Eliot Pattison - Beautiful Ghosts

As Corbett took a step toward the rifle, the pistol cracked twice. Two feet past Corbett’s head, near the shelves, wooden splinters exploded into the air. “Keep going. Give me a reason,” Dolan snarled. His face seemed to have lost all its color, a trickle of blood ran down one cheek. His eyes appeared to have sunk. He appeared to have aged several years. As Shan picked up one of the splinters and stepped to the shelves Dolan advanced toward Ko, who had retreated to the shadows along the wall, and slammed the pistol against his temple, knocking him to his knees.

“You didn’t know the old man was coming inside with a light to find his friends, you little bastard! You were going to leave me there!” Dolan’s voice still held an edge of the horror he must have felt in the darkness, thinking he was entombed in the ancient temple.

“You needed to go on retreat,” Ko growled, holding his head, still kneeling.

Shan looked at his son in surprise, and took a step closer to him. Dolan warned him away with a gesture of the gun.

“That’s what you think, isn’t it, that my money makes me shallow, that all your mumbo jumbo about souls somehow makes you all superior.” An unsettling wildness was in Dolan’s eyes now. The darkness had touched him, perhaps exactly as Ko had intended. “You know nothing! I’ve won awards, humanitarian awards, all over the world. I earn my treasures.”

“No,” a slow, steady voice said. Lokesh had stood, and was staring at Dolan with an intense, accusing look. “Maybe once you understood such things, maybe once you loved them. But now you only love the owning.”

“You old fool,” Dolan spat back, “what do you know about the world? You people sit around and stare at your navels while people like me are shaping the world.”

“You need to go back, and find what you lost,” Lokesh said.

The words seemed to stab Dolan. He twisted about, grimacing, but he seemed unable to break away from Lokesh’s gaze. Khan began to stir. He looked up with a gloating expression. “My hands,” he growled. “Untie me and I’ll teach them a lesson.”

Dolan ignored him, kept staring at Lokesh. “You don’t think I understand things. Think I don’t have a conscience?” He took a step toward Khan. “I’ll show you conscience! You want justice for Punji’s killer?” With one swift movement he raised the pistol, pointed it at Khan’s head, and fired.

No one moved. Dolan’s face was like that of the wild-eyed demons on the ancient thangkas. “There! That’s what Chinese do to killers, right? A bullet in the head.” Khan slumped forward, his head on the table, a pool of blood spreading around it.

“Your deity is leaving you,” Lokesh said. He had not taken his eyes off the American. “You can catch it only by stopping now. You have to let go, you have to start over.”

Dolan seemed struck again by the old Tibetan’s words. He looked at the gun in his hands, then Khan. “I don’t even know how to use one of these things,” he said in a small confused voice. “It just went off. You saw, it just went off.”

“You’re mad, Dolan,” Corbett said. “Certifiable. You should be spending your money on doctors.” He took a step toward the shelves, where the rifle leaned.

Lokesh stepped to the dead man, placed a hand on his back as if to comfort him, then began untying his bindings. Shan stepped to his side to help. The small-caliber bullet had left a neat circle near the center of Khan’s forehead.

“That girl in Seattle,” Shan said. “It wasn’t you either, was it?”

Dolan waved the gun, settling its barrel on Corbett. He tilted the weapon upward as if pretending to shoot, then walked away, to stand in front of the portrait of the Qian Long emperor. “That was my car,” he said in an absent voice, speaking to the emperor. “I was just watching when she was knocked unconscious.”

“And you were just watching when you threw her over the side, when you dropped her bike off the second bridge?” Corbett asked. He glanced at the rifle, still leaning on the shelves.

“Little Miss Perfect,” Dolan said in a voice like a stretched wire. “I could have given her so much. But she said she wasn’t going to be one of my concubines. She scratched me when I tried. I would have fired her but she would have sued me, the bitch.”

A deep, sad sigh wracked Corbett. “She saw you that night, when you turned off the alarms and let Lodi and Punji in.”

Dolan still faced the Qian Long. “She didn’t think I knew about her secret way over the wall. She always avoided me. Shared secrets with my kids. So perfect she had to come back to turn off the damned kiln.” He slowly turned. “I want him to come home with me,” he said.

Shan took a step forward, not understanding, but sensing that Ko was about to lunge at Dolan.

“Look at their eyes. They were great men. They understood such things, the weight of power. Take him, too,” Dolan said with a motion toward the portrait of the emperor’s nephew. “Roll them up,” he ordered, gesturing with the gun toward Ko.

“I am not one of your slaves,” Ko shot back.

“Yes you are. And after we find the treasure I have a plan for you. I am going to take you into that maze and shoot you in both legs, then leave you in the dark. The army will take your friends away and you’ll die alone, after a few days.” Dolan’s smile seemed chiseled out of ice. “If it had been the emperor you just tried to kill you would have been condemned to the death by a thousand slices. How lucky for you.”

“They don’t know where the treasure is,” Ko snapped. “This is as far as you go.”

Dolan pulled the trigger again, then a second time. Ko jerked back, wincing, holding his hand. One of the bullets had gone through his hand. Blood began seeping through his fingers. But he stepped forward, closer, as if daring Dolan to shoot again.

“You know nothing about emperors,” Dolan hissed.

Yao pulled out a handkerchief and pressed it to Ko’s wound.

Shan stepped in front of the gun.

“I am going to kill him,” Dolan said in a voice like ice. “Try to stop me and I’ll just do it quicker, shoot him right now. You can decide, Shan, what do you want? Let me kill him slow in the dark, or quick in front of his father?”

When Ko looked into Shan’s eyes there was no pleading on his countenance, only defiance.

Shan turned his back on his son, stepping in front of him. “I will take you to the amban’s treasure,” Shan said.

The chamber grew silent as death again.

“Dammit no!” Ko spat.

“You will take me there, you will help me load it, and get it back to Lhadrung,” Dolan demanded, his empty eyes beginning to fill with a cruel, excited fire.

“I will.” The words came from his own tongue but the voice seemed far away to Shan.

“You don’t know the way!” Ko shouted to Shan’s back.

“I know it now. Mr. Dolan showed it to me.”

“I hate you!” Ko moaned.

Shan closed his eyes a moment, but did not turn, because of what he would see in his son’s eyes. “But only if you promise not to hurt the boy,” he said to Dolan.

“Get me the treasure and I will not hurt him.”

“You will let him go back to his prison. No new charges.”

“No new charges,” Dolan agreed with an cold, victorious grin. “But afterwards you will surrender yourself to that Colonel as the killer of Khan. You will sign a statement that you tied him up and shot him in cold blood in revenge for his killing Lodi and Punji.”

Shan lowered his eyes and nodded. He did not know how long he had stared at the floor, only became aware that everyone was gazing at him. He stepped toward the corridor. “Did you see the rays of light?” he asked. He could no longer look into Dolan’s face. “There are segments of rainbows over the doors on this level, only this level, pointing upward, making a circle of rainbow segments, the bases of many rainbows. It is said that when holy men die their bodies dissolve into light, that their essence ascends to the sky in a rainbow. To heaven. Above.”