Murder on the Silk Road

by Stefanie Matteson

  “Where and when?”

  “In Beijing. The production is scheduled for next summer. But the work would have to begin before that—in the late spring.”

  “Has the project been approved? Somehow I can’t imagine the Party endorsing a play about the Salem witch trials.”

  “So far, so good,” said Reynolds. “China has changed a lot in the last few years. It’s changed so quickly that I sometimes can’t believe it myself,” he added. “Who would have thought a few years ago that enterprising peasants would be getting rich, but it’s happening.”

  “I’ve been amazed at the variety of goods in the free markets,” said Marsha, who had often commented in the changes since her last visit.

  “There are a lot of things you can buy at the free markets now that you can’t buy anywhere else. It’s astounding to think that only a few years ago free markets were banned. We could see a new phase coming, but we weren’t expecting this. It’s a little frightening.”

  “Why frightening?” Marsha asked.

  “Because it’s changed so fast in the four years since the new economic policies were introduced in 1980 that it’s impossible to predict where it’s going to go. None of the new rights that the people are enjoying are guaranteed. They’re all bonuses that could be taken away tomorrow.”

  “You mean, another crackdown is in the offing?” asked Charlotte.

  “Probably. The political atmosphere reminds me of that in the fifties during Mao’s campaign to encourage intellectuals to suggest ways in which the work of the Party could be improved. His slogan for that campaign was ‘Let a hundred flowers bloom, let a hundred schools of thought contend.’”

  “What happened?” asked Charlotte.

  “It was followed the next year by the Anti-Rightist Campaign in which the intellectuals who had spoken out were all thrown in jail. They had made the mistake of taking Mao at his word.”

  “Well, if the crackdown does come, let’s hope it’s not the production of The Crucible that sets it off,” she said.

  For a while, they chatted about the proposed production. That it would take place was by no means a certainty. There were a lot of contingencies: if they could get the space, if the Chinese actors whom the director had in mind would be available, if the American cultural exchange group that had agreed to underwrite part of the expense would come through with the money, and so on. In fact, it seemed so uncertain that Charlotte doubted it would ever come off. But then, the I Ching had told her it would, and so far the I Ching had been right.

  As she chatted with Reynolds, Charlotte savored the challenge. She had a million questions. Would the Chinese audiences draw the parallel between the witch trials in a Massachusetts village three centuries ago, and their own recent history? And, if they did, would the message be too inflammatory for the government to accept? How well would she work with actors with whom she couldn’t communicate directly, and who had been trained in an entirely different acting tradition? Then there were the strictly practical matters. How long would she have to stay? Would there be other American advisers? If so, in what capacity would they serve? Would she have any power to influence the actors’ performances, or would their direction be mostly in the hands of the Chinese director? Her mind was swirling with these questions and many more as she made her way back to her room, leaving Marsha to confer with Victor about their lecture schedule.

  She was just entering the courtyard in front of her building when Reynolds accosted her. “Oh, hi,” she said, turning around. “Are you staying here, too?”

  “No. I’m staying in Dunhuang town. But there was something else I wanted to talk with you about—in confidence.” He nodded toward an old Coca-Cola machine of the type that had disappeared long ago from just about everywhere in the United States except gas stations in the deep South. “Can I buy you a Coke?”

  “I’d be delighted,” said Charlotte.

  He returned a moment later with two Cokes, or “Luoky Colas” as they were called here, and gestured toward a bench at the side of the courtyard, which was shaded by a twisted old pear tree. “Would you like to sit down?”

  Charlotte looked at him questioningly as he handed her the Coke.

  “I read Murder at the Morosco,” he said.

  “Yes,” said Charlotte, wondering what he was getting at.

  “I also heard about the murder case in Maine that you helped solve,” he continued. “What I wanted to ask you about is this: the State Department has no authority to interfere with the Chinese police in their investigation into Fiske’s death. We’re completely at their mercy, and, frankly”—he looked over at her with his smiling blue eyes—“after meeting with the local police this morning, I don’t have a lot of confidence in their abilities.”

