I felt a warm glow as the Celestial Master hobbled toward a side door. What a marvelous stroke of luck! Master Li would have been deader than Ma Tuan Lin if eyes could kill, but all the mandarins could do was glare. We took a corridor to a small office at the end, looking out over a small simple garden. It was a worn and battered sort of room, crowded but comfortable, with mementos from the time of my great-great-great-grandfather, and the Celestial Master gave a groan of relief as he let himself down on a cushioned bench and relaxed his grip on the canes. He went straight to the point.
“It was the night before last, Kao—morning, actually, around the double hour of the sheep. I couldn’t sleep, as usual, and the moon was bright and you know how warm it’s been. I got up and into a robe and grabbed my canes and made it to the dock and my boat. Rowing’s the only exercise I can handle now. I get practice with the canes,” he said, making cane-shuffling gestures that really were like rowing. “I rowed to Hortensia Island, where I have a special dock and path I can manage. I was taking a walk through the woods, admiring the moon and wishing my mind could still create poetry, when I heard the damnedest scream. Then I saw Ma Tuan Lin running toward me.”
The saint tilted his head so he was looking down the sides of his nose at Master Li, and a faint smile tugged at his lips.
“Here comes the senile part, perhaps. I’m not sure, Kao, I’m just not sure. I can only tell you what I saw or thought I saw. To begin with, Ma was being chased by a little wrinkled man older than you, maybe even older than me, but who was running as lightly as a child, making sharp sounds that sounded like ‘Pi-fang! Pi-fang!’ “
“What?” Master Li asked.
The Celestial Master shrugged. “No meaning, just sound. Pi-fang!” Ma was holding something in his hands that looked like a birdcage, an empty one, and he let loose another scream of terror that made a pair of nesting grouse come shooting up through the darkness with their wings going pop-pop-pop! and they flapped right across my face and made me fall backward into some tall weeds, and that’s probably what saved my life. The little old man didn’t see me as he ran past. He waved his right hand and something started to glow in it, bright red, and then he hurled a ball of fire that struck Ma Tuan Lin square in the back.”
Master Li choked and pounded himself on the chest. “A ball of fire?” he asked when he’d recovered.
“I know, I know. The old boy’s finally had the last bit of his brains turn to butter,” the Celestial Master said wryly. “I’m telling you what I thought I saw. Ma was dead before he hit the ground—I didn’t need an autopsy to tell me that—and the little old man ran past him, leaping lightly as a leaf in a wind, and then there was a bright flash that blinded me. When my eyes cleared there wasn’t any little old man. Ma was lying there with that cage thing sticking up through tall grass beside him, and his back was smoking, and I looked every which way. No little old man. Then I heard a high distant ‘Pi-fang!’ and I looked up and saw a great white crane flying away across the face of the moon.”
The saint drew a deep breath and spread his hands wide apart. “Think that was crazy? I haven’t even started.”
“I can hardly wait,” said Master Li.
“Kao, beside the pavilion Ma uses on Hortensia Island there’s a big pile of earth from some kind of construction project that was canceled, and it wasn’t until I saw the pile that I realized I was at the pavilion,” the Celestial Master said. “What made me look toward the pile was a small sound coming from it, and I knew I’d lost my mind for certain when a terrible claw came crawling out into the moonlight. Then another claw followed it, and earth fell away and something big heaved up into the moonlight, and when the dirt dropped off it I was looking at the prettiest ch’ih-mei to appear in China in a century or more. A classic vampire ghoul, Kao, and it was looking up at that crane in the sky. Then the crane dwindled to a speck and disappeared, and the ch’ih-mei looked down and saw Ma Tuan Lin. In two strides it had reached him, and I swear it ripped the head right off the body! It lifted the gory trophy and took a big bite, but I didn’t see any more. I was crawling backward, sort of pushing with my canes, hoping the creature’s chewing noises would drown out any sound I made, and I made it safely back into the trees. Then I got to my boat and rowed back and gave the alarm, and that’s all I can tell you.”
Master Li nodded appreciatively.
“To whom did you give the alarm?” he asked.
“The emperor has an officer attached to my household staff. A nursemaid, I suppose, but useful at times.”
“And you told him what had happened?”
“I had to,” the Celestial Master said. “He didn’t believe a word of it, of course.”
