“Tell me about the gun,” Shan pressed. “If I can prove she had it Cao’s case against you is destroyed, because it is the only connection to you. A sherpa’s body was placed beside that of the minister’s, substituted for the American woman who died there. He was shot with a different gun. Not yours. A big one, a huge caliber. Not one issued by Public Security or the army.”
When Tan did not reply Shan retreated again, stepping into the first of the interrogation rooms that adjoined the corridor, opening drawers in its metal cabinet. When he arrived back at the cell he extended a small brown plastic bottle. Tan’s head snapped up. “Painkillers,” Shan announced. “Enough to get you through a couple more days.”
Tan extended his open palm. Shan tossed the bottle through the bars. Tan stared at the bottle, then clenched it so tightly his knuckles went white. “There was no dead American at the scene,” he announced in a thin voice. “Stealing that second body from the hospital was only a ploy to confuse the chief investigator.”
“How would you-” Shan began, his brow wrinkled in confusion. Then he understood. Tan was reciting the official version of events.
Tan replied with a bitter grin. “The monk said he saw the American woman running away after helping me commit the crime. The dead sherpa was patriotically trying to stop the murder and was shot.”
“What monk?” Shan asked, filled with new dread.
“That one,” he said, with a nod down the darkened cell corridor. “It was a busy morning in the interrogation rooms.”
Shan found himself halfway down the corridor before he was conscious of his own movement. He paused then followed the faint sound of breathing from a cell in the center of the corridor. He stepped hesitantly to the cell, discerning a small figure asleep on a pallet in the shadows at the rear. Scratched into the wall were several figures in a line about two feet above the floor, crudely drawn but still recognizable. A lotus blossom. A conch shell. The prisoner had been drawing the tashi targyel, the seven sacred symbols. Shan’s heart began rising into his throat. He knew before he spotted the shreds of a robe and a dirty prison shirt coat on the floor. Cao had brought back one of the captured monks.
When Shan returned to the colonel’s cell, Tan’s expression was oddly triumphant. “I don’t understand your obsession with rearranging facts, Shan,” he said. “When an artist is halfway through his masterwork you can’t just run and up and steal his paints. It’s unbecoming.”
“Cao is no artist. What exactly has he done?”
“He went away for half a day. When he returned he announced he had found the witness he needed to destroy me. He had the monk worked on for a few hours in the back rooms. When it came time for the climax he moved his little opera to this corridor, to the table there in the center so I could hear it all. The Tibetan has confessed to obstructing justice by not coming forward as a witness to the crimes. Cao promised him only a month’s imprisonment, and something for some other monk, a lama who will be released so long as he takes off his robe. So he signed a statement that he saw me with the pistol. Otherwise the lama was to get ten years’ hard labor.”
Shan felt his frail hopes slipping away. Cao had used the old lama from Sarma, the one who had been captured because he insisted on tending to the injured driver.
“Cao made him shout out his confession, like at one of the struggle sessions we used to have, just to be sure I could hear.”
Shan, suddenly feeling weak in the knees, gripped the bars in both hands.
Tan opened the bottle, dumped out several pills and swallowed them. “I think,” the colonel continued, “that Cao was considering a story of more texture, a more interesting tale for the audience back home. But he seems to have changed course. It is to be a simple trial. A forensic report says the victims died from shots from my gun, a witness says he saw me pull the trigger. He has spunk, that little Tibetan. They raised a baton to strike me when I started laughing and he leaped up to block it, and took the blow on his skull.” For a moment Tan hesitated and Shan saw confusion cloud his eyes before derision returned. “The fool.”
“He was apologizing for what he had done.”
Tan frowned. He had no reply.
“There was another death. Director Xie of Religious Affairs. How will such a report explain that killing?”
Tan shrugged. “The guards told me about it. No doubt it will be recorded as an industrial accident.”
“You have to stall him,” Shan said in a plaintive voice. “Tell him there was a conspiracy, suggest that Minister Wu was corrupt, that this was about a conspiracy of bribery reaching high into the government. He will have to pause, think about involving others in Beijing. It will buy us a few days. Tell me where you were. Maybe I can help confirm that you were somewhere else that day.”
Tan gazed without expression at Shan, then his lips formed a thin grin, made crooked by his swollen lips.
“Do you understand nothing I’ve said?” Shan asked. “Another day of this and he’ll have a confession from you. That is the prize he is after.”
Tan turned away to face the wall.
“We don’t have religion in China,” Shan said to his back. “We have confession. For a zealous Party member it is the moment of consecration. When the bullet enters your skull, some pampered niece of a Party official will watch and realize at that moment that the Party is her god. And that, Colonel Tan, becomes the entire point of your life.”
Tan turned back, his lips still curled up in the lightless smile Shan had seen so often in his Lhadrung prison camp.
Realization hit Shan like a sack of stones. He tottered backward, sank onto a nearby bench. “You want to die!” he gasped, burying his head in his hands. “You want the bullet in your head.”
Shan looked up once, twice, three times, each time with a new argument on his tongue, each time meeting the colonel’s crooked sneer. Finally Tan lay down on his pallet, his back to Shan.
Numb with despair, Shan stared at the floor as he shut the door and walked toward the rear exit. He did not at first notice that the Tibetan cleaners were gone until he nearly collided with a knob guard barring his path, automatic rifle slung forward. A single office was illuminated, cigarette smoke hanging in the air before it.
Shan let himself be herded into the office. The face of the man at the desk was hung in shadow above the metal shade of the gooseneck desk lamp, but the fearful expression of the guard told Shan all he needed to know. He lowered himself into the chair in front of the desk as Major Cao leaned forward and shut off a receiver on the desk. Shan’s mouth went dry as he recognized the device. Cao had been listening to his conversation with Tan. “I want the other monks,” Cao declared in a venomous tone. “All of them.”
“I hear there are a lot of Tibetan monks in India.” Shan fought to keep his voice steady. He was in Cao’s world now, an automatic rifle aimed at his spine.
“You know where they are, or can find them. You’re going to get them. You’re going to make sure they give me more witness statements against Tan.” Cao rose and walked around the desk, leaning on the front, barely three feet from Shan, as he lit another cigarette. “You won last night,” the major declared. “No raid. No detention of those villagers. You were right. It was very old school, what I was doing. A blunt instrument when what is needed is a surgeon’s scapel.”
Cao let the words hang in the air. Shan’s gut began to tie itself in a knot.
The major lifted a small silver and turquoise bracelet. “Director Xie put up a noble fight with his killers before he was knocked unconscious. He was still holding on to this when the cowards dragged him before the machine. It has been identified as belonging to the American Megan Ross. You were right after all. The American was at Wu’s killing. She was there, helping Tan. Now she and the monks roam as a criminal gang in the mountains. You are going to bring them to me.”