The decrepit truck groaned and shuddered as Shan took over the wheel to climb the next slope, the gears slipping, the engine backfiring with each shift. He began to think of it not so much as a truck as a conveyance to some peculiar new form of hell. He couldn’t save his son without saving Colonel Tan, a man he reviled, a man who had overseen Shan’s prison camp, where so many old lamas had died.
The crime scene had been reincarnated as a dump site. Tire tracks and boot prints crisscrossed the clearing. Cigarette butts were scattered everywhere. Empty water bottles had been tossed on the side of the road. Candy wrappers and crumpled cigarette packs had been trapped by the wind under stones. There was no trace of where the bodies, the blood, or the car had been.
Shan crouched at the edge of the clearing, trying to recall the terrible few minutes he had spent here, his gaze settling on the two rocks where the women had been leaning. He rose, then knelt by the rocks, sifting the oddly sandy soil in his fingers before surveying the murder scene in his mind again. There had been blood near the car, and shallow ruts scraped in the soil ending at their heels. The women had been dragged from beside the car and propped up. Before fleeing the killer had arranged them against the rocks, as if to make them comfortable. The Western woman had gazed at Everest with longing as she died.
“You’re supposed to be getting Tenzin’s body back,” Kypo declared from over his shoulder. “I could have told you it wasn’t here.”
Shan turned to meet the Tibetan’s challenging stare.
“In the village people won’t talk with me,” Kypo said. “They blame me, because I helped persuade them that you should be the corpse carrier. It was a sacred trust, they say, and you broke it.”
The words hit Shan hard. It was true. He had failed the sturdy, honest people of Tumkot village, had failed Tenzin himself. Of all the mysteries before him, the one he would have no time to address was why the old astrologer of the village had, after the first fatality of the season, abruptly declared that Shan was to be the carrier of corpses that year.
“If Tenzin cannot be found,” Shan ventured, “it must mean the villagers tried to search for him after I was arrested.”
“Up the trail, down the trail, along every side trail for a radius of two miles or more.”
“Not the road.”
“Not the road,” Kypo confirmed. The trails belonged to the Tibetans, the road to the government. “After a few hours there were too many uniforms on the mountain to continue.”
“The body was lost during the confusion here,” Shan explained in a patient tone. “Because of what happened here.”
The lean, athletic Tibetan, something of a local hero for having twice ascended Chomolungma, winced. “They raked it,” he announced. The sullen expression behind his sunglasses had not changed.
“Raked it?”
“It’s the road the tourists come up. All that blood was bad for business. They brought in a load of dirt and raked it.” Kypo turned and paced once around the small clearing, then wandered around the high outcropping that concealed it from the road below.
Shan stared in disbelief at the fresh soil at his feet. Once an investigation had been turned into a melodrama scripted for the Party, nothing could be relied upon. Even here, all he could do was grab at shadows. The knobs had buried the crime scene.
He shook his head then stepped to the rocks where he had found the women and with his heel dug two outlines, the shapes of the bodies as he had seen them. When he looked up the mechanic was standing in the middle of the raked dirt, gazing fearfully at the outlines. It was as if Shan had brought back the dead.
“Who did it, Jomo?” he asked. “Who was the killer?”
The Tibetan cast a longing glance toward the truck, as if thinking of bolting. “I never thought it was you,” he offered.
For a moment Shan considered the mechanic, who was such a wizard at coaxing life back into old engines that he was in demand at every garage in town. “What does your father say?” he asked, seeing the expected wince. Jomo’s father, the tavern keeper who was more often drunk than not, often professed publicly that he hated his son, had even named his son the Tibetan word for princess. But Jomo, well into his forties, had kept the name, and dutifully cared for his father, the town jester, often conveying him home at night in a wheelbarrow.
Jomo looked up apologetically. His father, Gyalo, occupied the rundown house closest to Shan’s stable, and more than once had entertained himself by throwing empty beer bottles at Shan’s door. “Some men in the tavern said they should drag you out of the jail and give you what you deserve, because killing the minister was going to ruin the season for everyone. My father said we pay taxes so Public Security could have bullets, and he wanted his money’s worth.” Jomo shrugged and looked away. “He was drunk.” Several times Shan had found Jomo in the dawn outside his door, sweeping up shards of glass. Suddenly Shan realized that if it had not been Tsipon or Kypo who had made the little altar by his pallet there was only one other possibility.
“I didn’t thank you, Jomo, for the prayers when I was injured, for summoning the Medicine Buddha.”
The mechanic glanced up nervously, not at Shan but toward the road, as if worried Kypo might have heard. “There aren’t any good doctors in town,” he muttered.
“What do they say in the market about the killing?” Shan asked. In such a place, in such a case, Public Security would have operatives, disguised as merchants or even truck drivers, not just to pay for secrets but to plant rumors.
“Someone from away. A private grudge. The minister was a great hero in Beijing. Someone said she was fighting corruption back in the capital and paid with her life when she was about to expose it.”
Not particularly original, Shan thought, but effective enough for one of the morality tales that always accompanied assassinations.
“It’s not the killing most talk about,” Jomo added in a conspiratorial tone. “It’s the monks in hiding, who refused to kowtow to Beijing. People who haven’t flown them for years are stringing up new prayer flags.” He stopped, grimacing as if frightened of his own words, then turned back to the truck and busied himself examining the tires.
Shan planted himself on a low rock where he could study the outlines of the bodies and the terrain. He had come from below that day, from the wrecked bus beyond the rise in the road, around the large outcropping that had obscured the car. The killer had done his work after the bus had been stopped, out of sight of the knob guards below. Out of sight, yet close enough for the pistol discharges to be masked by the firing of the knobs’ own guns. Monks had been wounded and beaten; one had later been killed. The thought chilled Shan to the bone. If the killings had been timed to coincide with the ambush on the bus, it meant the killer had used the monks, had played with their lives to accomplish his own crime. But the ambush below seemed to have been planned so the monks could get away, not merely as a diversion. It did not seem possible that a person who would take such risks to free monks would also fire bullets into two defenseless women.
He paced along the clearing, spotting Kypo leaning against a boulder at the side of the road, cleaning his sunglasses, staring at Jomo, his face drawn tight. One of the mysteries of Tsipon’s company was why these two men, Tsipon’s two trusted deputies, did not like each other, barely spoke to each other, seemed to go out of their way to avoid each other. Certainly the two men could not be more different in personality-Jomo the nervous, efficient mechanic always flitting about the garage and warehouse, Kypo the silent, contemplative climber and guide, always hiding behind sunglasses who, Tsipon insisted, knew the upper slopes of the Himalayas better than any man in China. But there was something else, Shan sensed, a wedge between them that neither seemed interested in removing.
As Kypo turned and moved down the road, Shan followed, pausing to study the scattered shell casings from knob rifles and the four large DANGER! NO STOPPING! signs that had been leaned against rocks at the eastern side of the road. Public Security might have balked at putting up crime scene tape, for fear of its effects on tourists, but had still made it clear the site was off limits. He halted at the stump of rock where the column had broken away to block the bus, seeing now the chisel marks along the side opposite the roadway. He lay on a small ledge behind the stump, exploring the shadow at its base with an outstretched hand, pulling up first one heavy wooden wedge, then two more before scrambling up the rock debris to lift the end of a red rope trapped under large boulders. It was as thick as his thumb, the heavy nylon rope brought in by Westerners for their expeditions. Kernmantle, they called it in English, the term for braided nylon filaments encased in an outer woven shell. This one had been ruined, crushed by boulders.