Skulduggery
Page 5
“We’ve done all we can do tonight. What we need to do is nose around Chinatown tomorrow, find out who Jimmy’s seen lately.”
We turned onto Clay, walked down to Portsmouth Square. Firecrackers sputtered in the park and the lights from the ferris wheel, set up for the Chinese New Year festivities, moved in a red and green and white circle as we passed. We crossed Kearney and Dan found a cab for me in front of the Holiday Inn.
He opened the cab door, helped me in, bent to give my address to the driver. In the light from the street lamp, his hair gleamed softly black and I was fascinated once again by the angles of his face, the sense of strength and power.
“I’ll call you in the morning.” Then he stepped back and the cab pulled away.
Who was Dan Lee to tell me to wait for his call? No asking, no co-planning. I would await his call, of course, because he was my only link to Peking Man. Not for any other reason.
SIX
He didn’t call the next morning.
He came.
As I let him in, I asked a little dryly, “What if I hadn’t been here?” I had already called the office, taken a day of vacation, claiming unexpected company.
He was already seated, opening his attaché case to pull out a yellow legal pad. He lifted his dark head, “I said I’d call.” The implication was clear. I would, of course, be awaiting his call so naturally I would be home. “I decided to come on over. We need to go at this logically.”
“Oh yes,” I agreed. “That’s always a good idea.”
He heard the laughter in my voice and, after a pause, his wide grin answered my own.
He leaned back on my couch and it suddenly looked small. “If the bones are the focus of this thing, then I need to know more about them. How they could be in San Francisco. How Jimmy might have come across them.”
I, too, had had some long thoughts about Peking Man and I showed Dan the books scattered across the coffee table with markers pinpointing the relevant passages. I left him poring over a history of Peking Man while I excused myself to go and dress.
When I returned, wearing my newest pant suit, an emerald green wool, he was scratching notes onto his legal pad and he said, without looking up, “You mean the guy announced a brand new species of man on the basis of one tooth?”
I knew that he was reading about Davidson Black, the Canadian anthropologist who taught anatomy at the Peking Union Medical College in the 1920s and 1930s. Black spent his free time studying fossils and in 1927, on the basis of a single tooth excavated at Chou Kou Tien, a town some thirty miles southwest of Peking, he announced to the world the discovery of a heretofore unknown hominid, Sinanthropus pekinensis, Chinese man from Peking.
“Right. But it sounds more daring than it actually was. As a matter of fact, most fossil remains are teeth and it is fantastic what a paleontologist can tell you from a single tooth. Everything about teeth has been analyzed and they can be identified and differentiated on the basis of the forms of cusps, roots, crests and crevices, on the kinds of grooving and enamel structure. There are quite distinct patterns in teeth that are unmistakably different, for one example, from the other primates. In apes, the dental arcade has parallel sides. In man, it is parabolic. In apes, the molars are longer than they are wide. In men, the molars are wider than they are long. In apes . . .”
He was holding up his hand. “Okay, so one tooth tipped them off to a new man. Then they went and dug up more of him, right?”
I nodded.
He riffled on a few more pages. “How did the stuff get lost?” He stopped. “On a ship?”
“That’s an old book, a general history of famous fossils. It was thought, shortly after World War II, that the bones had been shipped out of China on the S.S. President Harrison and had gone down when she sank, but it was later learned that the bones never reached the ship.”
I had brought in a tray with coffee and I pushed some books aside to put it down, then I joined him on the couch, poured us each a cup, and tried to get it all straight in my mind.
“You have to go back a long way,” I explained. “To November of 1941. Americans and especially the Americans at the Peking Union Medical College were getting nervous, afraid Japan’s war with China was going to expand to include the United States. Finally, it was decided to send the fossils to the United States. They were packed in two white marine footlockers and loaded on a train for Tientsin, there to be shipped on the S.S. President Harrison. But time had run out. The train reached Camp Holcomb, a marine installation, on December 8. That was December 7 American time and the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor that morning and America was in the war. The Japanese immediately arrested all Americans, including the Marines.
“Now, it’s from this point that no one knows what happened to the fossils. There are lots of theories:
“The Japanese soldiers, looting the marine camp, ripped open the footlockers and, not knowing the value of the bones, just tossed the fossils away.
“A Japanese soldier recognized the fossils for what they were and took them. Now, this gives scope for a lot of possibilities. The soldier kept them throughout the war and got back to Japan and has had them hidden there ever since. Or, he sold them to some Chinese who has also kept them hidden. Or he hid them in China and they’re still undiscovered.
“A variation on this theme is that one of the American marines latched on to them. This was possible because the fossils were packed in marine footlockers and, after they were captured, the marines in prison camp later received some of their footlockers. According to this theory, a marine, possibly one who had worked around the Peking Union Medical College and knew the value of the bones, managed to keep them hidden while a prisoner and after the war smuggled them into the United States. This theory would account for the mysterious woman who lives somewhere on the East Coast who has made a couple of abortive attempts to sell what she claims are the fossils, brought home after the war by her husband.”
Dan brought me up sharply. “You mean the bones have actually surfaced in the United States?”
