The Skull Mantra is-1 Page 5

  Shan did not answer.

  "The head rolled off the cliff. We will find it. I'll send squads out tomorrow. We'll find it and I'll persuade Sung to sign the report."

  Shan continued to stare at Tan in silence.

  "You're saying if the head isn't found the Ministry will expect me to offer up a killer."

  "Of course," Shan agreed. "But that will not be their primary concern. First you must offer up the antisocial act. Your responsibility is detailing the socialist context. Provide a context and the rest will follow."

  "Context?"

  "The Ministry will not care about the killer as such. Suspects are always available." Shan waited for a reaction. Tan did not even blink. "What they always seek," he continued, "is the political explanation. Murder investigation is an art form. The essential cause of violent crime is class struggle."

  "You said passion. And corruption."

  "That is the classified data. Private, for use by investigators. Now I am talking about the socialist dialectic. Prosecution of murder is usually a public phenomenon. You must be ready to explain the basis for prosecution here. There is always a political explanation. That will be the concern. That is the evidence you need."

  "What are you saying?" Tan growled.

  Shan looked at the photograph and spoke to Mao again. "Imagine a house in the country," he said slowly. "A body is found, stabbed to death. A bloody knife is found in the hands of a man asleep in the kitchen. He is arrested. Where does the investigation start?"

  "The weapon. Match it to the wound."

  "No. The closet. Always look for the closet. In the old days you would look for hidden books. Books in English. Western music. Today you look for the opposite. Old boots and threadbare clothes, hidden away with a book of the chairman's sayings. In case of a new resurgence of Party enforcement. Either way it shows reactionary doubts about socialist progress."

  "Then you check the party's central files. Class background. Find out that the suspect previously required reeducation or that his grandfather was an oppressor in the merchant class. Maybe his uncle was a Stinking Ninth." Shan's father had been in the Stinking Ninth, the lowest rank on Mao's list of bad elements. Intellectuals. "Or maybe the murderer is a model worker. If so, look at the victim," he continued. He realized with a shudder that he was repeating words he had last spoken to a seminar in Beijing. "It's the socialist context that's important. Find the reactionary thread and build from there. A murder investigation is pointless unless it can become a parable for the people."

  Tan paced in front of the window. "But to get this behind us, all I really need is a head."

  Something icy seemed to touch Shan's spine. "Not just any head. The head."

  Tan laughed without smiling. "A saboteur. Zhong warned me." He sat and studied Shan in silence. "Why do you want so badly to return to the 404th?"

  "It is where I belong. There's going to be trouble. Because of the body. Maybe I can help."

  Tan's eyes narrowed. "What trouble?"

  "The jungpo," Shan said very quietly.

  "Jungpo?"

  "It translates as hungry ghost. A soul released by a violent action, unprepared for death. Unless death rites can be conducted on the mountain, the ghost will haunt the scene of the death. It will be angry. It will bring bad luck. The devout will not go near the place."

  "What trouble?" Tan repeated sharply.

  "The 404th will not work at such a site. It is unholy now. They are praying for the release of the spirit. Prayers for cleansing."

  Anger was building in Tan's eyes. "No strike was reported."

  "The warden would never tell you so soon. He will try to end it on his own. There will have been stoppages by the crews at the top first. There will have been accidents. Guns have been issued."

  Tan abruptly moved to his door and called for Madame Ko to dial Warden Zhong's office. He took the call in the conference room, watching Shan through the open door.

  His eyes flared when he returned. "A man broke a leg. A wagon of supplies fell off the cliff. The brigade refused to move after the noon break."

  "The priests must be permitted to perform the ceremonies."

  "Impossible," Tan snapped, and strode back to the window. He pulled the binoculars from the sill, futilely looking through the gathering grayness for the worksite on the distant slope. When he turned, the hardness was back in his eyes. "You have a context now. What did you call it? A reactionary thread."

  "I don't understand."

  "Smells like class struggle to me. Capitalist egoism. Cultists. Acting to relieve their revisionist friends."

  "The 404th?" Shan said, horrified. "The 404th was not involved."

