by Lisa See
“Two of them anyway,” Annabel responded. “Mystery One: How did the Three Gorges, which actually insulate through their geography, become a cultural watershed? And Mystery Three: What caused certain artistic styles to take hold here and continue for millennia? Brian was profoundly interested in those questions, which is why it’s all the more distressing that he chose to take artifacts from the site rather than let us study them in context.”
“What context, Annabel?” Catherine asked. “You know Brian’s pieces didn’t come from here.”
“You’re right as always, my dear,” the older woman admitted.
Hulan was thoroughly confused. “I thought you said that the ax Brian found was a Ba artifact.”
The two women looked at her as though she were an imbecile.
“Absolutely not! It looked like a Yellow River chime,” Catherine explained.
“The jade bis weren’t Ba artifacts either,” Annabel added. “The Ba didn’t have an emperor in residence who would have needed to commune with Heaven.”
“Most important,” Catherine picked up, “this is a subsurface site. Now consider the ruyi. How long do you think a dried mushroom would last under the soil before it deteriorated?”
Lunch under the large canopy—which had been moved yet again up the hillside—came as a reprieve. The meal was much the same as on the first day—rice, noodles, and a chicken dish. The conversation also bore a striking resemblance to the one Hulan and David had heard that day. As she had back then, Hulan tried to listen for anything that would help her solve the murders of Brian and Lily. But she didn’t see what that could be as the five vultures babbled on to Michael Quon about the patriotic benefits of the dam, a sentiment Catherine tried to shoot down by pointing out that the Chinese already had the Great Wall. Despite his obvious glee at being addressed by the beautiful foreigner, Li Guo felt compelled to correct her: “The Great Wall has always been a bad symbol. Since the days of the evil Qinshihuangdi, it has been a concrete example of our foreign policy—keep outsiders out.”
Dr. Quinby agreed, adding, “It has also symbolized China’s inability to compromise, its isolation from the outside world, and its assertion of superiority.”
“But, Annabel, you can’t believe that the dam is a good replacement.” This came from old Dr. Strong.
“Ancient China has been my vocation and my avocation,” she admitted, “but I would willingly sacrifice a few relics to change world perceptions.”
The other archaeologists nearly fell off their benches. “You can’t mean it, Doctor,” the professor from Heidelberg blustered, reeling from the betrayal of her words.
“I expect more from you, Professor Schmidt!” Annabel retorted. “Your treatise on the symbolism of the Great Wall is still the academic standard.”
Zai had sent Hulan here in part for her ability to see through political code, and she felt something trying to come together in her mind, but her speculations were disturbed when she sensed Li Guo’s dark eyes boring into her. “For the future,” he said, “we will have the dam to remind us of the Confucian ideal of a sage emperor who serves the people.”
Yes, that helped. She almost had it….
“You forget one thing.” It was the first time Michael had spoken, and it completely disrupted Hulan’s train of thought. “The dam, too, is a false symbol. You mustn’t be deceived into thinking that your government isn’t using it for its own corrupt ends. You block the river, you destroy your history and your heritage.”
“You’re a foreigner,” the vulture said to the Chinese American. “You don’t know our country.”
Michael held up his hands in the universal sign of surrender. “I’m only saying that an edifice can’t represent a country’s soul.”
“Matters of soul are a privilege, Dr. Quon,” Li Guo retorted, but his eyes still hadn’t left Hulan’s. “China needs to think about global identity. Brian understood this.”
Catherine brought them all back to safer territory by asking if anyone had been able to phone out, which led to a discussion of the weather and how it would affect their work, which led to the Four Mysteries, which led back to the dam, which would eventually circle back to a discussion of nationalism. No wonder Brian had taken to eating his lunch elsewhere.
As the group slowly broke up and the teams returned to their pits, Hulan decided to retrace Brian’s final movements one more time. Just as she reached the upper path, she spotted Angela, protected by a plastic poncho, kneeling in the mud near a cluster of dead bushes with her backpack at her side.
