Eliot Pattison - Beautiful Ghosts

“A visitor named McDowell. An art historian.”

“We’re hiding from an art historian?”

“We hide from no one.” Tan watched the smoke drift from his mouth, following it to the ceiling, then sat, interlocking his fingers on the table with the smoldering cigarette jutting from the top. Shan had seen the gesture before. Tan had his own mudras. “If I had to do it over, I would not change anything I did a year ago,” Tan said slowly. He seemed to struggle to get the words out.

Shan could not understand the strange pain that rose in his heart. What did he mean? Was it Tan’s strange way of trying to shame Shan? A terrifying thought occurred to Shan. Tan could order him to find evidence against Surya, could threaten Shan with imprisonment if he did not cooperate. “I am sorry if you were punished for it,” he said after a long moment, looking at the tabletop.

“Don’t flatter yourself,” Tan snapped. “It wasn’t about you, it was about having all those criminals operating under my nose.”

“I didn’t come looking for you, Colonel. I, too, had decided it would be easier if our paths didn’t cross again.”

“Then why come to my office? Because of that beggar? I would prefer he go. Take him away.”

“He won’t go. He acts as if he is chained to the building.” Shan understood much about Tan. He had worked for people like Tan in Beijing for years, only they had used larger limousines and smoked more elegant cigarettes. But he did not understand the strange game they were playing now.

Tan stood and pointed toward the door. “Then go. Slip down your hole again. In a few more years I’ll retire and you can try the world once more.”

“If you don’t want me in Lhadrung, why offer a bounty?”

Tan took two steps toward Shan and snapped his arm as though holding a whip, pointing toward the door again.

Shan silently rose, walked past Tan, and stepped back into the alley. He had already taken ten paces when he heard Tan mutter a low curse behind him. Two men were climbing into the silver car, pausing as they saw Tan in the doorway. Shan recognized them as the two he had seen on the front steps. The shorter man with the unkempt hair, a suit coat now over his vest, waved stiffly and called out a greeting to the colonel. The taller man offered an icy grin and stepped into the center of the alley, blocking Shan’s path. He did not look at Shan, however, but stared over Shan’s shoulder toward Tan with an expression of curiosity. The shorter man studied Shan warily, then offered a disappointed sigh and turned to Tan. “This is the man I told you about, who was watching us from the shadows in front of the building,” he announced. “You know him?”

Shan clenched his jaw and stared at the man with new interest. He had thought he had been well hidden, had not even seen the man look in his direction. Another figure was in the car, the Western woman who had appeared on the steps, the art historian named McDowell.

“One of the reformed prisoners,” Tan replied without hesitation. “Sometimes they wander aimlessly around the district. They hate us when they are behind wire but can’t bear to leave us when we free them. Public Security doctors classify it as a psychological disorder,” he added with studied disinterest.

“Sometimes old criminals commit new crimes,” the stranger observed. “It is often productive to question them. There is no better informant than a former prisoner.”

Tan nodded slowly. “Of course. But not those from our camp in the valley. They have been well conditioned by the time they are permitted to leave. Most have little left to contribute. They just wander into town sometimes, looking for a job, or a meal. Pitiful creatures. This one, his family is destroyed, his reputation ruined, he lives from one meal to the next. I gave him the address for the Tibetan Relief Association. He knows he could be arrested again on my command,” Tan added pointedly.

“But he’s Han.”

“Not any more,” Tan snapped impatiently, pushing Shan toward the shadows as he stepped past.

Shan turned back to face the man in the vest, who for the moment appeared more curious about the colonel than him. Then the stranger slowly turned to examine Shan, gazing at his scuffed tattered work boots, the threadbare pants that were two sizes too big, the brown quilted jacket with frayed sleeves, the small red embroidered vase on its shoulder, the symbolic depository of wisdom, placed there by a woman whose herding camp Lokesh and Shan had shared during a winter storm.

The man reached into his pocket and produced a few coins which he pushed into Shan’s hand, then frowned and stepped down the alley as the tall polished man opened the driver’s door of the silver car and settled behind the wheel, speaking to the woman who sat beside him. Shan turned to see the short man gaze into the darkened doorway where Tan had taken Shan. The man at the wheel tapped the horn and his companion jogged to the car. A moment later they sped away.

When Shan turned Tan was still staring after the car. The strange ambivalence he had shown in the storeroom was gone, replaced by the cold fury that was never totally absent from his face. “It won’t be the same this time,” the colonel snapped. “If you give me reason to put you back behind the wire, any reason,” he said, his eyes still on the street, “you’ll never see daylight again.”

Shan sat with Surya another quarter hour after Tan disappeared into the government center, but the monk still did not acknowledge him, only stared forlornly into the dirt at his feet, wringing his fingers, sometimes gasping and fighting for breath. Surya had gone to some cold dismal place inside himself, from which no one else could hope to extract him.

“What words has he spoken here?” Shan asked the man wrapped in the blanket, the one who had tried to trip him previously. The man pushed his open palm toward Shan. As Shan dropped into it the coins the stranger in the alley had given him he asked himself again why Tan would permit begging. I would prefer Surya to go, Tan had said. As if someone other than Tan wanted him to stay. And if they let Surya beg in the central square, they could not stop the others. But why Surya? Not because of the killing at Zhoka. He recalled the three strangers and the way they had examined the thangka on the steps. Because he was an artist?

The man pushed back the blanket from his head, as if Shan had now bought the right to see his face. “He sang some songs, in a whisper,” the second beggar said in a nervous voice. His cheeks were disfigured with jagged scars, the kind raised by beatings with truncheons. He repeatedly glanced toward the steps. “Some old children’s songs, like my mother used to sing to me. He asked me about Chinese magic.”

“Magic?”

“He had never seen trucks or cars. He called them Chinese carts. He asked how they could move without horses or yaks.” The beggar looked at the coins in his hand with a reluctant, frustrated expression, as if they obliged him to answer Shan’s questions. “He asked if the great abbot could make them fly in the air, too.” The man glanced up at Shan. His nose had a jagged angle to it, the look of having been broken.

“Abbot? What abbot?”

“That’s what I asked him. He said he met a powerful abbot in the mountains, who could make great magic.” The man glanced warily at Shan. “Is it true?” he asked in a more urgent, lower voice. “Has an abbot come for the people?”

Shan looked in confusion toward the distant peaks. “I don’t know what is happening in the mountains.” He studied Surya again. “Did he say what they asked him?”

The man shrugged. “They always ask the same things, don’t they?”

“You took his apple,” Shan observed.