by Lisa See
Bill Tang was still out and not going anywhere, so David followed Stuart to the open doorway on the other side of the room. It looked like a closet, but actually it was the antechamber to Stuart’s vault. Tang had gotten much closer to his prize than Stuart had wanted to admit. He punched in an electronic code, and they stepped into a room lined floor to ceiling with drawers. He opened one of the drawers. Inside were four ruyis. They were horribly ugly and horribly beautiful at the same time—the way the fungus stems twisted, the way the heads unfurled. They were natural yet somehow seemed beyond nature in their otherworldliness. Stuart picked up the Site 518 ruyi, wrapped it in linen, and handed it to David.
“I hope you know what you’re doing.” It was the first time Stuart had acknowledged he might know more about the ruyi than its collectibility.
“What do you mean?” David asked, hoping Stuart could confirm what he suspected.
“This is China’s Holy Grail. Have you thought about the power it has to unite, control, and rule?” Stuart asked. “I don’t mean to be melodramatic, but have you considered what could happen if it fell into the wrong hands? The ruyi could be used symbolically to strengthen the Chinese military and in the process destabilize the current government. We, as Americans, may not like everything about the regime that’s in power now, but at least we know what we’re dealing with. So I hope you know what you’re doing and who to trust, because this could change China’s future.”
“Is it really Da Yu’s ruyi?” David asked point-blank. “Did Brian actually find Da Yu’s scepter?”
“You never met him, but Brian was a brilliant kid,” Stuart answered. “The fellowship proposal he sent this spring was amazing. It not only confirmed for me that he’d found a tomb or some other treasure chamber but that he’d made a discovery about Chinese culture through artifacts and language. Think about it, David. Think about how few artifacts there are in the world that have had an impact on how people view culture. The Rosetta stone provided the key to the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphics. The discovery of oracle bones did the same for Chinese language and history.”
“But the ruyi doesn’t have anything to do with language.”
“That’s right. I believe Brian made two separate discoveries. One was theoretical and would be of interest only to scholars; the other was something tangible and of far greater importance.”
David tried to mesh what Stuart had said with what he now knew about Brian. The split between language and the ruyi as separate entities in Brian’s journal entries backed up Stuart’s hypothesis.
“So in answer to your question,” Stuart went on, “yes, I believe Brian found proof of Yu the Great. But it’s shocking that he gave it to Lily.”
Drawing conclusions from what he’d read in Brian’s journal, David tried to explain. “He didn’t realize what it was at first. Once he did, I don’t think he had any intention of giving it to Lily or anyone else. He needed money, sure, but he was an archaeologist first. Once he realized that there were people after it, he knew he had to get it out to a safe place at any cost. He must have been very frightened or else he wouldn’t have told Lily what it was. He did tell her, right?”
“Yes, and he also told Catherine. What I don’t understand is why.”
“To save it. You were his last hope.”
“To save it from Bill Tang?” Stuart sounded skeptical. “I’ll admit that the guy’s gone around the bend—”
“He’s not who you think he is. He’s a high-ranking member of the All-Patriotic Society. Brian wanted to keep the ruyi out of Xiao Da’s hands.”
Stuart snorted in disbelief. “You’ve got this all wrong. Tang’s not some religious wacko. He’s just a VYRUSCAN tech head. He’s probably lost money in the stock market or…. I don’t know—” He visibly struggled to make sense out of what had just happened to him and what he knew of Tang. When nothing connected, he said in exasperation, “Tang’s a computer nerd. Christ, you’ve met the guy he works for.”
“What? Who?”
“Michael Quon. You had lunch with him at Site 518 the other day. Bill Tang’s to Michael Quon what Paul Allen is to Bill Gates.” Stuart’s words caught David off guard, and all of a sudden he noticed how much his head hurt. He didn’t want to hear this. “Michael Quon,” Stuart repeated. “Don’t you know who he is?” When David shook his head, Stuart said, “He’s the inventor of VYRUSCAN. You know, the software? Squares within squares and all that.”
