Three minibuses were pulling up outside the guest house just as Charlotte was setting out for the caves a short while later. The first two held tourists who were arriving for the trip to the cave; and the third was the shuttle bus that the guest house provided for the convenience of guests and staff. Emily was just getting off the shuttle bus as Charlotte emerged from the compound gate. Though Emily had disembarked right behind Ned, they gave no sign of knowing each other. If they were an item, Charlotte imagined that they would have to be very discreet. She had just been reading in the English language edition of the People’s Daily, the Communist Party organ, about a Chinese woman who was jailed for “incitement to debauchery” as a result of her relations with a French diplomat.
Emily fell easily into step next to Charlotte on the road that led to the foot of the cliff. “Are you taking the tour of the secret library?” she asked.
“Yes,” said Charlotte.
“Oh, good,” she said sweetly. “I am going to be your guide.”
“You speak excellent English,” said Charlotte. “Ned told me last night that you studied at London University.”
At the mention of Ned’s name, a blush crept up the girl’s lovely throat. “Thank you,” she said. “I would like very much to study in the United States some day. In New England, preferably. I am a great admirer of the Massachusetts poet Emily Dickinson. Are you familiar with her poetry?” she asked.
“Yes,” said Charlotte. “In fact, I have a volume of her poems with me.” Charlotte always brought poetry to read on trips. She had long ago learned that, she would never finish a novel, and poems had the virtue of being conducive to the kind of pleasant thoughts that brought sleep to the jet-lagged.
“You do!” said Emily, her brown eyes opening wide in excitement at coming across another fan of her favorite poet.
She wore a demure embroidered blouse of white silk with a black bow at the throat, and black cloth shoes with white anklets. If she had been wearing a long black skirt instead of the standard-issue baggy black pants, her outfit could have come from the closet of the reclusive poet from Amherst.
“I would like very much to talk with you about her sometime,” she continued as they joined the tourists who had gathered at the gate in the fence at the foot of the cliff: German conservators, Japanese monks, Chinese from Hong Kong, and a couple of groups of American and Australian visitors.
“I would like that very much as well,” Charlotte replied.
Excusing herself, Emily went in search of Victor, leaving Charlotte to browse at the souvenir stand, whose odd assortment of merchandise included painted silk fans, plaster casts of the Venus de Milo, reproductions of the terra-cotta warriors form Xian, and Santa Clauses playing electric guitars.
She was about to buy a rice-paper rubbing of a Tang horse for her step-granddaughter, Marsha’s brother’s daughter, when she was accosted by one of the Australian tourists—a plump woman with gray bangs and a sun visor.
“Pardon me,” the woman said. “Has anyone ever told you that you look just like the movie star—what’s her name?—the one who was married to Gary Corbett.”
Charlotte had been married four times, but people only seemed to remember Gary. He was the only one of her husbands who had been a movie star. The fact that he had also been a drunkard and a womanizer was forgotten—even, sometimes, by her. “Do you mean Charlotte Graham?” she asked.
“Yes,” the woman said. “That’s the one.”
“Not only do I look like Charlotte Graham,” she said with a smile, “I am Charlotte Graham.” She was accustomed to being mistaken for herself by fans who couldn’t quite believe that they were face to face with the real article.
The woman stared at her, her large gray eyes opening wide in amazement. “No!” she said. “You’re having me on.”
“Here it is, right here,” she said, pointing at the name on the traveler’s check she was using to pay for the rubbing.
“Oh, my God,” the woman hooted, peering over Charlotte’s shoulder at the check. “I have to tell my friend. I’ll be right back.” She stuck out her hand. “Vivian Gormley. Nice to meet you.” Then she turned to find her friend.
Mercifully, Victor arrived before Vivian could return. Charlotte was tolerant of her fans. More than tolerant: she loved them; they had brought her great happiness and success. But in a situation like this one, where she couldn’t easily get away, she preferred anonymity.
