Murder on the Silk Road (35 page)

She’d been thinking of it as something of a tragedy that he had been barred from the expedition, but instead it was probably the happiest day of his life. Now he could devote himself entirely to his scorpions.

On the plane, a People’s Aviation stewardess showed them to their seats, which weren’t built to accommodate American physiques. Charlotte’s knees were crammed up against the seat in front of her.

Once they were seated, Marsha started rummaging around in her carry-on bag, which she had stashed underneath the seat in front of her. As she did so, Charlotte noticed a new ring on her finger, a beautiful paste jewel.

“You have a new ring!” she said.

Marsha held out her hand to display the stone, a large imitation rose quartz in a simple setting. “Bert gave it to me last night. He bought it from that pretty girl in town who was selling the paste jewelry. He went back yesterday to track her down.”

How thoughtful of him to buy a ring that symbolized the Tang era that Marsha loved, Charlotte thought. Not only that, but their first night together had inspired him to poetry. No wonder Marsha had to travel halfway around the world to find him. He was the kind of man who was a rare commodity.

“It’s an engagement ring,” Marsha added. “We’re planning on getting married sometime around Christmas.”

“That’s what I really wanted to ask, but I didn’t want to pry,” Charlotte said. Turning in her seat, she gave Marsha a big hug. “Congratulations! I think you’ll be very happy together. But I’ll miss my faithful and trustworthy friend,” she added plaintively. “Who will I go to museums with?”

“I’m not moving to Bozeman.”

“You’re not! Is Bert moving to New York, then?”

“He’s not moving to New York either. We’re going to have a long-distance marriage—go back and forth.”

Charlotte raised an inquiring eyebrow.

“We’ve both been married twice before,” Marsha explained. “Maybe we’ve learned a little something. I certainly hope we have. His marriages didn’t work because he didn’t want to be a traditional husband. Mine didn’t work because I didn’t want to be a traditional wife. Besides, he doesn’t want to live in New York and I don’t want to live in Bozeman.”

“That’s the difference between the women of your generation and those of mine,” Charlotte said. “Even the most liberated women of my generation, me among them—at least in my youth—would have dropped everything to live with their husbands. Maybe I should have come to a similar agreement with your father.” One reason for the failure of their marriage had been his insistence that she move to Minneapolis.

“I know,” said Marsha. “Minneapolis is a nice city, but …”

“But, is right.” If ever there was a fish out of water, it was Charlotte Graham among the skiers and snowmobilers of that northern city. In effect, she and Jack had a similar arrangement now. Although she avoided Minneapolis if at all possible, he often visited her in New York, and she sometimes accompanied him on his business trips.

“Maybe it’s not too late. Daddy is educable, you know. It’s just that after forty years of being married to Mother, it’s hard being married to Charlotte Graham. By the way, did he ever call you back about that trip to the Virgin Islands?”

“Yes. Yesterday morning. Sorry, I forgot to tell you.”

“And?”

“And … I’m going.”

Marsha leaned back with a happy smile.

Marsha was right. Instead of thinking of their marriage as a failure, maybe she and Jack should simply redefine it. They were both satisfied with the arrangement; it was only their peers who said there was something wrong with it. Maybe they should look to the younger generation for their models. She turned to Marsha. “So how
are
you going to arrange it?” she asked.

“Well, Bert’s on the East Coast a lot for conferences and so on, and I can get out to Bozeman several times a year. Then we’ll spend our summers here.”

“Here?”

“In Dunhuang. The fossil grounds are so rich that Bert figures he’ll be spending his summers here for years to come. Which is fine with me. I can do my work here as easily as I could do it in London. If Chu will let me, that is. In addition to the manuscripts I came to look at this time, the library here has microfilm copies of all the manuscripts in the Stein Collection.”

“Plus there’s Wang’s nest egg to look at now,” said Charlotte.

“That’s right! Hundreds of new manuscripts. Including the world’s oldest printed book. In fact, I’ve been thinking about an entirely new project.”

“What’s that?”

“A new translation of the
I Ching
. Based on the oldest extant text.”

