Eliot Pattison - The Skull Mantra

"Here you are," she observed.

"Here you are," he shot back.

She smiled, as though he were a great wit. When she did so the bags under her eyes disappeared for a moment. He realized that she was slender beneath the huge gown. Without the bags, and without her hair tied so severely behind her, Dr. Sung could have passed for a stylish member of any Beijing hospital staff.

Silently she made a complete circuit of the table, studying Sergeant Feng, then Shan again. She approached Shan slowly, then suddenly grabbed his arm, as if he might bolt away. He did not resist as she rolled up his sleeve and studied the tattooed number on his forearm.

"A trusty?" she asked. "We have a trusty who cleans the toilets. And one to wipe up the blood. Never had one sent to interrogate me." She paced about him with intense curiosity, as though contemplating dissection of the strange organism before her.

Sergeant Feng broke the spell with a sharp, guttural call. It was not a word, but a warning. Yeshe was attempting to ease the door open. He stopped, confused but obsequious, and retreated to the corner, where he squatted against the wall.

Shan read the report hanging at the end of the table. "Dr. Sung." He pronounced her name slowly. "Did you perform any tissue analysis?"

The woman looked to Feng as though for help, but the sergeant was inching away from the corpse. She shrugged. "Late middle-aged. Twenty-five pounds overweight. Lungs beginning to clog with tar. A deteroriated liver, but he probably didn't know it yet. Trace of alcohol in his blood. Ate less than two hours before death. Rice. Cabbage. Meat. Good meat, not mutton. Maybe lamb. Even beef."

Cigarettes, alcohol, beef. The diet of the privileged. The diet, he comforted himself, of a tourist.

Feng found a bulletin board, where he pretended to read a schedule of political meetings.

Shan moved slowly around the table, forcing himself to study the truncated shell of the man who had stopped the work of the 404th and forced the colonel to exhume Shan from the gulag, the man whose unhappy spirit now haunted the Dragon Claws. With his pencil he pushed back the lifeless fingers of the left hand. It was empty. He moved on, paused and studied the hand again. There was a narrow line at the base of the forefinger. He pushed it with the eraser. It was an incision.

Dr. Sung donned rubber gloves and studied the hand with a small pocket lamp. There was a second cut, she announced, in the palm just below the thumb.

"Your custodial report said nothing about removing an object from the hand." It had been something small, no more than two inches in diameter, with sharp edges.

"Because we didn't." She bent over the incision. "Whatever was there was wrenched free after death. No bleeding. No clotting. Happened afterward." She felt the fingers one by one and looked up with a blush of embarrassment. "Two of the phalanges are broken. Something squeezed the hand with great force. The death grip was broken open."

"To get at what it held."

"Presumably."

Shan considered the woman. In Chinese bureaucracies, there was a gray line between humanitarian service to the struggling colonies and outright exile. "But can you be so sure of the cause? Perhaps he died in a fall and later, for unrelated reasons, his head was removed."

"Unrelated reasons? The heart was still pumping when the head was severed. Otherwise there would have been much more blood in the body."

Shan sighed. "With what then? An axe?"

"Something heavy. And razor-sharp."

"A rock, possibly?"

Dr. Sung responded with a peevish frown and yawned. "Sure. A rock as sharp as a scalpel. It wasn't a single blow. But no more than three, I'd say."

"Was he conscious?"

"At the time of death he was unconscious."

"Surely you cannot know, without the head."

"His clothes," Dr. Sung said. "There was almost no blood on his clothes. No skin or hair under the nails. No scratches. There was no struggle. His body was laid out so the blood would drain away from it. Face up. We extracted soil and mineral particles from the back of his sweater. Only the back."

"But it's just a theory, that he was unconscious."

"And your theory, Comrade? That he died by falling on a rock and someone who collected heads happened along?"

"This is Tibet. There is an entire social class dedicated to cutting up bodies for disposal. Perhaps a ragyapa happened along and began the rite for sky burial, then was interrupted."

"By what?"

"I don't know. The birds."

"They don't fly at night," she grumbled. "And I've never seen a vulture big enough to carry a skull away." She pulled a paper from the clipboard. "You must be the fool who sent me this," she said. It was the accident report form, ready for her signature.

"The colonel would feel better if you just signed it."

"I don't work for the colonel."

"I told him that."

"And?"

"It's a subtle point for a man like the colonel."

Sung threw him one last glare, nearly a snarl, then silently ripped the form in half. "How's this for subtle?" She tossed the pieces on the naked corpse and marched out of the room.

Jilin the murderer was obviously invigorated by his new status as the leading worker of the 404th. He loomed like a giant at the front of the column, slamming his sledgehammer into the boulders, pausing occasionally to turn with a gloating expression toward the knots of Tibetan prisoners seated on the slope below. Shan studied the others, a dozen Chinese and Moslem Uyghurs not usually seen on the road crews. Zhong had sent the kitchen staff to the South Claw.

Shan found Choje, sitting lotus fashion, his eyes closed, in the center of a ring of monks near the top. Their idea was to protect Choje when the guards eventually moved in. It only meant that the guards would be all the more furious when they eventually reached him.

But the guards sat around the trucks, smoking and drinking tea brewed over an open wood fire. They were not watching the prisoners. They were watching the road from the valley.

Jilin's jubilance faded when he saw Shan. "They say you're a trusty now," he said bitterly, punctuating the sentence with a slam of the hammer.

"Just a few days. I'll be back."

"You're missing everything. Triple rations if you work. Damned locusts gonna get their wings broken. Stable gonna be full. We'll be heroes." Locusts. It was a label of contempt for the Tibetan natives. For the droning sound of their mantras.

Shan studied the four small cairns that had been raised to mark where the body had been found. He slowly walked around the site, sketching it in his notebook.

Sung was right. The killer had done his work here. This was the butchering ground. He had killed the man, and thrown the contents of his pockets over the cliff. But why had he missed the shirt pocket, under the sweater, which held the American money? Because, Shan mused, his hands had been so bloody and the white shirt so clean.

"Why come this far from town and not throw the body over the cliff? It would never have been found." The query came from behind. Yeshe had followed Shan up the slope. It was the first time Yeshe had shown any interest in their assignment.

"It was supposed to be found." Shan knelt and pushed away the remaining rocks from the rust-colored stain.

"Then why cover it with rocks?"

Shan turned and studied Yeshe, then the monks who had begun to watch him nervously. Jungpos only came out at night. But by day the hungry ghosts hid in small crevasses or under rocks.

"Maybe because then the guards would have seen it from a distance."

"But the guards did find it," Yeshe argued.

"No. Prisoners found it first. Tibetans."

Shan left Yeshe staring uneasily at the cairns and walked over to Jilin. "I need you to hang me over the edge."