They were admitted through a high wooden gate into a garden with a marble swimming pool beside which were a solitary chaise lounge, a bar, and a wooden hot tub on a platform. Two attractive young Tibetan women in nurses’ uniforms stood beside the tub with towels at the ready. The figure in the steaming tub had a small towel over his head, keeping his face in shadow. The man stayed seated, not moving the towel as he spoke.

“Fuck me!” His voice was like the cackle of a hen. “You stayed alive, Tan, you stubborn son of a bitch! Bullets, bayonets, cannons, cancer. Nothing can kill you! As indestructible as one of your tanks!”

“Almost as indestructible as you, you scrawny bastard,” Tan replied in an even voice.

“People have tried to chew me up for years,” the Commissar rejoined. “But they always spit me out.”

“Because you’re just a sorry sack of gristle,” Tan said.

As if to prove Tan right, the old man stood. His naked body was shriveled in every respect. One of the nurses reached out to help him from the tub as the other readied a towel. He pulled off the cloth covering his head as she dried him. He was as bald as an egg. His face was so devoid of flesh it seemed almost skeletal. His skin was like yellowed parchment, stained with age spots.

“You’ll stay for lunch of course,” he said as a nurse draped a robe over his shoulders.

They dined at a small table in a large chamber that emulated an imperial banquet room, with faux enameled pillars and murals of peacocks and dragons on the walls. The Commissar, now dressed in a stylish version of a Mao suit, with dragons embroidered on the cuffs, studied Shan as he poured wine. He nodded and turned to Tan. “This one’s been stomped on a few times,” he observed to the colonel.

“Inspector Shan started his career in Beijing and has served under me in Lhadrung for the past several years,” Tan replied, as if it explained much.

The Commissar’s stern face broke into a grin. “I never trust a man who doesn’t show a few scars,” he declared and leaned over to pound Shan on the back.

Shan pointed to a short line of raised skin above his eye. “That was the first, from the edge of a metal ruler swung by a teacher in a reeducation camp. I was seven. All downhill from there.”

“How did you earn her wrath?” the old man asked.

“I explained that the picture on the wall of the Chairman with a clear face wasn’t real, because the real Chairman had moles on his face.”

The Commissar burst into cackling laughter, then raised his thin brows, in mock alarm. “Reckless behavior! Stand for the truth at all costs, eh?” he said and raised his glass to Shan. “He’ll do,” he said to Tan. “He’ll do.”