Eliot Pattison - Beautiful Ghosts

“How do you know about Chinese things?” Shan asked after a moment, cupping the water in his hand for a drink, then sluicing another palmful over his head.

“I started as a policeman in San Francisco. When I made detective I worked Chinatown for seven years.”

As they started up the trail again, the American’s strangely despairing mood vanished, and he walked beside Shan, almost lighthearted, asking him for words in Tibetan, the names of flowers, more than once exclaiming about the spectacle of the snowclad Himalayas in the far southwest, even picking up a stone that lay by the trail, carved with figures nearly obscured by lichen. “It’s a prayer, isn’t it?”

“A mani stone,” Shan explained. “Pilgrims buy them, or make them, and leave them behind, to bless others, to gain merit. This one could be centuries old.”

Corbett stopped, insisted that Shan teach him how to correctly recite the prayer, the mani mantra on the stone, then repeated it as he made a little mound of gravel and laid the stone upon it. “I pray to find William Lodi,” he said as he rose. “Double murderer.”

“It’s unsettling work, to be looking for bodies in water,” Shan said when they paused again a quarter hour later.

“I wasn’t,” Corbett said. “She found me. I was just on the ferry crossing the bay. I didn’t even know she was missing. I had been assigned to the Dolan theft, but no one had mentioned her. There had been a back-page story about a missing college girl I hadn’t even read. But suddenly she was there in front of me, the Dolan governess whom nobody had seen since the night of the theft. A few hours later I made the connection. An eyewitness caught and disposed of by Lodi before he went out and celebrated in those bars.”

“So you’re here because of the girl?” Shan asked.

Corbett seemed to resent the question. “I told you. I was assigned to the case. I could speak Chinese. Someone had to follow Lodi.” The American clenched his jaw and continued up the trail. He was finished talking.

They passed through some of the steepest, most treacherous land Shan had ever seen, walking in a brooding silence most of the way, Yao clutching his radio like a weapon. Half an hour after passing the trail intersection where Lokesh, Dawa, and Liya had camped, they entered a chasm with nearly vertical two-hundred-foot walls. When at last they exited the darkness of the chasm, Corbett gasped and stepped back into the shadows as if frightened. The slope they had emerged onto was jammed with sculptures-eerie, twisted shapes of stone that seemed to have been placed to warn travelers from the southern route. They were not human forms, but hulking shapes that suggested the vague, dark creatures of nightmares.

“It was just the wind,” Shan said uncertainly. “It’s just how the soft rock was carved by wind.” He found himself searching for signs of Lokesh and Dawa. It was the kind of place his old friend would linger for hours, wandering among the distorted columns with awe on his face, touching the stones, because Lokesh would be convinced it could not be the wind. Shan found himself stepping to the first of the columns, a ten-foot-high formation that looked like a human contorted in pain. In dimmer light they would look like giant skeletons and grotesque, misshapen animals. If this was the way the local deities shaped the land, how had they shaped its people?

Movement in the shadows caught his eye, and for a moment he thought Lokesh was there after all. But the man who stood with his hand on one of the skeleton columns, gazing at it with intense curiosity, was Yao. Shan watched the inspector for a moment, then hurried on, following the winding trail through the columns, Corbett close behind.

When they reached the end they paused, waiting for Yao.

“Is it true, Agent Corbett, that in America justice is simply a matter of facts?”

“Of course. The evidence tells it all.”

“Then you must be very careful here,” Shan warned in a low voice. “You are in a world that is not constructed of facts.”

“I don’t give a damn about Beijing politics. And I know a fact when I see it.”

“I’m not speaking of politics now,” Shan said, and gestured toward the nearest column of rock. “What do you see there?”

“Crumbling sandstone.”

“Many Tibetans would not see stone at all, but the work of powerful gods. Others would consider them perfect symbols for meditating on the frailness of the world. Many would travel a hundred miles to pay homage here.”

The American frowned and looked expectantly toward Yao, as if hoping for rescue.

“Two years ago an old man was stopped on a road near Lhasa with a golden statue. He had sold everything he owned to buy the statue, so he could leave it at a holy mountain to gain merit for the soul of his dead wife. He was certain she had died because he had cut down the prayer flags that always flew over their house to use the rope to tether their last two sheep. He was arrested because he told someone he had killed his wife. Someone else reported that he had given a man money for the death of his wife. It was the money given to the goldsmith but no one bothered to explain. He was accused of having stolen the statue and did not deny it, because the house he had sold to buy it had belonged to his wife.”

“What happened?”

“He was sent to prison and died in three months.” He fixed Corbett with a hard stare. “The government had all its facts right. He did say he killed his wife. He did pay money because of the death. He did feel like a thief with the statue.” Shan pointed to a small ledge cut in the rocks above the stone columns. It held several small weathered statues of saints. “There is the truth of this place. People here live by truths, not by facts.”

“And what is the truth I should be following?” the American asked as he stared at the little statues.

“Godkillers,” Shan said, and quickly explained what had happened to the shrines in the mountains.

An hour later as they climbed down a steep ridge Yao stepped in front of Shan and threw a hand up to block him. “Enough,” the inspector growled. “Are you seeking to trap us, maybe lose us in the wilderness? You will give me directions I can transmit to the helicopter now.” The midsummer days were long, but they had no more than two hours of daylight left.

“Before you learn to solve a mystery in Tibet,” Shan said, “you must learn how to learn.”

Yao grimaced and turned to Corbett. “We are being held hostage by a convict. It is well known that most convicts suffer from some form of mental disorder.”

“Right,” the American said with an amused grin. “Almost as bad as those suffered by investigators.”

Shan shrugged, not understanding what was passing between the two men. Something burned intensely inside each of them, but it was clearly not the same thing. “I had a teacher in my prison barracks. He said that to truly learn, turn your back on what you know, leave it all behind. He said to know the world you must immerse yourself in what is not your knowledge.”

Yao pulled out the army map he had been consulting most of the afternoon, turning it one way, then another. Shan was certain Yao had no clue where they were.

“I read a book about that once,” Corbett said, mischief in his tone. “It’s called having a beginner’s mind.”

Yao frowned at the American then waved the radio in front of him. “You said you knew where to go,” he said to Shan in an accusing voice, “but I think you have never been in this land.”

“I have not,” Shan admitted. “But the place we are going to is right there,” he said, and pointed to the crest of the next ridge, half a mile away, where a dozen large birds spiraled above an outcropping that had the appearance of a huge rock nest.