The Tang Dynasty Underwater Pyramid

by Walter Jon Williams

  “Like what?” Jesse, still not exactly compos, groped on the lacquered side table for a cigarette.

  “Get some machine guns! Mortars! Rocket launchers! Those guys are evil!”

  Jesse lit his coffin nail and inhaled. “Perhaps you had better tell me who these Ayancas are, exactly.”

  It was difficult to condense the last thousand years of Andean history into a few minutes, but I did my best. It was only the last forty years that mattered anyway, because that’s when my uncle Iago, returning from a trip to Europe (to buy a shipment of derby hats, believe it or not), saw his first James Bond movie and decided to form his own private intelligence service, and subsequently sent his young relatives (like me) to an elite Swiss prep school, while the rest formed into bands of street musicians who could wander the streets, not unobtrusive but at least unsuspected as they went about their secret work.

  “Fidel Perugachi is a traitor and a copycat cheat!” I said. “He formed his own outfit and went into competition with us.” I shook a fist. “Perugachi’s nothing but llama spit!”

  “So there are competing secret organizations of Andean street musicians?” Jesse said, slow apparently to wrap his mind around this concept.

  “All the musicians belong to one group or the other,” I said. “But the Ayancas lack our heritage. They’re sort-of cousins to the Urinsaya moiety, but we’re the Hanansaya moiety! Our ancestors were the Alasaa, and were buried in stone towers!”

  Jesse blinked. “Good for them,” he said. “But do you really think the Ayancas are here for the Goldfish Fairy?”

  “Why else would they be in Hong Kong at this moment?” I demanded. “You were right in Prague when you worried that you were being shadowed. Your opposition found out you were hiring us, so they countered by hiring the Ayancas. Why else would Fidel Perugachi be off playing his toyo in the fog and the clouds of sandalwood smoke?”

  “Sandalwood?” he said, puzzled.

  “Like your incense,” I said, and pointed to his little shrine. “There were great gusts of sandalwood smoke coming over the rail along with Perugachi’s music.”

  Jesse puffed on his cigarette while considering this, and then he slammed his hand on the arm of his chair.

  “Thunderbolt Sow!” he said.

  I looked at him. “Beg pardon?”

  “The Thunderbolt Sow is a holy figure in Buddhism. But Thunderbolt Sow is also the name of another cruise ship— Buddhist-themed, with a huge temple to Buddha on the stern, and several very well-regarded vegetarian restaurants. I bet that temple pours out a lot of sandalwood incense.”

  “At this time of night?”

  “Do you know about the smoke towers? Those coils of incense that hang from the roofs of the temples? They burn twenty-four hours per day— some of them are big enough to burn for weeks.”

  “So Perugachi wasn’t taunting us,” I said. “He got a job like ours, on a cruise ship, and he was finishing his second show as the ship came into harbor.” I thought about this and snarled. “Copycat! What did I tell you!”

  “The question is,” Jesse said, “what kind of menace is this, and what are we going to do?”

  So we had an early-morning conference, with the water ballet guys and Jesse and the members of my band. Jesse connected with the Internet through the cellular modem on his notebook, and we found that Thunderbolt Sow belonged to the same cruise line as Tang Dynasty, and followed the same schedule, only a day later.

  “We’ll be anchoring in Macau in an hour or so,” Laszlo said from beneath the avocado green beauty mask he hadn’t bothered to wash off. “But we won’t be able to get our salvage gear till midmorning at the earliest.” He considered. “We’ll spend tomorrow clearing off that tangle of cable, and maybe get a start on shifting the mast. The day following, Tang Dynasty discharges most of its passengers, takes on a new ones, and heads for Shanghai to start the circuit all over again, so we won’t be able to dive.”

  “But the Ayancas can,” I pointed out. “They can take advantage of all the preparatory work you’ve done and lift the package while we’re on our way to Shanghai and back.”

  “In that case,” Jesse said, “don’t do anything tomorrow. Just sit on the site to keep the Ayancas from pillaging it, and let them deal with the cable and the mast.”

  “We can spend the day rehearsing!” Laszlo said brightly, and the members of his troupe rolled their eyes.

