Murder on the Silk Road (15 page)

For a few minutes, the group, most of whom were with a party of German tourists, studied the statue as Emily explained about the Buddha’s ear lobes, which were elongated from years of wearing heavy earrings, and were a symbol of his renunciation of a life of the flesh for one of the spirit. “Now we’ll look at the Buddha from above,” said Emily.

Flashlights in hand, she and Ned led the group up the stairway. It was a bit like visiting the Statue of Liberty. They climbed and climbed—past the knees, the waist, the chest, the face. At each level there was a platform for viewing the statue. Charlotte was most impressed by the hands: huge gilded slabs that must have been twenty feet long.

Finally they reached the highest platform, from which they looked down on the gilded top of the Buddha’s head. It was covered with coins and cigarettes.

“What are the cigarettes doing there?” asked one of the tourists.

“They’ve been thrown there by people who’ve made wishes,” Emily answered. “If your coin or cigarette stays on the Buddha’s head, your wish will come true. But if your coin or cigarette falls, your wish won’t come true.”

“What happens to the money?” asked one of the Americans. It was a typically American question, Charlotte thought.

“It goes toward the restoration of the caves,” Emily replied. She gestured for them to step up to the railing. “Please feel free to try it,” she said. “I have extra coins, if you don’t have any.”

Taking a five-fen coin, which was worth about two and a half cents, out of her purse, Charlotte stepped up to the railing, closed her eyes, and made a wish. It was the same wish she had been making for the last forty-odd years: for a good property. Only in this case, she had something specific in mind.

“Let a hundred flowers bloom,” she said to herself as she leaned out over the railing to throw her coin.

It came neatly to rest in one of the Buddha’s tightly wound hair coils.

7

The tour of the Cave of Unequaled Height ended with the obligatory melon break, which took place every afternoon at around four, and was as much a part of the daily routine as afternoon tea in London. The ritual was performed by Ned. Squatting on the pavement at the foot of the cliff, he cut open a bunch of melons with the ornate knife that the men of the area wore strapped to their belts especially for this purpose. First he cut the end off of each melon to clean the knife, and then he cut it into slices, which Emily passed around. As Charlotte sat on a bench eating her melon, she pondered how to go about looking into Larry’s death. She was eager to go right out to the camp. But if Larry had left field notes, she would need an interpreter—she didn’t speak dinosaurese—and Bert, Dogie, and Orecchio had been holed up in the reception room with Peng all afternoon drafting some kind of formal agreement about dinosaur bones, of the if-you-find-it-you-can-keep-it-but-we-get-to-borrow-it-back-if-we-want-to variety. Then it struck her: Lisa. Lisa could help her—she knew as much about dinosaurs as any of the others. She quickly finished her melon, and, after thanking Emily and Ned, went in search of Bert and Dogie’s girl Friday.

She found her a few minutes later in the courtyard of her building, which was adjacent to Charlotte’s. She was washing out her laundry under a spigot. Each of the courtyards had a spigot, which was where the guests washed their clothes, brushed their teeth, and even washed their hair. It reminded Charlotte of overnight camp. The water from the various spigots drained into a ditch, which ran all around the compound, and which served to irrigate the fruit trees, flower gardens, and trellises.

“Hi!” said Lisa, as Charlotte approached. “Welcome to Foo Young’s laundry. I’m trying the Third-World approach,” she added, indicating the wet clothes that she had spread out on nearby bushes to dry.

“Don’t they have a laundry here?” asked Charlotte.

“Yes, but it takes three days and I don’t have three days worth of clean clothes.” She looked down at the pair of cutoffs she was wearing. “I’m down to my last pair of shorts. How’s everything in the art world?”

“It’s not the art world I’m thinking about at the moment, but the dinosaur world. Specifically, Larry’s dinosaur world.”

“What about it?” Lisa asked as she rinsed out a T-shirt.

Charlotte explained about her doubts (they were really Reynolds’ doubts, but she was abiding by his request for discretion) as to the motive for Larry’s murder, and told her about her theory that Larry’s death was somehow linked to his claim that he had made the biggest find of the century.

Lisa was skeptical. “I wouldn’t believe everything Larry told me,” she said. “He had a way of exaggerating things.”

