Forbidden City

by Alex Archer

  "Who did the transcription?"

  Surprise tightened Harry Kim's features. "That's a good question. Not everyone would have known how to read or write when the belt plaque was made."

  Annja nodded. "The person who made the belt plaque either knew how to read or write, or told someone who could."

  "Or the person who placed the curse upon the man inscribed the back of the belt plaque," Kim said.

  "Did Ban Zexu know the belt plaque was cursed?"

  "It's not the belt plaque that was cursed. It was the original ancestor. And all those who came after him." Harry Kim looked at Annja. "The whole lineage was cursed."

  Annja considered that. Familial curses, both given and received, figured into a lot of myths and legends.

  "Why would Ban Zexu carry the belt plaque?" Annja looked at the photograph again. "Why would he want a constant reminder that his family had been cursed?"

  Harry Kim sighed. "I have no idea. He would not have wanted to be reminded. Nor would any of his ancestors before him."

  "Someone should have gotten rid of it along the way," Annja said.

  "Or at least been careless and lost it. I lose things from time to time. Even things that I want to hang on to," Kim said.

  "The belt plaque would have been worth something to a collector," Michelle pointed out.

  "Perhaps, Ban Zexu or his family were not the original owners of the belt plaque. He could have purchased it or stolen it. Perhaps the man – Huangfu Cao – who contacted you and brought you here had discovered the belt plaque had been taken from his family. Perhaps Ban Zexu only found it after the cursed family member died. It could have been a keepsake," Kim said.

  "Who would want a cursed heirloom, Dad?"

  "Someone who didn't know what it was." Kim considered the photograph. "Or someone who believed that getting rid of the belt plaque would have brought forth even worse luck."

  "There's no family name on the belt plaque?" Annja asked.

  Harry Kim shook his head. "No."

  Dead end, Annja thought morosely.

  "If you ever find out the truth of the belt plaque," Harry Kim said, "I would very much like to know." He tapped the book of local legend that lay on the table. "For my book."

  "Of course." Annja smiled at him. "I hope that one day I can tell you that story." That means I'll know it myself, she thought.

  Chapter 10

  Pain flared through Kelly Swan's left ankle as her attacker continued pulling on it. The hard calluses that edged the man's grip bit into her flesh. More pain exploded in her lower back as she registered the impact of landing on her back after having her feet yanked out from under her. But she felt the comfortable weight of the pistol in her hand. Still, he was strong enough to pull her toward him, away from the wall.

  The man was young and looked vicious. He wore street clothes – khaki pants and a green pullover – and held a nickel-plated pistol in his other hand.

  He snarled an order at her in Mandarin. "Give up!"

  Footsteps sounded in the other room, coming fast.

  Her attacker tried again, pulling her toward him and crawling on top of her legs.

  Shoving the pistol only inches from her would-be captor's face, Kelly squeezed the trigger and put a round through the young man's head. He died with a look of surprise that froze on his cruel features.

  Kicking free of the dead man's hand, Kelly lay on her side and extended her gun arm. From the sound of the footsteps, she judged that more than one other man was in the house. She couldn't get the image of her father's corpse from her mind. Silently, she stilled herself, taking control of her breathing the way she had been trained.

  A man appeared in the doorway. He had his weapon pointed before him. He was aiming too high and by the time he realized his mistake and tried to adjust, Kelly had fired twice, punching bullets through his heart.

  She scrambled to her feet as the man fell. With her pistol tucked in close to her body at almost shoulder height, she remembered how awkward she'd thought the stance was when she'd first been trained to use it. She went forward with her profile turned to the door to make a smaller target. She wished she had a Kevlar vest.

  A third man stood at the far end of the hallway. He held a machine pistol in his hands and opened fire as soon as he spotted her.

  Recognizing the threat, Kelly dove back into her father's bedroom. Bullets chopped at the door frame, then slapped into the dead man lying half in and half out of the door.

  Kelly threw herself prone on the sanded wooden floor. The thin walls weren't going to offer any resistance to the hail of bullets. Instead of waiting for the man to realize that, she took deliberate aim with the pistol, guessing at the man's location.

  The bedroom filled with noise. The pistol's deliberate reports stood out against the deadly chatter of the machine pistol.

  Abruptly, the machine pistol stopped firing. Kelly took a moment to feed a fresh magazine into her weapon. She knew she had two rounds left. Even in the heat of battle, she kept count the way she'd been trained to. She also knew to optimize her ammunition and have a full magazine at the ready whenever she could.

  Looking at the dead men, seeing the forearms of the first man and the exposed back of the second where his shirt had ridden up, Kelly spotted the multicolored tattoos that covered their skin.

  Gangsters. The possibility rattled inside Kelly's head and she immediately denied it. Her father wouldn't have anything to do with Triad members. As far as she knew, her father had never dealt with the Chinese organized crime syndicates.

  But the tattoos marked the men as such.

  She heard the sound of a window opening in the other room.

  Kelly rose and ran forward. She reached the doorway, her gun before her, just in time to see the gunman getting to his feet outside. He sprinted toward the backyard.