Angela looked up, and Hulan saw something in the young American’s face she hadn’t seen before. Suspicion or caution, Hulan couldn’t tell which. But before either of them could speak, Michael Quon’s voice came floating over Hulan’s left shoulder. “She’s looking for mushrooms,” he said. “She’s been doing that since she got here. Find anything interesting?”
“These are golden mushrooms,” Angela answered, her voice oddly flat. “They popped up last night.”
“Are you going to give them to the chef tonight?” Michael inquired lightly. “Maybe he could sauté them with butter and garlic.”
“These aren’t for eating.”
“Poisonous, then?”
Angela didn’t bother to respond.
“Aren’t mushrooms usually found in shady areas?” Hulan asked.
“This once was a shady area,” Angela answered, then gestured to the skeletal remains of the nearby bushes. “Something killed the trees and this shrubbery.”
“Too bad those mushrooms aren’t lingzhi,” Michael went on. “You would have struck gold.”
Angela’s face reddened. To cover the emotion, she bent her head back down to stare at the little cluster that had surfaced near the trunk of one of the dead bushes. When she didn’t look up again, Michael looked at Hulan and shrugged.
Hulan headed east along the path. Michael followed, although she hadn’t invited him. In fact, she’d wanted time alone to think about what Li Guo had said. She was sure he’d been trying to send her a message. But Michael didn’t ask permission to accompany her, and she didn’t send him away. As he’d shown yesterday, he wasn’t a bad companion. His stride was steady and surefooted. He kept quiet even when they passed the little shack that belonged to the Wu family. The door was closed, but they could hear the baby crying inside.
They crossed over the trail that led down to the cave where the All-Patriotic Society held its meetings. A short way beyond this was another path. Hulan had already explored the main route to Brian’s refuge with David and Dr. Ma the other day, so she dipped down onto this new path, hoping it might give her a different perspective. Soon enough she could see the cove where Brian’s things had been found, though she wondered how much of the beach would be left there given the rising waters. Still, she wanted a closer look and edged down farther.
Michael was right behind her when she heard the Wu infant’s cries again. They sounded as though they came from below her, which meant that there had to be some kind of acoustical anomaly caused by the cliffs around them. She went down another five vertical meters and came to the entrance to a cave. The baby’s cries seemed to emanate from deep within. Hulan ducked inside, pulling her umbrella shut.
“Do you hear that?” she asked.
Michael nodded. “The mother must have taken the baby out, then gone into some other part of the cave.” He listened, then added, “I can remember my mom and dad piling us in the back of the car when my little brother wouldn’t sleep. This woman doesn’t have a car. Maybe walking the kid helps.”
Hulan took a couple of steps farther into the cave and called hello. The sound disappeared into the blackness. The baby continued to cry.
Michael reached into his knapsack and pulled out a flashlight. “I’ve been in here before. Want to take a look?”
To know the killer you had to know the victim, and Brian had spent his lunches and his weekends exploring caves.
“I’ll follow you,” she said.
They hadn’t gone far before the temperature began to drop. The umbrella had kept Hulan’s top half relatively dry, but her legs and feet were wet, so she chilled quickly. Otherwise, this cave was much like the one that she and David had been in the other night, except that there seemed to be many more side tunnels that led in different directions. Hulan and Michael went another fifteen meters past several turns and bends until they reached a room about four by four meters.
“Here’s where you have some choices,” he said. “This shaft used to let out down by the river.” He pointed the flashlight into a narrow opening that looked more like a well than a tunnel. “But now that the river’s risen, it’s running through the lower caverns. Hear it?”
She could. That passage could very well have led to the cave where she and David had talked with Ma on that first day. Now that she heard the water, she focused more clearly on the smell, which was not so much the muskiness of damp soil but something deeper and more primitive, as though the cave were alive.
