The truck bound for central Tibet departed when dawn was but a hint of grey on the horizon. One of the purbas sat on the hood with a small flashlight to avoid the telltale glare of headlights. Shan watched the truck from the rocks above as it coasted down the long slope, slowly climbed the next ridge, and disappeared into the vastness of the changtang, then slung his bag over his shoulder and starting walking.
He could tell from its birthing that the day was going to be clear and crisp, and he walked with vigor, his feet watching the path while his eyes watched the stars as they twinkled out. The air seemed to murmur, though he felt no wind. A nighthawk called. Something started in the rocks in front of him, fleeing with a clammer of small hooves.
In his mind he heard the Tao verse, as crisp as the call of the bird. Those who know do not speak. Those who speak do not know. Auntie Lau knew but she could no longer speak. Perhaps the dead American had known something, something about a broader conspiracy that was reaching into Yoktian. The dead boys could not speak, but sadly, he suspected they had known nothing at all about why they had died. The purbas and Maos were not shy of speaking, but their words were too often clouded with bitterness and hate.
As he walked with the sun rising over his right shoulder, he consulted the mental map he had made of the route Jakli had driven through the mountains. It was frustratingly short. He had slept too long in the truck the day before. Where his map ended, he would just keep moving north, toward the haze of the desert.
He walked two hours to the main road, and it was another hour more before the first vehicle approached. He jumped behind a rock and watched as a minibus, its sides badly dented and scarred as though it had barely escaped an avalanche, passed. In its windows he saw sheep standing on the passenger seats. Half an hour later he was walking on a steep curve around a high rock wall when the sound of another motor echoed down the road. He wedged into a split in the wall and watched a small car, its engine sputtering and belching greasy smoke, roll past. He eased out of the opening as it disappeared and found himself in the path of a truck whose approach had been masked by the car. As it pulled to a stop he recognized the odd-looking vehicle.
He sighed, then sat on a rock and put his bag on his lap. Jakli turned off the engine, climbed out, and sat beside him without speaking. The wind began to blow. A few small cotton-bright clouds scudded across the peaks.
"Sometimes on special days like this," she said after a few moments, "when it's so clear and deep, like a lake in the sky, you hear things. Groans and rumbles, the sounds of the earth. When I was young my Tibetan grandfather said it was the sounds of the mountains growing."
They watched the clouds.
"I said if they would just grow high enough, maybe everyone would just leave us alone."
A small grey bird landed and looked at them. "Why won't they leave us alone?" Jakli asked the bird in a voice that suddenly seemed to have the fatigue of an aged woman. She offered Shan her water bottle. He drank and handed it back, watching the bird as it watched them.
"This road," she said, with a vague gesture around the curve, "it goes north, out of Tibet. Not to Nepal, just back to Xinjiang."
Shan nodded. "I have eight days to get to Nepal. I am going back to Xinjiang first," he said softly, not wanting to frighten the bird.
"You have two days," Jakli corrected him. "After that no truck could get you there in time."
"I'm not going far, just to Yoktian. To the office of Prosecutor Xu."
Jakli considered his news a long time, then sighed. "If you confess to the killing of Sui," she said matter-of-factly, "just to call off the knobs, then I will stand up in the town square and say you're lying. I'll say that I did it."
He offered a small grateful smile. "I would give up much to keep the knobs away," he said. "But I will not give up the truth." Shan had simply realized that of those who knew but would not speak, the Prosecutor and her files perhaps knew most of all. "If Xu had discovered that Lau was a Tibetan nun," he said, "it would explain much. Why she has reacted so severely, made so many arrests. It would mean a campaign not against her traditional targets, but against Tibetans. And it would mean Kaju, the new teacher, must be one of the agents working secretly."
"But even so, what could you do?"
"Find proof about Kaju and expose him. Then even if we can't find them the children will stay away from him. He'll have to leave."
They watched the clouds. The sun emerged and lit the nearest of the snow-capped peaks so brilliantly it hurt the eyes.
At last Jakli sighed. "Where you go," she said, pushing her windblown hair from her face, "I will take you. We will find a way for you to leave in two days."
"No. You have a job, making hats. If you can make it to the factory, it's the safest place for you."
"It's a town job. I don't like it. They didn't ask me if I wanted to work in the city. I served my time behind the wire. They can't imprison me in a town too." She stretched, pushing her hands toward the sky. "Besides, I am going to my factory for a while, if the patrols don't block us. Check in, make some hats, just for fun." She pulled the bag from her lap and rose.
"It's too dangerous for you," Shan said, realizing that he had heard Akzu use the same words with Jakli. "I don't want you involved anymore. Please. You have a new life planned."
Jakli seemed to find the words amusing. "I could say the same about you," she said with a twinkle in her eye and stepped to the truck.
He followed her reluctantly and climbed in the passenger door. "If I write a letter," he said as the truck pulled away, "could you get it delivered to Lokesh? I left my blankets stuffed with sacks to fool the purbas. He was asleep under his already."
"Sure," Jakli said agreeably. "Just write and give it to me."
Shan retrieved his pad and opened it to a blank page. "He has no address," he added. "The purbas will know where he is."
"Actually, they don't. But I know the address. Kerriya Shankou," she said.
"Kerriya Shankou?"
Jakli waved her hand toward the rugged windswept landscape. "This pass. Entrance to Xinjiang. Postal code is the back seat."
Shan turned in confusion. The back seat was covered with a tarpaulin. He raised one corner. Lokesh was underneath, sleeping.
"He said he hoped you wouldn't be disappointed in him, that he was sorry to play a trick on you with his blankets. Looks like you all played a trick on the purbas."
"What do you mean?" Shan asked, looking at his old friend with a frustrated grin.
"They left in the dark, thinking all of you were under the blankets as they had instructed. But when I rose after dawn I heard someone outside, shutting the heavy door at the top of the rock. There's a flat rock there called the sentinel stone, between the lion's ears. I found Gendun on it. An hour later Bajys walked in. Said he jumped out of the truck because he discovered Gendun was missing."
