Murder on the Silk Road

by Stefanie Matteson

  He had the rattly breathing of the heavy smoker, and Charlotte suspected that he probably had emphysema. She nodded. “I think it was seeing Mr. Fiske’s body this morning.” She tried to explain: “Being inside the cave was like being inside his tent. The air in the tent …”

  Chu raised his hand as if to say, Don’t trouble yourself. Then he cleared his throat and spat on the pavement.

  Charlotte found the spitting habits of the Chinese disgusting. But they weren’t surprising. In addition to being constantly subjected to the dusty air, the Chinese all smoked like chimneys.

  The broad-faced Chu stared silently out at the cliff wall, his sandal-clad feet planted squarely on the ground and his Mao jacket tightly buttoned up to his neck. “Where are you from in the United States?” he asked after a while.

  “I live in New York now, but I’m originally from New England—the state of Connecticut. Have you heard of it?”

  Chu nodded his head. “I have a son who’s studying at Boston University. He’s a mathematics major there. He’ll be returning to Dunhuang for the summer tomorrow night. He’ll be working as a guide at the caves.”

  “How very nice. Do you have connections in the United States, then?” She added: “I thought you might because of your name.” Western names were becoming popular in China as a result of liberalization—Emily was a typical example—but George Chu belonged to another generation.

  “No. No connections. George is the homonym for my Chinese name. I prefer to use it in the company of Westerners. I was educated at an American missionary school,” he explained. “It was there that I picked up the nickname. That was before Liberation, of course.”

  Charlotte said nothing. She had already discovered that it was futile to press the Chinese when it came to details about their pasts.

  But Chu went on to answer her unspoken question: “I come from a bad class background,” he said.

  He said it matter-of-factly, as if saying “I come from the Midwest.”

  “My family were supporters of the reactionary Kuomintang regime,” he continued. “My father was one of the officers responsible for overseeing the transfer of China’s national art treasures from Szechuan, where they were stored during the Sino-Japanese War, to the National Palace Museum.”

  The irony of Chu’s confidence wasn’t lost on Charlotte: the man who had been railing against Stein for removing artworks from the caves at Dunhuang was the son of the man who had been at least partly responsible for removing China’s greatest art treasures to Taipei.

  “We visited there on our way to the People’s Republic,” said Charlotte. She had marveled at the fabulous embroideries, paintings, bronzes, and jades that had once belonged to the collection of the imperial court at Beijing.

  “Then you can understand the magnitude of my father’s crime against his country. For this crime I spent eleven years in a reform-through-labor camp. I assembled radios in a factory—ten hours a day, six days a week. In my spare time I studied the works of Chairman Mao.”

  “I’m very sorry,” said Charlotte.

  “There is nothing to be sorry about.” He removed a pack of cigarettes from his pocket and shook one loose. “As a result of my reeducation, I was able to develop my socialist awareness. By learning from the workers, I gradually came to understand the crimes of my class, and was able to shake off the shackles of my bourgeois reactionary upbringing.”

  As he raised the pack of cigarettes to his lips, Charlotte noticed that his wrist bore deep, ugly scars, the kind that, in a man who had spent so many years in prison, could only have come from the chafing of manacles, and she realized with a shiver of horror that his other arm had probably been lost to some sort of festering wound.

  “I expected the Communists to execute me,” Chu continued as he lit his cigarette, “but they treated me very well. After I was rehabilitated, the Party gave me a good education. I am very lucky to have the opportunity to make up for the past errors of my family in my current position. I owe a boundless debt of gratitude to the Party.”

  Charlotte was astonished at how lightly he wrote off the eleven years he had lost to political upheaval, to say nothing of the loss of his arm. She supposed he was better off than some, better off than many, in fact: he was alive, and he had come out of his ordeal with an enviable career. But she suspected that his soul bore scars that ran much deeper than the angry purple brands on his wrist.

