Beautiful Ghosts by Eliot Pattison

has he spoken here?” Shan asked the man wrapped in the blanket, the one who had tried to trip him previously. The man pushed his open palm toward Shan. As Shan dropped into it the coins the stranger in the alley had given him he asked himself again why Tan would permit begging. I would prefer Surya to go, Tan had said. As if someone other than Tan wanted him to stay. And if they let Surya beg in the central square, they could not stop the others. But why Surya? Not because of the killing at Zhoka. He recalled the three strangers and the way they had examined the thangka on the steps. Because he was an artist?
    The man pushed back the blanket from his head, as if Shan had now bought the right to see his face. “He sang some songs, in a whisper,” the second beggar said in a nervous voice. His cheeks were disfigured with jagged scars, the kind raised by beatings with truncheons. He repeatedly glanced toward the steps. “Some old children’s songs, like my mother used to sing to me. He asked me about Chinese magic.”
    “Magic?”
    “He had never seen trucks or cars. He called them Chinese carts. He asked how they could move without horses or yaks.” The beggar looked at the coins in his hand with a reluctant, frustrated expression, as if they obliged him to answer Shan’s questions. “He asked if the great abbot could make them fly in the air, too.” The man glanced up at Shan. His nose had a jagged angle to it, the look of having been broken.
    “Abbot? What abbot?”
    “That’s what I asked him. He said he met a powerful abbot in the mountains, who could make great magic.” The man glanced warily at Shan. “Is it true?” he asked in a more urgent, lower voice. “Has an abbot come for the people?”
    Shan looked in confusion toward the distant peaks. “I don’t know what is happening in the mountains.” He studied Surya again. “Did he say what they asked him?”
    The man shrugged. “They always ask the same things, don’t they?”
    “You took his apple,” Shan observed.
    The man shrugged again. “Look at him. He no longer wants anything of this world. I’ve seen it before, I saw the way they threw him out the door, the way he cried when they left, because they wouldn’t listen anymore. He said he had to go to the place with the wire, where old lamas are kept until they die.” The beggar stuffed the coins into his pocket and pushed the blanket back over his head.
    Shan shifted through his pockets and found a small tsa-tsa, a clay tablet shaped in the image of a saint. He dropped the tsa-tsa into the man’s lap. “You didn’t say what Surya told them.” While the monk had not seemed interested in Shan’s questions, and may have ignored those of interrogators, he still seemed to believe there were things that had to be said.
    The beggar pushed the blanket from his head with a frown, then slowly cupped his hands around the clay image. A strange mix of resentment and gratitude filled his eyes when he replied. “They asked about caves, about shrines, about symbols in paintings. They showed him some old thangkas. He kept saying he was a murderer. He kept saying he didn’t know where any more paintings were.”
    “He told you this?”
    “I heard.”
    Shan grimaced, chiding himself for not seeing the obvious. “You’re an informer.”
    “Sure. You think I would sit in Tan’s square if they didn’t tell me to?”
    “Why would they ask about paintings?”
    Again the man shrugged. “Must be a new campaign,” he said, meaning a political initiative. “That was all the old man said, except a warning as they tossed him outside. He said earth taming temples are too dangerous for people like them. As if they would care.” The beggar stuffed the tsa-tsa inside his blanket and covered his head again.
    As if they would care. But the old Tibetans would care very much about an earth temple. The beggar’s words echoed in Shan’s mind as he walked through the alleyways. It did not seem possible, but