Murder on the Silk Road

by Stefanie Matteson

  Going to the second room on the left, Charlotte took out the key—it was even bigger and heavier than the keys to the caves—and unlocked the door. The room was much larger than hers—it had probably been meant to house groups of pilgrims rather than individuals—but it was even more austere. The bed was a brick platform known as a kanga, which served as a bed in Central Asian houses, and which was covered with an old mattress and some bedding. The only other furnishings were a chair and a desk. On the desk were a typewriter, a stack of books, including several spiral-bound notebooks, and a large three-ring binder that bore a title card on the cover: Sand-Buried Treasures of Desert Cathay. Opening the three-ring binder, Charlotte found that it contained a typed draft of the book, annotated with handwritten notes indicating deletions, additions, and corrections. A table of contents listed the chapter headings: Let Us Talk of Silk, At the Western Gate, On Ancient Central Asian Roads, The Ruined Cities of the Taklimakan, The Manuscript Race Begins, Of Loot and Treasure, and so on. Scanning a few pages, Charlotte was struck by the tone, which seemed more lively than that of Peter’s other books. She wanted to read it, but it would never be finished, now.

  There was also a photograph in a silver frame, of Peter and a beautiful young woman, probably the aristocratic wife, Fiona, of whom he had spoken—or rather, boasted—on the train. They were sitting in a grandstand under a red- and white-striped tent, drinking champagne and eating strawberries. A sign identified the location as the Center Court at Wimbledon. She imagined that notifying Peter’s wife was Reynolds’ job. She didn’t envy him the task.

  She looked around the room. She hadn’t the slightest idea what she was looking for, and felt a little odd about being there, as if she were a voyeur of some sort. Then she saw Peter’s wallet. It was lying on the floor next to the kanga, with some papers.

  What the hell, she thought. That’s why Reynolds had given her the key, wasn’t it? She quickly went through it. There was money: U.S., British, and Chinese—both the regular currency and the Foreign Exchange Certificates that were issued to tourists—and there were credit cards, at least a dozen of them. She supposed a travel writer would need a wide selection. There were also membership cards for the Royal Central Asian Society, the Royal Geographic Society, and the Authors’ Club. She had once been a guest at the Authors’ Club. It was a stodgy old place whose walls were lined with mahogany bookcases filled with books presented by its members, mostly British aristocrats who fancied themselves writers, though its history included some illustrious names—Thomas Hardy and Somerset Maugham among them, if she remembered right. She couldn’t imagine why a young American like Peter would want to be a member, unless it was the snob appeal.

  His suitcase turned up nothing out of the ordinary, either.

  She was about to leave, when a book in the stack on the desk caught her eye. Its title was An Iconographical Index to the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas. Opening it up, she discovered that it was an index to the subject matter of the cave paintings. With the help of the index, an art historian would presumably be able to trace the development of painting by studying how a particular subject—a donkey cart, for example—had been depicted in the cave paintings over the course of nine centuries. She was leafing through the book, which was lavishly illustrated with reproductions of the cave paintings, when a sheet of paper caught her eye. On it was written a list of hexagrams from the I Ching. There were at least a dozen of them, listed vertically. Even more intriguing was the fact that a cave number was penciled in alongside each hexagram: Cave 114 next to the first, Cave 264 next to the second, Cave 291 next to the third, and so on.

  As a recent initiate into the mysteries of the I Ching, Charlotte wondered what it meant. Had Peter also been a follower of the I Ching? Could the caves that were indicated by the pencil notations contain paintings of scenes from the I Ching? But how, for example, could you depict a scene of “Difficulty at the Beginning,” which was the hexagram that she had cast last night? And even if the caves did contain depictions of ideas expressed in the hexagrams, of what relevance was it to Peter’s work, which concerned the exploits of Western explorers? Her mind was toying with these questions when she noticed that the cave number next to the fifth hexagram was Cave 323, the cave in which Peter had been murdered. It wasn’t likely that it was a coincidence. There were four hundred and ninety-two caves at Dunhuang. Which meant that the chances were pretty good that this list had something to do with Peter’s death. But what?

