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but he just stood in the shadows, staring in shame at the floor. Drunken customers were tossing coins at his father. The robe he wore, covered with bumper stickers, souvenir button pins and sewn patches meant for army uniforms, was intended for a Buddhist monk. Jomo’s father, the town jester and keeper of the tavern, had been a member of Shogo’s monastery before it was leveled decades earlier.
    Shan followed Jomo into the shadows, though a moment too late.
    “Demons!” Gyalo cried jubilantly as he pointed at them, his voice slurred from drink. “Fresh demons have arrived!” With astonishing speed he picked up an empty beer bottle and threw it at Shan. It would have hit him squarely in the head had he not sidestepped. The crowd went wild, raucously cheering at the new show.
    “We should go,” Jomo muttered, not lifting his gaze from the floor. He looked as if he were about to weep. “I’ll come back when he’s sober.”
    As they began to move toward the door, Gyalo pranced across two tables to alight on a heavy wooden chair mounted on an ornate altar salvaged from a temple destroyed years earlier. On the back of the chair a T-shirt was stretched, with the image of a woman making love to a skeleton dressed as a pirate. On the wall to the left, an image of Buddha as a rock star had been painted, on the right was another Buddha on a motorcycle, a cigarette dangling from his lips. Beneath it was a large bronze deity in the meditation position, an antiquity, its hands pocked where cigarettes had been extinguished, its lap now an ashtray.
    Hands reached out and grabbed Shan and Jomo, pulling them toward the altar. Shan struggled at first, knowing what was to happen, but it was futile to resist. He let himself be manhandled into a standing position next to Jomo, beneath Gyalo.
    “Gulag prisoner!” Gyalo shouted, lifting his cup to salute Shan. “We worship at your feet!” He drank, then lowered his voice to a stage whisper, addressing the crowd. “He never speaks of what crime he committed to be condemned to Tibet. Mass murder maybe? Drug lord? Raped the Chairman’s sister?” Shan did not resist as the old Tibetan, not for the first time, lifted Shan’s arm and rolled down his sleeve to display Shan’s tattoo for all to see. “Marked by the gods!” he cried, and poured the remaining contents of his cup over the tattoo as if to anoint it.
    Jomo spat a curse at his father, grabbed Shan’s arm, and pulled him from Gyalo’s reach. His father sneered at Jomo, then broke into loud, howling, wheezing laughter that quickly spread through the room. “ Pum phat !” Gyalo shouted at their backs. They were old words, used as an emphasis at the end of certain prayers.
    “Why do you let him do that?” Jomo demanded as they stepped outside.
    “He’s just trying to sell more drinks.”
    “He’s trying to get rid of you. He knows that the more people who know you are a convict the less safe you are.”
    Shan studied Jomo’s face, which had become tormented at Gyalo’s mention of rape. His father had been a young lama, had taken his vows of celibacy, when the town monastery had been destroyed. For some reason, he had been singled out for a special punishment used to break monks and build a new breed for Tibet. A female Chinese soldier had been ordered to become pregnant by him. Jomo had never known his mother, only that she had been one of the Chinese invaders and had forced Gyalo to surrender his robe by giving him a son.
    “Why did you go in there?” Shan asked as Jomo coaxed the aged truck to life.
    “He left me a note this morning. He said he urgently needed to know everything about those murders.”
    THE CLEANING CREW assigned to the constable’s office performed its chores after the supper hour, entering in the dark through the rear door under a guard detail that Jin had decided to supervise. Shan kept his head low, half concealed by a mop. Fighting a terrible, nearly paralyzing fear, he worked his mop