As the pilot taxied the plane into position, Marsha started rummaging around again in her carry-on bag. “Found it,” she said, pulling out a bottle of wine and the same two wineglasses she had produced on the train ride out. “I brought one bottle for the trip out, and one for the trip back. And,” she said, reaching back into her bag, “our indispensable corkscrew.”

Actually, Charlotte thought, someone like Marsha would be an invaluable addition to a paleontological expedition. If ever there was someone who could plan an expedition down to the last teabag, it was Marsha. Bert and his crew would never be stranded without a corkscrew or any other vital necessity.

As the engines roared in preparation for takeoff, Marsha poured the wine. “To our safe return from our journey to the west,” she said, referring to the Tang poem about the willow tokens. “Which came very close to not being a safe return.”

Charlotte thought of the meaning of the name Taklimakan: “Once you get in, you can never get out.” They had gotten out, but barely. “And to our return to the Celestial Kingdom,” she said.

“
Our
return?” said Marsha, “Did you hear from Bill Reynolds?”

“This morning. It looks like this deal with the Ministry of Culture is going to go through. Which would mean that I’d be here from May to July—roughly the same time as you. Of course, I’d be in Beijing, and you’d be in Dunhuang, but …”

Marsha laid a hand on Charlotte’s arm. “But you could visit us in Dunhuang. And Daddy could come along too. He would love it.” She gazed eagerly into Charlotte’s eyes. “Why not?” she asked.

“Why not?” Charlotte agreed.

The plane was finally taking off. As it rose into the air, Charlotte saw below her an ocean of sand waves edged by a wilderness of badlands—deep ravines and towering buttes, canyons and ridges, chasms and cliffs—all tinged flamingo-pink by the light of the rising sun.

She thought of the sandstorm that Victor said had once buried three hundred cities in twenty-four hours, and wondered how many ancient sculptures and manuscripts lay buried beneath the sands, how many not-as-ancient-as-you-might-think dinosaur skeletons were still entombed in the eroding hillsides.

Reaching down for the bottle, Charlotte refilled their glasses. “To the sand-buried ruins of ancient Cathay,” she said, raising her glass to the desert-scape below.

“
Gan bei
,” said Marsha.

16

“It arrived last week, all patched up and as good as new,” Bunny Oglethorpe was saying. She and Charlotte were walking down the pine-needle-carpeted path that led through the forest to the moon gate in the section of old Chinese wall that enclosed the Oglethorpe Gardens.

Charlotte wrapped her sweater more tightly around her. It was blessedly cool: a damp fog was rolling in off the ocean, wreathing the garden in the tendrils of mist that gave it its mysterious aura. At the end of the path, they came to the moon gate. As they entered, Charlotte noticed the round iron door pull—exactly like the one on the door of the stupa. She would never be able to enter the garden again without thinking of that distant monument on the Mountain of the Three Dangers.

The sculpture of Hsuan-tsang was the centerpiece of the north end of the garden. He sat cross-legged under his shelter as he always had, looking out over the fish pond to the brightness of the flower garden beyond. Charlotte had come here to see him dozens of times before. But where he had once been merely a pleasant
objet d’art
, he now carried a multitude of associations, some of which she would just as soon put behind her.

“It must look very different to you now,” said Bunny.

In fact, it did. The mysterious little smile that had seemed only vaguely archaic before now seemed to look past her gaze with an ineffable compassion for the human weaknesses that prompted men to covet, to steal, and to kill.

Leaning to one side, Bunny pointed to the back of the statue, which faced the rear wall of the shelter. “We had a conservator from the Asian Department at the Met fix the hole in the back for us.”

Charlotte stepped over to look. She could just make out the edge of the patched spot on the sculpture’s lower back.

“If the sculpture were free-standing, the patch would be noticeable, but in this position, you have to crane your neck to see it,” Bunny said. “I’m just glad to have it back, patch or no. With Chief Tracey’s help, we’re installing a new alarm system to prevent this from happening again.”

“Speak of the devil,” said Charlotte, who had caught sight of Tracey approaching out of the corner of her eye.

Joining them at the end of the garden, he tipped his Red Sox cap in greeting, and extended his hand to Charlotte. Though she had talked with him at great length on the telephone, this was the first time she had seen him in person since her return.