  Proceed in an orderly manner, she told herself. First, she had to find out what the hexagrams meant, particularly the fifth one. She now noticed that there was a copy of the I Ching on the desk, but looking up all the hexagrams on the list would take a while. She didn’t want to risk being discovered at it. Sticking the list of hexagrams in her pocket, she opened the door to look out into the temple hall. The coast was clear. After grabbing the iconographic index for good measure, she quietly left.

  Back in her room, she studied the list. Now that she had time to look at it more closely, she noticed that it was a photocopy. The original must have been quite old: there were fox marks and water stains and dark spots that looked like mildew. She could also see that the original had split along the creases where it had been folded. And that the hexagrams had been written down with a brush, rather than a pen.

  Picking up her copy of the I Ching, she looked up the fifth hexagram. It was Hexagram 29: “Deliverance.” The judgment didn’t tell her anything that she could form into a clear picture. But the reading for the changing line was different. It was:

  Six in the fourth place means:

  A jug of wine, a bowl of rice with it;

  Earthen vessels

  Simply handed in through the window.

  There is certainly no blame in this.

  The interpretation said that in times of difficulty, ceremonious forms should be dropped. Never mind that the gifts are simple and are presented without formality, it is sincerity that is important. In other words, don’t clutter your life with pretense.

  But it wasn’t the interpretation that interested her; it was the image. Picking up the iconographical index, she discovered that it was cross-referenced. In addition to looking up the subject matter and finding out what cave it could be found in, you could also look up a cave and find out what subjects were depicted in it. She quickly turned to Cave 323, and scanned the list, which included descriptions of the processions of Bodhisattvas, the figures in the paradise scene, and the scenes from daily life in the side panels. Near the bottom, she found what she was looking for: a listing for a “woman passing a jug of wine and a bowl of rice through a window.” Voila!

  Now the question was, Who had written down this list of hexagrams, and to what purpose? Followed by: What had Peter been doing with it? and what did it have to do with his murder? Looking at the list again, she noticed something else about it: there were check marks next to the first four hexagrams, but not next to the fifth or any of the succeeding hexagrams. She also noticed that all the hexagrams had one changing line, which seemed a curious coincidence when the possibilities ranged from zero to six. If ever there had been any question of her becoming bored at Dunhuang—and she suspected that after a while one Bodhisattva would begin to look just like the next—there was little possibility of that now. When it came to puzzles, Peter’s list of hexagrams made the Times of London crossword look like child’s play.

  Leaning back on her bed, Charlotte pondered Peter’s murder. One question that baffled her was, How had he gained access to the cave? She doubted he would have had keys. His purpose in being at Dunhuang was to study the role that Western explorers had played in the history of the caves, not to study the art. He could have stolen the keys, she supposed. Or, he could have been meeting someone—someone who did have access to the keys: a member of the Academy’s staff, for instance. As she lay there, the thought struck her that it might have been Peter who was returning Dunhuang’s stolen cultural relics to their original sites, but she imm
ediately dismissed the idea as absurd. If there was anyone who was convinced of the right of Western institutions to the artworks that Western explorers had taken from Dunhuang, it was Peter. But then she had another thought. Maybe Peter had been on the other side of the issue: maybe he was a looter himself. The looting of Dunhuang’s treasures had been going on for centuries. Who was to say that it wasn’t still going on? Especially when Asian art was in greater demand than ever.

