Murder on the Silk Road (33 page)

He missed the first time. From above, they could see his legs fly backward in reaction to his forward motion. A second later, they saw his legs fly backward again, but this time a huge dust devil, like a miniature cyclone, came whirling across the top of the Mountain of the Howling Sands with a wild shriek and caught his body in its grip. It was as if it were trying to suck him up into the heavens. He managed to hang on for a few seconds, his body outstretched as if he were flying, and then the wind pried him loose.

For a second, the wind spout held him suspended in the air as if he were a plaything that it was amusing itself with, and then it dropped him as unceremoniously as a child drops a toy when another of greater interest comes along. They didn’t see him land. They couldn’t see the base of the cliff. But they saw his white face disappear with a scream of terror into the darkness, like a bad memory fading into time.

It took a few seconds for the shock of his fall to sink in, it had happened so quickly. As Charlotte and Marsha looked on, Bert and Dogie peered over the railing, but there was nothing to be seen except a dark, swirling mass of sand that choked their lungs and stung their eyes.

“Come on,” said Charlotte. “Let’s get out of here.”

Turning their backs on the opening, they made their way back across the catwalk to the platform on the north side of the cave. Above them, the gilded face of the Buddha glowed through the haze, serenely unperturbed by the drama that had been unfolding before him.

A few minutes later, Bert and Dogie appeared at the door, their hair and eyebrows coated with sand. They looked like the figurines of Santa Claus playing the electric guitar which were on sale at the souvenir stand.

As they entered, Marsha rushed into Bert’s arms. “I’m so glad you’re okay,” she said, as he enveloped her in a bear hug.

“Same here,” he replied.

Charlotte couldn’t help thinking how frightened she had felt in his embrace only a few minutes before.

15

They found Victor’s body spread-eagled on the paved avenue at the foot of the cliff. The force of the wind spout had carried it about twenty feet out and an equal distance to the south of the spot where he had lost his grip. Though there was little blood, it was clear that he had landed on his head: the left side of his skull was caved in like a jack-o’-lantern that has begun to rot. The only other evidence of injury was to his hands: his fingertips were bloody from the strain of hanging on, and there were bits of red-painted wood embedded in the flesh; and to his skin: the wind had torn away his shirt, exposing his chest and back to the lashing of the storm. His skin was stippled with red where it had been pelted with flying stones. He was also missing a shoe. They found it a couple of dozen feet away, near his knife. It was the same kind of dagger they had seen for sale in the bazaar, with a hand-worked silver haft inlaid with polished stones.

The wind that had raged so furiously had spent itself, for the moment. The sudden calm was uncanny after the roar and howl of the storm. The sand suspended in the motionless air sifted down, like a gentle snowfall.

As they stood there over Victor’s body, Bert explained how he and Dogie had come to be at the caves.

“That’s what I thought,” said Charlotte when he had finished. “But what I don’t understand is, how did Victor reach the big cave so fast? We thought we would be past the seventh level before he got there.”

“He didn’t go back and down and around,” Bert explained. “He climbed over the railing and down to the next level. It was the same stunt he tried to pull here, only this time it didn’t work. What was he doing here, anyway?”

“It’s a long story,” said Charlotte. “It’ll take a while to explain. Why don’t we head on back to the guest house?”

As they turned to walk back, Charlotte noticed that Bert was limping. “Were you injured in the fight with Victor?” she asked.

“I was injured in a fight, but not the fight with Victor. I was injured in the fight with you. That’s a pretty mean kick you have there,” he added with a smile.

“Worse than a riled-up mule’s,” added Dogie.

“Sorry about that. I mistook you for the enemy. I should have known better.” She proceeded to tell them about the
I Ching
’s prediction that she would fall into a pit and be rescued by “uninvited guests” whom she at first would mistake for enemies.

“I know that line,” said Marsha. “It’s from ‘Waiting.’”

Charlotte nodded.

“But I’ve always thought the word ‘pit’ was translated incorrectly,” she continued. “The edition you’ve been using was translated into English from the German, which in turn was translated from the Chinese. In my opinion, a lot of the text got garbled in the process.”

