Murder on the Silk Road (4 page)

Leading them past a small moss-edged reflecting pool in which a big green frog sat picturesquely on a lily pad (he was usually there, and Charlotte had often wondered if the gardeners who kept everything else in such perfect order had arranged for his residency as well), Bunny paused on the terrace at the foot of the shrine, and waved a long arm dramatically at the empty pedestal.

“Where’s the sculpture?” asked Charlotte.

The Buddhist monk was Charlotte’s favorite, and the collection’s showpiece, as indicated by its place of honor. It was small—only three feet or so high—but exquisite. It was also very old: Charlotte couldn’t remember the date exactly, but believed it was eighth century. She especially loved the way the corners of the monk’s mouth turned up in an enigmatic smile that reminded her of the archaic smiles of the ancient Greek kouroi.

“Gone,” said Bunny. “It disappeared eight weeks ago.” She turned to the police chief. “What was the date, Chief Tracey? We should tell Miss Graham.”

“April fourth,” said Tracey. “Three days after it was set out for the season. The robber or robbers deactivated the burglar alarm system, loaded the sculpture into a van—we could tell the type of vehicle from the tire tracks—and drove away. Simple as that.”

“Chief Tracey has been telling us for years that the sculptures were vulnerable to theft,” said Bunny. “We should have listened.”

“
Some
of them are vulnerable,” the chief corrected. He nodded at the Spirit Path to the east of the sunken garden. The path was lined by a double row of weathered stone tomb figures that must have been ten feet tall, and weighed a couple of tons apiece. “I don’t think anyone’s about to haul those away.”

“Do you have any leads?” asked Charlotte.

“One,” said Bunny as she fished around in her big straw handbag. “Which is why we asked you to come here today.” Pulling out an airmail letter with a Chinese postmark, she handed it to Charlotte.

The letter was from the Bureau of Cultural Properties of the People’s Republic of China, and specifically from a Mr. George Chu, who was identified as the director of the Dunhuang Research Academy at the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas in Dunhuang, Gansu Province.

Charlotte looked up. “Did the sculpture come from Dunhuang?”

Bunny shrugged her wide shoulders, from which hung a white cable-stitch cashmere sweater. “All I know is that my in-laws bought the sculptures on their collecting trips to the Far East. It’s very probable that it’s from Dunhuang. I don’t think the Chinese government would go to all this trouble if it wasn’t.”

Charlotte turned back to the letter, which identified the sculpture as coming from Cave 206, and having been removed in the earlier part of this century. It went on to say that scholars working at the Dunhuang Research Academy had traced the statue to an art dealer in Hong Kong, and from there to the Oglethorpe collection. Apart from restoring the paintings and sculptures in the caves, the letter said, one of the Academy’s major goals was to seek the return of artworks “stolen” by Western museums and art collectors.

“Therefore, we beg you to restore this precious sculpture to its rightful owner, the People’s Republic of China,” the letter concluded. “What we hope is that Dunhuang can eventually be reconstituted as a single unit with everything intact as it was at the turn of the century and as it should be. The artworks that have been stolen from Dunhuang are China’s national treasures and I feel very strongly in my heart that they should be in China.”

“I don’t understand,” said Charlotte as she finished reading the letter. “What does this have to do with the fact that the sculpture is missing? Do you think the Chinese stole it back?”

“I’ll defer that question to Chief Tracey,” said Bunny.

“Not exactly, but pretty close,” he replied. “There have been a series of international thefts of artworks that originally came from Dunhuang. Some manuscripts were stolen from the British Museum; some temple paintings were stolen from the Louvre; another piece of sculpture was stolen from the Fogg Museum at Harvard. That one’s on Interpol’s list of the twelve most wanted stolen art objects. And there have been others as well. Interpol has succeeded in tracing some of these items back to Dunhuang. The Academy has refused to return them. They claim they were stolen in the first place.”

“Did they steal them, then?”

“This fellow Chu denies it,” said Tracey, “and Interpol tends to believe him. A more likely scenario is that they were stolen by an individual or a group of individuals who were using the letters sent out by Chu as guides as to what artworks to target next. Every institution or individual”—he nodded at Bunny—“that has had an artwork stolen has received one of these letters.”

