Eliot Pattison - Beautiful Ghosts

Tan rose and disappeared down the hall, returning in less than a minute with a dusty folder from which he pulled a report bound between two clear plastic covers, extending it to Shan. “In the back,” the colonel said.

The final pages were a transcribed report from an imperial official sent by the emperor to find the missing amban. The high-ranking mandarin had delivered a report to the emperor a month before the emperor left the throne, explaining his frustration at failing to find the amban, alive or dead, but reporting that many witnesses had signed sworn statements that the amban had departed from tradition and left his regular Chinese bodyguards in Lhasa, to travel in the company of Tibetan soldiers as a sign of good faith. The party had been deep inside rugged mountains five hundred miles north of Lhasa when the amban had encountered two warring tribes fighting over the rights to pastureland. Confident that he could negotiate a solution, and without regard to his personal safety, the amban had ascended to the mountain battlefield. He had met with the chieftains and indeed negotiated a solution that provided for sharing of the pastures, but at the banquet celebrating the accord an angry warrior who resented the outsider’s intervention had shot an arrow into his throat. Kwan Li had died asking for the emperor’s forgiveness. The tribes, terrified of the emperor’s likely reaction, had slain the guard party and withdrawn deep into the mountains, taking the bodies with them, leaving a group of lamas who had appeared on the scene to conduct death rites.

The emperor’s investigator had traveled on to Lhasa to complete his work, finding no contrary evidence but that of a drunken tailor formerly employed by the amban who insisted that on the eve of the amban’s departure he had been asked to make Tibetan soldiers’ uniforms for several monks. The story could not be verified, and the tailor disappeared after the first interview. The investigator suspected a conspiracy of Tibetans against the amban, that there had been no soldiers with the amban but only disguised monks. He insisted the emperor should dispatch troops to find and destroy the mountain tribes since they had either killed him, or been part of the conspiracy. He requested to return to Tibet to find the monks who had conspired with the tribes. The report closed with an annotation by an imperial secretary, noting that the emperor had declined to send troops or authorize further investigation, and had sent the mandarin to a senior post in a southern province.

“I didn’t understand why after coming here Ming spent half his time on the phone with Beijing,” Tan said as Shan closed the report.

“Because it’s all about political opportunity,” Shan said. “What he’s doing is not how a scientist conducts fieldwork. But it is exactly the way you would do it if you were aspiring to become a minister.”

“There was one more document,” Shan added after a moment, gesturing toward the computer screen, “but it was encrypted by Ming.”

“Because it explains too much?” Tan suggested.

They sat in silence, Tan looking at the screen displaying the encrypted letter, Shan out the window. “The inspector knows you tried to hide me, Colonel,” he said in a tentative tone. “He knows I haven’t said anything about his failure to verify whether Director Ming and Lodi had a prior relationship.”

“What are you talking about?” Tan growled.

Yao sighed and stepped to the computer. “He’s talking about me. He’s talking about rough bargains being made, and how I haven’t reciprocated.” He began tapping the keyboard. “It is not a high-level code Ming used. He doesn’t have access to the most secret ones. There’s probably a thousand people in Beijing alone who have this one,” he stated, punctuating his remark with several emphatic strikes of the keys. Suddenly the image on the screen blurred, and the figures rearranged themselves. The text of the last document appeared.

It was not one more letter from the amban, but five letters placed together in the secret file, short missives drafted over the course of a year, letters not included in the official files of the Amban Project. They lacked the flowery prose of the early correspondence, had the air of communication between two old friends who no longer had use for pretense. The first thanked the emperor for accepting that the amban had embraced the Buddhist faith, thanked him likewise for speaking in the words of the sutras. He prayed his uncle’s forbearance in the amban’s delayed departure for Beijing, because the amban was using the time to accumulate the most precious treasures the emperor had ever beheld. The second letter indicated that the amban’s effort to gather Tibetan artists to create masterpieces to honor the emperor was proceeding, although the amban found it necessary to journey to some artists because they were so aged, had even gone to nearby caves to visit hermit artists, caves named Dom Puk, Zetrul Puk, Woser Puk, and Kuden Puk-the names that had been searched in Ming’s pilgrim guide database, the ones he had just that day identified with local landmarks. The third reported that the amban had discovered the source of the greatest art he or the emperor could ever hope to find, and was now in the old monastery befriending its lamas, and visiting the priceless Mountain Buddha. A wondrous mechanical mandala was being built of gold and silver, and in honor of the emperor an artist was dedicating a black stone statue of Jambhala, the protective deity, on which he had been working for two years. The fourth, the longest, months later, announced a still greater revelation. The lamas had discovered that Kwan Li was in fact the reincarnation of their greatest leader, their abbot, and he had been installed as the abbot of the old earth taming temple, a place where deities were grown the way flowers were grown in gardens. The fifth reported that the abbot had received the humbling offer of the emperor, which he dared not write of further for fear of the secret being discovered. Great preparations were under way, and the abbot needed to go on retreat before returning to the capital. Meanwhile the abbot would secretly arrange for the shipment of the emperor’s treasures. He would deliver to the imperial messengers in Lhasa half a thangka of the protector deity of the gompa, a special form of the Lord of Death. If anything happened to the abbot while on the arduous journey he would hide the treasures and entrust the other half of the thangka to a trusted lama, who would present it to the emperor. Once joined the two halves would tell the emperor where to find the treasures. And later, like the sutras, the last letter closed, I will explain the rest of death.

“It’s not just about politics,” Tan said in a low, frigid voice. They had discovered why Ming was so zealous about finding information on the deities, why he had demanded to know the word, the name of the protective deity, and what it looked like.

“Ming wants it all,” Yao growled. “The political treasure, for his public face. And the treasure of gold and silver, for himself and his partners.”

“What does it mean, the offer of the emperor?” Tan asked.

“It doesn’t say,” Shan said.

“What temple?” Tan asked.

Shan and Yao exchanged a silent glance. “It doesn’t say,” Yao said.

“But in Lhadrung,” Tan said, his anger rising again. “Ming is reporting that the amban was killed in Lhadrung.” He pounded a fist into his palm. “Why now? What happened?”

Yao shrugged.

“What happened,” Shan suggested, “was the robbery in the Qian Long’s cottage. In removing the fresco, I think they exposed something unknown to anyone before. The secret letters of the amban.”

There was a final screen they had not viewed. Shan pressed a key and a photograph appeared, an image of a torn thangka, the upper half of a blue deity with the distorted head of a four-horned bull. As they stared at it the adjacent computer chimed and Shan opened the FBI message screen. Director Ming, it said, had flown to Lhasa on the same flight as Lodi, returning on the very next flight to Beijing. Shan quickly typed a reply, as Yao printed out a copy of the image of the torn thangka. Search travel records for Lu Chou Fin and Khan Mo, arrived in Tibet during past month.