To my eyes the tree looked to be thirty years old and no more. I felt my heart sink as I waited for his answer.
“It could be hundred years and another hundred, Ben,” he said, with laughter in his voice. “That tree was there for at least a hundred years before your Captain Montgomery Jenkinson-Smythe entered this place.”
We surged forward, a compact mass of nine people, three different hopes with but one quest – to find the chest, to find whether it still existed, whether it had ever existed, and, if it did still exist, whether it would be empty of the treasures that each one of us sought, or whether it would be full to the brim, and the hopes or prayers of each group would be fulfilled.
One of the monks said something to Joseph.
“Do you know which side of the tree he buried the chest?” Joseph asked, his breath billowing out in white clouds, stamping his feet to keep the cold at bay. I was glad I’d put on the extra pair of socks.
“No,” I replied. “There was nothing in his letter about that.” I turned to Sue, inviting her to comment. She shrugged her shoulders.
“I guess it wouldn’t be the front section, though,” I said. “He would’ve wanted to make certain that he wasn’t being watched by his men when he buried it, so he wouldn’t have dug the hole with his back to the gate. If it had been me, I would’ve dug the hole at the back of the tree trunk to make it less noticeable.”
Joseph turned back to the monk who had asked the question, and listened as he asked another.
“What does it matter where he dug the hole?” I said rather too loudly. “The bloody bed is only a couple of metres square. Just dig!” Nobody said anything. They had all stopped moving towards the tree. “Pass me the crowbar!” I said quietly through clenched teeth. “I’ll do it!”
“The tree is hundreds of years old, Mr Dunlop, sir,” Christopher whispered to me. “We must work carefully. These are sacred grounds. We have already offended the monks who worship in this place by breakin’ the lock and intrudin’. We’ll stand aside and let our brother monks disturb the earth.”
“Okay, okay,” I replied, the slowness of his speech adding to my frustration.
I kept forgetting that this was China. Nothing is rushed. All movement must first be considered and weighed. I stepped back and put my arm around Sue again. The four monks moved forward. A prayer wheel was taken from beneath the robes of one and for several minutes the only sound was of the soft humming of the wheel rotating on its reel, and the murmurings of repetitive incantations. I looked around at Joseph and Terrence and Christopher. Each had his head bent in prayer, whether for this place of worship, or for the success of our search, it was impossible to tell. I could see their lips moving, but the words were unintelligible to me. I was quickly running out of patience, and could feel Sue’s nails digging into my arm as she tried to hold her tongue. And then finally, there was movement.
The monks worked slowly. First one of them would ram the crowbar into the hard earth, one slow stroke at a time, and then one of the others would dig out the small amount of dirt that had been loosened. If they touched on one of the roots of the ancient tree, they would move to the side, trying not to disturb the reverence in which it was held. Captain Monty wouldn’t have been so careful. He would have rammed the spade through any small root that impeded his way and kept on digging. Those small roots would have grown larger over the hundred and ten years since he had been here, and maybe they were protecting the chest from our search.
One of the monks had removed his outer robe and spread it out on the ground. As each section or lump of soil was removed it was placed on the robe. Nothing was to be lost, nothing was allowed to spill on to the surrounding brick courtyard.
I kept expecting to hear the sounds of sirens and running feet, but the only noise to break the stillness was the shuffling of feet as those not digging tried to keep the cold at bay. Several times I stepped forward to urge them on, only to be hauled back by Christopher each time and be subjected to his waving gloved finger.
The air seemed filled by the steaming breaths of men, and one woman. Sue stood silently off to one side, watching the painstakingly slow progress. If it had been an excavation by archaeologists, it could not have been so slow. They were almost down the three feet that Captain Monty had spoken of, and there was nothing.
“Move closer to the tree!” I whispered. “Move the hole sideways.”
And again there was that admonishing look from Christopher. He knew that the monks were doing their best. It was their religion we were interfering with, and the sacred grounds of the temple of their fellow Buddhists that we were defiling. We would work at their pace.
The monks moved to the other side of the tree, to the right side, and started the agonising slow process again, shovelling each small spadeful of dirt back into the hole which they had already dug on the other side. I waited, then went to move forward again to urge them to work faster, and felt Sue’s hand clasp my arm again.
“It’s been five months since you found Captain Monty’s letter,” she said quietly. “Another five or ten minutes isn’t going to make any difference.” I turned to her, as she added. “If you keep interrupting, they might change their minds.”
“What do you mean?”
“The monks now know as much as we do, and it’s their territory. There’s nothing to stop them from making us leave, locking the place up and coming back tomorrow with the monks who own this temple.”
And all of a sudden there was a clunk, as the crowbar hit something solid. I spun back to the tree. Was it a rock? There hadn’t been any in the hole on the other side of the tree. It had to be the chest. Or might it only be a brick left over from an ancient construction?
