Tan clenched his jaw. “I don’t want him touching my body afterward.”
“I don’t expect to be invited to the occasion,” Shan observed.
“They usually have a cleanup squad,” Tan said in a distant voice. “They take a picture before they dispose of the body. It’s the last thing that goes in the file.”
“I could notify your family. A brother? A cousin? An old neighbor?”
“There is no one. There’s you.” He glanced at Shan self-consciously. “Not that you’re a friend,” he hastened to add. “It’s just that you’re. . reliable. An honorable enemy.”
“What happened in the end?” Shan tried again. “Where the rebels were finally defeated.”
“We wore them out. The American government stopped supplying them. If a village supported the rebels we bulldozed it. If a herder gave them food we machine gunned his herd. That Tibetan leader in India summoned them across the border, sending a tape of a speech asking them to lay down their arms.”
“You mean the Dalai Lama,” Shan said. The name was taboo to officials in Tibet.
“The Dalai Lama,” Tan agreed in a whisper, then repeated the name with a perverse, oddly pleased expression. The two men had entered new territory, someplace they had never been. “There was a last group,” Tan continued, “the core, the best fighters, maybe twenty or thirty men and women. Wu hated them. She was impatient for her final victory, for the destruction of the big monastery here in town because the monks there continued to hold public ceremonies in defiance of her orders. She kept asking me when I would have their bodies for her to display in the town square. But they always retreated high into the mountains, into their eagle nests. They had hiding places, where they disposed of the bodies of their comrades so we would never know the effects of our bullets. None of the Youth Brigade would join me, they were getting scared. They knew so little of real fighting that they were often killed when they tried to engage the rebels. But by then there were border commandos being deployed here. I was given two companies of real soldiers. Finally we reached the rebels through the back door.”
The words hung in the air. “Are you saying,” Shan asked, “that there was a traitor?”
“Officially,” Tan replied, “someone made a heroic conversion to the socialist cause.”
Shan’s mind raced. It was, he realized, the link to all the pieces of his puzzle. “Who was it?”
“No idea. Wu brokered the deal. By then she and I were not so close. I had started sleeping in the army barracks when the infantry moved to town. She gave me directions, where we could find them, with a very specific hand-drawn map, showing a secret path. There was a village that was not to be touched. It wasn’t easy to find their hiding place. Two of my soldiers died on the climb. But we surprised them as they ate breakfast, killed half right away, and chased most of the others across the border. They officially named me a hero, took me back into the army, made me a real officer.”
“A village?”
“Tumkot. We were not to touch it, just march through without a word. The next morning we took truckloads of food up to it, and in the afternoon lined up howitzers and began leveling the gompa here in town.”
“As if there had been a trade,” Shan suggested after a moment. “The village for the gompa.”
“As if there had been a trade,” Tan agreed.
“Wu was going to order all the monks inside, to trap them there when the shells fell. But the bastards beat us to it. She was furious.”
“You mean,” Shan guessed, “that they didn’t have to be ordered inside.”
“Right. Most of them went inside as soon as they saw us getting the guns ready. Later I realized they had been expecting it for months. They locked the doors from the inside and a monk went up the wall over the gate to throw the key down as the shells starting landing. We probably killed them all in the first half hour but she kept the barrage up for half a day.”
They sat in silence, watching the stars over the town.
“A crow picking at the bones of starved, scrawny eagles,” Tan said in a near whisper.
“I’m sorry?”
“It’s not what I set out to be.”
It was the most extraordinary thing Tan had ever said to him. A dozen replies occurred to Shan. It was the opening for the kind of conversation Shan had with lamas, in the night. But then he studied Tan and reconsidered. “Where were you, Colonel, the day the minister died?”
“I came here, to town. I walked around the old barracks and the infirmary building. That was where Wu held her struggle sessions when the weather was cold. I went and sat by that pit we pushed the old gompa into.”
“And the bodies of the monks.”
Tan did not reply.
Shan rose and piled the empty food cartons on the plate.
“What would you have me do, Colonel, if I am able to retrieve your body?”
“Put me behind the town.”
“You mean on the ridge, where you can see Everest?”
“No.” Tan’s level tone chilled Shan. “You can get out into the pit by climbing up from that old stable at its mouth. I want you to go out there in the middle of the night. I want you to dig in the pit until you strike bones. Then drop me in.”
Chapter Fifteen
“You and I both know that no matter what is stated publicly about the murders, you will be expected to return to Beijing with the truth.” Shan returned Madame Zheng’s unblinking gaze as he spoke. He had watched as the guards took Tan away, his chains reattached, before walking down the corridor. The commissar from Beijing had been waiting for him in the last office in front of a receiver. She had, as Shan had expected, been listening.
“We are beginning to glimpse the truth,” he continued. “The minister took Tan’s gun. There were not two murders but four.”
“Those large bullets fascinate me,” Zheng interjected. Though she seldom spoke, it was always in the low precise tone of an accountant. “They are not Chinese.” She had taken Shan’s advice and obtained the unofficial autopsy report for Tenzin. “If your American friend is involved then you will be the next to die.”
“A chance I am willing to take. Give me four days,” Shan said. “And I will bring back the proof. I need to have my son protected until then.”
Silence was Madame Zheng’s medium. She offered a tiny nod then held up two fingers.
Gyalo was in the corner of the buried chamber when Shan arrived, picking with a splinter of wood at a dirt-encrusted figurine, a little bronze Buddha. Shan looked at a small pile of fresh earth at the back of the room. The former lama had been digging at the blocked passage.
“I hadn’t realized,” Shan said abruptly, “that nearly all the monks were killed inside the gompa when the Youth Brigade destroyed it. Why was it different for you?”
Gyalo turned his back on Shan. Shan stepped around him and sat directly in front of him.
The Tibetan frowned but resisted no longer. “By then it was well understood that it was what all of us preferred, dying in the temples. We weren’t allowed to resist, we would have no purpose when the temples were gone. With such a death, praying in the temple, at one with the Buddha, reincarnation was nothing to fear.”
“But it was for you,” Shan said, shamed at his words but knowing he had to press the old man.
Emotion flooded Gyalo’s face. It was a long time before he spoke. “Some were singled out for special punishment. By then that Commander Wu understood our ways. For some a quick death wasn’t enough. She learned ways to destroy a monk, in this life and the next.”
“Singled out because they had offended the Hammer and Lightning Brigade,” Shan suggested. When Gyalo did not contradict him he ventured further. “Because they were suspected of being sympathizers with the rebels.”
Gyalo began picking at the little statue again. “I need a drink.” His hands were shaking, the tremors of an alcoholic in desperate need.
“If you were one of the old rebels it would be reason enough to kill her.”