  "But you have convinced me. Class struggle has once again impeded socialist progress. They are on strike."

  Shan's heart lurched at the words. "Not a strike. It's just a religious matter."

  Tan sneered. "When prisoners refuse to work, it is a strike. The Public Security Bureau will have to be notified. It's out of my hands."

  Shan stared helplessly. A death in the mountains might be overlooked by the Ministry. But never a strike at a labor camp. Suddenly the stakes were far higher.

  "You will compile a new file," Tan explained. "Tell me about class struggle. How the 404th caused this death as an excuse to halt their work. Something worthy of an inspector general. The kind that the Ministry will not challenge." He scrawled something on a sheet of onion-skin paper, then studied Shan for a moment. With a slow, ceremonial motion, he fixed his seal to the paper. "You are officially on detail to my office. I'll give you a truck and the warden's Tibetan clerk. Feng will watch. Permission to go to the clinic for interviews. If asked, you are on trusty duties."

  Shan felt as if someone was rolling a massive rock onto his back. He found himself bending, frantically looking toward the Dragon Claws. "My report would be worthless," he murmured, the words nearly choking in his throat. He had rushed his work to return to the 404th, to help Choje. Now Tan wanted to use him to inflict greater punishment on the monks. "I have been proven untrustworthy."

  "The report will be in my name."

  Shan stared at a dim, vaguely familar ghost, his reflection in the window. It was happening. He was being reincarnated into a lower life form. "Then one of our names will be dishonored," he said in croaking whisper.

  Chapter Three

  The drab three-story building that housed the People's Health Collective proved far more sterile outside than inside. The odor of mildew wafted through the lobby. On the lobby wall, a collage of bulldozers and tractors mounted by beaming proletarians was cracked and peeling. The same bone-dry dust that filled the 404th barracks covered the furniture. Brown and green stains ran across the faded linoleum floor and up one wall. Nothing moved but a large beetle that scuttled toward the shadows as they entered.

  Madame Ko had called. A short, nervous man in a threadbare smock appeared, and silently led Shan, Yeshe, and Feng down a dimly lit flight of stairs to a basement chamber with five metal examination tables. As he opened the swinging doors, the stench of ammonia and formaldahyde broke over them like a wave. The aroma of death.

  Yeshe's hands shot to his mouth. Sergeant Feng cursed and fumbled for a cigarette. More of the dark stains Shan had seen upstairs mottled the walls. He followed one with his eyes, a spatter of brown spots that arced from floor to ceiling. On one wall was a poster, tattered from repeated folding, that announced a performance, years earlier, of the Beijing Opera. With a mixture of disgust and fear, their escort gestured toward the only occupied table, then backed out of the room and closed the door.

  Yeshe turned to follow the orderly.

  "Going somewhere?" Shan inquired.

  "I'm going to be sick," Yeshe pleaded.

  "We have an assignment. You won't get it done waiting in the hall."

  Yeshe looked at his feet.

  "Where do you want to be?" Shan asked.

  "Be?"

  "Afterward. You're young. You're ambitious. You have a
destination. Everyone your age has a destination."

  "Sichuan province," Yeshe said, distrust in his eyes. "Back to Chengdu. Warden Zhong told me he has my papers ready. Says he's arranged for me to have a job there. People can rent their own apartments now. You can even buy televisions."

  Shan considered the announcement. "When did the warden say this?"

  "Just last night. I still have friends back in Chengdu. Members of the Party."

  "Fine." Shan shrugged. "You have a destination and I have a destination. The sooner we get done, the sooner we can move on."

  Resentment still etched on his face, Yeshe found a wall switch and illuminated a row of naked lightbulbs hanging over the tables. The center table seemed to glow, its white sheet the only clean, bright object in the room. Sergeant Feng muttered a low curse toward the far side of the room. A body was slumped in a rusty wheelchair, covered with a soiled sheet, its head slung over the shoulder at an unnatural angle.

  "They just leave you like that," Feng growled in contempt. "Give me an army hospital. At least they lay you out in your uniform."

