Murder on the Silk Road

by Stefanie Matteson

  Dogie was squatting at the side of the knoll, brushing the dust off a hollow-eyed skull, about a foot long, with a parrotlike beak. It was resting on a little pinnacle of sandstone, as if nature had neatly presented it to them as a gift.

  “Now ain’t that a purty sight,” said Dogie, tilting back his Stetson to wipe his temple with his forearm. “An intact Protoceratops skull.” With a flourish, he gave the skull a loving caress with his camel’s-hair brush. “Just a settin’ there, as plain as can be.”

  “I assume Protoceratops is a dinosaur,” said Marsha.

  “Yep,” said Dogie. “Protoceratops andrewsi. Named after Roy Chapman Andrews, who found dozens of ’em in Mongolia. A horned dinosaur from the late Cretaceous. Not a big deal, but it’s a good sign.” He looked up at Orecchio. “How’s that for a postage stamp, Gino?”

  Orecchio scowled, his heavy black brows drawing together in annoyance.

  Squatting down next to Dogie, Bert removed a knife from the holster on his belt, and scraped some encrusted sand from the jaw. “Flag it, Dogie, and we’ll look for the rest later on,” he said.

  “Aye, aye, boss,” said Dogie, with a salute.

  Once Dogie had marked the site, they continued on. Another hundred feet or so up the mountain, the jeep track turned to the north. Ahead, the faint tracing of a footpath that must once have been used by pilgrims wound upward toward the reliquary stupa near the top of the ridge.

  They paused here to rest. Bert removed a leather canteen from his pack and passed it around. As they drank, they looked out at Larry’s camp, which was situated on a small plateau at the edge of a ravine. Though it was probably a hundred yards away, the clear morning air made it look much closer.

  “My, my,” said Dogie, who was studying the camp through a pair of binoculars. “Look who we’ve got here.” He handed the binoculars to Bert, and pointed toward the camp. “Beyond Larry’s camp. On the other side of the ridge and a little ways up. It looks like he’s by himself.”

  Bert raised the binoculars to his eyes. “Bouchard!” he muttered. “Damn! I wonder how long he’s been here.”

  “What is it?” asked Marsha, who sat on a rock next to Bert.

  “There’s a second camp,” said Bert, handing her the glasses. “On the other side of the ravine.” He pointed. “Hidden behind the ridge.”

  Marsha took a look and passed the binoculars to Charlotte, who could just make out the blue top of a small domed tent. Above the tent flew the red, white, and blue flag of France.

  “It belongs to Jean-Jacques Bouchard. A French paleontologist.”

  “Larry must be madder than a wet hen,” said Dogie.

  “Why?” asked Charlotte.

  “Bouchard’s a parasite,” Bert explained. “If this were the Gold Rush—which it is in a way, it’s just a different kind of gold—you’d call him a claim jumper. He waits for another prospector to strike it rich, and then he moves in and starts picking out the choicest nuggets.”

  It was like lobstering, thought Charlotte. Woe betide the lobsterman who ventured to trespass on another’s lobstering territory.

  “That’s the way the guy has to operate,” said Dogie. “He couldn’t find a fossil himself if he tripped over it. Now, scorpions are another story.”

  “Scorpions?” said Charlotte.

  “Yeah, he’s one of the world’s reigning experts. A little interest that he picked up in the field. It just so happens that scorpions and dinosaur fossils occupy the same kind of territory.”

  “I wouldn’t even mind him poaching on our territory,” said Bert. “I feel a little sorry for the guy—there’s something pretty pathetic about a fossil hunter who can’t find fossil—except that he’s such a bad scientist.”

  “In what way?” asked Charlotte. She was getting a small lesson in the sociology of dinosaur fossil hunting.

  “A hundred years of progress in field technique, and he still behaves like a nineteenth-century fossil hunter out picking up specimens on a Sunday afternoon excursion,” Bert explained. “In my mind, his most egregious sin—and he has many of them—is that he doesn’t mark the place that he finds a bone.”

  “Meaning that you can’t go back and find the rest of the skeleton?”

  “Exactly. Or that you can’t study the ground the fossil came from. He’s a chronic violator of the first law of fossil collecting, which is ‘If you’re not going to mark the location, don’t collect the fossil.’ A fossil without a location is useless; you might as well throw it away.”

