Eliot Pattison - Beautiful Ghosts

“Are you lost?” Shan asked slowly, as his mind raced. “It is dangerous here.”

“Do you have any idea of the penalties for looting?” the man demanded.

“Looting? I thought everything was destroyed.” The man must have come in a helicopter, and it was not likely that such an official came without an escort of soldiers. Troops probably waited somewhere on the surface, perhaps in hiding. He edged toward the door.

The man raised his lamp as if he might use it as a weapon. “What are you doing here?” he demanded in a slow, authoritative voice. “Who do you work for? Who brought you here?” Despite the man’s disheveled appearance Shan saw his eyes burned with a sharp, intense intelligence.

“I live in these mountains.” Shan studied the pad the man had been writing on and realized the stranger, too, had been looking. But for what? “This is a dangerous place for tourists.”

The man gazed at him with a hard, impatient expression. “Neither of us are tourists, comrade. What were you doing in these ruins? Why this room?”

“Something happened here.”

“What do you mean?” The stranger swept the walls with the beam of light.

“First, someone stole something from here.”

The man froze for a moment, then turned back to Shan. “Why,” he asked with sudden interest, “would you think that?”

“There were plaster frescoes on three of these walls. One survives,” Shan said, pointing to the faded painting. “One crumbled away,” he said, pointing to the adjacent wall, to the left of the dim fresco. “You can see the plaster dust,” he added, pointing to the long low mound of crumbled plaster at the base of the wall. “But the third was strong and solid.”

He extended his hand toward the man’s light, which he released to Shan. Shan stepped to the right corner of the empty wall and lit a tiny crusted edge that ran parallel to the edge. He then lit the hidden crack at the top of the empty wall which he had previously explored with his fingers. “Whoever did this was careful to remove the traces of the old plaster. But not every trace. They would tape it or paste cloth or paper over it, then cut and break it off at the top, in this crack.” In the light, the edge of the plaster inside the crack, the top of the fresco, was visible. “And here,” Shan said, pointing to a piece of half-inch wire stuck in a crack. “A remnant of the brush they used to clean the wall afterwards. They tried to hide their crime.”

“Do you have any idea how difficult a process is involved in removing such a fresco?” the stranger asked in a skeptical tone. “There’s probably only a few dozen people in the world who could do it well.” He seemed to pause over his own words, then retrieved his lamp and studied the evidence Shan had pointed out, bending close to the corner, running his finger into the crack at the top just as Shan had. He extracted a six-inch-long brown fiber from the vestige of plaster at the top.

“Horsehair,” Shan said. “It was common to mix horsehair in the plaster, to help bind it. Many Tibetans still do so, in their houses.” He examined the hair extended by the stranger. “This particular horse probably lived several hundred years ago. It was brown and the hair was probably cut from its mane. Monks would have said prayers to its spirit, to thank it for helping to build the temple.”

The stranger cocked his head, staring intensely at the hair now with a strange mixture of fascination and chagrin. And then, as Shan watched with increasing alarm, he produced a small glassine envelope from his pocket and dropped it inside.

Shan inched closer to the door. If he pushed the man off his feet he could make the stairs, take his chances with any soldiers on the surface.

The man stared at Shan again, shining the light in his face once more. “That bastard Tan,” he muttered. “Did he really think he was going to hide you so easily? You’re the one. The prisoner Shan.”

Ice seemed to form around Shan’s spine. If he ran now, with the stranger knowing his identity, it would only bring more soldiers, more searchers in the mountains who would likely find and detain Lokesh and Gendun, even little Dawa.

“The Chinese who has gone wild,” the man continued, as though deliberately goading Shan, “who knows how to speak with the Tibetans in the mountains.”

“I am Shan,” he confirmed in a whisper. “Just speaking Tibetan means little,” he added. “The people will never speak freely with the government.”

“Why?”

Shan clenched his jaw in silence a moment. “You must be new to Tibet.”

The man cocked his head at Shan, the way he had at the ancient horsehair. “We want to hire you for a few days, until I go home, to help interview a few Tibetans. You’ll be paid well by my colleague. You have no regular job, you’re an ex-convict.”

“Home to where?”

The stranger made a little rumbling sound in his throat. “I am Inspector Yao Ling of the Council of Ministers in Beijing.”

The silence in the room was like a cloud of dust, welling up, almost choking Shan. Not only was Yao from Beijing, he was from the tiny, elite council that served the special, secret needs of top ruling officials. “I never knew the Council had investigators,” Shan said in a cracking voice.

“Investigator. Only one. The work I do doesn’t lend itself to public attention,” Yao said, and aimed the light at Shan’s face. “How would you know about the Council?”

“You came here because of the murder?” Shan asked.

“What murder?” Yao asked, drawing closer.

“The theft was only the first crime. Yesterday someone was killed here, in this room. Afterwards the old monk was arrested and interrogated.”

Yao frowned. He paced about the room, studying the wall with the missing fresco again. “Not arrested. We had to discuss something with him.”

“You and Director Ming?” Shan took a step toward the doorway. “Why would the Council of Ministers be interested in an old monk?”

Yao frowned. “You saw a body here?”

Shan pointed to the stains on the floor. “I saw the fresh blood. Surya…” he hesitated, still not knowing what Surya’s role had been. “Surya saw the body.”

The inspector sighed. “Ming said the old man knew about the old art, knew how to make its symbols speak, maybe about where it used to be hidden. But he had some kind of breakdown. Speaks like a lunatic now. We couldn’t make sense of anything he said, couldn’t use him at all. Next he will be inviting us to the moon to see all the bodies he left there.”

“You couldn’t use him,” Shan repeated. “But yesterday it was so important to speak with him Ming sent a helicopter?”

“Send it? He guided it.”

So it had been Ming giving orders to the soldiers over the radio, Ming who had acted as though he knew who died. “You didn’t come from Beijing because of the murder that was commited yesterday. You were already here.”

“There was no murder.”

“I was upstairs, in the ruins on the surface. I saw Surya’s face when he came up to us. He had been here. Someone had been killed.”

The inspector did not conceal his impatience. “Murder is a legal term. No one is murdered unless it is established by legal process. Brown stains on the floor of a cave, a raving old Tibetan, these things are of no concern to us.”

“But you are here.”

Inspector Yao raised his palm and opened his mouth as if to argue, but was cut off by a frantic shout.

“Yao! Jesus! You’ve got to-” The frantic cry was cut off by a long gasping groan. The speaker seemed to be moving away from them, fast.

As Inspector Yao disappeared through the door he had entered Shan hesitated, realizing it was his chance to escape. Then the cry came again, muffled, desperate, and Shan followed Yao, sprinting into the darkness. He had nearly caught up with the light beam ahead of him before he realized the desperate voice had spoken in English.