  Shan looked back at the arc of bloodstains. This was supposed to be the morgue. Corpses had no blood pressure. They did not spray blood.

  Suddenly the body in the chair groaned. Revived by the light, it swung its arms stiffly to pull down the sheet, then produced a pair of thick, horn-rimmed glasses.

  Feng gasped and retreated toward the door.

  It was a woman, Shan realized, and it wasn't a sheet that covered her but a vastly oversized smock. From its folds she produced a clipboard.

  "We sent the report," she declared in a shrill, impatient tone, and stood. "No one understood why you needed to come." Bags of fatigue shadowed her eyes. In one hand she held a pencil like a spear. "Some people like to look at the dead. Is that it? You like to gawk at the corpses?"

  A man's life, Choje taught his monks, did not move in a linear progression, with each day an equal chit on the calendar of existence. Rather it moved from defining moment to defining moment, marked by the decisions that roiled the soul. Here was such a moment, Shan thought. He could play Tan's hound, starting here and now, trying to somehow save the 404th or he could turn around, as Choje would want, ignoring Tan, being true to all that passed as virtue in his world. He clenched his jaw and turned to the diminutive woman.

  "We will need to speak to the doctor who performed the autopsy," Shan said. "Dr. Sung."

  Inexplicably, the woman laughed. From another fold of her smock she pulled a koujiao, one of the surgical masks used by much of the population of China to ward off dust and viruses in the winter months. "Other people. Other people just like to cause trouble." She tied the mask over her mouth and gestured toward a box of kiajiou on the nearest table. As she walked, a stethoscope appeared in the folds of the smock.

  There was still a way, a narrow opening he might wedge through. He would have to get the accident report signed. An accident caused by the 404th would answer Tan's needs without the agony of a murder investigation. Sign the report, then find a way to conduct death rites for the lost soul. To answer the political dilemma, the 404th could be disciplined for negligent behavior. A month on cold rations, perhaps a mass reduction of every prisoner. It would be summer soon; even the old ones could survive a reduction. It was not a perfect solution, but it was one within his reach.

  By the time the three men fastened their masks, she had stripped the sheet from the body and pulled a clipboard from the table.

  "Death occurred fifteen to twenty hours before discovery, meaning the evening before," she recited. "Cause of death: traumatic simultaneous severance of the carotid artery, jugular vein, and spinal cord. Between the atlas and the occipital." She studied the three men as she spoke, then seemed to dismiss Yeshe. He was obviously Tibetan. She paused over Shan's threadbare clothes and settled on addressing Sergeant Feng.

  "I thought he was decapitated," Yeshe said hesitantly, glancing at Shan.

  "That's what I said," the woman snapped.

  "You can't be more specific about the time?" Shan asked.

  "Rigor mortis was still present," she said, again to Feng. "I can guarantee you the night before. Beyond that…" She shrugged. "The air is so dry. And cold. The body was covered. Too many variables. To be more precise would require a battery of tests."

  She saw the expression on Shan's face and threw him a sour look. "This isn't exactly Beijing University, Comrade."

  Shan studied the poster again. "At Bei Da you would have had a chromatograph," he said, using the colloquial expression for Beijing University, the reference most commonly used in Beijing itself.

  She turned slowly. "You are from the capital?" A new tone had entered her voice, one of tentative respect. In their country, power came in many shapes. One could not be too careful. Maybe this would be easier than he'd thought. Let the investigator live just a few moments, long enough to make her understand the importance of the accident report.

  "I had the honor of teaching a course with a professor of forensic medicine at Bei Da," he said. "Just a two-week seminar, really. Investigation Technique in the Socialist Order."

  "Your skills have served you well." She seemed unable to resist sarcasm.

  "Someone said my technique involved too much investigation, not enough of the socialist order." He said it with an edge of remorse, the way he had been trained to do in tamzing sessions.

  "Here you are," she observed.

  "Here you are," he shot back.

  She smiled, as though he were a great wit. When she did so the bags under her eyes disappeared for a moment. He realized that she was slender beneath the huge gown. Without the bags, and without her hair tied so severely behind her, Dr. Sung could have passed for a stylish member of any Beijing hospital staff.