  “That is not his most egree—whatever—sin,” said Dogie.

  “What is?” asked Marsha.

  “Destroyin’ fossils. Rumor has it that he smashed the remainin’ fossils at a site in Tanzania after he had picked out the best ones for himself,” he said. “So a rival paleontologist wouldn’t find them.”

  “We don’t know for sure that he did that,” said Bert.

  Dogie made a face at Bert, mocking his goody-goody attitude.

  “But aren’t you all part of the same expedition?” asked Marsha.

  “Yes. But we each have our territories, just like you and Victor divide up the manuscripts between the religious texts and the secular ones.”

  “I see,” said Marsha. “And that ridge is the DMZ.”

  “You’ve got it. Larry tried to get Bouchard excluded from this expedition,” he continued, with a sidelong glance at Peng, who stood a short distance away, out of earshot. “He wrote a letter to Peng describing some of Bouchard’s more memorable stunts, and suggesting that he was an incompetent scientist.”

  “Needless to say, Bouchard wasn’t too happy about it,” added Dogie.

  “But he’s here,” observed Marsha.

  “Politics,” said Dogie disgustedly.

  Charlotte sat on a rock, sipping from Bert’s canteen and studying Larry’s camp. It looked more like a movie set. She had seen similar camps erected for indulgent directors in locations which, if they weren’t quite as remote as this, were close to it. But that was the power of the studio, not a university.

  “Yale must have a lot of money,” she said, nodding at the camp as she passed the canteen over to Lisa.

  “Not Yale,” said Lisa. “Larry’s family. He’s one of the Fiskes. He uses his trust fund to fulfill his fantasies of the explorer’s life. Hey, I’d do the same if I had the dough. Bert told you how Bouchard finds fossils; now let me tell you how Larry finds fossils. Or rather, procures fossils.”

  “How does he procure fossils?” prompted Charlotte.

  “Not like Dogie—with his head’ swiveling from side to side like a mechanical doll and his body bent over in the paleontology stoop,” Lisa said.

  Dogie stuck his tongue out at her.

  “Larry’s technique involves the liberal distribution of cold, hard cash. His typical M.O. is to go to the market in whatever area it is in which he’s looking for fossils, and put out the word that he’s looking for old bones and that he’ll pay cash for them. Then, he sits around and drinks tea for a couple of days and waits.” She paused to take a long swig of water from the canteen. “Then, when somebody brings him some interesting-looking bones—which somebody invariably does—he asks them to lead him to the spot where they found them, and bingo, he’s made a find. No sweat, no aching back, no sore feet.”

  “I think it’s dishonest,” said Dogie, with a good-natured grin.

  “You’re just jealous,” teased Lisa.

  “But he didn’t do that here, did he?” asked Charlotte. “From what Peng said, you expected to find fossils here.”

  “Yes,” replied Lisa. “But we didn’t know exactly where.” She waved an arm at the tortured landscape surrounding them. “He managed to find the fossil-bearing rock pretty fast. I’ll bet you twenty to one that a week ago you could have found him in the Dunhuang bazaar passing out the yuan.”

  “Judging from what he said last night, his technique must have paid off,” said Charlotte.

  “We’ll soon see,” said Orecchio w
ith a hint of skepticism.

  A few minutes later they had reached the camp. The working area was a large tent whose sides had been rolled up to let in the breeze. There were three large tables and a mahogany camp desk, of the type from which Napolean might have commanded the troops at Waterloo. Behind the desk was a leather swivel chair. A bar tray held an assortment of fine liquors.

  “How did he get all of this stuff out here?” asked Charlotte.

  “Has it shipped,” replied Lisa, flopping down in the swivel chair. “There’s nothing that you can’t accomplish if you have enough dough,” she said as she spun herself around in the chair. “He had this same stuff in Tanzania, in Chile, in India. All the comforts of Abercrombie and Fitch.”

  Bert and Dogie wandered over to investigate some dinosaur bones that were spread out on the tables. There weren’t many, but Larry had only been here a short time. Orecchio and Peng took seats in a pair of burgundy leather armchairs that were placed on an Oriental carpet in one corner of the tent.

  “I wonder where everybody is?” asked Lisa.

