Shan could not make sense of the Navajo’s words.

When Hostene looked up, tears were streaming down his cheeks. “What will I tell my sister when I see her in the night?”

“Your sister?”

“Abigail was my niece. Her friends begged her not to try this, not to come so far. I told her that if she insisted I would accompany her, to watch over her. And now I’ve let her be killed.”

“But only two bodies were found,” Shan said in confusion. “Neither was that of a woman.”

Hostene grabbed Shan’s wrist. “Abigail! Where is she then?” He had realized that his niece might be alive, alone on the mountain where a murderer was at large.

The door opened. Shan crossed the floor an instant too late. The guard took one look at Hostene, gasped, and with a swift, panicked motion tapped the side of the Navajo’s head with his club. Hostene collapsed to the floor.

* * *

“Gasoline.” it was Chodron’s only greeting when he finally opened his back door to Shan an hour after dawn the next day. The headman, wearing a sleeping robe, handed Shan an empty gas can and pointed to a small lean-to shed built against the house. Inside the shed was a barrel with a hand pump screwed into the top.

Hostene’s scalp had been cut open by the guard’s club. He had drifted in and out of consciousness most of the night, nursed by Dolma and by Lokesh, who mixed healing teas from the little bag of herbs he kept on his belt. At times Hostene seemed to have the same ageless vitality as his two Tibetan friends, at others his body was as weak as an infant’s.

“He may die,” Shan said as he handed the filled gas can to Chodron, who now wore a blue dress shirt and black trousers, as if he were attending a Party meeting.

Chodron passed Shan and went to an object at the foot of the wall. Tossing off the felt blanket that covered it, he revealed a small generator, connected to wires that led into the house. Shan gazed at three villagers who stood silently at the garden wall. They winced as the generator sputtered and sprang to life with a low hum.

The headman seemed to expect Shan to follow him through the inner door. Chodron gestured him toward a chair in front of the table that served as his desk. He did not offer Shan the black tea that he poured from a porcelain pot into a tall mug.

“I remember going to the circus as a boy,” Shan recounted after a long pause, “and exclaiming to my father that the most amazing men alive must be the jugglers. He said, “Look closely. None of the jugglers are old because eventually they begin dropping pins. Then no one remembers all the great magic they once made, only the dropped pins.”

“I have no time for your idle banter. Yesterday you proved I cannot trust you up on the mountain. I want you to write out your explanation for the murders. Today.” Chodron flipped on the switch of a gooseneck lamp and began sifting through papers.

“It may become difficult for you to keep control of both the villagers and the miners,” said Shan. “Perhaps you only need show your authority to rule the particular type of villagers bred in Drango. But you’ll have to produce value for the miners.”

“It is well documented that former hard-labor prisoners suffer from a variety of mental ailments.”

“There is only one plausible explanation as to why the miners remain undisturbed by the government. You protect them. In most years such a service must be quite valuable, considering all the taxes and regulations they avoid.”

“You haven’t got a shred of evidence. You are playing with your life, prisoner.”

“With such a difficult juggling act to perform perhaps you have not had time to catch up on Chinese history,” Shan continued. “A pity, as you would soon learn that for centuries the most serious crime in China has been corruption. Murderers simply had their heads cut off. Sometimes they might even be allowed to buy their freedom. But those who stole from the emperor were always condemned to death by a thousand slices. Sometimes the criminals were paraded around entire counties and at each town pieces were removed from their bodies. Today, entire offices of the Public Security Bureau are dedicated to searching out corruption. It is such a problem that every lead is energetically followed. The PSB compiles the proof. They only need someone to point them in the right direction.”

Chodron sipped his tea, looking bored.

“You lost a miner yesterday,” Shan continued. “He followed a different trail down. It was longer than the regular trail but it kept him out of view of Drango village. He said to tell you he left your tribute on the trail. Still steaming, courtesy of his mule.”

The grin that had begun to form on Chodron’s face slowly faded and was replaced by a resentful glare.

“Why should the miners keep paying you tribute if you can’t stop a murderer?”

Chodron set down his tea and picked up a pamphlet on his desk. “This begins to sound like a negotiation,” the headman grunted.

“I want the stranger freed to go up the mountain with me. I want Yangke freed of his collar and allowed openly to assist me.”

“Impossible.”

“You fail to appreciate that your survival depends upon a delicate balance. You are not the only one who can call in troops.”

“You wouldn’t dare. You’d be back in prison in six hours. It would be my word against a felon’s.”

“I meant Dr. Gao. The true king of the mountain.”

Chodron grew very still.

“What if Dr. Gao thought the peace of his retreat was being disturbed?” Shan asked.

“You know nothing about Gao except what some miner told you.”

“I was his guest yesterday. His photo gallery is much more impressive than yours. I noticed his beetle collection.”

“You? He would have you thrown out with his rubbish.”

“In the past we knew many of the same people in Beijing. Only in our retirement years have our paths diverged.”

“Yangke’s punishment was fixed. The lesson is lost if I relent.”

“August 1,” Shan suggested. “You are preparing for the national holiday. There is a long tradition of granting amnesty to prisoners to honor our noble founders.”

Chodron stared into his mug. “You can’t wander into my town and give me orders.”

“I prefer to think of it as giving sound political advice.”

Chodron tossed the pamphlet toward Shan, leaned back, and flipped a switch on a box. Dials and needles, lit from within, sprang to life.

“Drango village calling,” he said into the peglike microphone in front of the box, after reciting a series of numbers.

Shan began to understand the expressions on the faces of the villagers. They were afraid of the generator, they feared the radio. It wasn’t guns, tanks, or helicopters that were Beijing’s most potent tools in occupied Tibet. It was little black boxes like these, hundreds of them scattered across the far-flung land.

“Wei,” a woman’s voice said, in the universal telephonic greeting. “Municipal Affairs. Uncle Chodron, is it you? How is my favorite drunkard? When will you bring us some of those delicious apricots?”

For a moment Shan was deaf to the banter that followed. The pamphlet, entitled Ax to Root for internal distribution among Party members in Tibet, announced a political campaign. The time has come to destroy the persistent roots in the countryside that are pulling the people back into the old traditions of despotism and servitude, it read. This was Party code for the old monks and lamas who wandered the countryside. Old men and women being given shelter in the mountains and farming villages, soliciting money for temple construction, tempting children to become hooligan monks are violating the decrees of the Bureau of Religious Affairs. The government was about to pursue a zero-tolerance policy. All such individuals were to be identified and surrendered to Public Security.

“Ax to Root,” Shan heard Chodron say, and listened as the woman on the other end uttered a happy exclamation, then transferred him to another office. “I caught scent of some old cultists.” The headman stared at Shan as he spoke.