“What word would you have used?” asked Charlotte.

“Cave,” she said.

They were up until dawn explaining their interpretation of events, not only to Bert and Dogie, but to Ho of the tadpole mustache, and to a bunch of other Chinese officials who arrived about forty-five minutes after their call. They hadn’t expected their call to go through, but the phone lines had somehow survived the storm. Though Ho had a good grasp of English—or Chinglish, as Marsha called it—none of the other security police did, and Marsha was called upon to translate and to clarify the points that Ho didn’t understand. They sat in the reception room, sipping tea and answering questions: how Victor had found the entry in Wang’s daybook disclosing that the key to the manuscripts’ location was hidden in the Oglethorpe sculpture; how he had consulted Boardmann on the statue’s whereabouts; how they had plotted together to steal the statue; how Victor had killed Boardmann, making it look like a street homicide; how he had hidden the manuscripts in the stupa with the aim of smuggling them out of the country at some future time and selling them; how he had killed Larry, again making it look like a vagrant had done it; and finally, how he had killed Peter because Peter, who had come across the reference in Wang’s daybook independently, had wanted a piece of the action. Chu presided over the proceedings with an air of self-righteous indignation. Occasionally he made pointed remarks about the rapacity of the bourgeois capitalists or Dunhuang’s long history of plunder at the hands of the Western “so-called” archaeologists. Even the revelation that the world’s oldest printed book was among the manuscripts in Victor’s haul didn’t crack his suit of red armor.

But it was a different story when it came to the earlier events of that evening. Having already explained how she and Marsha had come to be in Cave 328 at one-thirty in the morning and their subsequent encounter with Victor, Charlotte now backtracked to explain what had happened before Victor appeared on the scene, starting with the arrival of Ned.

“Aha,” said Ho, his mustache quivering with the thrill of deduction. “Mr. Chee had also figured out that Mr. Danowski was stealing the manuscripts, and had come to spy on him.”

“No. Not exactly.” Charlotte’s gaze shifted to Chu, whose Mao jacket was buttoned to the throat even though he had just been roused out of bed. “He had figured out that Mr. Chu was the thief, and had come to spy on him.”

For a moment, Chu’s reserve dropped, and she could see the scars on the soft yellow spot of flesh revealed by the chink in the armor—the scars left by the torture, the starvation, the hard labor.

“Comrade Chu was the thief!”

“He wasn’t in league with Danowski. But he was also stealing manuscripts and sculptures. Or rather, his son was.” She proceeded to explain how, under Chu’s direction, his son had stolen the artworks from Western institutions.

“My son wasn’t stealing the artworks from Western institutions, he was
recovering
them,” said Chu, explaining in his defense how the artworks had been looted from Dunhuang by the foreign imperialists.

“We thought at first that Mr. Chu was Mr. Danowski,” Charlotte went on, ignoring the interruption. “But then we realized that there were two people, and that they were Mr. Chu and his son. They were returning the Bodhisattva that was taken from the Fogg Museum.”

For a few minutes there was a rapid exchange in Chinese between Ho and Chu. It was clear that Chu was painting himself to the police officer as the savior of China’s cultural heritage.

Afterward, Ho turned back to Charlotte. “Comrade Chu tells me that this sculpture was stolen by the American so-called archaeologist Langdon Warner in 1924. In which case, it would be incorrect to label Comrade Chu a thief.”

“Whether or not he is a thief is up to international authorities to determine,” said Charlotte. But she doubted that the Fogg would ever get its lovely Bodhisattva back.

Chu leaned his head back against the crocheted antimacassar on the back of his chair and took a self-satisfied puff from his cigarette with his manacled-scarred hand, holding it as usual between thumb and forefinger. The chink in the armor had been plugged up.

It was after five when their little party broke up. By the time the convoy of security police vehicles took off for Dunhuang town with Victor’s body, it was clear that the storm was abating. Though the wind still rattled the shutters, it had lost its fearful roar.