  Silently she made a complete circuit of the table, studying Sergeant Feng, then Shan again. She approached Shan slowly, then suddenly grabbed his arm, as if he might bolt away. He did not resist as she rolled up his sleeve and studied the tattooed number on his forearm.

  "A trusty?" she asked. "We have a trusty who cleans the toilets. And one to wipe up the blood. Never had one sent to interrogate me." She paced about him with intense curiosity, as though contemplating dissection of the strange organism before her.

  Sergeant Feng broke the spell with a sharp, guttural call. It was not a word, but a warning. Yeshe was attempting to ease the door open. He stopped, confused but obsequious, and retreated to the corner, where he squatted against the wall.

  Shan read the report hanging at the end of the table. "Dr. Sung." He pronounced her name slowly. "Did you perform any tissue analysis?"

  The woman looked to Feng as though for help, but the sergeant was inching away from the corpse. She shrugged. "Late middle-aged. Twenty-five pounds overweight. Lungs beginning to clog with tar. A deteroriated liver, but he probably didn't know it yet. Trace of alcohol in his blood. Ate less than two hours before death. Rice. Cabbage. Meat. Good meat, not mutton. Maybe lamb. Even beef."

  Cigarettes, alcohol, beef. The diet of the privileged. The diet, he comforted himself, of a tourist.

  Feng found a bulletin board, where he pretended to read a schedule of political meetings.

  Shan moved slowly around the table, forcing himself to study the truncated shell of the man who had stopped the work of the 404th and forced the colonel to exhume Shan from the gulag, the man whose unhappy spirit now haunted the Dragon Claws. With his pencil he pushed back the lifeless fingers of the left hand. It was empty. He moved on, paused and studied the hand again. There was a narrow line at the base of the forefinger. He pushed it with the eraser. It was an incision.

  Dr. Sung donned rubber gloves and studied the hand with a small pocket lamp. There was a second cut, she announced, in the palm just below the thumb.

  "Your custodial report said nothing about removing an object from the hand." It had been something small, no more than two inches in diameter, with sharp edges.

  "Because we didn't." S
he bent over the incision. "Whatever was there was wrenched free after death. No bleeding. No clotting. Happened afterward." She felt the fingers one by one and looked up with a blush of embarrassment. "Two of the phalanges are broken. Something squeezed the hand with great force. The death grip was broken open."

  "To get at what it held."

  "Presumably."

  Shan considered the woman. In Chinese bureaucracies, there was a gray line between humanitarian service to the struggling colonies and outright exile. "But can you be so sure of the cause? Perhaps he died in a fall and later, for unrelated reasons, his head was removed."

  "Unrelated reasons? The heart was still pumping when the head was severed. Otherwise there would have been much more blood in the body."

  Shan sighed. "With what then? An axe?"

  "Something heavy. And razor-sharp."

  "A rock, possibly?"

  Dr. Sung responded with a peevish frown and yawned. "Sure. A rock as sharp as a scalpel. It wasn't a single blow. But no more than three, I'd say."

  "Was he conscious?"

  "At the time of death he was unconscious."

  "Surely you cannot know, without the head."

  "His clothes," Dr. Sung said. "There was almost no blood on his clothes. No skin or hair under the nails. No scratches. There was no struggle. His body was laid out so the blood would drain away from it. Face up. We extracted soil and mineral particles from the back of his sweater. Only the back."

  "But it's just a theory, that he was unconscious."

  "And your theory, Comrade? That he died by falling on a rock and someone who collected heads happened along?"

  "This is Tibet. There is an entire social class dedicated to cutting up bodies for disposal. Perhaps a ragyapa happened along and began the rite for sky burial, then was interrupted."

  "By what?"

  "I don't know. The birds."

  "They don't fly at night," she grumbled. "And I've never seen a vulture big enough to carry a skull away." She pulled a paper from the clipboard. "You must be the fool who sent me this," she said. It was the accident report form, ready for her signature.