The Corpse Reader (44 page)

“And she hypnotizes her victims?” blurted Cí. “With her blind eyes?”

“There is no one blinder than the person who does not
want
to see.” Kan punched the table. “You’re so wrapped up in your absurd techniques, you’ve forgotten common sense altogether! I’ve already said she uses accomplices.”

Cí had already decided not to mention that he’d seen Kan conversing with the Jin ambassador. He knew an argument with Kan would get him nowhere.

“OK, you could well be right. So who helped her with the killings? Her husband?”

Kan looked toward the door, on the other side of which the inspector would be waiting. “Let’s go outside,” he said.

Cí put away his equipment and followed. He felt less and less trust in Kan. Why hadn’t he mentioned the rings? Why had he not reacted when Cí identified the corpse as the bronze maker—especially considering Kan was quite possibly the last person to have spoken to the man before he died?

“Forget about Blue Iris’s husband.” He frowned. “I’ve known him a long time, and he’s a good man. A Mongol with a face like a dog but an upright man. His one mistake was marrying that harpy. I think we’d do better to consider him her servant. She brought him from the North to be with her.”

Cí scratched his head. A new suspect.

“OK, but then why haven’t you had him arrested?”

“How many times do I have to tell you? I’m convinced there are various accomplices. One person wouldn’t be able to commit such atrocious crimes.”

Cí was fed up with all the mystery; it seemed like everyone except him knew what was going on. If Kan’s idea was correct, why wasn’t he going after the Mongol? Or if that was already under way, wasn’t Cí’s own part in the investigation pure absurdity? It had to be a lie cooked up by Kan, he thought.

One thing still didn’t fit: the perfume. Doubtless Kan, with his wide-ranging power, could have taken some and used it to implicate Blue Iris. But Cí failed to see how, if the perfume was exclusively for use by the emperor’s women, Blue Iris might also have some.

This last part he communicated to Kan.

“Didn’t she tell you?” said Kan in surprise. “Blue Iris was a
nüshi
. She was the emperor’s favorite.”

A
nüshi
. So
that
was how Blue Iris had become an intermediary between the nobles and the “flowers”; like a high priestess of pleasure, she knew better than any the art of courtship.

“The emperor likes to treat his guests well, so whenever he can he invites Blue Iris. She’s pure fire, that woman. Despite her age, she’d swallow you up in a second, no question.”

In spite of her blindness, Kan explained, word of her beauty had spread far and wide during the previous emperor’s reign. He had ordered that she join his harem and that her family be compensated.

“She was very young then, and she cast a spell on the emperor. Ningzong’s father no longer had eyes for any of his other concubines. He obsessed over Blue Iris, and he took pleasure in her to the point of exhaustion. When he became ill, he appointed her Imperial
nüshi
. He was old, and he suffered from numerous ailments, but she saw to it that he lay with concubines frequently—if anything more often than before—and that he had the queen once a month. She was in charge of leading them to the royal bedchamber, placing the ritual silver ring on their right hand, undressing them, spraying Essence of Jade on them, and then witnessing the act itself.” Kan seemed to be conjuring the scene in his mind. “Though blind, they said she enjoyed being there.”

Blue Iris had given up her position when Ningzong came to power, and she went on to run her inherited business with a fist of iron. The man she married, according to Kan, had also been bewitched.

“She’s got something she can turn on to drive men wild. You never know, she might even decide to cast a spell on you!”

Cí considered Kan’s words. He had no time for ideas of witchcraft, but it was true that he couldn’t get Blue Iris out of his mind. There was something about her; he felt his thoughts begin to get tangled as he pictured her…He shook his head to clear his mind.

“And the bronze maker?” asked Cí.

“He seemed nervous when we said good-bye,” said Kan. “I asked him about the new alloy he was working on, the one he kept going on about. You obviously noticed he was a show-off, but I had no idea someone would want to kill him.”

“Not Blue Iris?”

“That’s for you to work out.”

You never know, she might even decide to cast a spell on you!

These words played on Cí’s mind as he tried to concentrate on the job at hand. But he kept picturing Blue Iris’s delicate features, hearing her sonorous voice, and, above all, feeling those gray eyes on him.

Maybe his fascination had something to do with how capable Blue Iris was in spite of her disability, or how well she hid what were essentially scars, or how cool she’d been with Kan…He had to focus on the murder cases. And the fact Gray Fox would be back any day now. The potential implications of his return immediately concentrated Cí’s mind.

He decided to split the investigation into parts. He needed to address the remaining questions about the earlier murders, and he had to advance his investigation of the bronze maker’s murder by visiting his workshop and the location where the corpse had been found.

