Murder on the Silk Road

by Stefanie Matteson

  Charlotte was parched. “Am I entitled to a beer even if I haven’t earned it by discovering any fossils?”

  “Sure. We’ll give you a credit against a future discovery.”

  A few minutes later, they were sitting under the tent with Bert and Dogie drinking beer and watching the activity on the other side of the ravine: the five Chinese and Lisa working on the skeleton, and a lone figure in a porkpie hat on the boundary of the dinosaur quarry, measuring, writing, and shoveling.

  “What’s Orecchio doing?” asked Charlotte as she watched him digging up clumps of dirt from various levels of the strata. He carefully put each clump into a plastic bag and labeled it.

  “Taking soil samples for potassium-argon dating,” Bert replied. “He’s going to try to show that this is reworked sediment, but any undergraduate geology student could tell you it isn’t. It’s very simple: in undisturbed sediment, what’s on the bottom is oldest, and what’s on the top is youngest.”

  “The poor sonofabitch is just goin’ to have to face up to the fact that we’ve come up with one helluva postage stamp,” said Dogie. “The stamp albums are goin’ to have to be redesigned to accommodate this guy.”

  “I’m amazed at its size,” said Charlotte. “I’ve seen the skeleton of the T. rex at the American Museum of Natural History, but somehow it looks a lot bigger when it’s lying on the ground.”

  “Frankly, we’re amazed at the size, too,” said Bert. “If it is a T. bataar, and it may not be—it may be something entirely new—it will be the biggest one that’s ever been found, above or below the K/T boundary layer. The T. bataars that have been found before were smaller than T. rex, probably due to their more limited diet—even back then, the Central Asian plateau was more arid than North America—but from the size of this guy’s femur, we estimate that he weighed in at about eight tons, or the size of three average elephants, and as big as any T. rex that’s ever been found.”

  “Each hind foot covered over seven feet,” said Marsha, between swallows of the local beer. “He could cross a room with one step.”

  “She’s learnin’,” said Dogie.

  “How did he die?” asked Charlotte.

  “We don’t know for sure,” Bert said, “but we can piece together a little bit about the circumstances.” He smiled at Charlotte. “Paleontology is a lot like detection, in more ways than one.”

  Marsha must have told him about Reynolds’ asking her to look into the murders, thought Charlotte. So much for her being discreet.

  “In addition to fitting together all the pieces to form a skeleton, you have to fit together what you know about the environment to get an idea of how the dinosaurs lived.” He waved his beer bottle at the tortured terrain. “Sixty-three million years ago this was a dry interior plain, kind of like an African savannah. There were palms, reeds, and cypresses, but it was open, not jungly, like it was in King Kong. This area was the edge of an ancient lake.”

  Charlotte waited for him to go on, but he didn’t. It was one of those wide-open spaces that she had come to expect in his conversation. “It looks kind of like that right now, doesn’t it?” she said finally.

  The landscape that lay spread out before them seemed to swim in the midday heat. The sand of the desert floor shimmered like the surface of a lake that was stippled with tiny wavelets, and the clumps of camel-thorn took on the appearance of reeds and cypresses. The terns skittering across the desert floor seemed to be skimming along the glittering surface of the water. Even the atmosphere seemed as if it were from another epoch: the glaring sun rimmed every boulder with a yellow aura, which gave the landscape the harsh appearance of a land in which the giant carnivores had roamed.

  Pulling his pipe out of his pocket, Bert filled the cherry wood bowl with tobacco from his tobacco pouch and lit it. The still air was perfumed with its scent. Then he continued: “I would guess that our Tyrannosaur was drawn into a struggle with a duckbill at the water’s edge, and drowned. After he died, the body drifted into a backwater and came to rest. The flesh decomposed, and the skeleton sank into the sand. Over the eons, the sand turned to stone. Minerals were deposited in the bone, turning them to stone, too. As the earth shifted, what had been the bottom of the swamp was raised up into a hill. Finally, ancient rivers washed away the rock, exposing the layers of sediment, and erosion weathered out the bones.”

