The Corpse Reader (39 page)

He got up, shutting the folder. If he wanted to make any real progress, he knew he had to go back to the first murder and track down people familiar with Soft Dolphin.

An official told Cí that Languid Dawn could be found in the Imperial Library.

Soft Dolphin’s closest friend turned out to be a confident-looking eunuch of no more than seventeen. Though his eyes were red from weeping, his voice was assertive and his answers calm and mature. But when Cí asked him specifically about Soft Dolphin, his tone changed entirely.

“I already told the Councilor for Punishments, Soft Dolphin was very reserved. We spent a lot of time together, but we didn’t actually talk all that much.”

Cí avoided asking him what he spent his time doing. Instead he asked about Soft Dolphin’s family.

“He hardly ever mentioned them,” said Languid Dawn, relieved Cí didn’t seem to be treating him as a suspect. “His father was a lowly lake fisherman, and as with many of us, Soft Dolphin didn’t like admitting it. He’d fantasize.”

“Fantasize?”

“Exaggerate, go off on flights of fancy. He spoke respectfully and admiringly of his family—not out of familial piety but out of a certain conceitedness, I’d say. Poor Soft Dolphin. He never lied out of wickedness. He just couldn’t stand to think about his miserable childhood.”

“I see.” Cí looked up from his notes. “It seems he was very diligent in his work—”

“Oh, yes! He kept careful notes, spent any downtime going over his accounts, and he was always the last to leave. He was proud
of having been successful. That was why so many people were envious of him—and me, for that matter.”

“Envious? Who was envious?”

“Everyone, pretty much. Soft Dolphin was good-looking, soft as silk, but also rich. He was careful with money and had saved up.”

Cí wasn’t surprised. Eunuchs who progressed in court often became quite rich. It all depended on how good they were in the arts of flattery and adulation.

“He wasn’t like the rest,” added Languid Dawn. “He only had eyes for his work, for his antiques, and…for me.” At this, the young eunuch broke down.

Cí tried to console him. He decided not to push him further; he could always interrogate Languid Dawn again at a later date.

“One last thing,” said Cí. “Who would you say, apart from you,
wasn’t
envious of Soft Dolphin?”

Languid Dawn looked in Cí’s eyes as though he appreciated the question. But then he looked down.

“I’m sorry, I can’t tell you that.”

“You’ve nothing to fear from me.”

“It’s Kan I’m afraid of.”

Soft Dolphin’s quarters were situated near the Council for Finance, where he’d worked. Cí had to go by a couple of sentries on the way there, showing his pass. Everything in the space was extraordinarily neat and orderly: The books lining the wall, all of poetry, had been covered in identical silk bindings; the clothes were folded immaculately; the writing brushes were so clean a baby could have sucked on them; the incense sticks were organized according to size and color. The only exception was a diary on the desk that seemed to have been carelessly left open at its midway point. Cí asked the
sentry to check the register, and the man confirmed that no one had accessed the quarters since Soft Dolphin’s death. Cí went back through and moved on to the adjacent room.

It was a large salon whose walls looked as if they had been invaded by an entire army of antiques. On the first wall were dozens of bronze and jade Tang and Qin dynasty statuettes. Four delicate Ruzhou porcelain vases flanked the windows that looked out over the Palace of Concubines. Refined landscape paintings on silk covered the opposite wall, and on the fourth wall a single canvas hung, an exquisite piece of calligraphy crowning the door. The vigorous, right-to-left brushstrokes of the poem were stunning. At the bottom were several red seals denoting the previous owners. Cí was drawn to the sloping curves of the frame, and he found himself scrutinizing the piece close-up. It was much too expensive for a eunuch, even a relatively wealthy one like Soft Dolphin.

Cí went through into the third and final room, finding a divan wrapped in chiffon and heavily perfumed. The quilt came very precisely to the corners, like a glove tightly over a hand, and framed silks hung on the pristine walls. Absolutely nothing in these quarters had been left to chance.

Nothing except that diary.