  Instead of following through the window, Kelly raced to the back door. Pausing, she held the pistol beside her head and peered out across the yard. The gunman vaulted over the low wooden fence in the back and raced north along the narrow alley.

  Kelly plunged through the doorway and crossed the yard. She threw a leg forward and vaulted like a hurdler. Landing on the other side, she dropped into a three-point crouch and spotted the gunman ahead of her.

  He saw her, too. He whirled and brought up the machine pistol. The barrel spat flame. A handful of bullets peppered the low fence and tore chunks from the earth as Kelly rolled to cover behind a wall of brush across the backyard of the neighboring house.

  The man was out of bullets. Angrily, he threw the pistol down and ran full-tilt toward the alley mouth.

  Kelly gave only brief consideration to killing the man. She had her sights over his back. It would be an easy matter, a simple squeeze of the trigger.

  Instead, she pushed herself to her feet and gave chase. She had questions. She couldn't ask them of dead men. Driving her legs into the thin asphalt that barely covered most of the alley floor, she closed the distance on her quarry.

  He reached the street first and stood looking wildly for a moment. Traffic passed in front of him. Then he headed to his left.

  Kelly reached the corner, feeling her breath tight in her lungs. She dropped the pistol to her side. Neighbors peered out from the windows and doors of their homes. She pushed herself into motion, but before she had gone three steps a small sedan cut across traffic and bumped up over the curb.

  The running man caught hold of the door as the car passed. He reversed direction but was still jerked like a puppet on a string. In the next instant, he had the door open and was inside. Horn blaring as the driver leaned on it, the car roared away, cutting through the slower moving traffic.

  Unable to pursue, Kelly memorized the tag number out of habit. Here in Shanghai, she didn't have the connections she needed to trace a vehicle. Furthermore, she felt certain it had been stolen for the murder of her father.

  That was, after all, what she would have done.

  Back in her father's, b
arely able to control her grief, anger and sense of helplessness, Kelly looked at her father. He'd been tortured. She saw that from the cuts and burns on his body, the bruised and battered features. Ligature marks showed on his wrists and ankles where he had been bound.

  Her father hadn't died easily.

  Wiping the tears from her face with her sleeve, Kelly turned from him and surveyed the two men she'd killed. The police would arrive soon. She needed to be gone by that time.

  Taking a pillowcase from the bed, Kelly went through the dead men's clothes. She emptied their pockets of wallets, money, keys and weapons. She dropped everything inside the pillowcase. She didn't have anyone locally who would do things for her, but men could be bought.

  By the time the first strident double whoops of the police sirens reached her ears, she was finished. She took a last look at her father, then raced out the front door to the rental car.

  A few of the more curious and less cautious neighbors had left their houses and stood in their yards. As soon as she appeared, they scuttled back inside their dwellings.

  Kelly dropped into the seat, keyed the ignition, and pulled away as the first police car roared around the corner ahead of her. She didn't hesitate as she drove past. A quick glance at the rearview mirror revealed that the police car had stopped in front of her father's house. Two uniformed men got out with weapons drawn and cautiously advanced.

  Kelly wiped her tears away and focused on her next moves. She had to stay alive at least long enough to avenge her father's death. Anything past that, with the enemies she had pursuing her, was too much to ask.

  Little more than twenty minutes later, after being mired in the crush of morning traffic, Kelly pulled the rental car to a halt at the public docks and got out. She carried the pillowcase to the edge of the Huangpu River.

  Human voices, the screech of seagulls, and the popping of gasoline and diesel engines created a familiar cacophony. Acrid smoke burned her nose, but the odor was mixed with the stench of fish. Families that included several generations who'd lived all their lives out on the water, fished and worked at hobbies that helped support their meager ways of life.

  Kelly knelt on the dock and wasn't too out of place among the tourists, shoppers and fishermen. Quickly, she went through the contents of the pillowcase. The papers gave her names, but she guessed they were probably fake.

  She left the weapons inside, though she did take ammunition she could use, and she took the money. Working in the shadows as she did, money was both a weapon to reach her enemies and a defense to block them.

  When she was satisfied she could learn nothing more, she dropped the pillowcase into the water beneath the wooden pier and walked away. The men had been Triad. Someone would know who owned them. Once she found that person, she could discover who had ordered her father's death. She only wanted to live long enough to kill that man.

  As she approached the pier on the south side of Huangpu Park, Kelly spotted the boat she was looking for. The tall, concrete Monument to the People's Heroes stood only a short distance away at the confluence of the Huangpu and Suzhou Rivers. The structure looked like three bayonets leaning edge-first into each other for support. She'd never before seen the monument in that light. A lot of the local people hated it.

  The boat she was looking for was a ramshackle affair that had never seemed seaworthy, but it had been home to generations of family. It was much larger than the traditional sampans most river dwellers lived on.

  Thirty feet long and nearly half that wide, covered by sun-faded cloth draped over a bamboo skeleton, the boat offered luxurious accommodations when compared to the other craft around it. Rubber tires lashed to the sides stood as a buffer. The Chinese flag, five yellow stars on a field of brilliant red, flew proudly on the stern. An array of antennae protruded at the ship's stern, as well. She was named Fragrant Moon Lotus, after Tse Chu-yu's beloved wife.

