Текст книги "Water Touching Stone"

Автор книги: Eliot Pattison

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Shan looked into his mug. "I have interesting friends."

Something that might have been amusement passed over Xu's countenance, then her features hardened again. "If I weren't so overworked I could spend hours just thinking of all the charges against you. Entering Glory Camp, a state security facility, without authorization, breaching the security of my files, that's a few years right there. But I think we'll keep it simple." All she had to do was to ask for his papers, for the required identity documents he did not possess, or the required travel permit. Then she would order him to roll up his sleeves, and find the tattoo on his arm.

Shan fixed his gaze on a carved bird at the edge of the table. "I am here about the children," he said quietly. "The children who are being killed. Lau's children."

Xu stared at him in silence. She seemed about to speak more than once but reconsidered each time. Then she slowly stood and walked to the shelf behind her desk.

With a chill Shan saw the tiny red light that indicated that the video camera, now on the shelf, was still operating. She had been recording their conversation. But now she retrieved the camera, shut it off, and returned it to the shelf, facing the wall.

She came back to sit not at her desk but in the wooden chair beside Shan. "What children?" she asked. Her voice was still hard, and filled with suspicion.

"A boy named Suwan, nine years old, shot in the head. A boy in the Kunlun mountains, named Alta, beaten and stabbed to death. The same age. Both part of her orphan class."

Xu frowned. "You're desperate, comrade." She had apparently decided not to believe him. "There have been no reports."

"They were with nomad families."

Xu's eyes seemed to drill into his skull. He broke eye contact and stared at the bird again. "Impossible. You should investigate a bit more before concocting your stories. The orphans have a new teacher. Everything continues as normal. But of course you know that. You asked my secretary about him."

"Yet, Comrade Prosecutor," Shan said very slowly, "you are concerned about Lau. About how she died." He glanced back at the evidence table. "She was murdered. And now her murderer is killing her children."

Xu frowned again and sighed. "Fiction. Concocted by the reactionaries, to make the people fear the assimilation programs. Lau died in an unfortunate accident. When the river waters recede this winter we will find her body." She opened a desk drawer and retrieved a pad of paper. "Write your statement, comrade," she said. "You've done it before, no doubt. We will consult it in your sentencing." She paused a moment, then tossed the pad toward him. "Maybe you did think the children were in danger. Say that. It could be useful. Bad elements put the children in danger. They engage in the patterns of feudalism. Distrust of authority. Blood feuds. Obsession with icons of dying cultures," she suggested as she extended the pad toward him. "Reactionaries, all of them. Those who resist our efforts to integrate all peoples."

Shan did not touch the pad. "Is it possible she was a friend of yours?" he asked tentatively. Xu had written a memo to defend Lau.

Xu did not answer.

"I saw her body," Shan said. "She was beaten on her shins. Tortured, before being drugged and shot." He paused to let the words sink in. "What are you going to do about her children?"

This time when Xu stared at him her eyes blinked, then she looked down. For a fleeting moment there seemed to be a glimmer of uncertainty on her face.

"She was getting old," the prosecutor said. "She was having trouble with her heart."

"Who told you that?" He realized she had not answered a single one of his questions.

"There was a meeting of the Agricultural Council, after we decided she had died. It was mentioned in a speech honoring her on her death."

She stared at him as he shook his head slowly. "Maybe you should ask your friend Bao about the orphans," Shan suggested.

"What do you mean?"

"I had an old friend in Beijing. Forty years with the Ministry of Justice. Said I should always assume that Public Security knows ten times more than they tell the public, five times more than they tell their colleagues at other government offices, and twice as much as they tell the Chairman."

Xu acknowledged the point with a sour smile, then pulled a form from a pile of papers on her desk and began writing on it with the stub of a pencil. "Maybe I will find time to explore your imagination further, comrade. Not today. At Glory Camp. They will hold you in a special place, alone, so you can more clearly consider all you will need to confess to."

"I have a better idea. Let me go."

Xu gave a cold smile and kept on filling out the detention form. "Shan," she said without looking up. "A common name. It tells me nothing."

"You know Bao is lying to you," Shan said. "You just don't know how much. You think you should do something about Lau. What if what happened to Lau is connected to Sui being killed? Let me go and I will find out. I promise to meet you again, soon. Here. You think because Bao is Public Security that there is nothing you can do. But there is. You can let me continue."

