The Shadows of Shigatse (The Handover Mysteries, Vol. III)

By D. L. Kung

High in the remote Himalayas, who is the traitor—the nervous Dr. Chamba, the dashing Dr. Norsang, the beautiful nurse DaDon or the weary Swiss-Tibetan Kelsang?
Xavier Vonalp takes journalist Claire Raymond to his medical project in Tibet on a quest to nail the informer betraying Tibetan patients fleeing to Nepal. Identifying which of his colleagues is the deadly turncoat is hard enough, but on the eve of their departure from Hong Kong, Claire's ex-lover Jim returns to beg a sensitive favor.
A Korean War vet, Jim's father trained Khampas to resist the Chinese occupation of Tibet. His plane crashed in the Himalayas but no body was found. Against her better judgment, Claire investigates and before she knows it, she's smuggling a fugitive Tibetan freedom fighter to safety from Jim's deadly “discipline,” and fighting to help Xavier, trapped by the informer on espionage charges, escape a ten-year Chinese prison sentence.
Who’s betraying whom? And how long can Claire risk Xavier’s project for the sake of unfinished business with Jim?
In this moving culmination to the third and final volume of D. L. Kung’s "The Handover Mysteries," Claire discovers the fate of Jim's father—a symbolic finale to the end of American influence over the now-confident Beijing regime.
--Kung delivers a touching story enriched by its strong atmosphere." Publishers Weekly, Starred Review for volume II of The Handover Mysteries
--A compelling sense of place... It's an unusual debut--lyrical and suspenseful." Chicago Tribune.
Novelist D. L. Kung worked as a journalist for over twenty years in Asia for publications including Business Week, the Economist, the Washington Post, National Public Radio and the International Herald Tribune. Kung won the Overseas Press Club Award for Best Humanitarian Coverage in 1991. The author of six novels, Kung was nominated for the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2004

• Language: English
• Publisher: Eyes And Ears Editions
• Release date: Nov 4, 2011
• ISBN: 9782970074816

D. L. Kung

D. L. Kung worked for over twenty years in China as a reporter, covering everything from narcotic control in Hong Kong to political infighting in Beijing's inner Communist Party circles. Over the course of a career leading from Hong Kong to Beijing to Tibet to Sichuan and the Greater China coastline, Kung kept notes that now inform The Handover Mysteries with a vivid sense of place and pace.

Book preview

Chapter One

—Tuesday evening, April 16, 2002—

Help was on its way—Kelsang felt the confirmation letter from Hong Kong crumpled in her pocket as she leaned over the young man’s bed. But it would come too late to save Drapka’s legs.

Kelsang searched Vonalp’s letter for political indiscretions that might backfire on their clinic. All faxes, e-mails, and phone calls from the world beyond Communist Party control had to be neutered. Obviously the Chinese police had read Vonalp’s message about his trip to Tibet—the envelope had one corner cleanly torn off for the censor’s routine check.

‘I really regret this delay and look forward to meeting you at last. I’ve enclosed a copy of the new timetable proposed by the Chinese Foreign Ministry. It’s only safe to discuss your concerns in person and even then, we must be careful.’

The schedule for the Swiss official and his journalist wife was missing from the envelope, of course. The Chinese authorities wanted to keep all options open until they’d sized up this ‘humanitarian’.

The nurse straightened the yellowed bed sheet over Drakpa’s legs. A blackish discoloration was creeping up the right shin faster than up the left. The surgeon’s kindness had been to no avail. Drakpa turned away from Kelsang’s scrutiny. His clenched fist lay half-buried in the thick yarn of his sweater, the fingertips purple and raw, the knuckles bone-white with tension.

He’d guessed the worst. He must have examined the bandaged stumps of his feet while she was out of the ward. He’d seen the blistered, purple flesh gradually darkening above the gauze covering the sutures.

‘When?’ Drakpa interrupted the nurse’s thoughts.

‘Tonight. It can’t wait.’

‘Tell Sonam for me?’ Drakpa whispered.

‘Of course.’

