Murder on the Silk Road (7 page)

“Exactly,” Marsha agreed. “It’s like being called a Communist in the fifties was. Whatever explanation you offered, you were always suspect.”

From where Charlotte was sitting she could see Orecchio making his way back down the corridor from the washroom. This was going to be interesting.

“Speak of the devil,” said Dogie, who sat next to her.

As he caught sight of the open windows, a frown crossed Orecchio’s beetled brow, and he began closing them all again.

“I’m beginning to feel like I’m trapped in a sardine can on the floor of Death Valley,” said Dogie, wiping his brow again with the red bandanna. He stood up. “If you’ll excuse me, ladies, I have work to do.”

Taking up a position to Orecchio’s left, he started methodically opening the windows which the geologist had just shut.

By now, their duel over the windows had attracted the attention of the other passengers, most of whom appeared to be on Dogie’s side.

His coordination hampered by his temper, Orecchio angrily fumbled with the latches. The more swiftly Dogie opened the windows, the more infuriated Orecchio became. Finally, he turned on Dogie. His teeth were bared, and his hand was pulled back in a fist. Sweat was pouring down his brow.

The temperature in the car must have been a hundred and ten.

For a moment Orecchio just stood there. Then he spoke, his voice a low growl. “If you open up one more of those windows, I’ll cold-cock you,” he said. Then he added: “Got that, you cowboy asshole?”

Dogie stood his ground, a faint smile playing around the corners of his lips. “You wouldn’t dare. If you do, I’ll rope, hogtie, and brand you, and throw you so far it’ll take the Chinese a week to find you. I’m a pretty good fighter for a stamp collector. Wanna try me?”

Neither of them were big men. Charlotte would have put Dogie’s height at five eight and Orecchio’s at an inch or so shorter. But Dogie had a powerful, muscular build, while Orecchio was thin and slight.

“Excuse me,” said Bert. “Looks like I’ve got to help out a friend.” Standing up to his full height (which must have been six foot four in stocking feet and six foot six with his cowboy boots on), he sauntered out into the corridor. Crossing his arms casually across his chest and leaning his massive shoulder against the window frame, he proceeded to stare quietly at Orecchio.

Orecchio seemed to wither before their eyes. Charlotte thought of the saloon patrons cowering in the old Westerns as the hero bursts through the saloon doors, and had to suppress a giggle.

The moment was defused by the sudden arrival of the conductor, but Charlotte had no doubt that Orecchio would have backed down. Seldom had she seen a man use his size to intimidate so effectively.

After the conductor had stamped their tickets, the moment was over. But it had nearly come to a fist fight.

“I think this calls for some
pijiu
,” said Dogie as the two men returned to their seats in the compartment.

“Let me get the beer,” said Peter, gesturing for Dogie to sit back down. “I think you’ve done your work for the evening.” Picking up his carry-on bag, he left them to the analysis of Dogie’s dispute with Orecchio.

Peter returned a few minutes later with another pitcher of beer.

“How did you manage this?” asked Charlotte in amazement as she picked up the pitcher to refill their glasses. It was ice cold.

Peter spoke a word in Chinese. “It means ‘the squeeze,’” he explained. In the Middle East, it’s ‘baksheesh’; in South America, it’s ‘the bite.’ The terms may be different, but the concept’s the same the world over.”

“I thought the Revolution had purged the People’s Republic of corruption,” said Charlotte facetiously.

Peter rolled his eyes. “There isn’t anybody in China who can’t be bought with cigarettes”—he pointed at his carry-on bag, which was stuffed with cigarette cartons—“or with yuan and there’s nothing that can’t be accomplished through the back door.”

“The back door?”

“Knowing somebody. It’s the only way that anything ever gets done in China.” He looked over at Bert. “As I’m sure you’ll find out when you start to go about organizing your expedition.”

The expedition hadn’t had an auspicious beginning, thought Charlotte as “My Old Kentucky Home” blared out of the loudspeaker. Over the years she had been on a number of movie shoots that had started out the same way.

They usually turned out to be total disasters.

4

They arrived at the railhead at the depressing little town of Liuyan on the afternoon of the second day. Including their sightseeing stopover at Jiayuguan, the fortress at the western terminus of the Great Wall, they had been traveling for forty-one hours. And they hadn’t yet reached their destination. Dunhuang still lay another sixty miles to the south. Charlotte had long ago concluded that there was good reason for its being considered one of the least-known wonders of the world.

