secret. But she had never spoken to this monk about it. This one thought it was a warning, for he harbored his own secret about the exile capital. He was suspicious. I think he watched the convent from the hill and saw Lung’s truck arrive. There was no possible reason for the abbess and Lung to be together. Lung held the secret of the plan to smuggle the killer across the border. The abbess held the secret of the strange lama who had been roaming the hills, who the killer knew now to be a threat to his plans.”