“He stared as if he had seen a ghost. I told him the truth then, for he knew that gau had been in the family for centuries, that it had been Ugen’s. It had been sent home to me six years before when Ugen killed himself in prison.
“He stared and stared at the gau, then finally pressed it to his head and wept. I gave him tea. He would not speak with me. He just held the gau and stared at it. His hands trembled like those of an old man.
“Then the car horn started calling him. The other one, his companion, grew impatient, and was standing at the driver’s window, pressing the horn.”
“The other one?” Dakpo asked in a whisper.
“Another man in a robe over a suit, very tall, carrying what looked like a silver bell. They were being driven like they were Chinese royalty.”
An anguished moan escaped Dakpo’s throat. He sagged and Leshe helped him lie back on the pallet.
Shan studied Dakpo in confusion, then asked Jigten to bring the truck up. The young monk needed to return to his bed in Chegar gompa, where he could be properly looked after.
“Your foot,” Leshe said to Shan. “Pick up your trouser leg.”
The Tibetan woman murmured something and the big dog stepped forward. Shan forced himself not to react as the animal sniffed at Shan’s ankle. “He apologizes for biting you,” Leshe said, then made a clucking sound as she studied the bite. “That old fool put on honey, didn’t he?” She made a gesture and the mastiff licked away the honey. She lifted one of her wooden tubes and began applying a salve to the wound. The dog watched with bright, intelligent eyes. “He only bites Chinese,” Leshe explained in a matter-of-fact voice, then paused. “He appeared as a pup six years ago, waiting at my door.”
Shan offered an awkward grin and touched the dog’s head as it turned to contemplate him with its big, moist eyes. “I didn’t hear his name.”
The old woman cast an impatient glance at Shan, as if he hadn’t been listening. “It’s Ugen, of course.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Brilliant claws of gold reached across the dusk sky, as if a dragon were rising out of the sacred mountain. Shan sat outside the shepherd’s hut and arranged sticks on the ground. One six-inch-long stick with two shorter sticks underneath, over another long stick and another short pair, so that they made a square of a solid line, a broken line, a solid line, and another broken line. It was a tetragram, used to identify passages of the Tao te Ching, which he had memorized with his father as a boy. With slow, deliberate movements he disassembled the tetragram and built it again, dismantled and built it again, like a meditation practice. It invoked passage eleven, called “Using What Is Not.” “Clay is shaped to form a vessel,” it said. “What is not there makes the vessel useful. Take advantage of what is there by making use of what is not.”
It wasn’t simply that Shan had once misunderstood Jamyang. He was misunderstanding him again and again. First, Shan had known him as only a solitary, reverent hermit. Then he had grown to consider him as a lama in some mysterious exile, or a pilgrim doing penance. But he had also been a bureaucrat with a robe, an official who was fluent with computers. One of the agents trained to consume Tibet from the inside out. He had been all and none of those things. Shan had assumed his movements in his last few days had been actions to implement some plan, but they had all been reactions. He had missed the empty place, missed the phantom that gave everything meaning.
The realization had come slowly, a small dark thing gnawing at his gut since leaving Jamyang’s village. Some of the old lamas fervently believed that souls made sounds, that old hermits who suddenly found realization howled long syllables that could shake mountains. For Shan, the sound had come first, Dakpo’s anguished gasp before Jamyang’s aunt. He understood now that the monk’s reaction had changed everything. Dakpo had suddenly known, and collapsed, when Leshe had spoken of a man carrying a silver bell.
Shan had missed the phantom, the shadow that was always a step ahead, never there. It was time to use what was not there.
He rose and found the American by the little fire they had made to cook their evening meal. “I understand your need for silence, Cora,” he began. “But it must end. I want to help you but now you have to help me.”
The American woman struggled with her reply. There were still days, Lokesh said, when she did not speak at all. “There is no way out for me,” she said at last. “There is no one I can trust except Lokesh and Chenmo. And we can barely speak with each other,” she added with a bitter smile.
“And me, Cora. We can talk together. Together we are going to stop the murderer. Together we will get you home.”
“I should have been dead. I know that old Tibetans talk about not arguing with your fate, about embracing it. I was supposed to die that day.”
“No. You were supposed to live. You were supposed to become the way we stop the killer, the way word reaches the outside.”
“I’m always so afraid.”
“There are many things I have learned in Tibet,” Shan said to the American. “One is that your life isn’t about what others do to you, it is about what you do to yourself.”
“The killer wants me dead, doesn’t he?”
“I won’t lie to you. But Lokesh and his friends have taught me that you can’t let your decisions be determined by the cruelty of others.”
“I don’t know who the killer was. Just a monk.”
“It’s a puzzle, Cora. I know some of the pieces. You know some of the pieces. We have to fit them together. I should have asked you a question long ago. Did Jamyang come to you and Rutger sometime just before the killings?”
The American woman stirred the dying embers with a stick. “Two weeks before. With Chenmo. It was strange because he had always kept his distance, like he was very shy. Stayed away even from the other monks. Rutger said it must be because he was a hermit, that he had taken some kind of vow of isolation.”
“He came to your camp?”
Cora nodded. “He was no hermit that night. He said he understood we had taken pictures of the restoration. He wanted to know if they were the kind he could see on our camera screens. So we showed him. Rutger had been trying to get Chenmo to ask Jamyang to help name some of the old images on the walls and artifacts. A goddess playing a lute. A three-headed Buddha. A lion-headed god. We thought he came for that, and he did answer our questions. But what he wanted to see were photos of the monks who had come to help at the convent. He asked if we knew any of their names, and we explained we did not, that we kept our presence secret.”
“What happened? Did he show special interest in any of them?”
“He took the camera and scrolled through the pictures. He stopped at one and went very still. It was like he was scared by something he saw.”
“What was it? What photograph scared him?”
Cora shrugged. “Monks. Monks,” she repeated. “We came around the world to help monks. But now I know we must fear monks.”
“Did Rutger tell the abbess about this?”
“The abbess came to Rutger later. She was excited about what we were doing, about our photographing the internment camp. She encouraged us, gave us information about what went on in the camp, asked if she brought people who had been prisoners whether we would put them in our cameras. That’s how she said it. ‘Put them in our cameras.’ She said we needed to know what happened in those camps.” Cora broke off, biting her lips, looking into the embers. For a moment Shan thought she was going to weep again. She had seen for herself what went on in such a camp, had been tied inside one of its death shrouds.