Charlotte felt a pang of disappointment. She hadn’t even considered the possibility that Larry might have exaggerated. But then she remembered his feverish glow of excitement—so bright that she’d thought he might even be on drugs. No—she was sure he had really found something. “Would you like to go out to Larry’s camp with me?”

“To see if we can find what it was that he found?”

Charlotte nodded.

“I would love to,” Lisa cried. “I’ve been
dying
to get a better look at what’s out there. We were supposed to go surveying this afternoon, but then the boys [which was how she referred to Bert and Dogie] got tied up with Peng, and we weren’t able to. When do we leave?”

“How about right now?” They had more than three hours until dinner, and the light was still good. Since there were no time zones in China—the entire country was on Beijing time—it didn’t get dark until eleven o’clock.

“Great,” Lisa said as she spread the T-shirt out on a bush. “I’ve just got to get my sunglasses and a hat.”

“Me too,” said Charlotte. “Meet you here shortly?”

“Sounds fine.”

Twenty minutes later they were turning at the twisted corpse of the mummified donkey onto the rutted track that led across the valley floor to Larry’s camp. Lisa was suitably equipped with camera, canteen, and binoculars.

As they walked, Lisa chatted about fossil hunting. “The
Protoceratops
skull that Dogie found yesterday is a good sign,” she said. “To have found anything is a good sign, but to have found a nice skull right on your doorstep like that is a very good sign indeed. Sometimes you can spend weeks looking in a promising site and not come back with anything but a sunburn.”

“Larry told us at dinner that night that the site was paved with fossils,” Charlotte commented as they climbed the series of terraces that led upward from the bed of the wide, shallow stream that paralleled the road.

Lisa threw her a doubting look. “I heard him say that once before, about a site in Peru,” she said. “The area
was
paved with fossils: mammal bones—late mammals, too. Not to put down mammal bones—they can tell us a lot about mammalian evolution—but it wasn’t exactly the world’s greatest discovery.”

“Forgive my ignorance,” said Charlotte. “But what exactly are you looking for here? I know that you’re looking for dinosaur bones, but are you looking for any particular kind of dinosaur bones? I guess what I’m asking is, is there any particular thesis that you’re trying to prove or disprove?”

“The answers are yes and yes,” Lisa replied. “We are looking for particular kinds of bones, namely those of new species, and we are trying to prove a thesis, namely that Asia and North America were once connected, and therefore gave rise to similar kinds of dinosaurs.”

“What about finding fossils above the K/T boundary layer?”

“If you mean are we looking for fossils above the K/T boundary layer, the answer is no. If you mean would we like to find fossils above the K/T layer, the answer is yes. They aren’t something you look for; they’re something you come across. Teeth, bits and pieces. A fully articulated skeleton has never been found above the K/T boundary layer. That’s where the catastrophists get their ammunition. They say that bits and pieces alone aren’t enough to prove that the dinosaurs survived the catastrophe. Because they’re so small, they could have been washed away from their original sites and redeposited in more recent sediments.”

“But the discovery of a fully articulated skeleton above the K/T layer would prove that the dinosaurs survived the catastrophe, wouldn’t it?” She went on to repeat what she had overheard Larry saying to Dogie.

“Yes. A fully articulated skeleton would prove that dinosaurs survived the catastrophe, but not only did Larry not discover a fully articulated skeleton, nobody else is likely to either.”

“Why not?” asked Charlotte as they passed the pair of towering stupas that framed the Cave of Unequaled Height. They cast long, narrow shadows in the soft, pink, late-afternoon light.

“People have a mistaken notion about dinosaur fossils. They’re not easy to find. The fossil record isn’t rich. After all, these critters have been out of the picture for sixty-four million years. Take
T. rex
, to use a popular example. Only half-a-dozen skeletons of
T. rex
have ever been found. Combine the fact that a fully articulated skeleton is a rarity with the fact that the dinosaurs were already dying out at the time of the catastrophe, and you see that the chances of finding an intact skeleton above the K/T boundary layer are pretty slim. My guess is that Larry found a few bones. He would have delighted in dangling them in front of Orecchio’s nose.” A shadow crossed the angled planes of her face. “Too bad he didn’t get the chance.”