"But Lokesh should stay with Gendun," Shan said.
"He said he has to go to the school in Yoktian. He said he would walk all the way if he had to." Jakli kept her eyes on the road but Shan saw her smile. "Said he didn't want you involved anymore, that he felt better knowing you were safe and going to your new life."
"Why the school?"
Jakli shrugged. "Because of Lau. Because of my friend the Tibetan nun." She mouthed the last words slowly, as if getting used to their sound.
The Ministry of Justice office in Yoktian had been built to palatial dimensions. Indeed, Shan realized as he studied the two-story structure's tiled roof and balconies from a bench in the town square, it probably had been built as a palace, though early in the last century. He remembered the crescent moon flag he had seen in Osman's inn. Yoktian had been a regional capital in the Republic of Eastern Turkistan.
As he sat and waited he watched a team of municipal workers progress along the stucco wall that surrounded the Ministry building. The three men in blue coveralls were attacking a series of posters that appeared to have been recently glued to the large bulletin boards that hung on the face of the wall. Not a series of posters, he saw, but at least twenty of the same poster. It held the image of a red-haired woman with light skin and large round eyes. Along one side of the poster was a line of Chinese ideograms, along the other a matching line in the Turkic alphabet. Niya Guzali, the poster said. Then, below that, Niya is our Mother.
The crew was stripping the posters away. Where the poster hung tight, they unrolled and pasted another poster over it. One Heart, Many Bodies, it said in bold Chinese ideograms, with no Turkic counterpart, then Achieve Success by Building Socialism with Chinese Characteristics. One of the men, as he finished pasting a poster to the wall, looked nervously about, as if he feared something or someone in the crowd that milled about the square. Shan surveyed the square. With a chill his eyes settled on two grey uniforms, knobs holding automatic weapons standing on the far side of the square, watching the work crew. Or perhaps protecting the work crew.
Nowhere else had they seen knobs. No arrests were being made. There had been no roadblocks to finesse. No camps were being raided for undesirables. The seemingly inevitable reaction to Sui's murder had not come. Surely the body had been found. Scavengers would quickly draw attention to it. Sui had been going to see Prosecutor Xu. She would have been the first to miss him, the likely one to find the body. But she had not raised the alarm.
Someone else settled onto the bench, facing the opposite direction, and placed a plastic bag between them. "Shoes," the figure said in a loud whisper. Shan looked at him uncertainly. He wore a purple dopa, set back on his thick black hair, and two gold teeth gleamed from his mouth. "My name is Mao," the man said as though to explain. "It's clear," he added hurriedly. Jakli had promised to confirm whether the prosecutor's car was parked anywhere near the Ministry building.
Jakli had first driven to the edge of the town, parking outside a complex of windblown buildings made of corrugated metal. She had run inside, under a frayed banner that proclaimed Hats for the Proletariat, Hats for the World, then emerged a few minutes later with a white shirt and grey pants. He had quickly changed in the truck, but when she had arrived at the Ministry building she noticed his tattered shoes and complained that they would betray him. Depositing him on the bench, she had driven away. Now, twenty minutes later, new shoes had appeared. Shan eased his old shoes off, slipped on the black shoes from the bag and then, without looking back, walked across the street. He carried a thick envelope, the kind a case file might be carried in. Jakli had bought the envelope at the post office and stuffed it with a newspaper.
He walked into a large two-story entry hall, with a high vaulted ceiling pockmarked where pieces of plaster had fallen away. A graceful wooden stairway curled up one side of the hall toward a set of double doors crowned by an ornate plaster archway. On either side of the entry hall the lower walls were covered with painted murals of beaming proletarians. The paint was cracked and peeling, leaving many of the figures without faces, some without heads, but all their fists were intact, raised in salute to the red flag of the People's Republic. A brown beetle was crawling across the nearest of the murals.
The floor of the room had been spared revolutionary fervor. It was an intricate mosaic installed many years earlier, with scenes of horses and mountains and bowmen that, though cracked in places, was still beautiful. A desk sat at the base of the stairway, and from behind the desk a pair of legs protruded. A bald, middle-aged man lay on the floor, snoring, his head resting on a folded jacket. As Shan had expected, government decrees seeking to break the tradition of after-lunch napping would mean little so far from Beijing. It was the slowest part of the working day.
He moved up the stairs at a deliberate, businesslike pace and explored the empty corridor before entering the arched doors. Two lavatories. A janitor's closet. Two small meeting rooms, both empty. A door to a back stairway.
Pushing open the door under the arch, Shan entered a large square central chamber containing four desks for clerical workers, two on either side of a central aisle that led to an ornate wooden door. There were two smaller doors on either side of the square. Only one worker could be seen, a thin young woman sitting at one of the desks closest to the ornate door, looking at her reflection in a hand mirror as she held a tube of lipstick near her mouth. He quickly saw what he was looking for, a small sign by the first door on the left. Records.
He squared his feet between the first two desks and stood, arms akimbo, waiting for the woman to turn. She saw him first in the mirror and spun about, her face flushed. She trotted to his side and greeted him with a quick, deferential bow of her head. She was Han, with her hair in an elaborate braid down her back, and she wore a red blouse that appeared to be silk, over which a gold necklace hung. Three of her fingers were adorned with gold rings. Expensive ornaments for a government office worker.
"Someone," he said, trying to muster the smug, impatient voice of Beijing officialdom, "was supposed to be here to help. Is that you?" Gendun had told him that no one was ever totally rid of prior incarnations, that vestiges of them lurked invisibly in the background of the current one. It disturbed Shan that the voice came so readily, that the old incarnation seemed so near now. The lower life form from which he had evolved.
The woman looked at one of the side doors, where others, Shan suspected, lay napping. "The prosecutor is out," she said meekly.
