Eliot Pattison - Beautiful Ghosts

Shan began rolling up the painting. “I know scholars in Tibet.”

Dolan grabbed Shan’s arm and Shan looked up into his eyes, which burned with the wild expression again. “Using monks won’t stop me. I thought we proved that,” he said with a growl.

“Stop you from what?” Shan asked.

“Pushing the right buttons,” he said, then turned and left the room.

“A distraction,” Corbett said as they climbed into the car. “The shots had to be a distraction,” Corbett said. “But for what? He didn’t take the thangka.”

Shan’s eyes stayed on the house. His skin crawled. He felt unclean somehow. “Dolan had it photographed,” Shan said. “That’s why he wanted it on that table, under that bright lamp. Probably that man in the blue jacket.”

They parked on the side of the road near the gate and waited forty-five minutes before another vehicle emerged. The man in the blue jacket was at the wheel. Corbett leapt out and flashed his identification, conferring briefly with the man before hopping back in beside Shan. “There’s a coffee shop down the road. We will meet him there.”

The little café had been a gasoline station, its pumps still in the islands, draped with vines. The stranger looked up nervously as Shan and Corbett sat at his table.

“I need to know what Dolan had you do in the library,” Corbett demanded abruptly.

But the man denied setting foot in the room. “I was checking in with Dolan about our project.” He paused, studying Corbett, then looking out the window. He shrugged. “Someone passed me in the corridor when I was going to the library. A kid in white coveralls, one of the ones who does art restoration for him. I didn’t see what he did.”

Corbett fixed him with an accusing stare. “Did he have a camera?”

The man nodded then produced a business card. Corbett glanced at it, handed it to Shan. It stated he was manager for a mechanical engineering firm. “We work on remodeling projects for Mr. Dolan.”

“What sort of projects?” Shan asked.

The man winced. “He’s very particular about secrecy. There’s provisions in all his contracts.”

Corbett extracted the little leather folder containing his official identification and laid it on the table in front of him. “I can be particular, too. What sort of remodeling?”

The man shot a nervous glance around the little café. “Look, he is always changing things around. He has a whole wing that’s a personal museum. We helped build it. He’s changing it, that’s all. Better security, things like that. Everyone knows about the big theft there.”

Corbett gave a frustrated sigh and returned the folder to his pocket. “I want the names of those art restorers.”

“I don’t know them.”

Corbett shifted in his seat as if about to rise.

“What sort of changes in the museum?” Shan asked.

“A dining room in the center, surrounded by another heavy security wall, with a little kitchen station outside it, a dumbwaiter connecting to the basement below. A dressing room where waitresses can put on Chinese robes. A climate-controlled closet to store the robes. A bedchamber, fitted with Chinese antiques. He likes taking friends into the museum, likes to live with his art, but he worries a lot about security now. Who could blame him.”

“What sort of dining room?” Shan asked.

The man looked at him. “I never saw your identification. Why would the FBI want to know about Dolan’s dining room?”

“What sort of dining room?” Corbett asked.

The man frowned, then pulled a napkin from a dispenser and drew a quick diagram, a large rectangle. “The main gallery,” he explained, then drew two concentric rectangles in the center. “The security wall, and the dining room. The dining room has two doors,” he said, drawing short diagonal lines, one in the center of one of the short ends of the rectangle, another near the opposite end of one of the long walls. “The whole room is twenty feet long, fourteen wide. Lots of unpainted woodwork, mahogany and cedar. No wires.”

“You mean hidden wiring,” Corbett said.

“I mean no electricity at all, not inside the dining chamber. Dolan is a perfectionist about atmosphere, about authenticity. He’ll use candles I guess, maybe old oil lamps.”

When Shan reached out and put a finger on the table his hand trembled for a moment. He asked for the man’s pencil and drew quickly, explaining as he worked. “A built-in cabinet for displaying ceramics at this end,” he said, drawing a box shape across the end without the door. He drew an arc over one end. “A curved ceiling, to be painted like the sky.” He drew a small circle at the edges of each door. “Four narrow pillars, enameled red.”

The man shot a resentful glance at Shan. “What kind of game is this? If you already know, what’s the point of asking? Yeah, sure. But remember I didn’t tell you if Dolan asks. And how the hell did you-”

The man didn’t finish the sentence, for he stopped in confusion, looking at the intense, excited way Corbett clenched Shan’s shoulder, then grabbed the napkin. Dolan was building a replica of the Qian Long’s dining chamber.

Five minutes later Corbett pulled the car over at the overlook where he had shown Shan the high, treacherous bridge, where the girl had died. The American walked to the edge of the cliff before speaking. “The bastard killed her because he wanted some plaster painting that nobody else in the world would have. He probably plans to put on a dragon robe and sit on some throne in there, gloating over his empire. And if I breathe a word of this officially, the painting will disappear for years.”

“Surely the FBI won’t-”

Corbett ignored him. “But we know that he and Ming arranged the thefts and he knows we know. Yao can keep up the pressure over there. I can provide enough evidence to make the insurance company hold back the check and start a fraud investigation. Wear him down.”

Shan didn’t believe it, doubted that Corbett himself believed it. “I need that piece of paper that lets me fly back,” he said to the American.

“No way. I need you here.”

“You don’t understand. I need to be there when he arrives.”

Corbett turned to face Shan. “Who arrives? Where?”

Shan returned his steady gaze. “I need to warn the hill people, get Dawa and Lokesh and Liya to a safe place. Dolan is going to Lhadrung.”

“Impossible.”

“I’m sorry,” Shan said.

“Sorry?”

“He already has his fresco, hidden somewhere. What he wants more than anything now is the amban’s treasure. A man like that moves from one obsession to the next. It has driven everything he has done since Lu and Khan discovered that secret compartment in the emperor’s cottage. Because only one person in the world can have the Qian Long treasure. It’s so secret, so old, so linked to the emperors. Never in his life could he hope to find something that would match it.”

“He doesn’t know where it is.”

“He does now. I told him. He knows the fact that I brought the thangka from Lhadrung means the amban never left his gompa. Because the torn thangka did not leave. He might have guessed but Lu and Khan don’t know exactly where to look, don’t know for certain that it really is in Zhoka. Dolan didn’t know for sure where to look, that was why he was supporting Ming and his field surveys, even the surveys in the northern provinces. Nowhere did the amban ever mention his gompa, for fear of compromising its secrets. But when Dolan translates the marks in his photographs, the ones on the back of the thangka he will know.”

“What marks? You never showed us marks on the back.”

“Handprints. Inside them were very faint lines done in charcoal, for a map that had been abandoned, the map that was supposed to tie to the other half of the thangka, to complete the amban’s puzzle. But his sickness changed everything. He let himself be taken north to stage his assassination, to avoid any search by troops in Lhadrung, but then he returned home to Zhoka. He never sent the treasure, because he died. There are tiny words in Tibetan written along one of the thumbprints, so small they are almost lost with the cracks in the cloth. He apologizes to the emperor, and says the abbot has gone to Zhoka to reside with the treasures of heaven.”