Murder on the Silk Road

by Stefanie Matteson

  Charlotte worked next to a young member of the Chinese team who, ignoring the Beach Boys, hummed his own tune, which sounded suspiciously like “Ching, ching chow, chingee ringee roo, Chingeeroo was a Chineeman, Ring chingee choo.” She liked the work, which, like weeding the garden or washing windows or any other repetitive task, induced a relaxing, Zen-like state of mindlessness. After only an hour of scraping, she had exposed most of her section of four vertebra, each of which was nearly the size of a manhole cover. As she went along, she patched in with household cement, any small chunks that had dropped out, and put the pieces she couldn’t find a place for in a little pile.

  There was little conversation. It was too hot to talk and work at the same time. The landscape that had been like a dream world last night now looked as if it had been cast out of scrap metal by some brutalist sculptor. The edges of the rocks were hard and sharp, and the sky was flat and yellow. Occasionally, one of the young Chinese paleontologists would fetch a bucket of water from the well at Larry’s camp, and they would all douse their heads to keep cool.

  Keeping everything organized was Dogie’s job. He acted as informal site superintendent—deciding when to mix up the plaster, making sure that everyone had enough to drink, and keeping everybody happy and productive.

  “How’re ya doin’?” he asked, as he came around to check on Charlotte. Though the work required more elbow grease than skill, it was Dogie who had given her the limited amount of instruction she had required.

  “Pretty well, I think,” she replied. “I just have to clean out a little more from underneath here.” She pointed to where she had dug the sandstone out from underneath her section of vertebrae.

  He squatted down next to her. “Looks like this fella had a touch of arthritis,” he said. He pronounced it arthuritis. “See how these two vertebrae are fused. Back problems were common among the big dinosaurs.”

  “No kidding!” said Charlotte. In the course of her work, she had been developing an affection for this giant beast, who may have been among the last of the great Tyrannosaurs to walk the earth. Now that she knew he had a bad back, he became almost human to her.

  “Supportin’ eight tons or so of weight was one helluva job for the spinal column,” Dogie continued. “These are the back ligaments here.” He pointed to the ossified ropes that ran along the spinal column.

  “I wondered what those were.”

  “They held the backbone in place, like hawsers. The big dinosaurs suffered from fallen arches too; their arches collapsed from their weight.” He stood back up, and held out a plastic bag. “I’m takin’ up a collection—any bone fragments you can’t find a place for.”

  Charlotte handed him the pieces from her pile, which he numbered and put into the plastic bag. Then he moved on to her young Chinese companion, and Charlotte sat back to rest.

  The landscape that lay spread out below her was dry today. There was no lake—only dust devils, dozens of them, swirling and dipping. Beyond the dust devils rose a fortress, complete with battlements and turrets that seemed to rise and sink, as if they were floating. It was another mirage: the shimmering heat had transformed the cliff face into a picture out of a storybook.

  She had known many people who loved the desert of the American Southwest. “There’s something about the desert,” they said, “that makes you feel more alive.” But she wasn’t among them. In her mind, there was something about it that gave her the creeps. Sand, wind, mirages, sharp rocks, thorny plants, eerie dust devils. To her, it was a hostile, spooky environment.

  Turning back to her work, she began digging out the next vertebra. She was removing a big chunk of rock when a clunking sound told her that her trowel had struck bone. Unlike the vertebrae, which were covered with spiny projections that she now realized were the attachment sites for the dinosaur’s powerful ligaments and muscles, this bone was straight and smooth.

  When she had exposed a fair amount of it, she signaled to the young Chinese man next to her, whose name was Yeh, to pass over the empty whiskey bottle filled with hardener that they shared. The hardener was liberally poured on the fragile bones at regular intervals to keep them from disintegrating. As he was passing the bottle to her, Yeh suddenly stopped in mid-action to stare at the bone she was working on. Then he pointed excitedly at his teeth. Like those of many Chinese, they were stained brown from drinking tea. She was thinking about how having your teeth cleaned was still a luxury in China when she realized what he was saying: she had discovered the dinosaur’s tooth!

