The colonel hesitated as they reached the heavy iron gate of the compound on the outskirts of Lhasa. He was more nervous than Shan had ever seen him, and for a moment he thought Tan was going to tell his driver to turn around. But then Tan opened his door and, confirming that no one sat in the decrepit gatehouse, unfastened the latch himself and gestured the car inside as he pushed the gate open.

“There was a time,” Tan said when they began driving through a grove of trees, “when people called that a one-way gate, because so many visitors left in a van out the back, either dead or wishing they were dead. The Commissar had one of those wide-brimmed hats the Tibetans wear but he decided it was a cowboy hat, like in the American movies, and he got a long revolver with a leather holster that he liked to use. If you were one of his confidants and he wanted you to get rid of someone for him, he would talk about the intended victim in a disappointed tone then hand you a bullet. That’s all. He never said, ‘I want him dead’ or ‘get rid of him.’ Just the bullet.”

Shan sensed an unusual tension in the colonel’s voice.

Tan lit a cigarette, exhaling the smoke with a rasping breath. “Years ago, I went to see him here with the quartermaster from my regiment,” the colonel continued. He seemed to think Shan was not sufficiently fearful of the old serpent. “The Commissar had invited us to dinner. We had a good meal, just the Commissar and the two of us. Sat with cigarettes and brandy afterward. We finally rose to go and he walked a few steps from us and said, ‘I’m calling you out, you thief!’ and drew his pistol. He shot the quartermaster through the heart, right there, in his house. Then he laughed and offered me another drink. ‘Better this way,’ he said, and then, ‘You’ll sign a statement that it was a suicide.’ It was only the next day that I found out that a special investigative unit had sent him a report proving that the quartermaster had been selling army supplies on the black market for years. He was going to be executed in any event, though I always wondered if his real crime had been not sharing his takings with the Commissar. It was never corruption for him to get a piece. He just called it a gate fee because he was the gatekeeper of Tibet. That was one of his names for himself. The Gatekeeper, or the Avenging Dragon, for a while even Buddha’s Fist, when he was purging senior lamas,” Tan recounted as life-sized statues of Tibetan gods and saints began appearing on both sides of the driveway.

“He’s assimilated,” Shan said in a brittle voice. The figures were trophies, looted from temples and monasteries.