Xu's pencil stopped writing. "Maybe I was wrong about you," she said. "The Brigade runs a lao gai camp deep in the desert. Maybe that is where I should-" Her words were cut off by a woman's scream. There were shouts from the outer office, and the pounding of running feet. There was another high-pitched scream, then another. Xu stood at her desk, then quickly stepped to her door and opened it. The outer office was empty. At the sound of one more scream she ran to the corridor and down the stairs toward the sounds. Shan followed her, then stopped in the corridor and ran to its end, where he quickly found the back stairway.

In less than a minute he was running down an alleyway. He emerged onto the street a hundred feet from the Ministry office. Traffic in the street was stopped, the cars and trucks abandoned by their drivers. A crowd swarmed around the front of the Ministry building. Shan edged forward and stood on the running board of an abandoned truck to see over the crowd.

"Murder!" someone shouted.

He saw the prosecutor emerge from the building, followed by Miss Loshi and the lean man from the outer office. On the steps in front of Xu a man and woman in herders' clothing stood, the man holding a bundle in his raised arms, a bloody blanket wrapped around a young boy. The boy was dead.

Chapter Ten

Someone grabbed his arm and began pulling. He stood, resisting, staring at the dead boy. The woman beside the man with the boy began shouting at the prosecutor. Then she turned and began shouting at the rapidly growing crowd. Some people were fleeing, Shan saw, trying to urgently weave through the crowd, to escape the square. Han. The Han Chinese were fleeing.

"Niya!" someone shouted, and the crowd began to loudly chant the name. "Niya! Niya! Niya!" The name from the posters, the name of the red-haired woman he had seen on the posters.

The knobs, he suddenly remembered. There were knobs with machine guns. He turned and saw the two grey uniforms on a balcony overlooking the far side of the square. One appeared to be speaking on a portable radio. The other held his gun at the ready.

On the Ministry steps the herder with the boy still stood, silently holding the boy as though presenting the body to the prosecutor. He was crying. The dead boy's eyes were partially open, as if the boy were squinting, trying to see something in the distance. His shirt was torn and stained with blood. There was a hole in the center of his forehead.

Someone grabbed Shan's arm with two hands now and would not let go. It was Jakli. He looked back at the dead boy and let himself be pulled down from the truck and led away.

They walked fast, though not so fast as to attract attention, past four blocks of pressed earth and cinder block structures in various stages of disrepair, the shops, garages, restaurants and dreary offices with grey metal shutters that kept Yoktian alive. He asked her who the boy was but she said nothing. He asked who Niya was, and then he saw she was choked with emotion, her eyes moist, her jaw clenched as though to stifle a sob.

Jakli led him into a compound of four one-story buildings surrounded by a waist-high wire fence. A concrete walkway, so badly buckled and split that Jakli stayed on the dirt beside it, led to the mud-walled building that sat in the center of the compound, flanked on three sides by identical structures. Shan stopped at the entrance and looked at the wooden sign that had been fastened over the doorway. It had once held a slogan, but half the sign had blown away, so that all remained were the words Strengthens Children.

Jakli did not realize he had stopped until she was twenty feet down the darkened hallway. She turned with her hands on her hips, waiting.

"Was the boy from the zheli?" Shan called out.

She looked up and down the hall with worry in her eyes, then stepped closer. "An orphan, yes," she replied in a taut, melancholy voice. "His name was Kublai. Staying with a clan about twenty miles into the mountains. He was watching sheep and didn't come back. When they went to look they saw his body below a cliff, with a dead lamb in his arms. He had fallen, they thought, probably while rescuing the lamb. But when they retrieved the body they saw he had been shot. The lamb," she added with a sudden, deep despair, "the lamb was shot too."

"Who is Niya?" Shan asked again. "What does she have to do with the boy?"

"My cousins reached four of the zheli families and warned them away," she said, looking at the floor. "Malik brought a second boy to hide at Red Stone. The boy had tied two mastiffs to him, as if they would stop the killer. Some Maos are there at Akzu's camp now, guarding the boys. Other Maos are looking in the mountains too. The children are so hard to find."

"Are the boys connected to this Niya?"

But Jakli seemed not to hear again. She turned and walked, more slowly, stopping at a door near the end of the hall. Someone sat on the floor beside the door. The Mao with the gold teeth, who had brought the shoes. As Jakli bent to speak with him, Shan pushed the door open.

