The Chinese Alchemist

by Lyn Hamilton

  Waiting to cross at the light where a smaller road led into the area around the Baxian Gong, I caught sight of a familiar form, at least I thought I did. I decided it was Mr. Knockoff, this time with a bicycle with a wicker carrier basket that contained something wrapped in brown paper. To my mind that package was exactly the right size. I tried edging my way through the throng of cyclists and pedestrians, but he saw me before I could get to him. In what looked to be a suicidal gesture, he’d pedaled straight into traffic, jumping the median in the busy street running parallel to the eastern city wall, and heading into the old area behind the apartment towers.

  I hailed a pedicab at the corner, and tried to tell him to follow the man on the bicycle. He had no clue what I was say-mg. Consequently I told him I wanted to go to the Baxian Gong, which he did understand, given that was roughly in the direction that Mr. Knockoff was going. I hoped I would see him on the way.

  I didn’t, but when I got to the temple, there was a bicycle that I was almost certain was his parked in the entrance courtyard. The wicker basket was now empty. Either the package was deemed sufficiently valuable that it couldn’t be left at the entrance to a temple, which seemed to say a lot about its contents, or the man was doing something with it in the temple. I paid the driver and followed, but by the time I’d purchased my ticket, there was no sign of the young man.

  I was reasonably sure there was only one way in and out, but then when I thought about it, I remembered—at least I thought I did—a back gate. The question was, would he leave his bicycle? When there was no sign of him for several minutes, I entered, crossing a lovely arched stone bridge in the first courtyard, before systematically checking every hall that was open and crossing the next courtyard to another hall. The place was absolutely silent. I seemed to be the only person who did not belong there. There were the faithful few lighting incense sticks and kneeling in prayer, and from time to time a priest in black hat and tunic, short black pants, and white socks hove into view before disappearing again. There was no sign of my prey.

  It was in the hall devoted to Sun Simiao, the physician and alchemist, that I found him. He was kneeling, hands clasped around burning incense sticks, bowing and murmuring as he rocked back and forth, and I still couldn’t see his face well enough to positively identify him. The package was at his side. On the inside of the wooden railing that separated the worshippers from the worshipped, a priest was sitting on a low chair, chopsticks in hand, slurping a bowl of noodles. I suppose that, given we were in a Taoist temple in Xi’an, it was all perfectly normal, but I found it disconcerting, the idea of interrupting a man at prayer. I hung back, uncertain what to do, just long enough for him to see me. He leapt up, dropping his incense sticks as he picked up the package and, roughly pushing past me, made for the entrance and his bicycle. I followed as quickly as I could.

  The bicycle wasn’t there. Before I could even begin to fathom what that meant, the young man gave a cry and bolted into the street. I went after him, just trying to keep him in sight as he moved deeper and deeper into the old neighborhood that I had thought appealing before, and now found menacing. It kept getting darker and darker, twilight coming upon us very quickly. I couldn’t both follow him and keep track of where I was, so the longer this went on, the more lost I became. I couldn’t read any signs, and everything was starting to look the same. I, however, was standing out in this crowd more and more. By this time, a lot of people were staring me. They would not forget me.

  Just then the man turned into what looked to be an alley. Gasping for breath, I followed. At the entrance to the alley, I stopped, taking a second or two to get accustomed to the light, or rather the lack thereof, and to come to grips with what was playing out before me. I thought at first it was a dead end, that there was nowhere else for the pursued man to go, that perhaps I might somehow convince him to talk to me. At the far end of this laneway stood the man, whose face I still couldn’t see in the dim light, his back to the wall and package firmly held against his chest with both arms. He kept looking first in my direction and then at something else around the corner to his right, his head swiveling first one way, then the other. He looked as if he was trying to choose between the lesser of two evils and didn’t know which way to go. Suddenly, decision apparently made, he turned my way, and starting running straight for me.