"Meaning what? That inspectors from Beijing must just wait at her convenience?"
The woman's eyes widened at the mention of Beijing. "No- no! Of course not, comrade. I am sorry. I am just the prosecutor's secretary. I'm sure she would want someone to- but I'm not supposed to leave the office unattended."
Shan tapped the envelope in his hand impatiently. "I have no time to wait. Bring my tea to the records room."
The woman winced, then bowed her head and scurried toward a bench at one of the rear corners of the room where two large thermos jugs sat.
Shan decided he could risk no more than a quarter hour. He spent the first few minutes of them studying the system used for organizing the cabinets that lined three of the room's walls. A cabinet of papers with a label "Reports to Central," arranged chronologically, held what appeared to be monthly reports to Urumqi and Beijing, dating back several years. Most of the remaining file drawers were devoted to two other categories: "Citizen Reviews" and "Proceedings."
No file for Khitai. No file for Bajys, or Alta or Suwan. No file for Kaju Drogme. For Lau there was a half-inch-thick folder in the Citizen Reviews, the kind of background file that would be compiled for anyone in political office, even one as low as the Agricultural Council. He scanned it quickly, starting with the back, the earliest material. Most of it consisted of a standard form completed on the basis of interviews with Lau and a dozen acquaintances, signed by a Public Security case handler with a copy to Prosecutor Xu. He wrote the name of the case handler in the notepad from his pocket, then read the details. She had described herself as orphaned during what the handler called the "period of violent anarchy preceding assimilation," which Shan took to mean the arrival of the Chinese army, and had been assigned to an agricultural collective in the north, in the Ili Kazakh Prefecture. Her birth records had been lost in the fires that swept public buildings in 1963, during the "Period of Adjustment." Shan paused at the term. He had heard many labels of the bloodbath years of the Cultural Revolution, when he had lost his father and uncles, but this was a new one. Period of Adjustment. An image flashed through his mind of violent clockmakers sweeping the countryside, replacing gears in the back of people's skulls.
At the bottom of Lau's form was a list of questions, with boxes to be checked for yes or no. Did the subject serve a period of patriotic service in the People's Liberation Army? No. Does the subject regularly read publications of the Communist Party to stay informed of the progress of socialist thought? Yes. Has the subject been observed in practices of the religious minorities? No. Does the subject have relatives living outside the People's Republic? No. Identify the cheng fen, the class background, of the subject. Not verifiable, although no reason to refute subject's statement that her family worked as farm laborers, it said. Farm laborers were the most revered of class categories. Lau had understood her audience. There was a brief memo near the top of the file, dated only three months before. It was written by Prosecutor Xu to Lieutenant Sui of the Public Security Office:
I attach no importance to the absence of comprehensive registration files for Comrade Lau. Comrade Lau like many of us merely suffers from the disarray in government administration that plagued Xinjiang until recent years. Her records for the past decade are complete and have been verified. Where records do not exist, our long practice has been to conduct ad hoc verification of political reliability, which was done in her case. Additional verification will be conducted pursuant to the procedures of this office. There is no basis for the suggestion that she be reclassified as a cultural agitator.
Shan read the memo twice. The words were plain enough, but what was important was what was not written. What the memo meant was that Sui had questioned Lau's reliability, not long after Lau had learned she was being dismissed from her Agricultural Council post. Someone had sent information against Lau to Public Security, information that might suggest she should be politically reexamined, possibly be reclassified as an undesirable, not a criminal but sufficiently suspect to be barred from a position of trust. And Xu had decided to intervene, to defend Lau. The prosecutor seemed to have no suspicions about Lau. He read the memo once more. Sui was suggesting that Lau should be confronted politically, and Xu was saying no, as if perhaps she had some other purpose for the hidden nun, some other goal that Sui was interfering with. There were no records beyond the ten years during which she had lived in Yoktian County. The murdered boys had been approximately ten years old. Could Lau's entire existence in Yoktian have been planned as a cover for raising the orphans? Or at least certain orphans? The memo had been copied to someone named Bao Kangmei. He had heard the name before. The warehouse at Glory Camp had been closed by order of Major Bao, who must be Sui's superior officer. He read the last last two sentences once more. They read like a reproach, as if Xu was chastizing the knob officer.
The last entry in the file was a copy of another form, captioned "Report on Missing Person," signed by Prosecutor Xu Li, and showing that a facsimile of it had been sent to the same Bao Kangmei. Shan quickly scanned the form. The first report of Lau's absence had come from the school, then soon thereafter her horse had been found wandering along the river trail, and her jacket had been found in the river. Only the last paragraph had new information. Lau's identity papers had been turned in by a citizen to Lieutenant Sui, who personally verified that they had been found in the mud on the river bank near town. Sui had questioned Lau's political reliability, then had become involved in the investigation of Lau's disappearance.
He paused, then searched again for a file on Kaju. Nothing. He pulled the folder on Wangtu. Ten pages long, filled with routine entries. He dug deeper into the Citizen files. There was a file for Akzu, thicker than that for Lau. An ink stamp had been used on the cover. Cultural Agitator, it said in red ink. He scanned the file. It told the story of a peasant landowner who, like thousands of others, had been stripped of his property, then gradually rehabilitated. A memo dated six months earlier reported that Akzu had been singled out in a criticism session for failing to produce his clan's quota of wool. An agricultural expert had even testified that Akzu's stubborn adherence to outdated production techniques deprived society of valuable meat and wool. The most recent entry, dated a month earlier, was a memorandum from Brigade headquarters in Urumqi listing over fifty names of Kazakhs slated to go to a special year-long political education program upon implementation of the Poverty Reduction Scheme. Shan found Akzu's name halfway down the list.