First he would try for some answers about the earlier murders. He had the portrait of the younger corpse to use, but he could hardly take that around Lin’an. Where could those tiny, poppy-seed
scars on his face have come from? They didn’t look to him anything like the marks from an illness, so the only other thing he could think of was that they were scars from an accident. But what kind of accident? Surely, whatever the cause, the scars were a testament to pain. And if the man had been in pain, there was a good chance he would have gone to a pharmacy or a hospital.

That was it! A step forward! At least there were a finite number of pharmacies and hospitals. He just needed to ask if they remembered a man with such unusual marks on his face.

He called Bo and told him the plan.

Cí took the disfigured corpse’s hand from the conservation chamber and was pleased to see how well the ice had worked. The corrosion, like hundreds of tiny perforations covering the fingers, the palm, and the back of the hand, struck him as being similar to the holes of a tea strainer. He’d made a list of the jobs someone might have to handle the kind of acid that could make those marks—a silk cleaner, a chef, a housepainter, a chemist—but he hoped a pharmacist would be able to help him whittle it down.

They went to the Great Pharmacy first. There was a crowd at the entrance, and Bo sent his men ahead to clear a path. When Cí finally reached the main counter and took out the severed hand, he was mobbed again. Bo’s men dragged the spectators away, and Cí placed the hand in front of the pharmacists, who were trembling as if they feared their own hands might be chopped off.

“I only need you to have a look and tell me if you’ve prescribed anything for anyone with a condition like this.”

After examining the hand, the pharmacists didn’t think there was anything remarkable about the slight corrosion. Cí demanded to speak to the head pharmacist. A tubby, distracted-looking man
in a red gown and cap appeared and, having looked at the hand, agreed with his staff.

“No one would come asking for treatment for such a petty thing.”

Cí clenched his fists. These men didn’t seem to be trying very hard.

“How can you be so sure?”

The manager held out his own hands.

“Because I have the same corrosion. It’s from working with salt. Sailors, miners, fish or meat salters, anyone who works with salt day after day will end up with these same marks on their hands. I handle salt every day to conserve compresses. It’s nothing serious. I’m not sure this poor person actually needed his hand cut off,” he joked.

But Cí wasn’t laughing. He thanked the man for his help, put the hand back in the conservation chamber, and quickly left the Great Pharmacy.

One door opened and another shut. Discarding the idea of the marks being the result of acid eliminated several jobs, but there were as many, if not more, that had to do with handling salt. A quarter of Lin’an’s population must have been in some way involved in fishing, and although only a fraction of those would go out to sea to fish, there were all the workers in the salting warehouses. Cí thought that could be at least 50,000 people…His hopes now rested on one last detail: the small flame tattoo by the thumb. Bo said he’d do what he could to try and identify it. He gave the conservation chamber to Bo’s men with instructions to change the ice once they’d got it back to the palace.

Cí hoped his visit to the bronze maker’s workshop would turn up some useful evidence. He and Bo made their way to the docklands on the south side of the city. But when they reached the address, Cí was shocked to find that, where yesterday had stood the most important bronze workshop in the whole city, there were now only its burned remains. Embers were still glowing among the scorched beams, burned wood, melted metal, and piles of rubble. Fire had reduced the workshop to nothing but a smoking, desolated strip, just as it had done with his family’s home.

He made his way directly to the crowd nosing through the wreckage. Maybe someone could tell him something. A number of them spoke of a voracious fire in the early hours, others of the loud noises when the workshop fell. Everyone lamented how slow the firefighters had been to arrive; several adjacent workshops had also been damaged.

Then a beggar boy came over and said he had some firsthand information, but it would cost 10,000
qián
. The boy was nothing but skin and bones, so Cí added a bowl of boiled rice from a nearby seller to the sum. Between mouthfuls, the boy said there had been some noises before the fires had started, but in fact that was all he knew. Disappointed, Cí got up to leave, but the boy grabbed his arm.

“But I do know someone who saw everything.”

One of his fellow beggars, he said, always slept under one of the workshop awnings.

“He’s a cripple, which means he never goes very far from where he always begs. When I got here this morning I found him over there, like a rat hiding in its nest. He looked like he’d seen the God of Death himself. He was saying he had to get away. If they found him, he said, they’d kill him.”

Cí’s eyes grew wide.

“Who?”

“No idea. But he was terrified, I know that much. As soon as the sun came up and people started arriving, he disappeared into the crowd. He even left his things,” said the boy, pointing to a begging bowl and a ceramic jar. “But I bet I can find him.”

Cí searched the boy’s face—in vain—for the slightest trace of truthfulness.

“Fine, take me to him.”

“But sir, I’m very sick. And if I’m helping you, I won’t be able to beg…”

“How much?”

“Ten thousand, no, five thousand
qián
!”

Cí didn’t feel he had much of a choice, but when he asked Bo for the additional money, Bo insisted it was a bad idea.

“He’ll just vanish,” hissed Bo. “He’ll take the money and you’ll never see him again.”