Murder on the Silk Road

by Stefanie Matteson

“My mama called me Percy,” said Dogie.

  A few minutes later they had all bought paper cups of the cold ice cream. Everyone had vanilla—it was the only flavor. It was rich and creamy and much better than they ever would have expected, they agreed as they ambled on down the dusty street, trailed by the usual crowd of curious Chinese.

  They were turning a corner When Marsha suddenly grabbed Bert’s arm. “Come,” she said. “There’s something I want to show you. We still have time to kill before the bus comes back, don’t we?”

  Charlotte checked her watch. “Forty minutes.”

  A few minutes later they were examining the dragon bones at the herbalist’s kiosk. A lot of them turned out to be the bones of donkeys and sheep, but there were also a fair number of dinosaur bones, which Bert identified as those of common dinosaurs, mostly duckbills. They each bought at least one as a souvenir. Charlotte bought two—one for herself and one for Kitty. Hers was incised with the ideograph for “The Wanderer,” which looked like a jaunty figure in a big hat with an upraised leg frozen in mid-step.

  “Speaking of dragon bones,” said Bert as they wandered back toward the bus stop with their bags of bones, “I have some news for you lady detectives. Regarding the circumstances surrounding Larry’s death.”

  “What?” asked Marsha eagerly.

  “Lisa went over to Bouchard’s camp this morning. Crossed the DMZ, as we say. He invited her over to look at a scorpion. She gets along well with him, as she does with everybody. He’s an expert on arachnids—the spider family—and scorpions in particular. He was pretty excited about it—some new kind of giant scorpion that lives in colonies rather than by itself.”

  “And?” prompted Marsha.

  “He was showing her a picture of a scorpion in a book—pointing out how his new scorpion differed from its nearest relative, or something—when she spotted a piece of paper among his things.”

  “The missing page from Larry’s field diary?” said Charlotte.

  Bert nodded. “It was just as you suspected, Charlotte. He went over to Larry’s camp to investigate after we left. Finding Larry dead, he took advantage of the fact that no one was around to take the page from Larry’s field diary. He was planning to steal Larry’s claim.”

  Charlotte remembered her confusion at his open-mouthed reaction to her news that she and Lisa had found the T. rex skeleton: so he had been reacting that way because he had intended to claim Larry’s find as his own. Instead, all he had found was a new kind of scorpion.

  Bert dug around in the pockets of his jeans, and eventually produced a crumpled sheet of paper. “Here it is,” he said, handing it to Charlotte. “I thought you might want to take a look at it.”

  They stopped for a minute for Charlotte and Marsha to read the page from the diary. A lump rose at the back of Charlotte’s throat as she read the first lines. They said: “To north slope of ravine in A.M. Feel lucky—as if it’s going to be one of those days when something terrific might happen.”

  “The hundred-pound nugget of solid gold,” said Marsha.

  Bert nodded.

  The rest of the entry, made after Larry had found the Tyrannosaur, went on to describe the locality in great detail: the exact position, the type of soil, the lay of the land, and so on.

  “Lisa didn’t say anything then,” Bert continued after Marsha handed back the page. “But when she got back, she told Peng about it. He was incensed. He’d always been cool on Bouchard anyway, but he was under political pressure to include him. He confronted Bouchard, and he confessed. He’s been barred from the expedition. He’s packing up his things now.”

  Charlotte felt a bit sorry for him—the scorpion lover who couldn’t find a dinosaur fossil if he tripped over it. “What’s going to happen to him? Is his career as a paleontologist finished?”

  “I imagine so,” said Bert.

  “In my book, it’s no great loss,” said Dogie.

  “But he’ll still have his scorpions,” Bert added. “He’s been working on a book about scorpions for a decade. He says it will be the first book to encompass everything that’s known about them.”

  They had almost reached the bus stop when they were accosted by a pretty young woman who was selling paste jewels. Her wares glowed in the golden evening light: topazes, amethysts, and rose quartz in all shapes and sizes. Some were loose, others had been set into rings, bracelets, and earrings.