  There were a dozen questions she wanted to ask him. Why hadn’t he fled to Taiwan with the Kuomintang? What had been the fate of his family? What had it been like to be imprisoned in a reform-through-labor camp for eleven years? But she knew there was no point in pursuing this subject. By now, she had been in China long enough to know that once the ideological lingo started to flow, the door of communication had been shut. He reminded her of the fierce-visaged warriors in the cave. It was as if a chink of his armor had momentarily fallen out, revealing a soft yellow spot of tender flesh.

  She searched her mind for a safe topic of conversation. She wanted to maintain her rapport with this man. Though now wasn’t the time, she wanted at some point to talk with him about the Oglethorpe sculpture, and specifically, to ask him to return it if it should reappear at Dunhuang. She finally settled on artworks. “I would like very much to see the artworks from Dunhuang in the British Museum some day,” she said.

  “You can’t,” he replied, removing the cigarette from between his lips with his thumb and forefinger. He smoked mechanically, without pleasure.

  Charlotte looked over at him in surprise. “What do you mean?”

  “There is only one artwork on display: an embroidered temple banner. And of course the frontispiece of their most precious piece of booty, the Diamond Sutra. The rest is in storage. In 1914, they had an exhibit. If you want to see these things, you have to buy the catalogue from the exhibit.” His voice was deeply bitter. “Two volumes. Two hundred pounds a volume.”

  “But there must be hundreds of artworks from Dunhuang in their collection,” said Charlotte.

  Chu nodded. “There are. In fact, the British Museum is in possession of so many art treasures that it cannot possibly display them all. So they are stored in the basement.” He shrugged. “It is ironic, is it not? They were unearthed by Stein in Dunhuang only to be buried again in Bloomsbury.”

  In a way, Charlotte wasn’t surprised. The nineteenth-century explorers, especially the British ones, had been acquisitive. Their goal had been to bring back as much plunder as possible from foreign lands for the greater glory of the Crown. Never mind actually appreciating it.

  “For this, Stein was knighted,” Chu added bitterly. For a moment, he smoked silently. “I myself am only familiar with the treasures of Dunhuang from the British Museum’s catalogue,” he added.

  For a moment, Charlotte thought she saw a flicker of—what was it: yearning, hope, anticipation?—in the impassive eyes behind the thick lenses.

  “It is my dream to see these treasures some day for myself.”

  The diplomatic representative from the United States embassy in Beijing, whose name was Bill Reynolds, arrived the next morning. Though he was really a cultural attaché, he had been drafted to attend to the details of Larry’s death because he had happened to be in Ürümqi, the capital of the neighboring province of Xinjiang, on business, and was therefore able to get to Dunhuang in only twenty-four hours instead of the usual two or three days. Upon his arrival, he convened a meeting of American nationals in the reception room, at which he reassured them that the State Department was at their service to protect their interests and to handle any problems that might arise in connection with Larry’s death. In other words, the State Department would stand behind them if they ran into any problems with the police. He also informed them that he would be making arrangements for the transportation of Larry’s body back to the States (it was now at the People’s Mortuary in Dunhuang), and for the disposition of the contents of his camp and his room at the guest house, as soon as the body and belo
ngings were released by the police. He also filled them in on the police investigation. He had just come from the Public Security Bureau where a local man was being held in connection with the murder. Apparently, a portable high-tech shortwave radio that had been stolen from Larry’s campsite had been found in his possession. Though the local man claimed a foreigner had given it to him, the police were holding him for the murder.

  “If anyone has any further information regarding Larry’s death, I’ll be happy to convey it to the proper authorities,” Reynolds concluded.

  “How did he lose his arm?” Marsha asked.

  They were eating lunch: Charlotte, Marsha, Peter, Lisa, and Victor. The discussion was about Chu, who had sat in on the meeting with Reynolds, chain-smoking as usual. The only time he had stopped was to spit into the cuspidor.

  “In prison, as a result of being manacled,” Peter replied. “It was a common form of torture to keep people manacled with their hands behind their backs for months on end. Their wrists would become infected from the chafing, which sometimes resulted in the amputation of the lower arm.”

