Текст книги "The Lord of Death"

Автор книги: Eliot Pattison

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 13 (всего у книги 21 страниц)

Suddenly the American was back, brandishing a long hoe, swinging it to clear a radius of several feet around Shan.

“We can finish this here!” the blacksmith snarled. “We will have justice for once! A pyre can hold three as easily as one!” He moved forward, followed by the man with the club and the one with an ax.

Suddenly Ama Apte was at Shan’s side, holding out a hand from which hung a necklace with an ivory skull as its pendant. She extended it in an arc, taking in the entire crowd, causing them to step back, then dangled it in front of the blacksmith’s face.

“It’s enough, Ama Apte,” the blacksmith said loudly, though his voice had more pleading than anger in it now.

“It will not end here, nor with Tenzin’s pyre. The mountain is still at work,” Ama Apte declared, then stepped between Shan and Yates, who had lowered his hoe. She lifted Shan’s arm. “This one has been bonded to the dead of the mountain,” she declared, then startled Yates by raising his wrist in her other hand, showing the Tibetans his missing fingertip. “And the mountain has marked this one too,” she declared. “She has plans for them. My dice have confirmed it, this very night.” She kept the arms extended, squeezing them tightly. She smelled of aloe, used by many Tibetans for healing. On the heel of the hand that held Shan was a patch of dried blood. As she moved, there was a soft jingling, from her silver necklaces, and Shan recalled the words of the driver from the ambushed prison bus. When the yeti had gone inside the bus-to steal the prisoner files, Shan now knew-the driver had heard tiny bells.

The astrologer’s challenge was not enough for the angry men in the front, but her words were like magic for the others. Their rancor was gone. Some nodded and melted back into the shadows outside. Kypo slipped between his mother and the blacksmith, fixing the smith with challenge in his face until the bigger man muttered and broke away, taking his companions out into the street.

Shan turned to the dead sherpa’s sister as the chamber emptied. “We will help you wash him again,” he said in an apologetic tone. Kypo turned and soon brought new sticks of incense, his wife basins of water. The sister accepted their help in the preparation but would not let them touch the body again. As Shan and Yates watched from the shadows of the stalls Shan asked the American about the night before Tenzin had died.

“Three sherpas had gone up to scout locations for our staging camps,” the American explained, and offered a familiar description of the strenuous work involved in establishing a new line of support camps above the base camp, testing ice ledges, anchoring safety lines along the most difficult rock faces, trying to locate resting points protected from the frigid, incessant winds of the upper slopes. The three had planned to stay together but sudden blizzard conditions had separated the party on their descent after they had pitched a tent for an upper camp and Tenzin had continued down while the others had given up and gone back to the upper tent for the night. The next morning Tenzin, always the tireless worker, had announced on his radio that he would begin setting up a practice climb for the customers who would have to wait at the camp to acclimatize. When the other sherpas finally arrived they could not find him and radioed Megan, their climb captain. A search was begun from above and below. Two hours later Megan spotted his body in her binoculars. “There were over a hundred people at base camp that night,” Yates explained, “and since the sky had cleared, leaving a bright moon, any of them could have made the climb to the camp where Tenzin was sleeping.”

“The most important question,” Shan mused, “isn’t who could have made the climb, it is why a sherpa who just arrived from Nepal for the season so threatened someone that he had to be killed.”

The bonfire in the square had begun to die as Shan and Yates slipped outside, Shan pointing the way to Ama Apte’s house. They had reached the side of the square when Kypo stepped in front of them. “When did you meet my mother?” he demanded of the American in an unsettled tone.

“I never have, until now,” Yates replied, with a pointed glance toward Shan that said he had not forgotten the strange encounter with her at the base camp. Shan saw that the American was gazing at the truncated finger Ama Apte had raised to the crowd. “It’s nothing,” he added hastily. “She noticed my finger and decided to use it to help quiet the mob.”

As his two companions stared uneasily at each other, a red light flickered in the sky along the southern horizon then disappeared behind a peak. The mountain commandos sometimes patrolled with infrared scanners, and outside the Everest zone were known to shoot at anything that moved within a mile of the border, whether man or beast. Shan watched the light absently, nearly overcome with fatigue, following Kypo toward his mother’s house, past the center square. Half the villagers still lingered there, listening to a man’s harangue about how Religious Affairs had destroyed a farmer’s barley stores because the Bureau suspected he had helped the fugitive monks, how the knobs would do the same to all of them when they came.

