Eliot Pattison - Beautiful Ghosts

But they found nothing, nothing except five small claw-like marks at the bottom of the torn cloth, five more showing at the top of the printed image. The amban had made his mark on each.

“Speak to us,” Yao moaned, and made a hurrying gesture toward Lokesh, as if to encourage the mantras.

Finally Corbett rose, warning them that Khan and Lu might have another weapon secreted in the caves. As Shan rolled up the thangka he glanced at the pair of painted handprints on the reverse, then explained that they could reach Fiona’s house by dusk.

They moved quickly, running when they could, Dawa riding on Corbett’s back, then Shan’s, then Liya’s. It was late afternoon, the sun shining brilliantly, a warm wind on their backs, and as they left Zhoka behind the darkness slowly lifted from their faces. There was little speaking, even when they paused to drink from springs, but Shan saw something new in the eyes of his companions. Not fear anymore, but a calm detached resolve, the kind Shan often saw in Tibetans when they faced insurmountable odds.

Ko alone seemed unable to leave his torment behind.

“Thank you for what you did,” Shan said as they knelt by a stream. “You saved us.”

“I had never known a woman like Punji,” Ko said in an uncertain voice. “I mean … we didn’t really know each other. But she made jokes with me in the tunnels. Me being a prisoner, that didn’t matter to her. I remember her eyes. She was so beautiful. For a few minutes she and I were partners, and we were going to flee to the West, and I forgot everything else.…” He glanced at Shan, suddenly seeming to remember to whom he was speaking. “Forget it,” he snapped, and seemed to make an effort at anger. After a moment he just rose and offered to carry Dawa on his back.

“If we cannot catch them for what they did,” Corbett said as they watched Ko step away with the girl, “then we must take them for what they are going to do. Then they’ll talk, then they’ll tell us where to find what they stole.”

Yao offered a stern nod. “The amban’s treasure belongs to the government of China. But to find it we have to make the old thankga speak to us.”

“The key,” Shan observed, turning to Yao, “is knowing what was said in those last letters between the Qian Long and his nephew, the ones Ming has not seen. The amban said he was going to explain the rest of death. I thought he was speaking of Buddhist teaching.”

“He meant the thankga!” Liya exclaimed. “He meant the rest of the death deity, the other half of the torn thankga. He was going to explain the puzzle of the torn thangka to the emperor so there would be no mistake!”

“Like the sutras,” Shan said as he recalled exactly what he had seen on the computer screen. “Kwan Li said, like the sutras, he would explain the rest of death. He meant in Tibetan. He would write a letter in Tibetan to explain the secret.”

“But the letters are still in Beijing,” Corbett said. “We have to go.”

“I have no one in Beijing,” Yao said with a frown. “No one who can read Tibetan, no one I can trust.” He fixed Shan with a sober stare. “If you want to help the Tibetans here you must go with us there.”

Shan drifted in and out of a dark grey haze that was sometimes like sleep, sometimes like the edge of a deep meditation. He could find no calmness. Everywhere his mind turned he encountered something like the dark turmoil of clouds that he saw whenever he looked out the window. Part of him hated Yao and Corbett for forcing him onto the plane, for forcing him away from Surya and Gendun and the other Tibetans who so desperately needed help. Part of him hated himself for being unable to communicate with Ko, for being unable to crack the hard shell that had grown around the boy. He wondered with cold fear whether he would ever see Tibet, or his son, again.

Once Yao finished with him in Beijing the inspector would have no reason to return Shan. Except to be rid of him. Once in Beijing Shan would be near those who had first sent him to the gulag. Some had died of old age, but not all.

Even when he was able to force such doubts from his consciousness, even when he tried to sleep, he could not close his eyes for long, because of the images that haunted him. The confused, childlike expression of Punji, her brain destroyed by the blow of the rock, her killer cradling her as he carried her to the abyss. Surya, carrying night soil, speaking of his days as a lama as though they belonged to someone else. Gendun, speaking with deities in Zhoka’s dark labyrinth. Sometimes through a fog there was another image, from some dim corridor, a serene Chinese man in a dragon robe playing checkers with a jocular British officer, their hands without flesh, the hands of skeletons.

Eventually sleep must have overtaken him, for suddenly the plane lurched and they were on the ground, taxiing toward a low grey building under a low brown sky, the dust-laden atmosphere of a Beijing summer.

Yao cautioned Shan to stay seated, and they did not move until the plane was emptied of other passengers. Even Corbett left with only a quick nod in their direction. Two young men appeared in the grey uniforms of Public Security, pistols on their belts, nodding deferentially to Yao, casting suspicious glances at Shan as they escorted him out a door in the side of the jet ramp into a black car waiting beside the plane. Yao did not introduce Shan, did not speak, but simply stared out the window as they drove into the city, staring at the skyline.

It was a different skyline than Shan remembered, a different city in many ways, he realized with an odd pain in his heart. New highways had appeared in every direction, choked by new automobiles, tens of thousands of new automobiles. Unfamiliar buildings towered over the highway, Western-style buildings with empty faces, some with the names of Western companies affixed to their sides. Advertising signs sprouted like weeds over the landscape.

Some things had not changed. A sea of humanity still flowed down the sidewalks, overflowing into the streets, cascading into subway stations, rippling around street vendors. Familiar smells of fried pork, chilis, noodles, garlic, cardamom, ginger, and steamed rice wafted into the car, cut with the acrid fumes of diesel and gasoline. He stared at the window. He wasn’t there, he couldn’t be in Beijing, it was another of his strange, empty dreams.

They drove directly to the ancient complex, parked along the huge outer wall of the Forbidden City, entering through the massive arches of the Meridian Gate. The grounds were not open to tourists for another three hours, and as they walked across the vast empty courtyards memories pressed on Shan, recollections of his first visits with his father and mother, even of walking the grounds with Ko on one of the boy’s rare visits with Shan, as a youth of four or five. There, in the Hall of Supreme Harmony, Shan’s father had pointed to the emperors’ dragon-legged throne and explained how officials had approached the ruler with the ritual of three kneelings and nine kowtows. Beyond, in the Gate of the Great Ancestors, his mother had read him a poem written by an emperor a thousand years before.

Suddenly something stirred inside Shan, a new excitement of discovery. They were in a small quiet courtyard before the simple elegant cottage of the Qian Long’s retirement. Not until now, until the moment of stepping across the threshold of the private home of the emperor, did Shan feel the weight of the history entwined in their mystery. The fate of so many seemed inextricably linked to what had transpired between the powerful emperor and his nephew over two hundred years before.

Yao spoke quietly with the police guard at the cottage entrance, who unlocked the door and stood aside. The interior of the cottage had none of the grandeur of the imperial halls. It seemed the comfortable living quarters of a genteel scholar, full of scrolls and paintings, its furniture and rooms designed not for formal audiences but for relaxed reading and conversation. Its centerpiece was a dining chamber, an interior room with three cedar walls, red lacquered pillars flanking each of its two entries, a magnificent scroll painting of an early emperor on one side of the table. Shan studied the chamber a moment, then stood facing a long section of exposed lathwork opposite the painting, the plaster still open, still dropping its particles onto the wooden floor, where the fresco had been taken. On the elegant mahogany table, its legs carved like those of dragons, sat a stack of manila folders.