“Do you mean five concentric squares?” When Stuart nodded, David grabbed him. “Show me!”
They went back through the bedroom, where Tang was awake now and wrestling futilely against his bindings, but David and Stuart just rushed past and hurried downstairs to the library. Stuart turned on his computer and said, “Look, this isn’t a big deal. You probably have it on your computer even if you don’t know it. Think Norton Utilities, only Quon doesn’t have his photo on every product that goes out like Peter Norton does. Come on, David, you’ve heard of him. Quon’s like Larry Ellison—”
“I wouldn’t recognize Larry Ellison, or Peter Norton for that matter.”
“You’ve been away from the States too long.” It was another ill-advised attempt at humor. “Look,” Stuart said, “you’ll recognize this.” He pointed to the lower right-hand corner of the screen. David had probably seen the symbol a thousand times but had never really noticed it. Just like Da Yu’s map of his empire, the VYRUSCAN logo consisted of five concentric squares. The conclusion was horrifying in its implications.
“Michael Quon is Xiao Da,” David said.
Stuart’s eyes widened as he absorbed this, then whatever color had come back to his face in the last few minutes drained away again. “Catherine—”
“Hulan!”
Then David’s mind froze. He couldn’t think beyond the terrifying knowledge that Hulan was up in Bashan with Michael Quon. David had told her again and again not to worry about the All-Patriotic Society. She was in extreme danger and, because of his insistence that she abandon her investigation of the cult, she didn’t know it.
“David!” Stuart’s voice was sharp and commanding. “Here are my keys. Take my car. Do you have your passport? No? Then stop at your hotel and pick it up. Take my car to the airport. I’ll call ahead for a plane reservation. David, are you listening to me?”
David nodded, but he barely comprehended what Stuart was saying.
“You’ve got to go before the police get here. I’ll take care of things on this end.”
Stuart shoved a huge wad of cash into David’s pocket, then pushed him out of the library and toward the front door. The pain in David’s ribs jolted him back into some semblance of awareness. They were in the foyer. Ma’s body was still on the floor. David looked at the wrapped ruyi in his hand, then at Stuart.
“Just go,” Stuart said.
David jumped into Stuart’s Lexus, careened down the mountain, and skidded under the Mandarin’s porte cochere. He ran through the lobby. The desk clerk called his name, but David didn’t stop. He threw his things in his bags and was back in the lobby in five minutes to check out. There was no line. No one was going anywhere in this storm.
The desk clerk—a professional at one of the world’s greatest hotels—took in the awfulness of David’s face but spoke with deliberate calm. “I tried to get your attention before, Mr. Stark. I have a fax for you. It came in about an hour ago marked very urgent.”
While the clerk printed out the bill, David opened the envelope. The first page was short but to the point:
Phones and electricity out in Sichuan due to flooding. No word from Hulan and can’t reach her. Please give attached information to her if you get to her first. I am on my way to Bashan. Zai.
The next two sheets were in Chinese, but Zai had written short notes at the top of each page. The first was a toxicology report on Lily. The blood on her body was hers but showed traces of mycotoxins, which, Zai explained, derived from fungi. Traces of the same fungus had been found in her mouth. The fungus, howeve
r, was not poisonous and had not contributed to her death. Finally, in examining Lily’s wounds more fully, Pathologist Fong had found slivers of some sort of stone. This was being analyzed for type and source.
At the top of the next page, Zai had written in his uneven hand:
Transcription of document found on McCarthy’s body. These are ancient Chinese characters. Have sent document to Beijing University for translation.
But David already knew what the characters were. He’d read them in Brian’s journal: river, cliff, cave, dragon, below, and door. Below cave, Brian had written the one character that made the whole map make sense. It was the ideogram for good. David now knew where Brian’s secret cave was. He also understood with a kind of deep sadness that the young archaeologist was far smarter than even Stuart had given him credit for.