Another red light appeared momentarily between two ridges to the north.

Shan, now wide awake and frightened to his core, grabbed Kypo’s arm. “You have to send them home!” he insisted. “Put out the fire and send them home!”

“What are you talking about?”

“The knobs are coming tonight, not tomorrow! They want the village worked up, they want resistance so they can justify detention of every man here.”

Kypo raised his lantern close to Shan’s face, searching it as if hoping for a sign of deception, then just shook his head despondently. “It’s gone too far. Some of them have been drinking. They wanta fight with the knobs.”

“Then your mother-“ “My mother,” Kypo shot back, “has put herself in enough jeopardy tonight.”

A vise seemed to be tightening around Shan’s chest. He knew what Public Security was capable of, but he was probably one of only a few in the village who had seen it firsthand. He stared forlornly at the fire, seeing in his mind’s eye how the destruction of Tumkot would become another of the tragic tales told at campfires, another story of Tibetans battered by a century they hadn’t chosen to live in.

“Then get Gyalo away.”

“What are you talking about?” Kypo protested. “I don’t know-”

“There’s no more time for games. He is at your mother’s house. Get him out, back to Yates’s truck, back to the sunken chamber at my stable. And get me four sober men who can be trusted.”

Major Cao said nothing as Shan opened the door and slid behind the wheel of his utility vehicle parked below the village, did not react when four dark figures took up position around the vehicle. He was used to figures in shadow, and would never for an instant have believed anyone but other knobs would be so bold.

Shan put his hands on the wheel, in plain sight, before speaking. “You’re going to call off the raid tonight,” he declared.

Cao’s head snapped up, his hand went to his holster, then he froze as he took notice of the figures outside the truck.

“You’re a dead man, Shan,” he hissed.

“Your disadvantage, Major, is that you don’t understand investigations for the top ranks in Beijing. But I carried them out for twenty years. Everything is in motion, everything is in play, including the investigator. Especially the investigator. They will turn on you in an instant. The number of antisocial Tibetans you arrest won’t matter. Have you asked yourself why they sent you, an investigator from Lhasa, and not someone from Beijing for such an important investigation? You are the failsafe. If things don’t go well you become a conspirator. A few adjustments to your investigation file and suddenly you’re part of the crime.”

“I will start with the bones of your feet,” Cao said. “I will keep you alive for a month or two. But after the first hour you will never walk again.”

“Do you think Madame Zheng is here for the mountain air? Have you even bothered to ask what her role is?”

“An observer.”

“No. She is from the Ministry of Justice. I don’t know her but I know her type. She is credentialed as a judge prosecutor, I wager. And for you that makes her the most dangerous person in the county right now.”

“Ridiculous. She just sits in meetings and takes notes.”

“She will ask for your file. That’s when you know they are beginning to doubt your ability, beginning to consider their own version of the crime.”

There was just enough moonlight for Shan to see the wince on Cao’s face.

“A Public Security bus is ambushed and a state minister killed a stone’s throw away. She knows these events must be related, and every hour you lose pretending otherwise puts you that much closer to disgrace.” Cao seemed to stop breathing for a moment. Shan’s guess about Madame Zheng was right. “You have a few more days at most. Then new reports will be written, your name will go into the file.”

“You are delusional. I have fifteen years with the Bureau. That would never happen.”

“You have all the proof you need that it does.”

Cao’s head moved toward Shan.

“I am that proof. Read my file again.”

Cao was silent for a long moment. “For all I know, you were Tan’s partner in the killing.”

“The other element you don’t appreciate is that there are foreigners here.” As Shan spoke, the right side of the vehicle began to sag. As Shan had instructed, Kypo’s men were releasing air from the tires. It was the subtlest act of resistance but enough to cause Cao to hesitate. He had no way of knowing how many of the shadowy figures lurked in the darkness around his car.

“There’s nowhere you can hide, Shan,” he snarled. “When you attack a Public Security officer your life is forfeit.”

