Eliot Pattison - Beautiful Ghosts

“Holy Christ,” Corbett muttered. It had all started because of a chance encounter at a restaurant.

“What is the status of the audit?” Shan asked.

“The thermal imaging equipment has just arrived, on loan from England. We’re looking for an operator.”

“Where are the artifacts that are to be tested?”

“Still locked in their exhibits.”

“My third condition is that you get one of them.”

A sly smile rose on Yao’s face and he nodded. “Is that all?”

“No. You must go back to Lhadrung.”

“I was planning to. When it’s over there will be things to be cleaned up there.”

“Tonight,” Shan said. “Either you go back or I go back. When you get there find the informer, Tashi. Tell him you were able to locate the letter Ming said the police lost. The one Ming said the emperor wrote about Lhadrung. Tell him it, too, is being authenticated.”

Yao smiled again. “But why so urgent, why tonight? Your friends Lokesh and Liya are safe.”

“It isn’t his friends,” Corbett said. “He’s afraid they will send Ko back.” Corbett caught Shan’s eye, but Shan looked away, toward the ground. “He’s still trying to become a father.”

Every mile, every minute moving in the opposite direction of Tibet, tugged at something inside Shan. The news he was going to Beijing had been wrenching enough. The news that he was going to America had numbed him. He felt adrift. Several times on the plane he woke with a start, not from a dream exactly, for he had no image in his mind, only a nightmarish sensation, a terrible dread he would never see Gendun and Lokesh again, nor even Ko, despite Yao’s promise to return that night.

They landed in a steady rain, at an airport surrounded by highways and warehouses. Corbett, staying only a few inches from Shan’s side, led him to two young, well-scrubbed men in business suits who greeted Corbett with cool deference, acknowledging Shan with small frowns, then led them past a long line at the immigration stations into an office where several men and women monitored video surveillance screens. Corbett motioned Shan into a chair while he spoke on the telephone in a low voice for nearly ten minutes, then conversed just as quietly with a dour woman in a uniform who repeatedly gestured with a clipboard toward Shan. The official, clearly unhappy with Corbett’s explanation for Shan’s presence, finally scribbled on a form on her clipboard, ripped the paper from the board, and handed it to Corbett as she marched away.

They drove through the rain in silence; the two young FBI agents in the front of the large blue sedan; Corbett slumped against one rear window, asleep, Shan staring out the other window.

“Why the long face?” the man at the wheel asked Shan abruptly. He had been introduced as Bailey, though his features had Chinese aspects. “I thought everyone in China dreamed of coming to America. You look like you’ve been given the death sentence and the last good lawyer just died.” His partner laughed, and looked at Shan expectantly. When Shan did not reply, Bailey shot him an irritated glance. “Dammit, Corbett told us you speak English,” Bailey said in Mandarin.

“Coming like a prisoner is not in anyone’s dreams,” Shan replied in the same language. He remembered something Corbett had said in the mountains, to explain his presence in Tibet, that the Bureau had needed someone who spoke Mandarin. But this junior officer, working for Corbett, spoke the language.

Bailey laughed and translated for his colleague. “Does this look like a prison?” he asked in English as he eased the car to a stop in front of a small two-story cottage. The wooden shingles on its walls were grey, its windows and front porch trimmed in white. It had a weathered, disheveled appearance. Vines with purple flowers were growing around the pillars of the porch and overtaking its floor, a line of dense bushes along the front walk dangled long offshoots over the sidewalk.

“Neighbors can’t believe I work for the Bureau,” Corbett declared. He was standing by the car with his suitcase and Shan’s drawstring bag. “They prefer to have all their cops look like young Marines and all cop houses like military barracks.” The car pulled away from the curb.

As the American unlocked the door and gestured Shan inside, Shan realized how little he really knew about the man’s personal life. “Do you have family?” Shan asked as he examined a cluster of framed photographs on a table by the door. A boy with freckles, on a tricycle. An angry-looking little girl holding a large boot. The photos were faded, the glass in one frame cracked.

“None active,” Corbett muttered, and turned away. “Listen quick before I collapse from exhaustion. Here’s the tour,” he said, and began pointing, to the right, to the shadows beyond, then the left. “Living room, then the kitchen. Downstairs bath.” He grabbed his suitcase and kept speaking as he climbed the stairs. “Guest room is first door on the right. Then the bath, then my room.”

For a moment Shan stared in wonder. “You have two bathrooms?” His own apartment in Beijing, no bigger than the living room of Corbett’ s house, had been prized because it had been only thirty feet from the communal toilets. Bathing had been down the street at a municipal showerhouse.

Corbett didn’t reply. “I’m dead. Talk in the morning. Sheets on your bed are clean enough. Sleep well. Tomorrow you make new American friends,” he added before disappearing into his room, in a tone that almost sounded bitter.

But Shan did not sleep well. He sat on the bed for several minutes, staring at it, trying to remember when he had last slept on a real bed, with bed linens, then took the extra blanket folded at the bottom of the bed and lay on the floor between the bed and the window, tossing and turning, dozing for a few minutes at a time, each time waking, sometimes gripped in the awful, surreal fear that came with nightmares, though never remembering what he had dreamt. Wrapping the blanket around him, he found his way downstairs in the dark, moving silently through the rooms, feeling like a trespasser, wondering how one person could use so much space, discovering a porch off the kitchen, without walls but with a partial roof that kept the rain off half the porch. It was elevated, above a garage that opened from the rear of the house, so that Shan found himself among the tops of conifer trees, looking downhill toward a large body of water, perhaps half a mile away. It had the feel of being in a mountain cave overlooking a lake, though what he at first took to be stars reflecting off the water he soon realized were the lights of houses on the far side of the water. Rain came and went in rapid cycles, strong showers one minute, fading to mist the next.

On the kitchen table he found a short narrow glass holding dozens of toothpicks. He counted out sixty-four of the little sticks, saw a candle in a tin holder, and gently lifted it from the sill. It was attached to an electric cord. He turned the little round switch in the wire and the candle flickered. He studied it in confusion, watching the little filament that jumped back and forth to simulate a flame. Like many things American, it made little sense to him. If someone wanted a candle, they should have a candle, which would be much less expensive than a dim electric lamp made to look like a candle. His father had promised Shan a trip to America, and had begun teaching him things about the country. Sometimes, his father had once told him, Americans did things just to show they could be done.

Shan set the electric candle back on the sill then stepped back outside. He sat cross-legged upon the planks, under the flickering candlelight in the window above him. Emotion kept swirling around the calm place he sought. Despair, exhaustion, helplessness. He was a frail boat cut from its anchor. He forced himself to sit without moving for a long time, his eyes on the water at first, then vaguely on the distance beyond, blinking only when the rain started again, closing his eyes until it stopped, then gazing at the dim, grey horizon once more.