“Same here,” he replied.
Charlotte couldn’t help thinking how frightened she had felt in his embrace only a few minutes before.
15
They found Victor’s body spread-eagled on the paved avenue at the foot of the cliff. The force of the wind spout had carried it about twenty feet out and an equal distance to the south of the spot where he had lost his grip. Though there was little blood, it was clear that he had landed on his head: the left side of his skull was caved in like a jack-o’-lantern that has begun to rot. The only other evidence of injury was to his hands: his fingertips were bloody from the strain of hanging on, and there were bits of red-painted wood embedded in the flesh; and to his skin: the wind had torn away his shirt, exposing his chest and back to the lashing of the storm. His skin was stippled with red where it had been pelted with flying stones. He was also missing a shoe. They found it a couple of dozen feet away, near his knife. It was the same kind of dagger they had seen for sale in the bazaar, with a hand-worked silver haft inlaid with polished stones.
The wind that had raged so furiously had spent itself, for the moment. The sudden calm was uncanny after the roar and howl of the storm. The sand suspended in the motionless air sifted down, like a gentle snowfall.
As they stood there over Victor’s body, Bert explained how he and Dogie had come to be at the caves.
“That’s what I thought,” said Charlotte when he had finished. “But what I don’t understand is, how did Victor reach the big cave so fast? We thought we would be past the seventh level before he got there.”
“He didn’t go back and down and around,” Bert explained. “He climbed over the railing and down to the next level. It was the same stunt he tried to pull here, only this time it didn’t work. What was he doing here, anyway?”
“It’s a long story,” said Charlotte. “It’ll take a while to explain. Why don’t we head on back to the guest house?”
As they turned to walk back, Charlotte noticed that Bert was limping. “Were you injured in the fight with Victor?” she asked.
“I was injured in a fight, but not the fight with Victor. I was injured in the fight with you. That’s a pretty mean kick you have there,” he added with a smile.
“Worse than a riled-up mule’s,” added Dogie.
“Sorry about that. I mistook you for the enemy. I should have known better.” She proceeded to tell them about the I Ching’s prediction that she would fall into a pit and be rescued by “uninvited guests” whom she at first would mistake for enemies.
“I know that line,” said Marsha. “It’s from ‘Waiting.’”
Charlotte nodded.
“But I’ve always thought the word ‘pit’ was translated incorrectly,” she continued. “The edition you’ve been using was translated into English from the German, which in turn was translated from the Chinese. In my opinion, a lot of the text got garbled in the process.”
“What word would you have used?” asked Charlotte.
“Cave,” she said.
They were up until dawn explaining their interpretation of events, not only to Bert and Dogie, but to Ho of the tadpole mustache, and to a bunch of other Chinese officials who arrived about forty-five minutes after their call. They hadn’t expected their call to go through, but the phone lines had somehow survived the storm. Though Ho had a good grasp of English—or Chinglish, as Marsha called it—none of the other security police did, and Marsha was called upon to translate and to clarify the points that Ho didn’t understand. They sat in the reception room, sipping tea and answering questions: how Victor had found the entry in Wang’s daybook disclosing that the key to the manuscripts’ location was hidden in the Oglethorpe sculpture; how he had consulted Boardmann on the statue’s whereabouts; how they had plotted together to steal the statue; how Victor had killed Boardmann, making it look like a street homicide; how he had hidden the manuscripts in the stupa with the aim of smuggling them out of the country at some future time and selling them; how he had killed Larry, again making it look like a vagrant had done it; and finally, how he had killed Peter because Peter, who had come across the reference in Wang’s daybook independently, had wanted a piece of the action. Chu presided over the proceedings with an air of self-righteous indignation. Occasionally he made pointed remarks about the rapacity of the bourgeois capitalists or Dunhuang’s long history of plunder at the hands of the Western “so-called” archaeologists. Even the revelation that the world’s oldest printed book was among the manuscripts in Victor’s haul didn’t crack his suit of red armor.