I turned my hands palm up. “Who knows? There’s a well-known Chicago businessman, Christopher Janus, who’s been hunting for the fossils ever since he visited Red China and felt the Chinese were asking ever so subtly for his help in recovering the fossils. Janus has even offered one hundred and fifty thousand dollars for the bones, and that’s brought him some action.”
I took a sip of the coffee. I’m partial to coffee and chicory. Dan took a taste, looked at his mug curiously, took another.
“Like it?”
“Yeah. Something a little extra, huh?”
“Chicory.”
“You talk that way, too.”
I shook my head.
He smiled. “I like the way you talk.”
“Anyway,” I said quickly, back to Bach, “money ripples the water like sharks after meat. When the word got out, and it was well publicized, that the bones were worth at least one hundred and fifty thousand, there have been a couple of responses that may be genuine.”
One of them I described very briefly as there wasn’t a lot to it. A Chinese businessman in New York had contacted Janus, talked knowledgably about the fossils, then backed away from any serious discussions, claiming it was too dangerous.
It was the other contact which excited everyone involved in the search. A woman phoned, claimed she had the fossils, said she was the widow of a marine who had been stationed in Peking, offered to meet Janus.
“And she did, she met him in the observatory of the Empire State Building.”
“Aw, come on,” Dan protested.
“No, I’m serious. She came, a fairly tall dark-haired woman about forty. She showed him a photograph of this dark looking box with the lid off and in it were some bones scattered on a bed of straw. She was showing the picture when a tourist turned toward them, lifted his camera. She immediately dashed for the elevators.”
“She thought it was all set up to get a picture of her?” Dan asked.
“The woman had contacted him at least twice since but she would never arrange a meeting, never make any of the bones available for study by an expert. But she did send him a copy of the box photograph.”
I finished my coffee, leaned back. “No one has quite written her off. I mean, the picture exists. Of course, several experts have looked at it and the situation gets a little muddled because some of the bones can’t be Peking Man fossils . . .”
“Why not?”
“Because some of the bones pictured were never found in the excavations.”
“Oh well, then,” Dan began.
“But,” I interrupted softly, “there is a portion of one skull that a world-famous paleontologist has studied in blow-ups of that photograph—and he thinks it just very well may be.”
Dan had been ready to strike through some of his notes. His pen stopped. But he was frowning. “Have they hunted for this woman? Checked the widows of marines who were stationed there?”
“Oh, yes. Private detectives have hunted and so has the FBI. But no one’s been able to trace her.”
“I don’t see how she could be in Chinatown,” Dan said, almost to himself.
“I haven’t told you all the theories and some of them are a little closer to Chinatown. A couple of years ago a man was hiking in the foothills near Sonora. He found a deserted cabin and, in it, a footlocker. With bones. It was too much to carry. He told a friend when he reached home but when they searched for the cabin a few months later and found it, there wasn’t any footlocker.”
“That’s still a long way from Chinatown.”
“Right. But let’s go back to China, back to December of 1941. After the marines were taken into custody, some of the officers were permitted to stay in Peking for a week or so, under a sort of house-arrest. The Japanese were, in the beginning, very considerate of rank.
“One of the American marine officers was a doctor, William T. Foley, who is now a heart specialist in New York. Dr. Foley had many Chinese friends.
“Now, according to one version of the packing up of the fossils, they were packed in marine footlockers and carried the names of Dr. Foley and of Col. William W. Ashurst, the commanding officer of the marine detachment in Peking. This is important because the Japanese returned the captured officers’ footlockers to them in Peking.
“The colonel, who is now dead, said after the war that he did receive one footlocker full of bones and that he hid it as a prisoner but lost track of it in 1945. On the other hand, Dr. Foley has said that he didn’t open the footlockers that were returned to him and doesn’t know if they had been opened and searched. He had four footlockers. He gave two to friends to keep for him, stored one locker at the Swiss Warehouse and another at the Pasteur Institute, both in Tientsin.”
“Which lockers were the bones in?”
“The doctor has never said. Perhaps he doesn’t know. In any event, nobody knows. And nobody knows what happened to any of those four lockers.”
“That’s not close to Chinatown,” Dan said.
“There are immigrants, aren’t there?”
He nodded. “About four thousand a year and they come to Chinatown. You’re saying that if the lockers survived the war and if the fossils were in one of them, someone may have brought that locker to the United States—and Jimmy found out about it.”
“That’s possible.” I refilled our mugs. “There have also been hints that the fossils might be in Formosa or in Hong Kong or Macao. You name it, it’s been suggested.”
Dan stared thoughtfully at his notes. Then he looked at me, just as thoughtfully.
“You’re sure the skull you looked at last night was Peking Man?”
I wanted to hedge. This wasn’t my specialty. How could I be expected to be positive? None of my colleagues would expect or demand an absolute answer.
But, in my heart, I was sure. The feel of the fossil, its color, the mottled discolorations of different minerals, that bar of bone above the eye sockets; oh yes, I was sure—and I wasn’t going to hedge with Dan.
“Yes,” I said simply.
“All right.” He accepted it. No further questions of the witness.
