Murder on the Silk Road

by Stefanie Matteson

  She found her a few minutes later in the courtyard of her building, which was adjacent to Charlotte’s. She was washing out her laundry under a spigot. Each of the courtyards had a spigot, which was where the guests washed their clothes, brushed their teeth, and even washed their hair. It reminded Charlotte of overnight camp. The water from the various spigots drained into a ditch, which ran all around the compound, and which served to irrigate the fruit trees, flower gardens, and trellises.

  “Hi!” said Lisa, as Charlotte approached. “Welcome to Foo Young’s laundry. I’m trying the Third-World approach,” she added, indicating the wet clothes that she had spread out on nearby bushes to dry.

  “Don’t they have a laundry here?” asked Charlotte.

  “Yes, but it takes three days and I don’t have three days worth of clean clothes.” She looked down at the pair of cutoffs she was wearing. “I’m down to my last pair of shorts. How’s everything in the art world?”

  “It’s not the art world I’m thinking about at the moment, but the dinosaur world. Specifically, Larry’s dinosaur world.”

  “What about it?” Lisa asked as she rinsed out a T-shirt.

  Charlotte explained about her doubts (they were really Reynolds’ doubts, but she was abiding by his request for discretion) as to the motive for Larry’s murder, and told her about her theory that Larry’s death was somehow linked to his claim that he had made the biggest find of the century.

  Lisa was skeptical. “I wouldn’t believe everything Larry told me,” she said. “He had a way of exaggerating things.”

  Charlotte felt a pang of disappointment. She hadn’t even considered the possibility that Larry might have exaggerated. But then she remembered his feverish glow of excitement—so bright that she’d thought he might even be on drugs. No—she was sure he had really found something. “Would you like to go out to Larry’s camp with me?”

  “To see if we can find what it was that he found?”

  Charlotte nodded.

  “I would love to,” Lisa cried. “I’ve been dying to get a better look at what’s out there. We were supposed to go surveying this afternoon, but then the boys [which was how she referred to Bert and Dogie] got tied up with Peng, and we weren’t able to. When do we leave?”

  “How about right now?” They had more than three hours until dinner, and the light was still good. Since there were no time zones in China—the entire country was on Beijing time—it didn’t get dark until eleven o’clock.

  “Great,” Lisa said as she spread the T-shirt out on a bush. “I’ve just got to get my sunglasses and a hat.”

  “Me too,” said Charlotte. “Meet you here shortly?”

  “Sounds fine.”

  Twenty minutes later they were turning at the twisted corpse of the mummified donkey onto the rutted track that led across the valley floor to Larry’s camp. Lisa was suitably equipped with camera, canteen, and binoculars.

  As they walked, Lisa chatted about fossil hunting. “The Protoceratops skull that Dogie found yesterday is a good sign,” she said. “To have found anything is a good sign, but to have found a nice skull right on your doorstep like that is a very good sign indeed. Sometimes you can spend weeks looking in a promising site and not come back with anything but a sunburn.”

  “Larry told us at dinner that night that the site was paved with fossils,” Charlotte commented as they climbed the series of terraces that led upward from the bed of the wide, shallow stream that paralleled the road.

  Lisa threw her a doubting look. “I heard him say that once before, about a site in Peru,” she said. “The area was paved with fossils: mammal bones—late mammals, too. Not to put down mammal bones—they can tell us a lot about mammalian evolution—but it wasn’t exactly the world’s greatest discovery.”

  “Forgive my ignorance,” said Charlotte. “But what exactly are you looking for here? I know that you’re looking for dinosaur bones, but are you looking for any particular kind of dinosaur bones? I guess what I’m asking is, is there any particular thesis that you’re trying to prove or disprove?”

  “The answers are yes and yes,” Lisa replied. “We are looking for particular kinds of bones, namely those of new species, and we are trying to prove a thesis, namely that Asia and North America were once connected, and therefore gave rise to similar kinds of dinosaurs.”

  “What about finding fossils above the K/T boundary layer?”

