The Chinese Alchemist

by Lyn Hamilton

  I had a flashback to New York, to Burton’s exit from the auction house preview. Had he not said something like “Farewell, my concubine”? Had he been talking to Lingfei and the box rather than to me? It would have been a relief at the time to know that, but even now it was useful. Lingfei was an imperial concubine!

  If she was, I was soon to learn as I searched further, she was in serious danger of being lost in a crowd. According to what I read, Illustrious August had a harem of approximately forty thousand women. Apparently there was something called the Flank Court where the wives of men who had displeased the emperor were sent. New emperors tended to free the women held by the previous emperor, but since Illustrious August had reigned for more than four decades, from 712 to 756, there were a lot of women in his harem by the time he passed on. They were there on sufferance as it were, both acquired and discarded at his whim. Being of a feminist bent, the whole idea of a harem made me distinctly nauseous, but I read on.

  Other than his propensity to keep forty thousand women around for his personal pleasure, Illustrious August looked to have been a good emperor. He had several names; all emperors did. He was born Li Longji. The T’ang dynasty was founded by the Li family, and he was a Li. His dynastic title was T’ang Mingdi, also known as Minghuang. We know him best as Emperor Xuanzong. Emperors got special names after their deaths that encapsulated their reigns. If someone was a bad emperor, he got a bad name. Xuanzong is remembered as Illustrious August, or Profound Ancestor, which spoke well of him. Contrary to my earlier impression, perhaps he hadn’t named himself. From my perspective, he seemed to have had the most glorious reign of all in terms of culture. He loved music, and he even wrote some himself. There is a song he is supposed to have written when he was on a journey to the moon or something like that.

  It was interesting to speculate what it would take to become an imperial concubine. People fanned out across the kingdom to find lovely young girls—virgins were esteemed as always—for their emperor. Fathers would want their daughters to be chosen. But being chosen or perhaps offered to the emperor just got you into the pool, as it were, sort of like the secretarial pools of old. Then you had to claw your way up through a ranking system in hopes that you would be an imperial favorite, get your own luxury apartment in the palace and an annual stipend that was generous enough to keep you in cosmetics and finery, and maybe even acquire the opportunity to bestow favors, like homes and titles, on your family. For the few who managed this, others, perhaps the majority, probably never got to even see the emperor. So there had to be something exceptional about this Lingfei. Perhaps she was a singer or dancer, or she wrote exquisite poetry. That would appeal to Xuanzong. Above all, she must nave been extraordinarily beautiful.

  After about an hour of searching, I gave up. I’d have to have another go later. But I did look up argyria. Yes, it existed; yes, it was exactly as Dr. Xie had described it; and yes, you could make colloidal silver yourself with some distilled water and a battery to run a charge through it and the silver somehow. I didn’t spend a lot of time on this. It didn’t seem to be a useful life skill from my perspective.

  I made another attempt at eating and was marginally more successful than the day before. There was a message on my hotel phone from Rob saying his mobile wasn’t working very well, so he might be hard to reach, but given I’d been delayed for a few more days—that was an understatement—-he and Jennifer were taking a short cruise. He said he didn’t know whether his phone would work there either, but he would try to get in touch. Jennifer came on the line at the end to say how much she wanted to see me, and that I was to hurry up and get there. It was all I could do not to sob uncontrollably. Then, after watching Chinese television, hoping to see a photograph of Song Liang pop up on the screen even if I couldn’t understand a word, I decided to try once again to get some sleep.

  I boiled the water for my bedtime cup of Dr. Xie’s tea. It did smell a little strong, as he had said it would, but I had not found it that difficult to drink the previous night, and it certainly worked. As I took a teabag out of the plastic baggie in which Dr. Xie had given it to me, I had a sudden flash of memory: Burton taking a similar plastic baggie out of his pocket that day we’d had tea on Liulichang Street when I’d caught him checking out the antique stores. He’d brought his own tea bags.

  I got out my magnifier and had a really good look at the teabag. It was of the sort that has a string attached to it to help you dunk it in the water, with a little tag at the end where you hold it that usually gives the manufacturer’s name and the type of tea. This one was blank. The teabag itself was not of the type that is sealed all around. Rather, the staple attaching the string to the bag also sealed the bag. I painstakingly removed the staple, being careful not to tear the paper in any way. Were there two separate staple marks? There were not. Was it possible that the teabag had been stapled twice? I looked at the holes very carefully through the magnifier. I thought it possible that the teabag had been stapled twice.

  I decided then and there that Burton had been poisoned, not through his own actions, his pathetic although understandable desire for good health. No, there was something in that awful tea he drank, something that shouldn’t be there, something he would not detect because of the extremely strong and bitter flavor and aroma of the tea. The burning question was, had Xie Jinghe given it to him?

  I didn’t drink the tea.

