Shan paused at the last page. It read like a prayer, or a eulogy. “So young to pass,” it said, “so confused a spirit that is brought up with violence. You grew up in forests of bamboo and die among trees of flags. One hand on the knife, the other searching for your heart. Beware the prayer that brings poison. Beware the color you see.” Shan read it again, and again, each time growing more disturbed. It was about the Lung boy, whose body had scared Jamyang so. Beware the prayer that brings poison. Beware the color you see. Jamyang had known the killer was a monk.
They were not the last words on the page. At the very bottom, in a different ink, written later, were four more words. “Kaliyuga,” it said. “It has arrived.” The grief that surged within Shan as he read them was as real as that he had felt when he had held the lama’s dead body. Kaliyuga was the Tibetan word for the end of time. Jamyang had known that at least the end of his time had come.
“When was it?” he asked after a long moment, “when did he bring this to you?”
“Two or three weeks ago. He always came in the night. He brought incense sometimes.”
“Incense?”
Sansan gave a sad smile. “He knew I was often sick. Sometimes I cough and can’t stop for several minutes. He brought things, some from the old convent. I said we couldn’t take such things, but he said they were safer with us than in the ruins, that I needed them more.”
“Sansan, I don’t understand.”
She glanced at the door of the little shed, then stepped to the side wall and began lifting away planks. A double wall had been erected, a second row of planks that would be enough for a casual searcher to miss the narrow space they concealed. “Father at first kept his special things here, before entrusting them to Jamyang. The first time Jamyang gave us artifacts we just set them on the little shelf inside the compartment. Later he said he had a better idea. He worked in here alone one night, then brought me in holding a candle, and had me sit on the old rug.” She indicated a tattered piece of carpet, that looked like an artifact itself, then pulled away the final planks and held up her light.
Jamyang had built Sansan a shrine. On the lower shelf were offering bowls, several deity figures, and an incense burner. Above them was a faded, but still elegant thangka, a painting of the lapis god Menlha, the deity invoked for healing. In his left hand the blue deity held a bowl of nectar, the universal cure.
“He knew I was having a hard time getting my medicine,” Sansan whispered. She wiped a tear from her cheek. “He said this belonged to his uncle, who was a healer and who was known for making special cures out of gemstones and herbs. He said he wished he had such skills but that he did at least know no medicine would work unless the spirit was ready to accept it. He said I should light incense here each day and gaze at the lapis god. He said not to be shy about breathing in the incense, that in smoke and mist were where humans and god meet, that if I could awake the god then some of the nectar would enter my body.”
They stood silently in front of the altar. Shan realized he was meditating not so much on the deity as on Jamyang. The only time he had ever heard of the lama speaking of family was to this quiet, spirited Chinese girl. The words he had used echoed of regret. Shan looked back at the workbench. “He told you to scan that journal? He used those words?”
Sansan slowly broke her gaze from the altar. “Yes. It surprised me. I didn’t expect him to understand about computers. But that night he showed me differently.”
“What else happened?”
“He asked where I could get access to the Internet in town, if there was any place other than my house. I explained that sometimes I connected in the café, that sometimes the owner, another old professor, left the circuits on without controls when he left at night, and that he always kept the shop unlocked.” She cast a pointed glance at Shan. Beijing required those who provided public access to the Internet to record the identity of every user.
“Sansan, surely you don’t mean Jamyang wanted to use your computer.”
“That’s exactly what he wanted. And he knew about security controls. He said he would be able to conceal whose computer it was.”
Shan stared at the woman in disbelief. He wanted to shake her, to tell her to stop concocting such tales. But he saw her eyes, and knew she understood the weight of her words. Jamyang’s ghost was not the lama Shan had known.
“What did he do?”
“It was after midnight. I took him to the tea shop and started to wait outside but he told me to go. Like an order. He was not like a lama for a moment. More like … I don’t know. A soldier. He said he would leave the computer on the workbench here. I found it the next morning, with one of those khata scarfs wrapped around it, like it had been blessed. The owner of the café found another scarf hanging on his counter, with a little Buddha drawn on a napkin.”
The ache in Shan’s head was growing again. He had a sense of slipping away. Every truth he clung to was becoming an untruth. “Sansan, the owner of the teahouse was detained by Major Liang, for failing to control Internet usage.”
“But he’s back, Shan, everything’s fine.”
He looked at her in alarm. “That only means he cooperated, that he spoke about an unknown user who left a prayer scarf. It means Liang obtained what he was looking for, and it was not about the murders.” Shan looked back at the screen, at the disturbing image of the chorten and hammer. Nothing made sense.
There were times, Lokesh had told him, when the only way of knowing was not knowing.
* * *
Shan touched the side door of the police post, then withdrew his hand and sat on the step instead. He needed to see Meng, he wanted to see Meng, but didn’t know what to say to her. He could not stop worrying about Lokesh and Cora, knowing the grave dangers they faced, knowing how innocent each was in their own way.
He stared into the night sky and suddenly was with Ko again. It was the previous autumn and on arrival he had been taken to the prisoners’ infirmary, which was just another barrack lined with single cots instead of double and triple bunks. His son had a fever, an undiagnosed and untreated fever, with a violent nausea that let nothing stay in his stomach. Ko had been too weak to speak, and all Shan could think when he saw him was that this was the last time, that by his next visit the guards would have thrown his son into an unmarked grave and wouldn’t even be able to tell him where it was. For the entire visit Shan had just held his son, rocking back and forth with tears streaming down his cheeks.
He became aware that Meng was sitting beside him. He did not know how long she had been there. “If you hadn’t called Tan-” he began.
She raised a hand as if to cut him off. “He is not particularly pleasant on the telephone,” she said with half a smile as she extended one of her bags of sunflower seeds to Shan.
“The evidence from the murders,” Shan asked. “Is it here?”
“Locked in my file cabinet.”
“In the pocket of Lung Ma there was a metal object. I want to see it.”
“You know there are rules about handling evidence. I would have to make entries in the log.”
“Such rules are for taking evidence to trial, Lieutenant. There is never going to be a trial. You know that.”
Meng looked into the bag, as if searching for something. “I was a captain once,” she said. “I had a driver, access to special facilities for senior officers.”
He hesitated, not for the first time wondering about the part of Meng she always kept hidden. “I’m sorry. You’re right. I can’t ask you to put your career at risk.”
His words seemed to hurt Meng. “A triple homicide was committed in my district,” she replied. “I have a file.”
“You have a file,” Shan underscored. “Does Liang? The major came all this way but I am beginning to think the only file he has is on that American woman. You said he took the bullet. But I doubt you’ve seen a test on it. He doesn’t deal in evidence. He deals in fear and manipulation.”