Eliot Pattison - The Lord of Death

The open, pleading face of the blond woman who had died in his arms kept leaping into his consciousness, the foreigner who, impossibly, had been traveling alone with the minister. Is it me?

she had asked, as if she had been uncertain who was dying.

“They say there is still a gompa in the mountains that uses these things,” an uneasy voice suddenly declared behind him.

Shan spun about to see a tall Tibetan in sunglasses silhouetted in the doorway, looking at the peche plates.

“With a printing press I mean, the last in the region.”

Shan felt a rush of joy at the unexpected news. “Do you know where?” He had a sudden vision of himself carrying a bundle of the plates to the gompa, could almost see the joy of the old lamas when they saw what he had brought them.

Kypo shrugged. “In the mountains. We have to go. Tsipon said the moment you could stand I was to bring you.” Tsipon’s lead manager for expedition support was always a man of few words.

Shan rose from his stool. “Thank you, Kypo, for my-” he gestured to the stall that had been concealed with blankets-“my hospital room.”

“Tsipon said to put you in one of the storerooms in the warehouse, or that cottage behind the warehouse. I said you would want to be here, with your-” Kypo glanced at the workbench- “things.”

Shan had not hidden his work on the blocks from Kypo, but the Tibetan never once had asked about them, or seemed remotely interested. “He said make sure you were somewhere dark and warm.”

“You brought the food and things?”

“I brought the food and bandages,” Kypo replied pointedly, and stepped into the sunlight.

Minutes later Shan walked through the open garage door at the side of the largest building in town, emblazoned with a sign for the Himalayan Supply Company. Workers were carrying boxes, loading trucks bound for the Chomolungma base camp. Tsipon, standing with a clipboard in the entry to a storeroom lined with shelves, gestured Shan through the door. Shan found himself glancing around the room, where he had conducted inventory a week earlier. The shelves then had been overflowing with cartons containing oxygen cylinders, flashlight batteries, pitons, harnesses, heavy ropes coiled over long pegs. Now half the supplies were gone.

Tsipon tossed Shan an apple. “If you cost me this contract, Shan, you and I are done,” he growled. “And if I say goodbye, it’s not just goodbye to your son, it’s goodbye to the Himalayas.” Everything in Tsipon’s life was a negotiation. He had to be sure Shan knew that without his protection Shan would be picked up and detained for having no residency papers.

“You should have wakened me,” Shan said. “I should have been in the mountains already.”

Tsipon shook his head. “There were troops all over the mountains searching for those damned escaped monks. If some officer in the mountain commandos found you, without registration papers, how long do you think you’d last? And the shape you were in, you probably would have crawled off to some cave and died just to spite me.”

Shan took a bite of the apple. “Who else came to the stable?” he asked. He knew Tsipon, one of the most worldly Tibetans he had ever known, was not capable of making the little altar or writing the mantra.

Tsipon ignored the question. He stepped to the shelves, reached into a carton and tossed out clothing, kicking it toward Shan. “I’ve promised the American a dozen experienced porters next week. I went to Tumkot village yesterday,” he said, referring to the mountain village that supplied most of the porters and guides used by the foreign climbing parties. “I offered double wages. They practically threw me out. Their damned fortuneteller has them all worked up, telling them the signs say the mountain must be appeased, that the mountain had claimed Tenzin first and needed him back. They demand the body. I promised them you would get it for them.”

“When?”

Tsipon stuck his head out the door long enough to chide a Tibetan woman who had dropped a box of fuel canisters. “We have maybe three days, no more,” he snapped, and gestured Shan out the door into the cavernous main chamber of the warehouse. After locking the storeroom behind him, Tsipon lowered himself onto a crate and lit a cigarette.

“Have the foreigners arrived yet?”

“You met that Yates.”

“I mean officials. From some embassy, over the other dead woman.”

Tsipon cast a puzzled glance at him, blew a stream of smoke toward the ceiling. “They must have hit your head pretty hard. There was no dead foreigner.”

The announcement silenced Shan for a moment. He closed his eyes, again fighting his confused swirl of memories from the day of the murders. “What was the bargain you struck with Major Cao?” he asked at last.

The Tibetan blew two streams of smoke from his nostrils. “Bargain?”

“What was your accommodation with Public Security?” Shan pressed. “If I wasn’t his prime suspect, I was the closest thing he had to a witness. He would have at least held me for having no papers.”

“For this kind of case he needs to paint a very complete picture. He seems to want nothing more to do with you, though he knows you were on the fringe of the scene he is painting. I am to watch you and report back to him,” Tsipon admitted. “He might try to have you followed, though once in the mountains that should not be a problem for one of your capabilities.”

“Why would he still think I am involved?”

“Because of the paper in your pocket with the telephone number of our new hotel, where the minister stayed.”

Shan lowered himself onto one of the crates. Cao had never asked about the paper, but of course he would not have forgotten it.

“I can go to Lhasa,” Tsipon added in a speculative tone, “and come back with a bus full of workers. More Tibetans are being put out of work every day. That new train to Lhasa brings a hundred Chinese immigrants a day, each one poised to take a Tibetan’s job.” Tsipon fixed Shan with a meaningful stare.

It was a threat. Tsipon would prefer to use seasoned mountain tribesmen but he could always sweep up two dozen desperate Tibetans in one of the cities who would leap at the chance of earning wages. Such men would be hopelessly unprepared for dealing with the dangers of the upper slopes. Some, perhaps a fourth or more, would die. It wasn’t simply that Tsipon would blame him, but that he would also send Shan to retrieve the bodies.

“Why did you have that paper with the hotel number?” Tsipon demanded, anger abruptly entering his voice.

“There’s a chance,” Shan said, not sure why his voice had grown hoarse, “that I can get my son out of the yeti factory, get him back to the prison in Lhadrung County where he came from, with lamas and monks, where he will stand a chance of surviving. He’s going to die if he stays where he is.”

“That doesn’t explain the paper.”

“Someone I know from Lhadrung is staying there for the conference- the colonel who administers Lhadrung county, who is responsible for the prison camp where Ko came from.”

An odd expression appeared on Tsipon’s face, a mixture of confusion and glee. “His name?”

“Tan. Colonel Tan. He’s the only real chance I have for saving my son.”

The laugh that erupted from Tsipon’s throat grew so deep he had to hold his belly.

“I don’t understand.”

“Tan is the one. He’s not in the hotel, he’s in Cao’s jail. Colonel Tan is the one who murdered Minister Wu.”

They sailed in a smoking junk over the mountains. Jomo, the mechanic who accompanied Shan from Tsipon’s compound, believed in the reincarnation of machines. The ancient, sputtering Jiefang cargo truck he was now teaching Shan to drive had, the wiry Tibetan insisted, centuries earlier been a junk in the emperor’s battle fleet. Half its forward gears were missing, its rear window was gone, and its seat had so many gaps in the vinyl they had to sit on burlap sacks. Shan did not ask what kind of wretched life the ship had led to justify such a rebirth.