“Yes,” I interrupted before she could mention the temple grounds. “And then, after he removed the chest from their wagon, and hid the cross in his writing box, he was killed in an ambush five days or so later.”
“Right,” she said. “And all those deaths, the Inca king, the conquistadors, the Boxers and Captain Monty, were all violent.” There was a pause, and then: “Are we safe?”
“You are fine,” Joseph said. “The curse only causes harm to those who steal the dark emerald with savagery. There must be violence before the curse arises. You are safe. You found the dark stone. You did not wrench it by force.”
“I wonder how Captain Monty died,” Sue murmured.
“He was ambushed,” I replied. “You found it on the internet.”
“Yes, but how did he die?”
“Does it matter?” I asked.
“Well, wouldn’t it be extraordinary if he was killed by a Boxer spear, just like that second conquistador was. It gives you goose bumps just thinking about it.”
“Thanks, Angelo,” I said. “That was just the tale I needed before trying to get a good night’s sleep. I’ll probably be awake for ages tonight. But anyway, how about that cup of coffee you promised, and the few minutes alone that we asked for before you scared the pants off Sue.”
Angelo went red in the face with embarrassment.
“I’m sorry. That was not my intention,” he said. “It’s just that we thought you should be aware of the history of the dark emerald.”
“No, Angelo,” I replied. “That’s fine. I’m glad you told us.”
“Ah, good. Well we’ll leave you now. Just open the door and call if you need anything else. Your coffee will be here in a moment.”
“God, Ben,” Sue whispered as soon as the door had closed. I signalled to her to be quiet, and then listened as the sound of footsteps retreated along the passage.
“Okay, they’ve gone,” I said.
“This is becoming almost too complicated, Ben. We’ve now got the Jesuits, the Buddhists, Jackson Lee, and whoever is going to lay claim to the medallion, not to mention whatever else might be in the bloody chest, and now the goddamned curse as well!”
“I think the medallion is going to be the least of our problems. It’s Jackson Lee and his gang who’ve got me worried.”
“What about the curse!”
“What about it?”
“Well, we might be next!”
“Blood hell, woman! We didn’t steal it. We didn’t kill anyone to get it. We obtained it quite peaceably. Nothing happened to the Jesuit priest who picked it up after the second officer got the spear in his back, and the priest was surrounded by bloody violence! Don’t worry about it!”
“Why don’t we just pack up, go home, and sell the cross to the Jesuits. They’ve promised us at least half a million for it. We might even get more. They might even give us something for the gold pieces.”
“Why would they do that?”
“What, give us something for the gold pieces?”
“Yeah.”
“They could sell them on to the Buddhists and make a profit.”
“Ah,” I said. “I don’t think they’d be likely to come at that. It wouldn’t be the religious thing to do. And what if they reneged on paying us the half million or whatever?”
“We’ve still got Captain Monty’s letter and his drawing of the temple. They want the sacred relics. I think the cross is secondary. In fact, I reckon they’d sacrifice the cross if they could get their relics back. They’re probably just a little bit worried about the curse as well.”
“Maybe.”
“Ben, I’m really frightened. Jackson Lee might be the head of one of those triads. They’d kill us without even a second thought. And if they get their hands on us, well, they’d do anything to us to get us to divulge the location of Captain Monty’s chest.”
“I don’t think he’s with one of the triads. They’d have grabbed us already if he was. They had plenty of opportunity at the airport, and on the road in from the airport. Jackson Lee is just a small-time crook of some sort. And we’ve got Joseph and the Jesuits on our side now. We’re not alone any more.”
“Maybe,” she said, and then gave a nervous laugh. “Joseph and the Jesuits. It sounds like a fifties rock band.” She picked up the spectacle case that Angelo had left on the table and placed one end in front of her mouth. “And now folks, straight from their successful season in sunny Beijing, we have Joseph and the Jesuits playing their latest hit – Bring on the Buddhists!”