“Pay attention to the subtleties, Major,” Shan replied in a level voice. “At this point in your career they make all the difference. This is just an informal conversation. Let’s call it career counseling. What you are doing tonight will make headlines in the Western press. Climbers and trekkers from America and Europe are all over this area, most with cameras. By noon tomorrow they will be giving interviews by satellite telephone to reporters in their home countries. The jackbooted oppressor attacks a hamlet of peaceful Tibetans, practically in the shadow of Everest, as a pretext so a Public Security bureaucrat can divert attention from his failed investigation. You may be under tremendous pressure now, yet you still have a chance to come out victorious. But your career is over with the first phone call from an embassy to the Minister of Public Security. They will find you a latrine on the Vietnamese border that needs cleaning for the next ten years.”

“My case is finished. I have the murderer. The trial will be next week.”

“No. You and I know you wouldn’t be here tonight if you were finished. You never had to deal with a prisoner who wouldn’t speak. You have to have evidence from some other source. You have to dirty your hands. That’s why you’re here, to test the market for new witnesses.”

“We’ll just include you in the sweep,” Cao spat. “You’ll be lost in the confusion. When you have no papers no one needs to account for you. A nobody can become nothing in an instant.”

Shan gave an exaggerated sigh as he lifted the door handle. “I leave you to your witticisms. I think I told you before you are overeducated for your job. Too much wit, not enough judgment. You fail to grasp the most fundamental truth of those you work for. The higher you aspire, the lower must be the denominator on which you base your actions. I fear for you, Major. You may not survive as long as I do.”

“I promise I will survive long enough to destroy you.”

“You will have to choose. You can destroy me or you can find out the truth of what happened that day on the road to the Base Camp.”

As Shan began to open the door Cao spoke again. “I didn’t come just looking for hooligans tonight. There is a matter of a body that mysteriously vanished from the experimental hospital. Breach of a highly classified facility, that is an attack on the state. Theft of evidence in a capital case. Now this attack on me. I have enough to shoot you several times over.”

“I might understand losing a hand here, a leg there, but a whole body,” Shan replied evenly. “That sounds like negligence.”

“Imagine my surprise when I found out that you were responsible for taking that same body down from Everest, back to this village. I have learned to study my enemies, before I dissect them. You are a man, like me, of fanatical devotion to his responsibilities.”

Shan put one foot out the door, silently surveying the surrounding shadows, for a fleeting, desperate moment telling himself that there were men in the night who, with one word from Shan, would be eager to make a man like Cao disappear. “You are a victim of your own techniques, Major Cao. You need to speak with the doctor who performed the autopsy on that sherpa. Forget the report sent to you for the file. Make him understand that you need the truth. If you had bothered to look at the body even you could have seen that those two bullets were shot into him after he was dead, bullets with a much larger caliber bullet. But he wasmurdered, killed in his sleep on the slopes above the base camp. The foreign expedition leaders have photographs, have the evidence that proves it.

“When those foreigners release the photos of a leading sherpa murdered on Everest and tell how the government hid the body, it will be like an atom bomb detonating in the climbing community. No one will pay to climb on the Chinese side of the mountain, not for years. How many millions was the minister projecting for her new economic model? Fifty million? A hundred? You will be the man who lost it all. You will be the one who shamed China on the global stage. Your star will not fade. It will be extinguished overnight.”

These were were terms Cao understood. The major had no reply.

Shan studied his shadowed face, creased with worry now. “I will make you a deal, Major Cao, one that may yet save you.”

“You have nothing to offer me,” Cao snarled.

“Go to Sarma gompa tonight. Discover the next murder victim.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Director Xie is dead.”

“Impossible! I saw him a few hours ago.”

“You have a satellite phone I believe, as does Xie. Call him.”

Cao’s eyes seemed to glow as he glared at Shan, but after a long moment he opened the console, pulled out his phone and punched in a number. Shan could hear it ring, five times, ten times, before Cao shut it off and stared at it.

“I found his body at sunset,” Shan continued. “No one will have reported it. Seal the site. Call Lhasa. Tell them you believe it should be kept quiet to avoid rumors of civil disorder. Say it to them before they have a chance to say it to you. Tell them you need time to resolve it quietly, for the good of the state. Tell them you are following leads to discover why Xie was alone at the gompa. Then decide what to say to Madame Zheng when she asks about it. Lhasa will call Beijing. Beijing will call her. When you see her next, your head better touch the floor.”

The anger on Cao’s face was slowly replaced with worry. “Are you certain Xie is dead?”

