Dark Eye of the Jaguar

by Robert Mitchell

  “What about me?” Sue asked.

  “Well, yeah, you too, both of us. We have to be the ones to dig it up, not somebody else.”

  “What if we get caught digging in the courtyard of this temple, the Temple of Agriculture.”

  “What if we do?”

  “We could get into serious trouble. We might even go to jail!”

  “How can you go to jail for digging in the grounds of some temple in China for Christ’s sake? It’s China. The Chinese government doesn’t give a bugger about religion!”

  “Maybe so, but they’d care about a couple of foreigners digging up a treasure chest and trying to sneak it out of the country.”

  “Hey!” I snapped. “This is the chance that comes along once in a lifetime. If we don’t take it, and someone else finds the chest and gets covered with glory, well, let’s just say that I will be one very unhappy husband!”

  “You’ve got it bad, haven’t you, Ben,” she said, shaking her head.

  There was no reply to that so I just sat quietly and drove with my head facing straight to the front for the next fifteen minutes. It wasn’t until we had turned into our avenue that I asked the question.

  “So,” I said. “Do we go after the chest?”

  She placed her right hand on my knee and smiled. “If that’s what you want.”

  “It is,” I replied.

  “Okay then, but not until the middle of March. Okay?”

  “Right, the middle of March.”

  “What about Truecross?” Sue asked once we were inside the house.

  “Huh?”

  “What about the crowd demanding all that information about the cross? Do we still reply to them?”

  “Yeah, do it like we agreed. Tell them it’s been in the family for maybe fifty years or so. Ask them to provide their email address. We’ll keep them swinging a bit longer.”

  She sent it off and next morning there was another terse reply. I felt like telling them to go to hell, but, to tell the truth, I was intrigued. I was certain that they knew more about the cross than we did and I didn’t want to antagonise them too much. They were still insisting that we supply our email address.

  “Who are they?” I asked. “Why won’t they give us their email address? If they won’t tell us who they are, how the hell can they expect us to tell them who we are?”

  “I told you, if they give us their address they’ll get emails from all sorts of dealers and cranks wanting to sell them jewellery of every make and description.”

  “Yeah,” I shot back at her. “But on the other hand they might be a bunch of thieves wanting to find out where we live so they can take a crack at stealing the cross from us. I don’t believe they’re merely trying to keep a load of conmen and dodgy dealers away. There’s got to be another reason why they won’t give it.” I tilted the chair back, laced my fingers behind my neck and gave the matter some more thought. And then I had a brilliant idea. “What if they are the Church?” I burst out, leaping up out of the chair.

  “What church?”

  “The Jesuits!” I exclaimed. “They’d be the ones who’d know what was stolen from the churches in China during the Boxer rebellion. They’d have had a record of church treasures.” I started pacing the room, and then turned back to Sue. “They wanted to know about the stone in the middle. I bet that was the marker, the thing that identified it. They’ve recognised the stone as being one of theirs, something that the Church acquired back in the seventeenth century, and now they want to be certain. They either think that we’re trying to sell a forgery, or that we have the real thing and we don’t realise exactly how valuable it is. And they want it back.”

  “But we told them that we’re thinking of auctioning it. They could buy it at the auction!” Sue exclaimed.

  “Yes, but the auction will realise its true value. If they can get to us before we put it in the hands of an auction house they could get it at a much lower price, or so they might think. And if it really is theirs, and we ask too high a price, then they could sue us. They’d have the entire clout of the Jesuit Church behind them.”

  Sue’s face suddenly clouded over. “So they might try and take it from us? They might claim that it’s stolen property?”

  “Maybe,” I said. “But then again, it was looted by the Boxers a hundred and ten years ago and then recovered by a British officer. It’s the spoils of bloody war!”

  “Can you find out whether they could claim it back?” she asked.

  “My days as a law student never touched on looting,” I replied. “Especially not in China in 1900. And there’s no way I could check on what Chinese law might have to say about the situation, not without corresponding with some firm in China, and that’s just right out of the question.”

  “Do you have any barrister mates who could check it out for you, free of charge?”

  “I’d rather not ask,” I replied. “The buggers are too prone to gossiping.”

  “Maybe I can find something on the internet,” she said quietly, as though we were conspiring to commit a crime of some sort or other.

  Five minutes later she had found a reference to an article that had been published in the New York Times in February 2009 concerning efforts by China to persuade Christie’s auction house to withdraw two bronzes from sale that had been looted from the imperial Summer Palace in 1860 by either British or French forces. The article went on to comment that China would be on firmer ground demanding the return of looted objects from 1900 onwards than from 1859 to 1860, as the Hague Convention of 1899, to which all the Western powers then in China had been signatories, had outlawed the practice of looting. Until then there had been no international prohibition against looting.

  “We could be in trouble,” Sue said quietly.

