Jade Dragon Mountain (31 page)

Li Du took a step back from Tulishen. “I am not overburdened,” he said. “And there is much for me still to consider. There is time.”

“You should rest,” said Tulishen, in a harder voice. Then he turned to Jia Huan. “It has come to my attention that tourists are stealing mosaic tiles from the field. I want more guards posted there, now that all is in readiness. Go see to that now. And you know that this evening the ambassador wishes to rehearse his presentation with the tribute.”

“Your pardon,” said Jia Huan, “but I have already sent extra guards to the field. I assumed you would wish it.”

Tulishen was pleased. “That is very well done,” he said. “You are as always of great use to me. And what of the issue with tomorrow's banquet?” Before Jia Huan could reply, Tulishen turned to Li Du and explained, “We were prepared for a certain number, but did not know until this morning that there will be Muslims who do not eat pork.”

“The innkeeper Hoh will contribute beef dishes and bread,” said Jia Huan. “I confirmed this with him on my way here.”

“And,” Tulishen went on, now to Lady Chen, “I want you to bring some of your wine to the magistrate from Pu'erh. He is expecting special treatment. The Emperor's decision not to visit Pu'erh has been a blow to him, and we must not allow his jealousy of our success to upset the evening.”

Tulishen continued talking, and barely noticed when Li Du gave a little bow and slipped away. He was just outside the inn when he caught up with Mu Gao, who was heading in the direction of the city offices. He carried a jar of wine and a jumble of papers in the basket on his back.

“You are going to see Old Mu?” asked Li Du.

“Yes I am,” said Mu Gao, and glanced up at the sky. “It will be a fine evening. You want to drink wine with us tonight?”

Li Du smiled. “I am grateful for the invitation,” he said, “but another time, perhaps.”

“Your choice,” said Mu Gao, and clattered on his cane down the alley.

 

Chapter 17

“We know,” said Hamza, studying a moth that had landed on the little stone table in front of him. “We know…” he repeated, trailing off as the moth fluttered up into the branches of a cherry tree. He yawned and shook his head. “I do not know what we know,” he said, moodily, “only that I begin to suspect this city is an evil place.”

They were sharing a late lunch in the courtyard outside Li Du's room at the inn because they had been unable to find seats or to hear each other speak among the crowds and clamor in the dining hall. The warmth that had arrived early that morning had remained, and in the sunshine it was almost hot. A crow squawked from an unseen perch among the mossy patchwork roof tiles, and the sky was blue. Li Du had opened the doors and windows of his room.

“If we believe Sir Gray,” he said, “we know that the poisoned tea leaves were in a cup on Pieter's desk, beside a pot of freshly boiled water, when the two of them arrived at Pieter's room.”

Hamza reached for his cup of wine, and frowned when he saw that it was empty. He set the cup down. “And do we believe this Nicholas Gray? During my travels I have seen the results of their methods of
diplomacy
. The Company is like a seducer who first charms his victim, then leads her deep under the sea to drown her in the mountains of the underworld. Brother Pieter knew this also. First there is negotiation. Then there is death.”

The word hung in the air for a moment before Li Du responded. “For Gray, the murder is an inconvenience that has hindered his mission. What he wants—what he has been told to do—is to charm the Emperor with visions of the wealth that foreign trade will bring to China. A dead body, that of a man whose holy brothers are looked upon with some favor by the Emperor—it casts a pall over the festival and, possibly, over the negotiations. Gray would not take that risk lightly. He would have needed a very strong reason to kill Pieter—something more than rivalry or dislike.”

“And how do we know he did not have such a reason? I don't like him.”

“The story he gave does account for the missing cup. So let us assume—just for the present—that he spoke the truth. What then do we know of that night?”

Hamza ran his finger around the lip of his empty bowl. “You go on,” he said. “This straightforward thinking is not natural to me.”

Li Du ignored Hamza's apparent disinterest and said, “How did the murderer want Pieter's death to appear?” Hamza waited, and Li Du went on. “We were meant to think that Pieter returned to his room alone, prepared tea himself—he mentioned several times that he drank red tea in the evenings and also he did not like to be waited upon—and died the natural death of an elderly traveler who had undertaken a journey that was too difficult for him.”

