Eliot Pattison - Beautiful Ghosts

“There are curses,” Yao said, pointing to a line of script that ran along the edge of the thick plank at the side of the table. “The kind of people who do this leave curses for those who try to interfere.”

Shan looked back at the writing. It was recent, and had been made in chalk or with a piece of plaster. He struggled to make sense of the Tibetan letters. After studying the line of text he realized he could read the words, but could not make sense of their combination. He stared at it, reading it again and again. “It is not a curse,” he said at last. “It says…”

“Says what?” Corbett asked, staring at the bones.

Shan had not realized he had stopped speaking to look back over the ruins with a new sense of wonder. “The words are these,” he said, and pointed to them as he read. “Not time but beauty has claimed us.”

He reverently placed his fingers along the side of the first of the yellowed skulls, as though resting his hand on the cheek of an old loved one. When he looked up Yao was staring at him with a strange defiance in his eyes.

“It only proves that it’s Tibetans at work here,” Yao said, finding his investigator’s voice again. He lifted one of the femurs from the table. “You said you saw such a bone below,” he observed to Shan. “Tibetans use them, don’t they, comrade,” he asked, as if he were trying to force Shan into a confession.

“They make trumpets out of them,” Shan confirmed.

“And they gild them with silver,” Yao added, “perhaps to sell them through Lodi’s craft store in Lhadrung, or overseas, as antiques. If Lodi and his accomplices are so fond of collecting bones,” Yao said from the shadows, “do you suppose they are particular in how they obtain them?” He walked away without awaiting a reply, reaching into his pack. As he disappeared around the ruined wall Shan saw a small black radio in his hand.

Corbett still stared at the skulls.

“Did you understand what happened yesterday when you almost died?” Shan asked. “I don’t.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean the old writing on the wall. It had nothing to do with William Lodi, nothing to do with your case. But you took off your boots and stepped into the frigid water and nearly died. Because you had to see old Tibetan words on a wall.”

Shan’s words seemed to cause the American pain. He looked into his hands a moment, then stood and circled the table of bones. “I thought one of these could have been him, the one who died below. But none of these died recently, did they?” he asked after a moment.

“No.”

“So who’s been-? There must be graverobbers digging here.”

“There are no graves in this part of Tibet.”

The American gave a peeved frown. “Right. No one dies here.”

Shan found his gaze drifting back to the skulls. “What do you know of Tibetan history, Mr. Corbett?”

The American said nothing.

“What did the inspector tell you about this place?”

“A school of some kind, they said. An old art school that closed a long time ago. Looks like a century or more. Yao and Tan put it on their list of places outlaws might use.”

“It was a monastery. A gompa. The army and the Red Guard destroyed nearly every gompa in Tibet, thousands of them. Places like this, too remote for the infantry, were bombed from the air. I’ve heard eyewitness accounts about places like this. A lot of monks had never seen planes before. They waved at them as they began their bombing runs because they thought they were some kind of sky deity.”

The American’s gaze shifted from Shan to the skulls and back to Shan. He appeared troubled, then just confused. “Look, the history here has nothing to do with me. It’s not my land, not my country. I’ll be here a couple weeks, then I’ll be going home, never to come back.” His gaze drifted slowly back toward the skulls. “They just bombed them?” he asked after a long silence. “Monks?”

A shiver ran down Shan’s spine and he turned to see Yao in the ruined gateway, glaring at him. “Even in your country, Mr. Corbett, I suspect criminals have their own peculiar views about their society and its history.”

Corbett nodded slowly. “Still,” he said pensively, rising and walking to the table. “A funny thing about these skulls. I spent a year in a forensics lab.” He pointed to the seams joining the plates of the skulls. “They all died young. Not one of these was older than forty, I’d wager.” He shrugged at Yao then stepped past him out of the courtyard.

Yao’s face was flushed. His eyes were like two blades stabbing at Shan. “I think Colonel Tan was wrong,” the inspector growled. “You really are stupid after all. Spreading reactionary views hurts us all, most of all you. I’m not sure why you were released from prison. It was on Tan’s order, that’s all I know. But Tan’s orders can be countermanded.”

Shan stared at him impassively. He warned himself again not to be fooled by Yao’s disheveled, undisciplined appearance. The man was a top official, doubtlessly a high-ranking party member, and he could easily summon the cold calculation, the casual cruelty that were usually bred into such men. “If you want to understand the people of these hills,” he said after a moment, “you have to understand what you see on this rock, you have to understand what they have experienced in the past fifty years.”

“No,” Yao shot back. “Tibetans commit crimes out of fear, out of greed, out of passion, just like anyone else. It’s always the same. In the end it is because the criminal mind fails to embrace the socialist imperative.”

Shan did not break away from his intense stare. “You must be wildly successful in Beijing, Inspector Yao.”

Yao’s jaw clenched and unclenched several times, then he shrugged and raised the radio. “Helicopter patrols report six or seven Tibetans in the mountains south of here. A man and a child, another group of three or four with sheep. We’ll pick them up, let them make their contribution. You’ve changed my mind, Shan. I very much want to know what happened to the man who died here, where his bones wound up. Right now I can think of nothing more important.”

A man and child. The patrols had seen Lokesh with Dawa.

“You can’t,” Shan blurted out.

“A squad has already been dispatched.”

“Send more helicopters into those mountains and every Tibetan for miles will scatter,” Shan warned, trying to control his own sudden anger. “They will run so deep into the ground they won’t be seen for days, weeks even.” He looked back at the skulls for a long moment. He sensed he was betraying someone, but not certain whom. “I know where the dead go to,” he said in a low, resigned voice. “I know who can tell us about bones. Call off the soldiers and I’ll take you to the dead.”

“She was floating face up, her eyes looking right at me,” Corbett said in a brittle voice. The American was explaining how, incredibly, he had encountered the body of the murdered governess. They had paused at a stream in their steady ascent toward the southern peaks. “Must have been a hundred people there, looking over the rail, crying out, fainting, shouting for the crew. But she was looking at me.” He had turned his gaze from the distant mountains back toward Shan and Yao, with an awkward, forced grin. “I know a medical examiner who says sometimes the dead can be like that, their eyes looking nowhere and everywhere, following you like some zombie Mona Lisa.”

“Mona Lisa?” Shan asked. He squatted to scoop water from the stream.

Corbett shrugged. “A painting. I went out with the harbor patrol to recover her. I helped pull away the seaweed that was wrapped around her arms and legs.” He looked into his hands. “Twenty-three years old. She was wearing earrings shaped like little silver turtles. Supposed to bring long life, turtles, isn’t that what Chinese say?”