But it was a different story when it came to the earlier events of that evening. Having already explained how she and Marsha had come to be in Cave 328 at one-thirty in the morning and their subsequent encounter with Victor, Charlotte now backtracked to explain what had happened before Victor appeared on the scene, starting with the arrival of Ned.
“Aha,” said Ho, his mustache quivering with the thrill of deduction. “Mr. Chee had also figured out that Mr. Danowski was stealing the manuscripts, and had come to spy on him.”
“No. Not exactly.” Charlotte’s gaze shifted to Chu, whose Mao jacket was buttoned to the throat even though he had just been roused out of bed. “He had figured out that Mr. Chu was the thief, and had come to spy on him.”
For a moment, Chu’s reserve dropped, and she could see the scars on the soft yellow spot of flesh revealed by the chink in the armor—the scars left by the torture, the starvation, the hard labor.
“Comrade Chu was the thief!”
“He wasn’t in league with Danowski. But he was also stealing manuscripts and sculptures. Or rather, his son was.” She proceeded to explain how, under Chu’s direction, his son had stolen the artworks from Western institutions.
“My son wasn’t stealing the artworks from Western institutions, he was recovering them,” said Chu, explaining in his defense how the artworks had been looted from Dunhuang by the foreign imperialists.
“We thought at first that Mr. Chu was Mr. Danowski,” Charlotte went on, ignoring the interruption. “But then we realized that there were two people, and that they were Mr. Chu and his son. They were returning the Bodhisattva that was taken from the Fogg Museum.”
For a few minutes there was a rapid exchange in Chinese between Ho and Chu. It was clear that Chu was painting himself to the police officer as the savior of China’s cultural heritage.
Afterward, Ho turned back to Charlotte. “Comrade Chu tells me that this sculpture was stolen by the American so-called archaeologist Langdon Warner in 1924. In which case, it would be incorrect to label Comrade Chu a thief.”
“Whether or not he is a thief is up to international authorities to determine,” said Charlotte. But she doubted that the Fogg would ever get its lovely Bodhisattva back.
Chu leaned his head back against the crocheted antimacassar on the back of his chair and took a self-satisfied puff from his cigarette with his manacled-scarred hand, holding it as usual between thumb and forefinger. The chink in the armor had been plugged up.
It was after five when their little party broke up. By the time the convoy of security police vehicles took off for Dunhuang town with Victor’s body, it was clear that the storm was abating. Though the wind still rattled the shutters, it had lost its fearful roar.
Charlotte did her best to wash up before going to bed, but it was a losing battle. She had sand in her ears, her eyes, and her nose. Sand crunched between her teeth. The sight of herself in her mirror was frightening: her eyes were red and bleary, her face and hair were coated with grit, and any skin that had been exposed was flecked with blood where she had been hit by “running stones.” Her “China catarrh,” which had been on the wane, was back in full force: her sinuses were so stuffed that her head felt like a medicine ball. As she fantasized about the pleasures of a long, hot, steamy soak in her own bathtub back at her townhouse in a city halfway around the globe, it dawned on her that right about now the population of America would be setting off fireworks,
watching parades, and eating hot dogs.
It might have been going on six A.M. of July the fifth here, but at home it was going on five P.M. of the day before. Her realization that it was the Fourth of July at home brought with it the realization that she was a wanderer who was getting a little bit homesick. At least for a hot bath.
Like the wind, she had retired with the dawn, only to get up again two hours later to accompany Ho to the stupa to retrieve the manuscripts. She rode out into the desert with him at the head of the convoy of security police vehicles. The menacing black clouds of the previous evening were gone. In their place, the sun shone in a serene, cloudless sky. The air was crystal clear; it was as if the storm had scoured it of any vestiges of haze and dust. But if the sky bore no sign of the ferocity of the storm, the landscape did. The band of asphalt that comprised the highway was covered with drifts of sand, like a snow-blanketed New England country road after a nor’easter. Crews of road maintenance workers were already out, clearing the sand away with hand shovels. No backhoes here. Familiar markers had been swept away. The twisted corpse of the mummified donkey that had served as a signpost for the turnoff was gone. Nor was there any track to follow out to the mountain—it had been obliterated by the storm. Not that they had any trouble finding their way. After parking at the foot of the mountain, they followed the winding path of pilgrims’ track up to the stupa. The effects of the storm were in evidence here as well. The door had been nearly buried by a six-foot drift of sand. After sending some of his men back to the trucks for shovels, Ho set them to work digging it out.