  “Then Larry came along,” said Marsha.

  “Then Larry came along,” Bert repeated.

  He had made the pile of old bones come alive. Charlotte thought of Marsha’s description of what the interior of Cave 323 had been like during the Tang Dynasty. Yes, they were two peas in a pod.

  Dogie had stood up, and was studying the butte that overhung the neck of the ravine through his binoculars. “Look at that sonofabitch,” he said angrily, as he passed the binoculars to Bert.

  Charlotte could just make out the black-bearded figure perched on the edge of the butte. The way he was outlined against the sky reminded her of the vultures hovering over Larry’s camp on that fateful morning.

  It was Bouchard, lurking at the edge of the DMZ.

  11

  Half an hour later, Marsha and Charlotte were dousing their heads under the spigot in the courtyard. A shower would have been better, but …

  Marsha had actually been glad for an excuse to leave the dig. “It’s fun, but I can only take the heat for so long,” she had said. And once Charlotte had explained her mission, Marsha was as curious as Charlotte to get another look at Cave 323. Neither of them remembered a painting of a jug of wine and a bowl of rice, but they could easily have missed it in the dim light.

  But first came lunch. The dinner gong, which was actually a rusty old tire rim that the cook banged with a rock, rang promptly at one.

  With the paleontologists working out at the dig, the dining room was less crowded than usual. Their dining companions were Ned and Emily, who appeared to be inseparable, and a group of the German conservation consultants, who were carrying on their own animated conversation in German.

  Their talk was about Peter’s death.

  “I have a theory,” said Ned who was dressed as usual in a tie-dyed T-shirt. “Not about who did it, but about why it was done the way it was.”

  “What’s that?” asked Marsha as they were served their first two courses: a rice pilau with apricots, onions, and carrots, and a plate of thin-skinned dumplings stuffed with mutton and seasonings.

  “I was reading an account written by a Swedish explorer who visited the caves in the early part of this century. At that time, none of the staircases and balconies had been built. The caves on the upper levels were inaccessible. Originally they had been reached by ladders, of course, but the ladders had long since disappeared.”

  “And?” prompted Marsha.

  “And”—he smiled—“being a curious man, this explorer decided to check out some of the caves on the very uppermost level. He had his men lower him down over the edge of the cliff on a rope. And what do you suppose he found?”

  Marsha shrugged.

  “Human skeletons! Anyway, I figure that whoever killed Hamilton may have read the same account or a similar one, and gotten the idea of killing him in one of the caves on the upper level from there. If you think about it, a cave that’s not open to the public is the logical place to kill someone.”

  He was right, thought Charlotte as she helped herself to some of the pilau. The murderer wouldn’t have killed Peter in the desert. As they had learned from Larry’s death, the vultures would be a certain tip-off. Nor would he have killed him in one of the rooms: he might have been seen or heard.

  “How often do staff members get around to visiting the caves that aren’t open to the public?” she asked. With only forty out of four hundred and ninety-two caves open to the public, it was doubtful that they got around to the closed caves very often.

  “Only when a visiting scholar such as Ms. Lundstrom wants to look at the paintings or the sculptures,” Ned replied. “I would bet
that some of them haven’t been visited for years. It was the murderer’s bad luck that Ms. Lundstrom wanted to include Cave 323 in her lecture that day.”

  And that the insatiably curious Vivian Gormley had wanted to look at the paintings on the wall of the rear chamber, thought Charlotte.

  “In fact, if Ms. Lundstrom hadn’t come along, Hamilton’s corpse might not have been found until nothing was left of it but the skeleton. Everyone would have thought he had mysteriously disappeared on his trip to Bezeklik, and the murderer would have gotten off scot-free.”

  “That’s not to say he isn’t going to get off scot-free anyway,” said Charlotte, whose confidence in either the police’s or her own ability to solve the crimes was wanting.

  “I think we ought to change the subject,” said Emily. “Poor Mr. Hamilton.” She looked as if she was about to cry.