“He is extremely dead, as you will see.”

“Why would you ask for a deal? You just gave me everything.”

“Find the body at the back of the gompa ruins. Call your headquarters. Arrange for an ambulance from the yeti factory to secretly take away what’s left of the body. All I ask is that you cancel the removal order on Colonel Tan.”

“Why would I do that?”

“To save yourself the embarrassment of having to recall him from prison when the real killer is found. To pay for the favor I am doing you.”

“You have already told me what I need to know.”

Shan gazed out at the moon rising between two peaks. “Then I will save your career. Keep Tan in town and I will give you the real murderer.”

“The antenna attached to the car has been disabled,” Shan added as he climbed out. “There will be men hidden in the rocks. If you don’t stay in the truck for at least an hour I cannot be responsible for what will happen.”

As Cao lit a cigarette Shan saw his hand tremble. “When this is over, Shan,” the major spat, “I will have you on your knees begging me to shoot you.”

Chapter Eleven

Gyalo had gone to another level of existence. He cursed the gods, rattled off the names of the levels of hell as if he were being examined by some ancient guru.

“All the way here,” Kypo explained in a pained voice as he sat on a stool in the sunken chapel, “he shouted verses from sutras and tried to get out of the truck. I had to hold him down.”

It was no surprise the drunken lama had been left for dead. One arm had been broken, the side of his head had been kicked until it looked like a pulpy, rotten fruit. Two fingers were splinted in place. An eye was swollen shut. Blood trickled from his mouth where a tooth had been knocked out. Whoever had attacked him and thrown him into the pit had thought they were disposing of a dead man.

“I sent Yates away,” Kypo explained. “He was very upset. He said he had work to do at the base camp but he acted like it was his fault this had happened.”

Shan examined the broken arm. It had been expertly set and splinted. “The American did this?”

“My mother. When we brought him to her, her first words were ‘let the old bastard die’ and she turned her back on him. But a few minutes later she came back with her first aid kit and worked on him. She said to tell him the gods would look after him despite himself. He woke up and starting shouting like this.”

“Saying the same things as now?” Shan asked.

“Mostly.” Kypo thought a moment, reconsidering. “He chanted monk’s words, charms against demons, in the voice of a terrified child. It was as if he were more scared of us than those who attacked him. He reached for me, and said ‘just let me die.’ She hit him.”

Shan looked up, not sure he had heard correctly. “Your mother hit Gyalo?”

Kypo nodded. “With a small club. She knocked him out. She said she couldn’t risk having neighbors hear, said he needed to be still so she could set his arm. But she seemed glad for the excuse to strike him.” He searched Shan’s face, as if hoping for an answer.

“How did she know him? I thought she never came to town.”

Kypo shrugged. “And Gyalo never left town. For a while, before she knocked him out, he was trying to crawl to the door.” He shrugged again. “He’s been crazy for years. An old man. An alcoholic.”

“I’ve known many Tibetans a lot older.”

“Old enough to have known another Tibet, I mean.”

Shan chewed on the words, sensing the passing, like a leaf on the wind, of a shard of truth. Once all of his investigations had been linear, one fact linking to the next in quick progression leading to the truth. But in Tibet all his puzzles were like giant tangkas, the traditional religious paintings with overlaps of deities, suffering humans, protector demons, even alternate worlds, linked not by events so much as expectation and hope, by relationships in other, earlier Buddhist lives.

“Has your mother always been an astrologer?” Shan asked.

“Of course. It is who she is.”

“Was her father an astrologer? Her mother?”

Kypo frowned, bending over the former lama. He was not going to reply.

They washed Gyalo in silence, dressing him in clean clothes from Shan’s meager wardrobe. Shan lit more butter lamps. Kypo produced a small cone of incense and lit it by Gyalo’s pallet.

“He could still die,” Kypo observed in a heavy voice. “I think he wants to die. What will the town do without him? People call him a mascot. But he’s something else, something none of us understand.”

“I think he is more like a teacher,” Shan said. “One who takes on roles to make us understand. Except long ago he lost the ability to go back to himself.”

Gyalo stirred, coughing, as Shan held a cup of water to his lips. The old Tibetan ignored it, instead grabbing his arm and studying it, close to his eyes, as if to confirm he was real. There was nothing but bitterness in his eyes when he looked up and recognized Shan. “I know I’m in hell now,” he muttered, then drifted into sleep.