Inside, Lokesh looked up from a simple wooden table and offered a silent nod of greeting. It was a small room, with a window that looked over the schoolyard toward the south, toward the snow-capped Kunlun. Its walls were lined with photographs, at least two dozen. There were horses, many pictures of horses. There was a picture of a large Buddha statue, photographs of mosques, and even a reproduction of an old painting of Lao Tzu, the sage of Tao, riding an ox. At the top of a tall metal bookcase a string of prayer flags had been fastened, which draped down the side of the shelves.

Lokesh held a bell in his hands, an old bell cast of bronze, the tip of its handle ending in a familiar scepter-like shape. It was a dorje bell, used in Tibetan ritual.

"She forgot her bell," Lokesh said grimly, with a meaningful glance toward Shan. The peal of a dorje bell was said to drive away evil. Beside the bell on the table was a ball of thread, perhaps three inches in diameter, with red, green, and yellow threads intertwined. Not thread, really, Shan knew, but a sacred emblem used by some Buddhists to wrap around ritual implements as a means of invoking wisdom. One of Lokesh's hands left the bell and stroked the ball of thread. Further down on the table was a large book, a Koran, and a black dopa, one of the Muslim skullcaps.

"What is it you seek, my friend?" Shan asked the old Tibetan. His words came out almost as a sigh, cast out on the wave of emotion he still felt from seeing the third boy. He knew Lokesh had come down from Senge Drak, had chosen not to go back to the safety of Lhadrung, because he was looking for something, something he had hoped to find at the school.

"It is hard to put into words," Lokesh said in a hoarse voice, shaking his head, as if something was telling him not to speak. He gripped the bell with both hands. "In its physical emanation it is the Jade Basket. But it is said to be able to transform itself, if it needs to, for protection."

"Protection of what?" Shan asked.

Lokesh's brow wrinkled. "On the outside," he said with difficulty, as though the words caused him pain, "the last time anyone saw it, it looked like a silver gau. Open it and there is a finely carved basket of jade, and inside that a place for a prayer."

The last boy's shirt, Kublai's shirt, had been torn, he remembered as he played the image from the Ministry steps over in his mind. Like that of Alta and Suwan.

"That's what you came for?" Shan asked. "This Jade Basket? Is that what you must take back?" Is that what Lau died for? he almost asked. For an artifact? There were symbols, he knew, objects of great power, of great veneration, for which devout Buddhists would gladly give their lives to protect. Indeed, dying for such objects would add great merit for the next incarnation.

"It's not safe to speak about it," Lokesh said, still shaking his head. "If you don't know how to approach it, then the closer you get, the farther it is." He looked up at Shan, clearly struggling painfully with something inside. "Don't-" His voice choked off and he stared at the bell with a doleful, perplexed expression.

"Did Lau have it? Is that why you came here?" Shan asked.

But Lokesh just stared intensely at the bell in his hands. He seemed beyond hearing again.

Shan walked about the office, then stood in the doorway, surveying it. Xu had been here. Public Security had probably been here. Managing Director Ko had certainly been here. Xu had taken what seemed to be Lau's personal effects. But Lokesh had found two more, he believed, the ball of thread and bell. They had been hidden in plain sight, camouflaged with her cultural instructional materials. From behind him in the hallway he heard the Mao speaking to Jakli, pointing to something on the office opposite Lau's. He stepped to the other side of the hall to investigate. The Mao was pointing to a handwritten sign taped to the glass on the door. In two-inch characters someone had written one of the Great Helmsman's most famous slogans. Religion is the Opiate of the Masses. There was a nameplate on the door. Committee Chairman Hu, it said. Shan remembered the plump, worried Han teacher he had met at Glory Camp.

Shan wandered back into Lau's room. From the end of the table he picked up a piece of paper. A printout of names.

"The zheli," Jakli explained over his shoulder. "A list from the computer of all the orphans she worked with, and the zheli class schedule" She pointed to three names on the list. Suwan, Alta, and Kublai.

"Did Lau use the computer?" Shan asked.

Jakli paused and pulled the list closer. "No. She didn't like computers."

"Or, at least, didn't trust them," Shan suggested.

Jakli nodded as she examined the list. "Someone else did this."