  “If you mean are we looking for fossils above the K/T boundary layer, the answer is no. If you mean would we like to find fossils above the K/T layer, the answer is yes. They aren’t something you look for; they’re something you come across. Teeth, bits and pieces. A fully articulated skeleton has never been found above the K/T boundary layer. That’s where the catastrophists get their ammunition. They say that bits and pieces alone aren’t enough to prove that the dinosaurs survived the catastrophe. Because they’re so small, they could have been washed away from their original sites and redeposited in more recent sediments.”

  “But the discovery of a fully articulated skeleton above the K/T layer would prove that the dinosaurs survived the catastrophe, wouldn’t it?” She went on to repeat what she had overheard Larry saying to Dogie.

  “Yes. A fully articulated skeleton would prove that dinosaurs survived the catastrophe, but not only did Larry not discover a fully articulated skeleton, nobody else is likely to either.”

  “Why not?” asked Charlotte as they passed the pair of towering stupas that framed the Cave of Unequaled Height. They cast long, narrow shadows in the soft, pink, late-afternoon light.

  “People have a mistaken notion about dinosaur fossils. They’re not easy to find. The fossil record isn’t rich. After all, these critters have been out of the picture for sixty-four million years. Take T. rex, to use a popular example. Only half-a-dozen skeletons of T. rex have ever been found. Combine the fact that a fully articulated skeleton is a rarity with the fact that the dinosaurs were already dying out at the time of the catastrophe, and you see that the chances of finding an intact skeleton above the K/T boundary layer are pretty slim. My guess is that Larry found a few bones. He would have delighted in dangling them in front of Orecchio’s nose.” A shadow crossed the angled planes of her face. “Too bad he didn’t get the chance.”

  After a few more minutes of hiking, they reached the point a hundred feet up the slope of the mountain where the jeep track turned to the north, and where they had rested the day before.

  For a few minutes, they looked out at the camp, which was situated on a plateau on the other side of a nearby butte.

  “Quite an establishment for one person,” commented Charlotte.

  “Yes,” said Lisa. “Roy Chapman Andrews all over again. Right down to the table linens and crystal brandy decanter. I’ll never forget the time he invited us to his camp for oysters and champagne—that was on a dig in Mexico. He’d had the oysters flown in from Veracruz.”

  “Tough life,” said Charlotte, and immediately regretted her words. It wasn’t a very gracious thing to say of someone who’d just been murdered.

  “Yes,” said Lisa. “It’s easy to be envious of somebody who has so much money. But nobody ever begrudged Larry his wealth. It was because of his generosity. Not only with his money, but with his spirit. It sounds corny to say, but his was a life that enriched those of everybody around him.”

  Charlotte felt even worse about her crass comment.

  A few minutes later they had arrived at the camp, which was being guarded by a young Chinese man. Reynolds delivered as promised. Upon seeing them, the man stood up, and ushered them into the work tent.

  On her earlier visit Charlotte had failed to notice the artworks that decorated the tent: a couple of Chinese landscape paintings hung from the back wall, and a huge temple jar stood next to a brass-studded trunk. “This place is really something,” she said as she looked around.

  “The art is a Roy Chapman Andrews affectation too,” Lisa explained. “RCA collected Oriental art; Lar
ry collected Oriental art.” She walked over to inspect the scroll paintings. “I expect he just bought these recently. Otherwise, he’d have shipped them back already.”

  For a few minutes, they looked at the paintings, which were exquisite. Charlotte especially liked one of a monk in a hut by a silver lake.

  “What is it that we’re looking for exactly?” she asked as they turned back to face the work area of the tent.

  “A field diary,” Lisa replied. She walked over to the big mahogany camp desk. “My guess is that it would be in here.” She ran her fingers over the dust-covered surface. “I remember this desk,” she said. Tears rose in her hazel eyes, and she blinked them back.

  Charlotte joined her at the desk, and started going through the drawers. “What would it look like?” she asked.

  “Usually, it’s just an ordinary three-ring binder. But in Larry’s case, you never know—probably hand-bound in Moroccan calf and stamped with gold.”