“Hello, everyone,” said Victor, taking a position at the head of the group. “My name is Victor Danowski, and I’ll be your lecturer this afternoon. This is Emily Lin, our guide. We’re going to visit the secret library, which is located at the other end of the cave complex.” He pointed to the north. “Follow me, please.”
With Victor setting a brisk pace, the group took off down the avenue that ran along the foot of the cliff. Every so often there was a sign with an arrow which directed them to the “Secret Library.” After perhaps half a mile, Victor paused at the foot of a staircase leading up to the caves.
“Here we are,” he said. “Before we go up, I want to tell you a bit about the caves we are about to see: Cave 16 and the secret library, Cave 17. Cave 17 opens off of Cave 16, which is much larger. It was discovered in 1899 by a monk named Wang Yuan-lu who had taken refuge in the caves after fleeing a famine in his native province. Impressed by the artworks and saddened by their neglect, Wang made it his personal mission to restore the caves to their former glory. He was setting up some newly made statues in the cave now known as Cave 16 when he noticed a crack in one of the frescoed walls. Seeing that the space behind the crack was hollow, he opened up the wall and discovered a small room filled with ancient manuscripts and paintings that had been hidden away sometime during the eleventh century, for reasons that are still unclear. The most popular theory is that they were hidden to protect them from an imminent invasion by a barbarian tribe of Tibetan origin.”
Charlotte tried to concentrate on the lecture, but her mind kept returning to Larry’s murder. It seemed to her that he must have been killed early that morning. He hadn’t been dead for long—that much was clear from the fresh smell of the blood. She also doubted that he had awakened: there were no signs of struggle, and there wasn’t even much blood, a sign that he had died quickly. “Dead men don’t bleed,” a detective had once told her. It appeared to have been a simple death. She guessed that the murderer had simply stolen into the sleeping man’s tent and stabbed him in the chest. With a knife, she presumed, though the murder weapon was missing. She hadn’t noticed it in the tent, and, though she had kept an eye out on her way back to the work tent, she hadn’t seen it. She had been reluctant to look around too much for fear of disturbing the scene. She had learned that much from her experience with police work. Don’t walk around, and don’t touch anything. She had made the mistake of tampering with the weapon in the first murder case she had been involved in. She had rotated the barrel of the revolver to see if there were bullets left in any of the chambers, and gotten her fingerprints all over the murder weapon. But she could be forgiven in that case: she was the person who had fired the bullet, killing her co-star on stage in the murder scene in a Broadway play. The killer had substituted a real bullet for the blank in the stage prop. Once she had realized that it was real blood oozing from the wound in Geoffrey’s chest, her first impulse had been to check the barrel. She couldn’t quite believe that the bullet that had killed him had come from her gun.
Now she was party to another murder. In Geoffrey’s case, it had been clear to her from the outset that the murderer was his lover, whom he had recently jilted for someone else. It had simply been a matter of gathering the evidence to put him behind bars. This was a different matter.
“Okay,” said Victor after he had answered some questions from the audience. “Onward to Cave 16. I’ll tell you about Sir Aurel Stein when we get to the top.” Turning, he led the way up the rock-cut staircase.
The cave was the lowest in a group of three, one on to
p of the other. It was sheltered by an entrance façade that was similar to that of the Cave of Unequaled Height but not as grand: a glazed tile roof with upturned eaves supported by redpainted columns. After climbing the stairs, the group assembled in the cave, which Emily had unlocked with a key from a big iron key ring. The cave was quite large and was elaborately painted with figures of Bodhisattvas, which Victor defined as Buddhist deities who had postponed Nirvana in order to help others on the path to enlightenment. A group of garishly painted statues—Buddhas, Bodhisattvas, and guardian warriors—occupied a horseshoe-shaped dais at the back of the cave. These must have been the statues that Wang had been setting up when he had accidentally discovered the secret library. An opening in the wall on their right appeared to be the entrance to the secret library.
