“I asked to leave the job, leave Beijing. They broke me and sent me to a stable in Tibet.”
“A stable?”
“Public Security jargon. Where officers who have fallen out of favor are sent to be mere workhorses, to plod along without hope of advancement. The jobs no one else wants, in some god-forsaken backwater. Baiyun’s a stable, though they told me to consider it rehabilitation, that my record once had been so good I might still might find advancement in four or five years. A few months after I arrived I got the papers saying he had divorced me.”
Shan forced himself to look at the gate again, to avoid her eyes. “You didn’t have to tell me that,” he said. When he looked back she was staring at a pigeon. She looked like a young, lost girl. He looked at her hand on the table and realized he wanted to touch it.
Her face hardened as she felt his stare. “It’s an interrogation technique,” she said, wincing as if she had bitten something sour. “Let the subject know we are all comrades in the same difficult struggle.”
They fell silent again for several minutes, watching the gate again.
“People go in and don’t come out,” Shan observed.
“There’s a chapel. People go in and meditate. They may take an hour or two.”
“It’s an Institute,” Shan replied. “Those carrying briefcases are not going in to meditate.”
“There’s an official public description,” Meng observed, waving a brochure she had picked up in the guesthouse they had registered at, two blocks away. “And there are official private descriptions.”
“I don’t follow.”
The lieutenant unfolded the brochure and began reading. “The Chinese Tibetan Peace Institute is building bridges between the Han and Tibetan ethnic groups that reside in this region of the People’s Republic. By teaching the oneness of our great peoples we build happiness and socialist prosperity in every home.”
“Socialist prosperity,” Shan echoed. “It wasn’t written by a Tibetan. And the first Han seen here wore the uniforms of the People’s Liberation Army. This is Chamdo, traditional capital of Kham province, where Tibetan warriors using muskets were mown down by Chinese machine guns.” He frowned, not understanding why he felt the need to goad her.
Meng ignored him. “There are places on the Internet reserved for the government. They require special passwords.” She touched her cell phone and the screen came to life.
Shan cast a nervous glance around the cafe´ and leaned forward. “You know passwords for the Institute?”
“Public Security has a new database, like a reference guide to organizations that officers may need to know about.” She lowered her voice and read from the little screen. “The Peace Institute in Chamdo is a unique facility,” Meng recited, “where Buddhist teachers acquire the perspectives needed to lead their cadres into the future. Those who graduate from the Institute are awarded provisional membership in the Party. Some go on to serve the Motherland in strategic and often heroic capacities.”
The words raised a cold knot in Shan’s stomach. “Do they have a list of graduates?”
Meng worked at her screen as Shan sipped his tea. “It’s classified,” she said uncertainly. “A secret even within the Bureau. The screen keeps going back to what the Institute calls its internal manifesto.” As she made a movement to turn off the phone Shan grabbed it.
The manifesto was short and to the point: “Tibetans are not born traitors, but taught to live the lie through the influence of ego and prejudice in the religious class. Our goal is to use proven socialist methods to correct the error of their ways, to help them overcome the tyranny of their tradition.” He pushed the phone back and looked away.
After a moment he drained his cup, then took off the lid of the little teapot, a sign that it needed refilling. When the waiter ignored it, Meng rose and carried the pot inside. The instant she entered the building he slipped into the crowd. He needed to be alone, needed to be away from Public Security. Jamyang had lived in this town. He needed to find his ghost. He needed to understand the terrible foreboding he felt about the Peace Institute.
Shan found himself at a bus stop, lingering in a crowd of children in school uniforms. He let the crowd push him as a bus approached, did not turn back even as he found himself going up the steps of the bus. He sat at a window, not seeing at first, not feeling anything except impossibly tired.
When he shook himself awake, the bus, nearly empty, was on the outskirts of town. Tracts of shabby houses were giving way to fields and arid pastures. He got out at the next stop, crossed to the stop on the opposite side of the street and sat on its plastic bench. He heard a laugh and turned, seeing the back of a tall Tibetan with shaggy white hair, dressed in tattered clothes, and for a moment felt the ridiculous hope that it was Lokesh. Then the man turned and saw Shan, lowered his head and hurried away.
The hill on which he sat overlooked the town. Chamdo was Tibet’s third-largest city but it was isolated, so remote that it was seldom visited by outsiders, and even those were permitted only in organized groups. It was the perfect place for the government to conduct operations out of the public eye. He saw the warehouse complex where Jigten was loading the truck, then located the long block of buildings that comprised the Institute, some of the best-kept structures in the city. Jamyang had been there, at the anonymous complex in the anonymous, remote city. He had left in a suit and reappeared in a robe.
An hour later he was back at the bus stop where he had started, studying its city map, tracing the shaded, anonymous square of land that comprised the Institute. He turned for a moment, and realized that he was looking at the tea shop, unconsciously searching for Meng. Another mystery kept nagging at the edge of his consciousness, the mystery of why she so unsettled him. It was not fear of her he felt when he was with her. It was fear of himself.
Retreating from the corner, he followed the side street along the western wall of the compound. A row of well-manicured houses sharing common walls stretched out in front of the wall. At the end of the first block he crossed and walked slowly, studying the houses. They all had the same hardware on the doors and windows. There was no way through them, no way around them. They were just a buffer, like a moat around a fortress.
He glanced down the street, mindful of two men in spotless coveralls leaning on brooms at either end of the block, then approached the nearest door. It was locked. The window by the door was covered by a curtain but he could see through a narrow opening in the middle. The house was empty. Pressing his head close to the glass he saw through a window at the back. Behind the house was another wall, perhaps eight feet tall, not visible from the street. Strung along its top was razor wire.
Shan hurried on, rounding the next corner, to the back of the compound, where the street was busier. He settled onto a park bench under a tree, studying the buildings at that end of the block. Here too were houses that appeared empty, that seemed to serve as outer barriers to the compound, but in the center of the block was a store of some kind, and across from that a small police station. Monks went in and out of the shop. He searched the faces of each, watching for Dakpo. His hand unconsciously pressed against his chest, touching the badge of Yuan Yi, the mandarin bandit.
“It takes up two city blocks,” a voice said over his shoulder. Meng was facing the compound as she spoke. “Nothing but old shops and businesses along the wall on the other side. All with signs saying they were closed for an urban renewal project. Except the paper is all yellowed and dried-up. Like it’s been there for years.”
“The main gate is the only entry,” Shan observed. “Everything else is locked up except for this one shop.”
Meng started across the street even before he rose from the bench.
The shop was dedicated to religious literature and memoirs of the Communist struggle. A poster of Mao’s calligraphy stood over a stand of little Buddhas holding the flag of the People’s Republic. They browsed as if they were a tourist couple, buying a package of the inexpensive prayer scarves that pilgrims left on shrines. At the rear of the store was a room identified by a sign as the library. Inside, a small display case held several artifacts from the original monastery and two larger cases commemorated the Chinese youth brigade that had captured it fifty years before. Their patriotic efforts, the display explained, had liberated more than two hundred monks. It was the uplifting explanation favored by propagandists. It generally meant the monks had been freed of their earthly existence.