  “Like this?” said Charlotte. She pulled a tan notebook out of the middle drawer. It wasn’t hand-bound, but it was covered in leather and stamped with a pattern of dinosaurs in gold.

  “That looks like it,” Lisa said as Charlotte handed the book to her. Placing it on the desk in front of her, she took a seat in the leather swivel chair. “Did he mention when he made his big discovery?” she asked as she started leafing through the pages.

  “I gathered that it was on that day: Thursday, June twenty-eighth,” replied Charlotte, who was leaning over her shoulder.

  Lisa flipped through the pages to that day, and then looked up at Charlotte. The angled face under the flowered baseball cap was puzzled. “It’s not here!” she said. The word “here” came out in Jerseyese: heah.

  The page for Thursday, June twenty-eighth, had been ripped out. There was an entry for Wednesday, describing the areas in which Larry had been working on that day: location, type of soil, terrain, and so on. But nothing for Thursday except a few shreds of paper clinging to the spiral binding.

  “Maybe you’re right,” Lisa said. “Maybe he really did find something.”

  “But what?” asked Charlotte.

  “I’ve got an idea.” Lisa began rooting around in the drawers. “There should be a master map that’s marked off in grids, with each survey locality mapped. Maybe we can figure out something from the master map, if not what he found, then where he found it.” She had finished searching. “It’s not here,” she said.

  “What about there?” said Charlotte, who had spotted a cardboard tube leaning up against the back wall of the tent. Retrieving it from its storage place, she brought it over to the desk and slid out the contents: it was a large gridded map entitled “Dragon’s Tomb Site, Gansu Province, PRC.” Dragon’s Tomb was the name that Larry said he had given his site.

  “This is it, all right. Paleontologists like to name their sites,” Lisa explained. “It’s one of the privileges of discovering a site. Just like naming a new species is one of the privileges of discovering it.” She picked up a bone from the desk, and used it to hold down the corner.

  Charlotte reached out to touch the bone, which looked like a leg bone of some kind. “What’s this?” she asked. It was incised with Chinese ideographs that had been filled in with black ink to make them stand out.

  Picking it up, Lisa turned it over in her hands. “It’s a dragon bone,” she said. “They’re dinosaur bones—this looks like the femur of a duckbill to me—which were used by ancient soothsayers for divination. Here are the readings.” She pointed to the ideographs. “They’re from the I Ching.”

  “No kidding!” Charlotte exclaimed.

  “The bones were heated, which would cause cracks to appear,” Lisa explained. “The fortune was revealed by the pattern of the cracks.” Handing it to Charlotte, she added: “Someone probably brought it to Larry. It’s amazing what turns up when you put the word out that you’ll pay cash for old bones.”

  “It’s beautiful,” said Charlotte, running her finger over the polished ivory surface. The patterns created by the ancient calligraphy reminded her of the ornamentation on a fine piece of antique scrimshaw.

  Lisa had returned her attention to the map. “Look at all these localities! It looks as if the site really is paved with fossils.” She began counting the localities, each of which was marked with a red dot and numbered. “Thirty-seven in just a few days’ work.”

  “The problem is, which is the one we’re looking for?”

  “I think I’ve got it,” Charlotte said. “Presumably Larry numbered the localities consecutively as he went along, which would mean that the highest numbers should correspond to the most recently discovered ones.”

  “Of course! The one we’re looking for would be here,” said Lisa, pointing to the grid that included localities thirty-four through thirty-seven. “Unless he hadn’t gotten around to marking Thursday’s localities on the map.”

  “We can check that too,” said Charlotte. Lifting the map, she pulled the field diary out from underneath. “Look,” she said, pointing to the entry for Wednesday. “Here are thirty-one, thirty-two, and thirty-three.”

  “Which means that he was working on thirty-four, thirty-five, thirty-six, and thirty-seven on Thursday, and that one of those is the one we want,” added Lisa. She returned her attention to the map.

  “Can you tell where they are?” asked Charlotte.

  “They’re to the south of here; it looks like about three hundred yards,” Lisa replied. “On the north slope of a ravine, about halfway up.” She looked up at Charlotte. “Shall we check it out?”