Victor stood in front of the dais, the light from the entrance illuminating his pale face. Flanking him were Emily and Chu, who had also joined the tour. “Now we come to Stein,” he said, picking up the thread of the story. “Sir Aurel Stein was a British explorer of Hungarian descent who had already made several expeditions to Central Asia when he visited the caves in 1907. Upon his arrival, he heard a rumor about a hidden deposit of ancient manuscripts. He was eager to question Wang about this, but Wang was away on a begging trip. Returning to the caves a few months later, after the monk had returned, Stein decided on a two-pronged strategy to gain Wang’s confidence. The first was to express admiration for his efforts at restoring the caves.” Victor turned to point at the statues. “If you’ll take a look at the statues behind me, which Wang commissioned as part of his restoration, you’ll see that this must have required more than a bit of dissimulation. The second strategy was to draw parallels between his own explorations and those of the Chinese monk Hsuan-tsang, who had made a pilgrimage to India in the seventh century. It was the second strategy that bore fruit. As it turned out, Hsuan-tsang was Wang’s patron saint, and Stein’s reference to the beloved monk convinced Wang that he should show Stein a sample manuscript from the secret library. By fortuitous coincidence—”
“Fortuitous for the British, disastrous for the Chinese,” interjected Chu. He went on: “I would also like at this point to correct any mistaken impressions that it was the British so-called explorer Aurel Stein who discovered the library. As Comrade Danowski’s lecture has made very clear, the library’s discoverer was the Chinese monk Wang Yuan-lu.”
Victor continued with a look of patient forbearance. He had no choice but to be placatory; he was there only on the sufferance of the Chinese. “By a coincidence that was fortuitous for the British and disastrous for the Chinese, the manuscript that Wang picked at random from the thousands in the cave turned out to be a sutra that Hsuan-tsang had translated himself from originals that he had brought back from India. Impressed by this auspicious omen, the priest proceeded to open the secret library to Stein.”
“Now I’ll read you the pertinent section from Stein’s journal,” Victor continued. Removing a sheet of paper from a folder, he proceeded to read from the entry in Stein’s diary: “‘The sight the small room disclosed was one to make my eyes open. Heaped up in layers, but without any order, there appeared in the dim light of the priest’s little lamp a solid mass of manuscript bundles rising to a height of nearly ten feet, and filling, as subsequent measurement showed, close to five hundred cubic feet.’ It was,” Victor interjected, “one of the most fabulous archaeological discoveries”—he looked over at Chu—“correction: finds, of the twentieth century. Each night,” Victor continued, “Wang would remove a bundle of manuscripts and take them to Stein for further study. Meanwhile, Stein and his group were discussing—”
“They weren’t discussing, they were plotting,” interrupted Chu.
Victor gave his goatee a nervous little tug, and went on. “They … plotted … how to convince Wang to sell them the manuscripts.”
Charlotte could see that this was going to be a very tedious lecture if Chu was going to keep translating it into ideologically pure language. But Victor, who seemed to be accustomed to the interruptions, kept on, somehow managing to ignore Chu without appearing to challenge his authority.
“Finally,” Victor continued, “Stein managed to convince Wang to allow him to remove some of the manuscripts to a ‘certain temple of learning in the distant West,’ which was, of course, the British Museum. In exchange, he offered Wang a donation of silver for the restoration of the caves.”
“In other words, he bribed Wang,” said Chu.
Victor ignored him. “In all, Stein carried off twenty-four cases of manuscripts—thirteen thousand in all—and five cases of paintings, embroideries, and other art objects to the British Museum.”
“The monk sold the cultural heritage of China to the foreign imperialists for a hundred and thirty pounds,” said Chu calmly.
Charlotte was getting tired of Chu’s interruptions. He had made his point. Why not let Victor get on with it? Chu himself must have been getting tired, for, after this last comment, he turned and left, much to their relief. Victor diplomatically refrained from saying anything, but it was clear that Emily was glad that her boss had decided to give them a break.