  “How horrible,” said Lisa with a shudder.

  “What was he imprisoned for?” asked Marsha.

  “For being a class enemy. Translation: for being rich.”

  “Is being rich a crime worthy of imprisonment?”

  “In Communist China, it is. Or rather, was. Even being a poor relation of a class enemy was considered a crime.”

  Marsha was disbelieving. “There must have been something more than that.”

  “There was,” said Charlotte. “I talked with him about it yesterday.”

  The table’s attention turned to her.

  “His father was an officer in the Kuomintang, or rather, the reactionary Kuomintang regime, as he put it. He was the officer who was responsible for making the arrangements to transfer China’s national art treasures from the Palace Museum collection to Taipei.”

  “Oh, I see,” said Marsha. “But he must not be considered a class enemy any longer if he has this job.”

  “No,” said Charlotte. “He’s been rehabilitated.” She spoke facetiously: “He’s very grateful to the Party for his present job, in which he feels he can make amends for the past errors of his family.”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised if he were a radish,” said Peter in his supercilious voice.

  Charlotte was damned if she would ask what a radish was.

  “What’s a radish?” asked Lisa.

  “Someone who’s red on the outside and white on the inside.”

  They smiled at the aptness of the expression. But Charlotte was convinced that however white Chu might once have been, he was now red to the core.

  Reynolds arrived at the same time as the first course: the long noodles—literally, “dough strings”—that were the local staple. If ever the appearance of a State Department official could be counted upon to be reassuring, it would be his. He was a tall, thin man with smiling blue eyes and a gracious smile.

  “I recognized you in the reception room,” he said to Charlotte. “I’ve always wanted to meet you. Ever since I saw you in Dark Journey when I was about eleven. I fell in love with you then, and I’ve been in love with you ever since. But I’d appreciate it if you didn’t let on to my wife of thirty-five years.”

  “I won’t,” she said, returning his handshake. In his khaki chinos and green- and white-checked short-sleeved shirt, he looked about as out of place on the southern fringe of the Gobi as a Chinese nomad would have looked sipping a gin and tonic on a Connecticut patio.

  “May I join you?” he asked. “There’s something I’d like to speak with you about. In addition to Fiske’s death, that is.”

  “By all means,” Charlotte responded, indicating a vacant seat. “This is my stepdaughter, Marsha Lundstrom,” she said, as Reynolds extended his hand. “And the travel writer, Peter Hamilton.”

  “Oh, yes,” said Reynolds, shaking Peter’s hand as well. “I’ve read some of your books. Enjoyed them enormously. Are you working on a book here?”

  “Yes,” Peter replied. “It’s to be called Sand-Buried Treasures of Desert Cathay. About the role of Western explorers on the Silk Road.”

  “For or against?” asked Reynolds as he took a seat.

  “For, of course. If Stein and the others hadn’t hauled off the artworks from Dunhuang, they’d probably have been lost. I’m leaving tomorrow to visit the caves at Bezeklik, which are very similar to those at Dunhuang, except that hardly a statue was left standing after the Red Guards got through with them.”

  “The stories of the destruction are horrifying,” said Reynolds.

  “And not only by the Red Guards,” added Victor. “The Moslem iconoclasts were just as bad, if not worse. I visited a series of cave temples where every fresco that hadn’t been removed by the Germans had been horribly defaced by the Moslems; there wasn’t a single face of the Buddha that hadn’t been slashed.”

  Peter nodded. “At Bezeklik the peasants scraped the pigment of the frescoes off the walls to use as fertilizer. In my eyes,” he went on, “the Westerners who rescued the art from these caves are heroes.”

  “Don’t let Chu hear you say that,” said Victor. “He’d kick you out of here before you could say ‘The East is Red.’”

  After being formally introduced to Lisa and Victor, Reynolds helped himself to food from some of the dishes which had been served, and which included, in addition to the noodles, fried rice and a couple of vegetable dishes.