Her nod was a terrible confirmation of the twenty-year-old’s terrors. A deep animal groan came from his narrow bed. Comforting words were useless. She sat at Drakpa’s bedside, watching silent tears course down his wind-roughened face.

She ignored the other two patients in the ward—an old man too feverish from a respiratory infection to have overheard and a younger prisoner chained to his bed frame—a strange sight in most hospitals, but not in Tibet. He pretended to read an old newspaper and sucked on his newly toothless gums.

The clinic’s cement walls surrendered their day’s warmth to the chill of Himalayan dusk. Kelsang distributed faded cotton quilts. Soon the wards would be only slightly more comfortable than a refrigerator compared to the courtyard outside. Back there the more mobile patients were craning their necks westwards to soak up the final hours of red-gold sun.

Drakpa’s fiancée, Sonam, would be waiting in the courtyard for Kelsang. There was no hurry to break the bad news about Drakpa’s legs. First, Dr Chamba, the head of their small medical training school, would call the main hospital to alert Shigatse’s only orthopedic surgeon, Dr Jin, that resection was urgent.

Why she hadn’t stayed at her usual nightshift back home in an expensive private Swiss clinic? All she had to cope with in Geneva were Russian plastic surgery patients whining about the catering. She’d wanted to revisit the country of her birth as an adult, to find out how much of herself was the adopted Swiss and how much the Tibetan.

She discovered only that she was a nurse—pure and simple.

Kelsang waited for Sonam to finish her dumplings and soup, then she led her to the front yard. Sonam shivered under her cheap acrylic jumper.

‘I must reassure him,’ Sonam said after hearing the terrible news.

‘Not yet. He needs time to himself.’

Sonam slumped down on the dusty stone stoop. Her rapid breath puffed steam into the chilly air. Her flat cheekbones, cherry-bright from their futile flight through the high mountain passes, reddened more deeply with anguish.

‘The Chinese detained him because of me! Did you see the cigarette burns down his back? It was my flag they found in his room, Kelsang, but he never told them where he got it.’

Kelsang nodded.

‘We had to flee because of my mistake. I was so relieved when we first got here, more than halfway to the border. We should have steered wider of the main road to Dram. Then we’d have got to Kathmandu—’

‘We ran through all this before the first operation,’ Kelsang soothed her. ‘Think now of helping him after tonight.’

‘We were almost there! We could even see Nepal!’ The girl seethed, ‘But they were waiting, like snakes just ready to strike. They knew we were coming.’

Kelsang knew only too well. Over eighteen hundred escapees made it to Nepal and resettlement in India each year, but strangely, those who touched base with the Shigatse-Chungdala Medical Project ended up caught like trapped animals by Chinese security. Why? What with tonight’s coming ordeal, it didn’t bear thinking about.

The last gold sun rays washed the western side of the cement hospital as the rickety Shigatse-Chungdala Medical Project truck brought Drakpa through the main gates at half past seven. Apart from the incongruous new office tower built by Shanghainese investors, this building was one of the tallest in Shigatse, Tibet’s second largest town.

Dr Jin and his Tibetan anesthesiologist were already in the operating room preparing their instruments as Kelsang and Dr Chamba scrubbed up to assist.

‘Can you do a b.k.?’ Kelsang asked.

Dr Jin examined Drakpa’s mortifying stumps. He couldn’t be sure until things were underway. A ‘double below-the-knee’ would depend on sufficient circulation and viable tissue close to where the gangrene had already eaten into the calf.

Dr Jin determined where to start the flaps to cover the new stumps. Dr Chamba was a specialist in traditional Tibetan medicine, but knew enough anatomy to help Dr Jin with the awkward access to the back of the legs where the important muscles and key arteries lay. Kelsang manned the bins of sterilized instruments and mentally reviewed the order of their use—the clamps, the saws, the fine curved needles.

The painstaking slicing, the monitoring of the blood flow, the flesh callously discarded—it was becoming sickeningly familiar.

An inconvenient fury surged up like nausea in Kelsang. Sonam was right. The two lovers had missed freedom by a few thousand meters. A cruel betrayal forced them back through the deadly blizzard into Tibet wearing only cotton jackets and the pathetic sneakers that condemned the boy’s feet to frostbite.

