Without saying word, Madam Jin watched her brother-in-law retreat from the library.
She’d been tired that day, she had planned to retire early. After a simple supper she’d changed into her nightgown and retreated to her library to relax, perhaps read a little. She loved to read, anything that was history related fascinated her. Then her brother-in-law called, saying he was on his way over. He had some not so good news and needed to talk to her in person.
Indeed, what he’d told her about the stone had been a blow. After days spent in his lab equipped with ultra-advanced devices, her gemologist brother-in-law had concluded that the face of the Empress Seal was of costume-jewelry quality. A small cocktail party would have cost more. She glanced at the stone now sitting on the side table. It glinted defiantly, mocking her. Her entire year’s planning and hard work had turned out to be an utter failure.
Not that she was a stranger to failure. She’d had setbacks and defeats that had slammed her into the ground. But she’d always been able to dust herself off, get up, and try again. It was no accident she was the richest self-made woman in China, one of the richest in the world.
She sank into the lounger, kicked off her slippers and brought her knees to her chest. Could her brother-in-law be right? Had what she’d been chasing been a mere phantom, some fantasy that Eunuch Li dreamed up in his diary to dramatize his life serving the once-favorite concubine of the Emperor of the Qing Dynasty? But why would he do that? He’d been thrown out of the palace after Meigui died. He lived in anonymity until he died a lonely and penniless man in the early 1950s. Had he been considering something like an autobiography for a later day, but the timing was never right? After all, the bulk of the twentieth century was a tumultuous time for China, not kind to someone who was a eunuch. Most of them had died before they had a chance to tell their stories. Madam Jin remembered it was not until the 1990s that somebody helped the last living eunuch of the Qing Dynasty put a biography together. In it he had revealed to the whole world the fate of a group once looked down upon as freaks, vestiges of the feudal China.
Was it fate that Eunuch Li’s diary had ultimately fallen in her hands? Madam Jin wondered. Was it her destiny to possess the world’s rarest stone, or had she been dealt a sick joke, to be consumed by a dangerous obsession with something that was merely an apparition? Had she allowed her imagination to run wild? After all, it was not conclusive that the face of the Empress Seal was indeed a red diamond. Eunuch Li simply stated in his diary the palace gemologist’s opinion: it had the characteristics of all three gemstones, ruby, garnet, and diamond.
Or it could just be an ordinary red rock.
Her doubt was weighty but brief. Madam Jin pushed it out of her mind. Her instinct told her from the beginning that she was onto something. Her instinct was seldom wrong.
Eunuch Li was buried in a small graveyard on a foothill outside Beijing, a site nobody knew existed until early 2017 when it was discovered by a group of archeology students. When the news spread that it was likely a previously undisturbed eunuch burial site, Ms. Jin happened to be at the Palace Museum in the Forbidden City, viewing a piece of Ming Dynasty copperware she’d chased down from abroad. The news had piqued her interest. She wanted to be on-site to witness such a rare disentombment. The group of archeologists assigned to the task welcomed her like she was a goddess descending from heaven to bless them with a fruitful dig. Who wouldn’t want to have her, the famed Madam Treasure Scout, the richest woman in China?
The exhumation of the first cadaver confirmed the site was indeed a eunuch burial ground. A glass jar containing elements in murky liquid had been buried with the dead. “He’s a eunuch all right, but at least he was a complete man in death. Got back his treasures.” An archeologist showed Madam Jin the container. She was familiar with how the eunuchs had been castrated, their penis and testicles cut off in one swoop by a curved knife. But seeing the specimens preserved in a jar made her grimace.
