Shan wedged his smoking stick of incense between stones in the wall above the altar, murmuring a quick mantra before turning to the new Jade Crow chieftain. “Tell me something, Lung. Did your brother make this altar before or after his son died?” He half expected Lung to pull out his blade, but then he saw there was no fight in the man before him.
Lung Tso watched the smoke of the smoldering stick as he spoke. “After. Even then he kept it hidden. The night we burned his boy’s body he never came back to the house. I found him here, just before dawn, setting out the little statues.” He turned to Shan. “When we were young our mother took us to the temple. People would bring little things like images of houses and money and burn them. Should we burn something?”
“That was a temple of the Taoists,” Shan explained. “The Buddha does not expect it.”
“My brother said he had been having dreams about going to the temple with our mother,” Lung continued. “He said maybe we had been wrong to ignore the gods after she died. Maybe it was wrong to have roughed up all those Tibetans in the hills, he said, just because the police said so. He said our mother had warned him about making deals with demons.”
“You mean he thought his son’s death was some kind of punishment.”
“I told him his son died in a truck accident, that our dealing with the police was just good business, that the Jade Crows always made the best of their situation, it’s how we survived. But he wouldn’t listen. He said bringing the old nun was too late, that he should have done so long before.”
Shan paused. “You were here when she came?”
“The first time she came to us with another nun, right up the stairs as we sat at the table playing tiles. She demanded that we stop raiding the farms. My brother made sure she wasn’t hurt, even stopped the others from laughing at her, but agreed to nothing. When my nephew died he seemed to reconsider things. Lung Wi was a good boy, very smart, very lively. Always laughing. My brother was devoted to him. If we had stayed in Yunnan some of us might have avoided jail but my brother wouldn’t be separated from his son. The others don’t know it, but it’s why we came here, so my brother and his son would be together.
“When the boy’s body was brought back he wept. The only time I ever saw him weep. He pulled out an old box of our mother’s things and sat with them a long time. Then he took them and placed them around his son’s body. After a couple hours of sitting there in silence he left without a word. When he came back that old nun was with him. They washed the boy’s body and they said words together.”
“Your brother and the abbess?”
Lung shook his head. “The abbess and that other nun, the older nun. The monk too, though the abbess was in charge.”
“A monk? What was his name?”
“That Jamyang.”
“The tall lama with the red spot on his jaw?”
As Lung nodded Shan recalled he had seemed to know Jamyang’s name on his first visit. “Not as good as the nuns,” the gang leader added.
“What do you mean?”
“He disrupted things, stopped the prayers. He ran out like he couldn’t bear to be with the dead. What good’s a monk who is scared of death?”
Shan stared at the gang leader in confusion. “Where was the boy going when he died?”
“Jade Crow business,” was Lung’s only reply. He turned back toward the altar. “Do you have more of that incense?”
Shan found himself settling down in front of the altar. He absently handed Lung his last stick of incense. The gang leader lit it and stared at the little Buddha in the exotic garb, his head cocked, as if trying to understand how to speak to it. The last rays of the sun reached into the stable, bathing the altar in a golden glow.
Shan reached into his pocket and extracted the folded piece of paper he had found in Lung Ma’s holster. “This is what you wanted. This is what I took from your brother’s body.”
Lung Tso seemed not to hear for a moment, then he slowly turned and accepted the paper. His brows knitted in confusion as he read it. He looked up at Shan and gestured him closer to the little Buddhas. “My mother said in front of the gods no man can lie. This was it, this was all you took?”
“I swear it to you. These were the words that brought him to the convent that day.”
“Just dates and towns?”
“Certain dates. Certain towns, towns on the border, where things get moved out of China. And at the bottom that address in Chamdo. It was written by Jamyang.”
“This is why my brother died? I don’t think so.”
“A man cannot lie in front of the gods, Lung. Were the Jade Crows smuggling things across at those towns? Things like the cameras of those foreigners?”
Lung’s nod was so small as to be almost imperceptible.
“Where are they, where are the cameras?”
“Gone. Probably in some Katmandu market by now.”
“Look at the last two entries, Lung. One town, with two dates that were in the future when Jamyang gave these to him. One passed a few days ago. You’re planning operations there, to smuggle across the Nepali border on those dates. Someone is watching you.”
Lung’s eyes widened, as realization had finally hit him. “Fuck me.”
“Your nephew died,” Shan slowly declared. “Your brother and the abbess and Jamyang met here, because of his death. Then they and the German all died.”
“Fuck me,” Lung murmured again, repeating it several times. It had the tone of a prayer, the Jade Crow mantra.
Wind began to rustle the grass outside. They both stared at the little altar. The candles flickered. A nighthawk called.
“I want you to make a burnt offering after all,” Shan said at last. Lung looked up. “I want you to burn a truck for your brother.”
CHAPTER NINE
He waited in the shadows for nearly an hour, watching through the windows before walking in the side door of Baiyun’s little police post. “The German was an agitator for democracy,” he said to Meng’s back as she sat at her desk. “You knew that.”
Meng went very still, then slowly turned to face him. “He was a foreigner,” she replied, as if it were the same thing.
“You knew he was watching the new pacification camp.”
“A foreigner known for making documentary films who is traveling illegally in a district with one of the highest concentrations of detention camps in all of China. It would be a reasonable surmise.”
“For you.”
“And for Major Liang,” she shot back.
Shan hesitated a moment, confused at the flicker of uncertainty he saw in her eyes. “I need to get into that camp.”
“Don’t be a fool. Impossible.”
“Arrest me.”
Meng brushed a strand of hair from her face. Shan noticed for the first time her disheveled, weary appearance. She gestured toward the computer on her desk. “I spent two hours today trying to figure out who you are, Comrade Shan. Public Security has so many secret operations Beijing can’t even keep track of them in any systematic way. And you’re not really the Public Security type, are you?”
Shan did not reply.
“One of the green apes from that new pacification camp came in to run a request about a lao gai registration number. It was yours, Shan.”
He had forgotten that Lung Tso had taken his tattoo number, though not his discovery that the Jade Crows sometimes acted like surrogates for the Armed Police.
“But that’s all there was,” Meng continued. “Just your name, and an admission date over seven years ago. The Four hundred and fourth People’s Construction Brigade. Nothing else. One of Colonel Tan’s most famous prisons. Tan doesn’t lose records. It has to be a legend, the officer said, a deep cover. I didn’t bother to tell the fool that no one creates deep cover with empty files. But on the other hand, no convict would be so clever as to find a way for Tan to destroy his file and then be so foolish as to keep using the same name and stay in Tan’s county.”
“I could draw you a map of all the roads I helped build with the Four hundred and fourth. Arrest me,” he said again.