Kelsang’s admiration for Dr Jin’s skill summoned her professional presence of mind. The amputations would take two hours, even if Dr Jin left the wounds open for closing in a second stage—the more prudent choice at this point.

They worked in near silence. From time to time, Kelsang glanced up at the two men and wondered: was one of them the informer?

Dr Jin finished preparing the flaps on the right leg and moved on to the left. He and Dr Chamba changed positions and gestured to Kelsang for more clamps. The nurse resigned herself to a dark and dreadful night.

***

It was a bright and boring night, thought Claire. She wished Xavier and she were already in Lhasa, but tonight’s award was important for his agency’s funding, so they’d postponed their departure for Tibet until Friday.

She forced herself to smile at her loquacious host Mr Lok and yearned for a more entertaining dinner partner. She’d already endured the son of an electronics magnate on her left for half an hour. Cantonese was his mother tongue, but his Mandarin, the lingua franca of Hong Kong’s new Communist elite, had been painfully acquired. Claire realized that after twenty years of working in Asia, she’d been speaking Mandarin longer than this privileged brat had been alive. His English wasn’t any better, and hardly likely to improve with the new handover to Beijing’s rule. He was clearly happier flirting with Lok’s daughter. Claire relinquished him without regret.

The ballroom chandeliers dimmed. Three courses down and only dessert to go. A tiny Cantonese girl in sequins and pale face powder moved to the front of the band and checked the sound on her handheld microphone, its short tail flicking in her hand like an insect’s stinger.

Oh, Lord, would Lok expect to dance? Claire was a lithe five-feet-ten inches to his well-padded five-feet-two. Luckily, Lok seemed more interested in grabbing more filet mignon before the waiters disappeared. After all, the table cost him fifteen thousand Hong Kong dollars. Claire checked her watch.

Then the evening flipped over on its head.

‘Care to dance, Ribs?’

She thought she’d never hear those hard-worked Boston vowels again. She started at the feel of that familiar hand with its sinewy scar lashing the back of the knuckles lightly touching her shoulder. The other dangerous, clever hand rested lightly on the back of her gilt chair.

But Jim was a phantom. He’d disappeared seven years ago. She couldn’t meet his eyes in the lilting, candlelit shadows. She remembered his hands well enough.

Lok beamed and rose to his pudgy feet, ushering Claire straight into the arms of a missing person. She glanced at the rest of the table—all Cantonese businessmen and wives. They had no idea who Jim was. They were eager to rid themselves of this fortyish redheaded guay-po, a necessary foreign devil sandwiched between their bejeweled wives and mistresses.

Jim drew an astonished Claire on to the dance floor. She was almost his height and he pressed his wide, wry mouth against her ear. His firm embrace was just short of impropriety. She couldn’t help but smell the buried memories rising from the back of his neck.

She found her voice at last. ‘You never danced with me before.’

‘Didn’t come up before now,’ he murmured. ‘Operational guidance made it mandatory: One—see Claire Raymond’s pale bare back shimmering in an emerald silk dress. Two—make excuse to approach Claire from behind before she skitters away like a nervous doe. Three—hold Claire in my arms again.’

The music was a slow ‘Canto-pop’ ballad but held no associations for them. After a minute, Claire calmed down; she was once again the experienced foreign correspondent whom Jim had admired over a dozen professional lunches and then made love to in the less professional corners of Hong Kong.

The city had been a British colony then and she’d been single. Everything had changed.

‘You still have that collection of antique Chinese dressing gowns or did you retire those to the Hall of Hussies?’

‘I got married, Jim.’

Did that take him by surprise? She should have known better.

‘Correction. You got pregnant and then got married.’

Claire shivered. Jim held her more tightly. ‘It’s the air-conditioning. They always overdo it at these things.’

If he knew so much, why was he holding her like this? Why had he returned? From where?

Claire glanced up at the stage where her husband chatted to the Association for Hong Kong Benevolence to the Mainland’s chief poobah, an elderly Chinese as stiff as uncooked rice vermicelli. Xavier was softening up the old coot with war tales of working in northern China, southern Vietnam or North Korea. Her husband had taken off his glasses. At this distance, he wouldn’t see how tightly Jim held her.

