“It isn’t possible,” Yates murmured, his voice still full of disbelief.
Ama Apte slowly unbuttoned the neck of her shirt and pulled out her gau. “In all these years,” she said, “only Kypo has seen what my gau has held.” But she opened it now, in front of Shan and Yates, cradling it against the wind. There were several rolled up papers, traditional prayers. But on top of them were two yellowed photos. The first was of a young Dalai Lama. The second, tattered from much handling, was of a smiling Samuel Yates, holding a young, beautiful Ama Apte, Mount Everest peering over their shoulders.
Chapter Sixteen
Shan looked up at Chomolungma and saw a huge slab of snow and ice careen down the side of the mountain. Tectonic plates were crashing together below their feet. This was the place where worlds were shaken.
“It was never supposed to end that way,” Ama Apte said, looking up at Yates with wet eyes. “It was my fault that he died.”
“I think,” Kypo interjected, “it was my fault.” He understood that her pregnancy had slowed her down, had made it impossible for her to flee with Samuel Yates.
His mother reached and grabbed his hand. “Never! You were the one good thing that rose out of it.”
“My uncle,” Yates said, scrubbing at his own eyes now, “told me there was an unusual joy in my father’s letters at the end.” He turned and embraced Kypo. The Tibetan, embarrassed at first, awkwardly returned the embrace. Yates looked back at Ama Apte. “But where is he?”
“Two others came back from hiding in the ice field,” the Tibetan woman explained. “I told them it wouldn’t be the way of Samuel’s people, to be disposed of like the others. They helped me to scrape a hollow, bring gravel and some soil from the foot of the glacier. I brought heather, though it has always struggled to grow.”
Yates acted as if he had just seen the rock-covered mound at his feet for the first time. He sank to his knees, extended his hand to one of the spindly flowers that grew out of it. “He’s here?” he said, his voice twisted in confusion. He ran his hands over the grave. “He’s here. You knew him,” he murmured to the woman. “You knew him better than anyone. But you tried to have me thrown out of Tibet,” he added in a confused tone.
“Megan didn’t tell me everything, only that you were looking for evidence of the old resistance,” the astrologer replied. “I thought you were one of those reporters who came through from time to time to stir things up about the past, write something that just rekindles the anguish. I wanted you away. But then I saw your face at the camp, up close for the first time, and I thought I was looking at your father. Then it became even more important that you go because if you were anything like your father you wouldn’t stop until you were confronting the people from the past, and you would never know how dangerous they were until it was too late.”
“You put his cross on that altar,” Yates said.
Ama Apte nodded. “He and I would go there sometimes on the seventh day, on his Sundays. I would pray my way, and he would pray his.”
The American placed his hands, palm down, on the mound. “I never expected it to be like this.”
“What did you expect, Na-than?” Ama Apte asked in a tentative voice. She pronounced the name tentatively, with a gap between the two syllables, as if trying it on for size.
Yates shrugged. “I don’t know. I wanted to say goodbye, to be able to say I understood him. He was always behind me, looming like a ghost, as if we had unfinished business.”
“He took you to the unfinished business,” Shan said, gesturing to the two Tibetans.
Yates replied with a small, sad grin. “All these years, if only I had known, I could have-”
The shots came as two quick successive cracks and echoed off the rock face. Kypo grabbed his mother, trying to push her against the mound but she resisted, squirming away, leaping up and running toward the large clearing beyond the outcroppings. Shan was three steps behind her.
The coats of the three monks had been ripped open to expose the robes they had tucked underneath. Constable Jin wore a victorious smile as he paced in front of the monks, who stood in a line flanked by the two truck drivers who had assaulted Shan and Yates. Ama Apte slowed as she approached, then halted and silently complied as Jin aimed his pistol at her and gestured her toward the rock wall behind the monks.
The constable greeted Shan with an enthusiastic nod. “Comrade Shan! Imagine this. A few hours prospecting in the mountains and I strike gold!”
The larger of the Manchurians, with gray strands of hair blowing at the edge of his wool cap, glared at Shan, as his younger companion watched the pistol in Jin’s hand with a ravenous expression.
“These men are sought as witnesses to the murder of Minister Wu,” Shan ventured. “No doubt you will be commended for bringing them to Major Cao.”
Jin acted as if Shan had told a good joke. “My new friends and I are thinking more along commercial lines. We live in a free market economy now, I hear.”
“Your new friends,” Shan shot back, “killed Director Xie of Religious Affairs.”
“The official view,” Jin countered, “is that these monks committed that crime.”
Shan moved closer to the constable. “It’s a remarkable thing, Jin, when the truth starts to come out in a case like this, a little trickle becomes a sudden flood. Everything changes in an instant.”
“What are you saying?”
“I am saying that Public Security has all the evidence it needs,” Shan lied. “They will soon know the truth about these two truck-drivers. When they’re arrested they will sing like birds and you’ll be just one more conspirator. Worse, a law enforcement official who turned corrupt.” Shan mimicked a pistol with his fingers, pressed it to his head and pulled the trigger.
“Shoot him!” the older Manchurian snapped. “Shoot him and dump him with the other.”
“The other?” Shan asked. “So you did help dispose of the American woman.”
“Megan Ross is climbing somewhere,” Jin said in an uncertain tone.
“She was murdered with the minister. She is in the gully behind you.”
Jin took a step backward, aiming the pistol alternately at Shan, then at the monks. For the first time he appeared worried.
“Give me the pistol you fool!” the older trucker barked. As he spoke his companion jerked something shiny out of his pocket, flicking it with his wrist. A long narrow blade, a switchblade, appeared inches from Shan’s face.
“All we need are the gaus,” grunted the Manchurian with the knife.
“No,” Jin said. “They won’t give up their gaus.”
The oldest of the monks nodded. “We have blessings.”
The Manchurians guffawed.
“You are not able to force us,” the monk continued.
“We can force you with a bullet in your head,” the older man snapped.
“No,” the monk said calmly. “I don’t think you understand.” The youngest monk reached inside his clothes to extract the oversized lotus covered box Shan had seen at the base camp, opening it inside his coat, out of the wind. He produced a cylinder of paper fastened with a strip of red silk, which he unrolled for all to see. It held a drawing of a scorpion, with sacred words in Tibetan script running along its appendages.
“What the hell is that?” one of the drivers sneered.