Murder on the Silk Road (30 page)

“It’s early Tang,” said Marsha as they both gazed at the statue, “before the figures became more massive and opulent. I think it’s one of the most beautiful statues at Dunhuang. I’m not surprised that Langdon Warner chose its twin to carry off to the Fogg.”

“And I’m not surprised that Chu wants it back.”

It didn’t take long to find the cubbyhole: it was located at the rear of the inner chamber, near the floor. The painting above it depicted a man treading on the tail of a tiger, the symbol for the caution demanded by a dangerous enterprise. After a bit of discussion, they chose the adjacent cave as their observation post. This time they didn’t want to risk not getting a good look at their man. The two caves were connected by a doorway that had been cut through the wall between the antechambers.

The shape of the skeleton was beginning to take form, Charlotte thought as they descended the cliff. As she read the pieces, they fit together something like this: Peter finds the reference to the list of hiding places in Wang’s daybook. He solicits Boardmann’s help in tracking down the statue, and they plot together to steal it from the Oglethorpe Gardens. Somehow Ned Chee finds out about the plot. He might also have come across the reference to the list in Wang’s daybook during the course of his research, and figured out that it was Boardmann who stole the statue. He had worked closely with Boardmann, he said. Maybe Boardmann had said something or done something that tipped him off. In any case, Ned decides that he wants the manuscripts for himself. After stealing the list, most likely without Boardmann’s knowledge, he stabs him on the street—thus eliminating the competition—and camouflages the murder as a robbery attempt. Pretending to be a vagrant on a cold April morning in New York wouldn’t have been hard. All he would have needed was a stumbling gait, a plastic garbage bag full of aluminum cans, and a hooded parka to conceal his face. Then he arranges a return trip to Dunhuang, romances Emily to get her to hand over the keys (poor Emily), and starts assembling the manuscripts in the stupa. Then comes the second killing: Larry innocently wanders over to the stupa to check out what’s going on, and Ned sneaks back to his camp later to murder him in his sleep. Having succeeded in pinning the murder on a vagrant in Boardmann’s case by planting Boardmann’s watch on him, Ned repeats this ploy by planting Larry’s portable shortwave radio on Feng. He then continues with his nighttime work of removing the manuscripts from the cubbyholes with the intent of selling them later on. All is going well until Peter shows up. Using his copy of the list, Peter locates the cubbyholes, only to find that somebody has already cleaned some of them out. By keeping a close watch on the caves, he figures out which cave his adversary will visit next, and goes there to confront him. Not knowing that Ned has already killed Boardmann and Larry, he demands a piece of the action, and ends up as Ned’s third victim.

It wasn’t a complete skeleton yet; there were still some missing pieces. For instance: if Ned had been in Dunhuang for eight weeks, why had he only recently gotten around to removing the manuscripts from the cubbyholes? One reason might have been that he wasn’t able to figure out Wang’s code right away. The
I Ching
might have been in fashion with New Agers like Kitty, but it was off the beaten track for an art historian, Chinese-American or not. Another might be that it had taken him that long to convince Emily to part with the keys. In any case, the basic structure of the skeleton was there, and it seemed to fit together pretty well.

They would find out how accurate it was soon enough.

At nine that night, Charlotte disembarked from the minibus with Marsha, Bert, and Dogie at the traffic circle at the center of Dunhuang town. With nightspots in short supply, they had eagerly taken the bus driver up on his offer to drive them into town for the evening. They had nothing to do until they took up their watch at the caves later that evening. So they had decided to do what all sensible people did when they needed a little recreation and had some extra time on their hands (in Charlotte’s mind, anyway), which was to go to the movies. They had noticed on Sunday that the local movie theatre was showing a Charlie Chaplin movie, and, since language wasn’t going to pose a problem—most of Chaplin’s movies had been silents—they had figured “why not?”

