Eliot Pattison - Beautiful Ghosts

For a moment time stopped. Shan forgot the guard outside, forgot that a squad would soon come to take Ko away, perhaps forever. His son was asking about the Taoist verses.

“Is it funny?” he heard Ko ask, and Shan realized he was grinning. Shan shook his head, still smiling, unable to speak.

Ko gazed at the sticks. “Show me, father,” he asked in a near whisper.

Shan tossed the sticks, dividing them into piles, letting Ko count as he explained the ages-old process. He repeated several verses, Ko joining him as he grasped their rhythm, his gaze always on the sticks. Finally his son slowly replaced the sticks in the canister, staring at it with something Shan had never seen on his face. Calmness. “I am the sixth,” he said. “The son of the master criminal Shan Tao Yun,” he added with a tiny grin. He closed the canister and handed it back to Shan. “They’ll take it from me. They will destroy it, or sell it. Keep it for me.”

Shan nodded solemnly, then reached into his pocket and handed him a shiny, bluish pebble. “Lokesh spent most of his life in prison,” he explained. “When he was released a few months before me, he gave this to me, said he had had it all those years, that it was a protector charm of great power.” Ko accepted the pebble from Shan. “He said rubbing it kept him connected with the rest of the world, the important things in the world.”

Ko pushed the stone deep into his pocket. “Once or twice a year they let mail inside,” he said. “Sometimes they let us send letters.”

Shan struggled to keep his own voice calm. “I’ll send letters. I’ll try to find an address where you can write me.”

The door opened and two soldiers entered, one holding a pair of heavy leg manacles. Ko stood as the chains were fastened to his ankles. “We made justice,” he said in a voice suddenly proud. “When no one else could.” The soldiers pulled him toward the door.

“Stay alive!” Shan said in a hoarse voice. “You know how to stay alive.”

Ko replied with a defiant grin as the soldiers led him away.

Shan stayed in the shed for several minutes, staring at the canister in his hand, then packing it into the bag for his retreat.

“Someone came from the hills about the McDowell woman’s body,” Tan said, when Shan found him outside the gate. The ambulance with the flashing lights was gone. Dolan’s body was gone. “She asked if she could use a phone to call England.”

* * *

When the helicopter landed at the old stone tower the next morning, Lokesh and Jara were waiting with a heavy blanket to transport Punji McDowell’s remains. They nodded silently to Shan and Liya as they climbed out, and looked with surprise as Corbett followed, picking up a corner of the blanket. Shan had gone to the little conference room the afternoon before to find Liya on the phone, tears streaming down her cheeks, trying to speak with Punji’s mother in broken English. He had taken the phone from her and sat, translating between the two women for half an hour. Corbett had used the same phone an hour later, Shan at his side, as he spoke first with Bailey, then several others in America, arguing with some, then, after confirming that the emperor’s fresco had been recovered, agreeing to sign a statement attesting to Dolan’s heroic accidental death.

Over fifty Tibetans stood in solemn silence as they entered the courtyard with the white chorten shrine. Shan saw faces he had seen at the village, most of the Yerpa monks, many of the hill people who had gathered for the festival at the chorten, even half a dozen of the ragyapa, the old blind woman among them.

The monks took over as Shan and his friends set Punji McDowell’s body by the large pyre of stacked timbers from the ruins, arranging her body by that of Brother Bertram. Another shroud lay beside that of the abbot. On the outside of his folded letter Yao had scribbled a last wish. Let me stay at Zhoka, he had asked.

Butter offerings in the shape of the sacred symbols were set around the pyre, and as Gendun began a mantra which the other Tibetans quickly joined, the monks lit these first. It did not take long for the brittle wood to ignite, and soon the flames became so hot no one could stand closer than thirty feet. The flames leapt high, and the wind died, so that the smoke rose straight into the cloudless sky.

“I don’t understand,” Corbett said after they had watched in silence for a quarter hour. “I thought the dead were all taken to the birds.”

“Not in the old times,” Shan said. “For saints and great teachers, this was the tradition.” There had been another body that no one had spoken about, except a quiet whisper from Liya. Khan had been taken to the charnel ground.

It was over in less than an hour, the pyre reduced to ashes. Liya called for everyone to join her in the foregate yard, where food had been set out on blankets. Shan saw a familiar face nearby.

“Give you joy,” Shan said in English. Fiona was roasting crabapples on a little brazier.

“Give you joy,” Fiona replied. “My niece has been with the monks,” she added in Tibetan.

Her great-niece, Shan thought, as he turned and saw Dawa standing by Gendun. But there was a stranger with Dawa, a sturdy woman to whose arm the girl clung, and beside the woman was a man whose clear, honest face looked weary from travel. Dawa’s parents had arrived.

“They are going to stay,” Fiona said. “They are going to help me rebuild the kiln. We are going to make pots and tsa-tsa, like the old days, tsa-tsa for everyone in the hills.”

Corbett was soon surrounded by the Bumpari villagers, who brought him food and tea. Those who could speak Chinese explained how they had cleaned one of the cottages for him to live in. When they announced it, Shan saw no surprise in the American’s eyes, and heard neither protest nor acceptance.

Shan left them speaking in sad, yet somehow excited tones, to sit alone near the chasm edge.

“I can still show you where that cave is,” a familiar voice said behind him.

Shan patted the stone at his side for Lokesh to join him. “I need a retreat,” he agreed. “But I left my bag in town. You could draw me a map.”

“I will be here when you are ready. I will take you. There is a place I want to show you on the way, where cracks in the mountain form the signs of the mani mantra. There are berries ripening on the south slopes.” Lokesh seemed to follow Shan’s gaze toward the distant mountains and, as usual, seemed to read his mind, or at least his heart. “You found him, Xiao Shan, and he found you. This is not the end. This is a beginning.”

“He asked me about the prayer sticks,” Shan said. “I showed him how to use them.”

Lokesh’s eyes lit with great satisfaction but he did not speak. They sat in silence, watching a bird drift in the updraft below them, then, just as Shan’s father had done so many times when Shan was a boy, Lokesh found his hand and squeezed it, hard, just once, then dropped it and rose. “The American said he had a message for all of us from Inspector Yao.”

The group with Corbett had grown quiet. Even from the distance Shan could hear Corbett speaking of Yao and how he had stopped the looters, how the Chinese inspector had saved Zhoka.

“He speaks of the looters,” Shan said to Lokesh. “But no one asks about the treasure the looters sought.”

“I told our friend Corbett that Gendun still has not spoken to all the deities down there,” Lokesh explained. “It will take many more weeks. Even then,” he said, pausing to search for words. “Even then not everyone will be ready to go below. We know it is not for everyone.”

Corbett was holding a small piece of paper in both hands as Shan stepped closer. It was one of Dolan’s checks, which Shan had turned over to the American. “A hundred thousand American,” Corbett said. “Before he died Mr. Dolan told Inspector Yao that he wanted this to go to Punji McDowell’s children’s clinic.” It was one of the reasons Corbett had argued on the phone the night before. He would not agree to sign the statement on Dolan’s death unless he had assurance that the check would be honored, based on the written words of the dying inspector. It was not part of Dolan’s legacy, but of Yao’s. Yao had signed his letter attesting that Dolan had given him two checks, made to cash, one to be used for the clinic, one to go to the parents of the woman who had died in Seattle.