  “They remind me of the jewelry on the Bodhisattvas we saw this afternoon,” said Charlotte. Like the statues themselves, their richness was all the more striking by comparison with the dry, dusty, impoverished surroundings.

  “Yes,” said Marsha as she examined the trayful of stones. “The Prefecture of the Sands was known in ancient times for its high-quality paste jewelry. These must be the same kind of jewels that were sold to travelers on the Silk Road a thousand years ago. I love the pink ones,” she added.

  “Okay, ladies,” said Dogie, who stood by impatiently tapping the toe of his boot. “Time’s up. We’ve got to get back to the bus.”

  They left reluctantly, and promised the girl they would return.

  The minibus picked them up at the traffic circle a few minutes later. After passing the fields on the outskirts of town, and beyond the fields, the wavelike Southern Dunes, the minibus entered the narrow valley in which the caves were located. It was an eerie sight. The rays of the setting sun bathed the jagged ridge of the Mountain of the Three Dangers in a blood-red light. Below the mountain yellow dust devils swirled across the desert floor as they had the previous afternoon, but this time there were many more of them, and they were spinning much faster—hundreds of miniature cyclones, sucking sand into the air and then speeding off. The day before, they had reminded Charlotte of a few graceful couples waltzing expertly at a Roseland tea dance; today, they made her think of a dense pack of alienated youths gyrating wildly on a crowded dance floor.

  “Buran,” said the driver, gesturing at the menacing mass of yellow clouds that hung low on the horizon to the southwest, blocking out the setting sun.

  “What’s a buran?” asked Charlotte.

  “A black hurricane,” said Marsha. “One of the Gobi’s infamous sandstorms. The Chinese call them ‘flying sand and running Stones.’” She leaned forward to ask the driver a question.

  The driver gestured at the cloud bank as he answered.

  “He says he doesn’t know when it’s going to hit,” Marsha told them. “Only that it’s very close.”

  Knowing that their manuscript thief had started work at about two the other night, and figuring that after a week or more he must have worked out a routine, Charlotte and Marsha waited until one-thirty before taking up their positions in the adjacent cave.

  If the caves were spooky by day, they were even more so by night. The gilding on the fierce faces of the warriors guarding the Buddha gleamed in the light of their flashlights. Charlotte had fears about being attacked by bats, as she had once been in one of her early, and eminently forgettable, if not to say downright embarrassing films (in those days she couldn’t be choosy): I Married a Vampire. But Marsha reassured her that there were no bats in the desert. The harsh climate couldn’t support a large enough insect population for bats to feed on. The atmosphere was spooky too. Though the air was deathly still—the hot, dry wind that had blown all day had died down at nightfall—it seemed to vibrate, like a guitar string that has been stretched too tight and is about to snap. Even the animals were restive, alert as barometers to the change in the weather. The dogs of the small settlement yelped plaintively, and from the distant mountains came the menacing howl of wolves.

  “By the way,” said Marsha, once they were settled in the cave. “I checked Wang’s daybook this afternoon at the library.”

  “Was there a reference to the list of hiding places?” asked Charlotte.

  “Yes. It said, ‘On this day I have made a record of the hiding places for the manuscripts. I will hide my record in a statue of Hsuan-tsang in Cave 206.’ I forge
t. Is that the cave the Oglethorpe monk came from?”

  “Yes,” said Charlotte. Click. Another piece had snapped into place.

  They had been waiting only about ten minutes when they heard a light footfall on the floorboards of the gallery outside. They had expected their quarry to come from the direction of the guest house, but instead he came from the direction of the staircase to the north.

  “He’s coming this way!” whispered Marsha.

  In a minute, they heard the jangle of a ring of iron keys, followed by the click of a key in the lock. But it wasn’t the door of the adjacent cave that he was unlocking, it was the door of their own! Why would he be opening the door of their cave, unless he was searching them out?

  Charlotte felt Marsha’s icy fingers clutching her wrist.

