She hadn’t mentioned the attack in the room again, but her quietness told me more than any words could have done. It had scared her more than she cared to admit. A lesser woman might have gone into screaming hysterics and been confined to bed for days, but not Sue. She came from stronger stock than that, and had buried the trauma. I hoped that it had not been sent too deep within her inner self.
And I knew that Joseph would be thinking only of his precious relics. Perhaps they were the bones from some long dead saint, or perhaps a piece of the one true cross. If all the pieces of the cross held by churches, convents, monasteries, and other holy places throughout the world were gathered together in one place there would be enough material to build a dozen crosses, possibly even a house. But that was their belief, and who was I to say that they were wrong and I was right.
We retired to our room and tried to sleep, Sue with her head nestled on my left shoulder. She was soon breathing deeply and evenly, with the occasional snort to keep me awake, and I moved across to my own bed. I thought that sleep would not come and was certain that I had been lying awake with my thoughts for hours when I was woken by a light tap on the shoulder. I jumped up, my heart racing, realising that we had forgotten to ram the chair under the door handle. But this time it was only Father Angelo.
“It is time, my son,” he said, and then moved across to Sue. “I bless you both,” he said when she was fully awake. He made the sign of the cross, two fingers reaching out from his outstretched hand. “May the spirit of the Lord be with you and with our brothers as you go out on this sacred quest.”
We piled on the jackets, scarves and gloves which the priests had gathered together for us. They hadn’t bothered to go back to the hotel to recover the rest of our luggage. We had discussed it, and decided that it might only indicate to Jackson Lee, if he was still having us watched, that we were going for the chest.
Two o’clock on a cold night in early March in Beijing was not my idea of a fun holiday trip. But this was not a holiday. This was serious. Within an hour or so we would know whether we had struck it rich, and would know whether we would never have to worry about money for the rest of our lives. The priests from the Society of Jesus would know whether the relics which they had thought had been lost forever would be returned to them, and the monks would have their religious icons back in their temple, or some of them at least. Lee had the rest.
We crept out of the room and along a series of dimly lit passages, following Joseph and the other two priests as they went up one staircase and then down another, through a doorway behind a moveable bookcase, and then into the building next door. From there we came out a back entrance, seemingly half a block from the front door of the seminary.
There was movement in the shadows and I jumped as four Buddhist monks materialised. One spoke quietly to Joseph, his breath clouding the air.
Joseph turned back to me. “Where do we go?” he asked. “The monks have brought their minivan.”
“A minivan?” I replied. “Will it take all of us?”
“Yes, it will be a squeeze, but two vehicles might have brought more notice upon us.”
“Of course,” I said. “That makes sense.”
“So, Ben,” he said, and this time a little forcefully. “Where do we go?”
“It’s near the Temple of Agriculture, close to Tiananmen Square, in Dongjing Road. Do you know it?”
“Of course,” he replied, and started to laugh quietly, his misty breath ballooning out in the cold night air.
“What’s funny?” I asked.
“The Temple of Agriculture, Xiannong Tan, is a Buddhist temple. Your Captain buried Buddhist icons in the grounds of a Buddhist temple.”
“I didn’t say it was in the grounds of the temple!” I said, perhaps a little too forcefully. “It’s nearby.”
He laughed again. “Let’s climb aboard. You first, Mrs Dunlop.”
She unclasped her arms from around my waist, put there in a futile attempt to share my body heat, wiped a teardrop from underneath the tip of her nose with the back of one large fur-lined glove, and climbed up into the van.
Joseph turned to the senior monk and rattled off a few quick sentences in Chinese. I didn’t know whether there might be a problem with the Temple of Agriculture being Buddhist, but the monk’s demeanour didn’t change one bit. Maybe it came under their guardianship, or maybe under the control of some other group or sect. I didn’t care just as long as we got to dig without running into any problems. A delay would only give Jackson Lee more time to organise. And now that ten people knew the location of the chest, and not just Sue and I, there was more of a chance that this information could find itself to Lee.