After twenty minutes, the door was exposed. With Ho at her shoulder, Charlotte grasped the iron ring and pulled. Stepping over the four-foot foundation, they entered the cell. Once inside, Charlotte shined her flashlight at the north wall. To her amazement, it was bare. There were no stacks of manuscripts neatly piled like logs against the feet of the Bodhisattvas. The desk was there, as were the lamp and chair, but no manuscripts.
“There’s nothing here,” said Ho as he turned to her, mustache quivering. “I thought you said there were manuscripts hidden here.”
“There were,” she said. “They were here two nights ago.”
“Then where did they go?” he asked, waving a white-gloved hand at the empty cubicle. “Did they just get up and walk away?”
“I don’t know,” she replied, mystified. “Maybe someone smuggled them out of the country for Mr. Danowski in the interim.”
“In the middle of a buran?” he said contemptuously.
Charlotte shrugged.
“Or maybe you took the manuscripts and hid them somewhere else,” he said. “Maybe Mr. Danowski’s death wasn’t an accident. Maybe you”—he pointed a gloved finger at Charlotte’s chest—“killed him.”
“He took me into custody then and there,” said Charlotte. “We were on our way to the Public Security Bureau in his jeep when I figured out what had happened to the manuscripts.”
She was talking to Reynolds, who was back for the third time to make arrangements in connection with the death of an American national. They were sitting in one of the guest house courtyards, taking a melon break.
“Believe me, I was scared. I hadn’t been that frightened when Victor was chasing us, but I was frightened then. Ho can be a scary guy, just by virtue of his incompetence, and it didn’t help that I was on my way to a Chinese jail with all of these Chinese police, none of whom spoke English except for Ho.”
“And he far from fluently,” said Reynolds, as he leaned over to take a bite of the succulent orange melon.
“Fortunately I never did find out what the Dunhuang jail was like—”
He corrected her: “The Dunhuang Municipal Detention Center.”
“The Dunhuang Municipal Detention Center,” she repeated. “But I had a clear image of what it was like in my mind: a single dim light bulb hanging from the center of the ceiling, a small window with rust-pitted iron rungs, a narrow cot with a filthy mattress.”
“What an imagination! Forget the cot,” he said with a dismissive wave of his hand. “It would have been a wooden plank. This is China after all.”
“How could I have forgotten!”
“Actually, it’s not bad,” Reynolds continued. “I went there to talk to Feng. Every inmate has his—or her”—he looked over at Charlotte with a twinkle in his eye—“own private accommodations. The cells are a little on the small side, like about four by six, but at least you wouldn’t have had to share—”
“Thanks for the reassurance, Bill. I imagine I would have had my own private john too. In the form of a hole in the ground.”
Reynolds looked at her over the tops of his reading glasses. “That’s only for the first-class offenders. As a foreign devil, you would only have rated an enamel pot under your bed.”
Charlotte rolled her eyes. “I once played the mother of a college student who was arrested in Turkey for smuggling drugs—actually only a single marijuana joint,” she went on. “He ended up being jailed for nine years.”
“I remember that one. As usual, you were excellent in it.”
“Thank you,” she said. “Anyway, I had visions of being jailed for years before the United States Government could prove my innocence. As so many people were during the Cultural Revolution.”
Reynolds leaned over and patted her hand. “Don’t worry. We would have gotten you out in jig time.”
Charlotte believed him. In his checked shirt—red-and-white this time—Bermuda shorts, and knee socks, his presence in this desert oasis was as coolly reassuring as a cold compress on a feverish brow. “I was dumb to worry, but there it is. What’s the penalty for murder in the People’s Republic anyway?”