“Come on, come on,” I urged, ignoring the black looks that I was now getting from Joseph as well.
“Quiet, Ben!” Sue snapped. “Quiet. Listen!”
“Okay,” I said. “Okay, I’ll be bloody quiet. But they hit something!”
“No,” she replied. “I think I heard something.”
“Yes, the bloody spade hit something.”
“Not in the hole,” she said nervously. “I heard something over by the gate. It sounded like somebody kicked something along the ground. It sounded like the lock skittering along the flagstones. Didn’t you hear it?”
“No,” I replied. “You’re hearing things.” There was another solid hollow thud from the hole. “It’s an echo. This mist does funny things with noises.”
I watched as the spade went further into the hole that had now been enlarged towards the trunk of the tree. I watched as the monks scraped more of the earth away from the bottom of the hole, the spade grating on something solid beneath the loosened soil.
“Is it the chest?” I asked, trying to peer over between the two monks standing in front of me. They were talking to each other but with words that were totally foreign to me. “What are they saying?” I asked Joseph, my voice quivering with excitement.
“It’s flat on top, whatever it is,” he said, and I could hear the thrill in his voice as well. “They’re saying that it’s not a piece of masonry.” He turned to me, his face alight with anticipation. “I think it’s a chest! Pray to God that it will be our chest!” He gripped my forearm and gave it a squeeze. He was even more excited than I was. His precious relics had gone from a dream to a reality, even if only a possible reality, but a reality nonetheless.
They widened the hole even further and I forgot about sirens and running feet, and being discovered in someone else’s sacred place, and about Sue hearing locks kicked across the stone forecourt. More dirt came out and then the two monks standing in front of me leaned in. I could hear their grunting as they heaved to free the chest from a hundred and ten years of interment in the hard cold ground. It came up slowly, a great golden gash where the crowbar had scraped away a century of oxidisation on the top of the lid to reveal the brightness of the copper.
I could see from the way the monks were carrying the chest that it was h
eavy and still filled with the treasures looted by the Boxers. They placed it at my feet, although perhaps a little closer to Joseph’s than to mine.
“Is it your chest?” I asked Joseph. “Is it the one taken from the church by the Boxers?”
“Oh, yes!” he said. “Oh, my God, yes! The Lord has certainly blessed us this night!”
“Do we open it here?” I asked.
Sue’s words came back to me. There was nothing to stop the monks from loading the chest into their van and driving off, and leaving us and the Jesuit priests standing by the roadside. If I had been them, that’s what I probably would have done. The monks had given their word, but was that good enough? If we opened it now at least we could see what had been recovered. We would have a record of what was in the chest. There would be witnesses – us and the Jesuits. But if the monks drove off and left us here, they could always claim that all the chest had held had been books or rotting vestments, or maybe only a pile of rocks placed there by whoever they reckoned must have found the chest a hundred or so years ago.
Were the treasures still there? Was it possible that the Lancers whom Captain Monty had ordered to stay outside the walls of the temple had watched him as he buried the chest? They might have crept back and quietly observed him as he searched the cart and removed the chest, dragging it across to the tree. Even if they hadn’t been able to see what he had been doing inside the temple grounds, they would have taken note of the amount of time it took for him to call them back inside. They would have noticed the empty space left in the cart after he had removed the chest. And they would have noticed that he had no loot hanging from his saddle, and nothing draped across the horse’s withers either.
Why hadn’t Sue and I considered all of this before we had come back to China?
His Lancers could have returned within hours. They would have found the recently turned-over dirt by the tree, dug up the chest, removed the treasure, and filled the chest with rocks and bricks, or maybe even the heads of the Boxers they had mercilessly dispatched that same day. They would have buried the chest again, knowing that their Captain would be back from time to time to check on his secret cache, to see that it was undisturbed. They would have gone off laughing at the foolishness of their British officer for treating them as lesser beings, and grinned at the thought of the look on his face when he opened the chest and found several rudely decapitated heads staring up at him.
I could feel the perspiration running down the small of my back again, and my heartbeat pounding through my chest.
“Do we open it here?” I asked again when I had received no reply the first time, my voice breaking. I had to find out whether it was treasure, bricks, or worm-cleaned skulls. But would they be smooth empty skulls? The chest was meant to be airtight. The worms wouldn’t have been able to get to the heads. The skin on the heads would have dried like parchment, the eyes shrivelled and loose. Maybe the chest would be best left closed until we were back in that holy place where the spirits of the dead could be appeased, and not opened in this dark and gloomy temple forecourt.
“No,” Joseph replied. “We will take it back to the seminary, but this time we will enter proudly, through the front door. We will not sneak through the private entrance like persecuted people. And Father Angelo will be the first to lift the lid and reveal what the Lord has delivered back to us.”