  It was all over in seconds. First I heard the roar of a motorcycle engine, and then saw two riders take the corner from what had been the man’s right. The first rider had his right arm straight out at shoulder height, and slowed slightly as he passed the young man with the package, now pressed against the wall to the right of the rider. There was a brief scream, a screeching of brakes, and the young man fell. The package flew out of his arms. The second rider came straight at me. Able to move at last, I ducked into the first doorway I came to, and the bike and rider swept by.

  I heard the motorcycles turn for another run at me. This time they were going to stop, and I knew what they would do. The young man lay face down, almost certainly dead. Judging by the splash of blood against the wall and the widening pool under him, his throat had been slit. I staggered back from the sight, leaning hard against the door where I was standing. I almost fell through it into a little courtyard when it opened behind me. There were no lights in the buildings on the three sides of the courtyard, and no sign anyone was there. I pushed the door closed and locked it as the motorcycles swept by.

  I was holding my breath when I heard the motorcycles stop, and then the crunch of footsteps coming right to the door behind which I stood. Someone tried the door. A few seconds later, something or someone slammed against the door with some force; the door bulged slightly but the lock held. I didn’t think it would hold for very long. As I looked about for somewhere else to hide, I heard a man shout, then many voices coming into the alley. Whoever was out there trying to break down the door stopped, as someone started to scream. In an instant I heard the motorcycles race off in the direction from which they had first come.

  I waited for a few seconds, opened the door, and took a quick look outside, ready to hide again if need be. A crowd had gathered in the alley, all staring at a huge spray of blood splattered against one brick wall, a pool of blood on the ground, and the young man, facedown. There was no sign of the package he’d tried to protect.

  I just stood there, tears burning my eyes, my legs absolutely leaden. I simply did not know what to do. Then someone with a very firm grip grasped my arm and started pulling me out of the alley. “Lookie, mother, lookie, mother,” a voice said. It was the woman from the Sunday antique market, the one with the scar on her face. She drew me rather forcefully out of the alley, and thence straight into a pedicab. She said something to the driver and he was off like a shot. I tried to get out, but he wouldn’t stop long enough to let me. A few minutes later, he dropped me at the door of my hotel, and pedaled away before I could pay him. The idea that he and the woman should know where my hotel was without my telling them absolutely terrified me.

  Seven

  The first indication that Wu Peng had been right about my ability to make considerable sums of money came when Number One Brother asked for a meeting with me. Thinking he planned to berate me for not sending money to our father, I was reluctant, but it was difficult to refuse. He made no mention of other members of our family; he merely discussed an issue in the ward in which my family lived that would benefit from palace attention, and gave me a petition. I said I would see what could be done. When I had in fact, despite my reservations, spoken to one of the eunuchs who would know more about this matter, it was suggested to me that a gift would do much to ease the required petition through the system. Number One Brother obliged.

  I was on good terms with many of the more influential and powerful eunuchs in the palace and after that episode with Number One Brother found that my advice was sought on many matters. Gifts came my way in a satisfying manner. Many petitions passed through my hands and it was very simple for me to expedite one and del
ay another. One in particular, though, caused me much consternation.

  It was from Lingfei. In it she asked leave to marry a man that she loved. She did so, she said, because she recognized that she no longer enjoyed the favor of the Son of Heaven, now that Yang Yuhuan was Most Favored Consort. She said she begged his indulgence in permitting her to spend her remaining days with this man, a member of the Gold Bird Guard. As astonished as I was that she would have the temerity to ask to leave the emperor’s service—it spoke of a rash and unsettled spirit, it seemed to me, however evident her pain—still I felt a shiver of excitement. Had Auntie Chang not told me that Number One Sister had stayed out all night with a member of the Gold Bird Guard? Surely if I needed proof of our relationship this was it.