They continued to dig up the skeletons, most of them clearly thrown into the dirt hole wrapped only in a piece of cloth, no gravestone. Then somebody tripped over a small cracked tombstone hidden in a patch of weeds, upon which Eunuch Li’s name and birth-to-death date were crudely engraved. The name was faintly familiar to Madam Jin. As the team focused on unearthing what used to be Eunuch Li, Madam Jin dug into the deepest corners of her memory and came up with the name of Meigui, the famous concubine who had drowned herself in the well behind the Rose Pavilion. Just about everybody above a certain age in China knew the name Meigui. Her life was folklore of the past splendor and tragedy that still lingered in the Forbidden Palace to this day. And Eunuch Li, who’d served Meigui during her entire time in the palace, was mentioned in some of the history books she’d read, though details of his life and death were murky. Could this be the same Li? Blood rushed to her head, her heart beat faster. She might have blundered onto something significant. The prospect of adding another proud feather in her already immensely famous hat excited her. This time, Madam Treasure Scout would be hailed as the torchbearer who’d unveiled part of China’s untold history. Hawkeyed, she watched every move of the two men digging around the broken headstone.
The skeleton was raised and the jar dusted off. But there was something else. A package wrapped in a piece of oilcloth. Madam Jin asked to see it. The young man who’d brought up the package handed it to her and went back to attend to the skeleton now lying in the disinterred grave.
The package was the size of a five-by-nine-inch envelope, slimy to the touch, sodden with greenish-black mildew. A horrible smell assaulted her. For a second she thought it might be a piece of half-disintegrated fabric, but the distinct rectangular shape convinced her otherwise. She held it away from her scrunched face with one hand, the other went busy peeling off the outer layer. A moment later, she found herself staring at an old-fashioned notebook, black thread-bound with a black tassel attached at the spine. The pages were made of rice paper, damp and yellowed. Eunuch Li’s name was clearly inked vertically on the cover. Without any hesitation she dropped the notebook in her handbag. It was a piece of history and she was entitled to savoring it in the luxury and comfort of her library. Only after that would she hand it over to have it on permanent display at the Palace Museum. Who could say no to her, the savior of so many of China’s lost treasures? At the end of the dig that day, nobody mentioned the stinky package, as if it had never existed.
But the diary never made it to the Palace Museum as planned. She was immediately mystified by Eunuch Li’s story of the lost Empress Seal. But Meigui’s red stone, the stone that became the face of the seal and was possibly the biggest raw red diamond in the world, enthralled her. The desire to possess it had blazed through her like wildfire that could not be tamed or extinguished, licking her flesh, searing her soul. Would there be anything of her left when it was all over? Was it impulse that had led her to that dig that day, or was it fate? Madam Jin stretched out her limbs, dropping back in the oversized lounger.
The cell phone on her library desk buzzed. She glanced at the nineteenth century Limoges clock on the mantel. It was almost nine p.m. She ignored the buzz at first. Anybody in her circle knew not to bother her after eight p.m. With a vast fortune at the age of fifty-seven, the days of pushing herself hard to work around the clock had long been over. She could afford the luxury of quiet evenings alone in her idyllic country mansion, catching up on reading, usually a historical fiction, or simply soaking in a tub of rose and geranium scented water while immersing herself in heavenly music from her beloved maestros like Beethoven, Mozart, or Chopin.
But the buzzes became more urgent, abrasive, prodding her to get out of the lounger. Languidly, she dragged herself up and padded to the desk. The call was from New York.
“Yes?” she answered curtly, back in full business mode.
“Boss, bad news.” The voice on the other side was mechanical. “Remember the insurance policy you bought recently? He’s demanding a higher premium now. What do you want
me to do?”
Madam Jin thought for a second. “I’ll think about it and get back to you.” She killed the connection and slammed the cell down on the desk. That son of a bitch.
She’d been busy carrying out her plan. She’d just pulled off what she thought was one of history’s grandest heists. She’d forgotten all about Wesley Walters. The phone call just reminded her she had an insurance policy, and it was time she used it. She couldn’t be wrong. The red diamond was all too real, she was not chasing a phantom.