I breathed a sigh of relief and then saw the look of disappointment on Sue’s face. Was it only me who could foresee the evil it might contain? But then again, wouldn’t this be the best place to disturb and release the souls of the dead, here in the place where they had been so savagely and mercilessly dispatched?
Joseph turned to one of the Buddhist priests and seemed to be arguing the matter with him. There was further discussion amongst the monks and finally there were nods of heads. I didn’t like the fact that it had taken so long for the monks to agree, and was certain I had been right. Did they want the contents of the chest for themselves, or maybe only those things that did not belong to the Jesuits, of which there could have been many?
Joseph could see that I was still unsure about leaving it closed, but probably believed that it was because I was eager to see whether the precious items were still in the chest or whether they had been taken in antiquity. “Have faith, my son,” he said, smiling. “Have faith.” He made the sign of the cross. If he knew what was really in my mind, even he might have had second thoughts. The sudden sight of three or four shrivelled Boxer heads might give Father Angelo a heart attack. “I can feel the presence of our holy relics. I can feel their love,” he said quietly and placed one hand on my shoulder, and squeezed gently.
I hoped he was right. I could see the warm tear falling down his cheek, and heard the emotion in his voice as he said: “Come, let us go.”
And maybe he was right. Why would someone dig up the chest, remove the treasure, and then bury the chest again? They would need the chest to carry the loot away. Joseph was right. He had to be! It was all there! The relics, the jade, the gold, and even more precious things!
We turned back towards the gate, the two monks carrying the chest at the front and the other seven of us following close behind, each one in barely concealed excitement. I threw my arm around Sue, and drew her close to me.
“We did it, Suze!” I yelled. “We did it! We found the bloody thing!” I couldn’t care who heard. It didn’t matter if we woke up the whole street. We had the chest. After all those months, all the waiting, all the planning. We had the chest.
She didn’t reply. She couldn’t. There were tears of joy and relief falling down her cheeks as well, so I just drew her even closer. I was so proud of her. If she had been like some others I knew, she would have refused to allow me to buy the writing box, and would have nagged until she had got her way. But Sue was not like those others.
“We did it, Suze!” I said again, and crashed into Christopher’s back as he came to a sudden stop only metres from the partly opened doors in the temple wall. I bounced out to one side and came almost face to face with the Chinese gangster who had held the knife to Sue’s throat.
Ten
All three of the gangsters were there, the three who should have been securely locked up in the church’s storeroom. They were spread out just inside the huge gateway. And there was one other, presumably the one who had escaped in the car outside the hotel where they had kept Joseph. How had this untidy ragged man, this one single person, been able to bluff or force his way into the seminary and release the others? Had he been behind us in the car that Sue had been worried about? Had he raced back to fetch his cronies as soon as he’d seen us enter the temple grounds?
And all four of them had knives this time, knives that could only have come from the seminary kitchen; long heavy carving knives.
The one who had rammed the dirty-smelling cloth into my mouth and had done all the talking was holding a huge meat cleaver in both hands. The mongrel who had threatened Sue and who had grinned when he had kneaded her breast, held a large butcher’s knife in his left hand, his right arm, the one that Terrence had wrenched from its socket, hanging loose by his side. They stood their ground before us, blocking the gateway, silent, menacing.
The two monks who had been carrying the box placed it gently on the ground, their eyes never for a second leaving the faces of the thugs standing before us. They tossed their heavy faded saffron robes sideways across their shoulders, ready to do battle with these men, empty hands held out to the side. We had no weapons, apart from the spade and the crowbar, and these were behind us, carried by the other two monks. But we were eight men to their four, and one of their four had recently been severely incapacitated by Father Terrence. I had heard the scream when Terrence had re-located the man’s shoulder. The odds would have been good, had it not been for the knives and the heavy cleaver. My mouth went dry and I wiped a quivering hand across my lips.
Eight against four.
I knew what Terrence was capable of, and I had seen what Christopher
could do against an opponent wielding a knife. But they had taken these men by surprise when they had burst into our room at the seminary. That element was no longer a factor. And Joseph? Joseph was a man of peace. Joseph would try to reason calmly with these men, but calmness was not going to resolve this impasse. They wanted the chest. We would not give it up. Reason would not be the answer.
And then a shadowy figure, a figure dressed in the dark cowled cassock of a priest, the hood pulled up and over his head, shielding his face, both hands thrust deep inside the folds of the heavy material, stepped out from within the gloom inside the wall and moved across to Father Joseph. And another man, warmly wrapped in a dark parka and heavy fur-covered mittens, stepped forward, removed both mittens, and stood at the left shoulder of this other priest. My pulse rate slowed and I breathed a little easier. This priest, and whoever was with him, could only have been sent by Angelo. The escape had been discovered and Angelo must have sent this priest. But why had he only sent one of the servants with him? Why were there not more of them?
Dark Eye of the Jaguar Page 27