  To be sure, her request was not without precedent, something she would have known. There were imperial concubines who had been given their freedom to marry. Certainly Yang Guifei was dealing with other former favorites with dispatch. The Plum Concubine had already been exiled to the second capital in Luoyang, one that the Son of Heaven had not visited in years. Yang Guifei was extraordinarily beautiful, and she was also intelligent and ambitious. The Son of Heaven spent more and more of his time with her. I was not entirely sure why. I am perhaps not the best person to comment on this, but my feeling was that Lingfei’s slender form was rather more attractive than that of Guifei, who was rather plump. Evidently the Son of Heaven did not share that opinion.

  More than just recognizing the reasons behind Lingfei’s petition, I also felt a pang of jealousy. I planned, like my adoptive father, to take a wife when I had accumulated sufficient funds, and perhaps to adopt children as well. But I would never know the thrill of love, or its loss, of the sort Lingfei had expressed so passionately in this letter, of that much I was certain. Despite this unpleasant feeling, I moved Lingfei’s petition forward expeditiously.

  I did several things that evening, which given my state of mind was something of an accomplishment. I asked to change rooms, making up some lame excuse to do so, and then bolted myself in the new one, barring the door with a chair. I wanted to move to another hotel, but without my passport, that was not possible. No visitor got to check into a hotel in China without first producing this document.

  Next I called Mira Tetford’s office in Beijing, given I didn’t know if she was still in Xi’an, and left a message asking her how she was doing getting my passport back to me. I gave her my mobile number, and told her I’d pick up the passport whenever I was allowed to do so. I also left a message that evening at Dr. Xie’s office to the same effect.

  Then I called Rob in Taiwan. He didn’t answer. I wanted to leave a message, but I knew I shouldn’t. I would have sounded absolutely hysterical. What would I say? That I had locked myself in my new hotel room in Xi’an because I’d witnessed a terrible murder and that a colleague from Toronto had either managed to poison himself by drinking too much silver, or had been dispatched by some other means, possibly malevolent? The poor man might have a stroke. I figured I’d better calm down first and talk to him directly.

  Then desperate for something rational to do, I took a sheet of hotel letterhead, drew a line down the middle so that I had two columns, and put “Don’t Know” at the head of one, “Know” on the other. Dr. Xie might say I should stay away from it, and perhaps he was right, but that was easier said than done. People were dying around me, and there were other people out there I didn’t know, but who appeared to know me all too well. Somehow I had to understand this.

  There were a lot of things I didn’t know. I really didn’t know how Burton had died, but given the terrible events of the day, I could not assume an accidental death. I was no longer putting any effort into convincing myself that he had somehow inadvertently managed to poison himself with silver. Even though there had been no blood, no obvious trauma, I believed he had been murdered, just as surely as the young man with the package had been murdered. It was a matter of waiting for the autopsy results to confirm that. As much as I tried to tell myself that I was just being hysterical, I could not rid myself of that belief.

  I did know that Burton had been in Xi’an and presumably Hua Shan on the trail of the silver box. Logically if Burton were following his normal routine, that is to say visiting every antique dealer he could find, he would have gone to the antique market at the Baxian Gong that day just as I had. But he didn’t. He went to the western tombs in Dr. Xie’s Mercedes, then straight to the train station and on to Hua Shan to meet someone. In the morning he had met with the man in the mosque. As far as I could tell, Burton hadn’t gone there to pray. He had gone there because it was a quiet place at that time of day, where he could meet someone he didn’t want to be seen chatting with in the hotel lobby, which while perhaps not nearly so evocative, was considerably warmer and more comfortable. Who was the man in the mosque, and what if anything did he have to do with the silver box? Given Burton’s obsession with the box, it didn’t seem to me he’d be having discussions like that about anything else, except perhaps how to get the box out of the country illegally. But if the times logged in to my Beijing hotel room voice mail were accurate, Burton didn’t have the box then, if he ever did. Was the man in the mosque the person who convinced Burton to go to Hua Shan?

