Shan remembered the letter Yara had given him. He had to write a letter of his own to his son Ko to go with it as a cover, for Tan had seen to it that Shan’s letters to Ko would not be opened by the prison staff. He drained his cup and stood.

“The dead man’s name?” Lhakpa asked. “For my prayers.”

Shan hesitated. He felt a strange bond with the man who had been executed. “Chou Folan,” he said, using the man’s Chinese name. He instantly felt a pang of guilt, yet he sensed that he had secret, unfinished business with Metok Rentzig and was not ready to share that business with others.

“I shall pray that his soul finds harmony,” the snow monk declared. Although he had said he would pray for Shan as well, it seemed he did not have much hope that Shan would find harmony.

Shan awoke before dawn and sat on the edge of his bed, looking at his scattered belongings in the dim light that streamed in from the pole lamp in the courtyard behind the station. He, like Lhakpa, had taken winter quarters, moving into the apartment that was set aside for Yangkar’s constable, but he longed for the solitude of his little farmhouse above the town. The cracks in the walls of the long-abandoned building made it impossible to keep the frigid winds at bay, however, and the roof leaked in heavy rainstorms, but still it was his home. In the sterile quarters of the building behind the station compound, he felt like an intruder, just as he increasingly felt like an intruder in the constable’s uniform.

He washed then stepped outside. Tara, Lhakpa’s goat, was lying on the step to the back door of the jail. Shan filled a bucket of water for her then sat and rubbed her back as she looked up with her moist, strangely beseeching eyes. After several minutes he walked around the building and onto the town square. It had once been the courtyard of the huge monastery that had dominated the town, and in the grayness before dawn he often fancied he could hear the morning prayers from ranks of chanting monks echoing across the empty square.

The kitchen of the noodle shop was already filled with the steam of boiling pots and the scent of the cardamom Marpa used in his spiced momos, Tibetan dumplings. Shan poured himself a cup of tea and sat at the little table along the back wall where the proprietor usually took his own meals. Marpa left his young nephew to watch the pots and brought two bowls of porridge to the table.

“The snow monk still with you?” Marpa asked as he lifted a spoonful of porridge.

Shan hesitated. His duty, they all knew, was to turn an unregistered monk over to Public Security. “Why wouldn’t he be?”