He checked his notes again. “This doctor . . . who were the friends he left lockers with?”
“He won’t say.”
Dan raised an eyebrow at that.
“I suppose,” I said slowly, “that if someone in Peking has had the fossils, has kept them hidden all these years, hasn’t given them to the government, I would suppose it might be very tough for him if that were revealed. The government might question his . . . loyalty.” We both understood, without saying, that the present government of China demands loyalty. Would be harsh to the disloyal.
“If somebody has the bones in Peking,” Dan observed, “they can’t be in Chinatown.”
I grinned. “That sums it up.”
“There are too damn many possibilities.”
“Plus some other complicating factors. I kind of hate to bring it up but you remember there were two lockers with bones?”
Dan nodded.
“Well, one footlocker held fossils discovered in what was called the Upper Cave and those were of homo sapiens and not nearly as valuable. So, when you talk about the foot-lockers, it makes a lot of difference which one you had. For example, was Col. Ashurst’s footlocker the one holding Peking Man or did he spend the war protecting the Upper Cave bones only to lose them toward the end of the war?”
“Oh, Lord,” Dan said and he closed the legal pad and slapped it into his attaché case. “I give up. The only sure thing is that nobody knows for certain what happened to the damn things—so anything’s possible. Right?”
“Right.”
“But maybe we can find something out from this end. Maybe, when we track down who Jimmy’s talked to, who he’s seen, maybe something will fit into the puzzle. We’ll start at his office, his and Lily’s.”
“Maybe so, Dan. If we’re just smart enough to see it.”
SEVEN
She was angry. Her bright black eyes crackled with fury, but I knew, too, that she wasn’t far from tears.
“Well, don’t just stand there. Help.”
The office was a shambles, file cabinets tipped over, drawers pulled out, manila folders dumped in untidy heaps on the floor. Every desk drawer had been emptied and the drawers dropped carelessly onto the scattered papers, booklets, notes, mimeograph supplies.
“Damn everything! Why would anybody do it?”
A small plump middle-aged woman, she was on her knees beside a tipped-over green filing cabinet and her hands shook as she tried to sort through manila folders, replacing loose fluttery sheets in the proper place. A stack of folders beside her began to tilt and I was able to drop down and brace the slanted slippery mass of folders and keep them from opening and spilling all their contents. As I teased them back into a secure stack, she apologized.
“I’m sorry to be so rude. I found the office like this when I came in this morning.” She looked around, her face stricken. “I just can’t believe anyone would do this to us.” She was shaken, seeing the emptied drawers and ransacked files as an ugly flowering of viciousness.
Dan was kneeling beside us now, helping to pick up and straighten. At her words, he paused and looked around the tiny office, at the walls covered with posters, job notices, information on courses and aids for the elderly and sick and poor. “No, Lily, this isn’t vandalism.”
Her head jerked up, her face flushed and she fought tears. “Isn’t vandalism! I’d like to know what else you could call it? Why, it’s awful, it’s . . .”
He reached out, patted her arm. She drew a deep breath and the tears did come then, rolling silently down her face. She used the back of a hand to try and brush them back, tiredly, as a child wou
ld.
“Don’t cry, Lily,” he said gently. “We’ll help clean up. And, really, it isn’t as bad as it looks.” She started to speak but he went on, “Look around again and once you get past the first shock, you’ll see how everything’s been dumped—and that’s all. See, they didn’t tear up the files. Or spill and splatter mimeograph ink or smash anything.”
She twisted her head, looked back and forth, and slowly nodded.
“There’s nothing scrawled on the walls, nothing destroyed,” Dan continued. “Think what a mess it could be! They could have upended the water bottle, written on the wall with those magic markers, torn and kicked and ripped everything in sight.”
Lily’s plump gentle face was puzzled now, some of the anger and hurt seeping away. “But what’s it all about?”
“Somebody was looking for something,” Dan said and his voice was grim.
Lily stared at him and her face tightened. “What’s going on? You haven’t come to see Jimmy in months and here you are and everything’s messed up and Jimmy’s late—and he’s never late.” Her head swung toward me. “And who are you?” Then she shook her head sharply, patted her cheeks with her hands. “I’m so sorry. That’s rude, dreadfully rude! I’m just not myself.”
“I’m Ellen Christie,” I said quickly, “and don’t apologize. I understand.” I hesitated then added, “I’m a friend of Jimmy’s.” But I don’t think she heard me for she had turned back toward Dan, her eyes hard.
She put it baldly. “You haven’t been in here, Dan, since Jimmy quit school to come to work full-time for Trouble, Inc. Why are you here today?” She looked at the paper-strewn floor. “Today of all days?”
“He should have stayed in school,” Dan answered obliquely. “Should have finished his degree.”
Her voice was as harsh as Dan’s. “People are more important than pieces of paper.”
“You can do both. You did, Lily.”
Again she patted her face and her lips quivered. “I’m sorry, Dan. I don’t want to quarrel with you. We’ve been friends for a long time.” She reached out to touch his hand. “Jimmy is such a good boy. Don’t be angry with him. He’ll go back to school. I know he will.”