  Placing her other hand over Marsha’s, Charlotte led her back to the inner chamber, where they hid behind the central pillar, with its awesome array of gilded deities. Without the flashlight, it was totally dark, except for a faint outline of light seeping in around the edges of the door. Charlotte could feel her heart pounding in her chest. What would they do if he tried to kill them? They weren’t armed except for … Reaching out for Marsha, she felt for her shoulder bag. She was sure she had been carrying it. There it was—a leather bulge at her side. She tugged gently on the shoulder strap.

  At Charlotte’s prompting, Marsha removed her hand from Charlotte’s wrist, and quickly rummaged around inside the bag. Seconds later, she pressed the awl into Charlotte’s hand, and then reached back into her bag for the corkscrew. Thank God she was her father’s daughter, Charlotte thought.

  They were just in time. As the heavy wooden door opened, the moonlight fell clearly on their pursuer’s face, revealing the high, sharp cheekbones, the round wire-rimmed glasses, and the long black hair drawn back into a ponytail. As Charlotte had suspected, it was Ned—Ned of the theory of why Peter had been murdered in a cave, she thought ironically. No tie-dyed T-shirt tonight—he was dressed entirely in black. They waited in near-panic for him to come after them, but instead he crossed the antechamber to the door leading to the adjacent cave. Charlotte expected him to go in, but he stopped just inside the door. Maybe he was just waiting to see if the coast was clear, she thought. But as the seconds ticked by, it dawned on her that he was there on the same mission they were. He had also come to spy on Cave 328! What in the name of Sam Hill—to use one of Howard Tracey’s favorite expressions—was going on?

  They didn’t have to wait long to find out. Although it seemed much longer, it was probably only five minutes before they again heard footsteps on the veranda. This time it sounded like more than one person. A few seconds later they again heard the jangle of a ring of iron keys, followed by the click of a key in the lock. Then they heard the squeak of the hinges as the door of he adjacent cave opened. First one person entered—slow, heavy steps and a lot of labored breathing, like an old steam engine—and then the other. After the two intruders had closed the door behind them, they switched on their flashlights. Charlotte could see the light from their beams sweeping across the floor of their own antechamber. She strained her ears to hear. One spoke a few words in Chinese, which were followed by a vague rustling, and finally by a grating noise accompanied by some more words in Chinese, these uttered in a commanding tone, as if the one were giving orders to the other. She waited for the ring of a hammer on a chisel, but it didn’t come. Whatever they were doing, it wasn’t removing the stone slab that blocked the opening of the cubbyhole.

  The labored breathing reminded her of someone. She was trying to think of who it was when one of the men coughed—a deep, phlegmy cough, followed by a hawking noise, and the hiss of spitting. She had heard that cough before—once while sitting on the bench at the foot of the cliff, the other time while drinking tea with Ho in the guest house reception room. It was Chu’s cough, the emphysematous cough of the heavy smoker. But who was the other man? And then she knew the answer to that question as well. The cough was followed by a few more steps, and then a dull thud, as if something was being set down on the floor of the cave. “Shit,” said the other man. It was a young voice—an American voice, but with a Chinese accent. The image rose in her mind of a young Chinese man in a red and white Boston University T-shirt; a slender, round-shouldered man with protruding front teeth and aviator glasses.

  Then it struck her what they were doing there. They were returning the sculpture of the Bodhisattva that Langdon Warner had taken sixty years before. It was Chu’s son, in collaboration with his father, who had been stealing the Dunhuang artworks from Western museums and returning them to China!

  A few minutes later they were gone.

  Charlotte was dying of curiosity. She wanted to rush in to take a look, but Ned beat her to the punch. They could see the light from his flashlight through the doorway. They could also hear him talking to himself. “Son of a bitch,” he muttered. If he wasn’t an accomplice, and it seemed clear that he wasn’t, then he must have been there to confirm his own suspicion that it was Chu’s son who had been stealing the artworks from Western museums. In which case, there was no risk in revealing themselves to him. Charlotte was trying to decide whether or not to do so when another sound caught her attention.

  It was a low, throbbing hum, like the faint sound of an engine heard through the wall of an adjacent building.

  Ned heard it too. “Jesus,” he said.

  A second later, the hum became a roar, and a blast of cold, sand-laden wind blew in through the door of the adjoining cave, which Ned had opened to leave. The force of the wind was so great that it took him several seconds to close the door behind him. The buran was finally upon them.

