Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 92, No. 3. Whole No. 547, September 1988

The Man Who Wiped Away Footprints by Allan Lloyd

© 1988 by

“You know something of what happened here?” Ti asked.

“No,” the man said. “I was only thinking that Mr. Keng was surprised halfway through his work. See? Look there. He always moved in the same direction. The proper one. From south to north.”

“But what was he doing?” the magistrate wondered.

The man’s brown hand pointed to the narrow trail, to a line of broad footprints. “Only what he did every day of his life. He was wiping out the footprints.”

Note, those readers who are dyed-in-the-silk detective-story aficionados, that this story, set in China during the T’ang dynasty, makes fictional use of the acclaimed real-life detective, Ti Jen-chieh (630–700), the same magistrate on whom Robert van Gulik based his fictional Judge Dee...

Magistrate Ti Jen-chieh chose to enter the city of Wei through one of the southern gates because this was not an official visit, and because he sometimes felt the need to watch again the crowding colors of the common people.

It was a fine day for it, a light-yellow day in the spring of the first year in the Lin-te reign, A.D. 664. The magistrate had come to the capital of Ho-pei Province with the minimum of mounted retainers in order to help settle a minor death in one of the more distant branches of his father’s family. It was a duty that might have been met by any cousin or uncle, nothing that should have cost Magistrate Ti half a week’s stay in an uncertain saddle, yet, if the truth were told, his visit had less to do with his relation, whom he had never known, than with his own springtime dissatisfaction with the deskbound tedium of his judicial office. He was still an energetic man in his middle thirties, who suffered every time he sensed a peculiar new experience passing him by unappreciated or a missed insight into people and their ways. What good was a judge who knew only the outside of everyday passions and fears? The magistrate yearned to see as much of raw life as he could, and from every level.

This yearning was what had moved him to lead his company halfway around the walled city, even though as an imperial official he would be lodging in the nobler northern sector. It would be among these poorer neighborhoods in the south that he could find some of the noise and stench that his position too often isolated him from — the screaming vegetable hawkers, the itinerant jugglers, the beggars from faraway parts. Nothing, he knew, could ever take the place of the wisdom of basic human experience. Of course, it would never do for a man in his position to be seen too dirtily mixed with the howling people of the street — which was why he separated from his retinue just inside the south city gate and rode by himself toward the house of his relations in the eastern sector. This way, too, he could see the city less conspicuously and spare the family the bother of having to welcome a clumsy band of horses and men.

He rode on slowly, not only to see everything the better, but because he was not entirely sure where he was headed. He guessed the house must be in or near a neighborhood for artisans, because his father’s relation had started his career as a wheelwright. He was said to be very rich now, very proud and powerful — the kind of man to whom the loss of a wife would be as the loss of a well used saw. The magistrate was not expecting any great show of grief, as he was not expecting any honest outpouring of welcome, but he was curious to see something of this isolated offshoot of his widespread family and to make contact with yet another part of his past. And finally, perhaps most importantly, Magistrate Ti knew it was his duty to represent his branch of his father’s family at this grieving house, no matter how many befuddling and exasperating turnings he might have to take to get there.

He and his horse at last managed to reach an eastern ward of the city, where an island of greens and blues shimmered in the midst of yellows and browns. A narrow ridge of land between jumbled streets and the city wall had been given over or abandoned to a tuft of a park, a modest stand of stately bamboo and grass surrounding a slight glimpse of a pond. There were breezes here and cool colors and an unlikely privacy that made the nearby markets seem far away. At the farther end of the park could be seen a suggestion of rising stone, a line of trail climbing up it toward a poor hut made of bound reeds. There, shifting among the emeralds of the day’s light, a low-lying commotion of dust blurred the distance.

The magistrate had just stopped his horse and raised himself to look about when he heard a shuffle of hurrying legs pursuing him from behind. Five or six men were rounding a comer, their sandaled feet churning.

“Is there one among you,” he called out as they passed, “who will direct me to the Street of Ten Thousand Ruts?”