Shan sat on a blanket in the corner of the dim chamber, intending to mentally reconstruct his puzzle using its new pieces. But the exhaustion he had been fighting finally overwhelmed him. When he opened his eyes briefly an hour later Kypo was gone. Later when he opened them for a few moments Jomo was there, with a kettle of hot tea, helping his father to drink. Much later, when he fully awoke, Jomo was gone and several fresh momo dumplings were stacked on a low stool between Shan and Gyalo.

The former lama sat upright, gazing with his one good eye at the dim images on the walls. He wore an oddly vacant expression, showing no pain, none of his usual alcoholic haze. He stared at the image of the central demon on the opposite wall. It was Mahakala the protector, in his four armed blue form, holding a skull cup and a sword, draped in a garland of human heads.

“I knew a place like this once,” the old Tibetan said in a ragged voice. “but that one was destroyed.”

“The tunnels that connected to the temple were filled with debris,” Shan explained. “But there was an exit through the stable, probably forgotten long before the gompa was destroyed. I cleaned away enough to be able to enter.”

“Why would you do such a thing?”

“All these deities. It felt like they had been buried alive. They needed to be released.”

“You were scared of them,” Gyalo growled. “They put you under a spell.”

“They put me under a spell,” Shan readily admitted.

The moist, rattling cackle that came from Gyalo’s throat became a groan as the Tibetan clutched his side, doubling over in pain. Blood was seeping into the bandage on the arm that was not broken, but Shan had no fresh one to replace it.

“Who did this to you, Gyalo?”

“I need a drink. A real drink.”

“Of the handful of people who know you are here, not one will bring you alcohol.”

“Then I may as well die.”

“Who did this?” Shan repeated.

When Gyalo finally spoke it was to the demon on the wall, as if he preferred to converse with the old god. “Two strangers in dark sweatshirts, hoods over their heads.” His voice was dry as stone. “Big men, built like yaks. They didn’t introduce themselves. Someone else stood in the shadows, as if enjoying the show.”

“What did they want?”

“They spoke a few words of greeting at first, and gave me a bottle, like maybe they came for a blessing. After I drank some they said more words.”

“What words?”

“Questions. Who had spoken with me about the Yama temple that had been up on the mountains. Who had I given a sickle to, with the writing on the blade.” A spasm of pain racked his body, and he spat up blood again. He began shivering.

Shan lifted an tattered sheepskin chubacoat from a peg by the entry and covered him with it. “So you told them about the American and me.”

Gyalo gazed at the demon. “Not at first.”

Shan looked up in surprise. Surely the drunken lama had not invited the beating by trying to protect Yates and Shan.

“In the cupboard,” the Tibetan said abruptly, and pointed to a little alcove in the dusty stone wall.

“There is no cupboard,” Shan said, confused. The small squared-out space in the wall might well have once held shelves but no trace of them remained.

With what seemed like a great effort Gyalo lifted a finger and pointed insistently at the alcove. Shan stood, carrying a lamp to show that the space was empty. But when the Tibetan grunted and jabbed his finger again he tapped his fingers along the surface of the wall until, on the left side at shoulder height, his drumming reached something hollow. He pressed his fingers into the dust-encrusted stone, scratching until he found the lip of a board and pulled. With a small cloud of dust, a door cracked open. He reached inside and extracted a six-inch painted figure, carved of wood. It was Mahakala, Protector of the Faithful, in his fierce blue skinned form, matching the painting on the wall. Shan blew away the coating of dust from the figure and placed it on the stool beside Gyalo.

The Tibetan seemed to relax as he saw the figure, and for a moment Shan thought he saw the lama of fifty years earlier. But then he began to sway, and he managed only a few words before passing out again. “Look at the old fool,” he said, speaking of the little god, “what does he know?”

Shan watched the forlorn lama a long time, working and reworking the puzzle in his mind, before gathering up several musty sacks for a pillow and draping the blanket over the sleeping Tibetan.

He did not seek the constable’s help this time before venturing to the rear of the jail. The cleaning crew arrived exactly on time, saying nothing as he joined them again. The invisible workers who kept Tibet functioning were often invisible to each other as well.