The lecture now proceeded uninterrupted.
“As you may know, the prize of Stein’s haul was the oldest printed book known to mankind: the Diamond Sutra, which was printed in 868 A.D. It is now on display in the British Museum.” Victor went on to relate the rest of the story: “The next year, another Western explorer, the French Sinologist Paul Pelliot, also persuaded Wang to sell him several cases of artworks and manuscripts; these are now in the collections of the Louvre and the Bibliothèque National in Paris. Pelliot was followed by explorers from Russia, Japan, and the United States. When the Chinese government heard about the foreigners’ purchases, they demanded that Wang ship the remainder of the contents of the secret library to Beijing. But Wang distrusted the government, and justifiably so. Only a few of those manuscripts ever made it to the capital; the rest were lost or pilfered by corrupt officials along the way. In fact, they still turn up from time to time at rare book dealers.”
“Imagine that,” said Vivian Gormley in a loud voice.
“I saw one in Finland just last year,” Victor commented. “But the story doesn’t end there. As it turned out, Wang hadn’t turned all of the remaining manuscripts over to the government. He had shrewdly held back a nest egg of manuscripts that he considered of special value, and when Stein returned several years later, he was able to buy another six hundred manuscripts. After that, the door was closed to Western explorers, but that wasn’t the end of the discovery of ancient manuscripts at Dunhuang. Last year, a Chinese art student who had been restoring a sculpture of an earth god accidentally discovered a cache of manuscripts that had been sealed inside the sculpture’s belly. It appears that these manuscripts had been hidden there by Wang prior to his discovery of the secret library. It was to translate some of these recently discovered manuscripts that the Chinese authorities invited me and my colleague, Marsha Lundstrom, to Dunhuang.”
Victor replaced the sheet with the entry from Stein’s diary in his folder. “Are there any questions?” he asked.
“Yes,” said the inquisitive Vivian. “Are there any other manuscripts still hidden away?” She waved an arm at the statues of Buddhas and Bodhisattvas on the dais. “Inside these statues, for instance?”
“No one knows,” he replied. “There are twenty-four hundred statues at Dunhuang.” Flicking on his flashlight, he aimed the beam at the hole in the right-hand wall of the cave. “Now we’ll take a look at the secret library.”
6
“We’ll go into the secret library one at a time,” Victor announced. “Then I’ll tell you some more about the scholarly significance of the contents. And then we’ll talk about the frescoes of Dunhuang in general”—he waved an arm at the murals on the walls—“and of this cave in particular.”
One by one, the members of the group stepped up to the hole in the cave wall. “It�
�s only a hole” and “there’s nothing there” was the theme of their reactions. They were right, Charlotte discovered when her turn came. It was indeed an empty cubicle about ten feet square by ten feet high with some Buddhist frescoes on the walls. But to call it only a hole was a bit like calling the Parthenon only a pile of marble, she thought, as she tried to imagine what it must have been like for Stein to look upon the enormous cache of ancient manuscripts. Instead, the image that floated to the surface of her mind was that of Larry’s body. The still, dusty air inside the cave reminded her of the still, dusty air inside the tent, and she found herself overcome by the urge to bolt. She felt as if she would faint if she stayed in the cave a second longer. It was the same feeling that sometimes overcame her when traffic was backed up in the Lincoln Tunnel.
Lowering her head, she climbed back through the hole and made her way through the group to Victor and Emily. After mumbling an apology, she excused herself and left the cave. Outside, she descended the rock staircase and took a seat on the nearest bench, which was already occupied by Chu. Lowering her head between her knees, she took a couple of deep, slow breaths, and felt the wave of faintness slowly recede.
“Are you feeling better?” asked Chu after she had raised her head back up.
“Yes, thank you,” she replied.
“The caves sometimes have the effect of making people feel faint. I have felt faint on a number of occasions in the caves myself. Especially when I am not feeling well anyway.”
Murder on the Silk Road Page 9