No one answered him, hut there was something in their strained faces that moved him to kick his horse forward into a trot that took him through the park almost at their heels. He didn’t pull up until he had almost reached the door of the small hut.

An uneasy knot of people had clotted together there, the mix of the curious and the cruel and the idle that can be found near any public tragedy. Magistrate Ti lowered himself heavily to the ground and worked his way forward, excusing himself as he went.

What the crowd had gathered to see was a sad shell of a man lying twisted and oddly stiffened in the yellow dust of the path. Short and poor and weak, he seemed to have been caught and frozen in the act of running frantically, but horizontally, along the ground. What seemed most pathetic to the magistrate were the man’s scarred feet, tumbled out of their sandals as if he had been a child just learning to walk. In his right hand he held a broom made of straw tied at the end of a stick. At his head, almost as if it were cradling his head like a pillow, lay a broken earthenware bowl, filling even as the magistrate approached with the flowing color of the dead man’s blood.

“What has happened here?”

The magistrate had no power or connections in Wei, so he bothered to identify himself to no one, but the weight of his voice in the silence of the park was enough to start everyone talking at once.

“He’s only just been found!”

“He must have been struck as he was at his daily work!”

“A man’s passions come back to hound him, to make him pay some back — I told him so myself more than once!”

Magistrate Ti bent down to study the man’s darkened face, then straightened up to question the crowd. “Has no one been sent to summon the ward officials?”

After some confusion, a pair of boys was persuaded to run off for help. The magistrate, suddenly short of breath, found himself wishing they might take forever. “Who is this man, then? Does anyone know?”

A drunken voice separated itself from the mass of the growing crowd. “It’s Mr. Keng, isn’t it? I know his broom. Yes, the man that’s lived in this hut here from when I wasn’t much more than a boy.”

Suddenly, almost magically, everyone found something in the figure curling upon the ground that made it as recognizable as a brother.

“Of course, with that bit of hair on his head just like those trees behind his hut!”

“Where’s his wife, then?”

Heads turned and turned and someone said: “There she comes — walking from her day’s shopping.”

Looking over the huddled crowd, the magistrate saw a frail woman hobbling beneath a prickling bag of vegetables. He quickly sent another woman to meet her and prepare her for the news. Then he turned to a straight-standing man, grave and clean in simple clothes, who was staring at the corpse and nodding to himself as though now he understood everything. “You know something of what has happened here?” Magistrate Ti asked him in a low voice.

“Myself? No,” the man said flatly, “I was only thinking that he was surprised halfway through his work. See? Look there. He always moved in the same direction. The proper one. From south to north.”

“But what was he doing?” the magistrate wondered.

The man’s brown hand pointed to the narrow trail, to a line of broad footprints. “Only what he did every day of his life. He was wiping out the footprints.”

Standing in the golden-green of the park, his robe hanging cool in a stray breeze, the magistrate was about to ask the man why when he remembered something. “Of course! Master K’ung—”

“That’s right,” the straight-backed man said, pleased. He stepped closer to the magistrate and the dead man as the crowd exchanged their theories among themselves. “You remember some of the old stories that were told about Master K’ung, about Confucius, about some of the troubles he ran into in his day. No one wanted him around to tell them how badly they were living their lives or running their states, so in place after place they threw him and his men out of town.” The man dropped his voice and added in confidence: “I can’t say I blame them much. Who wants some impractical bore coming around to preach to them when he can’t find an honest job to feed his own belly?”

Not hearing the impiety, Magistrate Ti was thinking aloud. “Of course. They attacked him between Ch’en and Ts’ai, troubled him in Shang and Chou, chopped down a tree on him in Sung, and drove him out twice from his home state of Lu.” He looked down at the rumple of clothes at his feet. “And wiped out his footprints here in Wei.”

The straight man nodded with some excitement, absently nudging the body with his toe: “Right! And Mr. Keng here, with his broom still in his hand, being the ardent follower of Master K’ung that he was, took it upon himself these many years ago to avenge the humiliation done to his school by doing the same to the trail of anyone passing by his hut — a harmless enough hobby, really. None of us in this ward thought him dangerous or lunatic. We admired his zeal, in fact. He was a fine scholar in his own way — of the Confucian classics only, you understand. But he harmed no one by what he did. Only himself, by taking everything too much to heart.”