“But then what about the purse?”

“The murderer assumed that if the death was declared to have been natural, the purse would never have been noticed. It would have been buried or discarded with the rest of Pieter's modest possessions. The purse was put there in case the doctor recognized the signs of poison and reported those signs to the magistrate. If that happened, the purse would have been found and the poison identified. The blame would then be placed outside the mansion, far away from the actual killer. The Khampa gave Pieter the poisoned gift and he, unsuspecting, prepared their tea for himself that night. And that is exactly what the magistrate did believe. The plan was a clever one. But—”

“But I am confused again. How did the murderer give Pieter the tea? Pieter would not have simply served himself tea from an ornate pouch he did not recognize.”

“The poisoned tea that Pieter actually drank was not in the pouch. We have Gray's evidence on this. When he entered the room with Pieter, the tea leaves were already in the cup on the desk. And there was a pot of water, freshly boiled, beside the cup. The murderer must have been there only moments earlier to fill the pot with water from the kettle in the courtyard. Pieter assumed, as the murderer meant him to, that the tea had been prepared for him by a servant.”

Hamza squinted in the manner of a person trying to read text that is too small. “So the murderer did not account for someone else being in the room with Pieter.”

Li Du nodded. “Exactly. The murderer did not expect there to be a witness. As it happened, Gray was happy to keep the crime a secret in order to protect himself from suspicion. The problem for both of them occurred when Gray, in an effort to hide the poison, took the teacup from the room. He was acting in his own interest, but his interests would have been better served if he had left the scene as the murderer wished it to appear. The missing teacup achieved exactly what the murderer wished to avoid—it drew attention to the people in the mansion. But even with this knowledge, I fear we are no closer to knowing who arranged the poisoned tea.”

“The rash young scientist, the striding fool,” said Hamza, dreamily.

“You refer to Brother Martin?”
The so-called
, Li Du added silently.

“Magicians with obsessions are dangerous.”

“He is a botanist, not a magician, but I take your meaning. He has proved himself a liar, certainly. But he does have an alibi—he never left the courtyard, and could not have prepared the tea and hot water.”

“Then what of your cousin, the magistrate? He did not leave the courtyard either, but if he wanted Pieter dead there are many who might have done it for him. People of rank can hire assassins.”

“That is so, and he is the one who told the doctor to lie about the circumstances of Pieter's death. But what could be his motive? Tulishen, like Gray, is devoted to the success of the festival. He only asked me to remain in Dayan in order to enlist my help in avoiding trouble from the foreigners. What threat could Pieter have posed to Tulishen that would be worse than the consequences of a murder occurring in his house?”

“Then we come,” said Hamza, with another look at his empty bowl, “to Lady Chen. I find her nose very attractive.”

“She has,” said Li Du, “an unusual beauty. Her hair and her clothes have all the sophistication and style of the high courtesans in Beijing, but on her they seem almost a”—he searched for a way to express himself without incurring Hamza's mockery—“a lacquer. There is a deeper strength in her that is hidden by all those—” He gestured at his head in a vague illustration of pins and jewels.

Hamza's face took on a catlike expression. “So you like the Lady Chen, do you? Perhaps she likes you also. Why do you think she directed you to the journal? And how did she know where it was?”

“I think she is the one who took it from his room.”

“Why?”

“I do not know.”

Hamza huffed impatiently. “Your answers do not satisfy. What of Mu Gao? He is a bitter man.”

“That is true, but his anger is not at the Jesuits. He might have wanted to sabotage the festival, but he could have done that without killing a stranger. Of course, Pieter was in Dayan as a young man. We must not forget that.”

As he spoke, Li Du opened Pieter's journal and began idly to scan its pages. Hamza looked over his shoulder and sighed. “I remember him making those diagrams in the mountains,” he said. “But they are nonsense to me. How does anyone understand this language?”

“With some patience,” said Li Du.

