Hunt Among the Killers of Men gh-5

by Gabriel Hunt

  Besides Beggar’s Arch, three other tunnels fed into the amphitheater. At one end was a traditional Chinese teahouse accessed by a zigzaggy footbridge over a turbid flow of water.

  “Four people are in charge of the Bund, now,” said Qingzhao as they trailed Tuan, their fragile burden held between them.

  “Like gang turf?” said Gabriel.

  “More akin to social castes.”

  “Classes.”

  “Tuan runs street level. All you can see.”

  “It is my privilege,” chimed the big man leading them. “An entrepreneur named Hellweg has a lock on municipal services such as power, water. You may have noticed his petroleum tower—the Fire in the Sky. He’s some sort of European; Danish, or Scandanavian at any rate.

  “Our local army of mercenary police is owned by Lo Pei Zhang, who was once a military general. The soldiers are all ex–Red Army.”

  “And the fourth is Cheung?” said Gabriel.

  “Yes. Qingzhao’s former employer,” said Tuan, and Gabriel realized it was the first time he’d heard the woman’s name. “I believe he made his millions in currency speculation. His first millions.”

  Gabriel fired a glance back at Qingzhao. “So you were an employee of his.”

  “Mr. Cheung arrived in our fair land just as Communism was gasping its last,” Tuan rattled on. “The CCC is the new land of opportunity, but it is all quite subsurface now. That’s why Occidentals fear it so much, I think.”

  “And you,” said Gabriel to Qingzhao, “used to work for this guy? The one you’ve been trying to—”

  Her hand was on his forearm, extended across the body of the bowman between them. “Yes.” Her eyes added: Not now. Not in front of Tuan. Please.

  This was one raincheck Gabriel was going to follow up on.

  Next to a booth whose sign proclaimed CHANGE YOUR I.D., Tuan pointed out an ammo hawker with half a face, masked as though by a giant eyepatch. Most of the man’s fingers were missing or truncated.

  “Do not purchase ammunition from that man,” Tuan said. “Unreliable. Misfires.”

  “The man or the ammunition?” asked Gabriel.

  “Both.”

  Tuan led them into another cubbyhole with signage halfway-hidden from the commonweal: SU-LIN GUN MERCHANT. It stank of gunpowder and gun oil, and was a cramped warren of firepower old and new. Su-Lin was a gnomish woman with a calm Easter Island gaze; she weighed maybe 75 pounds. Tuan bent from his enormous height to grace her cheek with a kiss.

  “You must use the keyboard,” said Qingzhao. Two laptops were set up collaborator-style on a small counter, with Su-Lin perched behind one as though ready to commence a game of Battleship. “This translates. First you type the proper greeting.”

  They set down the bowman and Qingzhao typed: YOUR PIG MOTHER EATS NIGHT SOIL, which transposed to Chinese characters on Su-Lin’s screen.

  Su-Lin typed back: I LOVE YOU, TOO.

  Gabriel’s attention meanwhile had been arrested by a very special gun hanging from a clip on the back wall. His eye coded it as a close cousin to his faithful Colt Peacemaker, which he still wished he had strapped to his hip. That one was out of reach. This wasn’t.

  “You have seen something you like?” said Tuan.

  It was a large Colt revolver—age-burnished, true, but Gabriel recognized it as the treasure it was. “If this is what I think it is…”

  Tuan lifted it off the wall and handed it to him. The gun sprang open cleanly at his touch. There wasn’t a spot of rust on it anywhere.

  “This,” Gabriel said, as if he were introducing an old friend to a new one, “looks like an old Navy Colt, .36 caliber—from when they first started converting cap-and-ball ‘percussion pistols’ to the more newfangled revolver. They called them ‘wheelguns.’ ” He glanced back at Su-Lin. “How much do you think she might take for it?”

  “That depends on whether you like it,” Tuan goaded.

  “I like it very much,” said Gabriel. “Anyone who knows about guns would.”

  “Then it is yours,” Tuan said. “For your trouble. With my compliments.”

  “Why?”