A growing keen interrupted them, as the dead man’s wife drew closer to seeing and believing. The magistrate ignored her, frowning over the scribble of marks in the dust and the perfect work of erasing that the dead man had half completed.

“A very large man,” said Ti.

The footprints were flat and broad and pointed north. Each of the toes was vague in outline, as if nothing truly separated them from one another, or as if they were only five knobs in a single block of hard flesh. They were almost a hand’s length in breadth, made by a man of monstrous proportions, yet curiously shallow. As far as the magistrate could see, they extended only to the point where the trail gave way to rockier fields and finally to the first streets of another ward of the city. He gazed into the warm haze and dust north of the park.

“I wonder where he was headed, the man who made these footprints?”

Again, the straight-backed man was at his side and helpful, pointing out a dingy house on the verge of a running ditch. “Toward that place there, if you want me to tell you. Toward the house where the man that did this lives.”

Subtly, the magistrate maneuvered the man backward to the edge of the path, out of everyone else’s hearing. “Tell me what you mean to say.”

The man moved his shoulders. “Well, you can see for yourself, can’t you? Only look at the rest of the bowl he’s resting his head in. It’s one of those begging-bowls, the kind made of stone that the Buddhists always travel about with. Now we both know that there’s no love between the Confucians and the Buddhists. Never has been, am I right?” He poked in the direction of the dilapidated house. “And who do you think lives there where the toes of these prints are pointing but one of the most disagreeable Buddhists that Heaven ever meant to curse us with?”

The magistrate looked at him sharply. “And the two of them had argued before?”

“When didn’t they?” the other man snorted. “As fierce as thunder, the two of them! And Mr. Keng here always came out the loser — the other man has the louder voice!”

As a rabble of men and horses began to approach the park from the nearest neighborhood, Magistrate Ti dropped quickly to his knees to examine the ground about the body. He didn’t take long, because he knew that the city officials would be arriving in a moment to take charge of everything. He peered and hummed and wagged his huge head, then squinted lower to pick at something embedded within an unswept footprint. It was a common insect that he finally raised to his eyes, a smashed and forgotten insect.

“Come and introduce me to this ghastly Buddhist of yours, will you?”

The straight-backed man easily outdistanced the magistrate, not only in youth and vigor but in his sheer eagerness to get to the Buddhist’s house and start the questioning. Magistrate Ti caught up with him at the broken gate that led through a rotting garden to the faded house. An unhappy dog followed the two men to the door, hanging about, hoping for scraps until the door was opened and a bone was tossed out. It was followed by a man’s face, wide with interest and a voice that rawly invited them in with a shout.

Magistrate Ti studied the room in which he found himself with despair. It was even more bare than the dog’s bone. The walls were decaying with time, the ceiling was uncertain, and the floor was crowded with little more than dirt and emptiness. A stack of worn mats for sitting stood crookedly in one corner and the Buddhist walked immediately toward it, roaring and flailing his arms. “You’ll want some places to seat yourselves, gentlemen. I am a perfect host or I am nothing.” He spun about and flung the cushions at them. “Here — take, take, take!”

Shaken to the hem of his robe by the man’s blunt impropriety, the magistrate could do nothing but stare. The Buddhist was a round and healthy man, of only average height but of great density, his limbs and chest and shoulders massed with muscle and overgrown with hair. His voice swelled the room and the movements of his eyes seemed to leave nothing unseen. Even the coarse smell of his body was a presence among them. Ti sat down doubtfully upon a shaggy mat and glanced at his host’s bare feet. They were broad and spatulate, as flattened as one of his own cushions.

The helpful neighbor from the park made introductions, and Magistrate Ti acknowledged his indebtedness to Mr. Liu Ch’a for his hospitality. The Buddhist scrabbled idly about behind a screen for a while, searching awkwardly for tea or wine, then he gave it up and came to squat down facing his guests. His bristling brows and eyes made his face appear larger than human, more startled than a man gone suddenly deaf. He must have been in his late thirties, no more, but the magistrate thought he had to be the most truly ageless man he had ever seen.