  “I know what you mean,” she said.

  He went on. “But even if they were the most competent investigators in the world, I’d be concerned about their ability to conduct an investigation in which at least some of the people involved are English-speaking. I’m going to request that they bring in some higher-ups from the Foreign Affairs Division in Lanzhou, but I’ll have to go through official channels, and that will take time. Meanwhile, it would be a great help to us if we had someone on the spot to look after our interests, someone whose abilities we trust.” He paused for a moment to watch a mother goose make her way across the uneven concrete blocks that paved the courtyard; she was trailed by a line of little goslings. “Especially someone whose traveling companion is fluent in Chinese.”

  The mother goose and her offspring disappeared behind the stalks of the sunflowers that lined the opposite wall of the courtyard.

  “Like me, for example,” said Charlotte with a smile.

  Reynolds smiled back. “Like you, for example.”

  “And what exactly are our interests?”

  “To make discreet inquiries among the American guests at the Dunhuang Research Academy as to where they were at the time of the murder, et cetera, with the aim of finding out who killed Larry Fiske. Right now, Ho’s chief suspect is some lice-ridden good-for-nothing who, from everything I can gather, gets thrown in the hoosegow for every crime and misdemeanor committed in greater Dunhuang whose solution isn’t readily apparent.”

  “It sounds like the modus operandi of the Dunhuang police doesn’t differ much from that of the police anywhere else,” Charlotte observed.

  “Ho took me over to the local jail to meet this guy this morning,” Reynolds continued. “His name is Feng—the town drunk, apparently. And a beggar, to boot. I could smell him long before I saw him. I doubt he could find his way out of a paper bag, much less kill an American for no apparent motive.”

  “I thought the motive was theft.”

  “That’s the party line, but it doesn’t make sense. There were a few things missing: a shortwave radio, a calculator, a wristwatch. The cook helped the police identify the missing items. But they were all things that the servants might have walked off with when they fled. It’s my theory that whoever did kill Fiske planted the radio on the poor wretch they have in jail right now. A real thief would have taken the money from Fiske’s wallet, but it wasn’t touched.”

  Charlotte had come to the same conclusion.

  Reynolds went on. “And to be quite frank, if I don’t buy their solution to the murder, the Fiske family isn’t going to buy it either, and they’re going to be on our backs for more answers.”

  “From the little I know about them, the Fiske family isn’t one that you want to have a run-in with,” added Charlotte.

  “Exactly. If we don’t come up with some satisfactory answers, they’ll probably round up a Congressional delegation to investigate.”

  “Do you have any idea who might have wanted to kill him?”

  “I was going to ask you that question.”

  “Actually, I do have a couple,” Charlotte replied. “They’re pretty slim ones, but they’re places to start.”

  “Shoot.”

  “One is Eugene Orecch
io.”

  “The geologist from Pittsburgh?” asked Reynolds.

  Charlotte nodded. “On the evening we arrived”—it was only the evening before last, Charlotte thought, but it already seemed like ages ago—“we sat with Larry at dinner. By we, I mean Marsha and I and Bert Rogers and Dogie O’Dea, whom we had met on the train. Bert and Dogie are also paleontologists.”

  Reynolds nodded. “I met them this morning.”

  “Larry was very excited. He announced that he’d just made a big discovery—one of the biggest discoveries of the century, he called it. Orecchio was there too. Larry invited us all out to his camp. He said he wanted to show us his find rather than tell us about it.”

  “That’s when you found the body.”

  Charlotte nodded. “As we were leaving the dining hall, I overheard Larry tell Dogie that Orecchio wasn’t going to be very happy about his discovery.”

  “Then Fiske and Orecchio weren’t close colleagues,” said Reynolds.

  “Professional adversaries, from what I gather. They subscribed to rival theories about the reasons for the extinction of the dinosaurs.” She briefly explained the nature of the dispute. “I’m not sure if Orecchio overheard Larry, but I presume that if I could hear him, he could too.”

