Eliot Pattison - Mandarin Gate

Shan’s gaze lingered for a moment on a pot of red paint at the base of the chorten, then turned back to the red rectangle with its pattern of yellow spots. The killer had gone to a lot of trouble in arranging the scene, as if for a message. A chill crept up his spine as he at last recognized the rectangle constructed under the bodies. It was the Chinese flag, red with one large and four smaller yellow stars in the upper-left quadrant.

“Fools!” the young officer barked at the others, then he quieted at the sound of footsteps behind him, the anger on his face suddenly replaced with fear. The gaunt older officer had risen from the shadows. For a moment Shan thought the man in the green uniform was going to drop to his knees.

“Everyone back!” the older knob growled. “You and your men,” he declared to the officer in the olive tunic, “will have site security. One at the gate, the rest to set up a roadblock half a mile up the road.” What had the knob lieutenant called the senior officer? Major Liang.

The young officer shrank back, then murmured hurried orders to his men. The men in blue, the local constables, retreated toward the gate without another word. As the men in green marched away, two more men in grey appeared out of the shadows. The question of jurisdiction was resolving itself.

“Her hands,” Shan said, gesturing to the dead woman. “That is red paint on them, not blood. She was painting the old prayer wheel by the wall. The paint is spattered in an arc where her brush went flying. Under the arc is a pattern of blood. She was shot there, taken by surprise as she worked, facing the wall. I think you will find that bullet went through her back. It came out her chest and is probably in the wall. Unless the weapon was a revolver there will be a bullet casing on the ground nearby.”

The female lieutenant spoke in quick, clipped syllables, and the knob soldiers moved toward the wall. Major Liang shot Shan a warning glance, then followed the squad.

Suddenly Shan was alone with the bodies. He gazed for only a moment as the police retreated around the far side of the chorten, then moved quickly, letting old instincts take over. He knew from experience that such officers could do strange things with the truth of such killings, could make inconvenient murders disappear. Worse still, they could use murders at such a holy place as an excuse to destroy what was left of it. He owed it to Jamyang, to Lokesh, and all the old Tibetans, to understand what had happened.

He ran his fingers over the dead flesh, lifting limbs, testing for rigor mortis and temperature. They had been dead for four or five hours. He stooped over the faceless man, clenching his jaw at the butchery. The face had not been simply sliced off, the flesh and skin at the front and sides of the skull had been hacked away, like bark being chipped off a log.

The pockets of the man with the nearly severed head held only car keys and a package of unfiltered cigarettes. A bird, perhaps a crow, clutching a snake in its talons was tattooed inside his forearm. The savage blows that had nearly taken off his head had ripped apart another tattoo at the base of his neck, a creature with scales that might have been a dragon. Shan saw now the dirt caked on the heels of the man’s expensive shoes, bent to study the direction of the trail made by the heels before it disappeared, stomped away by police boots. The man had been dragged from somewhere near the front of the compound, perhaps even from the gate. He lifted one of the shoes that lay on the woman to examine the dirt embedded in its heel, then felt something more at the ankle and pushed up the pant leg. He paused in surprise. He had not seen an ankle holster for years. It was a subtle, hidden thing seldom seen outside the big cities of the east. There was no subtlety about the use of guns in Tibet. The holster held nothing but a piece of folded paper jammed in the bottom. He glanced back to confirm the police were still out of sight then stuffed the paper in his pocket. He rose and leaned over the body once more, pushing his fingers deeper into the pockets. He tapped the half-empty cigarette pack and felt a hard, unyielding surface. A piece of iron slid out of the pack, an intricately worked trapezoid with Buddhist prayers etched around two large holes in its narrow end. A flint striker. The dead Chinese wearing expensive clothes was carrying a primitive Tibetan tool for lighting fires.

He stuffed the striker back into the pocket then looked more closely at the two hands at the center of the flag. It wasn’t a stone that held them down, it was a weathered fragment from the ruined carvings that had been scattered around the grounds before the restoration had started, an image of one of Tibet’s Eight Auspicious Signs. He bent and saw the lines that represented stacked garlands of cloth. It was the Banner of Victory, which hailed the triumph of Buddhist wisdom over ignorance.

Shan moved hesitantly to the woman, knowing likely he had no more than another minute before the knobs returned. She appeared to have been in her fifties, with a delicate face, though her tattered brown frock and rough hands were those of a farmer. The necklace strand around her neck had been severed, probably when the killer had dragged her body. With two fingers he gently closed her unseeing eyes and murmured a prayer.

Quickly he found the bullet hole in her tunic, over her heart. It was a large, ugly wound, the hole of the bullet’s exit. She had indeed been shot in the back. The bullet’s exit had pushed out threads of other fabrics, red and white. He pried at the fabric and found that her chest had been bound with a length of cotton. A small stiff rectangle the size of an identity card extended from underneath. With a guilty shudder he lifted the cloth and extracted the rectangle, quickly stuffing it inside his pocket without taking the time to look at it. If they knew who a Tibetan victim was, they could make life very uncomfortable for the family, whom they would have always assumed hid information about the dead. He was taking a terrible chance. The knobs would be back at any instant, furious if they found him interfering with the bodies, but he did not trust them with the evidence, and felt strangely unable to leave the woman. He pulled at her frock, awkwardly trying to cover her grisly wound. For the first time he saw that her frock had dried paint on it, in several colors. It was a just a work frock. She had put it on over her dark red dress.

Run, a voice screamed inside, flee into the maze of rocks. Lokesh needs you.

With another anxious glance in the direction of the knobs, he bent to study the severed necklace. It had been made of tightly braided yak hair. He tugged on one end, releasing from under her shoulder an ornate silver box. A gau . She had been wearing a traditional necklace with a traditional amulet box.

Another siren rose in the distance, rapidly approaching, but still he did not move. With a shudder he pushed off the wool cap on her head and saw the short brush of black hair, then he pulled back the work frock.

A small choking sob escaped his throat as he recognized the maroon cloth. It was a robe. At the ancient, ruined convent, a Buddhist nun had been murdered and placed under the feet of two Chinese men. He grabbed her gau and fled.

He drove the truck wildly, over low ridges, up narrow tracks that were little more then dry washes, sliding to a stop where it intersected the old pilgrims’ path. Even after stopping he gripped the wheel tightly, knuckles white, head bent low, unable to control the dry sobs that wracked his chest. The day that had begun so reverently, so serenely, had turned into a waking nightmare. Jamyang had not simply died, he had killed himself, a grave sin for the devout. The old convent that had become a symbol of hope for the battered Tibetans had been turned into a butcher’s ground, and was in the hands of the knobs.