  “We’re early,” said Orecchio, checking his watch. “It’s still only ten of. He’ll probably be here any minute.”

  Standing at the side of the tent, Charlotte looked out at the campsite. In the middle was an old well sheltered by a stone hut. Arrayed around the well were other tents that served as kitchen, sleeping quarters, storeroom, and so on. A white Toyota Land Cruiser was parked at the center near the well.

  As she was standing there, Charlotte suddenly became aware of a faint noise coming from the vicinity of a small tent set some distance away from the others, which from its position overlooking the valley she assumed to be Larry’s. It sounded like the high-pitched beep of a household smoke alarm. Nearby was a tiny tent whose size and shape identified it as the latrine.

  Using nature’s call as an excuse, she set off down the hill to investigate where the noise was coming from.

  As she approached the tent that she thought was Larry’s, the beeping grew louder. On the other side, she suddenly came upon an elegant little tableau. A small table covered with a linen tablecloth held a silver tray with a crystal decanter of brandy and a brandy snifter. Next to the table were a canvas chair and a camp stove on which stood a pot of espresso. Finally, there was a telescope mounted on a stand for gazing at the desert sky. There’s nothing like a brandy and a cigar under the desert stars, Bert had said as he reminisced about past digs with Larry.

  But, it suddenly struck her, it was now almost ten o’clock. The tableau should have included coffee and croissants, not brandy and a telescope. All at once, she had a sense that something was very wrong. Bert had said that Larry had a cook and several retainers. Where were they? Then she noticed that some papers which must have come from one of the tables in the work tent had blown away and were scattered all over the campsite. If the retainers had been here, they should have picked them up. Also, an animal of some kind had gotten into the garbage.

  The camp looked deserted, not just empty.

  And why were the flaps of Larry’s tent drawn? In this heat, it must have been stifling inside. The flaps of the other tents were all rolled up.

  “Hello,” she said, drawing closer. The beeping was coming from inside. No one answered. After a minute, she repeated herself. “Hello,” she said again, this time a little louder. “Mr. Fiske?” Still no answer. Hesitantly, she opened the tent flap a crack. But it was too dark inside to see. Finally she drew it all the way back. The first thing she noticed was the white veil of a mosquito net draped over the cot. A necessity, she thought, as she waved away the mosquitoes that whined annoyingly around her head. As her eyes adjusted to the dimness, she realized that she wasn’t alone: a man was lying face-up on the cot under the mosquito netting. Moving closer, she took in his elegant silk paisley pajamas, like those the movie stars of her era used to wear for lounging around their elegant on-screen apartments. Then her horrified eyes unwillingly registered the rest: the man was Larry, and he was dead. His mouth was open and his face was contorted in a gruesome expression, like those of the gargoyles that adorned the roof ridges of Chinese temples. He must have been stabbed in the chest. The gold silk of his pajama top had a dark red bloodstain in the center. The smell of the fresh blood was metallic, like the end of a freshly sheared copper pipe.

  Suddenly, the air in the tent felt unbearably close and hot. She recognized the feeling: it was the same one that still sometimes overcame her on stage, the feeling that turned her legs into mush and her voice into a feeble croak. There it was called stage fright; here it was just plain panic. Time to get out of here. A second later, she was standing outside the tent, hanging onto the tent pole and gasping for breath.

  Beep, beep, beep, beep.

  It was the travel alarm clock on Larry’s bedside table. Taking a deep breath, she went back into the tent, and pushed the alarm button down. The beeping stopped. There, that was better. Much better. Next to the clock on the bedside table lay a wallet made of alligator hide. Only the finest: “eat well, dress well, sleep well” was his motto. Sticking out of the wallet was a thick wad of Chinese money. The motive wasn’t robbery, then.

  Outside again. Breathe deeply. Inhale: one, two, three four, five. Exhale: one, two, three, four, five. Again. Gradually, her breathing returned to normal, and her heart stopped fluttering like a caged bird in her chest.

  Overhead, one of the big black birds she had seen circling over the foothills soared on an updraft from the valley floor. Though it had looked small from a distance, she now realized that it was enormous; its wingspread must have been well over six feet. She also realized from its great hooked beak what kind of bird it was.

  A vulture.