He returned the file and stood sipping the tea that the nervous secretary had delivered to him. He had hoped for more, but what? A file on an anonymous American executed at Glory Camp? He opened the drawer on Citizen Reviews and found, to his surprise, one marked simply Mei guo ren. Americans. Inside were half a dozen memos from the prosecutor, all of them short, formal approvals for travel plans for American tourist groups. No, he saw, one was not a tourist group but a scientific delegation. Two years earlier a group of American archaeologists and anthropologists had come to the region under the wing of the Museum of Antiquities in Urumqi. There was a list of names and credentials attached to the memo, as well as a handful of photographs. Nothing that could be linked to the young blond American he had seen at Glory Camp. Shan recognized one name. Deacon. But it was a woman, Abigail Deacon, from Oklahoma, author of a book on ancient textiles. The files on the Americans ended with a date one year earlier. Stapled to the front cover was a stern note from the Public Security Bureau ordering that all reports on Americans henceforth be forwarded, without retention of copies, to Bao Kangmei.
He pulled another file, under Proceedings, for Jakli. There was a strip of yellow tape affixed to the edge of the file so it could be flagged easily when searching the drawer. There were other strips of yellow tape, not many. He quickly checked several. One was for a man who had been sentenced to life imprisonment for assaulting a birth inspector and who had escaped the year before. Another was for a man convicted and sentenced to ten years' lao gai for conducting a Lui Si remembrance ceremony. Lui Si, Six Four, was a reference to the 1989 disturbance in Tiananmen Square which occured on June 4. The yellow tape meant criminals with particularly dangerous politics.
He looked back at Jakli's file. It held copies of school files reporting classroom disciplinary infractions. A long report had been written by a political officer indicating that she had been a model student and targeted for communist youth camp. But then at age twelve that had changed. At age twelve, the officer wrote, she had come under the influence of reactionary culturalists. Meaning Kazakh sheepherders. When Jakli was twelve, Shan recalled, the army had shot her horse. The story ended two years earlier. No copy of Lau's letter to the prosecutor. He looked at the label again. Part One of Two, someone had scrawled on the file cover. But part two was not in the drawer. He looked on the table where a few files awaited refiling, then the Citizen Records in case it had been misfiled. Nothing. Someone else was interested in Jakli's current file.
Quickly he searched for one more file in the Citizen Reviews. Marco Myagov. Nothing. Then at the end of a drawer he saw a red-marked file, just labeled Eluosi. Six pages dealt with others, a form for each man and woman mentioned, rejecting requests for external passports. The remainder of the half-inch file was on Marco. Several applications for internal travel and work permits. He read the first one, dated nearly sixteen years earlier. Marco had applied for his young son and himself to travel north to Yining, to see an uncle who was dying. A large red stamp had been affixed to the front. Denied. Another, six months later, to attend the funeral. Denied. And another, to investigate a special school for his son. Denied. Request for a work permit. Denied. A dozen more requests, for a variety of reasons, all denied. The last was dated over ten years before. After that the material was all reports from Public Security suggesting his political unreliability, even suggesting smuggling activity. But nowhere was there mention of Marco being sentenced, not even to a rice camp, or any suggestion of hard evidence against the man. Shan moved to the most recent entry, a memo from Lieutenant Sui, copied to Prosecutor Xu. Interviews suggested Marco had organized one of the caravans that were still used to supply the high mountain villages at the top of the Kunlun and beyond, in Aksai Chin. Aksai Chin. Shan stared at the words. It was the disputed border zone, a barren, windswept territory claimed by both India and China, although controlled by the Chinese military. But Marco's caravan had gone out with eight riders, an informer reported, and returned with only four riders.
Shan quickly finished his notes and opened the door. The nervous secretary was at the nearest desk now, working at a computer console. A young man with the look of a soldier, though dressed in a business suit, sat at another desk reading a magazine. A bald man stood by the wall with a cup of tea, the man Shan had seen sleeping in the lobby. Shan hesitated, then pulled his notepad out and wrote on a clean sheet the name of Kaju Drogme. He stepped to the console and bent over the shoulder of the secretary, showing her the name. "I need to know who this man works for," he said.
The woman's face flushed, and her eyes flickered toward the man at the adjacent desk. "From the Brigade," she said in a self-conscious whisper. "Urumqi, I think. But here, it is Ko he reports to. Ko Yonghong." She looked up with a new air of self-importance. "Everyone knows Ko. He gives me rides in his new red car, one without a top. You know, like on American television."
Suddenly the arched outer doors burst open and Prosecutor Xu appeared, framed in the doorway. Shan bent lower, trying to hide his face behind the computer monitor. "Loshi," Xu called out as she stepped toward the secretary. "I need-" she stopped in midsentence. She had seen Shan.
He slowly straightened. She stared at him coldly, then looked at the young man at the desk, who had dropped his magazine and stood, suddenly alert, watching Shan with a predator's eyes. Shan realized he had seen the man before, driving the prosecutor's car at the motor pool.
"Thank you, Miss Loshi," Shan said. He returned the stare of the man he took to be the prosecutor's enforcer without blinking, then waited as Xu stepped toward the heavy wooden door at the rear and held it open. He turned and silently marched into the prosecutor's office. Xu stood aside to let him enter, stepped to Loshi's desk, and asked a question Shan could not hear. Loshi raised a sheet of paper to her chin, like a shield, as she nervously responded, then Xu returned to her office, closing the door behind her.
The room had been built as a sleeping chamber. Prosecutor Xu's desk was on a short platform that rose out of the rear center of the mosaic floor, extending in a broad rectangle to the back wood-paneled wall, just the size for a large bed. Several chairs were arranged in a semicircle on the platform in front of the desk. Not exactly a desk, Shan saw, but a heavy table of dark wood, its edges carved with the shapes of birds and flowers, similar to the designs on the floor. Another artifact of the building's past, the kind of remnant that would have been thrown onto a bonfire years earlier if it had been found in the eastern cities. Shan settled into the center chair.
Xu sat at her table and folded her hands in front of her. "Not even an inspector from Beijing has the right to use my office without my permission," she growled.
