Eliot Pattison - Prayer of the Dragon

“Major Ren. With Public Security troops.” Gao extracted his satellite phone from his pocket and held it up for Kohler to see. “You never searched me. I called them. Reception is remarkable from this altitude. It won’t be long. This is the easiest place to find for fifty miles.”

Kohler’s face sagged. “I want everyone on that ledge,” he ordered, “that high one that looks east. Now.” He gestured with the pistol. “Yangke in front.”

They walked in a solemn column. As the others entered the narrow gap in the rocks that opened onto the ledge, Kohler grabbed Shan’s shirt and pulled him back. “Shan and I are going to speak for a while. Anyone who comes through this gap before I say so will be shot.”

But Kohler was not really interested in conversation. He pushed Shan forward roughly, down the trail to the camp, onto the path toward the altar where Rapaki had prostrated himself.

Kohler said as they reached the edge of the fissure, “At the trial, you would be the one to tie it all together. No one else could. I started out thinking of you as a research scientist, drawing lines between disconnected facts. But that’s not what you do. You’re more like an artist. The barest touch of the brush, that’s your style.” Kohler’s tone became whimsical. He tossed the staffs into the abyss. “Every paradise needs more artists.” Shan tried to retreat from the rim. Kohler pushed him forward with the pistol against his spine.

“Two more months and I’ll be in India-a new man, a new life, in a villa like a castle by the sea. I can still run the company from there. Gao will be lonely, but we can talk on the phone.”

They reached the altar. Shan wondered how it would come. A violent shove? Or perhaps a blow from the pistol first? He remembered his nightmare of falling through bottomless darkness, passing skeletons who cringed when they saw him.

“He always had Thomas. He was going to spend more time in Beijing anyway, to be the boy’s mentor. We could have talked on the phone,” Kohler repeated, changing the tense of his words. “Nobody had to get hurt.”

Kohler set his pistol on the altar. He began unbuttoning his shirt. “You’re the only one who has any idea of what it’s like,” the German said. “The electric shocks. The batons. The pliers to the fingernails. We had a foreigner, a murderer, arrive in the winter, some poor fool from Pakistan. Outsiders who killed Chinese were always singled out for special treatment. They tied him naked to a pole out in the yard. He lived through the night but lost half a foot and six fingers to frostbite. Once he recovered, they beat him regularly and knocked out all his teeth. He ate worms when he could find them. Worms and rice gruel, that’s all he could eat. Most of his hair fell out. He was thirty-five when he arrived. After six months he looked seventy.” Kohler folded the shirt neatly, placed it at the foot of the altar, and glanced back at Shan. “You’re the only one who understands what I mean. Someday, somehow, you must make him understand.”

Shan took a step back, and another. “It doesn’t have to be like this, Heinz.”

Kohler slipped off his shoes, carefully rolled his socks into them. “I kept thinking the damned kid couldn’t possibly lift fingerprints from the rocks. He was just an amateur, after all. But he had to keep at it.”

“Like sending fibers for analysis taken from cloth stuffed in the victim’s mouth,” Shan said.

Kohler gazed toward a passing cloud. “Like sending the fibers,” the German agreed.

“From one of your scarves.”

“We trained him to be persistent in his quest for knowledge.”

“The price of fashion,” Shan said. “No one on the mountain but you wears cashmere.”

That message had sealed Thomas’s fate, Shan knew now. Kohler had ascribed a distant, almost abstract role to himself in the killings the night before. Shan knew that the reality was much more direct. Kohler had stuffed his bloody scarf into Tashi’s mouth and, later, when he was supposed to be hunting, helped Bing carry away severed body parts.

“Don’t tell him,” Kohler said in a whisper.

“There’s no need for Gao to know,” Shan agreed. “About that. Or about Thomas.”

It wasn’t simply that Kohler had been there when Thomas had died. He had summoned Bing and Rapaki to kill him.

Kohler pushed his shoes under the altar, his refined, assured voice returning. “You’re supposed to be unburdened, right? Like Rapaki.” He stepped forward. Along his naked back were the paired scars, familiar to Shan, where electric clamps had once been fastened. From his pocket he produced a small pouch, dumped some of its contents onto his palm, then sprinkled the yellow particles over his head. Not pollen. Gold dust. He paused for a moment, then poured the rest of the pouch over his shoulders.

“It’s going to be an adventure, this bayal. Rapaki and I will probably be bunk mates. I’ll debate physics with the gods who make lightning.” Kohler stepped to the end of the overhanging slab and carefully placed his toes over the edge, extending his arms out from his sides. Bare-chested, barefoot, glittering, he was like a graceful diver preparing for a championship performance. He leaned forward, keeping perfect balance as he fell, his golden head raised, arms outstretched, until he disappeared into the blackness below.

When Shan turned, Gao was there, watching, his face ravaged with emotion.

Abigail ran down the path. “He could have shot you,” she blurted out as she reached Shan.

“He could have shot me,” Shan agreed.

Abigail looked from Shan to Gao in confusion, then over the side of the fissure. “He had to act before the helicopter arrived. He talked about the gulag one night. He couldn’t face Public Security again.”

Gao held up his phone. “There is no helicopter,” he said. “The battery has been dead since that lightning storm.”

Abigail was trembling. Hostene put his arms around her.

“We’ll never make it down, not without staffs,” Yangke said.

Shan peered into the surviving pack. He pulled out Kohler’s folding knife, tossed it to Yangke, picked up a sharp, heavy stone, and pointed toward the summit. “You and I will go call our ride,” he said.

It took them a quarter hour to reach the radio relay station, another ten minutes to remove its power supply. An hour later the army sent a helicopter to investigate.

Chodron avoided Shan and his friends after they returned to the village. When he saw Abigail he glared, then looked up the trail behind her, as if waiting for Bing to make an appearance. He seemed to be satisfied with asserting his authority by posting a guard at Dolma’s house to keep Gendun, Lokesh, and the two Navajos inside. He did not object when they sent for food, did not seem to notice when ever-increasing numbers of villagers began visiting, often staying for hours, not even when his wife joined them. Several times a day he started his generator. More than once Shan saw him walking alone in the blackened fields.

The day before August 1, the headman and his lieutenants began erecting decorations for his festival day, though few others joined in to help fasten the paper flags and faded red and yellow streamers to doorways. An hour after dawn on his long-awaited day, he began playing patriotic anthems over a portable stereo connected to his generator, then stood in front of it in dress clothes, waving his arm as if conducting a chorus while his men set off strings of firecrackers. Shan sat on a bench with Yangke, watching and waiting.

Chodron did not immediately hear the approach of the helicopter that landed in the fields above. He kept waving his imaginary baton, calling irately to the villagers who were ignoring him, watching the slope. Then his arm froze in midair and his forced smile evaporated. He had noticed the two men coming down through the fields.