  “Why?” I replied. “Monty didn’t loot the chest and the cross from the Chinese government. The Boxers were the looters. If the contents of the chest belonged to the Jesuits, then the Chinese government can’t get involved. It’s got nothing to do with them. And anyway, Monty rescued the stuff from the Boxers. If you applied international maritime salvage law then Monty would be entitled to a reward.”

  “How big a reward?”

  “I don’t know. If it were the cargo from a ship then it would depend on how much danger Monty put himself in.”

  “He risked his life,” she said breathlessly. “Surely that’s the biggest risk anyone could go through.”

  “Yeah, I suppose. But this is not marine salvage law! It’s all way outside my area of expertise.”

  “What about the Chinese gold pieces, and the jade?”

  “I don’t know! They might have been part of the Jesuits’ regalia, or they might just have been other pieces that the Boxers looted and put in the chest. It’s not our problem.”

  “It could be.”

  “Bloody hell, Suze, let’s just wait and see, okay? We’ll worry about that when and if it ever happens. The important thing is to keep these buggers off our backs and go and find the chest. Okay?”

  “Okay,” she replied in a small quiet voice. She wasn’t happy.

  “Let’s try and find out who these people are,” I said. “If we send them our email address, will that tell them anything else about us?”

  “Only if they manage to hack in to our server.”

  “Is that easy to do?” I asked.

  “If it is the Jesuits, then they’d probably have people who could do it.”

  “Bugger!” I exclaimed. “What would that tell them?”

  “They’d have our address, our names, and they’d probably be able to read all of our emails, including the emails we sent to the internet discussion sites. They’d find out about the other pieces, the jade and the two Asian gold things.”

  “So there’s no way we can give them our email address, then?” I said.

  “No.”

  “So how do we contact them if we can’t give them our email address and they won’t give us theirs?” I asked.

  “We co
uld set up a sort of fake email address,” Sue offered.

  “Can you do that?”

  “I don’t see why not. We could use somebody else’s name and address; maybe pick someone who died recently. We could even set it up at one of those internet café places so that it doesn’t have any contact with our laptop or server.”

  “Brilliant,” I replied. “Is there anything we can do to stop them accessing our emails if they do happen to find our real email address by cracking into the internet discussion site?”

  “Not really. The best thing would be to totally delete all the emails that have anything to do with the cross, the gold pieces, the jade and Monty’s box.”

  “What, all of them? The ones to John Jenkinson-Smythe as well?”

  “Yes, the lot.”

  “What about just deleting the ones to the internet sites? We haven’t said anything to John about the cross, or the gold pieces.”

  “Yes, well, I suppose that should do,” she replied. “You go make some coffee and I’ll start wiping them off.”

  Sue set up the new email address the next morning, using Yahoo, and we sent the details to Truecross through the discussion website. She had used the personal details and street address of a recently deceased person who had resided next door to a friend of ours who lived a few kilometres away. There was nothing whatsoever to connect it to us. She then removed all of the pictures and the other information that she had lodged on the collectors’ website. We, as Ben and Sue Dunlop, were now isolated from the electronic world. It meant that we would have to keep using one of the pay computers at the shopping mall, but it was a small inconvenience to put up with if it meant that we could maintain our anonymity.

  “I still think we should get to Beijing as soon as possible and dig the chest up,” I said. “The longer we leave it, the more time there is for someone to throw a spanner in the works. We don’t know whether John Jenkinson-Smythe is going to do something. He could start court proceedings and the whole thing could become public. This Truecross, whoever they might be, would be sure to get wind of it and we’d have the devil of a time trying to sneak into Beijing and dig the damn chest up without the whole world being there to watch.”

  “What court proceedings could he start?” Sue asked.

  “He wants whatever was in the box!”

  “He doesn’t bloody know what was in the box!”

  “Yes, he does. He knows about the jade pieces, and if he looks on the internet and sees the gold ornaments and the cross, he might put two and two together.”

  “How the hell is he going to do that?” she asked, shaking her head as if I was some sort of fool.

  “Well, he just might.”

  “Ben, there must be tens of thousands of items on the net that people are asking about, and maybe a couple of thousand or more involving Chinese items. Our items aren’t even referred to as Chinese. Stop worrying. He’s not going to start searching on the internet. He’s got no reason to. Anyway, you always told me that going to court was a waste of energy, and that by the time a matter got into a court room it was usually years after the event. Even if he did sue us, nothing would happen for months. We’ve got plenty of time.”

  “Yeah, right,” I replied. “But I still think we should get a move on. I still think we should leave as soon as possible.”

  “I’ve already told you that we can’t get there before mid-March,” Sue replied. “It’s too cold.”

  “But we could take warm clothes, and the hotel will be heated. Hell, just think what’s at stake!”

  She strode over to the computer and started playing with the keys. “Here, have a look,” she said.

  “What am I looking at?” I asked.

  “The average temperatures in Beijing. See, it’s minus 2.7 degrees Celsius this month; minus 4.6 next month, January; minus 2.2 for February and it doesn’t climb above freezing until March, when the average temperature only reaches plus 4.5 degrees. The ground will be frozen until March.”