“Yeah, right,” I replied. “Let’s be serious for a few minutes.”
“Sorry, I thought I was.”
We both needed sleep, me more than Sue.
“And anyway,” I said. “We haven’t got the Buddhists onside yet. For all we know they might be a pack of bastards, and impossible to deal with.”
“Ben!” she replied. “They’re religious people. They’ll be reasonable. We shouldn’t have any trouble with them. Buddhists are men and women of peace.”
“The guys who ran the Spanish Inquisition were religious too, and look what kind of mongrels they were!”
“Yes, well, but they weren’t Buddhists. We’ll just have to wait and see.”
“And there’s another point,” I muttered.
“What’s that?”
“The chest is buried in the grounds of a temple, which most probably means it’s a Buddhist temple, which means that we might have to deal with them at some point in time, particularly if we have to take some armed protection when we go to dig up the chest. This whole exercise is looking like it might become very public.”
“Ah, well…”
Just as she was going to add something else, there was knock on the door and a young Chinese man came in bearing a tray with cups, coffee pot, sugar, milk, and a plate of Chinese bun-like things. He smiled, laid the tray on the table and backed out of the room. I hadn’t heard his footsteps coming along the bare floorboards of the passage, but then, I hadn’t been listening for them either. The two priests had been wearing ordinary leather shoes that made solid contact with the wooden floor, but the young person who had brought in the tray had been wearing soft slippers. We would have to be careful what we said. I leant across to Sue.
“You were going to say..,” I said quietly, pulling my chair closer to hers.
“Ah…, oh yes,” she whispered. “How do we know we can trust these people, the Jesuits, and the Church itself? I mean, Joseph seems like a person we can trust, but he’ll be following orders the same as Angelo will be. You’ve seen how serious the Bishop was, and how they seem to be in complete awe of him.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Well, we could dig up the chest and then they could grab the lot, and tell us where to go, tell us to bugger off home.”
“And not pay us, you mean?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“You’re forgetting one little thing,” I said, smiling.
“What’s that?”
“We still have the cross. Joseph has promised us half its value. If they grab the chest and tell us to bugger off, then we’d sell the cross and pocket the lot. Two or three million would suit us fine. We might have to fight them in court, but with the written agreement to pay us a finder’s fee on everything other than the relics, we’d have to win.”
“But we don’t have an agreement, not a written one, at least not yet,” she said.
“And we’re not doing anything until we get a written one.”
“Would Joseph’s signature be good enough?” she asked. “Wouldn’t we need at least the signature of the Bishop?”
“In the normal course of business the Bishop’s signature would be sufficient. But in this case I want it signed by a couple of the top men in Rome. And I want it written in English and in Italian, just so that there are no mistakes.”
“But that could take weeks!”
“No, a couple of days, that’s all. All they have to do is draft somethin
g up, fax it over, and we can go through it and change anything we don’t like.”
“It’d be easier sending it by email.”
“No thanks. I’ve had enough of the bloody internet. Once the document is agreed, they could sign it and courier it to Beijing. The whole thing could be done in three, maybe four days tops.” I paused. “And one of the things I want put in is that we still get half the value of the cross even if there’s nothing else belonging to the Jesuits in the chest, or even if we don’t find the bloody chest.”
She thought about it for a minute or so, finishing the rest of her coffee. “Okay, yes, that sounds good. And we’ve got to have that agreement signed before we tell them anything more, agreed?”
“Agreed,” I replied. “And there’s one other thing”.
“What’s that?”
“If they took us to court over the cross, there’d be a savage fight before they wrested the cross from us, the ones who possess it. I don’t think they’d even try it, not with the curse.”
She smiled then, and I could see her relax for the first time in hours.
“Okay, Ben, now that we’ve sorted that out, what about the Buddhists? Do we try and strike a deal with them?”