  Eight

  Lingfei’s petition to have leave to marry the man of her choice was denied. There was to be no further appeal. The reason given was that the emperor’s Pear Garden Orchestra would be diminished by the loss of her voice and her consummate artistry on the lute. I thought back to that evening when I had watched the orchestra perform, and in my mind tried to place Lingfei there. Perhaps she had seen me that evening, creeping out of the shadows the better to see and hear. Perhaps that was why she had chosen me.

  The next time I went to visit Lingfei, I took sweetmeats and flowers, peonies in remembrance of my sister. I had decided before I went that I would make no reference to her petition. When I arrived there, however, I was in for a terrible shock.

  She was standing, hair disheveled, several locks of it scattered about the floor, a pair of scissors on the writing table nearby. She held a cleaver in her hand. “Wu Yuan,” she said. “You will cut one finger off each of my hands.”

  I was aghast. “I will not, madam!”

  “I demand it!” she said. “You are my servant.”

  “You will not be able to play the lute,” I said, rather naively. “That is exactly the point,” she said.

  Light dawned. “And will you also ask me to pour acid down your throat so you will be unable to sing, madam?” I said, no longer caring if she might guess that I knew of her petition. “Or cut off your feet so you will be unable to dance?” I was very angry now, almost as angry as she. “I will not do that, either.”

  She raised the cleaver, as if to cut off her own finger. But then she dropped it, and burst into tears, collapsing onto a couch. I did not know what to say. I did not know what to do. I simply sat beside her and held her hand for a very long time. When I left her, I reached down and picked up a lock of her hair from the floor and took it with me.

  I got my passport back the next morning. Mira and Dr. Xie had obviously been persuasive, because they were still sorting through the toxicology reports on Burton. According to Mira, his blood was a toxic soup. She said he could be the poster boy for a campaign on the risks of self-medication. His suitcase had contained a very large plastic bag full of all sorts of stuff, from vitamins and minerals of every description, to the silver goo, to teas and infusions for almost every ailment you could think of, and some you’ve never heard of. Over and above the nasty substances in his blood like mercury and lead that all of us who live in developed nations can acquire just by living, there was the silver, of course; arsenic, perhaps acquired along with the lead through some environmental pollutants; and a host of other things. It sounded as if he’d
been taking the elixir of immortality for far too long.

  However, the cause of death was very probably hepatitis C. Burton had been suffering from this terrible condition, acquired who-knew-how and when. Perhaps that explained why he was so obsessed with his health. Sadly, many of the substances he took to make himself healthier just made him worse. As Dr. Xie explained to me, and as he’d hinted when we’d discussed the subject earlier, Burton’s body had identified these substances, such as the silver, as invaders and had in some sense turned their attention to them, neglecting the hepatitis C, which had gained the upper hand.

  It was very sad, but I also felt like a fool. I had suspected Dr. Xie of poisoning Burton. He had been nothing but generous with his time with me, and that’s how I’d rewarded him. I had thought my life was in danger because Burton had been murdered. Instead, Burton had very foolishly managed to kill himself. I was very glad I hadn’t left an hysterical message for Rob. He would be too polite to say anything, of course, but he would have been puzzled by my reaction, I was sure.

  As for Song Liang, the victim in the alley, did I know for certain that he was the same man who had been at the auction in New York, or had stolen the silver box in Beijing? I was beginning to think maybe I didn’t. I had to admit that I’d been more interested in his suit than his face, and for sure he wasn’t wearing fake Hugo Boss or Armani in that alley in Xi’an. He was better dressed than most of the people in that neighborhood, but that could be because he was from Beijing. I’d found that most of the people I saw in Beijing were well dressed, particularly the people in the part of town I spent time in, around the hotel and the auction house. The only information about him that was a link to Chinese art was his position at the Beijing Cultural Relics Bureau, and given that he died in Xi’an, just how relevant could that be?

  I had to go to the police station to retrieve my passport. I had also received a call from a brother of Burton’s I’d never heard him mention, who asked me if I would have a look at the contents of Burton’s suitcase, and make a decision as to whether or not anything there was worth sending home. This brother had tracked me down through the Cottingham, Burton having apparently told his employers that I too was after the box for a client, and then to the Beijing hotel where I’d now left a forwarding number, and thence to Xi’an. I took the suitcase back to my hotel and after sitting around staring at it for about an hour willing myself to open it, got around to the unpleasant task.

  It was an instructive little exercise, and very, very sad. Where the rest of us put clothes, Burton had a box of surgical gloves, his portable air purifier, disinfectant spray, a large economy-size bottle of hand sanitizer, and another box, this one of surgical masks. There were also two boxes of tissues. Hotels do provide tissues, but I guess Burton wasn’t about to risk the ones in the dispenser in a hotel bathroom. The police had told me they had kept the pills and other potions, a very large plastic bagful. Presumably they had kept the tea apparatus and the teabags, too, because there was no sign of them in the bag.