“Well, I do.” Master Li grinned and winked. “I didn’t say I believe all of it, but I’ll keep an open mind and who knows? I’ve come to accept some incredible things in my time.”
The Celestial Master grinned back, and then winced and tapped his head.
“Tired, Kao, tired. The time I have left is about as limited as my remaining brains, and if you want anything more from me today you’d better get it now,” he said wearily.
Master Li leaned forward.
“What I want,” he said, speaking slowly and clearly, “is a written commission to investigate this matter and anything that may be connected with it, with the full authority of, and signed by, the Celestial Master.”
Not long afterward Master Li led the way out through a series of side doors, and then around through the gardens to the courtyard and our palanquin. He was clearly depressed when he should have been exhilarated, and I looked at him questioningly.
“Well, Ox, we can forget about getting a case like a great white whale,” he said.
“Sir?”
“I owe the mandarins an apology. They were hushing up the matter and hoping to cram the corpse into a tomb before busy-bodies like me came along, for the very sound reason that China’s greatest living saint has confessed to the murder of Ma Tuan Lin,” Master Li said sadly.
3
Master Li was getting weary, and once I had rowed over to Hortensia Island and tied the boat at a dock he had me bend over so he could climb up on my back. He weighs no more than a schoolboy, and his small feet fit easily into my tunic pockets, and I’m so accustomed to carrying the old man around that without him I feel undressed. I took the paths he indicated toward the pavilion where Ma Tuan Lin, according to the Celestial Master, had met his death.
The island has changed beyond belief in the short time since that day. New construction is everywhere, and scarcely an acre of wooded land remains. Then it was almost totally given over to trees and shrubs and grass, and outside of the Yu (much more about which later) there was only the collection of astronomical instruments first established by the great Chang Heng and fewer than twenty secluded pavilions used as retreats by eminent mandarins. It was peaceful and beautiful, and we saw and heard nobody at all as I followed the paths through the trees. Ahead was a grassy clearing and Master Li had me stop and set him down. He reached inside his robe and pulled out his wine flask and swilled moodily, spitting the pulpy residue at flowers. I expected them to shrivel and die beneath the bath of pure alcohol, but for some reason they didn’t.
“Ox, I must congratulate you on your self-control. Not one single question,” he said with a wink. He knows he’s trained me well. “Let’s look around. I’m betting the Celestial Master actually did see our vampire ghoul remove Ma Tuan Lin’s head, thus greatly improving Ma’s appearance, and I’ll be disappointed if proved wrong.”
We’d already learned that the body had indeed been found and removed from here, and as we walked forward I saw the outline of the pavilion and then I saw a huge pile of fresh earth beside it, and finally I saw something black and moving, sharply outlined against a green background. It was a cloud of flies buzzing around sticky black streaks that had recently been red, matting the grass. We walked to the pile of earth and found signs of a very recent disturbance that might have been c
aused by a creature crawling out, and I found sandal prints in a soft spot in the path close to the pile. The toes had dug in and sprayed dirt backward, which would be consistent with somebody running for his life, and I soon found another soft spot with a huge print on it that might have been made by a creature like a vampire ghoul.
“The Celestial Master would have no reason to invent an item like a birdcage. Let’s find it,” Master Li muttered.
We found the cage in tall grass close to the bloodstains. The sage picked it up and whistled appreciatively as he looked at it, and even I could see the workmanship was superb, and very old. It couldn’t have held a bird, however. The bars were oddly spaced with at least one gap through which a small bird would have escaped, and a peculiar maze of wires ran across them. A single bead was strung on the wires and with a little dexterity it could be made to slide this way and that, but Master Li said one bead couldn’t possibly fulfill enough functions to serve as a primitive abacus. The bars were decorated with a jumble of symbols of every description, from animals to utensils to astronomy, and Master Li shook his head and shrugged.
“I have no idea what it was used for but it’s almost unbelievably ancient,” he said. “Say what one will about Ma Tuan Lin, he had a gift for discovering valuable artifacts. He was a considerable collector and claimed to be an authority, and maybe we’ll find something about this in his papers.”
He tied the cage to his waist with his long yellow sash and stood looking around for a moment with his hands on his hips.