“How near is the location of the chest to the temple, Ben?” Joseph asked, a smile on his face.
“Very near,” I replied.
“It’s buried in the grounds,” Sue said, her head still nestled into my shoulder.
“Yeah,” I said. “It’s inside the walled enclosure of the temple.” I flicked Sue’s head off my shoulder.
The senior monk spoke to Joseph, and Joseph just nodded his head.
“Are we okay to go?” I asked Joseph.
“Yes,” he replied.
“Is there any problem with it being a Buddhist temple?” I asked.
“No. He said that they should have first consulted the order who worship in that temple, but he realises that we don’t have the time. There will not be a problem.”
“Thank God for that,” I replied.
“Amen,” he said, making the sign of the cross.
I turned to Sue. She was hunched over on the seat, her gloved hands rammed down in the pockets of her parka, the hood up over her head. I knew that she was wearing thermal underwear. I had watched as she had put them on. Believe me; they weren’t in the slightest bit glamorous, but they might prove to be fun in the removal later that morning.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
“It’s cold!” she said, shivering. “I’m freezing!”
“Well, you wanted to come. I don’t think this is going to take long. You’ll be back in a warm bed at the seminary in no time, and probably back to the hotel by lunchtime tomorrow, then into a nice soft bed and a full buffet breakfast the following morning.”
“I’ll miss staying with Joseph and Angelo and the others,” she said quietly after a while. “Even though it was scary, I felt that we were amongst friends, sort of part of a family, a little community.”
“Yeah, I know what you mean.”
I didn’t take the conversation any further. Sue had always regretted that we hadn’t had any children. It hadn’t been a matter of choice. It was just the way it had turned out.
“What’s that back there?” she asked suddenly, five or so minutes later.
“Back where?” I said.
“Back there. I thought I saw a car behind us.”
“There’s a car ahead of us, and a couple more down the road over on the right. Of course there’s bound to be one behind us. It’s a main road.”
“But this one didn’t have any lights on,” she said. The tremor in her voice was clear. I knew she would be thinking back to the knife at her throat, and I knew that she shouldn’t have come.
“It’s just the Chinese way, Mrs Dunlop,” Terrence said. “Many of them believe that if you drive without using your headlights then you save electricity, and if you save electricity, then you’re saving petrol. It’s the same with windscreen wipers. Many drivers won’t use them when it’s raining. Don’t worry.”
Her fear had communicated itself to me and I turned and watched the other vehicle. I was tempted to ask Terrence to get the monks to slow down, to see what this other vehicle would do, but I knew I would probably only hold myself up to some form of ridicule, so I kept quiet. It maintained a constant distance behind us and then seemed to drop back, finally pulling into the kerb as the monks signalled a left hand turn. I faced the front again.
“We’re here,” Christopher said
ten minutes or so later from the front passenger seat as the minivan pulled up outside a massive pair of solid wooden doors set into the gateway of the high brick wall surrounding the grounds of a temple, or what was probably a temple. All I could see was the wall and the doors. He turned around to me. “Are you certain that this here temple is the place, Ben?”
“Is this the Temple of Agriculture?” I asked.
“Yes, sir,” he replied, a tinge of concern in his voice. “Of course. Don’t you recognise the place?”
“We’ve only seen it on Google Earth,” Sue said. “Oh, and a couple of pictures on the internet. But the pictures were taken inside the grounds. We’ve never seen any pictures of the wall or the gates, and from here you can’t even see the tops of any buildings.” She turned to me. “Do you remember what the surrounding buildings looked like?” she asked.
I wiped the condensation from the van windows and looked at the buildings on the other side of the street; each of them five or six stories high, small dirty-looking shops on the ground floor and flats or apartments on the others, everything in good need of a coat of paint. The narrow street was lined with small trees, their spindly branches heavily pruned and totally devoid of leaves, the lower section of the trunks painted white. Nothing looked familiar, but then I hadn’t been looking at the surrounding area. We’d only had eyes for the temple and the grounds. I shook my head.