“I don’t think so. All we’ve got to bargain with is the location of the chest. If we get an agreement and they go back on it, we’ve got nothing to hold them to their part of the deal. Those guys are Buddhists, not Jesuits.”
“It doesn’t mean we can’t trust them,” Sue said. “And we’ve still got the two gold pieces described in that deposit note.”
“I don’t think that’s enough. Their notion of a deal and our notion might be entirely different. We’ll be dealing with the oriental way of thinking, and possibly even with the Chinese government. The Jesuits are mostly westerners, and they’re run from Rome. The Buddhists are Chinese. I don’t know whether they’re controlled by the central Chinese government, or from some other place like maybe Tibet, or whether they might even be autonomous, answering to nobody. Governments can break their word any time they want, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it.”
“Ben, I told you. It’s still getting too complicated.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, what if the Chinese government steps in and grabs the lot? We know what happened during the Cultural Revolution. They don’t need the law on their side. What if they get nasty and want the lot for the Beijing Museum, or some party member fancies a few ornaments for his mansion? They could even brand us as thieves, alleging that we were trying to steal China’s heritage. We could be threatened with jail. Hell, we could even go to jail! We could finish up with less than nothing.”
“We’d still have the cross,” I said.
“Yes,” she replied. “But if the Church decided to fight us for it, and we were already up before a Chinese court, or in a Chinese jail, what chance would we have of fighting our claim? The Australian government wouldn’t help. Our trade with China is too important for our politicians to get into an argument on our behalf.”
“Oh, Sue! Come off it!”
“No, I’m serious. I think we should sell the cross to the Jesuits right now for a million dollars and tell them where the chest is. They can deal with the Buddhists and the Chinese government, and Jackson Lee, and any other bugger who gets involved in this bloody business!”
“Yeah, but Sue!”
“No bloody buts. It’s a lot of money and we could do a lot with it. What do you think? Can we sell it to them? Please?”
“No. If things get worse, then we can think about selling the cross. But not yet.”
“Worse! How the hell can things get any worse?”
“Has your life been threatened? Has mine? No. We wait. We wait until we find the chest, and then we maybe get Joseph and his mates to look after everything that’s in the chest that isn’t Church property. If they gave a solemn religious oath, that’d be good enough for me, and it should be good enough for you. That’d keep the Buddhists off our back and possibly enable us to avoid any government intervention. Anyway, let’s not worry about the Chinese government until they get involved, or rather, if they get involved. Okay?”
“I still don’t like it, Ben.”
I could see that somehow she had got it into her head that we would be stealing the chest, that we would be involved in some sort of criminal act against the state.
“Look,” I said quietly. “The Chinese government isn’t going to get involved. They won’t know anything about it. And anyway, it’s probably a small thing as far as they’re concerned. If the government tried to confiscate what would appear to be Church property, including sacred relics, there’d be hell to pay from Catholics and Buddhists around the world. We are merely recovering a lost treasure. We are not robbing tombs. Everything will be fine.”
She thought about it for a minute or so and then said: “Okay, but you don’t think it would be smarter to bring the Buddhists in now?”
“Why?” I asked.
“Well, there’s Jackson Lee.”
“Jackson Lee doesn’t know where the chest is,” I replied. “He doesn’t know whether it’s buried, or hidden in some building or bank, or being held by someone. He doesn’t know where we are now. He doesn’t know that we’ve been joined by the Jesuits. Forget Jackson Lee for the moment. He doesn’t even know that there is a bloody chest! He’s only after the gold piece and whatever else we might have, or whatever else he thinks we’re going to collect from somewhere! He doesn’t even know why we’re in China for goodness sake! All he’s doing is guessing. He’s just a bloody nuisance, that’s all.” She shrugged her shoulders. “Okay, is there anything else?” I asked.
“No, except do we stay here, in this building, until we dig the chest up?”
“Yes, I suppose so, why?”
