Shan moved on, pausing under one of the trees to look back. There were professors in Baiyun, Jigten had explained. He had been taking Jamyang’s spirit tablets to sell to a professor. A young man walked by, carrying a cloth sack of rice on his shoulder. He was compact, his skin almost olive-colored. Most of the town’s inhabitants were tall, long in the face, with prominent features, people of the distant northeast, of Manchuria. This man had the features of China’s tropical southwest, not far removed from the tribes of the rain forest. Shan watched the figure as he disappeared into an alley. He had seen the features before, on the tattooed dead man.
He looked back at the men in the square, trying to understand his odd discomfort, feeling more than ever the urge to flee, to find Lokesh and take him to safety. But he also felt a growing need to understand this strange, unreal town with three bodies in a refrigerator.
A cry of pain broke him out of his paralysis. Low, rushed voices rose from the alley off the square. A woman cursed from the shadows, then gasped. Figures ran away, between buildings.
Meng was on her knees when Shan reached her, retching onto the ground.
“I’m all right!” she growled when Shan put a hand on her shoulder.
“You’re not all right,” Shan said. “You were attacked. I should find a doctor.” He quickly scanned the shadows. Rice kernels were scattered around her, the bag they had been in on the ground a few feet away. He looked warily about. A figure in the shadows turned and ran as Shan took a step toward him.
“No doctor!” Meng snapped. She leaned over, shaking the rice from her hair, then, bracing herself on the building, rose unsteadily. Her hand went to her upper lip. Blood was dripping from her nose. “I’m prone to nosebleeds,” she said. “You know, the altitude.”
“You were just attacked, Lieutenant.” He handed Meng her hat. “A Public Security officer was attacked.”
“Nonsense. We … collided,” Meng said weakly. “Not looking where I was going.”
Shan looked up the alley, out to the square. “You were watching me. Following me.”
“I strive to learn from my elders. Like I said, you are wise in the ways of Beijing.”
He stared at her. The more he interacted with Meng the more of an enigma she became. There should be urgent radio calls, plans for a sweep of the town. People were sent to prison for years for lifting a hand against a knob officer. He considered her words. Which ways of Beijing worried her?
“You knew who they were,” he said. It was not a question. “Just like you knew who that other man was. The one labeled south. His tattoo was like the banner of a gang.”
Meng fished a napkin from a pocket and held it to her nose. “They describe themselves as more of a social club. The Jade Crows they call themselves, a group of undesirables from Yunnan. Someone there decided to give them transportation to Tibet instead of prison.”
“You mean they bribed some court official.”
Meng acted as if she had not heard. “It’s part of the model for pioneer towns. Mix the populations. Don’t let one group take over the town.”
“They show every sign of having taken over the town, Lieutenant. Your town.” He turned at the sound of footsteps in the alley. The Tibetan constables were running toward them.
Meng seemed about to argue, then looked at her bloody napkin. “It’s late. I have a long drive to headquarters,” she said, then turned and disappeared around the corner of the building.
Headquarters. She meant the district Public Security headquarters, twenty miles north of the Lhadrung County line. Shan reminded himself that she did not report to Liang but to other officials, officers who had set pacification as her primary duty. He was tempted to follow her, but outside the county Shan’s meager protection would not exist. Outside Lhadrung he was no one, a former gulag inmate who had ignored the rules requiring former prisoners to remain in the county of their registration.
He looked back at the square. The checker players had all disappeared.
* * *
The responsibilities of the Irrigation Inspector for the northern townships of Lhadrung County were far-reaching. Shan’s district encompassed nearly a thousand square miles. His first annual reckoning to the county seat had reported two hundred and twenty-five road culverts, twenty earthen dams, and three hundred and fifty miles of ditches used for drainage. In a lighter moment he had once mentioned to Lokesh that his was an honored post, an office that had existed in the old Chinese empires, and for the next week the old Tibetan had addressed him with imperial honorifics. In reality it was a job that kept Shan covered in mud much of the time. His assignment had been the clever, and cruel, inspiration of the county governor, Colonel Tan, who had grudgingly accepted the obligation to protect Shan after he had saved Tan from a false accusation of murder the year before. But Tan had wanted Shan as far away as possible, and so humiliated he might be tempted to flee. The appointment, and moving Shan’s son Ko to Shan’s former prison camp in Lhadrung were, Tan had sternly warned, the last favors he would ever do for Shan.
The silver lining to Shan’s cloud was that he had no direct supervisor, and could travel anywhere he wished within his district in the battered old truck that came with the job. He leaned on his shovel now, watching the convent ruins below. A police barricade, manned by two officers, still blocked the road into the murder scene but there was no sign of activity inside the convent compound itself. He lifted his shovel like a badge of office and set off down the path that led to the ruins.
There had been only one vehicle at the gate when he had looked with Jamyang. The nun, the foreigner, the Chinese man, and their killer had been there, and surely they had not all arrived together. Above the convent there were several old pilgrim paths but as they approached it they converged, so there was one main path from each direction that reached the old walls.
Half a mile from the compound he stopped at an intersection with another path, looking up the trail that arrived from a narrow hanging valley above him. It was the route to Thousand Steps, the nuns’ hermitage. The murdered nun had no doubt come to the convent down that path. It had been a beautiful early summer day. The birds would have been singing, her step would have been light. Once at the ruins she had taken up her restoration work on one of the old prayer wheels. Once one or two of the wheels were done and being spun by the devout, Lokesh had told him, the convent would be invincible, as if the wheels would defend it as surely as great guns.
He slowly turned in a circle, surveying the landscape. The nun had come from above, the Chinese man had driven, but what of the foreigner, what of the killer? The convent had once been the hub of the upper valley. Other trails converged from the shepherds’ homes high in the mountains, still others from the farms and even Chegar gompa, the monastery at the mouth of the valley miles away. Keeping out of sight of the police at the roadblock, he found the other trails that led into the ruins of the gates along the side and rear walls. They were all intersected by a line of heavy boot prints where police had circuited the building, but all the tracks leading up to the walls were those of the soft, worn footwear of Tibetans. At the rear wall, where the trail was soon lost in a tangle of brush, Shan discovered the track of a single bicycle. It had been ridden to the convent and hidden among the boulders, then later ridden away.
Bicycles were becoming more common among the people of the valley floor, who were being pushed away from using yaks and donkeys, but he never recalled seeing one anywhere but on the roads. Few paths were in good enough condition to allow any kind of wheeled passage. He studied the rocky landscape where the trail disappeared. The path might lead to the trails of the upper slopes but he doubted a bicycle could be used on those trails. Much more forgiving would be the large path that ran along the lower part of the ridge, the more heavily used pilgrim path that connected the convent and Chegar monastery.