The Chinese Alchemist (23 page)

While I’d been on the telephone with Alex, I’d received some calls. One was from Mira telling me that she was on her way back to Beijing and that she hoped she’d see me before I left. The second was from Dr. Xie saying much the same thing. He added that I should not go out by myself at night, as quite uncharacteristically Xi’an had turned violent. “Tell me something I don’t know,” I said to the voice mail.

And there was a third call telling me to get out of China or else. At least I think that’s what he said. Really, if people want to scare somebody into doing something, they should take the socks out of their mouths and enunciate clearly. Actually I thought getting out of China would normally have been a good idea, but given that I was just going back to the haunt of some of this telephone mumbler’s confreres, there didn’t seem much point. Beijing, however, sounded like a good idea to me. I called and booked a flight the next day.

Liu David had still not called me back. Maybe he was still kneeling on a bamboo mat in front of the Baxian Gong, afraid to take his fancy cell phone out lest it attract attention. I didn’t think so, though. The market would reopen next Sunday. I supposed he just was not in any position to return my call. I was reasonably sure he would, eventually.

I went on with my mulling. Alex had given me some very interesting information. I was certain that Dory had told me that she had seen the three boxes together, but that her stepfather had broken them up and sold them off in the mid 1970s. What had happened to them after that? Dr. Xie had obviously acquired one of them. Dory had also said that there would have been an outer wooden box that disintegrated. That continued to bother me even though I’d seen the silver caskets at Famen Si and learned they too had an outer wooden box. How as a young person would she have known that? Did her stepfather just tell her? And how would he know?

What if all these T’ang objects that were turning up in New York had been stolen from Lingfei’s tomb? Was that possible? Was it also possible that this was a business of Golden Lotus, along with their other nefarious activities? Did the fact that many objects had come from Dr. Xie’s collection make him a tomb robber as well as a successful businessman and philanthropist? He was certainly besotted with Chinese antiquities. Just how bad was his infatuation? And even if he were a tomb robber, what did this have to do with anything?

Then the telephone rang. I reached for it, but then drew back my hand. Was this to be another of those awful phone calls that would test my nerve? Should I let them know I was in the hotel? Still there were important calls I wanted to receive. I picked it up but didn’t say anything.

“Are you all right?” Rob said.

“So far.”

“Can you get to Beijing?”

“I think so. I have my passport and I have a flight.”

“It will take me several hours to get out of here.”

“I know.”

“Beijing. Your hotel. I’ll be there.”

“So will I.”

I was out the front door of the hotel very fast the next morning. I’d called Peter, the taxi driver who’d pestered me every time I left the hotel, and had him waiting at the door. The woman with the scar was out there, sweeping away. I hoped she didn’t see me because it was pretty clear she was spying on me, whether for ill or good I did not know. She did see me, though, and my bag being loaded into the back. She leaned against her broom and got out a cell phone. Somebody knew I was heading out of town. Still, we sped away the minute my door closed, and the hour plus drive to the airport went without incident. So far, so good.

I found myself in a window seat, with an old Chinese couple beside me. It was immediately apparent they hadn’t been on an airplane before. The seatbelt perplexed them utterly. I showed them how to use it. When the flight attendant brought drinks, they couldn’t figure out what to do with them. I showed them the tray, and how to operate it. They kept smiling and she, in the middle seat, kept patting my arm, and chatting away. I smiled and nodded. She got out a Thermos and offered me some tea. I declined, having rather gone off tea of late.

I noticed the old man straining to see past me and I offered, via hand motions, to change seats with him. At first he shook his head, but I offered again, and when I’d managed to get both of them out of their seatbelts, in his haste to look out the window he practically sat on my lap. I had to crawl past both of them to get to the aisle seat. The flight attendant had a rather bemused expression on her face, but then came and thanked me. At the window, the old man kept exclaiming and pulling on his wife’s arm so she’d lean over and look too. It was a very clear day, and I expect the view was extraordinary. Watching their enthusiasm, I almost forgot my worries for awhile.