“What would their motivation be?” asked Charlotte. “Patriotism?”

“Ayuh,” said Tracey, using the Maine substitute for the affirmative. “There have been a number of cases where the theft of artworks has been motivated by patriotism. For example, a Mexican journalist stole—or liberated, depending on your point of view—an Aztec codex from the French National Library; a group of Scottish nationalists stole the Stone of Scone from Westminster Abbey; and an Italian nationalist stole the Mona Lisa from the Louvre.”

“We never would have known about any of this if it wasn’t for Chief Tracey’s research,” interjected Bunny. “The state police never even thought of looking into the international situation.”

Charlotte wasn’t surprised. It was Tracey’s dogged legwork that had resulted in the recovery of some valuable stolen herbals in the previous case on which she had worked with him.

“But why resort to theft?” asked Charlotte. “If indeed the artworks were stolen originally, couldn’t the Chinese have gotten them back through legal channels?” She ignored a disapproving glare from Bunny.

“Not likely,” said Tracey, shaking his head. “A few museums have voluntarily returned artworks to their countries of origin. A Danish museum returned some ancient manuscripts to Iceland, for instance. But most don’t want to set any precedents that they might have to live up to later on. If the British Museum, to use the best-known example, were to return its holdings to their countries of origin, it wouldn’t have anything left. The Elgin marbles, of course, are the best-known example.”

Charlotte had read about the Greek government’s efforts to persuade the British Museum to return the Elgin marbles, which had been removed from the Acropolis by Lord Elgin in the nineteenth century.

“In fact, the term Elginism has come to refer to the plunder of cultural treasures in general,” Tracey continued.

Bunny snorted in contempt. “Plunder! I’d like to know what would have happened to these sculptures during the Cultural Revolution if they hadn’t been removed from China. If these countries had cared about their artworks in the first place, they wouldn’t be facing these problems now.”

“I expect you’re right, Mrs. Oglethorpe,” said Tracey, ever deferential. “Anyway, to get back to the case at hand … We suspect that this theft is part of the greater pattern of thefts of artworks that originally came from Dunhuang. But we also might be dealing with a common thief, or even a very knowledgeable thief who wanted to make it
look
like this theft was part of the greater pattern of thefts. That’s where you come in, Miss Graham.”

“Charlotte, please,” she said. After two years, Tracey still insisted on calling her Miss Graham. “What do you want me to do?”

“Yes, Charlotte,” said Tracey with a smile. “We want you to see if you can locate Mrs. Oglethorpe’s missing sculpture. In the other cases, the artworks were returned to their original sites. If indeed the theft of this sculpture is related to the other thefts, it should have been returned to Cave 206 at Dunhuang. Mrs. Oglethorpe will provide you with a photo for identification purposes. I know you’re familiar with the sculpture—”

“It’s my favorite,” said Charlotte.

“Mine too,” added Bunny.

“But there are hundreds of caves at Dunhuang, and probably thousands of sculptures, a good many of them of Buddhist monks,” Tracey continued. “They might all begin to look alike. If you do find that the sculpture is there, we can then try working through international channels to get it back.”

Bunny shook her head in disgust. “Try, is right,” she said.

“If it’s not, we can continue looking elsewhere. We’ve been trying to find out through Interpol if the statue’s in Dunhuang, but so far we haven’t had any success. When Mrs. Oglethorpe heard from Kitty Saunders that you were going to, Dunhuang, she couldn’t believe our luck.”

“It’s as if fate had interceded on our behalf,” said Bunny.

“Yes,” Charlotte agreed. “It is.”

