An hour after sunrise the next morning they reached Jomo, waiting in another of Tsipon’s trucks. A grim determination had settled onto their faces. They had passed an uneasy night on pallets in the hermit’s cave, having reached it after sundown. Neither man gave voice to their increasing certainty that Tan would have been already tried, that Ama Apte and Kypo would have been seized by the knobs as accomplices and transported to the gulag before they could reach the town.
Yates watched the high ridge as they pulled out onto the road. They had been bone weary by the time they had reached the cave, barely able to stand, but Dakpo had fixed them roasted barley and tea, waking them after they had collapsed onto pallets to make them eat. Then he had presented Yates with a small drawstring pouch.
“When I heard about the Yamas being stolen and returned after being opened up,” the hermit said in a hesitant tone, “I knew it had something to do with Samuel. I had been apprenticed to an artisan at the gompa when I was a boy and knew about such statues.” The old Tibetan seemed strangely nervous, and poured himself more tea before continuing. “Samuel and I spent many hours sitting on ledges above the highway counting army trucks. He spoke about the problem of getting letters home. That’s when we came upon the idea. We had sent one of the statues and had enough letters for another when. . when the world ended.
“I kept them for a year, then sealed them in an old Yama statue and kept it with me all these years. Then after the murders I took it to the Yama shrine, in case the soldiers searching the mountains found me here. Yesterday I went back for it, and opened up the bottom.”
“I am sorry, Dakpo,” Yates said, “for what I did to the Yamas.”
The hermit smiled. “I have been saying prayers with them. They will heal.”
Yates, choked with emotion, upended the pouch. Letters from forty years before tumbled out, thirty or more rolled and folded pages.
Shan watched in silence as the American, wide-eyed, began unrolling letters and reading them. But soon, unable to fight his fatigue, he leaned back on a pallet and accepted the hermit’s offer of a thick felt blanket. In his fitful sleep he awakened more than once to hear snippets of conversation between the two men sitting at the brazier. The reticent hermit had been full of words that night, and in the languid warmth of the pallet Shan listened from the shadows to tales of an energetic American teaching Tibetans to dance and sing, of Samuel Yates leading secret missions to recover artifacts from several gompas on the eve of their destruction by the Youth Brigade, of a week during a lull in the fighting when Samuel, Ama Apte, and several others tried to track yetis, of the intense affection between Samuel and Ama Apte that had somehow sustained their little band when they were living on half rations.
As the embers were dying, their faces lit only by a dim butter lamp, the hermit had leaned toward Yates, his voice now that of a wise old uncle. “We sat up all night once guarding a pass as a long line of monks moved past, fleeing to the south with artifacts from their temples, fleeing to freedom. I will never forget it. The moon was full, the ground covered with snow, monks cradling bronze deities in their arms like babies, yaks carrying bigger statues, a long single file of red robes and yaks that stretched across the snow. As the last one disappeared the mother mountain began to glow from the distant sunrise, even though the stars were still overhead. Samuel spoke some words toward her, like a vow to the mountain. He said when it was over, when things were right again in the world, he would bring back his son, because he wanted his son’s soul to be filled with the power of this place.”
Chapter Seventeen
A somber air had settled over Shogo. The residents walked down the newly swept streets with solemn, nervous expressions, staring straight ahead. Three shiny black limousines were parked by the municipal building, a sober reminder of the dignitaries who had come for the trial.
Shan slipped into the hall in the center of the building among the workers who moved tables and chairs inside. A table draped in black with three large wooden chairs behind it sat on a raised platform at one end of the room, with another chair for witnesses at one side, an easel bearing a map of the region at the other. A large portable portrait of Mao on heavy canvas had been unrolled and hung behind the judges’ table. As several workers fussed with weights at the bottom to stretch it straight, others brushed it clean. Less than three dozen chairs were arranged in two sections in front of the table. The pageant, as Shan expected, was to be a private affair.
A door opened at the side, admitting several well-dressed officials, led by a strutting Major Cao, who gestured and pointed, playing guide to the visitors. He stopped in midsentence as he saw Shan standing there in his tattered, soiled clothes, his face bearing the grime of hard travel. Shan did not move, did not change expression, though he could feel the heat of Cao’s fury from across the room.
The major turned to a lieutenant and was no doubt about to order Shan ejected when a small dapper figure in a plain black suit broke away from the group of dignitaries. Madame Zheng said nothing as she approached, but followed Shan when he turned and stepped out into the corridor.
The three figures quietly entered the clinic, not waking the receptionist, asleep again at the door. Shan went straight to the bed at the rear of the patient ward, where the driver of the bus still lingered, his layers of gauze now replaced with adhesive plasters, playing his electronic games. Jomo found a broom and swept the floor near the bed of the only other patient, a sleeping middle-aged woman wearing an oxygen mask. Madame Zheng, as Shan had previously cued her, picked up a tray of bandages and medicines by the entry and carried it to a table by the rear wall, then lifted the medical chart on the soldier’s bed.
The patient’s expression grew uneasy as Shan approached. He stuffed his electronic game under his blanket and pressed back in his pillow as if expecting to be struck.
“About time to be released,” Shan observed.
“Tomorrow, or the next day,” the corporal eagerly replied. “My barracks knows I’m here. I called them a couple of days ago.”
“We were thinking some exercise would do you good. A little ride, a little walk, a little talk.”
“Talk?”
“About the dead bodies you saw that day.”
“That minister?”
“The other.”
“You mean the blond one,” the soldier said.
Zheng leaned forward, her head cocked toward the man.
“The Westerner,” Shan nodded.
“The one who disappeared. The ghost.”
“We are,” Shan declared as he handed him the clothes that hung on a peg by his bed, “great believers in ghosts.”
A quarter hour later Shan and Madame Zheng stood in the shadows of the garage bay at the rear of Tsipon’s warehouse as Jomo eased the long green sedan into the bay and shut the door. It took less then two minutes before an angry figure in a business suit and tie burst through the side door.
“Idiot!” Tsipon raged. “I need that car! The trial is starting!”
Jomo dangled the keys in his hand, then retreated to the opposite side of the car, the keys dangling in his hand. “You sent men to kill my father.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. Get in the car. You can drive me.”
“They were two truck drivers, outsiders. You paid them to do things, illegal things.” Jomo stopped at the trunk of the sedan.
Tsipon looked at his watch. “You’re talking nonsense, Jomo. I am your employer. I am your father’s landlord.”
As Jomo opened the trunk Tsipon’s expression darkened. He darted toward his mechanic with a snarl, then halted abruptly when Jomo threw a bulky object at him, hitting him in the chest. A large yellow bucket.
Shan shifted forward in the shadows. Jomo was only supposed to have told Tsipon he knew about the yellow bucket.