"Your office, Comrade Prosecutor, belongs to the Ministry of Justice," Shan said, surprised again at how easily the words rolled off his tongue. Not surprised, he thought after a moment, but frightened, that the old Shan, the one-time Inspector General of the Ministry of Economy, lurked so close. He clenched his jaw and tapped the envelope. "Ministry representatives are always entitled to access if they are looking for corruption, say, or abuse of office."
The words had the desired effect, silencing Xu for a moment. Shan had little hope of defusing her anger, but he might deflect it, might at least stall it on the chance, however improbable, that an escape presented itself. And if he could not escape, he might use her arrogance to at least get her to admit what she knew about the killings.
Xu's lip curled up as if she was about to snarl, but she looked into her hands, not at Shan. "I have nothing to hide. I have nothing to fear from-" Her words were cut off as the door was flung open and a thick bull of a man burst into her office.
"Call them off!" the man shouted at Xu. "Order your damned whelps off or I'll call Beijing! You are endangering my investigation!" His heavy cheeks were flushed with color. Drops of saliva shot from his mouth as he shouted.
Shan didn't need to see the grey uniform to know what the man was. The Public Security Bureau had arrived, and if he had had a slim chance of escape a moment earlier, he had none now. He rose slowly, fighting the knot that was tying itself in his abdomen, and silently pulled a chair from the side of the desk and sat again, facing the knob officer, as if he were with Xu. The prosecutor did not seem to notice. The action took Shan out of the line of fire between the two and gave him a clear view of the furious stranger.
His hair was close-cropped and speckled with grey, like Shan's. His face had the broad, flat features of the southeastern coast, a region known for its fishermen and pirates and the difficulty of distinguishing between the two. As his barrel chest heaved up and down, Shan saw a bulge on the left side of his uniform, below the armpit. A pistol, strapped under his tunic.
"You will have to be more specific, Major Bao," Xu said icily.
Major Bao. It was the knob officer who had demanded all reports on Americans be sent to him, the one mentioned at Glory Camp. Lieutenant Sui's commanding officer. Shan remembered what Fat Mao had said. The two people in the county to stay away from were Prosecutor Xu and Major Bao.
"Specific, hell!"
"Major, you're overwrought." Xu seemed accustomed to his fury. "Sit down."
Shan studied the two in confusion. They should have started their feeding frenzy by now. They should have begun the process of dissecting and digesting Shan. But Xu and Bao appeared to be little interested in cooperation. Lieutenant Sui, who must have reported to Bao, had been with Xu at the motor pool. Bao Kangmei had also been the name copied on Xu's memo about Lau. Shan looked at the knob again. His hands were like cabbages, his eyes like dirty ice. Bao Kangmei. Resist America Bao. It had been a popular name during the struggle with the Americans in Korea.
Bao made a sound like a growl and dropped into the center chair just vacated by Shan. "Your damned investigators are spooking everyone," he said in an icy tone. "Everyone's running to cover. The caravans will stop moving. If you ruin my operation, I'll ruin you."
Shan studied the knob. Bao didn't want to stop the caravans, he wanted them to keep moving. Shan remembered the black market goods at Glory Camp, in the shed guarded by the knob guard. In the shed with the dead American. Was that all it was? Was Bao just a black market businessman? Perhaps the American had simply been an unlucky merchant, in Xinjiang to buy carpets on the black market, perhaps even to trade for electronic goods.
Xu sighed as if she were sympathetic to Bao. But her face showed no warmth. "My team has never been closer to a breakthrough. The Poverty Scheme is what we have waited for all these years. I will not call them off a real case so you can chase phantoms."
"Not phantoms, Comrade Prosecutor. Enemies of the state. Enemies of Beijing."
"It's your crutch, isn't it, Major?" Shan looked up in surprise at Xu's words. Never had he heard anyone speak in such a tone to a knob. "You're the only one who speaks of Beijing so often. But I am the one who catches criminals. Beijing knows that."
Bao glared at her.
Xu's face seemed to soften, now that she had scored against him. "Surely a few minor inquiries in the mountains can't upset an important Public Security operation, Comrade Major."
But Bao did not seem to have heard. His oxlike head was turning to the side, looking onto a huge table, bigger even than that used as Xu's desk, which was pushed against the wall. It seemed conspicuously oversized, as though ready at any time to receive a banquet or a body, at Xu's convenience.
A single cardboard box sat in the center of the table. On it, written with a broad black marker, was a name. Lau.
Bao exchanged a silent, meaningful look with Xu, then rose and stepped to the table. Xu stared after him with an icy expression. By the time she had joined him Bao had dumped the contents of the box on the table. Shan stood to see better, then glanced at the door. He might make it if he walked quietly away, without attracting those in the outer office. But he turned back to look at what Xu had collected from Lau. Three books. A short, narrow knife, like a dagger. A wooden box, the size of a shoe box, though half as high. Several notebooks. A small jade statue of a horse. A simple white metal box, dented from long use, inlaid with a row of pink coral squares on its top- a pen case, of a type often seen in Tibetan instruction halls.
Oddly, the discovery seemed to have subdued Bao. He stared at the evidence, then at Xu. "You have been sharing the results of your investigation with my office, no doubt."
"We have no official investigation results yet comrade. Just a missing persons review, after all. These are simply personal effects. In case we ever identify her family. Things from her room in the teacher's dormitory. Space is in short supply. Her room was cleared out for another teacher."
"But still," Bao said in a taunting tone, "here they are, on your evidence table."
Shan quietly inched his way toward the table. He stood back, out of Bao's reach, but close enough to see the objects clearly. The books were poetry. The top one Shan readily recognized, the works of Su Tung-po, a broken Sung dynasty official who had written beautiful poems about living in exile.
"Even in death you are too kind to her," Bao said as he picked up the knife and waved it in the air, as if it proved a point.
"A letter opener," Xu shot back, not bothering to hide her impatience.