“My dear old friend and teacher rowed over here and took a walk in the moonlight,” he said in a slow melancholy voice. “As fate would have it, he arrived at this spot just in time to see a monster chasing its dinner, meaning Ma Tuan Lin, and he did indeed see the creature rip Ma’s head off. Ox, you’ve heard the Celestial Master. You know he couldn’t stand Ma Tuan Lin. Deep inside he felt guilty for not grieving at a terrible murder, and the guilt worked through a weary mind and projected images, and the result was that he really does believe his story about—pay attention—’a little wrinkled man older than you, maybe even older than me, but he was running as lightly as a child.’ All right, what kind of hat does the Celestial Master wear?”
I thought about it. “It’s a white hat, tall and conical, tapering to a point,” I said.
“It’s called Hat of Nine Yang Thunder,” Master Li said dryly. “It’s meant to resemble the beak of a crane. Did you notice his robe?”
“It was a Taoist robe, except for the First Rank emblem,” I said.
“Which is?”
“A crane.”
“Yes indeed, and did you notice his ring of office?” Master Li asked.
“Some kind of large red stone,” I said.
“It’s a garnet called Ball of Retributive Lightning,” said Master Li.
“Oh-oh,” I said.
“Oh-oh indeed,” said Master Li. “Ox, the Celestial Master projected himself as a tiny wrinkled old man who could throw away his canes and run lightly as a child as he massacred bastards like Ma Tuan Lin, blasting them with his ring of office and then transforming himself into the crane he carried on his robe and hat, flying safely away across the moon, like in dreams. The mandarins feared that the wrong people might take that tale and cause a terrible scandal, but you and I are not going to be the wrong people.”
“No, sir,” I said.
“We’ll go through the motions of an investigation,” the old man said. “If nothing else I have the Celestial Master’s authentic signed commission to show for it, which is scarcely to be sneered at.”
“Yes, sir,” I said, and then made something of a point of shutting my mouth. (“That,” I added silently, “is the understatement of the decade. After he finishes doctoring a document like that he can present a pass allowing him to wander in and out of the imperial treasury with forty mule carts, eighty peasants with shovels, and a derrick.”)
There was nothing more to be found at the scene of the murder, so Master Li led the way into Ma Tuan Lin’s pavilion. I was rather surprised to find it was a simple austere place: one large room and a bathing chamber, opening to a small enclosed garden and a vista overlooking the lake. Master Li explained that mandarins like Ma were not allowed to build palatial establishments on the island. All the pavilions were identical, designed for peaceful contemplation, and were the property of the emperor. We looked through the mandarin’s papers and collection of books and scrolls, and all we found were notes in scholarly shorthand I couldn’t read and Master Li said were pure Ma Tuan Lin: idiotic garbage. The only point to the search was to see if there was any information about a peculiar old cage, so Master Li made it quick. Just as we were about to leave he stopped in the doorway.
“I almost forgot,” he said. “Fifty or sixty years ago I took one of these pavilions for a week or two, and since they’re all the same…”
He let the sentence hang in the air as he turned and walked back to the small wooden altar against the east wall.
“They showed me where to stick jewelry or whatever if I didn’t trust the gardeners,” he said, and he reached out and pushed a wooden panel and then slid it aside and stuck his hand into a tiny hole. “I’ll be damned,” he said, because when his hand came out he was holding a small thick notebook.
We sat at the table while he went through it. Not even Master Li could make sense of the entries because they were simply series of numbers and marks indicating percentages, and there was no indication what the numbers represented.
“The total goes up and up, dramatically, and all of a sudden the percentage doubles, and all I can say is if it’s Ma’s money he was getting rich enough to buy an estate on Coal Hill,” Master Li said. Then he turned the last page and pulled something from the notebook. “Ox, look at this!” he exclaimed happily.
There was the cage we had found, in the form of a small ink rubbing apparently taken from an old stone surface. I say stone as opposed to metal because blurred and blotched places indicated a worn chipped surface, but it was clear enough to unquestionably represent the cage. Master Li hoped for some explanatory text when he turned the rubbing over, but instead he found Flying White shorthand, which he translated for me.
“ ‘Eight! I’ve found all eight! Now they cannot deny me the principal share, and my bones shall lie on White Dragon Peak!’ “
“Sir, do you know what that means?” I asked.
“Not really, but the last part is interesting,” he said. “White Dragon Peak is the principal landmark rising above a large and rich valley near Shensi which Ma Tuan Lin—falsely, I always assumed—claimed was once his family’s ancestral estate. This sounds as though he hoped to buy it back, and that would take an incredible amount of money.”