"It makes it easier," Shan said in a low voice and saw the question in Jakli's eyes. "For the killer." The killer had the list, available at any Brigade computer, and only needed the location of the zheli members. Which was why he had tortured Lau. He studied the schedule. The zheli had two class meetings left for the year, one in a week, and the other five days later, both at a place called Stone Lake. He pointed at the entries.

"At the edge of the desert," Jakli explained. "It was a tradition of Lau's, to end the season of classes with two sessions there. To understand the desert better, she said. It's too hot to go there in the summer."

"The boys," Shan said. "Which are the boys? I wasn't certain before, but now it seems clear. The killer is only attacking boys."

Jakli studied the list and pointed out nine more names. She held her hands together and twisted her fingers as she stared at the names, as though she had seen a ghost. It was not a student directory. It was a death list.

There were notes fastened on the wall, torn from student workbooks. Thank you, auntie, one said, for showing me that the desert is still alive. My baby bird sang a song today, another said. Two seemed to be poems. While my horse drank, it said, I saw an old farmer, so asleep a mouse nibbled at his whiskers. Another was written with a more mature, artful calligraphy. In the mountains, it said, old men wait, with the wisdom of snow.

Shan looked out the window. The building across the courtyard to the south had low drifts of sand along its walls. Beyond them, he gazed at the Kunlun, toward Senge Drak. Jakli had left Gendun there that morning, sitting on the sentinel stone on top of the mountain.

He sensed someone step behind him. He did not turn but saw the tumble of long dark hair from the corner of his eye. Jakli silently reached onto the wall and removed the second poem that he had admired, the one about wise old men. She folded it, and put it inside her shirt. He watched as she retrieved a chair from the table and studied the montage of photographs on the wall. After a moment she set the chair down in front of the wall, climbed it, and pulled down a photograph of the Great Hall of the People in Beijing. She handed it to him with sad smile and stepped down. The photograph was stiff and heavy. He turned it over. On the back was affixed a photograph of a red-robed, balding man with spectacles, wearing a serene smile. The Dalai Lama. Jakli used her fingernails to slit the tape that held the secret photograph and put it in her pocket.

Suddenly the light in the office was switched off. The Mao with the gold teeth was at the door, silently pointing out the window. People had begun filing into the courtyard, arranging themselves along the wall of the opposite building. Jakli froze, then darted to the wall, and pressed against it, as if to hide.

It was knobs, herding children out of the school. Thirty or forty students had apparently been pulled out of classrooms with their teachers, who cowered in the doorway to the courtyard. The students were being arranged in a single line along the wall. One knob officer was shouting at them to be quiet, while another stood with a video camera, sweeping its lens along the faces of the children. As they watched, the youngest children, perhaps seven years and younger, were dismissed and sent running back to their teachers. Another group of older children, teenagers, was dismissed a moment later. The knobs began talking to the fifteen or twenty children who remained, one man speaking as another recorded the interview with the camera.

"It's all right," the Mao said. "Just stay quiet."

"They know the zheli's not here," Jakli said.

"Sure," the Mao said, "But some of the children may know how to find them. For the Poverty Scheme, the knobs are probably saying. Have to round up the orphan children, for their own good. Like the wild horses," he added bitterly.

Shan looked back toward the table. Lokesh was watching the children with anticipation in his eyes, as if perhaps he was thinking of going to them. Had the Mao told him about the third child? Shan wondered.

As if reading his mind Jakli stepped to the table and sat across from Lokesh. She placed a hand over his and shook it until Lokesh looked at her. "Another boy," she announced gently. "Another boy has been killed in the mountains."

When she had finished explaining what she knew, Lokesh sat staring at the dorje bell, lost in his thoughts again, more forlorn than ever. Shan leaned over Jakli. "The boy. Was he missing a shoe?"

"I don't know. Is it important?"

"The other two, they each had a missing shoe."

"What kind of shoe?"

He shrugged. "Just shoes." He thought a moment, then told her about the wooden tablet Bao had found and his reaction to it. "Suwan had one," Shan said. "It was shattered by his killer."

Jakli looked up with new worry in her face, then stood and stepped to the bookcase. She retrieved a photograph of a horse with a wooden frame from the top shelf. Not a frame, Shan saw as she held it out, but a flat piece of wood onto which the photo had been carefully taped to give the appearance of a frame. Jakli turned it over to reveal the wedge shape on its reverse side. Another of the tablets with the ancient writing.