As the major clamped his huge hand over the wooden box, Shan saw that it was of rosewood, a superbly crafted container carved with delicate flowers along its rim. Bao raised the box and shook it. Something rattled inside. He turned the box over, looking for a latch.
"A puzzle box," Xu said tersely. "Ching dynasty."
Shan saw that she was right and realized with pleasure that it was a very old piece, one of the wooden puzzle boxes that had been popular in China two centuries earlier. No two would be alike, and each would be opened by pressing a certain point or sliding a series of pieces out in the right order. He realized with surprise that Xu might have been saving it, as Shan would have, to discover the right combination of pressure and pushing which would unlock its secrets.
"You really don't understand, do you?" Bao observed in a gloating voice. He looked at the prosecutor with a strange pleasure in his eyes, then laid the box on the table and with an abrupt hammerlike movement of his fist smashed it open.
He ignored Xu's glare as he picked through the shards of wood. There were two pieces of metal inside, one a two-inch trapezoid of bronze, engraved with a figure of a flying bird, a hole at each end. The other was a brilliant gold coin.
Bao extracted the gold piece from the splinters and extended it like a trophy. It was a Panda, the one-ounce gold coin minted by Beijing for the international collector's market. The Major gave Xu a victorious glance and, still extending the coin in front of his chest, returned to his chair. As Xu turned to follow Shan quickly pocketed the bronze medallion.
Bao let the prosecutor wait and watch as he set the coin on the desk in front of him, then slowly, clearly relishing Xu's discomfort, he produced a pack of cigarettes and lit one. "Maybe," Bao suggested as he exhaled a sharp stream of smoke, "you don't always catch the criminals, Comrade Prosecutor."
"Lau labored for many years," Xu said in a smoldering tone. "A model worker. There is no crime in saving wages."
Shan stood by the table, looking at the coin in front of Bao. It was worth more than some herders made in a year.
"Your model worker had secrets. Good citizens don't keep secrets. A true believer in the socialist imperative keeps no secrets." A row of yellowed teeth showed as he offered a narrow smile. "There are those in Yoktian who want to unravel the fabric of society. It all starts with a few loose threads."
"What do you imply?" Xu shot back. "She was one of those holding it together. We needed her."
As Bao shook his head he exhaled, creating a cloud of smoke about him. Then his gaze settled on something under a piece of paper on Xu's desk. He leaned forward and snatched it up. Shan instantly recognized it, a wedge-shaped tablet like that in Suwan's belongings. Not the same, for this one had a crosshatch design across the top edge, but bearing the same Sanskrit-type writing. Bao slid the top out, then slammed it shut and stood. "Where did you did you find this?" he demanded.
"Lau's things." The prosecutor lit a cigarette, inhaled deeply, then shot a stream of smoke toward Bao. Like a duel of dragons, Shan thought. He found himself stepping closer, looking at the wooden tablet.
Bao's eyes widened for a moment, and he looked back at the items he had scattered across the table. He said something to himself in a low venomous tone, so low Shan was not sure he had heard correctly. "Bitch," it sounded like, "the traitorous bitch." Then he met Xu's puzzled gaze. "You haven't called anyone about this?" Bao barked. "The Ministry? The Antiquities Institute?"
Xu shot an uncertain glance toward Shan, then slowly shook her head. "Just a toy of wood some children made."
Bao's eyes closed to two narrow slits. "Fine. Keep thinking that, comrade," he spat. "Treason all around and you only see toys." He spoke to the wooden wedge now. "Think of all the work that has been done, all the sacrifices we have made to establish the most glorious society on the planet. The government gives us everything. We owe it everything. To think that there could be those in this very county who seek to tear our state apart, it sickens me," the knob growled. "You're wrong about her, Comrade Prosecutor. She wasn't who she said. There is no lower life form than those subversives who seek to undermine the state. Insects. Maggots, all of them, especially Westerners who foment it. We will crush them. And I will also crush those who stand in our way." He stuffed the wooden tablet into the big flapped pocket at the bottom of his jacket.
Shan found himself standing at the desk. He quickly sat back in the chair near Xu.
Xu's face drew tight as she stared at the pocket where he had stuffed the tablet. "I thought we were speaking of caravans." Did she recognize the dangerous ground Bao was pushing her toward? Shan wondered. Or was she simply reacting to the wild gleam in his eyes?
Bao's hand moved to a breast pocket, from which he extracted a folded piece of rice paper. "You've never seen this, I suppose?" He unfolded it and extended it in his hands a moment, then turned it over. It was a strip sixteen inches long, a poem inscribed in a child's hand, in Mandarin on one side and Tibetan on the other. Master's gone to gather flowers, the first line said. Pollen on his funny robe.
"Discovered hidden in her quarters," Bao stated. "Fortunately Public Security was able to intercept it instead of another office," he added pointedly, then folded the paper and stuffed in back in his pocket.
"A child's imagination," Xu offered stiffly, though the writing seemed to shake her.
Shan stared at the floor, avoiding eye contact with either. The poem was written about the waterkeeper. Bao suspected there was a lama somewhere, an illegal lama, and that Lau had been connected to the lama.
"I was in Turfan too," Bao said, giving no sign of having heard the prosecutor. "I heard the speeches. Some have lost sight of their essential duties. If you neglect your essential duties, no matter how hard you work, you are a liability to the state." It was a familiar code Bao was using now, speaking in political slogans.
As the major finished, his gaze rested on Shan for the first time. "Do you know your essential duties, comrade?" Bao asked him with a narrow, lightless smile. "Do you recognize treason when you see it?"
"I remain ever mindful of what I owe the state," Shan said woodenly. He fought the almost overwhelming urge to bolt. Xu's enforcer was outside the door, then the man at the stairs, perhaps others who had returned from their rest. With luck, Shan might get past them. But Major Bao was not the type to travel without an escort. There would be more knobs outside.