“Nice to see you again, Miss Graham,” he said, the boyish round face under the visor of his baseball cap gleaming.

“Charlotte, please,” she reminded him, once again.

“Charlotte was just telling me about how the thefts of Dunhuang manuscripts and artworks from museums around the world were planned by the director of the Academy and his son,” Bunny said. “I wonder what, if anything, is going to happen to him now.”

“I happen to have the answer to that question,” said Tracey.

As usual, he was one step ahead of the game. For someone so reluctant to leave his little corner of Maine—he had once told Charlotte that he’d only been out of state twice in his life, and then only to Boston—he managed quite nicely to keep tabs on his interests around the world.

“I thought Miss Graham would be interested in following up, so I called my contact at Interpol headquarters outside of Paris. As you know, Miss Graham and I worked on a rare-book theft case together a couple of years ago. As a result, I know some people in the art thefts department there.”

“I remember,” said Bunny. “The Saunders’ neighbor. A terrible thing.”

“The countries from which the artworks were stolen have petitioned the Chinese government for the return of the artworks through the United Nations. But my Interpol contact tells me that he doesn’t expect the Chinese to return them. In cases like this, their policy is, ‘what we have, we hold.’”

Kind of like the British Museum’s policy, thought Charlotte.

“But,” Tracey continued, “this is very interesting: they are going to remove Chu as director of the Academy.”

“I thought he would be a cultural hero,” said Charlotte.

“I did too. But apparently tourist dollars are more important to the Chinese than cultural relics. They’ve done a lot to promote tourism in Dunhuang. They’ve built a guest house, an airport, a museum. Chu was already in hot water because of his attitude, which was putting off tourists.”

Charlotte thought of his obnoxious interruptions of Victor’s lecture, and of the signs he’d posted telling which Western countries had “stolen” the missing artworks.

“The thefts were the final straw,” Tracey said.

“What will happen to him?” asked Charlotte.

“Nothing serious. He’ll just be transferred to another museum. He’ll probably like it better. It’s bound to be in a less remote location.”

“And his son?”

“His son is going to have a lot of trouble finding a country that will accept him as a foreign student,” he said. “Boston University certainly isn’t going to take him back.”

“My stepdaughter is going to be very pleased to hear this news.”

“Why’s that?” asked Tracey.

“She’s planning to go back to Dunhuang next summer with Bert Rogers—he’s a paleontologist she met there. They’re getting married. She wants to do some work translating manuscripts in the library while Bert digs up dinosaur fossils, and she was afraid that Chu would make it tough for her.”

“I don’t think she’ll have anything to worry about,” said Tracey. “The new director will probably be glad to have an American scholar of her caliber there to study for the summer.”

Charlotte wondered if the same would be true of an American movie star and her businessman husband.

An hour later she had repeated the whole story for the third time—to Kitty Saunders. Once again, they sat at Kitty’s kitchen table. Outside, the gulls wheeled and dived in the cerulean-blue sky, and the sun glittered on the little cove. The fog had retreated as quickly as it had come.

“Would you like some more tea?” asked Kitty, after Charlotte had answered all her questions. Insatiable curiosity was one of Kitty’s chief characteristics, one that had prompted her husband to nickname her Walt, short for Walter Winchell, the gossip columnist.

“No thank you,” said Charlotte. She had already had three cups of good old Lipton orange pekoe, Kitty’s enthusiasm for odd-tasting herb teas having waned after her book-collecting neighbor was poisoned with an herbal concoction two years ago.

“I have a present for you,” said Charlotte.

“Oh, how nice!” said Kitty, clapping her hands together dramatically. Though Kitty hadn’t trod the boards since their days in summer stock, she still liked to think of herself as a dramatic type and had cultivated the mannerisms to go with the image.

Reaching into her pocketbook, Charlotte pulled out the present, which was wrapped in lavender tissue paper, and handed it to Kitty.

“What is it?” Kitty asked, after she had unwrapped it.

“It’s called a dragon bone, but it’s really a dinosaur bone. The ancient Chinese used them for divination. These are ideographs representing the hexagrams from the
I Ching
,” she said, pointing out the characters that were incised in black on the bone’s surface.