  She remembered Marsha talking about the lively business in the heads and hands of the sculptures. She had often seen these on display in the galleries on Madison Avenue, elegantly mounted on pedestals of marble or semiprecious stone. Who would miss another head or a hand from among the twenty-four hundred statues in the caves? Peter had admitted to making fifty thousand pounds on a pair of antique soup tureens that he’d sold to a Madison Avenue gallery. That was before the government had cracked down on the exportation of antiquities. But she imagined that someone as sophisticated about foreign countries as Peter was would know how to get contraband artworks out of the country. The Chinese claimed that the revolution had purged their society of the corrupting evils of the profit motive—many Chinese still considered a tip a form of subornation—but Charlotte suspected that somewhere in the Celestial Kingdom there was a grasping Chinese “facilitator” who was as eager to accept cold, hard cash in exchange for performing an illegal service as any South American petty bureaucrat. “The squeeze,” Peter had called it, when he had produced the cold beer on the train. And if a facilitator was out there, Peter could find him. She thought of his mysterious business trips—to Xian, when they had run into him on the train—and the trip he was supposed to have taken to Bezeklik, and wondered what kind of business it was he was referring to.

  The unformed darkness was beginning to take shape, and a little light was beginning to trickle in. Thank you, I Ching. She now had a working hypothesis: Peter had been stealing artworks from the caves. Her little tour of his room had even offered a motive: the Cleveland native with the Bertie Wooster accent had a beautiful wife who was a member of the British aristocracy. From her friendship with Tom Plummer, the journalist who had written Murder at the Morosco, Charlotte had a pretty good idea of how much money could be made in the writing business. And it wasn’t enough to support a lifestyle that included a house overlooking the heath in Hampstead and all the trimmings. Peter’s books had been applauded by the critics, but that didn’t mean they had been best sellers. She guessed they had probably sold ten or twenty thousand copies apiece, which was hardly enough to have brought in the kind of income necessary to keep up with the Waverley-Smythe set. Peter had admitted as much on the train. A rich wife would help, but he struck Charlotte as the type who would feel as if he had to keep up the pretense, at least, of supporting himself. She would bet that the income from the sale of a head here, a hand there, would come in very handy. But her working hypothesis still didn’t explain the list of hexagrams, and the list of caves that went along with it. Nor did it tell her who had killed Peter Hamilton.

  Proceed in an orderly manner. Her next step should be to take another look at Cave 323, she decided. Maybe the painting of the woman passing the jug of wine and bowl of rice through the window would offer some clue. She also wanted to look at the other caves on the list. And for that, she needed Marsha. The caves were ordinarily kept locked, but Emily had entrusted Marsha with her ring of keys. Marsha was scheduled to repeat her lecture on the Tang Dynasty early the next morning—at daybreak, in fact, which was the only time of day that the caves were illuminated by natural light—and Emily had allowed her to keep the keys until then. She checked her watch: it was just after eleven. The best time to look at the caves would be after two, when everyone was asleep. Marsha had gone out to the dinosaur dig with Bert and Dogie early that morning, and she didn’t know if they were planning to come back for lunch or not. She supposed she could wait until this evening, but she didn’t want to.

  Grabbing her big straw coolie hat and her tube of SPF 30 sunblock, she headed out to the dinosaur quarry.

  She had been a bit worried about finding the Dragon’s Tomb Site again on her own, but she needn’t have been. As she drew near the mountain, she noticed that the desert floor was marked with a new track, which led off to a spot at the base of the foothills a few hundred yards to the south of Larry’s camp where half a dozen vehicles were parked. The parking lot turned out to be the debouchure of the ravine in which the dinosaur quarry was located. It took her only a few minutes to climb up the ravine to the quarry, around which a camp had already sprung up. The quarry itself was shaded by a large awning made of reed mats supported on bamboo poles, and a work tent had been erected on a flat shelf on the opposite slope of the ravine. Nor did the dinosaur skeleton look the same: all that had been visible when she and Lisa had found it were the giant legs, part of the backbone, and a section of the forty-foot tail, which had curved back into the hillside like a giant, serpentine garden hose. Now, the top surface of most of the skeleton lay exposed, and the long tail was fully uncovered. “All there,” said Dogie, “except for a few pieces at the very tip.” As was most of the neck, its individual vertebra looking like slices from a small tree trunk.