The flight was not the end of our adventure together, however. There was still the escalator to be mastered. The woman was about to fall over backward before I realized that they didn’t know how to negotiate this newfangled contraption either. I lunged for her, keeping her upright, and then I held on to both of them until they were safely off the escalator. Then there was the marvel of the baggage carousel. I had to help them with their luggage because the old man grabbed one suitcase, a huge plaid number, and was dragged along by it, nearly falling over in the process. Somehow I’d forgotten how complicated these things are.

I was about to take my leave, having managed to get them both, along with their luggage, to the glass gates that separated the passengers from those waiting for them, when I saw something that made me feel ill. It was the man in black, now in uniform, and he was clearly looking for someone. I had a pretty good idea who that someone might be, and even had a notion or two about how he knew I’d be on this flight. I was not yet prepared to meet him.

I slipped in between the old couple, linking arms with them. The man in black, now in green, stepped toward us, but in an instant we were swept up in a crowd, twelve or fourteen people, I think, including babies, the welcoming party for the old couple. At first everyone looked at me with some puzzlement, but the old man was excitedly chattering away, and then the old woman said something, and I was suddenly being much fussed over. I was given a baby to hold while luggage was sorted, and the youngest couple, grandchildren of the travelers, parents of the infant in my arms, explained in English that the old couple, who had lived and worked on a farm outside Xi’an all their lives, was coming to live with the family in Beijing. The granddaughter thanked me for helping them, and especially for letting her granddad look out the window. She said, rather unnecessarily, that it was their first flight. I thought it was probably their last, too, and that they’d be talking about it for as long as they lived. She said the family had been worried about how they would manage on the airplane, but couldn’t afford to send someone to travel with them. She said they’d hoped that someone nice would look after them, and were grateful I had been there.

All the while, the man formerly in black watched me. Yes, he saw me, and he recognized me, but he didn’t make a move. That told me something: he wasn’t there in an official capacity, despite the uniform. I found that even more chilling than the alternative. I wasn’t sure how I was going to get away, but at least I had cover as far as the curb. I just hoped there was a taxi at the ready.

“Do you have a car arranged?” the young woman asked.

“I’m afraid not,” I said.

“Then we must insist upon driving you to your hotel.”

Normally I would have politely declined, but this time I decided that I should consider this my reward for good behavior and a timely one at that. Surrounded by my new friends, I sailed right past my pursuer. Mentally I informed him I’d be seeing him soon.

Ten

I kept my promise to Lingfei that I would not reveal the subject of her work. Our life together, however, was soon to come to an end. That is because the gathering storm finally reached Chang’an.

The buffoon, An Lushan, was proving himself a poisonous element in the empire. When Yang Guozhong was made first minister on the death of Li Lin-fu, An Lushan began to fear that he would lose the Son of Heaven’s patronage. I could see no reason that he should think that. The Son of Heaven regularly sent An Lushan women from the imperial harem for his pleasure, and still made sure that he was well rewarded financially as well.

Despite or perhaps because of royal favor, An Lushan was sent north to curtail the activities of the barbarians on the northern frontier. It is not possible to know the inner thoughts of someone like An Lushan. Perhaps so far from Chang’an he began to imagine plots against him. For whatever reason, he turned on the emperor whose favor he had so long enjoyed. With a large army, An Lushan began to march, not against the barbarians, but toward Chang’an.

It was possible that the armies of the Son of Heaven might have prevailed were it not for a disastrous decision. Our army was ordered to advance and engage An Lushan. We were defeated absolutely. This left the route to Chang’an undefended, and it became char that An Lushan would take the capital. The Son of Heaven, who had neglected affairs of state for so long, was forced to flee west. I was one of the eunuchs who went with him. You can imagine the terrible time that was, the chaos, the fear. Before I left I went to Lingfei’s home, but she wasn’t there. I did not even say good-bye.