  Yeh had stood up, and was signaling to the rest of the crew to come over and take a look. Dogie arrived first. “Whadda we have here?” he asked. Stepping up to the hole in which Charlotte had been working, he peered into it to see what the fuss was all about. Then he dropped to his knees, grabbed Charlotte’s trowel, and started scraping away like an energetic fox terrier going after buried backyard treasure. After a few seconds of this, he leaned back and let out a holler: “Whoopee, ti yi yo, git along little dogies,” he cried to the heavens. Taking off his Stetson, he waved it in the air. Then he slapped Charlotte on the back, and yelled to Lisa: “Lisa, git this lady a beer!”

  “What have I found?” asked Charlotte, as Bert squatted down next to Dogie. Next to him was Peng, who jabbered excitedly with the other Chinese.

  “You’ve uncovered a tooth of our reptile friend here,” said Bert, who was as quiet as Dogie was loud. “And it’s attached to a great big, beautiful skull, which is back in the hill here.” He indicated where the rest of the skull was buried. “It was just as I suspected: the skull detached from the lower jaw and came to rest with the snout up against the spinal column.”

  Charlotte looked up at Dogie as Lisa handed her the beer that she had fetched from a nearby cooler. “Have I paid back my credit?”

  “I’ll say you’ve paid it back,” Dogie said. “In spades. I’d estimate that we owe you another case, at least.” He turned to the crew. “Okay, troops. Get your picks, get your trowels. We’re gonna uncover some dirt.”

  Charlotte felt lightheaded, and it wasn’t just from the heat: it was the thrill of discovery. Now she knew what Bert had been talking about. She had been the first person to see this bone in sixty-three million years.

  Instead of breaking during the midday heat, they kept on working, eager to see what lay buried in the hillside. They divided into two shifts. While one worked, the other rested and drank. Heat stroke was an ever present risk.

  After an hour and a half, they decided to quit. They had partially exposed a near-perfect skull, one of only a handful of skulls of the giant carnivore ever found. It was about five feet long, as long as a standard desk. The huge serrated teeth were the size of bananas.

  With its giant empty eye sockets, it reminded Charlotte even more of Ozymandias. “He reminds me of a poem,” she said as they were standing around taking a last look at their find.

  “What poem?” asked Bert.

  “Ozymandias of Egypt,” she said. “It’s by Shelley.

  “I never heard of it, but that doesn’t mean anything,” Bert said. “I never got around to studying English literature.”

  “I didn’t either, but I had to recite it in a movie once.” Her finishing-school education had taught her how to balance a book on her head and choose the right frock, but there were embarrassing gaps in the scope of her knowledge that regularly cropped up to annoy her, like English literature.

  “Let’s hear it,” said Dogie.

  Her stage comprising a slab of rock above the quarry, Charlotte proceeded to recite the poem, stopping after every couple of lines for Peng to translate:

  I met a traveller from an antique land

  Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

  Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,

  Half sunk, a shatter’d visage lies, whose frown

  And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command,

  Tell that its sculptor well those passions read.

  Which yet survive, st
amp’d on these lifeless things,

  The hand that mock’d them and the heart that fed;

  And on the pedestal these words appear:

  ‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

  Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’

  Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

  Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,

  The lone and level sands stretch far away.

  Her recital at an end, Charlotte stepped down and joined the others at the edge of the quarry. She was met with hearty applause.

  “That’s a good name for him,” said Lisa. “Our T. bataar is hereby christened Ozymandias: Ozzie for short.”

  “Gan bei, Ozzie,” said Dogie, and everybody drank. They were all a little punchy from the heat and the excitement of finding the skull.

  “You know,” said Bert quietly, as he squatted down next to Ozzie’s skull with a beer bottle in his hand, studying his shatter’d visage, “I don’t think our friend Ozzie is a Tyrannosaurus bataar.”

  “Not a T. bataar! What do you think he is, then?” asked Dogie. He crouched down next to Bert to get a better look.