She was a woman of action. Her research had begun almost immediately the moment she had discovered the possible existence of the red diamond. Eunuch Li’s diary offered a clue. He wrote that the Emperor’s mother, the dowager, considered Meigui her archrival. She believed Meigui exerted too much influence on her son, pushing him to adopt progressive western ideas that could topple the Qing Dynasty. The rumor that Meigui believed in Christianity, and the reality that she was pregnant again with the Emperor’s second child terrified the Empress Dowager. What if the child turned out to be a boy? The state of the Emperor’s marriage was an embarrassment to the Empress Dowager. The Emperor hadn’t spent one night with his wife, the Empress of the Qing Dynasty. Meigui’s bastard son with a bastard religion could end up being the next Emperor, the Son of Heaven. That would be blasphemy to the glory of the Great Qing Dynasty. Meigui had to go. The Empress Dowager used a foreign reporter to set Meigui up, making it look like the Emperor’s favorite concubine was having an affair with a western devil.
Eunuch Li’s diary didn’t get into the details of the Empress Dowager’s conspiracy. It simply stated that the night the Emperor caught Meigui and the foreign reporter in bed together, Meigui was ordered to kill herself, and she did so by drowning herself in the well in the courtyard of her dwelling. In the days after Meigui’s death, the maids and eunuchs at the Rose Pavilion were ordered to clear their mistress’s belongings, which according to the Empress Dowager, were to be thrown out or burned. The Emperor seemed to have developed some doubt, perhaps he’d ordered Meigui’s death in a moment of rage. He’d asked Eunuch Li for a few of Meigui’s favorite things, among which was the Empress Seal. But like Meigui’s soul, the Empress Seal was nowhere to be found.
Shortly after Eunuch Li was dismissed from the palace, a photo in the Beijing Gazette caught his attention. A foreign reporter was shown conducting an interview with the Empress Dowager. The name of the reporter was William Blackwell, the chief correspondent of the British newspaper, The Telegraph. The article in the Gazette stated that Mr. Blackwell had gained exclusive access to the imperial court and had conducted several interviews with the Emperor and the Empress Dowager over the years. But to Eunuch Li, he was the man who had come to Meigui’s bed on that fateful night. Eunuch Li also remembered that it was said that the Emperor had mentioned during an earlier interview with a foreign reporter that the newly minted Empress Seal, with the rose on its exotic gemstone face, complimented the French ambassador’s gift, the Emperor Seal with the jade face in a fleur-de-lis pattern. Could that foreign reporter also be William Blackwell? The man who helped kill Meigui, the man who’d had the chance to swipe the Empress Seal when he came to Meigui’s chamber?
Madam Jin took the eunuch’s guess as a clue. Today’s technology made her research easy, and her money had paved the way to the whereabouts of the lost Empress Seal. Luck was on her side.
A few strokes on her computer keyboard led her to numerous sites about William Blackwell I, a British reporter for The Telegraph who’d spent decades of his life in China. Due to his unsurpassed skill at gaining exclusive access to the innermost political and personal goings-on within the imperial court, Blackwell eventually became the paper’s chief correspondent to Beijing. Most websites sang his praises as Britain’s most distinguished journalist and notable historian. Several Chinese sites, however, painted him as a devilish sexual deviant, sighted frequently at Beijing’s high-class brothels as well as opera houses where all stage roles were played by male singers. One site went so far as to claim that even the Empress Dowager was so enamored by Blackwell’s charm that she’d carried on an affair with him for many years, sneaking him into her chamber at night through many of the secret tunnels under the Forbidden City.
Salacious, but there could be some truth to it. A competent, risk-taking reporter in a foreign land, agreeable and pleasant, yet psychopathic and Machiavellian, all traits necessary to survive and thrive . . . Madam Jin was not surprised.
A few more taps on the computer had brought up the contemporary William Blackwell, the great-grandson of the famous journalist. This one lacked the rugged and adventurous spirit of his pioneer great-grandfather but had quite a similar map of personality traits: charming, flamboyant, skirt-chasing, narcissistic. Perfect. She’d test the waters.