  I figure I’m a good packer, and I travel light, but believe me Burton would have had to do laundry every night. If anything he had fewer changes of underwear than I did in my carry-on bag, which was all I’d brought to Xi’an. He also had five azure scarves, considering them more important than clean underwear, I guess. It was cold, yes, but somehow I’d managed to get along with only one scarf. If it hadn’t all been so awful, it would have been funny. I sent an e-mail to the brother saying there was nothing worth keeping, and I’d see to it that Burton’s clothes, what there were of them, went to a worthy cause. I told him I’d try to find out if Burton had checked any luggage at the hotel in Beijing when he’d flown to Xi’an. The surgical gloves, masks, air purifier, disinfectant spray, and the like I tossed in the waste basket.

  Life went back to normal almost immediately. My capacity for self-delusion is as bad as the next person’s, and it must have been in high gear that day. All it took was a tentative finding of accidental death in Burton’s case, and I was prepared to believe all was well and that I should just get on with my life. I would forget the search for the silver box, I would do something appropriate to mourn poor Burton, and I would go to Taiwan as soon as they’d let me.

  First order of the day was to deal with the demons. It was Wednesday, another antique market day at the Baxian Gong. I decided to go. I walked slowly through the park outside the city walls, and into the neighborhood beyond the ugly high-rises, telling myself over and over that I could do this.

  I wasn’t sure I could bring myself to revisit the alley, but that wasn’t a problem because I was pretty sure I would never be able to find it. However, the person I did want to see was the antique dealer with the scar on her face. It was pretty clear that she wished me no ill. Indeed, she was my guardian angel. She’d dragged me out of that alley and got me to my hotel when my legs had turned to lead. I’d have been standing there for a long time if she hadn’t, maybe long enough that the police would have wanted to spend more time with me than they already had. Still, I really wanted to know how she knew where I was staying. There was always a possibility that she didn’t, that she’d just sent me to one of the closest tourist hotels to get me out of there. At the very least, I owed her a thank you.

  Looking back on these thought processes of mine now, from a safe distance, I am amazed at how proficient I was becoming at rationalizing just about everything. I felt almost euphoric, as if this huge weight had been lifted from my shoulders with the news that Burton’s death was an accident. My life had never been in danger at all.

  In any event, the woman with the scar on her face wasn’t there. I looked everywhere, including the shops that lined the little plaza. And then, given that I was having no luck with the task I’d set myself, I started doing what I said maybe an hour earlier that I absolutely would not. I began to look for the silver box again. I mean, I was there anyway, wasn’t I? Somewhere in the back of my mind, I must have been planning this, because I had put the copy I’d made of the photograph in the Molesworth & Cox catalog in my bag before I went out. It was ridiculously rash, of course, but having been told Burton had essentially killed himself by accident, the threat had receded from my mind. I got out the photograph and started negotiating the narrow aisles between the stalls, by which I mean sheets on the ground on which the items were displayed, asking each of the dealers in turn if they had seen such a thing. Some of them understood the question, others did not. All shook their heads.

  In the middle aisle I came upon a dealer who had some very interesting objects on display, including a lovely jade disk that I thought, despite a crack, would make a truly unique piece of jewelry with minimal effort. I picked it up and then looked into the face of the dealer who had it on offer, planning to try to purchase it, and also to show off my photograph of the silver box.

  The man was dressed in a rather scruffy-looking padded jacket against the cold, worn boots, and pants. He had a cap pulled down low, and his face was a little smudged with dirt. It was, however, Liu David, lawyer and business consultant from Beijing, the same man who couldn’t call me back because he was in Shanghai, or if not David, then his identical twin. I opened my mouth to say something, and he gave me just the very slightest of shakes of his head. I closed my mouth, set down the jade disk, and moved on.

  This was perplexing indeed. I supposed there were several possible explanations for Liu David’s presence there, but there was only one I liked. Regardless, I’d obviously seen something I wasn’t supposed to, and the best course of action was to get out of there. Trying not to look too hasty, I made my way along the aisle stopping occasionally to look at something, on to the street, and then, at as stately a pace as I could muster when my inclination was to run, back to the city walls. I liked the idea of big, high city walls between me and the antique market at the Baxian Gong.

  I didn’t get far, however. I was about a block or two away from the antique market when a man, one I recognized from the market, and to whom
I had shown the photograph of the silver box, approached me. His English was such that we could make ourselves understood, if not exactly converse about the problems besetting the planet. He suggested he had some objects I would be interested in seeing. I asked him about the silver box.

  “Yes,” he said. “T’ang. You come with me. I take you to box.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me this when I asked?” I said, just a tad suspiciously.

  “Too many ears,” he said. “Also police always watching us. They are corrupt,” he added. “They want money not to arrest me.”

  I didn’t know whether that was true or not, although it was depressing to think it might be. Part of me assumed this was a variation on what I refer to as the tax-collector pitch, which goes something like this: dealer notices you admiring something, whispers in your ear that he will give you a very special price because the tax collector is over there, whereupon he gestures somewhere indeterminate, and he has to pay him or her off or he will be in trouble, and he is a man with a family, etc., etc. I’ve heard this one all over the world.