“According to Chinese law, a convicted murderer should suffer immediate execution following sentencing.”
“Oh,” she said with a sigh. “Anyway—there I was, thinking about assembling radios at Mao Zedong Thought Study School—that’s what Chu told me he did in prison—when I thought of ‘Waiting,’ the hexagram I got when I consulted the I Ching after we found the manuscripts in the stupa.”
Reynolds nodded. She had told him before about the I Ching’s prediction that she was destined to establish a more permanent connection with an exotic foreign country as a result of her encounter with a circle of friends.
“The interpretion talked about going resolutely to your fate—the importance of calm, courage, inner fortitude. The minute I thought of the hexagram, my panic subsided and I was able to think clearly. We had been operating all along on the assumption that money was the motivator.”
“As it was for Boardmann and Hamilton,” said Reynolds.
“But the earlier events of that evening—namely Chu and his son returning the Fogg’s Bodhisattva—pointed up the fact to me that it wasn’t the value of the Bodhisattva that was at issue—neither patty was interested in selling it—but rather, which party had the right to claim it as their own.”
“It was the right of ownership that was at stake.”
“Exactly. That got me to thinking that the same might be true for Victor. If he had made one of the century’s greatest archaeological discoveries, and I think the I Ching manuscript would qualify, his name would have gone down in archaeological history. Students of the future would read about Carter, who discovered King Tut’s tomb; Schliemann, who discovered Troy; and Danowski, who discovered the world’s oldest printed book. But not if he reported the find to the Academy. Which, as a visiting scholar, he was required to do.”
“It was just as you thought when you were speculating about who had murdered Larry: the motive was professional jealousy.”
“That’s right. Except that we were in the wrong field; it should have been archaeology, not paleontology. In fact, Peng was happy to credit his American colleague with the discovery of the Tyrannosaurus, but Chu was another story. He wanted everything for China. He wouldn’t even let Victor freely examine the manuscripts that he had come halfway around the globe to study. He parceled
them out one by one, like candy to a child. He would have claimed the discovery as his own, and Victor would have remained an anonymous laborer in the fields of academe. Faced with this prospect, he decided to temporarily remove the manuscripts from their hiding places, and take them out to the stupa to photograph them. We had seen him returning some manuscripts to the caves on that first night we spied on him, but we didn’t know then who he was or what he was doing. His intent of course was to publish his findings, with the photographs, in an academic journal before notifying the Chinese.”
“Thereby making sure that it would be he and not the Chinese who was awarded academic recognition for the discovery,” said Reynolds. “I think I would have done the same in his case.”
“Any ambitious capitalist would have,” said Charlotte with a smile. “Thank goodness that for a few moments there, I was thinking like any ambitious capitalist. If I hadn’t been, I’d now be acquiring an intimate acquaintance with the luxurious accommodations at the Dunhuang Municipal Detention Center.”
“Of course, someone at the Academy would eventually have discovered that Victor had returned the manuscripts to the cubbyholes. But it might have taken a while, and in the meantime you would have been dining on rice gruel and mutton fat.”
“I thought you would have gotten me out right away.”
Reynolds smiled. “Well,” he said. “Sometimes it takes a little longer than one would hope for.”
Charlotte raised her signature eyebrow.
“By the way, Feng identified Danowski as the foreigner who gave him Fiske’s shortwave radio,” he said. “Ho showed him the photograph of Danowski that the Academy had in its files. I think we can safely assume that it was he who planted the shortwave radio on Feng.”
Charlotte was perplexed.
“What is it?” asked Reynolds.
“When Marsha and I went to the bazaar on Sunday, we questioned Feng’s cronies. The crippled boy that hangs around with Feng told us that the foreigner he had seen talking to him had been carrying a lute. When I saw Ned Chee playing a lute, I assumed the foreigner had been he.”
Murder on the Silk Road Page 26