A Japanese-made minibus was waiting at the curb—if that’s what you could call the edge of the dusty beaten-earth road—to take them to Dunhuang. They were a party of eight: Charlotte, Marsha, Victor, and Peter; and the four members of the paleontology team. If the train had been hot, the minibus was even hotter. Although it must have been equipped with air conditioning—the bus appeared to be brand new—it wasn’t working. Nor did the landscape offer any diversion from the heat. The pitted band of asphalt that had replaced the ancient camel track skirted the edge of the Black Gobi, so-named for its expanses of coal-black gravel. It reminded Charlotte of the most barren sections of West Texas, but at least West Texas had sagebrush and tumbleweed. This landscape didn’t even have a blade of grass. She had read that the top-secret test site for China’s nuclear weapons program was located nearby. It didn’t surprise her that they had chosen, this barren wasteland; there was nothing here that could have been destroyed in a nuclear blast.

After a little over an hour the soil started turning pinkish-red, and struggling patches of vegetation began to appear—tufts of grass, thickets of bush, and even a tree or two. Herds of camels grazing on the thorny bush placidly watched the traffic go by. Another half an hour, and the appearance of poplar trees in the distance indicated that they were drawing near Dunhuang. Although it had a population of thirty-five thousand, the town turned out to be barely more interesting than the desert around it. A collection of dreary concrete-slab buildings intersected by dusty streets filled with bicycles and donkey carts, it hardly seemed like the Silk Road city of legend. But then it wasn’t—the ancient city had long ago been buried by the sands. After passing through town, they continued south on an arrow-straight road colonnaded with poplars that ran through irrigated fields of corn, wheat, millet, cotton, and vegetables. Then, suddenly, they were in the desert. The desert began precisely where the irrigation left off—not the black
gobi
, or gravel and rock debris, that they had seen so much of, but a storybook desert of golden, wind-sculpted dunes stretching away to the horizon. “Like the, topping on a lemon meringue pie,” said Marsha.

A couple of miles later the road emerged onto a barren gravel plain, and followed the wide, shallow, boulder-strewn channel of a stream for another eight or ten miles. Then it turned into the mouth of the narrow valley that was the site of the caves.

As the member of their group most familiar with Dunhuang (this was his third trip), Victor Danowski was asked to give an impromptu lecture. Like Marsha, he had been invited to Dunhuang to translate the recently discovered manuscripts, but his area of expertise was religious texts rather than poetry.

Assenting to the group’s request, Victor made his way up to the front of the minibus. He was a thin, balding, wiry man—a runner, Charlotte had learned when she encountered him on an early morning walk in Shanghai—with a pale complexion, heavy black-rimmed eyeglasses, and a graying Vandyke-style goatee.

“If you’ll look to your left,” he said, pointing out the window, “you’ll see a mountain ridge. That’s the Mountain of the Three Dangers, where the wandering monk Lo-tsun had his vision of a thousand Buddhas in a shining cloud of brilliant golden light. He called the phenomenon Buddha’s Halo.”

“Looks like pretty good fossil huntin’ territory to me,” said Dogie, as they gazed out at the reddish-purple mountain range that rose from the barren plain, its rugged foothills a glowing pink in the late afternoon light.

“Lo-tsun was traveling in the area in 366 when he had his vision,” Victor continued. “Of course, we now know that it was an illusion caused by minerals in the rocks caught in the glow of the setting sun.”

“I preferred the shining cloud,” whispered Marsha.

“Lo-tsun believed that it was a holy place, and decided to build a cave in the opposite mountain, the Mountain of the Howling Sands”—he pointed to their right—“in which to live and to worship. Over the next thousand years, hundreds of other caves were built by Buddhist worshipers.”

“Here are some caves,” said Bert, looking out the window.

The cliff face to the west was honeycombed with black holes. To Charlotte, it looked a little like an Indian cliff dwelling.

“Yes,” said Victor. “We’re now at the beginning of the cave complex. These are the dormitory caves, where the monks and artisans lived.”

“What are the structures on the left?” asked Bert, indicating a row of domed structures that lined the road at the top of a series of terraces leading upward from the streambed.