Returning to the first room to examine the volume, Cí found that it consisted of thin paper pages decorated with images of lotus leaves. Cí settled down to read it. He found that Soft Dolphin’s work life wasn’t mentioned in the slightest; he wrote about purely personal matters. It appeared that he and Languid Dawn had been deeply in love. Soft Dolphin wrote in delicate, praising tones about his young lover, as he did when mentioning his parents.

Cí finished reading and put the diary down with a frown. All he could really glean was that Soft Dolphin, in spite of his passionate love life, seemed to have been both sensible and honest.

But he could also infer, he thought, that Soft Dolphin had been tricked by his murderer.

Cí went early the next morning to the finance records office. Gray Fox didn’t sleep on the palace premises, and Cí knew he tended not to be an early riser. So he decided to take advantage of a bit more time without his so-called helper.

According to the files, Soft Dolphin had spent the past year dealing with accounts to do with the salt trade, the import and export of which the state had control over along with tea, incense, and alcohol. Cí had little knowledge of mercantile dealings, but simply by comparing the past year’s reports against the previous year’s, it was easy to see that profits were steadily declining. The downturn could have had to do with market fluctuations, or some illegitimate siphoning of funds, or perhaps even the hugely valuable antiques collection of a certain Soft Dolphin…

To get more information, Cí presented himself at the Council for Finance, where they told him that state profits had been down across the board for the duration of the conflicts with the northern barbarians. Now Cí understood that the Jin invasions had impacted the whole country in one way or another. He bowed, thanking the official, and left to go and clean the corpses.

In the antechamber of the examination room, the stench hit him straightaway; he knew camphor swabs wouldn’t be much good but stuffed his nostrils with them nonetheless. Just then, Bo appeared.

“Here it is; sorry it took a while,” he said, bringing out the lance Cí had asked for.

He looked the lance over, checking its weight and alignment and nodding in satisfaction; it was exactly what he needed. Then he carried on with his preparations, mixing white thistles and bean-tree pods and setting fire to them—another way of counteracting the smell. He also had some ginger to chew, but that was about all he could do. He took a deep breath and entered the examination room.

The corpses were once again crawling with worms, in spite of having been cleaned only the previous day. He picked the larvae and worms off with a wooden stick dipped in vinegar and water and completed the cleansing by pouring bowls of water over the corpses.

He made no new findings with either the corpse of the older man or that of the eunuch; the decomposition had gone so far in both that the blackened flesh had begun peeling away from the muscles in stiff sheets. But on the face of the younger corpse, the one he’d had the portrait made of, he discovered a myriad of tiny pricks like poppy seeds. These scars looked to be old and were scattered across the face like tiny burns or pockmarks. There were also odd squarish rings around each of the eyes. He quickly sketched the marks in his notebook, and then found exactly the same marks on the hands.

Then Cí took the lance and went over to the older man’s corpse, introducing it into the crater wound on the chest and carefully nudging and applying pressure. He asked Bo to help him turn the body and discovered that, as he had suspected, the wound went all the way through from front to back. So, there were not two separate wounds at all. He was about to remove the lance when something gleamed on it, catching his eye. Picking up his tongs, he removed the object; it turned out to be a stone chip. He couldn’t tell where it might be from, but he saved it as evidence.

Cí turned to Bo.

“I need another corpse,” he said in a serious voice.

“Well,” said Bo, looking worried, “I’m not going to help with that!”

Cí let out a laugh and Bo a sigh; they weren’t going to have to kill anyone, but Cí did ask if it would be possible to have access to a corpse so he could test a hypothesis. Bo immediately suggested they go to the Great Cemetery.

“No. It has to be from somewhere other than the Great Cemetery,” he said, remembering Xu’s threats straight away.

Next he took out two large sheets of paper, one with an anatomical drawing of a human from the back, the other from the front. Bo had never seen anything like them.

“I use them as a screen,” explained Cí. “These black points indicate the places in the body where it is fatal to receive a wound, and the white points are where, though not fatal, wounds would have grave consequences.” He spread them out on the floor and marked on them precisely where the wounds had been inflicted.

Cí cleaned the lance and put away the sketches. After giving the order for the three corpses to be buried, he and Bo left the palace.