Read Online Mandarin Gate by Eliot Pattison - Free Book Online Page B

had first heard it, Shan had actually thought it was some kind of joke. But now the slogan was emblazoned on public walls and banners all over Tibet and offered up for Tibetan schoolchildren to recite like a militant mantra.
    Shan looked back at the statue. The only Tibetan writing he had seen anywhere in Baiyun was inscribed along the top edge at the front of its pedestal: PRAISE THE GREAT LEADER TO WHOM WE OWE OUR LIVES AND PROSPERITY.
    He gazed absently at the words as he forced himself to reconstruct the grisly scene in the store’s refrigerator. Liang’s special doctor had opened Bei’s leg up, and extracted his teeth. They had suspected him of being a foreigner but finely worked teeth were becoming less reliable an indicator of foreign origin in modern China. The titanium rod was unquestionable proof. They had closed up the scar then pulled the teeth for good measure. He looked up, surveying the streets again. He still had the sense of something unnatural about the pioneer town, and not just because it was one of Beijing’s prefabricated formula settlements.
    Folding the paper under his arm he wandered around the square, sitting again, closer to the checker games that had been set out on upturned crates. Once more he surveyed the park and the modest windblown houses beyond it. There was another slogan on the back edge of the pedestal, in Chinese. It was faded, barely legible even though the statue was probably no more than a year old. He found himself rising again, trying to read the words. They were carefully written, in a very light hand that gave the impression of an official inscription that was weathered. But it was no official slogan: Superior leaders are those whose existence is merely known .
    He stared at the words in disbelief, reading them again. It was the first verse of the seventeenth passage of the Tao Te Ching , written more than two thousand years earlier. The chapter explained how the best leaders were those barely known to their people, the worst were those who interfered with daily life. They were words that Beijing would choke on, the words of dissidents, though not of Tibet.
    As he turned back toward the checker players he sensed movement, as if they had all been watching him. He slowly walked among them. Curiously, the players all had books beside them. A book of European history, in English. A book about the bone oracles of early China. A book of rites from the last dynasty. All but one of the players glanced up, nodding absently at Shan. The fourth man, an older, refined-looking gentleman wearing a grey sweater vest and wire-rimmed spectacles, seemed to studiously avoid acknowledging Shan. In his lap was a book of Sung dynasty poetry.
    Shan moved on, pausing under one of the trees to look back. There were professors in Baiyun, Jigten had explained. He had been taking Jamyang’s spirit tablets to sell to a professor. A young man walked by, carrying a cloth sack of rice on his shoulder. He was compact, his skin almost olive-colored. Most of the town’s inhabitants were tall, long in the face, with prominent features, people of the distant northeast, of Manchuria. This man had the features of China’s tropical southwest, not far removed from the tribes of the rain forest. Shan watched the figure as he disappeared into an alley. He had seen the features before, on the tattooed dead man.
    He looked back at the men in the square, trying to understand his odd discomfort, feeling more than ever the urge to flee, to find Lokesh and take him to safety. But he also felt a growing need to understand this strange, unreal town with three bodies in a refrigerator.
    A cry of pain broke him out of his paralysis. Low, rushed voices rose from the alley off the square. A woman cursed from the shadows, then gasped. Figures ran away, between buildings.
    Meng was on her knees when Shan reached her, retching onto the ground.
    “I’m all right!” she growled when Shan put a hand on her shoulder.
    “You’re