“You will have heard by now,” Ti said, “of the sad death of your neighbor, Mr. Keng.”

The Buddhist changed his face, but only a very little. “I haven’t,” he said levelly. “But I pass only rarely outside these poor walls. Most of my work is done within.”

The magistrate focused upon the man sitting coldly before him and felt that he was looking at dead wood. “I have no real power here in Wei, but it grieves me deeply to see a harmless man and a good one struck down as he went about what he believed to be his sacred duty.”

The Buddhist opened his hands helplessly toward the ceiling. “Life and death are grave matters, are they not? And the second follows the first as swiftly as nightfall.” He smiled placidly. “What’s a man to do?”

“You yourself knew Mr. Keng, of course.”

“Of course. What two men can live so close to one another and not meet? They might see each other, one might be stopped walking by the other, they might fall to talking together—”

“And when you talked together, Mr. Liu, were you of one mind or two?”

Strangely, the magistrate was having trouble keeping the form of the Buddhist clearly present before him. The man was calm and self-possessed enough, tranquil as glass, but there was an added resonance in him that seemed to unsettle the balance of the entire room. It was almost as if he were somehow sitting behind himself and smiling, laughing in secret at the magistrate’s clumsy efforts to make him declare himself and confess. “We screamed at one another lustily and to no effect, each trying to awaken the mind of the other to some kind of sense. The devotees of Master K’ung, you know,” he added patiently, “are often victims of their own bothersome, excessive activities.”

Glancing neutrally about the drab room, Magistrate Ti asked, “And which school do you follow yourself, Mr. Liu?”

The Buddhist dropped one hand to the floor and rested his fingertips upon it. “I studied for many years at Mount Shuang-feng, first with Master Tao-hsin and then with Master Hung-jen. The one taught me how to sit long and say nothing and the other taught me how to think and read the Chin-kang ching, the Diamond Scripture.”

“Did neither of them teach you how to beg?”

This was the question that finally moved the straight-backed man, who had been sitting on the edge of everything, to sigh audibly with satisfaction.

“Beg, did you say?” The Buddhist looked about him and frowned. “Well, I do sometimes, but only when the need is very keen.”

“And the first thing you must need,” Ti pressed gently, “is some kind of bowl for your alms.” He raised his eyebrows at the naked room. “Has something become of yours, might I ask?”

The three men sat silent for a moment. A bustle of movement echoed distantly from the park.

Plainly worried now, the Buddhist said: “I don’t know what you mean to say, but there’s been no one here since this morning. And that was only when the woman came to take my robes to clean.”

“You must have carried it out yourself, then?”

“When I went where?”

“You must have moved outside at least once today,” the magistrate said.

“Motion does not move,” Liu Ch’a intoned profoundly. “You can see for yourself,” he said, gesturing toward the frayed screen, “that my sandals are free from dust.”

To everyone’s surprise, Magistrate Ti rose and stepped over to the screen. There he found a single pair of homemade sandals, unevenly and grotesquely carved from flat blocks of wood. Ti picked them up and turned them over. Their bottoms were knotted and scarred and strangely shaped, almost as if the scuffed marks of them across shallow dust would mimic the shuffle of a bare foot. Swaying uncertainly where he stood, the magistrate could not decide if what he had seen on the path had been the prints of feet or the prints of sandals fashioned to look like feet — or perhaps neither. He grumbled in frustration. Then he looked again at the soles of the sandals and saw on one of them part of a killed insect, shining and blue, stuck by its own blood to the wood. He set the sandals down, wiping their dust from his hands.

“It’s not good for any man,” he said softly to the Buddhist, “to spend too much of his time out of the sun’s light.”

“The external world has nothing to do with me, nor I with it,” Liu answered peacefully, though his face was creased “Have you never noticed, Magistrate Ti, that the real sky is never revealed until all the birds have flown out of sight?”