  “Look at this row of ridged irregularities on top of the nasal bones,” said Bert, pointing to the prominent ridges that ran down the front of the skull. “They’re much more pronounced than those of a T. bataar.”

  “What is it, a horn boss?” asked the pith-helmeted Peng, who had joined Bert and Dogie next to the massive skull.

  “I think so,” said Bert. “A horn boss that I suspect supported a row of hornlets. Probably something like the horns of a Ceratosaurus, only smaller.”

  “What’s a Ceratosaurus?” Charlotte asked Lisa.

  “A horned dinosaur,” she replied. “Something like a rhino.”

  “Judging from the horn morphology, I suspect we’ve got a brand new species of Tyrannosaurus on our hands,” said Bert. “A knobby-nosed Tyrannosaurus.”

  Charlotte and Marsha decided not to go to the caves that night. They hadn’t slept much the night before, which, combined with a full day’s activities, had left them worn out. Besides, their man wasn’t going anywhere until he had finished emptying out the cubbyholes in all twelve of the caves on the list, and he was only up to the eighth. But they ended up not going to bed early after all. Dinner turned out to be a celebration. In addition to wine and beer, there were many toasts of mao tai, the potent Chinese vodka-like liquor that Dogie called tarantula juice. “This stuff would raise blood blisters on a rawhide boot,” he said. They toasted Ozzie of the bad back and fallen arches. They toasted Larry, Bert, Peng, and Charlotte—in fact, they toasted anyone who offered the least excuse for a drink. After dinner, they retired to the terrace for a repeat performance of the show put on by the guest house staff, this time for the benefit of a group of new arrivals from Japan. After the performance, Emily again invited the guests to contribute. Buoyed by their discovery and emboldened by the alcohol, the Chinese paleontologists were the first to take the stage. To everyone’s delight, they sang “Red River Valley” in English accompanied by Dogie on the harmonica. They were led by Peng, who had traded in his pith helmet for a cowboy hat, a gift from Bert and Dogie. After that, Charlotte was persuaded (not that she was ever reluctant to mount a stage) to repeat her rendition of Ozymandias.

  But the most popular act was a song that Dogie composed on the spot about “a Tyrannosaur named Ozz with a bit of a schnozz with a yozz for a duckbill named June.” Marsha translated for the Chinese, but without the puns and double entendres, it must have lost a lot, because they seemed baffled as to what the Americans found so hilarious.

  They were still laughing when Ned took the stage. He announced that he would sing two classical songs from the Tang Dynasty, whose scores had been discovered among the manuscripts in the caves. The first was called “Golden Sands of Shachow.” Shachow, he explained, was the ancient name for Dunhuang, and meant “Prefecture of the Sands.” He was well into the song when Charlotte realized that he was accompanying himself on a pear-shaped stringed instrument that was made out of wood inlaid with figures of mother-of-pearl.

  The Artful Dodger had said he’d seen a foreigner carrying a lute talking to Feng. Could that foreigner have been Ned? She had seen Ned disembarking from the shuttle bus later that afternoon—the afternoon of the day she had found Larry’s body—but he hadn’t been carrying a lute. If he had been carrying a lute earlier that day, what had he done with it? She nudged Marsha. “Look at Ned’s instrument!” she whispered. “Is it a pipa?”

  Marsha looked up at the instrument and then back at Charlotte, and nodded.

  Charlotte leaned over again to whisper in Marsha’s ear. “But the boy said it was a foreigner who was carrying the pipa, and Ned looks Chinese,” she said as the haunting melody of the ancient song filled the air.

  “He’s fourth- or fifth-generation Chinese-American,” Marsha whispered back. “There’s a big difference. To a Chinese kid who only rarely sees foreigners, his clothes, his demeanor, and his accent would have made him seem as foreign as you or me.”

