Eliot Pattison - Beautiful Ghosts

When Shan arrived at Yao’s side the inspector was standing at the end of the corridor, staring upward at the rock ceiling where a six-foot-wide torrent of water fell from above, into a pool that drained into the darkness to their left.

A short black metal electric hand lamp lay in the swift stream, still illuminated.

Yao searched the darkness with his light. Shan reached into the frigid water and retrieved the small light, which seemed none the worse for its soaking.

“There!” Shan exclaimed a moment later, pointing out a pair of boots on a rock by the pool. They were expensive leather hiking boots, with thick woolen socks stuffed inside them. “The rocks are worn very smooth,” Shan said, “very slippery.”

But Yao was not listening. The inspector was staring at something on the wall beyond the little pool, dim shapes outlined in paint on the black rock.

Shan stepped away, into the darkness, slowly at first, then at a jog, following the path of the water down a series of wide steps that had been cut into the rock along the left edge of the cupped, hollow course etched by the water. It would have been like a chute for anyone who had slipped from above, a treacherous slide, without handholds, without purchase of any kind, any means of stopping. He passed chambers carved into the rock, then a crumbling fresco. After a minute he realized there was light ahead and switched off the little lamp. The passage began to descend more gradually, straightened until it was nearly level. He rounded a bend and was facing sunlight. The path ended with a rock pillar, at the side of a pool, on the far side of which was a rectangular opening perhaps five feet high and eight across, through which the water plunged hundreds of feet into the gorge below. Iron bars had been set into the stone long ago, spaced perhaps twelve inches apart, but most had rusted away, leaving broken rusty spikes hanging from the top of the opening. On the far side of the opening two bars had stayed intact, but were thinned and pitted with corrosion. A large, big-shouldered man, a Westerner, lay with his feet braced against the two remaining bars, raking the rock wall beside him with his right hand, futilely trying to find a grip as he braced himself with his left hand, which was submerged in the shallow, fast moving water.

“Are you all right?” Shan asked in English.

“What do you goddamned think, Yao? As far as I can tell I am about to die. These bars won’t last forever.” The stranger was older than Shan, his curly brown hair streaked with grey. He wore a vest with multiple pockets. An expensive camera hung from a strap around his neck.

“I am not Yao,” Shan said as he searched for something, anything, to extend to the man.

The Westerner glanced sideways toward Shan. “Good!” he shouted. “He’s probably not strong enough to do what has to be done. He probably would have run to call Beijing for advice.”

“Who are you?” Shan asked as he began pulling his belt from his waist. He could not step into the water to help the man. If he slipped he would either slide out into the gorge or into the Westerner, which would probably dislodge the bars the man was braced against.

“Did you come to help me or write my goddamned obituary?” the man barked angrily. His fingers were leaving traces of blood as they clawed the wall.

But Shan repeated the question as he kept looking for something to use to pull the man to safety.

“Corbett,” the stranger yelled. “FBI.”

“You must throw me your camera,” Shan said.

“Like hell.”

“I have no pole, no rope. I am going to tie your camera strap to my ankle, and my belt to your strap. There is a rock pillar here. I am going to tie myself to it with my shirt and stretch out in the water. You’ll have to catch the belt so I can pull you over.”

The American looked at Shan with a grim, scared expression, then with his bloody hand pulled his camera from around his neck, whirled it over his head, and launched it toward Shan. The camera hit the wall behind Shan, the lens shattering and breaking away from the body of the camera. Shan unfastened the heavy strap, looped it through the buckle to his belt, tied the strap to his ankle, and, a moment later, eased himself into the water, holding one sleeve of his shirt, the other tied to the pillar.

“What did they ask the old monk?” he called as he moved.

The American cursed. “I don’t know, dammit. They asked him to draw a picture of death.”

Shan braced himself. “You’ve got to reach out with your left hand when I say,” he called.

As the stranger slowly raised his hand from the floor of the stream, putting more of his weight on his legs, the iron bar beneath his right foot snapped loose, broken away at the bottom.

Shan extended his leg, struggling to direct the end of the belt close to the man’s hand. “You’ve got to turn and grab it when I say,” he called.

“If I miss it I’m gone.” The man groaned.

“I don’t know which is going to last longer,” Shan said, “my shirt or that last bar.” He pushed his leg as far as it would go, lifting it, twisting it, watching the end of the belt as the water carried it closer to the man. “Now!”

In the same instant the man twisted and grabbed the belt, the last bar broke, and Shan’s shirt began to rip. The American began to slip out the opening, his legs hanging over the abyss, the heavier man pulling Shan toward him. Then, suddenly, a hand appeared on Shan’s arm and began pulling him back. He twisted to see Yao, one arm wrapped around the pillar, pulling Shan, until Shan could grasp the pillar himself, then straddle it as he and Yao together pulled on the strap tied to his ankle.

Suddenly the American was in their grasp, and they hauled him out of the water. Shan collapsed beside the man. Yao sat down heavily, gasping, but not before, with a small sideways motion of his foot, hidden from the American, he had kicked the American’s camera into the water, where the current quickly pushed it over the edge.

“Where the hell were you?” the American growled at Yao.

“Don’t complain,” Yao said as he struggled for breath. “I saved you a hundred dollars.”

Shan looked from one man to the other as they lay exhausted on the floor of the tunnel, Yao staring angrily at the American, the American making a low laughing sound. Shan forced himself to his feet, grabbed his shirt, pulled the little electric lamp from his pocket, and ran back up the tunnel.

Shan kept running when he reached the surface, darting into the shadows of one of the long alleys of the ruins toward the slope, listening for pursuit, watching for signs of soldiers on the surface. Nothing. He jogged, following the mental map he had been making of the ruins, until he arrived at the eastern edge, the side opposite the stone tower. He looked down at his wet legs as he caught his breath. If a man had been murdered in the fresco chamber the day before, then the body had been quickly disposed of. What better way than to throw it into the swift subterranean stream and let it wash out into the gorge, as the American almost had?

Following a foot trail along the top of the curving wall he found a perch that afforded a view into the gorge below the old gompa. The full length of the waterfall that sprouted from the mountainside was visible. The water tumbled into a pool five hundred feet below, from which a stream wound its way out, north and west toward Lhadrung Valley. He knelt and studied the treacherous, nearly vertical walls of the gorge. There would be no access to the pool below without traveling miles east to the valley and miles back up the gorge. There was no sign of a body, but there was no way of knowing how deep the pool was, or if the body had washed away or fallen into the shadows surrounding the pool. He saw bits of color and shapes that seemed not to belong to the rocks of the ravine, and remembered how in her fit of fear Dawa had flung so many things over the edge. Somewhere down there was Gendun’s little Buddha, and the bag with Shan’s ancient throwing sticks.