"It's called Kharoshthi, this writing. From the people who lived here two thousand years ago. Sometimes the tablets are uncovered in the desert."

He reported Bao's reaction when he had found one of the tablets on Prosecutor Xu's desk and how Xu also had several of Lau's personal effects.

Lokesh looked up. "What? What did she have?" he asked in a strained, hurried voice.

"Not a gau," Shan said. "Books. A little jade horse. A pen case."

"A pen case?" Lokesh asked urgently, leaning forward. "Copper? With turquoise circles?"

Shan shook his head and studied his friend in confusion. "White metal. With coral."

Lokesh grimaced as if in pain and looked back at the bell.

Shan's eyes drifted back to the wooden tablet in Jakli's hand. He asked what Bao had meant when he had asked about the Antiquities Institute.

"The People's Antiquities Institute," she said. "It's a group of government scientists, archaeologists with Party memberships."

"I don't understand," Shan said. "Why would he say it has to do with Westerners?"

Jakli looked up with new alarm in her eyes. "Westerners? He said that?" She shook her head slowly. "It was the Americans who gave the tablets to Lau, enough for her to distribute them to the zheli. It was part of her helping them understand who we are."

"But to Major Bao it is an act of treason," Shan said, his mind suddenly racing. He had been wrong about Xu. She had not known about Sui, nor about the two dead boys. It could have been Bao all along, Bao and the boot squads searching for those he considered traitors to China. He must have found a link between Lau and the Americans and might be following the zheli to the Americans. Shan remembered the poem about the lama and Bao's reaction to the wooden tablet on Xu's desk. Evidence of treason. To Bao, finding traitors would be more important than finding Sui's killer, at least temporarily, if he were on the verge of closing in on his traitors. Shan and Jakli exchanged an alarmed glance.

"The Americans have to be warned," Jakli gasped. "They go to the zheli class sometimes."

"To the zheli?" Shan asked in disbelief. "Surely it would be too dangerous."

"I was there with Fat Mao when Lau tried to talk them out of it. The Americans said they wanted to talk about their work to the children, to the next generation, to let them know there are other people on the planet who care about them."

Their work. What was it the Americans were doing that could so infuriate Bao? Digging up ancient tablets? Looking at old cloth?

"They said it was worth the risk," Jakli added, "to have children listen."

Shan remembered Deacon's strange words. He and his wife had come to Xinjiang to stop hiding. "Maybe you should go to the Americans," he said. "I must help the children."

Jakli gazed at him, her eyes widening in realization. "But what you said about Bao, it means that it is all about the Americans, about following a chain of Lau's students to the Americans. The children are hiding. You will never find them. But if we can't find the children, then we must go to the other end of the chain and work backwards. Find the Americans, and trace back their link to the children. Cut off the trail that Bao is following. It's what we have to do. And then," she added with a determined glint, "then we get you back in time to cross to Nepal."

Suddenly a figure appeared in the doorway, a thin young woman in the grey uniform of a knob. They froze, all except Lokesh, who stood and rang the dorje bell, the bell that drove away demons. He rang it loudly, repeatedly, stepping forward while extending the bell toward her, and with each of his steps the woman retreated, until finally she turned and bolted down the hall. Jakli grabbed Lokesh, who was laughing now, and they ran down the hall in the opposite direction.

***

Karachuk felt different this time, Shan thought. There was still the excitement, the feeling of entering a lost century, but there was also something else. Not fear, but close to fear. A sense of foreboding in the wind.

Jakli seemed to sense it too. She had maintained a brooding silence for much of the journey to the lost city and now paused warily as they passed out of the corridor of ruins and saw the domed building where Shan had met Marco. She looked at the sky, which was grey and unnaturally dark for mid afternoon, and frowned, then nodded toward a small spiral of dust, a tiny whirlwind that was scudding toward the wall behind them. "See one of those wind demons at night," she said, "when the moon is just right, and you'll be sure you've seen a ghost." She offered a half smile as she spoke, but it did little to ease the tension from her face.

Lokesh, standing in front of them, stared at the spinning zephyr. "When I was a boy," he said solemnly, "an old man told me that whirlwinds are one of the ten thousand forms that spirits may take. It is the way some souls move about. Inside, there is a brilliant seed of awareness." He studied the wind devil intently, as though trying to recognize something within it. "They can appear suddenly, like a thought, and then just-" Lokesh shrugged as the spiral passed over the outcropping and was gone from view, "just pass us by."