For months she monitored William Blackwell IV’s London home, studied his ins and outs and activities around town. On the day when Blackwell was speaking at the Tate Museum for the opening of a Chinese art exhibition, she had an aid hand deliver a threatening note to Blackwell’s town house. The aid handed the letter to the butler with a hundred-pound note. “Make sure Mr. Blackwell gets the letter, unopened,” ordered the aid. The butler had looked indignant for a second but did exactly according to the instructions. The letter made it to Blackwell’s study unopened.
A smile crept up on Madam Jin’s lips. Money works magic.
The rest was history, just as she’d expected. Blackwell panicked. In the comfort of the Ritz-Carlton suite a few blocks away, she’d listened to and recorded Blackwell’s late-night frantic call to his boyfriend Wesley Walters through the bug she’d planted inside the rose-patterned wax seal on the flap of the envelope. She’d struck gold. The Empress Seal did indeed exist and had been sitting in Blackwell’s London home for the last century and a half.
She’d shuddered with excitement.
But that dirty son of a bitch Walters had thrown a monkey wrench in what she’d thought was a seamless plan to scare Blackwell into surrendering the seal to her and to her alone. Quiet, no fuss no muss. She’d underestimated Wesley Walters, the weasel, turning the whole thing into a public fanfare, forcing her to run around the world playing all kinds of charades while taking calculated risks along the way. Yet he, Wesley Walters, Mr. Nobody, would have made significant monetary gain, not to mention notoriety, if that replicated seal ever made its way to his gallery.
At a party at the Tate Museum, she’d requested a private viewing of the seal prior to the arrival of all the guests that evening. Mr. William Blackwell IV was eager to accommodate her, China’s richest woman. She’d distracted Blackwell by showering him with compliments, expressing her gratitude for his selfless act, returning such a treasure to China. Meanwhile, her brother-in-law examined the Empress Seal and secretly but deftly made an imprint of the seal face on a piece of plumbing putty. A substitute face was quickly made and waiting for the Empress Seal when it arrived in Beijing China days later. During the authentication process the distinguished gemologist played Houdini. A switch was made, bringing the great heist to a successful completion. That was over a week ago. She’d never thought all her effort had been in vain. The red diamond remained elusory.
Walters was to guarantee the Empress Seal’s return to China, in whole. “With your intimate relationship with Mr. Blackwell, I believe I can count on you. I want to make sure that the Empress Seal makes it back to China in one piece,” she’d forewarned a perplexed Walters on their way to the Tate that evening, though she’d kept the secret about the face of the seal to herself. Walters, the cunning and vicious bloodhound, was never to get a whiff of what the stone really was. Now he was being greedy and brazen. He thought he had delivered the goods and somehow deserved a bonus. It all came down to money again.
That bastard, he will have to rectify the situation.
She picked up her cell again.
Chapter 17
New York City, present day
Simone Loveless stepped out of
the shower stall. The tiny bathroom in her one-bedroom apartment felt like a sauna, steamy and hot. Naked and dripping wet, she stepped in front of the skinny full-length mirror on the back of the bathroom door. It had been part of her morning routine since she was sixteen years old, staring at her own naked body in the mirror, fancying herself walking on the runway in clothing designed by the grandest names of the haute couture world.
With one hand she slowly wiped the steam from the mirror, left to right, top to bottom as her own image faded in. She wiped until she could see herself on full display, all five feet and eight inches of herself.
She examined the reflection critically, twisting her body left to right, this way and that way. Every inch of her alabaster skin was still flawless, but it lacked that luminosity women were willing to die for. Her delicate breasts and cherry red nipples were still perky but had lost their gravity defying upturned curve. The eyes that stared back at her were icy, pale blue, but not as crystal clear as unadulterated glacier water.
A swath of wet hair slithered over her forehead. She flipped it back. There was a glint—minuscule, almost unnoticeable. But she saw it, one root of her pale blond hair had turned an ugly, decaying grey. She yanked it out. There. She’d eradicated the disease of aging. She looked into the mirror again.
The Face of the Seal Page 20