Bao let the smoke drift out his mouth so that it curled around his cheeks. "Tell your prosecutor to do the same."
Shan clenched his jaw so tightly his teeth hurt.
"I am not his-" Xu began. Shan turned toward her with an empty expression, resigned to his fate. Xu locked eyes with him for a moment, then looked back at Bao, without continuing.
"I do not consider Prosecutor Xu a woman who forgets her duties," Shan offered.
Bao gave Shan another narrow smile and leaned toward him. "I thought I knew all of the trained hounds here. You're new?"
His incredible luck had failed. For a moment there had been hope that both would end the meeting with mistaken assumptions about him. But now there were only two ways to leave the room. With Xu or with Bao. He couldn't say he worked for the knobs, as Xu had assumed. He couldn't say he worked for Xu, for any disclaimer from her would mean immediate arrest by Bao. Shan's only hope was to give Xu something, perform for her now, make her curious enough that she might offer him cover.
Bao stared at him with sudden, intense interest.
"I am new," Shan said. "I am from Beijing."
"Who are you?" Bao pressed. "Your name."
"Someone who is wondering why you seem more concerned about smugglers than the murder of one of your officers."
Bao's eyes flared and his upper lip began to curl at one edge, exposing a large yellow tooth, like a fang. He stood and threw his cigarette, still lit, onto Xu's desk. "You don't know that."
"On the highway. Two days ago."
Bao did not take his eyes from Shan. "Accidents happen on the highway," he muttered.
"His name was Lieutenant Sui." Shan heard a sharp intake of breath from Xu, behind him. "Two bullets in the heart. Surely you have reported it. Beijing takes great interest in attacks on Public Security officers." Could it be possible that Xu didn't know about Sui?
Bao's face paled. His lip curled higher, toward his nose. It was not a sneer- more like the way some animals bare their teeth before tearing into the flesh of their prey. Without looking Shan sensed Xu's body tighten, but he did not take his eyes off Bao. The major reached Shan's side in two quick steps, then raised his open hand and slapped him, hard.
"No officer was killed," he snarled. Then, in his next breath, as only one trained in the peculiar logic used by political officers could do, he asked, "How do you know this? This is a Public Security matter." His furious question was directed at Shan but Bao's eyes came to rest on Xu. Then, as if his remark needed further punctuation, he raised his thick pawlike hand and slapped Shan again.
Shan tasted blood from the inside of his cheek. He would sit there and let Bao slap him all day but he would say no more. Shan had found a place inside, an oddly serene place, a little room he had constructed in prison and not visited since. Some prisoners had called him the Chinese Stone for never breaking from physical punishment. Some of the Tibetans had said it was because his soul had sufficiently evolved so that he was always prepared to leave his body. He had never thought they were right. He only knew that he had evolved sufficiently that, no matter what, even under the threat of death, he would not cower before men like Bao. It didn't mean much to the world if such men couldn't get what they wanted from physical torture, for they could usually obtain it through chemicals. It only meant something to Shan.
As he braced for another blow Shan reminded himself of the Tibetan prisoners who, after all the torture, the starvation, the freezing, even the amputations, thanked the Lord Buddha for allowing them the opportunity to test their faith.
Through a fog of pain Shan heard Xu push back her chair and step away from her desk. He had lost. She was going to join in Bao's fun, he thought numbly.
"This is Prosecutor Xu Li of Yoktian County," he heard her say in a loud, professional tone, the way she might speak before a tribunal. "In the name of the Ministry of Justice I am demanding that Major Bao immediately desist."
Bao had found a place within himself too. Not a place of serenity. Perhaps the opposite of serenity. As the Major looked toward Xu he made a sound like a snarl, a sound of disgust. Shan followed his gaze. He had to blink hard to focus on the prosecutor, blink several times before he fully understood what she was doing. Xu stood with a video camera. She was recording Bao's actions.
Bao picked up a tea mug and threw it, not at Xu, but at the wall beyond Xu, who kept filming as the mug shattered behind her. Then he grabbed the gold coin, spun about and marched out of the room, slamming the door behind him.
A brittle silence lingered in the office. A thin line of smoke rose from Bao's cigarette, still on Xu's desk. Xu approached her desk and stood looking at the door, then looked at Shan. She raised the smoldering cigarette with the paper it had landed on and dumped it into a mug at the side of her desk, then picked up the phone and asked Loshi to bring in two teas.
The prosecutor circled her desk twice, her arms folded over her chest, not speaking until the tea arrived.
"I could have you behind the wire at Glory Camp before nightfall," she said.
"I've been to camps," Shan said quietly, returning her stare over his steaming mug. "Good exercise, bad food."
"I thought you were working for Public Security when I met you. One of the new agents brought in for the project."
"The Poverty Eradication Scheme?"
Xu did not respond. "Let's say you're not Public Security. Let's say you're not Ministry of Justice, not here on a corruption investigation. Just theoretically. But you know that Sui was killed, a secret kept even from me." Xu had not challenged Shan's announcement about Sui. Bao's reaction, he realized, had been confirmation enough. And Shan had been wrong. Xu had not known about Sui's death, he was certain. But Bao had. The knobs knew one of their own was murdered, and they were doing nothing about it.
"Walk around one of the markets and listen for twenty minutes. You'll see how big a secret it is."
She still ignored him. "So let's say you were associating with bad elements. Say, independence-minded herdsmen. Maybe subversive hatmakers."
The words hit Shan harder than Bao's hand ever could. Xu had seen Shan at the garage with Jakli, maybe also checked at Glory Camp for the names of anyone on the rice truck known to the guards. He glanced across her desk, looking for the second half of Jakli's file, the active half.
"I don't wear hats," he said weakly.
"Then maybe you're with the smugglers. We'll have lots of time to decide."
"I'm not with anyone."
"But you are from Beijing. I can tell. Your accent maybe. Or your arrogance in getting around my office."
