Eliot Pattison - Beautiful Ghosts

“Thank you,” Shan murmured, in English.

“Introductions were a bit rushed yesterday,” the man announced. “I’m Corbett. Federal Bureau of Investigation. Glad you could make it.” The American pulled out the empty chair beside him, nodded at Shan, then placed one hand over the other on the table and gazed expectantly at Yao.

Shan stared at the American. Corbett didn’t know him but seemed to be welcoming him, almost seemed to be taking Shan’s side in some battle that was about to erupt.

“Our messenger found you then,” Yao said.

Shan slowly shifted his gaze from the American to Yao and nodded.

“We require your assistance. International criminals are at work in Lhadrung.”

Shan did not answer until he had studied the faces of each of the men at the table, settling his gaze on Tan, who was himself staring at the small black portfolio in front of Yao. Tan had asked for Shan’s assistance once before. “I am not an investigator,” Shan said in a tight voice.

“Of course you’re not,” Yao shot back. “We need someone who can guide us in the mountains, someone who can explain things there. Reliable Tibetans are difficult to find in this county, it seems.” The inspector’s casual, almost disheveled appearance was deceiving. His voice was cold and sharp-well practiced, Shan suspected, in giving orders and political criticism.

Shan found himself looking at the black portfolio. “I won’t help put Tibetans in jail.”

Tan cursed. Director Ming made a high-pitched sound that could have been a laugh.

Yao gave a disappointed sigh. “We have been briefed on your politics.” He rose and retrieved something from a chair in the shadows behind the table, shaking the object to make it jingle. Leg manacles. He extended them toward Shan for a moment, then draped them over one of the empty chairs at the table. “You are not officially an ex-convict. You are still a convict. Someone,” Yao said pointedly, “chose to grant a parole to you. Paroles may be revoked.”

Strangely, Shan realized he no longer felt fear. Like many of the prisoners released from the gulag, he had half expected to return to it one day. He studied each of the men at the table again, then silently stepped to the manacles. He lifted each foot in turn onto the chair, locking the manacles around his ankles.

“Jesus,” Corbett muttered.

Tan’s lips curled in a thin grin aimed at Yao. Yao replied with a frown, then glared at the chains on Shan’s feet. Ming, however, seemed delighted with Shan’s behavior. He rose, sprang to the door, and called out enthusiastically for the soldiers.

Shan retreated to the carpet by the door, staring at the pattern along its edge, facing the door. It was frayed and faded, but he could see its weavers had worked a line of sacred symbols along its edge. A treasure vase, a lotus flower, leaping fish. He kept staring at the carpet as two soldiers came through the door for him, each grabbing an arm. It was another of the prisoner’s reflexes that had been ingrained in him. When you’re in the outside world, imprint small, colorful pieces of it in your memory, for the dark, grey times to come. His original sentence had been indefinite. Tan had warned him if he went back inside he might never come out again.

“Director Ming was mistaken,” Tan said to the soldiers in a low, cool voice. The soldiers retreated, disappeared out the door.

“You came out of the mountains because of your son,” Tan said to Shan’s back.

As Shan turned back toward the table he recalled Lokesh’s words. Maybe in Shan’s case this was the way the father’s deity was completed, letting them use his son to inflict his final punishment. His gaze settled on the black file again. “I won’t put Tibetans in prison,” he repeated, his voice nearly a whisper.

Yao reached into the black portfolio and pulled out a yellow folder that held several pages from a facsimile machine. “Shan Ko Mei,” Yao said in a slow, sharp voice.

The name caused something to pinch in Shan’s heart. He had not heard it spoken by another voice in at least six years. He himself had only whispered it, infrequently, toward the stars, when he tried to find words to ask his father’s spirit to watch over the boy. But he had stopped even mouthing the words long ago. Shan was dead to his son. The name was a wound over which thick scar tissue had grown. Now they had jabbed a blade into the old wound and were twisting the steel.

Someone touched his arm and he recoiled with a sound like a sob.

“Sit down.” It was the American, Corbett, motioning to the chair beside him. “You should sit.”

Shan dropped heavily into the chair. Tan stared at him, clenching his jaw, anger in his eyes, but also wariness, as if Shan were laying a trap for him. Director Ming kept glancing at the others, amusement still in his eyes. Yao was angry, impatience obvious on his face. The American locked his fingers together on the table and stared at Shan, worry in his eyes.

“My son doesn’t know who I am,” Shan said.

Yao gave a satisfied sigh, as if Shan’s words signaled they were commencing with business. He spread the pages from the yellow folder in front of him. “An early opportunist,” he began, his eyes on the papers now. “Thief. Vandal. Destroyer of state property.”

Shan recognized the folder now. It was a Public Security file, the file of a convict, the record they sometimes dragged out to shame a prisoner in front of those who did not know him. But Yao was mistaken. It wasn’t Shan’s file. Reading back the file of a particularly hardluck convict for its intimidation value was a crude interrogation tactic. Shan would have expected more from Yao.

The Beijing inspector cast a satisfied glance toward Shan, then raised the front page and continued. “Those were the early years. Later, repeated charges of hooliganism,” he reported, using one of Beijing’s favored labels for antisocial behavior. “The reluctance to mete out firm discipline and instruction in the socialist imperative early on guaranteed the outcome,” he read. “In the end an assault on a Public Security officer. Fifteen years lao gai, ” he added, referring to a sentence of hard labor. Yao dropped the paper. “One of the coal mine camps,” he said, meaning one of the massive open pit mines where malnourished prisoners excavated their own particular hell, digging coal with crude tools all year long, seven days a week, year after year. Half the coal pit inmates died before completing their sentences.

Yao leafed through the papers clipped to the file, pausing at one of the rear pages. “In the beginning it was one of those elite schools for children of party members. When a child gets in trouble they get assigned extra readings about the heroes of the people. He was caught stealing from classmates. They called a doctor. He interviewed the boy. He reported to the Deputy Mayor.”

Something icy crept down Shan’s spine.

“The doctor reported that the boy was incurably antisocial. He kept boasting his father was a famous criminal, head of a gang that robbed and killed all over China, that even the Chairman feared him.”

Shan sensed the blood draining from his face. His wife, who was assigned to a city nearly a thousand miles from Beijing after they were married, had raised their son, sometimes-not often-visiting Shan in Beijing on holidays. His wife, the Deputy Mayor, who had divorced Shan after his imprisonment.

“One night he was caught writing slogans against the party. He was expelled from school. A week later telephone poles began falling down in the night. It took another week before they found him with an ax at a line of fallen poles. He had taken down eighty poles in total. His mother was sent to a special party facility for discipline. He went to a farm labor camp, from which he escaped a month later and surfaced with a gang that sold heroin outside factory gates. He was using a new name. Tiger Ko. When he was caught that time he attacked the arresting officer, sent him to the hospital. His mother left office in disgrace.”