Shan looked at the path of the wind devil. It seemed the story of everything that had happened since he had left his mountain in central Tibet. Awareness passing him by.

Through his strange mix of emotions, Lokesh had understood they had to move quickly. There was no doubt now that the killer was still at work, and the remaining zheli boys had to be found and protected. The Mao with the gold teeth had also understood, and as soon as they cleared the school, he had jogged away toward town. But Jakli was right. If Shan had less than two days, he had to focus on the Americans. If Bao was the killer, he was only interested in the zheli and the Jade Basket as a way of finding subversives. Ultimately his goal would be the illegal Americans and those who helped them. If so, that was where the answers lay, with the Americans.

The ruins were empty. They walked stealthfully, like thieves, wary of the slightest sound and movement, sometimes starting from the occasional gasp of excitement from Lokesh as he gazed on the ruins. Jakli led Shan with short uncertain steps into Osman's inn. The stuffed chair and tables were still there, even the chess set, but all sign of recent use had been removed. Sand had been thrown on the tabletops. A search party would know it had been inhabited more recently than the remainder of the city, but would not know if it had been last week or ten years before.

No one had reclaimed Karachuk since the hurried exodus only forty-eight hours before. "Wasted. We wasted the trip," Jakli said in frustration as they stepped outside. "No one's-" She stopped as Shan pulled her arm and pointed to the corral, where Lokesh stood near the fence. He was holding a dark brown lump in his palm, wearing a victorious grin. "It's fresh," he called out, putting the lump under his nose. "Today!" It was camel dung.

As they hurried toward the corral Lokesh cocked his head toward the rocks at the back of the corral. "This place," he said with the same enthusiasm, "it is wonderfully full of spirits!" It took a moment before Shan could discern the object of his friend's attention, in the shadows near the top of the rock. A large grey creature, watching them intently.

"Not a spirit," Jakli said with new energy in her voice. "Osman's dog." She eagerly scanned the rocks. "Osman didn't go. He's the protector of Karachuk."

They found the dog's master in the temple, lying on a pallet below the rough-hewn altar. Only two candles lit the large room. The big dog, having greeted Jakli by burying his muzzle in her hands, had followed them into the chamber, then stepped in front of them and pushed Osman with his nose.

"All right, all right," Osman mumbled to the creature and sat up. As his eyes cleared he made a sudden motion toward something lying at his side, then relaxed as he recognized his visitors.

"Sorry to disturb your dreams," Shan said.

"Not sleeping, exactly," Osman said gruffly. "Listening." He spoke quietly into his dog's ear, and the animal trotted away, down the tunnel. Back to its post.

"Listening?" Shan asked.

Osman nodded and gazed down the dimly lit corridor. "For the wind. For helicopters. For spirits." He was in a dark mood. He seemed to be waiting for something evil to arrive.

"Any sign of Nikki?" Jakli asked softly.

"Of course not, girl," Osman grunted, rubbing his hand over his face. "He's too smart to come out of the mountains now. Probably go straight to the horse festival," the Kazakh added, casting a small, expectant grin toward Jakli.

Lokesh stepped to the altar and lit one of the butter lamps with a candle, then gestured for Shan to do likewise, paying homage to Buddha. As Shan stepped over Osman's pallet a glint of light caught his eye. On the floor, beside the pallet, was a long chopping knife, nearly as big as a sword.

"Too early to come back," Osman growled. He spoke to Jakli, but his eyes were fixed suspiciously on Shan. "The knobs could still come."

"We're not staying," Jakli replied. "We came to learn the way to the American. Deacon. He went into the desert. Which oasis?"

"No oasis."

"He has to be at an oasis," she said impatiently. "We must find him, Osman. There is no time to argue."

Shan looked about the room, which was growing increasingly brighter as Lokesh lit more lamps. The statue of Buddha had been covered again with the canvas. There were wooden crates stuffed with liquor bottles, a basket full of glassware, and in the farthest shadows something else. Cardboard cartons. Shan took three steps toward them before Osman warned him off with a raised palm. "Too much curiosity can be a dangerous thing," the grizzled Kazakh said.