  Seeing the boat made Kelly feel a little safer. Tse Chu-yu had been a good friend of her father's all of her life. He was one of the few men she'd known when she was young who hadn't looked down on her simply for being female.

  Do you really want to bring your troubles to an old man's home? Guilt assailed Kelly as soon the thought entered her mind, but the anger and confusion she felt over her father's murder won out.

  She walked forward.

  Chapter 11

  After telling Harry Kim and his daughter how much she appreciated their help, Annja drove her rented SUV back to the bed-and-breakfast. Her mind was so consumed with questions over the belt plaque and the curse that she barely noticed a new sheriff's deputy sat in a cruiser beside the building.

  On the other side of the sun-kissed windshield, the deputy sat listening to a combination of the scanner and some jazz music. The tourist traffic had picked up slightly, trickling through the shops and market areas.

  Annja parked her vehicle and walked over to the deputy.

  He was a middle-aged man with thick hair and a sculpted mustache. His uniform was crisp and showed knife-edge creases. His hat occupied the passenger seat and pump-action shotgun leaned forward over it.

  The window rolled down and the cool of the air conditioner rushed out. The deputy looked at Annja.

  "Hi," Annja greeted.

  "Miss Creed." The deputy smiled a little.

  "Who are you?"

  "Deputy Connelly."

  "I see Sheriff Barfield hasn't lost his paranoia over me." Annja tried to keep the irritation out of her voice but wasn't sure she was successful.

  The deputy's smile widened. "I wouldn't get my feelings hurt over it if I was you," he said.

  "But you're not."

  "No, I guess not." Connelly shrugged. "Sheriff Barfield doesn't have big trust for anyone involved with media. He's gotten his interviews twisted around before, and had stories that weren't anything at all suddenly balloon into major events when they were actually nothing at all."

  "What's that got to do with me?"

  "The sheriff has looked into your record, Miss Creed. Seems you're a trouble magnet. He's just going to be happy to see you leave town."

  "That isn't exactly hospitable," Annja said.

  "No, ma'am. I don't think the sheriff was trying to be."

  I guess I can't blame him, Annja thought. She offered Connelly the rolls Michelle Kim had sent with her, in case she needed a snack.

  Connelly thanked her for the food.

  Hefting her backpack over her shoulder, Annja walked away.

  Inside her room, Annja set to work. She was online and cruising through the sites where she'd posted pictures of the belt plaque.

  Twenty-three responses awaited her. Most of them only wanted her personal details or to make suggestive comments.

  But there were some interesting contacts.

  What you've found looks like Scythian art, but it could be Chinese. Those two cultures intermingled a lot along the Silk Road.

  Annja already knew that, but she kept reading.

  The weird thing is it looks a lot like a photograph posted by someone else looking for a belt plaque like that. The guy claims it's some kind of inheritance and was lost during the big migration of Chinese to the United States during the Gold Rush.

  I checked and the posting's still up at www.treasureslostandalmostforgotten.net.

  Curious, Annja clicked on the link the poster had provided. Another window opened up. Immediately, the page filled the screen.

  The belt plaque lay in a man's hand and the photograph was cropped so close – that only the hand and the object were visible. The photograph was black-and-white.

  Something about the image jarred Annja's memory. She took the book Harry Kim had given her from her backpack and flipped it open to the pages marked with yellow Post-it Notes.

  One of the photographs in the book showed Ban Zexu holding the belt plaque in his open hand. Evidently the photographer had gotten Ban Zexu to pose with his keepsake.

  Moving the book close to the computer screen, Annja
quickly decided that the Web posting had been cut from the image in Harry Kim's book. Someone had cleaned up the image a little, but the pose was the same. The scars on Ban Zexu's left hand were visible. The picture came from the book.

  Switching over to a search engine, Annja entered the title of the book and Harry Kim's name and discovered the book was also offered as an electronic download with searchable text.

  Okay, so Huangfu Cao didn't have to come here to find out about the belt plaque, Annja realized.

  She returned to the posting.

  If the piece is genuine Scythian art, it could be quite a find. Could be worth a few bucks to a museum or a private buyer.

  And there's always the guy at the Lost Treasures Web site.

  The thing I found most interesting, though, is the image. I've got a Masters in Fine Art with an interest in anthropology, so I'm kind of big in art history (which is how I could tell you it might be Scythian art). I found a link that might involve that object you found.

  According to a local legend out of the Taklamakan desert area, death – and I mean the embodiment of death – came to live along the Silk Road. He, she or it set up residence there and went into business. From what I've been told, death made deals with merchants. For enough money, merchants could pass along the way without being killed. They had to have belt plaques much like the image you've posted here.

  A tariff imposed by Death. The thought intrigued Annja. Several rulers of port cities or along heavily traveled trade thoroughfares often claimed a cut of profits. Taxation was a key contributor to the American Revolution. Citizens, including some historians, often forgot that the U.S. was founded on the precept that taxation wasn't going to be allowed.