Charlotte did her best to wash up before going to bed, but it was a losing battle. She had sand in her ears, her eyes, and her nose. Sand crunched between her teeth. The sight of herself in her mirror was frightening: her eyes were red and bleary, her face and hair were coated with grit, and any skin that had been exposed was flecked with blood where she had been hit by “running stones.” Her “China catarrh,” which had been on the wane, was back in full force: her sinuses were so stuffed that her head felt like a medicine ball. As she fantasized about the pleasures of a long, hot, steamy soak in her own bathtub back at her townhouse in a city halfway around the globe, it dawned on her that right about now the population of America would be setting off fireworks, watching parades, and eating hot dogs.

It might have been going on six
A.M.
of July the fifth here, but at home it was going on five
P.M.
of the day before. Her realization that it was the Fourth of July at home brought with it the realization that she was a wanderer who was getting a little bit homesick. At least for a hot bath.

Like the wind, she had retired with the dawn, only to get up again two hours later to accompany Ho to the stupa to retrieve the manuscripts. She rode out into the desert with him at the head of the convoy of security police vehicles. The menacing black clouds of the previous evening were gone. In their place, the sun shone in a serene, cloudless sky. The air was crystal clear; it was as if the storm had scoured it of any vestiges of haze and dust. But if the sky bore no sign of the ferocity of the storm, the landscape did. The band of asphalt that comprised the highway was covered with drifts of sand, like a snow-blanketed New England country road after a nor’easter. Crews of road maintenance workers were already out, clearing the sand away with hand shovels. No backhoes here. Familiar markers had been swept away. The twisted corpse of the mummified donkey that had served as a signpost for the turnoff was gone. Nor was there any track to follow out to the mountain—it had been obliterated by the storm. Not that they had any trouble finding their way. After parking at the foot of the mountain, they followed the winding path of pilgrims’ track up to the stupa. The effects of the storm were in evidence here as well. The door had been nearly buried by a six-foot drift of sand. After sending some of his men back to the trucks for shovels, Ho set them to work digging it out.

After twenty minutes, the door was exposed. With Ho at her shoulder, Charlotte grasped the iron ring and pulled. Stepping over the four-foot foundation, they entered the cell. Once inside, Charlotte shined her flashlight at the north wall. To her amazement, it was bare. There were no stacks of manuscripts neatly piled like logs against the feet of the Bodhisattvas. The desk was there, as were the lamp and chair, but no manuscripts.

“There’s nothing here,” said Ho as he turned to her, mustache quivering. “I thought you said there were manuscripts hidden here.”

“There were,” she said. “They were here two nights ago.”

“Then where did they go?” he asked, waving a white-gloved hand at the empty cubicle. “Did they just get up and walk away?”

“I don’t know,” she replied, mystified. “Maybe someone smuggled them out of the country for Mr. Danowski in the interim.”

“In the middle of a
buran
?” he said contemptuously.

Charlotte shrugged.

“Or maybe you took the manuscripts and hid them somewhere else,” he said. “Maybe Mr. Danowski’s death wasn’t an accident. Maybe you”—he pointed a gloved finger at Charlotte’s chest—“killed him.”

“He took me into custody then and there,” said Charlotte. “We were on our way to the Public Security Bureau in his jeep when I figured out what had happened to the manuscripts.”

She was talking to Reynolds, who was back for the third time to make arrangements in connection with the death of an American national. They were sitting in one of the guest house courtyards, taking a melon break.

“Believe me, I was scared. I hadn’t been that frightened when Victor was chasing us, but I was frightened then. Ho can be a scary guy, just by virtue of his incompetence, and it didn’t help that I was on my way to a Chinese jail with all of these Chinese police, none of whom spoke English except for Ho.”

“And he far from fluently,” said Reynolds, as he leaned over to take a bite of the succulent orange melon.

“Fortunately I never did find out what the Dunhuang jail was like—”

He corrected her: “The Dunhuang Municipal Detention Center.”

“The Dunhuang Municipal Detention Center,” she repeated. “But I had a clear image of what it was like in my mind: a single dim light bulb hanging from the center of the ceiling, a small window with rust-pitted iron rungs, a narrow cot with a filthy mattress.”

“What an imagination! Forget the cot,” he said with a dismissive wave of his hand. “It would have been a wooden plank. This is China after all.”

“How could I have forgotten!”