“Jake, this is starting to sound a little bigger than a newspaper scoop. A little scarier, too. And a whole lot crazier.”
“Conceded. But maybe my weirdness makes a little more sense to you now. I seemed crazy because the story seemed crazy, until your car blew up. That’s when I knew this was real, and you had to be protected.”
“I can protect myself,” she said automatically, even though the idea of a protector was not entirely unappealing.
“Sorry. I mean you needed a partner. A friend.”
She glanced down at the sheaf of diagrams. “You think the skinheads are after these staffs of Shambhala?”
“Yes. Or at least after the idea that there’s something to the Shambhala legend.”
Rominy sat back, thinking. She didn’t know if she was sitting next to a lunatic or Einstein. But then a thought occurred. She knew what had poked her thigh-the empty bullet cartridge she’d found on the floor of Jake’s pickup, behind the seats. Its meaning hadn’t been clear, but all this talk of big things and microscopic things had jarred her memory. She let her fingers touch it, next to her leg, but decided against pulling it out. Instead, she remembered its size. It was small, smaller than she imagined most bullet shells to be.
In fact, the shell was the right size to hold a bullet that would make a small hole just like the one in Barrow’s rear window when they were being chased on the freeway.
What was the shell from such a bullet doing inside Jake’s cab?
Had that gunshot come from assailants she never saw as she was mashed down on the seat? Or from Jake Barrow himself?
Should she challenge him on it?
“Okay, but I still don’t get it, Jake. You got me to go along, get the safety deposit box, find the mine, and retrieve the satchel. That’s my part as the heir, right? Why do you need me now?”
He smiled, putting his hand on hers, covering where that gold ring burned on her finger. “Can’t you tell? I’ve fallen in love with you.”
38
Lhasa, Tibet
September 10, Present Day
L hasa gave Rominy a headache, but then it gave almost all first-time visitors a headache. At nearly twelve thousand feet, it was one of the highest cities in the world. Yet its dizzyingly perched airport was still tucked in the valley of the infant Brahmaputra River, the runway surmounted by taller mountains that glowed like green felt. The sky was a deep blue and clouds drifted overhead like galleons. The topography was so steep that she and Jake had to take a tunnel to get to Lhasa’s neighboring valley. Golden willows and cottonwoods bordered gravelly rivers. Lines with flapping prayer flags were stitched from tree to tree like cloth graffiti, telegraphing prayers to the eternal. Buddhas peered down from niches in cliffs. Painted ladders symbolized ascension through reincarnation toward the final grace of nirvana.
Tibet was a jumble of time. There were more oxen than tractors in the barley fields. The stone houses with small openings looked like fortresses compared to the glass expansiveness of American homes, and they were enclosed by adobe walls instead of white picket fences. Yet their geometry was more proportional and pleasing than a McMansion, with trapezoidal windows, walls alternately whitewashed or the color of the earth, and prayer flags fluttering from the four corners. There were bands of black and ocher at the eaves of the roofs, the tops flat because it so rarely rained.
The sun burned with an intensity never felt in sea-level Seattle. Everything was crisp, the clarity defeating attempts at perspective because there wasn’t enough haze to judge distance. Shadows were intensely black; rock glittered. Even the facial bones of the Tibetans seemed sharp like their mountains, their skin the color of the earth. If you wanted to contemplate the workings of the universe, this was the place.
Rominy had expected Lhasa to be backwardly quaint, but the city was a burgeoning, car-crowded metropolis of more than 400,000 people in which native Tibetans were a minority. Han Chinese had flooded in to dominate Tibet’s capital. The Potala Palace was as awesome as Jake had promised, an otherworldly edifice of more than 900 rooms, but opposite were the huge concrete parade grounds beloved of totalitarian states, complete with a musical electronic billboard. Pedicabs jockeyed with honking taxis. There were billboards for Budweiser beer, shops for Italian clothing, and stores full of glistening motorcycles and Mercedes.
“The Chinese Communists invaded Tibet in 1950,” Jake recounted, “and by 1959 the Dalai Lama-the one who was just a child when Benjamin Hood was here-had to flee into exile. The same guy has since become a global celebrity, but we can get into the Potala as tourists while he can’t as regent. The wars and upheaval are said to have killed more than a million Tibetans. Meanwhile Chinese have moved in, so you have this country that’s half traditional and half modern, everything put on overdrive by go-go capitalism ruled by Communist dictatorship. Even now, if border guards find a book with mention of the Dalai Lama, they confiscate it.”
“You seem quite the expert.”
“Ever since I got on the Ben Hood story, I’ve been reading about Tibet.”
Some of old Lhasa remained. East of the Potala, around the golden-roofed Jokhang temple, the Barkhor neighborhood of historic buildings and markets sustained sights and sounds Kurt Raeder might have encountered in 1938. Here the streets were narrow and winding, jammed with booths with cheap clothing and globalized souvenirs. The smell was charcoal braziers and cypress incense. A single stall of scarves-a brilliant bank of pinks, reds, purples, and yellows-was a detonating rainbow.
“They like color, don’t they?” said Rominy.
“Wait until you see their temples.”
In the rectangular plaza in front of the Jokhang, men and boys flew kites that looped and dueled in the blue breeze, trying to slice each other’s lines. On the foothills to the north, the Sera, Nechung, and Drepung monasteries clung to the hillsides like old-man eyebrows, limpets of medieval glory overlooking the modernist bustle below. And around the mount of the Potala, a constant circuit of pilgrims shuffled in a clockwise direction called a kora, turning prayer drums and working their rosary mala s.
Jake and Rominy checked into the Shangri-la Hotel.
“If we’re traveling incognito, isn’t the name of this place a little obvious?” she whispered.
“Nobody knows we’re here,” said Jake. “Besides, we won’t stay long. But you can’t just run around China willy-nilly, you need a guide with permits. I e-mailed ahead to a booking service and they found one last-minute, which probably means no one else wanted him.”
“Great.”
“It won’t matter. We just need his paperwork.” He turned back to the desk clerk. “A room in the back, please. And yes, double, not twin.”
Rominy didn’t contradict him.
In their room, Jake hugged her. “Take some aspirin and a nap to help acclimate to the altitude. I’m going to pick up a few things in the market and will see you for dinner.”
T heir guide was an American expat in khaki cargo pants, REI hiking boots, and a torn Led Zeppelin sweatshirt, a genial-looking nobody of the kind Rominy had spent half her life meeting at Seattle coffeehouses and passing over as amiably directionless. They all seemed to have the goals of a fourteen-year-old: play hard. This one had made a living of it, guiding in Tibet, but if what Jake said was true, they’d drawn the bottom of the barrel. He was traveler-shaggy, with a mop of dark hair that hadn’t seen a shower for days, a weedy beard, and just the beginning of beer pudge. He wore peace beads at neck and wrist and had a sweat-stained camouflage Booney hat from L.L. Bean. He wandered into the restaurant tapping an iPhone, absentmindedly bumping the Tibetan waitress.