  It was Orecchio who notified public security, which was the Chinese equivalent of the police. He’d offered to jog back to the guest house, and called from there. A young police officer named Ho wearing a dirty white-jacketed uniform met them in the guest house reception room shortly after their return. He had a thin black mustache which Charlotte assumed was supposed to look William Powell-ish, but actually looked more like a pair of tadpoles having a tête-à-tête under his nose. The reception room was identical to all the others they had visited in China—at the art museum in Shanghai, at the cloisonné factory in Guangzhou, at the embroidery shop in Beijing: brass spittoons in the corners; photographs of a smiling Zhou Enlai and a stone-faced Hua Guofeng on the walls; and overstuffed chairs clad in ill-fitting slipcovers, the back and arms protected by crocheted doilies, spaced with geometric precision around the perimeter of the room. A large floor fan in one corner whirred, creating the illusion of coolness. They each took a chair: their party of six; Ho, looking appropriately officious; and his earnest young assistant, who had slightly crossed eyes that blinked every few seconds, like those of a turtle basking in the sunshine. After a few minutes, they were joined by Chu, who wore a dark gray Mao suit that matched the frames of his heavy, thick-lensed eyeglasses as well as his hair, which stood up stiffly in the severe style favored by the cadres, as Party officials were called. He held a cigarette between the thumb and forefinger of his one remaining hand, like a gangster in a Grade B gangster movie. Occasionally, he leaned back to spit into a cuspidor in the corner behind him. As they all drank steaming cups of bitter green tea from lidded cups, Ho asked a few questions: the name of the victim, the location of the camp, the purpose of their visit. Then, after notifying them that he would probably want to talk with them again, he got into a police jeep and sped off into the desert toward the Mountain of the Three Dangers.

  The interview was disappointing. Charlotte had the feeling that something more should have happened. The police didn’t seem to care. To them, Larry was just another foreign national who had had the temerity to inconvenience them by being murdered on Chinese soil. Never mind that he was a Fiske, that he was a paleontologist from Yale, that he was a man of vigor and imagination. That didn’t mean anything to them. After the interview, there was little else to
do but carry on. They adjourned to the dining hall for lunch, but Larry’s murder had robbed them of their appetites. And the few bites they were able to get down were interrupted every few minutes by the other guests. The word was out that an American paleontologist had been, murdered in the desert, and foreigners and Chinese alike were curious. The waiters stood around in little knots at the edges of the room, looking on as the other guests came forward with their questions. When did it happen? What’s going to happen next? Who will conduct the investigation? The Only person who was able to reply to any of them was Peter, whose years of foreign travel had left him with a good knowledge of official procedure in such situations. The investigation would be conducted by the Chinese police, he told them. The State Department had no authority to interfere, but they would probably send out an official to handle other arrangements, such as notifying Larry’s family of the death and transporting the body back to the States. As for the most frequently asked question—Who do you think did it?—nobody had the slightest idea.

  After lunch, Marsha went off to study her manuscripts, and Charlotte retired to her room. She felt as if she was coming down with the flu. Her throat was scratchy and her lungs were congested. She was upset about Larry’s death: it had been horrible, seeing him lying dead like that on his cot, the bloody stab wound in his enormous chest. But her sickness was more than a reaction to that. It was also a reaction to the desert dust. Marsha had warned her that “China catarrh” was common among tourists, as well as among the Chinese themselves, many of whom routinely wore face masks. Everyone in China always seemed to be coughing up phlegm, and cuspidors could be found in every hallway and corner. Her guidebook had suggested that tourists take along antihistamines, and she took one now. She wanted to feel better for her first cave tour, which was in a half hour. Though it seemed disrespectful somehow to take part in an art tour on the afternoon of the day she had found Larry’s body, she had nothing else to do but sit around in her stifling room, and a tour might help get her mind off his death. It was to be a tour of Cave 17, the cave in which Sir Aurel Stein had found the secret library. The lecture was to be given by Victor Danowski. In return for the invitation to study at Dunhuang, the Chinese authorities had asked that the scholars from the Oriental Institute aid them in promoting tourism by giving lectures to the tourists who arrived daily by the busload from the hotels in “Dunhuang town,” as it was called to distinguish it from the location of the caves.