“Your nephew would still be alive but for Shan. He may have been a Beijing investigator once, but not now. Once a criminal, always a criminal. People like you and me are his enemy. He stirs things up, he breeds instability. He cares nothing about the laws of Beijing anymore. He does not intend that the murderer be sent before a Chinese judge.”

“Deny these things,” Gao demanded of Shan.

Shan looked toward the distant mountains. “I am not your enemy,” he said.

“Would my nephew still be alive if you had not gone up the mountain?”

“I don’t know,” Shan’s voice dropped to a whisper. “Probably. I went up the mountain to find answers. The killer was feeling pressured. If Hostene and I don’t go back, his niece will certainly die.”

Chodron said, “Shan may have murdered your nephew.” He leaned toward Gao. “I could easily write a report for Public Security. Shan was in the area, had access to heavy blades, had a simple motive. He had been found out. Was this killing an unreformed convict’s last desperate attempt to keep from spending the rest of his life in prison? Was there a conspiracy between Shan and this Hostene? Perhaps Shan took a bribe to cover up the evidence that Hostene killed his two companions. Then he had to silence your nephew because he was conducting his own investigation and had discovered the terrible truth. A convict and an illegal foreigner-the kind of solution Public Security welcomes.”

Chodron turned to Shan. “A simple confession will prevent unnecessary suffering by your two old goats.”

Shan searched Chodron’s face. He saw movement behind the stable. Two of the headman’s men were carrying Gendun, who was limp as a sack of rice.

Shan took a step toward the lama.

“The other one, Lokesh,” Chodron added, “his turn comes next. I recall that he was quite rude to me that night you arrived.”

Shan was unable to speak. He jerked the chain tight between his manacled wrists, his fists clenching and unclenching. He had thought when he discovered Thomas’s corpse that things could not get worse. But now he stood in chains as Chodron demanded that he confess to murder to save Lokesh and Gendun.

Someone moved between Shan and Chodron. Gao. “We will allow Shan and the American to go up the mountain again,” the scientist declared. “They can have seven days, no more. Put the manacles on the two old men who are his friends. Treat them as prisoners awaiting Public Security.

“If anything happens to me or to Kohler, or if they are found on the eastern side of the mountain again, or if Shan does not return in a week, the two old men are to be surrendered to Public Security. Major Ren is touring the district. He is responsible for Ax to Root in this region. He will know what to do with them.”

“Ren,” Chodron muttered with a grunt that seemed part satisfaction, part fear.

Gao did not look at Shan as he continued. “When Shan returns, he will be given a choice. He can surrender to me and I will send him to Beijing, where he belongs, to learn how to serve his government once again. Or he can surrender to you and return to prison.”

Shan’s throat went dry as a stone. “You won’t call Public Security for a week?”

“Not unless Kohler or I am endangered.” Gao exchanged a glance with the headman. “Or Chodron.”

A delicate, treacherous bargain was being struck between Chodron and Gao. Shan was the prize.

“No,” Shan said.

“No? It is not your decision!” Chodron said.

“I will not sign a confession. And I will not go after the killer unless Lokesh and Gendun are unchained and put under Dolma’s care and provided with whatever she says they need. And no more tamzing.”

Shan braced himself as Chodron swung back his open hand. But Gao caught the headman’s arm. “It will take a criminal to catch this criminal,” he said.

Chodron replied, “The manacles stay on the lama. A guard stays at the door. They may not leave Dolma’s house.” He glared at Shan, then accepted the key extended by Gao. “Three sessions of tamzing are sufficient for now,” Chodron added with a satisfied air as he released Shan from the handcuffs. “Come back without the murderer and there will be three more sessions.”

Shan gazed at Gendun. Three more sessions would kill the old lama.

Chodron announced in a suddenly cheerful voice, “In another week, we celebrate the annual harvest festival. This year’s is our best harvest ever. We will also celebrate the solution of the murders. We will celebrate the compassionate power of our elders in Beijing.”

Gendun lay on a pallet, Lokesh at his side, as Dolma heated tea on a brazier by the open window. Gendun’s cheeks were discolored in several spots, his forehead was creased, a sign of the lama’s silent battle to control his pain. He seemed weak and fragile. He appeared, Shan realized, with a wrench of his gut, exactly like the Tibetan prisoners he had lived with in the gulag, the old lamas who had slowly withered before his eyes. He had buried so many of them he had lost count.

“Chodron found two shepherds counting prayer beads,” Dolma reported in a tormented tone. “A family had mounted an old rusty prayer wheel at their front door. He was furious. He burned the beads, smashed the wheel, then dragged Gendun out into the street, saying it was all his fault.”

As Shan lowered himself beside the lama his hand reached out of its own accord and cradled Gendun’s, a chain around it now. He recalled with a numbing sense of defeat the way his father had lain dying after he had been beaten by the Red Guard. Shan had sat helplessly, squeezing his father’s hand for hours, until with a terrible rattle that still echoed in his nightmares the professor had breathed his last.

“We are brewing teas used by the old healers,” Dolma said with a nod toward Lokesh, who chanted a mantra for the medicine deity. The widow busied herself among the small crocks and jars that lined a shelf below the window. At first Shan thought her preoccupation was with the teas, then saw that she fidgeted with a cleaning rag, twisting it in her fingers, casting nervous glances out the window. Shan rose and stepped to Dolma’s side. “I need to understand your nephew, Tashi,” he said in a low voice. “What did he do when he left the village?”

She scrubbed her eyes with her apron. “He was a good boy, Yangke’s best friend. Ten years ago, Yangke came back from the Chinese school Chodron had sent him to. He had many problems there, always being disciplined, refusing to respond to the Chinese name assigned to him, protesting when they punished him for speaking Tibetan. But he had the best grades in all his class, and they are always looking for Tibetans to go to the universities in China. Chodron announced that he had arranged for Yangke to attend university in Sichuan Province, that our village was honored to have one of its own selected by the government. But at the celebration Chodron held for him, Yangke announced he had already been accepted somewhere else, as a novice in a monastery near Lhasa. Chodron was furious but the next day Yangke left for the gompa. Only later did we discover that he had persuaded Tashi to go with him. But being a monk didn’t suit Tashi. After a few months he left for a job in a factory.”

“And he got into trouble there?”

“He was never happy. He loved drawing. He always kept his pen case with him. He would have become a great painter of tangkas if. . if things had been different. When he left all he took with him was that old silver pen case. They say he committed a crime that had something to do with the black market, with shipping stuff across the border. He was found guilty of falsifying export documents and sentenced to three years in prison.”

“What prison?”

“In the west, near Rutok,” the old woman said. Rutok was the largest city in remote western Tibet, home to many hidden military bases and gulag prisons.