Time and again, through lonely evenings staring across the Foreign Correspondents’ Club bar, Claire had retraced the contours of Jim’s face. The only memories he’d left behind were of that drawl that miraculously disappeared whenever he spoke foreign languages, those hard-hewn hands, and his disdainful humor. It was as if she had taken the Cheshire Cat for a lover, a cat that left only his smile, and then moved on to yet another one of his nine lives.

Claire had only one.

And now they were dancing as if it was the most normal thing in the world. She detected a slight limp—that wounded leg always threatened to become a deadly giveaway. Vietnam hadn’t killed him, only mutilated his right thigh and scarred the soul of an idealistic Catholic boy who had flown off in a 707 from Travis Air Force Base determined to match his old man’s combat record.

The music shifted to a new song. Jim showed no intention of letting her go.

‘Claire, if you lined up all these people here tonight end to end what would it be?’

‘A lot of wrinkled ball gowns?’

‘No, the Great Wall of Ass—’

‘Isn’t your date missing you?’

‘Okay, okay, I can play the gentleman. You remember that night I carried you across the flooded gutters on Ice House Street?’

‘Your leg slipped.’

‘And me a vet. How can you laugh?’

‘Veteran of what? Jim, where’ve you been? The first couple of weeks I figured there would be a letter or a call. After that I went numb, just filed my stories like a good little reporter. Since nobody knew about us, I couldn’t even talk about you. After a while, you just didn’t exist anymore.’

‘That’s it?’ Jim pulled back from her to examine her face and she saw his expression in full—one eyebrow raised in affectionate inquiry. His wavy black hair could place him in a Marseilles market, a Lebanese accountant’s office, or a South American news bureau. You could assign him anywhere. So useful, that Jim McIntyre—and so ephemeral.

‘Yeah, that’s it.’

‘I knew you could handle it. That’s why we had such a good time together. And now you’re the happily married wife of a Swiss do-gooder big shot.’

He ran a finger across the small of her back exposed by the daring drape of her silk dress. That was unfair.

‘I thought of asking you to dance once,’ he said, ‘but it was no good for a respectable news hound to be seen with the Prince of Darkness. Now, we’re just another couple on the dance floor,’ he shrugged. ‘Let’s have lunch tomorrow at our old Indian place, for old time’s sake.’

‘Sorry, no time. Xavier and I are going out of town in a couple of days.’

‘Beijing? Shanghai?’

‘No, Tibet.’ She bit her tongue. It was none of Jim’s business. His shoulder stiffened.

‘The Chinese aren’t letting journos into Tibet. Sealed it off.’

‘We’re visiting a medical project.’

Stop, she told herself, shut up. ‘I haven’t gotten into Tibet on a working visa in ten years.’

Jim shrugged. ‘Sounds fun. Wish I could go. My dad was there fifty years ago. Officially out of bounds for me.’ The music stopped. Jim released her only enough to look into her eyes.

‘No lunch? Sure?’

He wanted something. She shook her head and returned to the grinning Mr Lok. She’d left a smudge of her make-up on Jim’s lapel—the only intimacy left to them now.

Or so she thought.

Chapter Two

—Tuesday midnight—

Kelsang watched Dr Jin examine the knees to measure the gangrene’s progress. This time prudence meant cutting more, not less. He shook his head gravely at the surgical team and resumed his gruesome task anew.

Kelsang handed over the largest of three saws, but her thoughts drifted to Sonam waiting for her lover back at the little training clinic.

There’d been no time to explain the implications of what Drakpa faced psychologically or physically. An above-the-knee reduced his chances for independence. A really good set of prostheses would be hard to get, given his police file. The project’s meager budget went to saving lives, not improving them. How much guilt could his girlfriend bear, watching her virile lover reduced to this? What kind of relationship endured such humiliation, recrimination, and helplessness?

She’d forgotten to ask Sonam about Drakpa’s family. Buddhist society placed less influence on physical traits than western society—no one would reject a cripple—but someone would have to feed and care for Drakpa. His best chance was with family or the monks at Tashilhunpo Monastery, not with a penniless girl in political trouble.

