Free Mandarin Gate by Eliot Pattison Page A

Shan.
    The silver lining to Shan’s cloud was that he had no direct supervisor, and could travel anywhere he wished within his district in the battered old truck that came with the job. He leaned on his shovel now, watching the convent ruins below. A police barricade, manned by two officers, still blocked the road into the murder scene but there was no sign of activity inside the convent compound itself. He lifted his shovel like a badge of office and set off down the path that led to the ruins.
    There had been only one vehicle at the gate when he had looked with Jamyang. The nun, the foreigner, the Chinese man, and their killer had been there, and surely they had not all arrived together. Above the convent there were several old pilgrim paths but as they approached it they converged, so there was one main path from each direction that reached the old walls.
    Half a mile from the compound he stopped at an intersection with another path, looking up the trail that arrived from a narrow hanging valley above him. It was the route to Thousand Steps, the nuns’ hermitage. The murdered nun had no doubt come to the convent down that path. It had been a beautiful early summer day. The birds would have been singing, her step would have been light. Once at the ruins she had taken up her restoration work on one of the old prayer wheels. Once one or two of the wheels were done and being spun by the devout, Lokesh had told him, the convent would be invincible, as if the wheels would defend it as surely as great guns.
    He slowly turned in a circle, surveying the landscape. The nun had come from above, the Chinese man had driven, but what of the foreigner, what of the killer? The convent had once been the hub of the upper valley. Other trails converged from the shepherds’ homes high in the mountains, still others from the farms and even Chegar gompa, the monastery at the mouth of the valley miles away. Keeping out of sight of the police at the roadblock, he found the other trails that led into the ruins of the gates along the side and rear walls. They were all intersected by a line of heavy boot prints where police had circuited the building, but all the tracks leading up to the walls were those of the soft, worn footwear of Tibetans. At the rear wall, where the trail was soon lost in a tangle of brush, Shan discovered the track of a single bicycle. It had been ridden to the convent and hidden among the boulders, then later ridden away.
    Bicycles were becoming more common among the people of the valley floor, who were being pushed away from using yaks and donkeys, but he never recalled seeing one anywhere but on the roads. Few paths were in good enough condition to allow any kind of wheeled passage. He studied the rocky landscape where the trail disappeared. The path might lead to the trails of the upper slopes but he doubted a bicycle could be used on those trails. Much more forgiving would be the large path that ran along the lower part of the ridge, the more heavily used pilgrim path that connected the convent and Chegar monastery.
    As he began to climb over the crumbling wall he heard a sharp cracking sound. He spun about to see a robed figure standing fifty yards away, frozen, staring at Shan.
    Shan ran, but the monk was faster, weaving around boulders before disappearing into the field of outcroppings. Finally halting, panting for breath, Shan watched the rocks, hoping for another glimpse of the stranger. He saw him only for an instant, a close-cropped head wearing a pair of sunglasses that peered out from behind a rock, then disappeared. The monk had not been there for the restoration project. Shan ventured to the point where the man had first appeared, starting for a moment at another cracking sound under his own foot. He bent and picked up a black piece of plastic, then saw another, and another, then small shards of thick glass. Behind a boulder the ground was strewn with more, dozens of pieces. Gathering several of the biggest,