  “Meat seems to be in short supply here,” said Charlotte as she passed him a dish of her favorite green beans in garlic sauce.

  “It’s not that it’s in short supply; it’s the lack of refrigeration. Slaughtering a sheep or a pig in the summer is a chancy undertaking. Have you tried the local melon, yet?” he asked.

  Charlotte described how they had been greeted with juicy slices of the local muskmelon. “I’ve been told their sweetness is due to the properties of the local soil and water,” she said.

  Reynolds nodded. “Dunhuang is famous for its melons, and for its grapes. During the Tang Dynasty the melons were shipped by camel caravan to the imperial court at Xian, where they were prized as a delicacy. In fact, this area used to be known as the ‘sand and melon county.’”

  “What is it that you wanted to talk with me about?” asked Charlotte, who’d had enough polite talk about melons.

  “Two matters, actually,” he said, nibbling on the green beans, which he held expertly between the tips of his chopsticks. “The first is The Crucible.”

  For a moment, Charlotte was stumped. “You mean Arthur Miller’s play?”

  Reynolds nodded. “I saw you in the original Broadway production. In 1954, I think it was.”

  “It was 1953. From January to June. I thought everyone had forgotten that fiasco.” Charlotte had played Elizabeth Proctor, the Salem wife who is jailed and finally hanged as a witch. The play had closed after only six months. The critics had dismissed it as an anti-McCarthy polemic.

  “I could never understand why it closed so fast.”

  “Spineless critics. Nobody wanted to go out on a limb to praise a play that they interpreted as a political diatribe against McCarthyism. They were afraid they might end up in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee, or worse.”

  “Pretty sad commentary,” said Reynolds.

  “Pretty sad time,” said Charlotte. She had never been directly affected, thank God. Though she had always appeared in a wide variety of roles, her public image was inextricably linked to the elegant, sophisticated women she had played in her most famous ones. The idea that she could ever have been a Communist would have struck even the most zealous red-baiter as ridiculous. Others she knew hadn’t been so lucky. They had been forced to take the stand to answer what the House interrogators had nicknamed the Sixty-four Dollar Question, after the radio quiz program that was popular at the time: “Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the Communist party?”
r />   Reynolds nodded in agreement.

  “What about The Crucible?” she asked. Though the original production hadn’t been successful, the play had gone on to a long and critically acclaimed off-Broadway run several years later, after the McCarthy issue had subsided, and had since come to be considered an American classic.

  “The Chinese Academy of Dramatic Arts wants to mount a production. They’re looking for an American actor or director to serve as their adviser. The director of the Academy called me last week to ask if there was anyone I could recommend, and today I run into you; it seems like fate.”

  “You are fated to make friends in China,” said Marsha.

  Marsha was right. Kitty’s reading from the I Ching was coming true again. She explained to Reynolds about the reading, and how it had predicted that she was fated to make friends in a certain “sphere of activity” that would lead to a more permanent connection with the foreign country she was about to visit.

  “Well, here’s your chance,” said Reynolds. “It will be a first—the first time a play by an American playwright will be staged in the People’s Republic of China with a Chinese cast. What do you say?”

  Here was the intellectual challenge she was looking for, Charlotte thought. The idea of putting on The Crucible before a Chinese audience was thrilling to her. “I don’t speak a word of Chinese,” she said. Actually she spoke three phrases: “Hello,” “Thank you,” and “How much?” Along with “Where is the toilet?” they were all one needed to know in any language.

  “Doesn’t matter. There will be translators.”

  “Tell me more,” Charlotte demanded eagerly. “Beginning to end. Everything you know. I would absolutely love to do this.”

  “The idea is the brainchild of Nan-sung Kong, the director of the Chinese Academy of Dramatic Arts,” said Reynolds, slurping up the dough-strings. “He’s an avant-garde director, to the extent that China has an avant-garde.”

  “What’s he like?”

  “Very enthusiastic, very creative, very emotional. More like an American than a Chinese, I’d say. And certainly not like a native of Beijing, who are known for their reserve.”