  “And you think that Orecchio killed Fiske because he had made some kind of discovery that would have invalidated his catastrophe theory.”

  “Maybe,” said Charlotte. “It’s a start.”

  “Who’s number two?”

  “The French paleontologist, Jean-Jacques Bouchard. He was also an enemy of Larry’s. Apparently his scientific technique is sloppy—he doesn’t label what he picks up and that kind of thing—and Larry had tried to have him excluded from the expedition. Without success, obviously.”

  “Ho told me that Bouchard has a camp near Fiske’s.”

  “Like about a hundred yards away.”

  “It sounds as if you’ve given this matter quite a bit of thought already,” said Reynolds, taking a long swig from his bottle of Luoky Cola.

  “How can you help it when you’ve just stumbled over a dead body with a stab wound in the chest. Any news on the murder weapon, by the way? Or on the time of death?”

  Reynolds shook his head, then looked over at Charlotte. By contrast with his usual genial manner, he was now very serious: “I don’t want to get you into anything that you don’t want to get into.”

  “I can only look at so many frescoes,” she said. If she had been worried about how she was going to occupy her time while Marsha and Victor were studying their manuscripts, she had no worries on that score now.

  He continued. “If the Chinese authorities accuse me of putting you up to looking into the murder for us, I’m going to deny it.”

  “So this is how Foggy Bottom works,” she teased.

  “That’s how it earned its nickname—for the murkiness of its policies,” he said. “In spy jargon, you’re out in the cold.” He went on: “But I do want you to be careful. I don’t want you getting yourself into trouble. The last thing I need is another body on my hands. Besides, I wouldn’t want the actors guild on my back. The Fiskes are going to be trouble enough.”

  “I doubt you’d get anyone from the union to come here to investigate,” said Charlotte. “No room service, no hot tubs. For that matter, not even any private bathrooms.” She gazed out at the Mountain of the Three Dangers. “Though it does bear a faint resemblance to Palm Springs.”

  “Without the golf courses and the palm trees,” said Reynolds.

  “Would you mind if I went out to Larry’s camp?” she asked. “I’d like to find out what it was that he discovered. Maybe I’ll be able to find some field notes or something.”

  Reynolds placed his palm on his chest in; a gesture of helplessness. “How is a little ole diplomat from Beijing supposed to keep track of everything you crazy tourists do to amuse yourselves in your spare time?” Then he added, “I’ve posted a round-the-clock guard at the camp to protect Fiske’s belongings. But I’ll see to it that you’re allowed access.”

  “Is there anything else?” asked Charlotte. “A pledge of secrecy? A manual of covert operations?” She smiled. “I’m only kidding. But seriously, if there’s any particular way in which you’d like me to proceed, just tell me.”

  “Deng Xiaoping is famous for a slogan that he uses in defense of his economic policies,” Reynolds replied. “It goes, ‘It doesn’t matter whether a cat is black or white as long as it catches mice.’ There is one thing, though,” he added. “I don’t want to hear too many of the nitty-gritty details.”

  “Gritty is right,” said Charlotte, wiping the sand from her brow. The wind gusting over the dunes that capped the Mountain of the Howling Sands rained sand down on their heads.

  Reynolds smiled. “In fact,” he said, “I don’t want to hear any details at all, gritty or not. I just want to be presented with the mouse: boxed, wrapped, and neatly tied with a bow.”

  After the usual postprandial siesta, Charlotte went to see the colossal Buddha in the Cave of Unequaled Height. It was truly an awe-inspiring sight to stand at its gigantic feet and look up at its strong, plain face, which gazed down through half-closed eyes at the petty foibles of humanity from a hundred feet overhead. The giant Buddha’s gilded countenance shone in the light from openings in each story of the nine-story pavilion fronting the cave, and from the long tapers that stood in large, sand-filled boxes at its feet. Unlike the other caves, which were dormant relics of an ancient past, the largest of the caves was still used by worshipers who came to pray and to light votive candles in memory of their departed ones or to bring themselves good luck. The atmosphere was otherworldly. The chimes dangling from the upturned eaves jingled in the wind; the joss sticks burning at the Buddha’s feet filled the air with a fragrant, mysterious haze; and the flames of the votive candles flickered in the dim light. Charlotte could easily imagine what it must have been like for the Silk Road traders who prayed here for a safe journey before setting out across the infamous Taklimakan Desert to the west, a nine-hundred-mile sea of massive, shifting dunes that was considered the most hostile desert in the world. She had been told that the name meant “Once you get in, you can never get out.”