At a relay station west of the city, generals killed First Minister Yang and forced the emperor to order the execution of his beloved Yang Guifei. The Son of Heaven had to agree, anguished though he must have been. The Son of Heaven then began a terrible journey to Chengdu, where, in despair, he abdicated in favor of one of his sons.

An Lushan, who had seemed to be in the ascendancy, instead became painfully and desperately ill, and died. Some said it was murder, others merely his just desserts. The rebellion was over. Still, it was a very long time before I returned to Chang’an.

An obsession in the early days of archaeology and anthropology was the hunt for the origins of man and the so-called missing link between Neanderthals and us. Scientists scoured the globe in an effort to find this elusive creature. One of the most exciting finds in this regard occurred right outside Beijing, near a village called Zhoukoudian, where a tooth dating back to something between two hundred and thirty and five hundred thousand years ago was found in 1921. The tooth was followed by thousands of bones. It was different from examples of early man found elsewhere, and some thought it the link they all were seeking, naming it homo erectus Pekinensis, or more popularly, “Peking Man.” The story of Peking Man is fraught with intrigue, the skull and bones disappearing as they were being transported for safekeeping as the Japanese invaded. Some said they were ground up as an aphrodisiac, others that they were merely misplaced. Still the story has a spellbinding quality to it, even if they were wrong about it.

It was not lost on me that there was a missing link in all of this for me as well, something that would bring together the two threads, Dory and her silver box and Golden Lotus and indeed everything that had happened over the past several weeks, just one fact that would cause everything to make sense to me, which at that very moment it did not. Yes, I could see where there were intersections between the two, but they could easily be coincidence rather than cause and effect. I did know of one piece of information that I lacked, and that was the name of the man in black, and his relationship, whatever it was, to this whole affair, but whether this was my missing link or not, I had no idea. There was only one way to find out, and that was to ascertain who he was, if only because it was one of the few avenues left for me to pursue. Dr. Xie had said the man in black was army but not army, which is to say he was one of those people who terrified others into doing what he wanted, ruling his fiefdom through fear was the way Dr. Xie had put it. That sounded like Golden Lotus to me. And someone or something had sent Burton to Xi’an.

As scary as the prospect of getting within even a mile of the man in black was, he had already shown that he was not about to confront me in a public space, so that meant I just had to make sure I was never alone with him. After some thought, I decided that if you can’t learn someone’s name by any other means, and heaven knows I’d asked everyone I thought might know, then as a last resort, you ask the neighbors. These neighbors would not only yield useful information, but they would also afford me some cover. That at least was my plan.

First, though, I had to find the neighborhood. I knew my chances of locating the little store where Burton had eluded le—eluded me, that is, until the lovely old woman with the bound feet pointed me in the right direction—were not good. I’d been quite lost by the time we got there, concentrating as I was on keeping Burton’s taxi in sight rather than keeping track of where I was. I thought, though, that I could find my way in reverse from the Drum Tower.

That is precisely what I did. There was a woman outside the hotel sweeping the driveway. This was beginning to seem not only repetitious but suspicious as well. I found another way out of the hotel, and thence to the Drum Tower and from there into the hutong neighborhood. There were several wrong turns involved, and a lot of backtracking, but in the end I found the doorway with the five posts, the elaborate guardians of the gate, the rather impressive roofline that turned up at the ends, and the long wall that took up most of the lane. This time the man in black was not in the doorway; indeed, he was nowhere to be seen.

I went along the lane to see if I could find someone who might know the name of the lucky residents. My first efforts met with no success, mostly because I couldn’t find anyone who spoke English. At last, though, late in the afternoon, I found a little bar with a rather voluble proprietor on the lane that runs along the north side of an artificial lake not far from the Drum Tower. To prime the proverbial pump, I bought an overpriced glass of imported wine, and went on and on about how lovely the neighborhood was. She told me the area was now rather hip, at least I think that’s what she said, and while it was good for business, she was afraid the neighborhood might be spoiled. I said there looked to be some really lovely homes in the area. She said most of them were pretty small, and most didn’t have toilets.