We soon left and I rowed without incident back to the city. We stopped at Master Li’s shack long enough to hide the old cage beneath the platform that keeps our pallets dry when storms send water washing across the floor, and then he had me carry him to the Wineshop of One-Eyed Wong. (I’ve described Wong’s in previous memoirs and it doesn’t play a significant role here, so I’ll simply say it’s a place in the criminal area of Heaven’s Bridge where Master Li can find useful people, and he found some now.) He had a couple of forgers make fast copies of Ma Tuan Lin’s rubbing of the cage, and then he got a pack of street boys to take the copies to every first-rate burglar he could think of.
“You see,” he said when we were eating dinner at his private table, “there’s a chance that Ma was referring to cages rather than a hundred other things when he wrote on the back of the rubbing. If so, he had found eight of them. Where are the other seven?”
I shrugged. “His office, his house.”
“Keep in mind, Ox, that the cage we have is very ancient and superbly made. It’s a remarkable artifact, and if Ma Tuan Lin was holding eight of them he would certainly have made his extraordinary collection the excuse for banquet after banquet, at which he could boast of the infallible instinct and keen trained intellect
that enabled him to find treasures where lesser men failed. So far as I know he did no such thing, and let’s remember the wording. ‘Eight! I’ve found all eight! Now they cannot deny me the principal share, and my bones shall lie on White Dragon Peak!’ “
“Sounds like he had partners in a business enterprise,” I said hesitantly. “Sounds like the cages would be valuable to them, so much so he’d get the principal share in whatever the venture was.”
“That’s exactly what it sounds like, and thus he would give cages to partners in exchange for percentages of the business. Perhaps the very existence of the cages would be kept secret, perhaps not, and if not, we will consider an interesting possibility,” the sage said. “Ma Tuan Lin would never dream of going into partnership with lesser mortals. His partners would have to be mandarins of his own rank or higher, and such men tend to collect rare items and display them in their homes to envious visitors.”
From his silence I judged he wanted me to see how far my sieve-like brains could carry the thought, so I said, “If Ma Tuan Lin gave cages to his partners and his partners put them on display, the burglars of Peking can tell you exactly where the cages are.”
“Good boy,” said Master Li. “Every mansion in town has been scouted again and again by burglars using inside help. It would be asking too much to find all seven, but if we can find even one I’ll satisfy a bit of curiosity by questioning the owner. If not, I think we’ll just forget about cages and worry about what sort of a report we can give to the Celestial Master.”
Within an hour we had a visit from a gentleman with shifty eyes and an interesting pattern of knife scars where his nose used to be, and an hour after that we were back inside a palatial palanquin, being carried up Coal Hill.
It was night, with a huge round moon that had orange circles around it, and Coal Hill was just starting to come to life. I never cease to be fascinated by the spectacle of the wealthy arranging to be seen seeing people who have been seen seeing people worthy of being seen seeing, if that’s the proper way to phrase it. First it’s a glow of light approaching, and then a rhythmic “Hut-chu, hut-chu, hut-chu!” and the foreman appears leading an army of jogging grooms carrying torches. Another glow follows, and another chant—“Mi-chi, mi-chi, mi-chi!”—comes from trotting servants dressed like royalty who surround aristocratic palanquins and carriages, carrying brilliantly colored lanterns. “Yi-cha, yi-cha, yi-cha!” chant yellow-gowned eunuchs who mince beside the principal palanquin swinging censers of smoking incense, and one may be lucky enough to see a flash of emerald and turquoise, glittering gems and glowing jade, gold-stitched silk and embroidered satins, a crimson gleam from a long lacquered fingernail, a liquid glance from a languid eye, and then trumpets blast “Ta-ta-taaaaa! Ta-ta-taaaaa!” and heralds puffed like peacocks in their pride prance forward and turn down the awaiting lane where other trumpets answer “Tum-teeeee! Tum-teeeee!” and lights appear as if by magic, a thousand paper lanterns illuminating trees that in winter have artificial leaves sewn to them, and an orchestra in a clearing plays a hymn of welcome, and dancers leap and vault ahead of the heralds, and a flock of pink geese hiss and squawk and cackle, and those gorgeous butlers in the courtyard are not spreading yellow sand to receive the illustrious footprint of the eminent guest—oh no, that’s real gold dust forming a path to the door.
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