  Charlotte was part of a scheduled tour of the Cave of Unequaled Height, which was directed by Emily. Emily was accompanied by her Chinese-American Heathcliff, who had come along not as her boyfriend but in his official capacity as an expert on Chinese sculpture. She had already explained that the giant Buddha—the largest of three colossi at the caves—had been constructed during the Tang Dynasty in the cave that was believed to have been the one built by the monk Lo-Tsun in 366.

  “To enable pilgrims standing on the floor of the cave to view the face of the statue from so far below, the head was enlarged out of proportion to the body,” Emily explained. “If you’ll look closely, you’ll also see that the features of the head—the eyelids, nostrils, lips, and hair coils—have been molded in high relief so that they will be clearly visible from below.”

  For a few minutes, the group, most of whom were with a party of German tourists, studied the statue as Emily explained about the Buddha’s ear lobes, which were elongated from years of wearing heavy earrings, and were a symbol of his renunciation of a life of the flesh for one of the spirit. “Now we’ll look at the Buddha from above,” said Emily.

  Flashlights in hand, she and Ned led the group up the stairway. It was a bit like visiting the Statue of Liberty. They climbed and climbed—past the knees, the waist, the chest, the face. At each level there was a platform for viewing the statue. Charlotte was most impressed by the hands: huge gilded slabs that must have been twenty feet long.

  Finally they reached the highest platform, from which they looked down on the gilded top of the Buddha’s head. It was covered with coins and cigarettes.

  “What are the cigarettes doing there?” asked one of the tourists.

  “They’ve been thrown there by people who’ve made wishes,�
�� Emily answered. “If your coin or cigarette stays on the Buddha’s head, your wish will come true. But if your coin or cigarette falls, your wish won’t come true.”

  “What happens to the money?” asked one of the Americans. It was a typically American question, Charlotte thought.

  “It goes toward the restoration of the caves,” Emily replied. She gestured for them to step up to the railing. “Please feel free to try it,” she said. “I have extra coins, if you don’t have any.”

  Taking a five-fen coin, which was worth about two and a half cents, out of her purse, Charlotte stepped up to the railing, closed her eyes, and made a wish. It was the same wish she had been making for the last forty-odd years: for a good property. Only in this case, she had something specific in mind.

  “Let a hundred flowers bloom,” she said to herself as she leaned out over the railing to throw her coin.

  It came neatly to rest in one of the Buddha’s tightly wound hair coils.

  7

  The tour of the Cave of Unequaled Height ended with the obligatory melon break, which took place every afternoon at around four, and was as much a part of the daily routine as afternoon tea in London. The ritual was performed by Ned. Squatting on the pavement at the foot of the cliff, he cut open a bunch of melons with the ornate knife that the men of the area wore strapped to their belts especially for this purpose. First he cut the end off of each melon to clean the knife, and then he cut it into slices, which Emily passed around. As Charlotte sat on a bench eating her melon, she pondered how to go about looking into Larry’s death. She was eager to go right out to the camp. But if Larry had left field notes, she would need an interpreter—she didn’t speak dinosaurese—and Bert, Dogie, and Orecchio had been holed up in the reception room with Peng all afternoon drafting some kind of formal agreement about dinosaur bones, of the if-you-find-it-you-can-keep-it-but-we-get-to-borrow-it-back-if-we-want-to variety. Then it struck her: Lisa. Lisa could help her—she knew as much about dinosaurs as any of the others. She quickly finished her melon, and, after thanking Emily and Ned, went in search of Bert and Dogie’s girl Friday.