  It had not escaped my notice that Burton had been much better at tracking the silver box than I had. All I had done was follow him. What did that mean? Certainly his facility in Chinese had made a huge difference. But who had talked to him? I had seen him speaking to two individuals I couldn’t identify, the man in black and the man in the mosque. Was it possible that the former had sent him to Xi’an, and the latter to Hua Shan? It seemed to me that if I could backtrack on his trail, I’d possibly learn what he had. Whether or not this was a good idea was open to question.

  I didn’t have a clue who the hapless young man in the alley was. Of his demise I was certain. He was not going to spend the night in a hospital and then be sent home. His throat had been slit. His heart would have stopped in seconds. Could it have been a random robbery that ended in murder? I didn’t think so. He had looked to me as if he knew very well who was around the corner in that alley, and he’d chosen to come to me. This was quite possible because, of the two, I was clearly the lesser evil, and he probably thought he’d be able to push me out of the way easily enough, which I suppose he could have. He just never got the chance. The other horrible thought was that if I hadn’t been there, standing in one entrance to that alley, he might have gotten away from the motorcycles by retracing his steps and blending into the crowds of a main street. I had stood in his way, slowing him down long enough to doom him.

  I had not seen enough of him in the Baxian Gong to clearly identify him with real assurance as the man in New York who had looked to be interested in bidding, nor as the person who had stolen the box in Beijing, just as I didn’t know if the package he held contained the silver box. I did not let this lack of clarity stop me from leaping to conclusions. He was Mr. Knockoff, and the fact that he’d wanted the box, maybe enough to steal it, pointed once again to this entire situation being about the silver box. If that was true, then two people had died for it.

  Another big question mark was the identity of the man in black, the smirking army officer. Who was he, and what if anything did he have to do with this? How had Burton known him? Burton apparently knew him well enough to know where he lived. He’d gone to a house in the Beijing hutong neighborhood and, lo and behold, there the man in black was. Did Burton have an appointment? Did he go to confront the fellow about the box? Had the man in black told him something that had sent Burton on a hasty and fatal trip to Xi’an?

  I was more and more convinced, again with no real facts to back me up, that the man in black had been blocking the view of the box in the auction house. If I was right, then he too was tied to the silver box. Dr. Xie had told me not to try to find out who the man in black was, but surely I didn’t have much choice now. Someone had told Burton who the man was, and presumably it had
been someone in the room when the box was snatched or, I suppose, when the videotape was shown, which would add three police officers. The police seemed unlikely, so that left Dr. Xie, Mira, Ruby, David, or the hapless employee of Cherished Treasures House, who had looked guilty all right, but surely for dereliction of duty and not theft. He had been devastated at losing his job. Dr. Xie had said he didn’t know who the man in black was. Maybe he didn’t, maybe he did. Maybe he was simply trying to protect me when he said he didn’t know.

  After almost an hour of pondering all this, one ear cocked toward the hall outside my room, my heart leaping into my throat every time a door opened or closed, I had a “Don’t Know” list that covered the entire column and then some. The “Know” side of the ledger was distressingly short, only one entry in fact: a number of people associated with this silver box were dead.

  Along with that came the unwelcome conclusion that I too was now inescapably linked to the silver box. It was not a pleasant thought. Here I was in a country where I didn’t speak the language, didn’t understand anything that was going on around me, and therefore didn’t stand a chance of getting out of the place in one piece unless I thought of something fast. Where to start? Given the hour and the fact that I was afraid to leave my hotel room, it had to be something I had with me. That was the file on the silver box that I had put together an eternity before. I had made a copy of the photograph of the box in the Molesworth & Cox catalog, and had several photographs that Dory had given me of the silver box George had purchased some time previously. I had also kept the translation of the box up for auction that Justin at Molesworth & Cox had given me at the preview in New York, and I had gone to both New York and Beijing with a translation of the box already in Dory’s possession.