The movie theatre had been designed in the fifties during the period of political alliance with the Russians, and was typical of Russian-style architecture—a featureless block of stucco with a colonnade here and there. Chu’s son may have considered Charlotte’s movies spiritual pollution, but they were in the finest taste compared to the pollution of the Chinese landscape by this hideous Russian architecture, which was ubiquitous. On the balcony above the doors a hand-painted sign advertised the picture, which was Chaplin’s masterpiece,
The Great Dictator
. In it, Chaplin played both the evil dictator and the common man who is crushed by the dictator’s policies. Charlotte remembered when it was released. It was 1940, the year after Hitler’s invasion of Poland provoked a declaration of war from Britain and France, and the year after the release of her own first picture. She hadn’t seen it since.

After buying their tickets, which cost the equivalent of twenty cents, they went in. Inside, the theatre was a big, barnlike structure with a cement floor, hard wooden seats, and dim lighting. As the film unwound, Charlotte found herself profoundly moved, not only by Chaplin’s brilliant performance, but also by the reaction of the audience. The theatre was charged with emotion. There were those who were no doubt remembering their own humiliations during the Cultural Revolution, but there were also those who were no doubt remembering their own misdeeds. For Chaplin’s dictator was a man who does evil because he is a man to whom evil has been done, and the wounds inflicted by son turning in father, student turning in teacher, and friend turning in friend must still have been raw in the minds of the audience. Many were probably intellectuals from Beijing and Shanghai who had been shipped out to the western regions, the People’s Republic’s equivalent of Siberia, and never had the chance to return.

When the lights came on at the end of the movie, Charlotte could see tearstains on the cheeks of many in the audience. She thought again of Reynolds’ proposal, and ached for it to come through.

Afterwards they wandered around the town. At ten o’clock the dusty streets were still crowded. It seemed as if everyone was out for the evening: peddlers hawked shish kebab and melons, young men played pool at tables that were set up on the sidewalk, lovers strolled languidly, arm in arm—a big change from a few years before when public displays of affection were prohibited. Townspeople eager to practice their English approached them with the question: “Are you very happy?” This concern with their state of happiness puzzled them until they figured out that the phrase was from a popular English phrasebook.

They were trying to decide where to go next when Dogie let out one of his hoots of glee. He was staring at a moon-faced woman wearing a white cap who was turning a tin drum on a nearby street corner. “If that woman ain’t sellin’ ice cream, my name ain’t Percival V. O’Dea.”

“Percival!” said Charlotte.

“Yep. It means knight in Old French. My mama was a schoolteacher. Taught history. My father was a no-account scalawag who never finished seventh grade, but we don’t talk about him.”

“What the V. for?” asked Marsha.

“Virgil. After the Roman poet.”

“With a name like that, it’s no wonder he’s called Dogie,” said Bert.

“It’s not much worse than Albert,” countered Dogie.

Stopping the drum, the woman scooped out a white substance with a wooden paddle, and deposited it in a paper cup for a customer.

“I think you’re seeing correctly, Percival,” said Marsha.

“My mama called me Percy,” said Dogie.

A few minutes later they had all bought paper cups of the cold ice cream. Everyone had vanilla—it was the only flavor. It was rich and creamy and much better than they ever would have expected, they agreed as they ambled on down the dusty street, trailed by the usual crowd of curious Chinese.

They were turning a corner When Marsha suddenly grabbed Bert’s arm. “Come,” she said. “There’s something I want to show you. We still have time to kill before the bus comes back, don’t we?”

Charlotte checked her watch. “Forty minutes.”

A few minutes later they were examining the dragon bones at the herbalist’s kiosk. A lot of them turned out to be the bones of donkeys and sheep, but there were also a fair number of dinosaur bones, which Bert identified as those of common dinosaurs, mostly duckbills. They each bought at least one as a souvenir. Charlotte bought two—one for herself and one for Kitty. Hers was incised with the ideograph for “The Wanderer,” which looked like a jaunty figure in a big hat with an upraised leg frozen in mid-step.

“Speaking of dragon bones,” said Bert as they wandered back toward the bus stop with their bags of bones, “I have some news for you lady detectives. Regarding the circumstances surrounding Larry’s death.”

“What?” asked Marsha eagerly.

“Lisa went over to Bouchard’s camp this morning. Crossed the DMZ, as we say. He invited her over to look at a scorpion. She gets along well with him, as she does with everybody. He’s an expert on arachnids—the spider family—and scorpions in particular. He was pretty excited about it—some new kind of giant scorpion that lives in colonies rather than by itself.”