  As Charlotte looked at Ned, the eyes behind his round wire-rimmed glasses closed as he lovingly plucked the strings of his beautiful instrument, she tried to imagine him as the person who had killed Larry, planted the shortwave radio on Feng to make it look as if he had done it, and then killed Peter. He was credible as a suspect: he had access to the caves and he knew the value of the manuscripts. But somehow she couldn’t imagine Emily’s gentle Heathcliff as a murderer. If it was Ned who the Artful Dodger had seen with Feng, it was more likely that he had been giving him a handout.

  It was after midnight by the time Charlotte got to bed. “Fortify the mind with gladness and good cheer,” the I Ching had said. She had most certainly done that. But she would still have to wait until the clouds broke.

  13

  Although the I Ching had predicted she would be spending her time waiting, the next day was actually fairly eventful. After being awakened by the buzzing of flies at the crack of dawn (the crack of dawn actually wasn’t so bad, coming as it did at close to eight), Charlotte was startled to hear a loud knock on her door. She opened it to find Chu’s son standing there in his aviator glasses and Boston University T-shirt. He was there to tell her that she had a telephone call from the United States. After flinging on a robe, she followed him back through the guest house’s maze of paths and courtyards to the lobby to take the call. To her surprise, the connection was as clear as a bell. Though conditions in China were generally backward by comparison with those of Western countries, she had often been pleasantly surprised by such efficiencies as telephone connections that were fast and clear, souvenir stands that accepted Western credit cards, and laundry that was returned the same day, neatly folded and stacked.

  Its high-toned accent unmistakably identified the voice that had traveled halfway around the globe as that of Bunny Oglethorpe. “Charlotte Graham, is that you?” the voice asked.

  Charlotte replied that it was.

  “I didn’t think I’d be able to reach you so easily. This is Bunny Oglethorpe. I just got a call from Chief Tracey. He told me that he’d just heard from the New York police. They have a special fraud squad that investigates art thefts. They found our sculpture.”

  “Where?”

  “At the country house of a professor at the Oriental Institute who was murdered last April during a robbery attempt. The house is somewhere up on the Hudson, near Catskill. The heirs found it when they were cleaning out. When they took it to be appraised, the dealer informed them that it had been stolen.”

  “What was the professor’s name?” asked Charlotte.

  “Boardmann,” she said. “Adrian or Avery or something like that.”

  “Averill,” said Charlotte. So much for getting the problem of the Oglethorpe sculpture off her mind, she thought. Instead of having one less thread in the tangled skein, she now had more than ever.

  “Do you know him?”

  “I know of him.
He was scheduled to lead the study tour that I’m on. When he died, the Institute was looking for someone to take his place, and my stepdaughter, Marsha Lundstrom, asked me. She’s also a professor there. I’m on this trip as his replacement.”

  “What a coincidence!” said Bunny.

  “Maybe,” said Charlotte, for whom there had recently been a lot of coincidences. “Do the police think he stole the sculpture?”

  “Yes, but out of what motive, they don’t know. Maybe he was planning to sell it after some time had passed. Or maybe he just wanted to live with it, like that man who stole the Rodin bronze from the Victoria and Albert.”

  “But why that sculpture?”

  “That’s what I asked. I’m very fond of our monk, but it isn’t a Rodin. Unless he just stole it because it was easy to steal, and, being a professor at the Institute, he knew about the series of thefts of artworks that had come from Dunhuang and thought he could pass it off as part of that.”

  “Maybe,” said Charlotte.

  Bunny sighed. “Anyway, I thought I ought to let you know. I didn’t want you going to a lot of trouble trying to find it. It’s on its way back to its place of honor in the garden. With a hole in its back, but otherwise okay.”

  “A hole in its back?”

  “Yes. The dear professor smashed a hole in its back. Which is one reason why the stealing-it-because-you-want-to-live-with-it theory doesn’t make sense to me. Why would someone deliberately vandalize a piece of sculpture that they stole because they wanted to live with it?”

  “The damage couldn’t have been accidental?”

  “I haven’t seen the sculpture yet myself. It’s due back here on Friday. But the New York police told Chief Tracey that it looked deliberate. They thought he had used a hammer. But they also said it looked as if it could be easily repaired.”