  “You are a guest. Qingzhao said you helped to save her life. That is a favor bestowed upon me as well. Please allow me to repay this debt in a way that pleases you.”

  Gabriel nodded his thanks. He was always ill at ease accepting gifts, because you never knew what obligations might accompany them. But he wasn’t about to turn down this one. He had a feeling he might need a good gun very soon.

  The place Tuan called his Pleasure Garden featured a cabaret stage—empty just now—and about a million varieties of flowering plant life nourished by misting nozzles and artificial sunlight, here in the middle of a city of stone.

  The newly unwrapped terra-cotta warrior—Qingzhao’s bowman—watched silently as they ate from a table carved from a monkey-puzzle tree, laden with about forty dishes of food.

  Tuan held up a goblet of absinthe for a toast.

  “To my newest soldier,” he said.

  The licorice-flavored drink went down hard and sizzled with an afterbite of burned sugar.

  Apparently, Qingzhao bartered the terra-cotta warriors with Tuan for supplies and intelligence. The figures she had discovered near the idol in the shrine room had great value, even as damaged as they were. The two empty slots Gabriel had noticed were remnants of earlier deals between Qingzhao and Tuan; their collaboration had been ongoing for the better part of a year.

  “Barter being the best form of trade?” asked Gabriel.

  Tuan nodded.

  Gabriel surveyed the table. “My apologies, but this seems like an awful lot of food for three people.”

  “I am showing off,” Tuan smiled. “Forgive me.”

  “It will feed others when we are done,” said Qingzhao. “Tuan is responsible for filling many bellies.”

  “So,” Gabriel said, returning to the subject of the clay warriors, “value for value. Like the black market in religious ikons in Russia.”

  “Not quite,” said Tuan. “The Russian way provided an interesting lesson on the subject of smuggled antiquities, because so many of their black- and gray-market religious ikons were forgeries. Of course, one of my business interests is a thriving popular outlet for replica warriors. We’ve copied most of the basic templates from the warriors found in the Xian pits and the army of Emperor Qin. We do custom paint jobs. We even have a service whereby your own features can be worked onto the terra-cotta warrior replica of your choice. My artisans use photographs of the subject. You’d be surprised at how many people want a recreation for their garden or foyer. How many people actually collect them.”

  “At a couple grand a pop, no doubt,” said Gabriel. It was no different to him than some spinster collecting plates from the Franklin Mint. “But the replica market provides cover for moving the real warriors to private collectors who can’t show them because it would be illegal to possess them.”

  “They pay for that privilege,” said Tuan. “The funny thing is, the replica company actually started turning a profit last year. And most people cannot even discern authenticity, which has allowed the market in art forgeries to thrive the way it has.”

  It was true. Forgers had become so painstaking at their craft that the difference between a fake masterpiece (which hung in galleries and toured worldwide to the acclaim of millions) and the genuine article (which hung in someone’s expensive, climate–controlled cellar and was available for viewing only by an elite few) had been reduced almost to nil. As far as the world was concerned, the fake was real. The real paintings only increased in value every time a subterranean auction was held, and sometimes the aficionados tried to screw each other. Michael had told him that half the Impressionists in the last Getty exhibition were bogus, but no one wanted to say so. What was the point in starting that blaze of controversy unless the whereabouts of the real ones were known?

  The epidemic had gotten so dire that within the last five years, even the Mona Lis
a had come under serious doubt. Which might explain her goofy, cryptic smile at last. I’m a fake, boys.

  Tuan pushed back his seat. “My honored guest,” he said. “Permit me the ill manner of a private conversation with Qi.”

  “Qi?” said Gabriel.

  “My diminutive for our delectable little fighter. You have no doubt already felt the strange attraction she exerts.”

  She lowered her gaze.

  “No doubt,” Gabriel said.

  He handed Gabriel a puzzle box of closely worked unlacquered cedar. “We have a few small affairs of business to transact that are not for all ears to hear.”

  Gabriel accepted the box with mild interest. It called to mind nothing so much as the Rubik’s Cube he’d held just days before in Michael’s office.