After a few more minutes of hiking, they reached the point a hundred feet up the slope of the mountain where the jeep track turned to the north, and where they had rested the day before.

For a few minutes, they looked out at the camp, which was situated on a plateau on the other side of a nearby butte.

“Quite an establishment for one person,” commented Charlotte.

“Yes,” said Lisa. “Roy Chapman Andrews all over again. Right down to the table linens and crystal brandy decanter. I’ll never forget the time he invited us to his camp for oysters and champagne—that was on a dig in Mexico. He’d had the oysters flown in from Veracruz.”

“Tough life,” said Charlotte, and immediately regretted her words. It wasn’t a very gracious thing to say of someone who’d just been murdered.

“Yes,” said Lisa. “It’s easy to be envious of somebody who has so much money. But nobody ever begrudged Larry his wealth. It was because of his generosity. Not only with his money, but with his spirit. It sounds corny to say, but his was a life that enriched those of everybody around him.”

Charlotte felt even worse about her crass comment.

A few minutes later they had arrived at the camp, which was being guarded by a young Chinese man. Reynolds delivered as promised. Upon seeing them, the man stood up, and ushered them into the work tent.

On her earlier visit Charlotte had failed to notice the artworks that decorated the tent: a couple of Chinese landscape paintings hung from the back wall, and a huge temple jar stood next to a brass-studded trunk. “This place is really something,” she said as she looked around.

“The art is a Roy Chapman Andrews affectation too,” Lisa explained. “RCA collected Oriental art; Larry collected Oriental art.” She walked over to inspect the scroll paintings. “I expect he just bought these recently. Otherwise, he’d have shipped them back already.”

For a few minutes, they looked at the paintings, which were exquisite. Charlotte especially liked one of a monk in a hut by a silver lake.

“What is it that we’re looking for exactly?” she asked as they turned back to face the work area of the tent.

“A field diary,” Lisa replied. She walked over to the big mahogany camp desk. “My guess is that it would be in here.” She ran her fingers over the dust-covered surface. “I remember this desk,” she said. Tears rose in her hazel eyes, and she blinked them back.

Charlotte joined her at the desk, and started going through the drawers. “What would it look like?” she asked.

“Usually, it’s just an ordinary three-ring binder. But in Larry’s case, you never know—probably hand-bound in Moroccan calf and stamped with gold.”

“Like this?” said Charlotte. She pulled a tan notebook out of the middle drawer. It wasn’t hand-bound, but it was covered in leather and stamped with a pattern of dinosaurs in gold.

“That looks like it,” Lisa said as Charlotte handed the book to her. Placing it on the desk in front of her, she took a seat in the leather swivel chair. “Did he mention when he made his big discovery?” she asked as she started leafing through the pages.

“I gathered that it was on that day: Thursday, June twenty-eighth,” replied Charlotte, who was leaning over her shoulder.

Lisa flipped through the pages to that day, and then looked up at Charlotte. The angled face under the flowered baseball cap was puzzled. “It’s not here!” she said. The word “here” came out in Jerseyese:
heah
.

The page for Thursday, June twenty-eighth, had been ripped out. There was an entry for Wednesday, describing the areas in which Larry had been working on that day: location, type of soil, terrain, and so on. But nothing for Thursday except a few shreds of paper clinging to the spiral binding.

“Maybe you’re right,” Lisa said. “Maybe he really did find something.”

“But what?” asked Charlotte.

“I’ve got an idea.” Lisa began rooting around in the drawers. “There should be a master map that’s marked off in grids, with each survey locality mapped. Maybe we can figure out something from the master map, if not what he found, then where he found it.” She had finished searching. “It’s not here,” she said.

“What about there?” said Charlotte, who had spotted a cardboard tube leaning up against the back wall of the tent. Retrieving it from its storage place, she brought it over to the desk and slid out the contents: it was a large gridded map entitled “Dragon’s Tomb Site, Gansu Province, PRC.” Dragon’s Tomb was the name that Larry said he had given his site.

“This is it, all right. Paleontologists like to name their sites,” Lisa explained. “It’s one of the privileges of discovering a site. Just like naming a new species is one of the privileges of discovering it.” She picked up a bone from the desk, and used it to hold down the corner.