Eliot Pattison - Beautiful Ghosts

They both stared at the name. Kwan Li. It was the name Shan had seen on the easel in the conference room. He saw something else now, scrawled in Tibetan along the bottom, covered by the curling edge of the paper on Shan’s first reading. Dead, by order of the Stone Dragon Lama, it said in faded ink. May the gods be victorious.

* * *

The driver cheerfully agreed to a quick detour, dropping them not in Lhadrung but at the base of the ridge that marked the eastern hills, nearly a mile from the grey trucks that marked a new prison work site. Tan had ordered the prisoners to clear fields in the valley below the high cliffs that marked the beginnings of the mountains. Half an hour later they were on top of the ridge, walking along the crest. Shan smelled woodsmoke again, also something new. Cordite, the scent of explosives. He hurried, carrying Dawa, until he could see that Fiona’s sturdy little house was intact, though the top of the kiln and its structure were gone, lying in pieces over the little plot of barley, which had been trampled.

The door of the house was open again, and Shan looked inside to see Fiona sitting at the table by the little kitchen, arranging colored shards into piles. Porcelain, Shan saw as he approached. The porcelain tea set had been smashed, and she was arranging the shards of the cups, pot, and saucers into piles.

“Jara says he can get some glue in town,” she said without looking up.

“I am sorry, Fiona,” Shan said. “I am glad you are not hurt.”

“They did not touch our Ivanhoe,” she said with a sad smile, rising slowly to her feet. “They wanted to look at old Tibetan things. They took some of the peche, all my old statues. They demanded to know what pilgrim guides I had. They saw the English books and asked if Lodi was in my family. That’s when they threw a little bomb into my kiln.”

“Did you know them?”

“No. Two men, a big one and a little one with a crooked nose.” He extracted the group photo from his pocket and pointed to the men who stood beside the American Dolan.

“Yes,” Fiona murmured, her face darkening. She raised a finger and touched another face, sighing. She had recognized her nephew, Lodi. When she looked up she offered a sad smile. “They did not know where to look.” She gestured Shan toward the sleeping alcove, where she pulled away three blankets to reveal a small prayer table, where scriptures might be laid for reading. Shan stood in silence, glancing outside, where Yao and Dawa were patting the brown dog, then watched as Fiona pried up the top of the table and extracted two old peche and a bundle of felt. She leaned back and unfolded the bundle on her legs to reveal a brilliantly colored piece of yellow silk with blue brocade along the edge.

Shan stared, dumbfounded, momentarily forgetting Yao and Dawa, as he dropped to his knees to study Fiona’s treasure. It was a robe, elaborately embroidered with images of cranes, dragons, and pheasants.

“It was given to my family many generations ago, in payment for a ceramic statue of Buddha.”

“Do you know by whom?” Shan whispered as he leaned to study the symbols on the robe. Arrayed around the animals were axes and bows.

Fiona shook her head. “That is lost.”

But Shan did not need to be told. He did not touch the intricate symbols, but lifted the cuffs, which were cut to resemble horse hooves. The row of five-clawed dragons along the bottom of the robe said it all. There was only one family allowed to wear such dragons. As impossible as it seemed, the garment came from someone in the family of the Chinese emperor. The hoof-shaped cuffs were in the Manchu fashion, from the Qing dynasty. And in the bag from Liya was a document with the seal of the Qian Long emperor, of the Qing dynasty.

“It is very pretty,” Fiona said as she folded the garment back into the felt.

“Yes,” Shan stammered. “Did the two intruders ask for the robe?”

“Not the robe. They demanded, what did I know of the Chinese prince.”

“What prince?”

“Kwan Li,” she said in a matter-of-fact tone.

“Why him?”

She shrugged. “He is missing. But I pretended not to know him.”

For the first time Fiona seemed to notice the figures outside. “Have you brought friends? I should make tea.”

“One is more than a friend,” Shan said, with sudden guilt for forgetting who waited. “Forgive me. She has come to help you.” As he spoke a small eager face appeared at the entrance. “Help her great-aunt.”

He looked back to see Fiona standing, her eyes welling with moisture, her long arms extended. Dawa rushed forward and fell into her embrace.

Outside, he found Yao staring at the clay tsa-tsa tablets Shan had seen on his first visit. They were still in a line, but all were crushed, as if someone had carefully, heel to toe, walked on top of the fragile deities.

* * *

Frantic activity filled the guesthouse compound when Shan and Yao arrived two hours after noon. A military truck had picked them up as they walked down the highway toward the turnoff to the compound. The sergeant at the wheel, one of Tan’s staff, excitedly radioed ahead with the news of their appearance. Yao, who had maintained a brooding silence since their discussion on the truck, kept glancing at Shan as the truck approached the compound, then suddenly he opened the small pouch, which he had clutched for the past hour, and ripped out the back page of the catalog. He handed Shan the page, bearing the list of fees paid, or to be paid, then gave Shan three of the six discs he had taken from the cottage, gesturing for him to stuff them into his pockets. He was dividing the evidence, giving half to Shan.

Why, Shan kept asking himself as they entered the compound, why would the inspector trust Shan with such vital evidence? It was as if Yao had suddenly decided to worry about Ming, perhaps even fear him. The inspector had not asked questions when Fiona had described in more detail how her home had been raided. But he had carefully recorded in his pad her description of the two men who had done it, the small Chinese with the crooked nose and a large Mongolian who smoked sweet-smelling cigars.

At least thirty people were working in the courtyard, with wheelbarrows, buckets, hammers, and brooms. The bilingual sign at the gate that had identified the compound as the Lhadrung Guest House had been replaced with a new one, bigger, with two rows of freshly painted foot-high ideograms. ANNEX, MUSEUM OF ANTIQUITIES, read the top line. BUREAU OF RELIGIOUS AFFAIRS was painted below.

As the sergeant herded Yao into the main building, Shan paused at the door and studied the courtyard. There were army soldiers, Tan’s soldiers, supervising Tibetans laboring along the back wall and far side of the yard. Two Tibetan men and a heavyset soldier with his tunic stripped off were hammering with sledges at a large bent piece of metal. It had been the head of a large statue of Buddha that had been stored along the rear wall. The soldiers were pounding chisels into the metal, splitting the back of the head. At a long makeshift table of planks supported by sawhorses several dozen smaller artifacts were piled, the small statues of deities and saints that typically adorned the private altars of Tibetan families. Half a dozen well-groomed Han Chinese men and women seemed to be supervising the work of perhaps ten Chinese men, clad in blue denim work clothes, several of whom were digging a trench along the wall. Shan stared at the workers in confusion, then suddenly he felt weak and leaned against the wall.

The oldest of the men in blue clothing, a stocky man Shan’s age, sat on the plank table and was amusing himself by throwing stones at a row of the smaller altar offerings placed at the edge of the stagnant fountain pool ten feet away. Another, a lanky young Han with greased hair and a cold sneer on his face, hovered over a barrow of dirt pushed by a middle-aged Tibetan man. As Shan watched the man lost his grip and the barrow tipped over.