As the magistrate lowered himself to the mat again, the doorway trembled with the shadow of a young woman entering behind an armful of sodden clothes. She was dark and small, lovely as rich wood, and the first appearance of her face was of eager happiness. When she saw the magistrate and the neighbor seated in front of Liu Ch’a, the joy left her face and she almost let the clothes drop.

“Just go about what you need to do, Miss Li,” the Buddhist said kindly. “Don’t mind us.”

She began to wander numbly toward the screen when Ti stopped her. “Whereabouts did you wash this man’s clothes today, girl?”

“In the ditch, sir, where I always do.”

“And does that lie in the direction of the park?”

“The opposite,” the straight-sitting man put in.

The girl nodded.

“And where do you live yourself?” the magistrate went on.

“On the — on the other side of the park.”

Ti stared at her for a time, at her dark hand feebly stroking the Buddhist’s robes as if they were sleeping children. Then he waved at the man of the house. “You must have come here early this morning. Did you see this man then?”

“He was still sleeping,” she said.

“Was that before or after he left the house?”

The Buddhist started to say something, but Magistrate Ti shut his mouth with a glance.

“I’m afraid I don’t understand,” the girl wavered. “Mr. Liu didn’t go out this morning. He never goes out.”

“But did you actually see him sleeping this morning?”

“Well—” She looked at her master, then away. “He always leaves his robes for me at the door. The room was dark. I thought I could hear him breathing.”

“But tell me,” the magistrate insisted, “did you really see him?”

The girl looked uncomfortably at her bare feet and hesitated. She seemed so young and confused that anyone watching her must have thought her next words would sound fragile in the hollow room. Yet when she did reply, her voice was thin and polished as a sword-blade, colder than stone.

“No.”

Her saying it changed everything all at once, and the raw chill of it darkened the corners of the room. The magistrate could feel the subtle shifting of the moral weight surrounding him. The girl had done what she could. She had tried her best to protect her master, but she had been unable to brazen it out to the end, and now she stared at the Buddhist as if he were far away.

Ti said: “And can you tell me, Miss Li, precisely how long you have been in love with Mr. Liu here?”

The man of the house shouted and began to stand, but it was on the girl that the magistrate kept his attention. She should have wilted delicately in a curling of shame, or at the very least protested in virtuous anger at the suggestion, but instead she stood still as ice and looked at the Buddhist with an iron hatred.

“When a young woman gives her heart away,” the magistrate said, “she seldom chooses as well as she should. She chooses the merchant instead of the hardy farmer, the craftsman instead of the respected teacher. She follows visions of romance that have nothing to do with what is proper for her, what is expected of her. And sometimes she gives her love in secret, to one who could never return it.”

The standing girl, still holding the wet robes, and the again seated man tried to look at each other without looking, two children who had been planning a forbidden game together. Magistrate Ti watched them, and when he continued he gradually concentrated more upon the girl, and his voice grew harder.

“I have always tried to be fair in my thoughts and words concerning the ideas of others. There are enough schools of thought for us all, and each man should be allowed to choose his own.” He turned to Liu Ch’a. “Now, your way of thinking, sir, seems to leave out more than it lets in. You sit your life away here in this room, never allowing anyone near. You know much about your own mind, but you don’t know the least thing about anyone else’s. Here you have a young woman washing your clothes every day and she is nothing more to you than one of these cushions. This is not only an inhuman way to live, Mr. Liu, it can also be very dangerous.”

“What are you saying?” The Buddhist tried not to see the girl.

“I am saying that a woman whose one passion is turned away will soon find another, perhaps a fouler one, to consume her.” The magistrate asked the girl: “Was this the first man you ever loved?”

She hesitated a time before she answered.

“No, he was the only.”

“So you would have no understanding of what he could not give you, of those ties of love that his philosophy teaches him are only ties of suffering. Is there any bitterness,” the magistrate reflected aloud, “greater than the bitterness of being ignored?”

In the awful quiet of the room, she whispered: “He never looked at me. Never.”

“Then look at each other now!” Magistrate Ti rasped, while the neighbor stared at the girl, then at Liu, wholly lost. “Look at each other: the man without a man’s body and the woman who schemed to have his body separated from his head!”