  I rubbed my chin and gave this some thought. Jesse’s idea was good enough, but it lacked savor somehow. I felt it was insufficient in terms of dealing with the Ayancas. With Fidel Perugachi and his clique, I prefer instead to employ the more decisive element of diabolical vengeance.

  “Instead,” I suggested calmly, “why don’t we mislead the Ayancas and drive them mad?”

  Jesse seemed a little taken aback by this suggestion.

  “How?” he asked.

  “Let’s give them the Goldfish Fairy, but give them a Goldfish Fairy that will drive them insane!”

  “You mean sabotage the ship?” Jesse blinked. “So that they dive down there and get killed?”

  “It’s not that murdering the Ayancas wouldn’t be satisfying,” I said, “but practically speaking it would only motivate them toward reprisal. No, I mean simply give them a day of complete frustration, preferably one that will cause them in the end to realize that we were the cause of their difficulties.”

  I turned to Laszlo. “For example,” I said, “this morning you attached a buoy to the Goldfish Fairy that would make it easier to find. Suppose that tomorrow you move that buoy about five hundred meters into deeper water. They’ll waste at least one dive, possibly more, finding the ship again.”

  Laszlo grinned, his white teeth a frightening contrast to his green mask.

  “You can only dive that deep a certain number of times each day,” Laszlo explained to Jesse. “If we waste their dives, we use up their available bottom time.”

  “And,” I added, “suppose you clear the wire only from the front half of the ship. You use the jacks to move the mast partly off the fore hatch. This will suggest to them that their target is in the forward hold, not in the after hold.”

  Lazslo’s grin broadened. He looked like a bloodthirsty idol contemplating an upcoming sacrifice.

  “They’ll spend all day getting into the forward hold and find nothing!” he said. “Brilliant!” He nodded at me and gave his highest accolade.

  “Ernesto,” he said, “you’re an artist!”

  *

  I spent the next day on the launch at the dive site, but I didn’t so much as put a foot into the water. Instead I watched the horizon for signs of the Ayancas— and there was a boat that seemed to be lurking between us and Hong Kong— while the mermaids and the off-duty Apollos swam about the boat and practiced their moves. The mermaids were even more listless, if possible, than the day before, and Laszlo felt obliged to offer them several sharp reproofs.

  When Laszlo and a colleague made their second dive to the wreck, the others happily called a lunch break. Someone turned a radio to a station filled with bouncy Cantonese pop music. The Apollos sat in the stern slathering on sun oil, performing dynamic-tension exercises, and quaffing drinks into which, to aid in building muscle, vast arrays of steaks and potatoes seemed to have been scientifically crammed.

  Since no one else seemed inclined to pay attention to the ladies, I perched on the forward gunwales with the mermaids and helped them devour some excellent dim sum that we’d filched from the kitchens of the Grand Dynasty Restaurant that morning.

  “So, how do you find the water ballet business?” I asked one of the mermaids, a nymph from Colorado named Leila.

  She took her time about lighting up a cigarette. “After Felicia and I came in sixth in the Olympics, we turned pro,” she said. “I’m not sure what I expected, but it certainly wasn’t this. You try cramming your lower half into one of those rubber fish tails for an hour a day.”

  “Yet here you are in the Pacific, on a beautiful sun
ny day, on a grand adventure and with the whole of Asia before you.”

  She flicked cigarette ash in the direction of the Apollos. “That’s not what I’d call the whole of Asia.”

  “You’re not fond of your co-workers?” I asked. For it was obvious that the mermaids kept very much to themselves, and I’d wondered why.

  “Let’s just say that they and I have a different idea of what constitutes an object of desire.”

  “Surely they can’t all be gay,” I said, misunderstanding.

  “They aren’t,” Leila said. “But they are all narcissists. When I cuddle on a couch with a guy, I want him to be looking at me, not at his own reflection in a mirror.”

  “I take your point. Perhaps you ought to confine yourself to homely men.”

  She looked at me. “You’re homely,” she pointed out.

  “As homely as they come,” I agreed, and shifted a bit closer to her on the gunwale.