  Near the quarry, a tape player had been set up on a rock for the entertainment of the crew, which included nearly a dozen people. In addition to Bert, Dogie, and Lisa, there were the pithhelmeted Peng and the four members of his team, and Orecchio, who worked nearby, measuring the distances between the various strata and recording his findings in a notebook. Finally, there was Marsha, who was crouched over the skeleton with an awl, scraping the rock from a bone that appeared to be part of the large rear foot. The tape deck was playing a Beatles song, “Rocky Raccoon.”

  Charlotte squatted down next to Marsha, who had adopted Lisa’s working garb of cutoff jeans and a halter top, and headgear straight out of Lawrence of Arabia, in which the back of her neck and her upper back were shielded by a bandanna tucked under the back of a baseball cap, in this case one that bore the legend “Society of Vertebrate Paleontology” and a picture of a dinosaur. Love had brought her a long way from court poetry of the Tang Dynasty. “What are you working on?” Charlotte asked.

  “Oh, hi,” said Marsha with a wide smile, tipping back her baseball cap to wipe the sweat from her brow. “A metatarsal,” she replied. “One of the foot bones.” She pointed to her own sandal-clad foot to demonstrate. The cracks between her perfectly painted toenails were brown with dirt. “This guy had three toes. We’ve got almost all of the bones.” She pointed to a sharp, curved bone of glistening white. “Even the claws, which I still have to dig out. It’s kind of like being a dental hygienist.”

  “What happens to it once you get it all dug out?”

  “The pieces are wrapped in burlap that’s been dipped in plaster of Paris. Then they’re packed in straw, and shipped back to the museum in Beijing, where they’ll be reassembled. Bert says it will take about three months to reassemble the entire skeleton. If we find the skull, it will be the most complete T. bataar that’s ever been found.”

  “T. bataar?”

  “Tyrannosaurus bataar. The Central Asian cousin of the T. rex. Apparently, they’re very similar, but it isn’t strictly correct to call this guy a T. rex.”

  “What are the chances that you’ll find the skull?”

  “I don’t know.” She shrugged. “I’m still a novice at this.” She looked over at Bert, who was working on the tail with Dogie. “Bert, what are the chances we’ll find the skull? Charlotte wants to know.”

  Seeing Charlotte, Bert stood up and ambled over. Despite his tall, heavy frame, his movements had the fluid grace of a dancer. He was a man who was at home with his body and himself. “I see that you’ve been talking with my newest field assistant,” he said, reaching down to grasp Marsha’s hand.

  She looked up at him, her wide blue eyes smiling.

  “It looks like she’s coming along pretty fast,” said Charlotte.

  �
��I think we’ll keep her on.” He squeezed her hand. “What are the chances that we’ll find the skull? Well, usually I’d say they’re pretty slim. But in this case, I have a hunch we might find it.”

  “Why’s that?” asked Marsha.

  “Because of the position of the neck.” Bert stepped over to the neck, where Peng was working with the other members of his team. “See how the neck is arched backward?” he said, pointing downward.

  The upper back and neck of the skeleton were arched backward, almost as if the dinosaur had died in the middle of doing a backbend.

  “That’s from the shrinking of the tendons and the ligaments after death. We think the skull might have detached from the lower jaw and rolled up against the backbone, inside the hill here.”

  Peng translated what he was saying for the other Chinese, who nodded enthusiastically in agreement.

  “Want to help us look for it?” Bert asked. “I’d be happy to give you a trowel and dental pick.”

  “No thanks,” said Charlotte. She eyed the skeleton. Actually it looked as if it might be fun, if it wasn’t a hundred and ten in the shade. “Actually, I just came out to talk to Marsha for a few minutes. Do you allow members of your work gang to take breaks?”

  “Sure.” He smiled down at Marsha. “Time off for good behavior. I need a break too. The cooler’s over there.” He pointed to a picnic table under the tent. “We’ve got orange soda and beer. Sorry there’s no Coke or Pepsi, but we’re a little far from the supply line out here.”