  “We’ll be nearby,” Tuan said. “While we’re gone, perhaps you will find this interesting to examine. What most people call a Chinese puzzle box, the kind one buys in the so-called ‘Chinatowns’ of various cities, is actually a Japanese configuration. Historically this has disallowed inquiry into something uniquely Chinese—a different configuration and puzzle strategy, now overwhelmed by the more common Japanese variants. This one is authentic. Its purpose is not to test skill at solving a mere puzzle…”

  “But to test the mettle of the solver,” Gabriel said, feeling a tiny surge of dread: of all the ways Tuan might have chosen to test him…!

  Tuan and Qingzhao repaired to a curtained alcove to speak in hushed whispers while Gabriel considered the box in his hands.

  He wanted to set it aside and perhaps wander near enough to the curtain to eavesdrop on the conversation, but he suspected that neither would be advisable. His host had been cordial so far—but he was clearly a dangerous man and not one to anger.

  Gabriel reluctantly focused on the box in his hands. Classic puzzle boxes, he remembered, always featured sliding panels. But no part of this one appeared to slide in any direction. Thinking back to the Rubik’s Cube that had so confounded him in New York, Gabriel began exerting mild stress on different parts of the box and sure enough, a triangular corner came free on a little interior hinge, now hanging out like a wing and spoiling the box’s symmetry. After a one-eighty revolve, it settled back into its appointed corner upside down, completing an ideogram that had previously been bisected. He recognized the ideogram: it translated roughly into “as above, so below.” Accordingly, Gabriel twisted free the corner that was diagonally opposite—a corner that had not budged before. It flipped out and settled back with mild pressure, and Gabriel felt something click definitively inside the box.

  Ah. Now we’re getting somewhere.

  The top of the box, he found, felt loose, as if it would slide if he pressed it. He did, and realized that the entire top half of the box could be eased away from the bottom half, turned like a knob and reseated. Each repositioning completed a Chinese character previously obscured or lost within the filigree of design.

  The top half of the box displaced a quarter of its own length. Gabriel realized that if the bulky section could fold over, the box would retain its original size and shape. The engineering seemed impossible, but sure enough—click.

  Now panels revealed themselves in the conventional manner. The wrinkle of an authentic Chinese box would be that some of the panels would be tricks, traps or dead ends. These enigmas were dependent on the user’s preconceptions of how such things might or might not work.

  He pressed on one panel—

  “A word of advice, my dear new friend,” said Tuan, returning.

  Gabriel was embarrassed not to have heard his approach. He’d been more wrapped up in solving the puzzle than he’d realized. He put the box down unfinished, hearing somewhere, in the back of his head, Michael’s voice chastising him. You give up on things too easily.

  “Qi has told me of your adventures and difficulties,” said Tuan. “I would say you should not expect to leave China, if that is your thought. You are on Cheung’s map now. The caution you take should be threefold. Really, if it was safety you sought, you should not have even dared to come back into the city at all.”

  “Mind reader,” said Gabriel.

  They left Tuan in his den and returned, painstakingly, to where they’d first met him. The old couple was gone.

  Gabriel wanted to ask Qingzhao what she’d gotten in exchange for the priceless terra-cotta warrior this time, but he was prepared to wait to grill her—about this and her relationship with Cheung—till they were alone, far from prying ears and eyes.

  Coming in and out of central Shanghai could be like stepping into a time machine. Barely outside the city limits, the terrain and people seemed to come from far in the past. Gabriel had once seen the backlots of Shanghai Film Studio, where an entire small city had been constructed for the purposes of shooting movies. During Gabriel’s visit, the street had been dressed as 1933 Shanghai right down to the fake billboard for King Kong, in service of an epic called Temptress Moon; on the adjacent lot, you found yourself on the same city street, 200 years earlier. Driving through the streets of the city proper could feel a lot like that, antiquity and modernity rubbing shoulders block by crowded block.

  It was easy for Gabriel to close his eyes—once again in a pedicab with Qingzhao—and imagine he was some European interloper from ages ago, racing along the cobblestones toward a meeting with Kangxi Shih-k’ai or one of his lieutenants.

