"Did you see her only that once?"

"Sometimes she came to town. She was always smiling. She gave me a book of poems written by retired soldiers." Loshi put the phone down. "I guess I never knew anyone who smiled so much. Like an old beggar, she smiled. You know."

Shan looked at her uncertainly. Like an old beggar. She meant like one of the old nuns and monks who used to roam Chinese streets seeking alms. Did her whole generation remember the monks that way, just as beggars? He watched the street. Jakli was speaking with the men at one of the tables. There was a horse-drawn wagon parked in front of the garage now, partially loaded with hay. A man was pumping air into one of its rubber tires.

"Were you born here, Miss Loshi?" Shan asked. "In Xinjiang?"

She shook her head absently. "We're from the coast. The ocean. North of Shanghai. Technically, I was born here, but we're from Shantung Province. My father was sent to manage a factory in Kashgar many years ago. Some day I'll go to Shantung. Prosecutor Xu says she could get me transferred, if we keep maintaining our quota of resolved cases."

"You'd rather be in the east?"

"Back home? Sure."

Home. Loshi had never been there, but Shantung was home. He should write to the Chairman. Dear Esteemed Comrade. After fifty years we now have conclusive proof that the experiment of absorbing the western territories has failed. Because Loshi wants to go home.

"What about the prosecutor? Does she want to get transferred too?"

Miss Loshi made a sly smile and opened a nylon case on the table beside her. She pulled out a pack of cigarettes and lit one. She hesitated, then offered one to Shan. He shook his head. "She's not going anywhere. I'm leaving soon. But Comrade Xu-" She shrugged and exhaled two sharp streams of smoke from her nostrils. "Longest serving prosecutor in all of Xinjiang, in one post. Twelve years. In Yoktian, of all places."

Shan wondered if the young woman understood what she was saying, or was it just because Yoktian, in Loshi's world, was not a fashionable place to be? Twelve years in her post meant Xu was in career trouble, that she had been sent here, or remained here, because she had fallen out of favor. He recalled Bao's tone when he had reminded Xu of political commentary made at a conference in Turpan. If you neglect your essential duties, Bao had said, no matter how hard you worked, you are a liability to the state. But Xu was a zealot, the Jade Bitch. She kept the rice camps full. She shot at prayer flags from helicopters. What essential duty had Bao been referring to?

Shan glanced at the cigarette package on the table. "They're expensive," he observed. They were American. Loto gai- Camels.

Loshi seemed pleased that he had noticed. "I got them from Ko yesterday. To apologize to me about the sports car. He had to give it to that Major Bao."

Shan almost asked her to repeat the words. "Major Bao? He gave his sports car to Bao?" he asked incredulously.

"You know." Loshi shrugged. "Public Security. Ko said he would get another one soon." Her breath tightened and she leaned toward the window. A black car, Xu's Red Flag sedan, was pulling to a stop in front of the garage.

Shan stared a moment longer, unable to comprehend why Ko would give his expensive car to a man who was not even a friend, who was a rival in many ways. "I'll go around the back," he said in a conspiratorial tone, and stood. "I won't tell her we spoke."

Loshi gave him a nervous, uncertain smile, cupped her hands over the cell phone, and looked back out the window.

Shan watched from the side of the tea house as the chess players at the table scattered the instant the prosecutor stepped out of the driver's seat. She stood and surveyed the compound, hands on her hips, then sat at the abandoned table, putting a small canvas bag on the table beside her. Moments later Shan stepped around the corner of the garage and joined her.

"He came back that day and asked about you." Xu said immediately, venom already in her voice. "Major Bao. He was still angry. Not just angry. Enraged. Said he should have arrested you. I asked him why. Said you could jeopardize a confidential investigation. He demanded more information about you."

"What did you tell him?" Shan asked.

"That you were one of my informers," Xu said, and paused, as if for effect. "But he wanted your name, your work unit." The prosecutor lit a cigarette, a thick unfiltered kind, the sort factory workers smoked. "I told him it might jeopardize a confidential investigation," she said with a sour smile. She stared smugly at Shan as she let the smoke drift out of her mouth. "But I have a friend in the Ministry in Beijing. Nearly ready to retire. I called her. There was an Inspector Shan once, she said, Inspector General of the Ministry of Economy. A fighting dog sort of investigator. The kind everyone hates." She inhaled on the cigarette again and examined him. "You know. Impractical. Incapable of prioritizing for the socialist order."

It was a familiar phrase. One of the idioms of tamzing, the struggle sessions where individuals were confronted with their shortcomings as citizens and their remedies beaten into them, figuratively and otherwise.

Shan saw that his hands had done it again, unconsciously made a mudra, as if trying to tell him something. The fingers were clasped, the middle fingers raised upward. Diamond of the Mind. "Prioritization for the Party, prioritization for the state, prioritization for the workplace," he recited the equally familiar refrain that had been shouted at him more than once from political verse books. "I saw an advertisement for a book once in a Western magazine," he said. "Getting your office organized in ten easy lessons." He looked at her with a stony expression. "Kind of the same thing."

She offered an icy smile. "This Inspector Shan, he's said to have taken on Party bosses, maybe even investigated them. Said to have been made to disappear." She opened her mouth and let the smoke curl around her lips.

"The advantage of disappearing," Shan said, "is that afterward expectations are so much lower." He stared at his hands. "All the zheli boys are in jeopardy," he said. "More could be killed."

"This Shan. My friend called the Ministry of Economy. The main thing people say about this Shan is good riddance. He made everyone's life difficult. As hard as a senior Party member. But when he was offered Party membership he turned it down."

"The killer is after the boys. Only the boys." He looked back at the tea house, where Loshi sat watching through the window. Ko had given his expensive car to Major Bao. It made no sense.

"An investigator is supposed to find answers, supposed to make life easier for people," she continued, as if she had not heard any of his words.

Shan focused on the end of her cigarette. "Sometimes an investigator can do no more than remind people of their conscience."

Xu's lips curled, as if she found the comment amusing. "Your killer," she observed. "He may have been looking for that one particular boy. Kublai. Maybe it's over."

"Or maybe he wants them all dead," Shan said.

Xu winced. "Don't be ridiculous. No one could get away with eliminating entire…" Her words drifted off, as her eyes drifted toward the horizon. She shook her head.

"What are you saying, Comrade Prosecutor? One or two boys, and who cares? But ten or fifteen, that would be what? Unacceptable casualty levels? Politically embarrassing? How about five or six? Maybe up to ten, and no one would really notice?" He kept his eyes on her as he spoke. "Just orphans, after all, just Kazakhs and Uighurs at that."