"As I said, I am an investigator. My name is Shan. And I am from Beijing."
"But not investigating for Beijing. Surely not an independent investigator? Please, comrade. This is not some American movie."
"I am retired."
Xu studied him over the top of her teacup. "And you say you've been in camp before? Maybe you were forcibly retired."
Shan raised his mug. "I salute your deductive powers."
"And what? You're investigating as a pastime?"
"I was asked by friends to look into something. Nothing that concerns you," he offered, though he didn't believe it.
"Except you wind up breaching security at Glory Camp, then rummaging through my files."
Shan looked into his mug. "I have interesting friends."
Something that might have been amusement passed over Xu's countenance, then her features hardened again. "If I weren't so overworked I could spend hours just thinking of all the charges against you. Entering Glory Camp, a state security facility, without authorization, breaching the security of my files, that's a few years right there. But I think we'll keep it simple." All she had to do was to ask for his papers, for the required identity documents he did not possess, or the required travel permit. Then she would order him to roll up his sleeves, and find the tattoo on his arm.
Shan fixed his gaze on a carved bird at the edge of the table. "I am here about the children," he said quietly. "The children who are being killed. Lau's children."
Xu stared at him in silence. She seemed about to speak more than once but reconsidered each time. Then she slowly stood and walked to the shelf behind her desk.
With a chill Shan saw the tiny red light that indicated that the video camera, now on the shelf, was still operating. She had been recording their conversation. But now she retrieved the camera, shut it off, and returned it to the shelf, facing the wall.
She came back to sit not at her desk but in the wooden chair beside Shan. "What children?" she asked. Her voice was still hard, and filled with suspicion.
"A boy named Suwan, nine years old, shot in the head. A boy in the Kunlun mountains, named Alta, beaten and stabbed to death. The same age. Both part of her orphan class."
Xu frowned. "You're desperate, comrade." She had apparently decided not to believe him. "There have been no reports."
"They were with nomad families."
Xu's eyes seemed to drill into his skull. He broke eye contact and stared at the bird again. "Impossible. You should investigate a bit more before concocting your stories. The orphans have a new teacher. Everything continues as normal. But of course you know that. You asked my secretary about him."
"Yet, Comrade Prosecutor," Shan said very slowly, "you are concerned about Lau. About how she died." He glanced back at the evidence table. "She was murdered. And now her murderer is killing her children."
Xu frowned again and sighed. "Fiction. Concocted by the reactionaries, to make the people fear the assimilation programs. Lau died in an unfortunate accident. When the river waters recede this winter we will find her body." She opened a desk drawer and retrieved a pad of paper. "Write your statement, comrade," she said. "You've done it before, no doubt. We will consult it in your sentencing." She paused a moment, then tossed the pad toward him. "Maybe you did think the children were in danger. Say that. It could be useful. Bad elements put the children in danger. They engage in the patterns of feudalism. Distrust of authority. Blood feuds. Obsession with icons of dying cultures," she suggested as she extended the pad toward him. "Reactionaries, all of them. Those who resist our efforts to integrate all peoples."
Shan did not touch the pad. "Is it possible she was a friend of yours?" he asked tentatively. Xu had written a memo to defend Lau.
Xu did not answer.
"I saw her body," Shan said. "She was beaten on her shins. Tortured, before being drugged and shot." He paused to let the words sink in. "What are you going to do about her children?"
This time when Xu stared at him her eyes blinked, then she looked down. For a fleeting moment there seemed to be a glimmer of uncertainty on her face.
"She was getting old," the prosecutor said. "She was having trouble with her heart."
"Who told you that?" He realized she had not answered a single one of his questions.
"There was a meeting of the Agricultural Council, after we decided she had died. It was mentioned in a speech honoring her on her death."
She stared at him as he shook his head slowly. "Maybe you should ask your friend Bao about the orphans," Shan suggested.
"What do you mean?"
"I had an old friend in Beijing. Forty years with the Ministry of Justice. Said I should always assume that Public Security knows ten times more than they tell the public, five times more than they tell their colleagues at other government offices, and twice as much as they tell the Chairman."
Xu acknowledged the point with a sour smile, then pulled a form from a pile of papers on her desk and began writing on it with the stub of a pencil. "Maybe I will find time to explore your imagination further, comrade. Not today. At Glory Camp. They will hold you in a special place, alone, so you can more clearly consider all you will need to confess to."
"I have a better idea. Let me go."
Xu gave a cold smile and kept on filling out the detention form. "Shan," she said without looking up. "A common name. It tells me nothing."
"You know Bao is lying to you," Shan said. "You just don't know how much. You think you should do something about Lau. What if what happened to Lau is connected to Sui being killed? Let me go and I will find out. I promise to meet you again, soon. Here. You think because Bao is Public Security that there is nothing you can do. But there is. You can let me continue."
Xu's pencil stopped writing. "Maybe I was wrong about you," she said. "The Brigade runs a lao gai camp deep in the desert. Maybe that is where I should-" Her words were cut off by a woman's scream. There were shouts from the outer office, and the pounding of running feet. There was another high-pitched scream, then another. Xu stood at her desk, then quickly stepped to her door and opened it. The outer office was empty. At the sound of one more scream she ran to the corridor and down the stairs toward the sounds. Shan followed her, then stopped in the corridor and ran to its end, where he quickly found the back stairway.
In less than a minute he was running down an alleyway. He emerged onto the street a hundred feet from the Ministry office. Traffic in the street was stopped, the cars and trucks abandoned by their drivers. A crowd swarmed around the front of the Ministry building. Shan edged forward and stood on the running board of an abandoned truck to see over the crowd.
"Murder!" someone shouted.
He saw the prosecutor emerge from the building, followed by Miss Loshi and the lean man from the outer office. On the steps in front of Xu a man and woman in herders' clothing stood, the man holding a bundle in his raised arms, a bloody blanket wrapped around a young boy. The boy was dead.