Beautiful Ghosts Read Free Page A

figures. Shan stared at the old man’s face then looked back at the paper. The mantra had been written at least a thousand times, then the paper rolled and folded as if Atso had intended to leave it somewhere very small.
    He lifted the ruined statue, the little silver Tara. It had a patina of great age, except for a patch of bright metal at one shoulder where the devout had rubbed it for good luck. Shan held it close, studying the dented, imploded head, holding it at various angles, examining the long gash along the goddess’s spine, Jara’s haunting declaration echoing in his head. They kill for a word in these hills. The goddess was hollow, and empty inside. Often the Tibetans inserted small rolled-up prayers inside such statues.
    Shan looked back at Lokesh. Instead of beginning the death rites his old friend had invited him to study Atso’s body—even though the hill people would not be happy that Shan had touched the body, even though they both knew the monks would resist any effort by Shan to investigate the murder for, to them, the only investigations that mattered were those of the spirit. He lowered the goddess to the blanket then stepped to Lokesh’s side. “What is it you know?” he asked. “What is it you’re not telling me?” He extended the paper. “What had so worried Atso he would labor for a thousand mantras?”
    Lokesh studied the paper forlornly, as if reading every mantra. “I met him only once, when I was gathering berries in the mountains above here two weeks ago,” he said, nodding toward the snowcapped peaks to the east. “He asked what it was we were doing at Zhoka. When I told him it was a secret, that he should come today to find out, he grew angry, then sad. He said we didn’t understand, that Zhoka is a place of strange and powerful things that must be left alone. He said that the most dangerous thing about Zhoka is not understanding what it does to people.”
    “Are you saying he died because of something here?” Shan asked.
    Lokesh turned back to look at the corpse. “Somewhere gone is what he seeks,” he said quietly.
    Shan studied his friend. The old Tibetans had a way of mixing tenses, of slipping over time, ignoring spans of decades, even centuries, when speaking, in order to express essential truths. As he was about to press him, a figure appeared in the shadows behind Atso. A young woman, dressed in black, her hair in a long braid down her back, knelt beside the body. She returned the broken statue to its bag without examining it, then pulled at the blanket, straightening it, patting it around his body, as if putting a loved one to bed. As she did so Shan glimpsed Atso’s right boot. It, too, had a wrapping of jute, identical to that of the left boot. But the boot was not so tattered as the other, did not need the jute to bind it together.
    “Liya,” Shan said, “where have you seen the statue before?”
    When she looked up Liya’s eyes were full of tears. “When I was a little girl Atso carried me on his shoulders so the sheep would not run over me. I haven’t seen him for ten years, not since his wife died and he moved into that hut.”
    “Where were they taking him?” Shan asked, not understanding why the Tibetans seemed to be avoiding his questions.
    “There were strangers in the mountains last night when I was riding, between here and the valley.” Anguish rose in Liya’s eyes. “I dismounted, thinking I could hide. But suddenly they aimed lights at me and began shouting. They said I was not allowed to go to the east, as if they owned the land around Zhoka. I thought they were herders passing through, worried about pasturelands. I thought the monks would be happy to have as many as possible here today. When I said there was to be festival here, with monks, two people began speaking in English, very excited. A man and a woman. A man put a light on my face, then he apologized in Chinese and they all backed away. It made no sense. What would a Westerner