“What?” the Buddhist choked.

“You came here twice this morning, didn’t you, Miss Li?”

“No,” she murmured.

“The second time was for the robes, but the first time — very early — was for the sandals and the earthenware bowl, am I not right?”

“No.”

“It must have been at first light when you carried the sandals and bowl past Mr. Keng’s hut to the still-deserted southern end of the park. There, you must have fitted your own feet into the shoes, scuffed back northward, taken them off again, and walked back barefoot off the path to wait for the Confucian to come out with his broom. Then you broke the bowl over his head and hurried back here to replace the sandals and start your daily work, assured that the bowl and the footprints pointing here would be more than enough to pay this man back for his uncaring. This is how it happened, isn’t it?”

“No.”

“There is no other possible interpretation!”

Miss Li stood and flinched, shaken, but her eyes and face were dry. It was as if a long, brooding hurt had scorched most of the womanhood out of her. She fought back one last time. “And why couldn’t everything have been done as you said by Mr. Liu himself?”

In answer, Magistrate Ti reached into his robes and brought out something small and diaphanous that he held out to show them. A stray spark of the yellow afternoon light outside entered and glanced in a prism off the lens of a shattered wing. He was holding the minute half of an insect.

“The blue ying fly,” he said with reverence. “The very same that was praised in our Book of Songs so long ago. I found this in one of the marks near the body of Mr. Keng. The other half of it, or another half of another, may be seen on the bottom of one of the sandals over there. The fly had been stepped on, cruelly and without thinking, as I myself would step on stones.”

The girl did not understand. Neither did the neighbor.

The magistrate exhaled. “Don’t you see? Those footprints — made by sandal or by foot — could never have been made by Mr. Liu here. It is not in him. Oh, I suppose some Buddhist might be moved by a great anger to take the life of a rival, but nothing could ever let him kill through sheer carelessness the living beings of the road beneath his feet. This is why so many of them will carry along an alarm-staff to scare off small animals or a broom to sweep ants aside from their path. I imagine this accounts, too, for the strange shape of Mr. Liu’s sandals — flat and broad, so that he can slide through the dust instead of stepping. If you had only understood this, Miss Li, you would never have robbed Mr. Keng of his only life for nothing greater than a woman’s meaningless jealousy.”

She looked at Liu then, at the unspeaking man she had followed with her eyes and thoughts for so many days, and her face became the face of a child who meets death for the first time with fury and despair.

“Him and his sitting and his thinking and his closing his eyes to hum! He thinks of nothing, he believes in nothing! He looked through me as he looked through paper screen. And you!” she turned to the magistrate. “What makes you think him so devout? He doesn’t even pray!”

“Miss, I meant he has lost his orthodoxy,” Ti told her. “I did not mean he has lost his mind.”

A shadow appeared in the yellow doorway then, that of an official from the city’s own magistrate, but the girl saw nothing. She was staring down at the robes finally dropping from her hands, trying to feel a certain texture she could never hope to grasp.

The straight-backed neighbor walked Magistrate Ti back through the park, leaving him wordlessly just before they reached the dead man’s hut. There was no one else about. The authorities of Wei had come for the body and the wife, and the crowd had dispersed to return to the workday that was hurrying ahead without them. They had left the path pocked and scarred with the erasures of curiosity and confusion, so that all that could be made out now was a blur of footprints and a haze of yellow dust.

Ti looked around at the lifeless hut, at the sparkling park, at the busy clatter of work and play in the surrounding streets where already the people were forgetting. There was a ghostly loneliness in the air that preserved the scene and he felt suddenly that no matter how long he stood here, the sun would not move overhead.

Then he saw, rolled aside beneath a bush, the Confucian’s crude broom. After a long moment, he bent to pick it up and then bent again to begin sweeping. It took him a long time to wipe away the intruding, disrespectful footprints of the citizens of Wei, but when he finally set the broom aside, its handle waiting for the next pair of hands, the path was as clear and new as if it had lain unbothered for over a thousand years.