Shan bent over the incision. There was no swelling, no bruising, no scabbing. He pointed to the ridge of tissue above the incision. “He cut open the dead man’s leg along an old scar.”
Meng silently nodded.
He stared at her warily, sensing a trap. Knob officers were not permitted to be so headstrong. It was unthinkable that one would seek to intrude on the secrets of her superiors. She was only a lieutenant, he reminded himself, when most officers her age were of higher rank. “If you were to cut open these sutures it would be insubordination,” Shan concluded. “So you want me to.”
There was mischief in Meng’s narrow smile, but also a certain nervousness Shan had not seen before.
“Do you have the times of death?” he asked as he lifted a knife from a wall rack.
“Of course. Sometime during the past week, give or take a day. I admire your faith in our abilities. We have their personal belongings, two shell casings and a timber ax that was found with tools stored near the front gate that is consistent with the weapon that severed Nan’s head. No blood on it. Liang took the bullet we dug out of the wall. We’re pretty certain the victims are two males and a female. That, Comrade, is the extent of our forensic investigation.”
“But Liang has resources, access to labs. You said he brought that doctor.”
“As far as I can tell what the major is doing is reviewing the files on every inhabitant of Baiyun.”
The incision was deep, all the way to the femur. Except there was almost no femur. The bone had been shattered long ago, replaced with a prosthetic. As he stared at it Shan felt his chest tighten.
“I don’t understand,” Meng said as she bent to the incision, prying the flesh apart with her hands.
“Titanium,” Shan explained. “This was not done in China.” He quickly moved to the man’s mouth and pried it open. At least half a dozen teeth had been extracted. “Bodies will speak of their home if you look close enough.”
“A foreigner!” Meng gasped.
It changed everything. Her curiosity was gone, replaced by fear. She grabbed the sheet and covered the body, her movements suddenly frantic. “We must leave! Now!”
“No,” Shan replied. “You must leave. Go outside. Forget we were here.” He stepped to the other man, Nan, the Chinese whose head had nearly been severed.
“Not him!” Meng said. “No point.”
He began to pull away the sheet. The second man’s head had been crudely sewn back in place. Even so the man was short, Shan realized. Short and stocky and dark-complected.
Meng paused as she reached the door. “Major Liang is expected today. It won’t matter whom you work for if Liang finds you with a murdered foreigner.”
“All the more reason for you to leave.”
She eyed him coolly, then turned and left without another word. Shan quickly pulled away the rest of the sheet from Nan. The holster on the man’s ankle had been removed, like everything else. He looked at the black bird tattooed on Nan’s forearm. With his expensive clothes the man had seemed like an affluent businessman, perhaps even a senior official. Now, as he returned the sheet, Shan was not so sure. Meng had known him, had seemed oddly dismissive of the man, and of his death. But Jamyang too had known him, and given him a paper with a list of Tibetan towns. He paced slowly along the man, lifting his appendages, even examining his long black hair and scalp, then sniffed at the black deposits under his fingernails. Motor oil.
Meng was nowhere to be seen as he stepped outside. The sleepy little town of Baiyun was coming to life in the late afternoon. Trucks were pulling off the valley’s only paved road into the gas station. The smell of steamed rice and onions wafted from the little tea shop. In the square, two pairs of Chinese men, all older than Shan, were playing checkers. He pulled a newspaper from a waste barrel and sat on a bench, pretending to read as he studied the checker players and the buildings beyond.
Baiyun, in the remote mountains of central Tibet, had nothing of Tibet. It was a Chinese town, or some distant bureaucrat’s notion of what a Chinese town in Tibet should look like. White Cloud town. A pretend Chinese town in a pretend province of China. Someone had tried to plant gingko and plane trees along the edge of the park but the plants were nearly all dead or dying. The park benches that had been placed along the square were falling apart. Some of their planks were missing. The fiberglass statue of Mao, meant to be the focal point of the town square, was already being corroded by the harsh, dusty winds that often roared up the valley. Scores of such statues had been assembled in government warehouses, destined to replace the centuries-old stone chorten shrines that had once been fixtures in Tibetan villages. There was a new political slogan favored by the Party head in Tibet: The Communist Party Is Your New Buddha. When he had first heard it, Shan had actually thought it was some kind of joke. But now the slogan was emblazoned on public walls and banners all over Tibet and offered up for Tibetan schoolchildren to recite like a militant mantra.
Shan looked back at the statue. The only Tibetan writing he had seen anywhere in Baiyun was inscribed along the top edge at the front of its pedestaclass="underline" PRAISE THE GREAT LEADER TO WHOM WE OWE OUR LIVES AND PROSPERITY.
He gazed absently at the words as he forced himself to reconstruct the grisly scene in the store’s refrigerator. Liang’s special doctor had opened Bei’s leg up, and extracted his teeth. They had suspected him of being a foreigner but finely worked teeth were becoming less reliable an indicator of foreign origin in modern China. The titanium rod was unquestionable proof. They had closed up the scar then pulled the teeth for good measure. He looked up, surveying the streets again. He still had the sense of something unnatural about the pioneer town, and not just because it was one of Beijing’s prefabricated formula settlements.
Folding the paper under his arm he wandered around the square, sitting again, closer to the checker games that had been set out on upturned crates. Once more he surveyed the park and the modest windblown houses beyond it. There was another slogan on the back edge of the pedestal, in Chinese. It was faded, barely legible even though the statue was probably no more than a year old. He found himself rising again, trying to read the words. They were carefully written, in a very light hand that gave the impression of an official inscription that was weathered. But it was no official slogan: Superior leaders are those whose existence is merely known.
He stared at the words in disbelief, reading them again. It was the first verse of the seventeenth passage of the Tao Te Ching, written more than two thousand years earlier. The chapter explained how the best leaders were those barely known to their people, the worst were those who interfered with daily life. They were words that Beijing would choke on, the words of dissidents, though not of Tibet.
As he turned back toward the checker players he sensed movement, as if they had all been watching him. He slowly walked among them. Curiously, the players all had books beside them. A book of European history, in English. A book about the bone oracles of early China. A book of rites from the last dynasty. All but one of the players glanced up, nodding absently at Shan. The fourth man, an older, refined-looking gentleman wearing a grey sweater vest and wire-rimmed spectacles, seemed to studiously avoid acknowledging Shan. In his lap was a book of Sung dynasty poetry.