“Caves are alive,” Michael explained, “and filled with organisms similar to those found on the ocean floor.” He swung the flashlight’s beam to another area. “This shaft also goes down, but it narrows into a crawl space very quickly. We’d need some other gear to go that way—headlamps, jeans, and maybe kneepads for you.” He arced the beam to the back of the room. “Or we can continue on. There are other caverns to explore, none of which are that difficult. There’s a hollow ahead with some spectacular formations.”
By now Hulan was very cold, and she was feeling the weight of the mountain all around her. The baby’s cries still echoed through the cave, and she wondered why his mother hadn’t done something to sooth him.
“Did you come here with Brian?” she asked. Her voice reverberated off the walls, and she felt increasingly claustrophobic.
“Once. But Brian preferred to cave alone.”
“I would have thought you’d follow the buddy system, just like swimming.”
“I do when it’s really challenging, but Brian and I didn’t consider this cave to be all that rigorous.” He scrutinized her, read her discomfort, then said, “I think we should go.”
He took a step toward her, and she watched in horrified fascination as he purposely stumbled on a rock and let the flashlight fall from his hand. The flashlight clattered to the floor of the cave and went dead, thrusting them into pitch black.
Hulan stood completely still, waiting for her eyes to adjust. They didn’t. There was nothing to adjust to. Cold fear held her in place. Was Michael Quon the killer? If he was, then she had foolishly walked into his trap. She heard nothing. After all the crying, the baby finally went quiet. Hulan held her breath, listening. She could hear Michael breathing nearby.
“Don’t move,” he ordered. There was absolutely nothing threatening in his tone.
She heard his shoe edge out across the floor. She felt his hand on her arm. He pulled her to him and wrapped his arms around her.
“Don’t be frightened,” he whispered in her ear. His heart beat steadily against her fluttering one. Her body felt how gentle he was, and her heart began to slow to match his rhythm.
“I’m going to look for the flashlight,” he told her. “Stay still.” Then, using her body as a guide, he ran his hands down her waist, over her hips, and down her legs. He kept one hand in a proprietary grip around her ankle while he searched the ground with his other hand. A second later the flashlight was back on. He took Hulan’s hand and led her out to the cave entrance.
They stood at the mouth of the cave looking down on the roiling river. At last Michael turned to face her. “I’m sorry. That was a boyish and stupid maneuver to get us alone together in the dark. I shouldn’t have done that.” Then he dropped her hand, stepped out into the rain, and with an assured gait headed up the hill back toward the Site 518 encampment.
She waited a few more minutes, trying to understand her feelings, then she followed the path down to where it disappeared into the rushing current. Brian’s little beach had to be three meters or more below the raging waters.
THE WEATHER HAD CALMED TEMPORARILY, BUT THAT WAS TO BE expected. The storm would circle back again at least once before blowing itself out. But even with the break, the airport was nearly deserted. No one wanted to fly in this weather. David went to China Southern’s ticket counter and checked in for the 11:50 flight to Wuhan. He hadn’t eaten in about twenty-four hours, so he got some breakfast while he waited for his departure. A television was tuned to the news, where every fifteen minutes the scroll across the bottom of the screen reported that massive flooding along the Yangzi below the Three Gorges had now claimed twelve hundred lives. At 11:30 he boarded the plane; it taxied out to the runway, and then everyone waited as thunder rumbled and lightning streaked around them. Three hours later, in another momentary calm, the plane took off. Even after reaching cruising altitude, the seat belt sign remained on because of violent turbulence.
David couldn’t stop thinking about Michael Quon. He was sophisticated. He’d figured out how to propel his cause through money and charisma. He was masquerading as a religious leader, but he had a rotten and corrupt core. He advocated austerity yet partook of the finer things in life. He was also probably very good with women, if for no other reason than that success and money are great aphrodisiacs. He’d used the Society’s tenets as a means to gather a group to him, with the understanding that religion is more powerful than politics. That was why Communism was failing, while groups like the Falun Gong and the All-Patriotic Society were growing.