“Well,” I said after we all looked at each other for twenty or so seconds. “If this is the Temple of Agriculture, then this is the place Captain Monty referred to in his letter.” I suddenly had a mind-numbing thought. “I just hope to hell he didn’t get it confused with some other place with a similar name. Is there any other temple nearby with a similar name?”
“No, sir,” Christopher replied. “Not that I ever heard of.”
“Ask the monks,” I said. He turned to the driver, spoke quietly for a few seconds and then turned back to us.
“No, sir,” he said in that southern twang I was finally getting used to. “This is the only one near here.”
“What do you mean by near here?”
“There might be another temple somewhere else in China, but not in Beijing.”
“Well,” I said, my heart rate slowing back to twice its normal speed. “So we should be okay then. Although….”
“Although what, Mr Dunlop, sir?” Christopher asked.
“Well, it’s just that we both expected that there’d be gates, maybe wrought iron gates. Captain Monty spoke about the gateway. Are you sure this is the only Temple of Agriculture in Beijing?”
He smiled, and then asked: “So, Ben, where is the chest buried exactly?”
“Maybe Sue and I should get out of the van,” I said. “We can look through the gateway to see if the buildings match up with the ones in the pictures on the internet.”
“Ben!” Christopher replied rather sharply. “As you may have noticed, the gates are solid planks of wood, and it will be dark inside. I don’t think your suggestion is a feasible one, sir.”
“Ah, right,” I said.
“Ben,” he said, and I could tell that his patience was almost at an end. “No more prevarication, please! Where is the chest buried?”
This was the moment I had been worried about. They knew that it was buried somewhere within the temple grounds, but they couldn’t dig up the whole of the grounds. Once I gave them the exact location, they no longer had any need of us. I had left the agreement signed by the two Cardinals in Rome back at the seminary, on the table in the room where we had been sleeping. It was in plain sight and there was nothing to prevent them from taking it and denying its existence. I knew then that I should have asked them to scan the signed document into Sue’s laptop. We could have emailed it to ourselves, to both our proper email address and also to the fake one we had set up. But it was too late for that. All Sue and I could rely on was the trust of the Jesuit Church. I was certain I could trust Father Angelo and Father Joseph, and probably Fathers Christopher and Terrence as well. I wasn’t so certain about Bishop Petro. One other thing I was certain of, was that they would do whatever Bishop Petro ordered. He had almost given up the location of the chest when Jackson Lee had Joseph locked up in the hotel.
But whether I believed that we could trust these priests or not, it all came down to whether I could trust the Catholic Church itself.
There was no going back. There was no way we could ask for the mini van to be turned around so that I could do something to protect the agreement. There was nothing we could do to strengthen our position further.
“Where is the chest buried, Ben?” Terrence demanded, his right fist clenching and unclenching, a sure indication that he was on the point of forgetting what he had taken vows to become.
I wiped my hand across my brow, feeling perspiration that should not have been there.
“It’s buried a short distance inside the gate,” I said, perhaps a little too quickly, my mouth suddenly gone dry. “It’s next to the trunk of a tree near the entrance to the temple itself, on the right hand side.”
It was done now. We were in their hands. It was all now resting on the cast of the dice. I turned to Sue.
“What did Captain Monty say exactly, Suze?” I asked her. “You had it off by heart at one time.”
“Well,” she replied, closing her eyes and pausing for a moment. “What he said was something like: I used a small tool that I found in the cart to dig a hole about three feet deep amongst the roots of a tree on the right hand side of the entrance to the temple.”
“About three feet deep,” I repeated. “How big was the copper box the bible was kept in?” I asked Joseph. “How high would it have been?”
“I’m not certain,” he replied. “But I would guess that it would be perhaps a foot high, thirty centimetres, perhaps a little less. I could call Father Angelo if you like. He would possibly have a better idea than me. But why do you ask?”
“If the hole that Captain Monty dug was three feet deep and the box is only a foot or so high then we should only have to dig down a bit over two feet, or sixty centimetres, before we hit it.”
