Shan drank his tea, desperately trying to understand what was happening in the village. “Has Public Security come?”
“So far only some bully from Religious Affairs, late yesterday. The fox, people are calling him already, because he wears a fox-fur hat.” Kypo’s face tightened. “He had four men with him, plus Constable Jin. They searched for the escaped monks in every house, made sure everyone knew they would be imprisoned if they lifted a finger to help the monks. There were problems.”
“Problems?”
“The monks weren’t here, of course, but that wheelsmasher wasn’t convinced we were telling him everything. He tried to change the minds of some of the older villagers, put them in chairs in the square like a tamzing.” Kypo sighed. “He tried for a couple of hours, then went away.”
Shan fought a shudder. Tamzing was a term from a painful past, the name for the public struggle sessions when the Red Guard had tried, figuratively and literally, to beat correct political thought into wayward citizens.
“What do they say in the village about the trap set for that bus?”
“Nothing. The only thing we know for certain is that it was set by someone who doesn’t understand what the knobs are capable of doing to us.”
“Those monks must have been from local farms and villages,” Shan suggested. Like in the old days, he almost added. Once, Tibetan families had always sent their oldest son to the local monastery. “That’s where they would search first.”
“Funny thing,” Kypo replied. “The government doesn’t know who they were, don’t have any names for those monks. The only files the knobs had about those monks were on that bus. They disappeared in the confusion.”
“How would you know that?”
“There aren’t many qualified mechanics in these mountains. Jomo sometimes gets asked to help at the government garage, where they towed the bus. Tsipon sent me to pick him up when he was finished. I asked to see inside the bus. Those prison buses have a little lock box bolted under the dashboard for records being transported with the prisoners. This one had been pried open.”
Shan felt a stir of excitement. With the records gone, the missing monks had a real chance of freedom. “Why did you ask him to look?”
“Like you said,” Kypo replied in a taut voice, “the monks had families.”
Shan looked up in surprise, with a surge of fear. Was Kypo saying he had meant to steal the files himself? The offense would have guaranteed him years in prison had he been caught. “If things don’t go well in Cao’s investigation, Kypo, he will have to cover himself with a politically foolproof explanation.”
“I don’t understand.”
“He will say that the ambush and the assassination were one and the same act, that it would have taken many people to coordinate, that what happened that day was an act of organized rebellion by the mountain people. He will have martial law declared, call in hundreds of troops-”
A frightened gasp, a shattering of pottery interrupted Shan. Kypo’s wife, listening in the shadows, had dropped the dishes she’d held. Shan did not complete his sentence, did not mention that the very existence of a village like Tumkot would stick in the craw of any military commander trying to subdue the region.
“And have you decided what to say when the knobs finally come to ask you about the ropes?” Shan continued.
Kypo feigned a look of confusion then, as if to hide his true reaction, rubbed his eye. He was one of the only Tibetans Shan knew who wore contact lenses.
“It’s only Religious Affairs for now because Public Security is obsessed with the assassination. But they can’t ignore the coincidence much longer.”
“Coincidence?”
“Between the ambush on the bus and the murder of Minister Wu.”
Kypo buried his head in his hands a moment. “Cao already came to the warehouse, asking about the stolen equipment.”
Shan pressed his hand over his arm. The patch on his bicep where the knobs had connected the electrodes had begun to quiver. “What did he ask?”
“Not much. I explained we are a climbing support company owned by the leading Tibetan in the local Party organization. We have strict inventory controls. The rope had been ours, yes, but was ordered by a foreign expedition, put on a truck going up to the base camp, and delivered days before the killing.”
“What expedition?”
“The Americans. Yates and that woman who works with him.”
Shan’s head shot up. “What woman?”
“I don’t really know her. Ross is her name, a famous female climber apparently. His climb boss, Yates calls her.”
Shan drank his tea in silence, trying again to piece together the puzzle of the Western woman who had died in his arms. No one had mentioned her disappearance. If she was Yates’s partner, why hadn’t he reported her missing? “Where is this woman now?”
Kypo shrugged. “Sometimes she sleeps in the bungalow behind the depot, sometimes at the base camp. But usually she’s out climbing. She’s a relentless climber.”
“Surely Cao inquired about the day of the killing?” Shan asked.
Kypo rose and stepped to the rear window, gazing into the yard where the girl played with the goat. He absently kneaded a patch of discolored skin on the back of his hand, a remnant of frostbite. “Technically most of our work is done under license from the Ministry of Tourism, which also contracts with us for special projects. He already knew the minister had accounted for all of us that day.”
Shan moved to his side before speaking again. “What are you saying?”
“Minister Wu called it an exhibition. We had ropes set up to demonstrate rappelling and other techniques. She wanted a full mobilization, as she called it, a demonstration to her important visitors of all the resources available to support increased utilization. That’s how people from Beijing speak of the mountain. Utilization rates of equipment. Base loading of camps. Capacity of the slopes. She gave a speech at Tsiipon’s new guest house when she arrived, for a gathering of local businessmen. She accused us of wasting the people’s resources, urged us to work harder. You know the speech. All of us Tibetan children need to mind our aunts and uncles from Beijing. Afterward she handed out ballpoint pens with red flags on them.”
“Where did she arrange these demonstrations?”
“A few miles up the road, near Rongphu gompa,” he said, referring to the restored monastery that was the last habitation before the base camp. “That’s where she was going, to inspect everything before the important visitors arrived that afternoon. Nearly everyone was up there. You know how it goes when groups come from Beijing. They use Rongphu like a bus stop. She had a film crew there and at the base camp for days before, shooting footage for a film she was going to show in Beijing. A big outdoor lunch was planned on the grounds of the monastery. It was the minister herself who ordered that section of road closed that day, so she could enjoy her mountain.”
“Who would have known about the minister’s orders?”
“Only every villager, farmer, and herder for twenty miles.”
“But not in advance.”
“Of course not in advance,” Kypo agreed. “It would have been a state secret.”
From the window Shan could see up the slope above the town. Boys and dogs were returning to the open pastures, tending small flocks of sheep. Women in dark wool dresses toiled in fields of barley. Above them, on a trail that led toward the high peaks was another woman, leading a donkey piled high with boughs of juniper. Juniper was the sacred wood, its smoke used to attract deities. Such large quantities would once have been regularly carried to temples and gompas. But in this region, long ago scoured of its temples, such an amount was used for another purpose.
“Did someone else die?”
Shan did not miss Kypo’s wince. The Tibetan gestured toward the woman leading the donkey, now approaching a long cleft in the high rock wall above the village. “It’s the village diviner,” he said in a tight voice.