Eliot Pattison - Beautiful Ghosts

“Meditation chambers,” Shan explained. They aimed their lights inside each as they passed it. The walls were rough stone, the chambers unfurnished. Yao stepped inside the last one, followed a moment later by Shan.

A faint hint of incense hung in the air. A dust-covered scrap of cloth in one corner may have been a monk’s blanket.

“They would sit in here,” Shan explained, “sleep in here, eat in here, chant their beads in here. For days, sometimes for weeks.” He studied Yao, whose face had shown a flicker of uncertainty. “When the Tibetans meditate they can go away, to a place unfamiliar to you and me.”

Yao frowned but stepped to the blanket and squatted in front of it, pushing his light close to it. He seemed unwilling to touch it. “This is my fourth visit to these ruins,” he said. “Each time I sense I hear something, and I strain to listen but there is nothing, only perhaps a lingering vibration, like an old echo. Not a sound, but an intuition of sound.”

Shan studied Yao. It was a strange language the inspector spoke. Sometimes he sounded like a policeman, sometimes a party member. But other times he spoke more like a professor. Yao looked back at him with amusement in his eyes. Was he mocking Shan? Was he somehow mocking the gompa?

He stood and fixed Shan with a cool, steady stare. “You have a decision to make, comrade. There is another way to proceed, Colonel Tan’s way. Saturate the mountains with troops. Bring every man, woman, and child in, every goat and yak, and see what kind of confessions spring forth. Tan says it always works.”

“I need to know you are not lying to me,” Shan said. “About my son. About your investigation.”

For a moment Yao looked uneasily at the doorway past Shan, as if wondering whether Shan might try to prevent him from leaving the meditation cell, even try to fling him into the stream. Then his gaze hardened. “I’ve told you.”

“What you are speaks louder than what you say.”

“What-an investigator for the highest government offices? It’s what you did for twenty years, comrade.”

“Exactly.”

One side of Yao’s mouth twisted into something like a smile. “Colonel Tan said you might be desperate, that you would be irrational about protecting Tibetans. He said to weigh all your words carefully. He said you never did anything by chance or from stupidity. You may recall he wanted to send soldiers with us today, but I turned him down. This time. You were supposed to see that as a gesture of good faith. To show my commitment to your rehabilitation.” He took a step toward Shan but Shan did not move. “All I want is the truth,” Yao said.

“No,” Shan said. “Like you said, I spent many years doing what you do. I know exactly what you want. What you want, all you want, is to close your file, get a politically palatable answer to close your file. There are prosecutors who have discovered that Tibetans are the answer to every open case. Social misfits. Genetically inferior, some scientists will testify. No one to defend them. Hostile to Beijing. By definition politically undesirable. But sturdy enough to contribute years of hard labor.”

Yao frowned again. “So far,” he sighed, “your rehabilitation appears to be a failure.” The inspector pushed past him into the corridor, then paused and reached into his pocket, produced a slip of paper which he handed to Shan. It was a long grouping of numbers, in a familiar format. Without conscious effort Shan rolled up his sleeve and compared the digits. It was a lao gai registration number.

“It is his number. His facility is in northwestern Xinjiang,” Yao explained, referring to the vast province north of Tibet, a land of deserts and remote, inhospitable mountain ranges, a favorite venue for gulag camps.

Shan gripped the paper in his fist. “You still haven’t told me why you are here. It’s not just because the FBI is here or because of the timing of the crime.”

“Among the old papers in the Qian Long cottage Ming found a copy of a letter from the emperor saying he was sending something beautiful from his personal cottage, in tribute to his friends in Lhadrung.”

“What friends?”

“We don’t know. Like you said, he had lamas in his court.”

“How do you know the letter was genuine?”

“Because Ming said so,” Yao snapped. “It was Ming who reported the theft to the Chairman, and the letter.”

“You’re saying the fresco was taken as the tribute promised from Beijing to Tibet two centuries ago? That it was a political crime?”

Yao just smiled, then stepped away to explore the two remaining chambers that opened into the passage above the pool from which Corbett had almost fallen to his death.

One chamber was empty except for a corner where dust had accumulated, preserving the prints of heavy climbing boots, expensive boots, not the kind Tibetans would wear. There were over a dozen prints, in at least two different sizes. In the second, the last chamber, which had the benefit of the sunlight coming from the stream’s outfall, they found chaos. Shards of clay pots littered the floor, which was carpeted with what had been the contents of the pots. Flour, sugar, rice, the contents of torn envelopes of dried soup. A small butane stove, its frame bent as if crushed by a boot. Tea leaking from the small bags used in the West, each with a tiny English label. A box of latex gloves, into which a jar of honey had been dumped. Down, from two sleeping bags that had been slashed open.

Yao pointed to the bootprints outlined in the spilled flour and sugar.

“At least three pairs of boots. The owners of the supplies,” Shan suggested, and showed him how all the tracks were at the front of the room where those in the boots had surveyed the damage, except for one set that led straight to the farthest corner. Two pairs of tracks showed the heavy treads of Western-style boots, the third was smooth, from the type of soft boots worn by many Tibetans. He followed the single set of tracks to another clay pot in the corner, under a blanket. It held batteries, still in plastic packs, the size used in the metal light Shan had found on his first visit, and an empty package of cigars. Soaked in rum, the English label said.

Yao made a small satisfied sound like a purr, then began examining every inch of the room, shining his light in each corner, studying even the ceiling. Within five minutes the inspector had found a small battery powered saw, its circular blade covered with plaster dust, and, in another clay jar, loaded ammunition clips for a rifle.

“I can compare chemical composition of the plaster from the emperor’s cottage,” Yao announced as he held up the saw with a victorious gleam, then popped off its blade and inserted it into one of his glassine envelopes. “If even a microscopic portion remains we’ll find it.”

Shan simply stared and nodded. He had been studying the tracks as Yao worked. The soft imprints had been there before the final set of boot tracks, as if a solitary Tibetan had destroyed the supplies. Surya wore soft-soled boots.

Ten minutes later they found Corbett bent over a flat rock, holding a pair of long tweezers over a small piece of paper on which he had assembled the fruits of his fastidious search. Three cigarette butts, without filters. Another of the small cigar butts with the sweet tobacco. Four single-edged razor blades that had been shoved into a crack. A piece of wide adhesive tape, folded, stuck to itself. Several chips of what looked like bone. Fragments of a dark blue stone that might have been lapis lazuli, one of the stones favored in Tibetan artwork. More of Surya’s prayer beads, over fifty. And tiny grey specks Shan could not recognize.

“Silver,” Corbett explained. “Flecks of silver.” He raised the largest in the tweezers and held one of the lamps close to it.