3

Three weeks and two days later, Charlotte found herself in the ancient Chinese capital of Xian, the setting-off point for the ancient Silk Road. Their group of three—Charlotte, Marsha, and Victor Danowski, another Sinologist from the Oriental Institute—had already been in China for a week. They had toured the Forbidden City in Beijing, viewed the treasures of the Shanghai Museum of Art, and, most recently, visited Xian’s fabulous terra-cotta army: thousands of life-sized clay warriors, each with its own individual characteristics. The warriors had been buried with an ancient emperor to protect his tomb. But all of this was a preliminary to the highlight of the tour, the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas, which were reached via a forty-three-hour train ride that followed the route of the ancient Silk Road. By now, Charlotte had learned a little about Dunhuang: at the juncture of the two major caravan routes—one leading west to the Middle East, the other south across the high passes of the Himalayas to India—it had been a center of Buddhist worship for over a thousand years. The Caves of the Thousand Buddhas was a complex of nearly five hundred caves that had been carved out of a sandstone cliff face, many of them commissioned by traders and dedicated to the success of their expeditions. Each was a treasure trove of Buddhist art, containing richly detailed statues of the Buddha and other religious figures and elaborate wall- and ceiling-paintings. Although the sites they had seen so far had gone far to quench Charlotte’s thirst for the exotic, she was looking forward to visiting Dunhuang, which was considered one of the world’s least-known wonders.

After a farewell lunch, their guide escorted them to Xian’s modern railroad station. They would be taking the Shanghai Express, one of five trains that left each day from Xian for China’s remote West. It was Charlotte’s introduction to train travel in China, and, from the moment she entered their four-berth compartment, she was captivated. Their compartment in soft-sleeper—the equivalent of first class in a classless society—was charming. From the fold-down table with its starched white tablecloth to the lace curtains at the window and the miniature reading lamp with the silk shade, it was the epitome of cozy, genteel travel. There was even a vase of flowers on the windowsill. They were plastic chrysanthemums, but it was the attempt that mattered.

Charlotte had noticed that the Chinese, despite their poverty, always made this effort to make things beautiful: the incense burning in the ladies room, the old woman in the market who arranged her leeks in the shape of a fan, the plastic flowers in the little vase.

“I love it,” she said as they entered. “It’s like traveling in the nineteenth century must have been.”

“It’s exactly like traveling in the nineteenth century must have been,” said Marsha as she stowed her hand baggage away on the upper berth. “China is the only country in the world that is still making steam locomotives. Modern antiques, fresh off the assembly line.”

After getting them settled in, their guide moved down the corridor to do the same for Victor, who, due to an error on the part of the travel service, had been assigned to a compartment in another car. Charlotte and Marsha had already said goodbye to the guide at the station and given him a generous tip. Until they arrived in Dunhuang, they and Victor were on their own.

“Well, here we are,” said Marsha with a wide smile as she flopped herself down on the lower berth opposite Charlotte.

A tall, raw-boned, fresh-faced beauty, Marsha looked more like a downhill skier than the Sinologist she was. But appearances could be deceiving: her passion was for the kind of ancient Chinese poetry that extolled the pleasures of drinking tea, growing flowers, or gazing at the moon.

“Yes,” said Charlotte. “Here we are.”

The trip had come about so fast that being here still seemed unreal to her. It seemed as if she hadn’t had a second to call her own since that bright Maine morning on which Kitty had thrown the Chinese coins down on her kitchen table. She was looking forward to the long train ride; it would give her a chance to catch her breath. Leaning her head against the crocheted antimacassar on the back of the seat, she noticed a duffel bag in the luggage compartment above the door. “Looks like we’ve got a third,” she said, nodding at the duffel.

Marsha turned around to look. “So it does,” she agreed, as the ringing of a loud bell signaled their imminent departure. “I think that’s the all-aboard signal. He or she had better get here pretty soon.”

The train had just started to roll out of the station when the door of their compartment slid open and a man entered. He was about forty, with a babyish face, thinning sandy-blond hair, and tortoise-shell glasses. Handsome, in an intellectual sort of way.

“Hello, Marsha,” he said.

“Peter!” exclaimed Marsha with a radiant smile. “What are you doing here? I thought you were in Dunhuang already. Averill told me that you’d be arriving in Dunhuang at the beginning of June.”

“I was shocked to hear about Averill. That’s the kind of thing that happens only in New York, unfortunately.” He shook his head in disgust at the city’s woes. “I was in Dunhuang until last week. I’m going back; I had some business to attend to in Xian.”

“Well, it’s very nice to see you,” said Marsha, getting up to give him a friendly kiss on the cheek.

“I knew you were going to Dunhuang, but I didn’t expect we’d be on the same train, much less in the same compartment.”

“How did you know?”