  Charlotte smiled. “I don’t see why not.”

  Unlike the walk out from the guest house, the going to the south of the camp was treacherous. The terrain was a wild expanse of badlands eroded by ancient rainfall into ravines and gullies interspersed with bluffs, ridges, and buttes. There was no way to go directly from point A to point B. Their way was blocked at every turn by outcroppings that jutted into the sky, or by huge rounded boulders that cascaded down the slopes. Although the terrain was desolate, it had a stark kind of beauty. At this time of day it was a study in contrasts: the pink and lavender bands of sediment on the walls of the ridges contrasted with the brilliant blue of the sky; the deep shadows cast by the gullies and ravines contrasted with the glowing red of the summits, which had caught the rays of the declining sun; and dark cloud shadows glided effortlessly across rough surfaces of purplish-red sandstone.

  Lisa led the way. She had a long, lanky frame, and the easy, swinging stride of someone who was accustomed to walking. Like Bert and Dogie, she walked with her eyes focused on the ground, looking for fossils. But it didn’t take a practiced eye to find them. Even for Charlotte, they were easy to spot. The fragments of white bone were everywhere. They seemed to ooze out of the purplish-red earth like bones in a horror-story graveyard. The twenty-foot-square sections represented by the grids on the master map had been marked off with strings and stakes, and each locality had been marked with a number painted in red on a nearby rock. As they walked on, it became clear that Larry had chosen only the best of the localities to mark—the most complete, most readily accessible, and the most well-preserved. Hundreds of unmarked fossil fragments lay scattered around on the ground. Fossils that might have been treasures at a less productive site were worthless here, Lisa observed.

  Charlotte was reminded of the legend on Dogie’s T-shirt: So many dinosaurs, so little time. “Dogie would be calling for a lot of pijiu if he were here this afternoon,” she observed.

  “He’d have to bring in a whole keg,” Lisa agreed as she squatted down for the umpteenth time to examine a large skeleton. “Larry was right. It’s a fossil-hunter’s paradise out here. I’ve never seen anything like it. Here’s a duckbill,” she said, “complete except for the skull.”

  “What happened to the skull?”

  “Probably carried off by a carnivore. They liked the skulls; they were the tastiest part. Bert calls it Rogers’ Law of Fossil-Hunting: the
skull of the best specimens is never preserved. Unfortunately, it’s the anatomy of the skull that tells us the most about how dinosaurs are related to one another.”

  As they went along, Lisa talked about the stratigraphy of the site. The strata were undisturbed, she said, which meant that the ground hadn’t been disturbed by seismic activity or by ancient erosion, and therefore that the history of the landscape was clearly revealed by the patterns of the strata.

  “Here,” said Lisa, handing Charlotte the binoculars and pointing to the flank of a nearby butte that was lined with stripes of pale greenish-gray, soft orange-pink, and glowing golden ochre. “The K/T boundary layer is the dark narrow band that you see sandwiched between the layers of sandstone.”

  Charlotte studied the dark layer that ran evenly through the rock like a layer of chocolate filling in a vanilla layer cake.

  “The dark band is actually a seam of low-grade coal called lignite. It was formed from the soot that blanketed the earth as a result of the devastating wild fires that broke out after the catastrophe,” Lisa explained.

  “I thought you didn’t believe in the catastrophe theory,” said Charlotte as she handed back the binoculars.

  “I don’t. Or rather, we don’t. But that’s not to say that a catastrophe didn’t occur. We just don’t think that it was the sole cause of the dinosaurs’ extinction. A factor, maybe, along with other factors such as overpopulation, disease, falling sea levels, cooling climate, deforestation, competition from mammals—you name it. There are a million possibilities.”

  “Which do you subscribe to?”

  “All of the above, and a few more. I think the dinosaurs died out gradually from a combination of converging environmental factors, all of them mundane. That’s the trouble with the gradualism theory—it lacks the pizazz that the catastrophe theory has.”

  “In other words, whatever could go wrong, did.”

  “Yes, and all at the same time,” said Lisa. “Well, within a few million years, anyway. Which amounts to the same time, geologically speaking.”