“They’re stupas,” Victor replied. “Reliquary chambers of famous monks who have died. Mementos of the monks were deposited inside—papers and sutras and things like that.” He leaned over to look out the windshield. “Here’s the main section of the cave complex coming up now.”

Here the cliff was taller, and there were four or five levels of caves. Stucco fronts had been added to protect the entrances, and balconies and staircases built to improve access. If the dormitory caves had reminded Charlotte of a cliff dwelling, these caves reminded her of a retirement condo.

“If you’ll look behind the trees, you’ll see what looks like a nine-story pagoda,” Victor continued. “Actually, it’s the façade of the Cave of Unequaled Height, which is the centerpiece of the cave complex. It’s believed to be Lo-tsun’s original cave, although it’s since been greatly enlarged.”

Charlotte could just make out the ornate orange-tiled roofs of the many-tiered pagoda through the verdant fringe of green lining the cliff base.

“The Cave of Unequaled Height houses, a colossal Buddha that is one and a half times the size of the Great Sphinx of Egypt. And,” Victor continued, “if you’ll look to the other side, you will see two tall stupas.”

The passengers’ heads all swiveled to the left.

“If you look directly between those stupas, you’ll see another stupa near the top of the ridge of the Mountain of the Three Dangers. That stupa is dedicated to Lo-tsun. Legend has it that it’s located on the exact spot where he saw his vision.” Victor leaned over again to look out the windshield. “Well, here we are.”

Near the end of the fringe of green they crossed a concrete bridge and passed under a gaily painted archway consisting of a series of rooflets capped with green tiles and supported by red pillars. A few minutes later they pulled into the guest house courtyard. Charlotte checked her watch: they had been traveling for precisely forty-three hours and forty minutes.

They emerged from the stifling bus into a courtyard that was shielded from the sun by gnarled old apricot trees thick with fruit; in their refreshing shade, it was cool and quiet. Wind chimes tinkled in the breeze, and birds twittered. The gurgle of water came from somewhere nearby. After the heat and desolation of the desert, the lushness of this little oasis was startling.

They were greeted by a stout, middle-aged man with only one arm. The right sleeve of his rumpled blue Mao suit was pinned to his shoulder to keep it from swinging free. He introduced himself as George Chu, director of the Dunhuang Research Academy. Charlotte recognized the name as that of the man who had written the letter to Bunny Oglethorpe. After a short, formal welcoming speech, he introduced their guide, a fresh-faced young Chinese woman named Emily Lin. Like Chu, she welcomed them in perfect English. Her speech was followed by the appearance of half-a-dozen pretty young service workers carrying washcloths soaked in cool water to sponge off the dust of the desert.

“All
right,
” said Dogie with a devilish grin as the girls appeared with their baskets. “Bring on the dancing girls.”

After the travelers had washed their faces, they were offered dripping slices of luscious melon to quench their thirst. The combination of the pretty girls and the exotic setting created the most romantic of atmospheres, as if they had just arrived at the oasis by camel caravan instead of by minibus. Charlotte thought of the
I Ching
’s prediction that she would be traveling to “an exotic foreign country.” It didn’t get any more exotic than this.

Following the melon break, the service workers showed them to the guest house complex, which Charlotte thought delightful, at least by contrast with the drab, Stalinist-era, concrete-block hotels which they were used to. It consisted of half-a-dozen single-story, tile-roofed buildings made of mud brick that had been plastered and whitewashed. The buildings were set amid a network of courtyards shaded by grape arbors and fruit trees, and linked by paths lined with zinnias and dahlias, which were, like most of the flowers planted in China, red. Charlotte’s room was simple: plain stucco walls, a tile floor, twin beds covered with pink chenille bedspreads. It reminded her of a roadside motel, but without the bathrooms. For washing up, there was a white-enameled basin painted with gaudy flowers, and a kettle of hot water. After Charlotte had seen her room, a service worker showed her to the toilet facilities. Each of the buildings had a w.c. at one end, of the typical Chinese hole-in-the-ground variety. But there was only one bathhouse for the complex. A sign on the door said that the water was turned on only between the hours of eight and ten in the evening. Charlotte turned on a tap in one of the sinks. Nothing came out. “Primitive but charming” was exactly right.