“And?” prompted Marsha.

“He was showing her a picture of a scorpion in a book—pointing out how his new scorpion differed from its nearest relative, or something—when she spotted a piece of paper among his things.”

“The missing page from Larry’s field diary?” said Charlotte.

Bert nodded. “It was just as you suspected, Charlotte. He went over to Larry’s camp to investigate after we left. Finding Larry dead, he took advantage of the fact that no one was around to take the page from Larry’s field diary. He was planning to steal Larry’s claim.”

Charlotte remembered her confusion at his open-mouthed reaction to her news that she and Lisa had found the
T. rex
skeleton: so he had been reacting that way because he had intended to claim Larry’s find as his own. Instead, all he had found was a new kind of scorpion.

Bert dug around in the pockets of his jeans, and eventually produced a crumpled sheet of paper. “Here it is,” he said, handing it to Charlotte. “I thought you might want to take a look at it.”

They stopped for a minute for Charlotte and Marsha to read the page from the diary. A lump rose at the back of Charlotte’s throat as she read the first lines. They said: “To north slope of ravine in
A.M.
Feel lucky—as if it’s going to be one of those days when something terrific might happen.”

“The hundred-pound nugget of solid gold,” said Marsha.

Bert nodded.

The rest of the entry, made after Larry had found the
Tyrannosaur
, went on to describe the locality in great detail: the exact position, the type of soil, the lay of the land, and so on.

“Lisa didn’t say anything then,” Bert continued after Marsha handed back the page. “But when she got back, she told Peng about it. He was incensed. He’d always been cool on Bouchard anyway, but he was under political pressure to include him. He confronted Bouchard, and he confessed. He’s been barred from the expedition. He’s packing up his things now.”

Charlotte felt a bit sorry for him—the scorpion lover who couldn’t find a dinosaur fossil if he tripped over it. “What’s going to happen to him? Is his career as a paleontologist finished?”

“I imagine so,” said Bert.

“In my book, it’s no great loss,” said Dogie.

“But he’ll still have his scorpions,” Bert added. “He’s been working on a book about scorpions for a decade. He says it will be the first book to encompass everything that’s known about them.”

They had almost reached the bus stop when they were accosted by a pretty young woman who was selling paste jewels. Her wares glowed in the golden evening light: topazes, amethysts, and rose quartz in all shapes and sizes. Some were loose, others had been set into rings, bracelets, and earrings.

“They remind me of the jewelry on the Bodhisattvas we saw this afternoon,” said Charlotte. Like the statues themselves, their richness was all the more striking by comparison with the dry, dusty, impoverished surroundings.

“Yes,” said Marsha as she examined the trayful of stones. “The Prefecture of the Sands was known in ancient times for its high-quality paste jewelry. These must be the same kind of jewels that were sold to travelers on the Silk Road a thousand years ago. I love the pink ones,” she added.

“Okay, ladies,” said Dogie, who stood by impatiently tapping the toe of his boot. “Time’s up. We’ve got to get back to the bus.”

They left reluctantly, and promised the girl they would return.

The minibus picked them up at the traffic circle a few minutes later. After passing the fields on the outskirts of town, and beyond the fields, the wavelike Southern Dunes, the minibus entered the narrow valley in which the caves were located. It was an eerie sight. The rays of the setting sun bathed the jagged ridge of the Mountain of the Three Dangers in a blood-red light. Below the mountain yellow dust devils swirled across the desert floor as they had the previous afternoon, but this time there were many more of them, and they were spinning much faster—hundreds of miniature cyclones, sucking sand into the air and then speeding off. The day before, they had reminded Charlotte of a few graceful couples waltzing expertly at a Roseland tea dance; today, they made her think of a dense pack of alienated youths gyrating wildly on a crowded dance floor.

“
Buran
,” said the driver, gesturing at the menacing mass of yellow clouds that hung low on the horizon to the southwest, blocking out the setting sun.

“What’s a
buran
?” asked Charlotte.

“A black hurricane,” said Marsha. “One of the Gobi’s infamous sandstorms. The Chinese call them ‘flying sand and running Stones.’” She leaned forward to ask the driver a question.