Eliot Pattison - Mandarin Gate

“You were the only knob truly probing the murders. He gave you free rein. He used you because he never thought you were capable of finding the truth. You became part of his cover. What he does is the opposite of an investigation. He knew who the killer was from the beginning. He knew the evidence, and set about to erase or obscure it. He never had tests done on that bullet, he just wanted to be sure no one else did. He wanted you to believe he was seeking the American because she might be a witness but he wanted to find her so he could kill her. From the moment he arrived everything he has done has been to protect the killer.”

Meng staggered backward as if she had been physically struck. She lowered herself onto a flat boulder. “Impossible,” she said. “I would have-”

“Would have seen it? Been told? Avoided helping him? It’s what he does, Meng, what they do. Manipulate people like you and me. Cover up. Enlist you to build the lies.”

The color was slowly draining from Meng’s face. “I don’t believe you, Shan. You mistrust everything. You mistrust yourself. I understand you had a terrible experience. It was all so unjust. But you see poison everywhere now. I tried to give you a gift and you hated me for it. Like I had something to do with what happens to these poor Tibetans.”

He returned her stare without speaking. When she broke away, tears were in her eyes.

“Check the records,” he said. “Speak to people at headquarters. The arrival of Major Liang would not have been missed. There’s no doubt a house for government visitors. They would keep records of who stays overnight. If you can’t find the records talk to the housekeepers.”

She turned away from him. He waited several minutes, then began walking down the road.

He had gone nearly a mile when he heard the wheels on the gravel behind him. The truck eased by and stopped.

She began shouting before her feet hit the ground. “You think I am just another damned puppet! You think I don’t care about anything!” As she pulled her uniform cap from her head hairpins went flying, so that her long tresses whipped about in the wind. She shook the cap at him. “I am tired of your damned self-righteousness! You think no one can see the truth unless they’ve suffered for it!” She threw her cap on the ground and stomped it into the dust.

Her words came out in sobs now “I am no puppet, Shan Tao Yun! I hate the way Tibetans look at me! I am no animal! I am real! I am-” Tears were streaming down her face. “I just want…” Her words broke into sobs.

He laid a finger along his lips, then put his arms around her. She clung to him as if she were drowning. From somewhere in the hills behind them came the deep-throated call of a prayer horn.

* * *

Dawn was seeping over the mountains as Shan crept cautiously along the path behind the gompa. When he had taken Dakpo back to Chegar the monk had asked to be left with Patrul, saying he did not wish to disturb the gompa at such a late hour. Only later he realized it was more likely that Dakpo feared going back into the monastery. He could not shake the feeling that he owed the monk more, and could not forget he had only two days until the full moon.

The former abbot was sitting before his simple altar in the big barn when Shan approached. Shan was standing ten feet away when the blind man raised a hand over his shoulder and gestured for him to come forward and sit.

“It was good what you did for Dakpo,” Patrul said. “You have a habit of rescuing creatures in distress.”

“With Dakpo, Rinpoche, I am not sure if I rescued him or pulled him deeper into the mud.”

“He is young but he has learned enough to know there is no purity without impurity.”

“I would like to find a way to speak with him. Did he find his way back to the gompa?”

The old teacher shook his head. “He fears what he would do to it.”

Shan turned for a moment to look at the storerooms along the corridor of the long barn, then weighed Patrul’s words. “What he might do to it?”

“I think you understand how the truth is the most painful weapon of all. The truth you armed him with would devastate the monks.”

Shan gazed up at the Buddha on the makeshift altar. He was the blind man here. He knew how much the monks of the struggling gompa revered their abbot. Norbu was their hero, their savior. Norbu had resurrected Patrul out of the oblivion of the gulag. To tell them the truth would be telling them they had been used, that they were a sham, that they were puppets of Public Security.

When he turned back to Patrul the big shaggy mastiff was by the old lama, gazing at Shan. “You were serving ten strings, Rinpoche,” Shan said after a long silence. “No one gets early release when they’ve opposed loyalty oaths. Trinle said it was because you went blind.”

Patrul offered a sad grin. “He’s a good boy. Always looks for the best answer, if not the true one. He forgets I was nearly blind when they arrested me.”

“Bringing back the silver bell to Chegar would have made Norbu welcome but arranging for you to be at his side made him a hero.”

“They called it a humanitarian release,” Patrul said with a bitter laugh. There was pain in the teacher’s voice. He had already realized that he too had been a puppet.

“But still you are here,” Shan replied. “Perhaps there was the hand of a deity in this.”

“No matter what happens my Chegar suffers.”

“I don’t think so. You are its protector. You have always been its protector. No matter what happens there will be no abbot from Beijing here for many months, probably a year or more.”

“A gompa needs an abbot.”

“They have one, the best they ever could hope for. In a way he never left.”

“I am old and blind.”

“You are wise and shrewd. If Tibet can have a shadow government, then surely Chegar can have a shadow abbot.”

“ Lha gyal lo. ” The words came in a whisper from the shadows.

Shan lifted a butter lamp and stepped to the storage room behind them, the door to which was open. Dakpo sat propped up on a bed of straw. He bent over the monk, feeling his forehead, then his pulse.

“I am well enough, Shan,” the monk said bravely. “A few cracked ribs are worth the cure you have given us. But I worry,” he added. “Trinle came last night to say Norbu has the monks stirred up, talking about their duty to the Dalai Lama. I can’t confront him. I am not sure I would be believed. And now the full moon comes. The tentacles will reach across to Dharamsala. I can’t.…” The monk’s voice faded away.

“I understand, Dakpo. It is nearly over. You need to continue being his student so he does not suspect. Nothing has changed.”

“Everything has changed.”

Shan grinned. “Exactly.”

Suddenly the calm of the dawn was disturbed by the ringing of a bell. It was not a call to worship. Shan stepped to the shadows of the entry to see monks emerging into the courtyard of the gompa, trotting toward the row of bicycles along one wall. He called out a hurried farewell to Patrul and Dakpo, then ran out the back of the barn.

Minutes later he was standing in the back of his truck, watching the monks through his binoculars. They made a thin line of maroon along the flat road, an arrow aimed down the valley. Shan followed the path of the arrow, trying to understand its target. It could be the convent ruins. It could be Baiyun. It could be some pilgrim’s path selected for clearing.

By the time he drove back onto the main road he saw that others were traveling toward the center of the valley. Figures on bicycles, on tractors and donkeys, were converging not on the ruins or the town but on a crossroads that marked the intersection of the main road with a dirt track that led to farms in the hills. He sped up as he reached the pavement, soon passing the monks, noting several familiar faces, including Norbu near the front.