  The illusion was enhanced a moment later when he heard a pair of gunshots and, looking up, saw twin holes punched in the canvas flap next to his head. He had a fleeting sense of high-velocity projectiles passing inches from his face and then two more holes appeared in the flap next to Qi.

  Somebody was shooting at them.

  Chapter 8

  Gabriel reached forward to pull the pedicab driver out of the line of fire.

  The man was already dead, holed through the neck and chest.

  The pedicab came to a lurching halt, pitching forward, crashing into a gent on a bicycle and sending him cartwheeling into the air.

  Gabriel and Qi dived out and flattened in opposite directions, hugging cobblestones slicked with night mist.

  Rolling on his back, Gabriel groped for his newly acquired Colt, still wrapped in cheesecloth and now sitting in the middle of the street as citizens, heedless to the silenced gunfire, crowded around and stumbled over him.

  Then he had to claw the big .45 cartridges from his pocket. Conventional wisdom with guns like this held that one should load five shells and leave the hammer down on an empty chamber, since the gun had nothing that could remotely be interpreted as a safety. Gabriel always—always—loaded six.

  Qi had already whipped out a sleek automatic from a spine scabbard and was seeking targets.

  Several gunners in black, with hoods, materialized out of the throng to rake the pedicab with machine-gun fire. It vaporized into toothpicks and floating chaff as Gabriel rolled, sighted prone, and discharged his new gun for the first time. It kicked hard and roared like a cannon, a curling gout of fire licking from the muzzle. One of the gunners arched into the air and fell—a high center hit—knocking down several people who were stampeding at the sound and sight of gunfire.

  Gabriel lifted the shattered wheel of the pedicab and with one mighty swing dislocated the jaw of a second shooter who’d run toward him. Almost instantly two more thugs focused their attention on the guilo and Gabriel found himself in an unwilling three-way.

  He kicked out at one guy grabbing him, heard the picket crack of a blown kneecap, and swung the man into his nearest neighbor. Gabriel had dropped his gun; he retrieved it now and put a round into the chest of one attacker.

  Where were the police when you wanted them? A show of force by some of China’s ubiquitous uniformed keepers of order might have put an end to this melee. But the police were no more anxious to rush headlong into a situation that might get them killed than anyone else would be, a guilty reality that could cost you your existence if somebody abruptly opened fire on your
pedicab.

  As he took down another attacker with a slash of his gun hand across the man’s face only to see two more pop up in his place, Gabriel wondered, How many shooters were he and Qi worth?

  In the words of a famous bank robber: All of them.

  Gabriel rather indecorously shoved a woman laden with wicker baskets aside as he thumb-cocked the hammer of the Colt one-handed and blew a round into an assailant who surely would have shredded the woman for a chance to nail Gabriel. The big lead slug spanged off the attacker’s AK-47, destroying the breech and rendering the gun useless except as a club. It also took away two of the attacker’s fingers, putting him out of the fight.

  Bullet Number Four reaped a lucky hit, passing through one gunner and into the guy behind him. They would probably live, too, but they dropped their weapons and fell down, and that was all that mattered to Gabriel at the moment.

  Gabriel looked around furiously, finally catching sight of Qi as she discarded her now-empty weapon and took on a barreling adversary by imploding a wire birdcage over his head and then delivering an expert pointed-toe kick to a nerve bundle near the man’s groin that put him down, spasming. Qi swiftly took charge of her victim’s pistol.

  Gabriel reversed-out to a kneeling position and fanned his last two shots, blossoming two bright glurts of blood across the chest of another black-clad man seconds away from doing the same to him.

  Gabriel leaped to his feet and barreled toward Qi, taking advantage of an instant’s lull. If there were a second wave coming, it was stalled long enough for Gabriel to locate Qi and turn an ambush into hot pursuit.

  “Come on!” he yelled, grabbing her hand and almost spoiling her aim as she plugged a masked gunner.

  “No, this way!” she yelled back. Gabriel accepted the change of direction; she’d know the streets here better than he would.