Kelsang must seek help for him soon. Dr Chamba kept his head down and stuck to his wards and his research. And the monks might refuse. These days were hard for the monastery, where the ranks of religious were terrorized by Chinese purges of ‘rebellious elements.’

Drakpa’s recuperation might give her six months or so to arrange the rest of his life.

***

Had Xavier spotted Jim’s enfolding embrace? Probably not. Claire knew his mind wasn’t on the award gala, but in Tibet. He was obsessed over a secret report that someone in his medical project up there was tipping off the Chinese police about political escapees.

He stood up to accept the bizarre little award placed in his arms:

‘. . . You all seem so well-informed on our projects—the Henan nutrition survey, Shenyang infant respiratory, the drug addiction program in Kunming but then, I guess you should know because you paid for them all, and my agency thanks you.’

There were a few laughs.

‘Tonight I’ll tell you about a new project on the borders of north-western China, an urban medical training school which also acts as a supply base for a rural medical clinic some five hours’ drive away.’

Across the darkened ballroom, Jim’s gaze bored like a laser into her bare back.

‘We have a local staff of four. In the school, a doctor and nurse perform minor operations and treat malnutrition, and snow emergencies. Cases are relayed to them from the rural station by a second doctor-and-nurse team. In addition to accident and frostbite victims, respiratory diseases, and near-starvation, they treat dog bites, electric shock, rape, and trauma to internal organs, not to mention head injuries.’

Claire glanced at the matron opposite her. The society beauty’s eyes widened at the words electric shock. Was the guest of honor treading into dark political territory in a city that made apolitical behavior its watchword for survival? Was he toying with his Hong Kong donors? The new fashion was to discard ties with the departed Brits and proclaim ethnic brotherhood with the mainland.

He’d omitted the Tibetan names, the beatings and tortures with cattle prods, iron rods and sticks driven with nails. Still, Lok shifted uncomfortably until Xavier wrapped up his thanks.

Bowls of oranges and small perfume bottles in silver paper landed on each table, the green light from the staff that the gala was over. The ballroom’s full complement of stark ceiling lights flew on, cueing the blinking, bloated mob to race for the doors.

Claire hugged Xavier. ‘Dog bites, rape, electric batons? I’m not sure how popular you’ll be from now on.’

‘My comments were unassailably neutral, almost Swiss, you might say,’ Xavier laughed.

‘Too much talk about Tibet might make fundraising difficult.’ From right behind Claire, Jim stretched his hand out to Xavier and looked at Claire.

‘This is James Francis McIntyre, an old— friend from the US Consulate. Jim, this is my husband, Xavier Vonalp.’

‘I wonder how long it took this mob to realize that their fellow nationals being treated in your clinic weren’t Chinese cousins at all. You must know a lot about the situation.’

Xavier demurred. ‘My information comes from our local staff in Tibet.’

‘I’m sorry we haven’t met before,’ Jim said, thrusting his hands back into his pockets as if his tuxedo trousers were an old pair of paint-stained khakis. ‘Maybe we could meet for lunch this week and compare notes?’

Claire scrutinized Jim. ‘You said you couldn’t go to Tibet.’

‘Well, officially, it falls into Beijing’s bailiwick. Like your husband, most of my information comes from our local staff.’ He smiled at Xavier hoping the nuance had found him a friend.

Xavier kept his distance from American diplomats, always so inquisitive about his regular visits to North Korea. He let Claire be his buffer.

‘I’m overloaded these days, but Claire’s bags are packed. Why don’t you let him give you some background? I’d certainly appreciate anything he can tell us. Sorry, I’ve—’ A fussing charity donor pulled Xavier to one side.

Jim wasn’t so easily deterred. ‘Well,’—he winked with mock resignation— ‘then I would suggest an Indian restaurant I know, not far from the Foreign Correspondents’ Club? I’m sure you’ll like it.’

‘I don’t think so,’ Claire repeated.

‘Twelve-thirty?’

Xavier put his arm around Claire. ‘She’ll be there. Just don’t