“Well,” she replied. “We’re in Beijing. I’d like to see some more of the city. We didn’t get to spend very long at the Summer Palace the last time we were here. I’d like to go back for another look.”
“Sue,” I said, my patience starting to wear thin, and amazed at the way women’s minds worked. She had jumped from fear to fun in almost an instant. “You just asked about Jackson Lee. We’re not going to worry about him, but we sure as hell aren’t going to forget him. He’s out there somewhere. And in a very short space of time he’s going to wonder why we haven’t come back to the hotel. He’s going to come looking for us. We stay here, and we stay inside. Right?”
“Okay, boss,” she replied, rising up out of the chair and saluting.
“Oh shut up,” I said laughing. “Drink your coffee and have one of those buns.”
Joseph wasn’t too happy when we told him that we wanted the Heads of Agreement signed by the top brass back in Rome. The poor guy was eager to get out and recover the relics. He didn’t seem too concerned about any of the regalia that might be in the chest. I suppose regalia could be replaced. It wouldn’t have the tradition of the originals, but it would still have the glory and the beauty. But the relics, if they had been discarded or destroyed by the Boxers, would be gone forever. The poor guy just wanted to know whether they still existed or not. He wanted to leave within the hour.
“But we should go now, Ben,” he had said for perhaps the tenth time after they had both returned to the room. “This is an ever-changing city. Buildings are being knocked down every day and replaced with modern skyscrapers. If we wait even an hour, it could be an hour too long.”
He had a point. It was only a couple of years since our first trip to China and there were already noticeable changes to the skyline.
“Don’t worry,” I had replied. “The chest is safe right where it is, for the moment.”
He had jumped up from his chair. “What do you mean, for the moment?”
“No, Joseph,” Sue had said. “The building where the chest is hidden is not going to be touched. It might happen in ten or twenty years, but not in the foreseeable future, not as far as we’re aware anyway.”
“Where is it?” he had asked again, for the tenth time.
We had both merely smiled and changed the subject.
Eventually they agreed to hold on to anything found in the chest that didn’t belong to them, but only for a period of two years. They weren’t happy doing this, and had insisted that we agree to inform the Buddhists within days of recovering anything which might have been part of those religious items that had been deposited with the Church for safe keeping over a hundred years ago. I could see their point. The valuables had been left in the care of the Church. The Church had lost them. It was the Church’s duty to honour its obligation. But I wouldn’t have it any other way. We had to retain control. The Buddhists could be told that their religious artefacts had been recovered, but they would have to deal with us if they wanted them back, at least during the two year period. Whatever happened after the two years was in the hands of the gods, either theirs or ours.
Within two days the wording of the agreement had been settled between us and the Jesuit Church. It was a simple document, with most of the verbiage taken up in the preambles. It wasn’t a document that would have been approved by most lawyers, it wasn’t particular enough, didn’t have enough contingencies, or parties of various parts, but it was clear, concise, and to the point. We were now waiting for it to be signed by a couple of Cardinals in Rome and sent to Beijing by secure courier.
It was all going far too well.
Seven
It was our third day in China. The Heads of Agreement document, in triplicate, had been signed and handed to the courier service in Rome.
“I’ve got a touch of migraine,” Sue had said that morning. “I need my pills.”
“Which pills?” I asked.
“The pills I take when I’m getting a migraine. You know which pills!”
“Right, yes,” I replied. “I know the pills.”
I knew them right enough. There was the time a few years back when we had been travelling through outback Queensland on a camping holiday and Sue had suddenly thought she had a migraine coming on, and realised that she had forgotten to pack her small bottle of these particular pills that her doctor had prescribed. We were a hundred and fifty kilometres from the nearest large town, but I had to drive those one hundred and fifty kilometres, telephone Sue’s doctor from the local pharmacist and get him to fax a prescription through. Then I had to drive the one hundred and fifty kilometres back again. Yes, I knew which pills she was talking about.
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