Eliot Pattison - Beautiful Ghosts

Yao gestured Shan toward the food but Shan had no appetite. He sat in a chair by the stacked tapes as the group applauded Ming, who disappeared through a rear door. The woman began to explain the results of what she called their excavation of reactionary messages. Based on the repetition of names in the artifacts, the matrix devised by Ming had identified half a dozen primary sites as candidates for illegal hordes of state assets hidden by the monk class who had formerly ruled the people because, as everyone now understood, the monks always kept the wealth of the people for themselves. The messages had pointed to places called Bear Cave, Cave of Light, Miracle Cave, and Lama Throne Cave, each now identified with caves in the mountains south and east of Lhadrung. The messages gave no indication of the exact locations, but did refer to geologic features such as peaks shaped like spires which, with the help of the People’s Liberation Army, surely would be found, the woman assured her audience.

Shan rose and quietly slipped back outside, pausing to gaze with a cold, painful emptiness toward the trustees, then walking back out of the gate and into the trees. After fifty paces he turned, confirming no one followed, then sat, trying to understand the emptiness his son’s appearance had caused. Not finding understanding, he instead pushed it back inside, reminding himself the Tibetans in the mountains still needed him. He pulled a videotape from his shirt. It had not been difficult to lift the top tape from the pile as everyone’s eyes had rested on the woman. He smashed the tape against a rock until its case broke away in splinters, then he pulled some of the exposed tape out, breaking it from its spool. With a small flat rock he scraped a shallow hole in the soil and buried the remains of the video.

“I’ve seen everything you’ve done,” a stern voice cracked. It hit him like a blade between his shoulders. Shan stared into his own hands a moment, then slowly looked up at Yao, who leaned against the nearest tree. “Destroying the tape recorded by Ming as evidence. Deliberately spilling those old prayers today so Tibetans could recover them. Ming would be furious.” Yao looked at the earth covering the tape with a strange mixture of amusement and anger on his countenance. “I begin to understand the kind of mistakes you made in your career, Inspector General Shan.”

The last words caused Shan’s head to snap back toward Yao. “I read your file again this afternoon, all of it this time. Model worker in your Ministry. Nominated for party membership but you declined. Never in my life have I heard of someone declining such an honor. You may as well have put a gun to your own head.”

“It didn’t feel like an honor at the time,” Shan said. “I was investigating a senior party official for corruption. He arranged for the nomination while I was writing my report.”

Something like a dry laugh escaped Yao’s lips. “Did you get your man?”

“The Ministry of Justice exercised its discretion not to prosecute.”

“And so you start the process all over,” Yao said with a shrug, taking a step toward Shan. “You must understand that what Ming is doing is correct.” He pushed his boot into the loose soil and dug in, plowing back the dirt to expose the tape. “The artifacts belong to the state. The mass interrogation is also a highly effective technique for dealing with indigenous populations.”

He picked up the shattered, dirt-encrusted tape, frowned at Shan, then began using it like a shovel, digging the hole wider and deeper. He quickly finished, stood, pulled the other three tapes from his jacket, and tossed them into the hole with the first tape, kicking the soil on top of them. “But he is so overzealous. I find it distasteful. Old people crying on a video, with a soldier hovering over them. I will not have such evidence in my trials.” His face hardened as he looked back up at Shan. “Try something like that again, and I’ll have you back behind wire, buried so deep in the system no one will ever find you.” He pounded the earth over the tapes with his boot. “What I just did was an exercise of my official discretion. What you did was a crime against the state.”

Ming was holding court again in the hall when Shan and Yao returned to the compound. They stood at the entrance to the chamber a moment, listening to the director explain why one of the targeted caves was thought to be on a high, square mountain facing west. An army officer with a wooden pointer indicated possible locations on a topographical map now pinned to the wall.

Shan took a step inside the door, staring at the map, but Yao pulled him away. Shan followed him silently through a smaller door at the end of the entry hall, into a long corridor with half a dozen doors. They passed an unoccupied office with a desk strewn with paper. Through a second door, closed, came the sound and smells of a kitchen. Three more doors held numbers like hotel rooms. Inside one of the rooms a Chinese matron was making a bed. Yao opened the last door and gestured Shan inside as he studied the corridor behind them, then closed the door and switched on a brilliant overhead light.

The high-ceilinged room had the atmosphere of a small chapel. The wall opposite the door was covered with cedar planks, lustrous with the patina of age. Planks covered the other walls as well, but they had been painted with yellow enamel. A red flag, its upper left field consisting of a large yellow star with four smaller stars arrayed in an arc beside it, hung on one wall, flanked by portraits of past party dignitaries. A ten-foot-long table topped with plastic laminate filled most of the chamber. Yao rushed to the far end of the table, where a laptop computer sat, and turned it on, impatiently tapping the frame of the machine as the screen lit. After a moment he inserted one of the discs from Liya. The logo of the Museum of Antiquities appeared, then a familiar title, another pilgrim’s guide.

They quickly examined the other discs, including the two Yao had given Shan. Three were more pilgrim’s guides, and a file showing the results of a computer search. Someone had looked for patterns in references, for the location of certain repeating Tibetan place names: Dom Puk, Zetrul Puk, Kuden Puk, Woser Puk. Bear Cave, Miracle Cave, Lama Throne Cave, Cave of Light. As Shan would have expected, the search showed the names to be used repeatedly, each in several locations across old Tibet. But Ming had now identified local sites bearing the names. The fourth was a log of transactions. Yao stared at a small box of discs behind the computer, bearing a label with Ming’s name on it. He glanced at the door then opened the box and inserted the first of the discs.

A new legend appeared. “Nei Lou,” it said in large figures, over a Chinese flag. State secret. Project Amban, the next screen said, over a short biography of Prince Kwan Li. The prince had been a nephew of the emperor, and a fierce general renowned for several victories in the western lands where the empire kept trying to subdue the Moslems. He had been appointed amban, imperial ambassador to Tibet, in recognition of his achievements on the battlefield. Next came a series of meeting records, all dated several years earlier.

The task group and its name had the air of a high-level government project. Shan pointed to the list of task group members at the bottom of the memorandum. They were all Chinese names, and many had their official affiliations listed. A senior official from the Public Security Bureau, a ranking officer of the Party secretariat, the Bureau of Religious Affairs, the Minister of Culture, the head of the People’s National Library, the Chief Curator of the Forbidden City Museum. A professor of history from Beijing University.

“They were discussing a new public information campaign drawn from historical experience,” Yao said as he scanned the next screen, and glanced at Shan. It was one of the peculiar holdovers from the era of Mao, the occasional announcement of a new hero, often a dead hero, as a way of underscoring correct socialist thought. “To honor the heroic nephew of a revered emperor. It says the amban was to return to the capital for the festivals declared in honor of the long reign of the Qian Long emperor and the enthronement of the emperor’s successor. But he was lost en route from Tibet. The available histories did not agree on his fate. The committee established that he had stopped to settle a war between two small tribes that had taken a terrible toll on the local peasants and was killed, making the ultimate sacrifice in the service of the downtrodden.”