  Once Ned had closed the door, Charlotte switched on her flashlight and turned to Marsha, who was crouched behind her. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine. But I wouldn’t mind knowing what’s going on. If it wasn’t Ned who’s been removing the manuscripts from the cubbyholes, who was it? And why was Ned spying on them?”

  “Whoa. One question at a time. It was Chu and his son, and they weren’t removing anything. They were putting something back. Ned was here because he suspected what they were up to, and wanted to confirm his suspicion.”

  “If I could raise an eyebrow, I would,” said Marsha as she stood up.

  Gesturing for Marsha to follow her, Charlotte led the way into the adjacent cave, and then directed her flashlight into the inner chapel. “Look,” she said, aiming her beam at the third figure on the left, which knelt on a lotus blossom with its offerings to the Buddha.

  “The Fogg’s Bodhisattva!” said Marsha.

  “Yes,” said Charlotte. “Restored to its original home.”

  14

  As the winds raged outside, Charlotte reiterated what Chu had told her about his family, and particularly about its being his father who was responsible for the Nationalists’ looting of the art treasures from the Palace Museum. “My guess is that he hatched this scheme to steal the Dunhuang treasures from Western museums to atone for the sins of his family. He’s very grateful to the Communists.”

  “For incarcerating him in a prison camp for eleven years?”

  “He’s glad they didn’t kill him, as they did many other class traitors. He could have lost his life.” Her tone was ironic. “Instead he only lost an arm. He’s been rehabilitated, you see. He was blinded before by his bad class background. But after ten years of reeducation, he’s able to see the virtues of a system that allows someone with a class background such as his to rise to a position of such great responsibility.”

  Marsha sighed. “China is such a tragedy.”

  Charlotte continued. “The son was just the cog in the wheel of his scheme. Chu dictated what objects to steal, and the son stole them. Stealing the Bodhisattva from the Fogg must have been a difficult trick, but stealing the Dunhuang manuscripts from the British Museum and other Western libraries was probably pretty easy; it’s hard to keep track of so many, and libraries are notorious for the
ir bad security.”

  “Even the Fogg’s Bodhisattva wasn’t that difficult,” Marsha said. “I read about it at the time. The thief just deactivated the burglar alarm while the security guard was sleeping and walked off with the sculpture during the night. And Ned? What was he doing here?”

  “He’s the one who’s been tracking down the missing art works for Chu, with Boardmann’s help. Once Ned had located an artwork, Chu would send a letter asking for it back. Bunny Oglethorpe got one. In many cases, the theft came immediately on the heels of the letter. Ned must have put two and two together, and concluded that Chu was connected with the thefts.”

  The dull, throbbing hum outside the wall of the cave had been growing steadily louder, and was now accompanied by the rattle of sand and gravel lashing against the wooden door.

  “We’d better get out of here,” Marsha said. “I’ve heard these sandstorms can be like blizzards—the atmosphere can get so thick with sand that you can’t see your hand in front of your face.”

  As they were heading toward the door, Charlotte felt a blast of sand-laden air. The door had suddenly opened. She found herself facing the beam of an intruder’s torch—the roar of the wind must have obscured the noise of his key in the lock. She turned to flee to the adjacent cave, but it was too late.

  “Not so fast,” he growled, moving between her and the door.

  Charlotte couldn’t see who it was, at first. Like a deer caught in an automobile’s headlights, she was stunned by the brightness of his torch. As her eyes adjusted, she could make out the short, wiry build, and the white face with its neat black Vandyke beard. It was Victor Danowski. Of course! He had come for the manuscripts. If not Ned, therefore Victor.

  “I saw the light under the door,” he said as he inched closer. “If you ladies are going to play at being detectives, you ought to be more careful. But then, you won’t have to worry about that much longer.”

  It was then that Charlotte noticed that he was brandishing a knife—the same knife that had killed Larry Fiske, Peter Hamilton, and Averill Boardmann. “I wish Averill were here,” she remembered him telling her when they had talked outside the library. She had believed him.