Cao had cancelled the order to transport his prisoner out of the county. Tan lay on the pallet, one filthy blanket covering his body, another rolled up for a pillow. His face was in shadow, but Shan saw Tan’s breath momentarily catch as he reached the cell door.

“I need to know how you knew the minister,” Shan said. “I need to know why you needed to see her.”

Tan stood up, retrieved the tin cup from the sink and, fixing Shan with a steady gaze, urinated in it. When he was finished he hobbled forward, dragging one foot.

“I am encouraged you still have your bodily functions,” Shan observed as he retreated several steps.

“Get the hell out of here!” Tan snarled. His face was directly in the light now. Shan could see the way it sagged, could see the bruises and lacerations. Although the eyes still burned with a cool fire, there was no arrogance left in them, only hatred.

“I had thought the killer had somehow stolen your gun. But then I discovered the minister had entertained someone in her room the night before her death. I have struggled to find some theory to explain how the killer got your gun. You would not have surrendered it without a struggle, and if it had been stolen you would have raised the shrillest of alarms with Public Security.

I have learned to be suspicious of complicated explanations. I find the simplest one is likely the truth. You were the one she entertained, and shetook your gun. You were too embarrassed to report that you lost it to a minister of state. A female minister.”

Tan, apparently deciding he could not reach Shan, extended his arm through the bars and poured his urine in an arc across the front of the cell, as if casting a charm to ward off an evil spirit. Before he finished his hand started twitching, so that the contents of the cup splattered onto his hand. Tan dropped the cup and clamped the hand under his other arm.

Shan silently retrieved the mop and bucket he had left at the end of the corridor, mopped up the urine, then located another cup in an empty cell and tossed it onto Tan’s pallet. He then extracted a sack from his pocket and extended it through the bars. Tan slapped it away, launching it from Shan’s hand, spilling the contents onto Tan’s feet. Four momos, the last of the dumplings Jomo had left in the underground chapel.

With the reflex of a seasoned prisoner Tan bent and scooped up the momos. He had jammed one into his mouth and was gulping it down when he seemed to remember Shan. With a hint of shame in his eyes he glanced up, then hobbled to his cot and proceeded to eat the rest.

“Tell me about the gun,” Shan pressed. “If I can prove she had it Cao’s case against you is destroyed, because it is the only connection to you. A sherpa’s body was placed beside that of the minister’s, substituted for the American woman who died there. He was shot with a different gun. Not yours. A big one, a huge caliber. Not one issued by Public Security or the army.”

When Tan did not reply Shan retreated again, stepping into the first of the interrogation rooms that adjoined the corridor, opening drawers in its metal cabinet. When he arrived back at the cell he extended a small brown plastic bottle. Tan’s head snapped up. “Painkillers,” Shan announced. “Enough to get you through a couple more days.”

Tan extended his open palm. Shan tossed the bottle through the bars. Tan stared at the bottle, then clenched it so tightly his knuckles went white. “There was no dead American at the scene,” he announced in a thin voice. “Stealing that second body from the hospital was only a ploy to confuse the chief investigator.”

“How would you-” Shan began, his brow wrinkled in confusion. Then he understood. Tan was reciting the official version of events.

Tan replied with a bitter grin. “The monk said he saw the American woman running away after helping me commit the crime. The dead sherpa was patriotically trying to stop the murder and was shot.”

“What monk?” Shan asked, filled with new dread.

“That one,” he said, with a nod down the darkened cell corridor. “It was a busy morning in the interrogation rooms.”

Shan found himself halfway down the corridor before he was conscious of his own movement. He paused then followed the faint sound of breathing from a cell in the center of the corridor. He stepped hesitantly to the cell, discerning a small figure asleep on a pallet in the shadows at the rear. Scratched into the wall were several figures in a line about two feet above the floor, crudely drawn but still recognizable. A lotus blossom. A conch shell. The prisoner had been drawing the tashi targyel, the seven sacred symbols. Shan’s heart began rising into his throat. He knew before he spotted the shreds of a robe and a dirty prison shirt coat on the floor. Cao had brought back one of the captured monks.

When Shan returned to the colonel’s cell, Tan’s expression was oddly triumphant. “I don’t understand your obsession with rearranging facts, Shan,” he said. “When an artist is halfway through his masterwork you can’t just run and up and steal his paints. It’s unbecoming.”

“Cao is no artist. What exactly has he done?”