  “Yes,” Charlotte agreed. “I have something for you, Emily.” Reaching into her bag, she pulled out a small oblong package that she had done up in the paper that her souvenir rubbing had been wrapped in. She handed it to Emily. “I would be very pleased if you would accept this as a gift,” she said.

  Emily looked puzzled as she opened it with her delicate fingers.

  It was Charlotte’s volume of Emily Dickinson. She had bought it years ago at a used bookstore for a few dollars; it was a facsimile edition of Dickinson’s poems complete with the original steel engravings of trees and roses and the like.

  This time, the tears did well in Emily’s eyes. “Thank you very much,” she said quietly as she ran her hand over the leather cover, which was embossed with a rose. “I don’t have her poems in English,” she said. “Only in Chinese. I will always treasure this,” she added, clasping the book to her breast.

  “I’m glad we ran into you,” said Charlotte. “I’ve been carrying it around in my travel bag for two days.”

  “You beat me to the punch,” said Ned with a smile. “A copy of Emily Dickinson in English was one of the first presents I was going to get for Emily when I got back,” he said. “Her Chinese translations are full of mistakes.” He looked at her fondly. “But I’m sure I can find something else she’d like.”

  Emily smiled lovingly back at him.

  “I’m glad we ran into you too, Miss Graham,” Ned continued. “I have something I wanted to tell you. I thought you might be interested to learn that one of the other stolen artworks has been returned.”

  “Really!” she said.

  “Yes. An embroidery on silk—a temple banner—of an elevenheaded Kuan-yin. Emily discovered it in the secret library this morning when she was giving a tour. Somebody apparently put it there during the night. It was stolen from the Cleveland Museum of Art in May—one of their prizes, I understand.”

  “After the disappearance of the Oglethorpe sculpture.”

  “Yes. And since the Oglethorpe sculpture hasn’t reappeared yet, I think the return of the temple banner probably means that the Oglethorpe sculpture wasn’t part of the overall pattern of thefts of artworks that originally came from Dunhuang. Though I could be wrong, of course.”

  “Which also means that Bunny Oglethorpe isn’t likely to get it back.”

  “To be quite frank, I don’t think she would have gotten it back even if it had reappeared here. The Bureau of Cultural Properties considers the Dunhuang artworks stolen property, and has no intention of returning them. Chu has already asked Emily to mount the temple banner for display in the museum.”

  At least she had the problem of the Oglethorpe sculpture off her mind, thought Charlotte as the soup arrived, a steaming mutton soup in a big porcelain bowl. Not that she had been giving it much thought, anyway. But it was one less silk strand in the knotted tangle that she had been charged with unraveling.

  After a dessert of apricots and tea, Charlotte and Marsha set out for the caves. Life in the little oasis came to a dead halt during the hour following lunch. The souvenir kiosk was shut up, as were the museum and the library. Even the birds were napping. The only sounds were the trickle of the irrigation stream that ran along the base of the cliff, and the tinkle of wind chimes.

  As they mounted the first rock-cut staircase, Charlotte wondered if anyone was observing them, and then dismissed her concern. First, the place was as quiet as a cemetery (an unintentionally apt analogy), and second, if anyone had the right to be looking at the caves, it was Marsha. If anyone did challenge them, she could always claim she was doing research for her lectures.

  “I just remembered something odd about the way Peter was dressed,” Charlotte said as they reached the second level. The sight of the cave in which Peter was murdered looming overhead had brought back the memory of their excursion to the lake the evening before.

  “What’s that?” asked Marsha.

  “He was wearing brown wool slacks and a navy-blue sweatshirt. First, why would he wear slacks in the desert? I’ve only seen him in Bermuda shorts. Second, why would he wear wool slacks?”

  “Not exactly the clothes for the desert,” Marsha agreed.

  “And third, why would he wear brown wool slacks with a navy-blue sweatshirt? He was always impeccably dressed, and the combination of brown and navy-blue isn’t one that’s usually considered sartorially de rigueur. Unless he wanted to wear his darkest clothes so that he couldn’t be seen at night.”

