Shan had chosen the chair by window, with the glare of daylight behind him. Chodron’s gray suit jacket was only slightly too large in the shoulders. He had blocked the view of his feet with a briefcase, knowing his tattered boots would betray him in an instant. But he need not have worried for the woman’s gaze remained on the little black leather folder hanging from the lanyard around his neck.

He opened the top file and lifted a pencil from the table. “Let’s start with your name,” he said in a level voice. He had spent twenty years on this side of the interrogator’s table.

The woman’s mouth opened and shut several times but no words came out.

“Get dressed,” Shan instructed, the weary impatience of a senior official in his tone. “Get a glass of water. Get a chair.”

Chodron’s mistress was named Jiling. She worked in the municipal affairs office and was responsible for census data and the distribution of funds to the county’s villages. Chodron had found the perfect partner. Now Shan understood how he was able to function in an official capacity in an unofficial village.

“I don’t know you. Are you from Lhasa?” Jiling asked after his first quick round of questions. She had chosen to wear an austere dark blue suit. She took back her identity card when Shan finished with it and kept it in her hand. “I saw the banner,” she said in a hoarse whisper.

“I am from Beijing.”

The woman slumped.

“Cooperate now and you may not hear from us again.”

“I don’t know anything.”

“You have already told me you are involved in the administration of the villages in this county.”

Jiling looked down at her identity card. “It is a big county,” she observed, beginning her defense.

“Surely you know the penalty for misappropriation and misal-location of public funds.”

The color drained from her face. Executions were almost always public events in China, but the ones that were given the most publicity, that sometimes filled entire stadiums, were those of corrupt officials.

“I have over a hundred villages-”

Shan cut her off with a wave of his hand. “There is a saying in English-If a tree falls in the woods and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?”

“I don’t-I don’t understand.”

“If villagers don’t exist, are their tax payments considered public funds?” He gestured toward the opulent furnishings of the sitting room. “If we have to continue this after today’s visit, you will be required to provide receipts for everything in this house, with the source of payment for each.”

Jiling straightened in her chair. “I am merely a low-level official,” she declared.

Good, thought Shan. The ones who crumbled immediately were usually the least helpful.

“Drango village is on the official list,” she added.

“But what is its official population count?”

“Thirty,” she admitted, her voice cracking.

Shan had seen more than double that number of people in the village. So Chodron could collect taxes from everyone and pocket the difference. The village might appear on the official rolls but half its taxes never reached the government. No one would have complained. The villagers who realized would have considered it protection money, a fee for keeping the government away. An antitax.

Shan studied the woman, refilled her glass for her, began casually asking about her office, about her superiors, about where she and Chodron kept their bank accounts, whether she traveled with Chodron at Party expense. These were tedious queries that Shan could propound by rote, and which any experienced bureaucrat would expect to be included in such an interview.

“Where do you sell the gold?” he asked abruptly.

“I don’t know what you are talking about.”

Shan gave an indifferent shrug. “If you won’t speak about it then you just give him the opportunity to do so first, to use the information for negotiation. It will be an interesting dilemma for the prosecutors, who to make their primary target. The attractive, well-educated Chinese bureaucrat versus the Tibetan farmer. Except the farmer is a revered Party member.”

Jiling no longer fidgeted with her identity card. She was squeezing it so hard it began to dig into her flesh, drawing a thin line of blood. She calmly stepped to the sink and washed her wound.

“Who are you if you are not with Major Ren?” she asked from the counter.

“Perhaps you should look outside.”

Jiling studied him uncertainly, then went to the front window. She pulled the drapery cord, opening the curtain only a few inches. When she finally focused on the brown sedan parked outside she pressed a hand against her heart.

Shan approached the window. Gao was leaning against the car smoking, though Shan had never seen him with a cigarette before. The woman from the factory office now sat in the driver’s seat, strangely transfixed, eyes forward, hands on the wheel.

“Some people said he was dying in his castle in the mountains.” Jiling spoke in a whisper, as if fearful Gao might hear. “Others said he went back to Beijing to live in a palace. They call him the chairman’s chief sorcerer.”

“When Chodron is here, who is he exactly?” Shan asked.

There was another car, a black utility vehicle, parked fifty feet behind Gao’s. “Do I need to invite him inside?” he continued when Jiling did not answer. Then his mouth went dry. Two men in gray uniforms got out of the utility vehicle and began walking toward Gao.

“Chodron has offices in the county Party administration,” Jiling told him. “He used to be termed the chief Party representative for the rural proletariat. Now they call for ethnic diversity in the Party leadership. The last title they gave him was secretary for indigenous agrarian workers.”

That explained how Chodron managed to come and go as he pleased, an official without portfolio, though if he spent too much time in town with his Chinese mistress he might jeopardize his standing.

Jiling had gone silent. She was looking at his feet. Shan had forgotten his tattered boots.

“Undercover work,” he asserted. He motioned her toward the table. She hesitated, glanced from Shan to the men outside.

“If I need to summon them I will,” Shan said. “But I assure you I will try not to involve you further. Write down what you have told me. When Dr. Gao comes to the door, hand him the statement.”

“Where are you going?”

“To interview the groundskeeper,” Shan ventured.

“He’s nobody, some old Tibetan.”

Shan pointed to the table. She looked at his boots, then at Gao and the knobs outside, then retreated to the table and began writing.

Shan quietly slipped through the rear door and scanned the yard. The groundskeeper was sleeping against a tree, his chin propped on his chest. Shan removed his lanyard, pushed it into the pile of plucked weeds near the man’s feet, and entered the shadows at the back of the yard. The small strip of forest behind the row of houses gave him cover until he reached the street, two hundred yards from Chodron’s house.

His eyes stayed on the town’s tallest building but his feet, as if by an instinct all their own, went in the other direction. In a small park consisting of a derelict playground and a grove of trees, he settled onto a bench made of cinder blocks and weathered planks. His ribs were aching from his beating at Little Moscow. He lowered his head into his hands. He had not felt such despair since the early days of his exile and imprisonment in the gulag. His life was spiraling out of control. The lives of everyone close to him were threatened by dark destinies-prison, a firing squad, cancer. Murderers who hacked off hands were loose on Sleeping Dragon Mountain and he could protect no one. He needed to rest. He needed to meditate, to expunge the despair from his mind, to expel the pain from his body. He needed to do what Gendun called taking himself out of himself.