  These pleasantries continued until Laszlo finished his dive and demanded more rehearsals. Since he had Total Artistic Control, there was little I could say on the matter.

  By the time the water ballet guys had finished all the dives safety procedures would allow, they’d prepared Goldfish Fairy to a fare-thee-well. The wire tangle had been shifted aft and, according to Laszlo, looked awful but would be relatively easy to clear when the time came. The mast had been partially shifted off the forward hatch, with the marks of the jacks plain to see, but the jacks themselves had been removed— if the Ayancas didn’t bring their own, they were out of luck.

  In a final bit of mischief, we shifted the buoy half a kilometer, then raced back to the Tang Dynasty just in time for our first show. Leila and I made plans to meet after the second show. Among other things, I wanted to hear her memories of the Olympics— I’d actually been to an Olympics once, but I’d been too busy dodging homicidal Gamsakhurdians to pay much attention to the games.

  We’d barely got into the general wretchedness of the judging at synchronized swimming events when my cell played a bit of Mozart, and I answered to hear the strained tones of the ship’s entertainment director.

  “I thought you should know that there’s a problem,” he said, “a problem with your friend, the one in Emperor Class.”

  “What sort of problem?” I asked as my heart foundered. The tone of his voice was answer enough to my question.

  “I’m afraid he’s been killed.”

  “Where?”

  “In his room.”

  “I’ll meet you there.”

  I told Leila to go to Laszlo’s room, and after she yelped in protest I told her that she had to contact everyone in the troupe and insist that no one was to be alone for the rest of the trip. Apparently my words burned with conviction, because her eyes grew wide and she left the room fast.

  I sprinted to Jesse’s room and called Jorge, who was our forensics guy, and Sancho, who was the strongest, just in case we needed to rearrange something.

  The entertainment director stood in front of Jesse’s door, literally wringing his hands.

  “The cabin steward brought him a bottle of cognac he’d ordered,” he said, “and found him, ah …” His voice trailed away, along with his sanguinary complexion.

  “I’ll have to call the police soon,” he said faintly. “Not to mention the captain. It’s lucky I was on watch, and not someone else.”

  I was so utterly glad that I’d bribed the man. There’s nothing you can trust like corruption and dishonesty, and I made a mental note to slip the entertainment director a few extra hundred at the end of the voyage.

  “Where’s the steward?”

  “I told him to stay in my office.”

  Sancho and Jorge arrived— Jorge with a box of medical gloves that he shared with us— and our confidant opened the cabin door with his passkey.

  “I won’t go in again, if you don’t mind,” he said, swallowing hard, and stepped well away.

  I put on gloves and pushed the door open. We entered and closed the door behind us.

  “Well,” Jorge said, “I can tell you right away that it’s not a subtle Oriental poison.”

  Nor was it. Jesse lay on his back in the center of his suite, his throat laid open, his arms thrown out wide, and an expression of undiluted horror on his face. There was a huge splash of blood on the wall hangings and more under the body.

  “Don’t step in it,” I said.

  Jorge gingerly knelt by the body and examined the wound. “You’re not going to like this,” he said.

  “I already don’t like it,” I said.

  “You’re going to like it less when I tell you that his throat appears to have been torn open by the fangs of an enormous beast.”

  There was a moment of silence.

  “Maybe we should talk to the Hopping Vampires,” Sancho said.

  “Nobody can talk to them,” I said. “They don’t speak anybody’s language.”

  “So they claim,” Sancho said darkly.

  “Never mind that now,” I decided. “Search the room.” I found Jesse’s wallet and card case, from which I learned that his name was actually Jiu Lu, and that he was the head of the microbiology department at Pacific Century Corporation.

  Well. Who knew?

  I also found his cell phone, with all the numbers he’d set on speed dial.

  “Where’s his notebook computer?” I asked.

  We couldn’t find it, or the briefcase he’d carried it in, or any notes that may have been in the briefcase.

  “Let’s hope he kept everything on that machine encrypted,” Jorge said.

  We left the wallet where we found it, but took the cell phone and one of Jesse’s business cards. When we slipped out of the room, the entertainment director almost fainted with relief.

  “Go ahead and call the cops,” I told him.