David folded the papers and put them in his breast pocket. The worst of his worry dissipated to be replaced by deadly focus.
HULAN WAS WRAPPED IN HER SILK ROBE WHEN SHE ANSWERED A soft knock at her door and found Michael Quon asking if she was going to the dining room. She thanked him for stopping by but said no.
“No breakfast?” he asked, stepping inside the room.
“Just tea,” she answered.
Once he noticed how sheer her robe was and that she was wearing nothing underneath, his eyes darted around the room uneasily. “Your room’s very neat,” he said.
“Thank you, Dr. Quon.”
“I guess I’ll be going then.” Then he backed out of the room, his eyes still not meeting hers. “Have a good day.”
She closed the door and climbed back on the bed. She decided she wasn’t even going to think about that encounter, because there was no secret to the fact that women were naked under their clothes all the time and men and women still managed to go on about their business.
Electricity and phone service had been restored during the night, but for how long Hulan had no idea. She got through on her first try to the Mandarin Oriental and learned that David had checked out, then the line went dead and evidently so did the electricity, because the overhead fan slowed and finally stopped. She thought about where David could have gone. Knowing he might not be able to get back to Bashan because of the weather, he’d probably taken an early flight to Beijing. If he’d retrieved the stolen artifacts, then he’d want to get them to Director Ho at the Cultural Relics Bureau as soon as possible. At least that’s what she would have done if the situation were reversed.
She still needed to speak with Vice Minister Zai. She figured that Captain Hom was the only person in Bashan who might have access to a method of reaching the capital, but when she got to his office he didn’t have any great ideas. He had a cell phone, but the mountainous walls that surrounded Bashan prevented it from working within the town’s footprint. He sometimes drove up into the hills to reach a relatively unobstructed spot, but a landslide had closed the road last night and workmen were still trying to clear the mud and debris that kept seeping down the rain-saturated hillside.
“There’s always a way to move around in the countryside,” Hulan pointed out. “A back road, a special trail—”
“They’re either under water or under mud.”
“The river—”
“It rose another two meters last night. Even the fishermen are staying ashore.”
She had no choice but to wait it out, he told her as he walked her to the door. “I can see you worry too much, Inspector,” Hom said, exhaling twin streams of cigarette smoke from his nostrils.
“It’s my nature,” she admitted.
“Weren’t you the one who told me to beware of my nature?”
He had her there.
“Well,” Hom went on, “even I can change my ways. I thought about what you said the other day about the All-Patriotic Society. Tonight I will see for myself if what you say is true.”
“Be careful,” she cautioned. “They don’t like the uninitiated.”
“I was invited.”
Hulan’s eyebrows rose in surprise and question.
He nodded complacently. “My brother-in-law and I were invited to go together. I think it’s a good opportunity for Zhou to explain what he did to the people.”
“Self-criticism? We both know that didn’t have good results during the Cultural Revolution. We both know a crowd can turn dangerous very quickly.”
He grinned, showing his yellowed teeth. “I don’t think we have to worry about that. We were invited by Officer Su, your favorite. He sees an opportunity to make things better in Bashan Village. I’m putting a note of this in his dangan.”
“He is a Society member?”
“Maybe,” Hom answered, his throat rattling with nicotine, “and maybe he’s serving as a bridge between our office, Bashan’s problems, and the people.”
If this were so, then Su had made another smart move. It was through the recommendations of superiors or through political activities that helped maintain the status quo that junior officers earned promotions. Although the All-Patriotic Society was illegal, the purpose for which Hom and his brother-in-law had been invited sounded as though the outcome could lead to restored tranquillity among the masses.
“This invitation shows an open heart,” Hom remarked. “Do you want to join us? It would make Officer Su happy.”
She shook her head. She walked down two steps, then turned back to Hom. “I still don’t think you should go.”
“My subordinate invited me, Inspector.”