  “How do you know it’ll be frozen? We’re not talking about Siberia. We’re not talking about chopping through permafrost!”

  “But if we wait until March, we should be clear of below freezing temperatures,” she replied.

  “Hey!” I yelled, pointing to the computer screen. “Look at that. The bloody November temperatures are almost the same as those in March. We should’ve gone in November. We should’ve gone a month ago. We’d have the bloody chest by now and wouldn’t have to worry about these guys pestering us.”

  “I’m sorry. I just didn’t think we had enough time to arrange it all.”

  “Yeah, well now we’ve got three months to wait, three months while we try to keep these guys at arm’s length!”

  “I said I’m sorry,” she said in her quiet voice.

  I stormed out of the room and slumped down into one of the chairs on the balcony, and watched the motor vessel Miramar churn its way up the Brisbane River, heading towards the Lone Pine Sanctuary with a load of tourists on board; and slowly I calmed down. Sue hadn’t known that we would be approached by someone who wanted the cross, someone who would be so persistent. And there was no denying that I had agreed with her back in the middle of November when she had suggested the middle of March as the best date for us to go. I went back into the computer room.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I guess it’s pretty easy to be correct in hindsight.”

  “Why don’t we go at the end of February?” she suggested. “There should be hardly any tourists at that time of year. You’re the one who’ll be doing all of the digging. If you don’t mind breaking your back on rock-hard dirt, then I won’t mind watching from the sidelines as long as I’m all rugged up in winter woollies and a fleecy-lined parka.”

  “Hah, hah, yeah, okay, good idea,” I replied. “If we stay for two weeks we’ll still be there at the middle of March. If the ground’s too hard when we arrive, it should be okay before we have to leave. Can you book the tickets through the travel agents?”

  “Yes.”

  “And see if they can put us into the same hotel we stayed at when we were there the last time. That was fairly close to Tiananmen Square, and it wasn’t a bad hotel.”

  “It was quite good, I thought,” Sue replied.

  “Yeah, it certainly put on a good breakfast.”

  We now had two and a half months to kill. Sue made our bookings and lodged applications for visas. That got rid of one week. We still had another twelve or so weeks to go. During that week, the first of what were to be many emails came in from Truecross.

  “I was right,” she said brightly as she walked in the door. She’d been certain that they had been writing from either the United Kingdom or somewhere else in Europe.

  “Oh, yeah?” I replied.

  “Yes. As soon as I saw the dot com with the It suffix, I said to myself, I’m right!”

  “Where’s it from then?” I asked.

  “Italy.”

  “Did you ever think that it might have been John Jenkinson-Smythe?” I asked.

  “No,” Sue replied. “He already knew our email address, and he doesn’t seem to be the kind of person for subterfuge. He would’ve just demanded answers outright.”

  “It’s surprising that we haven’t heard from him since that last email,” I said.

  “He’s probably given it up as a bad job,” Sue replied.

  “Yeah, I hope so, but I must admit, he’s still got me worried.”

  “Forget about him,” Sue snapped. “Aren’t you interested in what this Truecross person had to say?”

  “Okay,” I said. “What did they say?”

  Sue had logged on at one of the pay computers at the mall when she had finished the shopping and had run off a copy of their reply for me. She passed it across.

  In order that we may be assured that you are the ones who hold the cross and who entered its details on the website, would you please email a current picture of the cross with a newspaper in the background so that we can verify.


  “Who do they take us for?” I asked. “A newspaper would tell them exactly where we are.”

  “We could send them a picture with a copy of the latest National Geographic magazine in the background,” Sue offered. “That won’t help them much.”

  “Good idea. When did the email come in?”

  “Three days ago.”

  “Three days ago!”

  “Yes, well, I’m not going down to the mall every day just to check to see if we’ve got any mail.”

  “Can’t we check our fake email address from here and then go and open it at the mall if there is something?” I asked.

  “I’d rather not,” she replied.

  “So who’s getting paranoid now?” I asked sarcastically.

  “Ah, can we get back to the matter in hand?” she said, hands on hips. “Do we send them another picture, with the National Geographic, or not!”

  “Okay. Take the picture and send it off in another three days. We might as well draw this out as long as we can, seeing as how we’re not going until the end of February. How are you going to send a picture anyway?”

  “I can download it direct from the camera into the mall computer. It’s easy.”

  “Okay.”

  Four days later Sue was back with their answer. I had offered to go to the mall the morning after she had sent the picture off, to see if there was a reply. I was anxious to find out who this guy was, and there was nothing else to keep me occupied at home. Sue had been unable to go. She’d had a dentist appointment on the other side of town.

  “No,” she had replied. “Let me do it. You might accidentally stuff it up.”

  I couldn’t argue with her logic. When it came to computers, Sue was streets ahead of me. A year or so ago she had asked me to delete two pictures from the memory of the digital camera. I had deleted the entire memory, losing every picture taken over the previous six months. I wasn’t allowed near the camera again, at least not without strict supervision.