  “Macanese police.” His eyes were hollow with tragedy. “You have no idea.”

  With Sancho guarding my back, I went on the fantail and called every number that Jesse had set on his speed dial. For the most part I got answering machines of one sort or another, and any actual human beings answered in an irate brand of Mandarin that discouraged communication from the start. I tried to inquire about “Jiu Lu,” but I must not have got any of the tones right, because no one understood me.

  In the morning I would call again, with the entertainment director as interpreter.

  *

  Most of the ship’s passengers disembarked that morning, all those who weren’t making the round trip to Shanghai and who preferred to remain in the languid, mildly debauched atmosphere of Macau, or who were heading by hydrofoil ferry back to the hustle of Hong Kong.

  Whatever the Macanese police were doing by way of investigation, they weren’t interfering with the wheels of commerce as represented by the cruise ship company.

  “There goes Jesse’s killer,” Jorge said glumly as, from the rail, we watched the boats fill with cheerful, sunburned tourists.

  Rosalinda, who gloomed at my other elbow, flicked her cigar ash into the breeze. “This afternoon the boats will come back with his replacement.”

  “Unless the killer is a Hopping Vampire who’s sleeping in his coffin at this very moment,” Sancho added from over my shoulder.

  Most of those who came aboard that afternoon were people who had come to Macau on Tang Dynasty’s previous journey and were returning home by way of Shanghai. Only two actually made Macau their point of initial departure, and when we got ahold of a passenger manifest we made these the objects of particular scrutiny. One of them was an elderly man who trailed an oxygen bottle behind him on a cart.

  He went straight to the casino and began to bet heavily on roulette while lighting up one cigarette after another, which certainly explained the oxygen bottle. The other was his nurse.

  Given that I hailed from a family of Aymara street musicians who also formed a private intelligence- gathering agency, at the moment operating in tandem with a water ballet company aboard a passenger ship di
sguised as a Tang Dynasty palace, I was not about to discount the less unlikely possibility that the old gambler and his nurse were a pair of assassins, so I slipped the entertainment director a few hundred Hong Kong dollars for the key to the old man’s room and gave it a most professional going-over.

  No throat-ripping gear was discovered, or anything the least bit suspicious.

  Sancho and a couple of cousins also tossed the Hopping Vampires’ cabin, and they found throat-ripping gear aplenty, but nothing that couldn’t be explained with reference to their profession.

  The entertainment director had got through to the people on Jesse’s speed dial who he believed were Jesse’s employers, but he was Cantonese and his Mandarin was very shaky, and he wasn’t certain.

  Because of the smallish crowd on board, and consequent low demand, we were scheduled for only one show that night, and I confess that it wasn’t one of our best. The band as a whole lacked spirit. Our dejection transmitted itself to our music. Even the presence of our mascot Oharu in his poncho and derby hat failed to put heart into us.

  After the show, Jorge and Sancho carried Oharu off to the Western Paradise Bar while I visited the entertainment director and again borrowed his passkey.

  I found a yellow Post-It note and wrote a single word on it with a crimson pen.

  And when Oharu stepped into his cabin with Jorge and Sancho behind him, I lunged from concealment and slapped the note on his forehead, just as the Taoist Sorcerer slapped his yellow paper magic on the foreheads of the Bloodthirsty Hopping Vampires in their stage show.

  Oharu looked at me in dazed surprise.

  “What’s this about?” he asked.

  “Read it,” I said.

  He peeled the note off his forehead and read the single scarlet word, “Confess.”

  “You should have got off at Macau,” I told him. “You would have got clean away.” I held up the bloodstained ninja gear I’d found in his room, the leather palm with the lethal steel hooks that could tear open a throat with a single slap.

  At that point Oharu fought, of course, but his responses were disorganized by the alcohol that Sancho and Jorge had been pouring down his throat for the last hour, and of course Sancho was a burly slab of solid muscle and started the fight by socking Oharu in the kidney with a fist as hard as hickory. It wasn’t very long before we had Oharu stretched out on his bed with his arms and legs duct-taped together and I was booting up Jesse’s computer, which I had found in Oharu’s desk drawer.