  “In other words, he was planning to visit the cave,” said Marsha. She supported Charlotte’s hypothesis about Peter being an art thief. There was a lively market in illicit Asian artworks, and Peter’s background and connections made him ideally suited to that trade, she agreed.

  “I figure he was killed either by a competitor or by someone who was in league with him,” Charlotte said. “Maybe his partner killed him in an argument, or maybe his partner wanted the whole pie for himself.” When she put it into words, it sounded corny. “Or maybe I’ve seen too many Westerns over the years.”

  Marsha smiled.

  “It’s something to go on, anyway,” Charlotte continued. “The only other idea I’ve come up with is that Chu killed him because he didn’t like the slant of his book, but that’s pretty farfetched.” She looked up at the cliff face. “Anyway, we’ll soon see. Or at least I hope we’ll soon see.”

  After ten minutes, they had reached the top level. At the porch, they paused while Marsha picked out the right key from the bunch on the heavy iron ring. Once inside, they took out their flashlights, and shined them at the frescoed walls of the antechamber.

  The processions of elegant Bodhisattvas on the side walls still beckoned them toward the inner chamber. Now that Charlotte knew what had been waiting for them there, their beckoning glances took on an eerie quality.

  “I don’t see any jug of wine,” said Charlotte as the beam of her flashlight played over the walls and ceiling of the antechamber. “Do you?”

  Marsha shook her head.

  They then proceeded into the inner chamber. On the south wall was the big mural of the Western Paradise that had been the subject of Marsha’s lecture. On the north wall was a hunting scene in which gaily clad hunters rode on elegant Tang horses. Stepping around the broken pieces of the toppled statues, they slowly made their way around the central pillar in a clockwise direction, just as the pilgrims had a thousand years before, their flashlights scanning the lively flower-bordered paintings of scenes from everyday life.

  “If there’s going to be a painting of a jug of wine and a bowl of rice,” said Marsha, “it’s going to be here.”

  It was Charlotte who spotted the painting first, on the right-hand wall, just past the blood-stained spot on the lotus-patterned floor where Peter’s body had rested: a small painting, close to the floor, of a woman passing a jug and a bowl through a window. “Here it is!” she cried. As she crouched down to get a better look, she was struck by its crudeness. Even to her untutored eye, it was clear that it hadn’t been painted by the same artist, or even during the same period, as the other paintings. She turned to Marsha. “Is it my imagination, or is thi
s painting from a different period than the others?”

  “It’s not your imagination at all,” said Marsha, who had crouched down beside her. “It’s a different period all right. By about a thousand years. I’d say this is late nineteenth century. Or even early twentieth. The paint looks practically fresh, and the colors are more crude.”

  Charlotte now noticed that the paint wasn’t flaking off as it was in the other paintings, but was bright and clear. And instead of the subtle hues that characterized the Tang paintings, these colors were vibrant, if not garish.

  “The execution reminds me of the statues that Wang commissioned in Cave 16,” Marsha said. “Maybe he commissioned this painting as well. But why commission such an insignificant painting in such an obscure location? Who’s going to see it behind the central pillar?”

  As Marsha spoke, the beam of Charlotte’s flashlight picked out something else unusual about the painting, or rather about the wall just below the layer of brown paint that represented the ground. It was a horizontal crack in the plastered wall. With the beam of her flashlight, Charlotte followed the crack across the bottom of the painting, down nearly to the floor, back across, and up again. It outlined an eighteen-inch-square cavity that had been blocked up and plastered over to look like the cave wall.

  “It’s a hiding place of some sort!” said Marsha.

  “An old hiding place that’s been recently opened,” Charlotte added. On the floor of the cave beneath the hiding place was a line of fresh plaster dust that had clearly fallen out of the recently opened cracks.

  Charlotte felt in her pockets for something they could use to pry open the cavity. She usually carried a small Swiss Army knife in her purse, but her purse was back in her room. Besides her flashlight, the only thing she had taken along with her was the list of hexagrams.