Hamza's attention moved from the book to Li Du's open window. His face brightened when he saw the desk, on which sat the bottle of wine that they had purchased at the market. It gleamed cheerful blue and white. “Is it possible,” he said, “that you have wine left? I finished mine on the evening we bought it.” He picked up the bottle and shook it. “But this is at least half full,” he said, delighted.

Li Du raised an eyebrow. “It is hardly the time of day for wine.”

“You are mistaken. Wine is as good in sunlight as in moonlight.”

His attention on the journal, Li Du gestured for Hamza to help himself.
Why
, he was thinking,
why did Pieter write these final pages so poorly? Was he upset?
Pieter had been meticulous on every single page of the journal. He had sketched out one complex equation after another without a single mistake. What had made him slip on that final day? Had something distracted—

Li Du was pulled violently from his thoughts by the sound of porcelain shattering on the floor of his room. As he turned, he saw Hamza fall to his knees, then topple to the floor, clutching the carpet as he began to shake with violent convulsions.

Instantly Li Du was on his feet, the journal forgotten. He glanced from the wine bottle on the desk to the broken cup on the floor, and knew with cold certainly that Hamza had been poisoned. He understood this, understood that it might be too late, but even as his sense of dread increased he was running across the courtyard, crying out for help. Above him the tree branches against the blue sky were like a cracked mirror. The bamboo groves were like walls and the crooked paths distorted and endless.

He almost collided with a maid who was lighting an incense lantern, and it swung crazily, stirring the fragrant smoke into a gray cloud. She let out a startled cry. He told her to fetch the doctor to his own rooms without delay. She gathered up handfuls of her draped silk skirt and rushed away toward the main entrance of the inn, and Li Du continued his own headlong run until he came to the shut door of Hugh Ashton's apartments. He called, and pounded so hard the iron handles rattled in their fastenings.

The door opened and Ashton's pale face peered out. When he recognized Li Du he relaxed momentarily, only to tense again as he reacted to Li Du's expression. Li Du cut him off before Ashton could speak. “Hamza has been poisoned and is dying. You must help him.” Ashton stared, and in a burst of frustration Li Du pushed past him into the room.

“Here,” Li Du said, sweeping his arm to encompass the plants that filled the space. “Somewhere here there is something that will help. What did you learn from the doctor?
Think
!”

The panic in Li Du's voice galvanized the young scholar, and with a low exclamation he rushed to the stacks of paper and pushed the weights from the top of the piles. A small jade ink stone broke into three pieces on the floor. Its lion's head rolled into a corner. The books that had been stacked on top of the piles fell to the floor in bedraggled heaps of fanned pages and covers.

“I know what I am looking for,” muttered Ashton as he tore through the sheets of paper separating the plants that he had meticulously pressed and labeled. The yellowed sheets fluttered through the room like feathers, settling one by one onto the floor in a crackling layer. Ashton whispered under his breath: “
Thea chinensis
 …
Pimentae jamaicensis
 …
Ricinus chinensis sebifera
 … adiantum … mandragora…” He stopped, triumphant, and held up a brown root. “This one,” he said. “Where is he?”

Together they hurried from the room. Li Du led Ashton through the courtyards. Li Du only barely registered that they were abandoned, and that everyone must be out in the streets enjoying the performances. As they came close to Li Du's room they heard muffled voices. Just outside the door, several maids were huddled, crying and whimpering in distress and indecision. One of them managed, in little gulping gasps, to tell Li Du that the doctor would be there soon.

Inside, another servant stood helplessly over Hamza, whose breath was a weakening rattle from his throat. His skin was waxen. As they knelt beside him he spasmed; his back arched and his fingers curled into stiff claws as his face contorted in a cry of pain.

Ashton's face registered horror and he said with a shaking voice, “I need something to crush the root.” Li Du grabbed the heavy marble inkstone from the desk, and was surprised to find it full of ink. The cool liquid ran black down his fingers and over his hand. He ran his sleeve over the stone to wipe the rest of the dripping ink from it as he put it in Ashton's white, outstretched hand. Ashton crushed the root against the floor then forced Hamza's mouth open and the juicy pulp into it. He closed Hamza's jaw so that his teeth bit down on it and he swallowed.