“Well then,” Joseph said. “It should be relatively easy to find, provided that the ground is not too cold for digging.” He reached forward and grabbed the side door of the minivan, sliding it back with a crash that reverberated around the quiet street. I waited for lights to come on from some of the surrounding buildings, and the sound of a police car. But all was quiet, not even the barking of a dog. I saw a cat slink silently across the road fifty metres away, something in its mouth. It paused, looked at us, and then continued on its way, skirting a patch of ice in the middle of the street.
“My apologies,” Joseph said, his voice loud in the silence of the night.
We all climbed out, into air that was a good twenty degrees lower than it had been in the vehicle. I looked at Sue and smiled as she hunched the parka further around her face and clasped her arms around her chest.
“You should’ve stayed in the seminary,” I said, with a grin spreading across my face. “You could be tucked up all nice and warm in that cosy bed.”
“It’s not cosy. It’s hard. And it’s no good if you’re not there with me. And besides, I’d much rather be here.”
I put my arm around her shoulders and drew her into my side. She looked up at me and then at the temple wall. It was too high to climb.
“How are we going to get inside!” she exclaimed. “The doors are closed! Look at the size of the lock!”
“Hell!” I said. “I’d forgotten that they might be locked.”
Joseph turned to the senior monk and within seconds a crowbar came out of the minivan and the lock fell clattering to the ground. The hasp was flipped sideways with a loud metallic clang. Again I turned to the surrounding buildings, streets and laneways. Surely someone would be up and about at this time of night. But if they were, they were paying us no attention. Perhaps it was the fact that four of our party were Buddhist monks, dressed in the
ir normal robes, and it was a Buddhist temple that we were forcing our way into. Or perhaps it was just the Chinese way. It wasn’t their concern. Keep your nose out of anything that doesn’t directly affect you.
The rest of us, including the priests, were all dressed in western clothes, rugged up in parkas, gloves, scarves and hats. I wasn’t certain how the monks were able to tolerate the cold, clothed only in their robes. Maybe they were wearing multiple pairs of Chinese long underwear, male versions of the ones Sue was wearing. I was starting to have second thoughts about helping Sue out of hers when this was all over.
The doors were pushed inward with a heavy creaking sound, leaving a gap large enough for us to move through in single file. Two of the monks led the way and the other two brought up the rear, carrying our digging tools.
I looked through the dark opening, into the dim misty interior of the courtyard. A night-bird made a sound and in my mind I could see Captain Montgomery Jenkinson-Smythe charging into the temple grounds with his Lancers, horseshoes clattering on the pathway, sabres flashing in the sunlight, lances pointing forward as they closed on the Boxers cowering behind the cart that had borne the chest. And I could see him, almost casually, pulling back the hammer of the large revolver as he dispatched the two men prostrating themselves on the ground and asking for mercy. That was the moment when the curse of the dark stone had taken its revenge.
My body trembled. Was this right? There was still time to turn and flee and let the priests and the Buddhists reap the rewards of the Captain’s actions.
“Ben!” an urgent voice called, and I turned to Sue. She pushed me forward. “There it is!” she said excitedly, one large glove held close to her face, the other pointing ahead.
“Yes!” I said. “There’s the tree!” And we walked through the smoky gloom into the brick courtyard.
It was different from how it had looked on Google Earth. There had been four trees when we had looked those many weeks ago, two trees on the left hand side and two on the right, and all had seemed to be of the same size. But Google Earth was an image from above, an aerial view, and the foliage had seemed to be far denser, giving the impression of substance, of size. But these trees were sparse, long spindly branches pointing upwards. The foliage had fallen during the winter months and the new growth had not yet appeared. The four trees were all of different sizes, the one we were headed for being larger than the other three, and hopefully older, and hopefully still the one that had been there back during the Boxer rebellion. The others couldn’t have been more than ten or twenty years old. I turned to Terrence, and pointed through the mist at the tree. “Does that tree look like it’s at least a hundred years old to you?” I asked, my voice breaking, my lips difficult to move in the freezing night air.
Dark Eye of the Jaguar Page 26