Old customs regarding manners reached deeply, even in the Public Security Bureau. Of course he would go. She waved again and continued down the stairs. She went back to the hotel and asked the desk clerk to find a driver to take her to Site 518.
While in town the dock’s concrete steps, which disappeared each day under the Yangzi’s swelling volume, seemed the focus, at Site 518 the water itself held center stage. The quiet banks were no longer a cradle against which the river eased on its incessant course to the sea. The current had picked up more earth in its travels, turning the waters murkier and more foreboding as they frothed, billowed, chopped, and lurched. The canyon resounded with the roar of gravel and boulders rolling against the riverbed, of trees grating and shredding, of waves smashing against shoals, rocky shoulders, and massive abutments. Hulan knew that up in the hills peasants still worked the terraces, clearing waterways and opening irrigation channels. Here the archaeologists toiled in pits barely protected from the wind and rain under leaky and quivering tarps.
Hulan walked to the cave shared by the five men from the municipal museums. They were awake but barely. Four of them sat together around their little table, wearing grubby undershirts, smoking Magnificent Sound cigarettes, and drinking tea. The fifth hovered over a hotplate stirring congee.
“You look like you just washed down from the Tibetan Plateau,” Li Guo, the one she recognized as the most talkative, called out. “Come in out of the rain. We’ll give you warmth.”
The other men thought this mildly risqué comment hilarious. Hulan gave them a look that should have shriveled their balls to the size of peanuts, but the men were unrepentant.
“Are you looking for your husband? We don’t have him in here this time, right, Mr. Hu?”
The man stirring the congee made a great play of scanning the dark recesses of the cave. “No yang guizi here.”
The five chortled, coughed, choked on their tea, spat on the ground. They thought it was all very funny; she thought that in this one regard Ma had been right. These men were vultures.
“Do you know when Dr. Ma will return from Hong Kong?” she inquired as pleasantly as possible.
“No time soon,” Li answered. “He said he went to buy back what Brian and Lily stole, but he’s probably down on Hollywood Road right now selling precious antiquities that should go to our museums. He calls us vultures. We say he is a shark!”
Hulan left them clucking at the loudmouth’s wickedness. She was unsure of what to do next. She wandered down the hill to the pit wher
e Catherine Miller and Annabel Quinby labored. Hulan spent the next three hours scraping at the ground and making small talk as the rain cascaded down around them.
She did as instructed but kept most of her attention on the way Catherine and Annabel interacted. Annabel was more senior, but when Catherine uncovered a shard of pottery, their conversation seemed to be between equals. The piece turned out to be just a couple of centimeters in diameter, but the ancient artist’s design could still be read. Catherine told Hulan that these designs were one of the things that archaeologists and linguists looked for when trying to make the link between artistic patterns and the pictographs that composed the earliest archaic characters of what eventually became the Chinese written language.
This conversation reminded Hulan of something Stuart had said out at the dam site, and she brought it up now. “Your father told me that Brian found some pieces here with motifs that were different from those typically used by the Ba,” Hulan said. “What did he mean by that?”
“The Ba had very distinctive works of art,” Catherine explained. “They made weapons and common articles like pitchers and bowls that suggest a highly developed artistic, though warlike, culture. The Ba’s axes were of particular interest to Brian. They were made from jade or bronze, but they were similar in shape and style to the musical chimes found at Yellow River sites. This made Brian think that the Ba hadn’t developed their ax organically. He thought the shape had been transported—and its original use changed—from a musical instrument of the Yellow River peoples to a weapon.”
Annabel, who’d been listening to the exchange, looked up and added, “But how did that transformation happen, Inspector? Even today, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, we’re secluded within this gorge. So how did the Ba come to interact with the other more established cultures on the Yellow River? Why did the Ba need to be so warlike, and how did their artistry develop?”
“Your Four Mysteries,” Hulan said. As on her first day here, Hulan had picked up something sticky on her hands. It had to be some property in the soil. She thrust her hands out into the rain, rinsed them off, and wiped them on her pants.