Xiao Da was all about manipulation and control. He believed himself to be the wind; the inferior people were the grass. He got away with that in China, where the people were, as Hulan said, susceptible to indoctrination. Xiao Da mirrored what others wanted to see. For poor Chinese peasants on the banks of the Yangzi, he was a savior who would protect them from the dam. To someone like Neighborhood Committee Director Zhang, he was a way of catching the newest fad. For someone like Brian McCarthy, he was a way of honoring the past.
David wondered if possession of a mushroom could be enough for the man who called himself Xiao Da to wrest the wind from the current Chinese government. It might be if he had a religious hold on the masses. Beyond that, could a foreign-born person be influential enough within another country to upset global stability? Stranger things had happened in other parts of the world.
This line of reasoning led David back to Vice Minister Zai. How much of this did the old bachelor know? He had made a strong and believable case for David and Hulan’s trip to Bashan as a possible last chance for their marriage. At the time, David had been embarrassed but also grateful. But Zai had said other things that day, about David and Hulan reconnecting to the special gifts they each had that made them able to see beyond the petty cases they’d both been working on in recent years. For David, that would mean larger, more sophisticated, global matters; for Hulan, the rekindling of her ability to see into the mind of a killer. Zai had also talked about David’s method of using logic to deal with cases, while Hulan put her physical body between herself and evil. Was that why Zai was on his way to Bashan now? Had he truly sent the two of them into danger without telling them what they were about to encounter? Or did he know that something had already happened to Hulan?
All this “logic” was just a way for David to manage his feelings. He couldn’t lose Hulan. He couldn’t face the world without her.
That night electricity was out in Bashan Village. Candles and a couple of hurricane lamps illuminated the Panda Guesthouse’s dining room in a warm glow. The chef managed to put together one of his better meals. Beer was on the house. A sense of camaraderie reigned. There is nothing like a natural disaster to bring people together.
Given the conditions, talk turned once again to the great edifice being built at Sandouping. Without the five men from the municipal museums, the conversation was measured. What if the dam was built to a height of only 150 feet? What if a series of smaller
dams was constructed instead? What if China allotted twenty more years for archaeological excavation? What if only half a million people had to move?
Hulan sat next to Michael Quon. He’d come by her room to escort her to the dining room. This time she hadn’t objected. How could she, since she was going there anyway? But he’d stood just inside her door as he had this morning, waiting as she finished getting ready, looking around with that same measured appraisal that he used to take in everything. They didn’t speak then about what had happened earlier, but as the rain poured down and the candles cast their golden light, Hulan kept going back to that moment when she’d been swallowed by the blackness of the cave.
What if when Michael dropped the flashlight he’d tried to kill her? Hulan would have attempted to fight him—in the pitch-black without a weapon. But even if she’d somehow triumphed, what would she have done then? She would have tried crawling out. She might have fallen down through one of the shafts that led to the river, drowning in the dark. She might have chosen the wrong route and could still have been flailing in the tenebrous gloom even now. No one would have known where she was, and when the lake behind the dam flooded those caverns sometime in the next few years, her bones would have been lost forever, like so much else along the river. But what she couldn’t shake from her mind now was that moment of surrender when Michael Quon had held her in his arms and she’d let her heartbeat follow his.
From the international terminal on the outskirts of Wuhan, David grabbed a taxi to drive to the airport for small local flights. The term “buckets of rain” came to him as the taxi inched down the highway. Here the weather was not so much a storm—with winds and lightning—as one huge waterfall cascading from the sky. More than once the taxi floated several yards before the tires found asphalt again. The first bridge they came to was completely submerged. When the driver said he could go no farther, David reached into his pocket and pulled out the money Stuart had given him. He counted out five hundred dollars U.S. and promised the driver more if he would do whatever he had to do to get David to the local airport. The driver made a U-turn and sought out a different—and ultimately successful—route.