The Chinese Alchemist

Nine

Neither of us said anything about that unnatural incident ever again, nor did I mention it to anyone else, tempting though the prospect of sharing such juicy gossip might be. The next time I saw Lingfei, she looked as she always had. She had covered her mutilated locks with an elaborate wig so no one would be the wiser. Our time together went on as before, she dictating formulas to me, I, in my best hand, recording them. I could not fail to notice, though, that after the failure of her petition, the ingredients for which she sent me were not always the medicinal herbs she’d been working with before, but rather others, more costly, like cinnabar and powdered oyster shells, mica, and pearls. I also recorded detailed processes for formulating something, I knew not what. From time to time our work together was interrupted when the emperor moved his court to the hot springs east of Chang’an where he was spending more and more of his time. While I quite enjoyed the time spent there, Lingfei was impatient to return to her work.

Finally I could contain my curiosity no longer. “What is this you are working on?” I asked in some exasperation, having had to redo, with only the most minor of changes, a formula that I had already written three or four times for her.

She looked at me for some time without speaking. I was afraid I had offended her, and was about to apologize profusely, when she signaled me to be quiet. “Can I trust you, Wu Yuan?” she asked very quietly.

“Why wouldn’t you?” I asked rather rudely. “I have been coming here for more than a year now without fail. I believe my work has been satisfactory, has it not?”

“Indeed it has,” she replied. “But it is not the quality of your work or your punctuality that I am concerned about. It is your ability to hold a confidence. I know only too well the gossip that goes on in the imperial harem, amongst the women, but also amongst the eunuchs, too. I understand firsthand the deceit, the bickering, the plotting and subterfuge that grip the harem. I defy you to tell me that is not so.”

“I cannot,” I said. “I can only promise you that I will not betray your confidence.” I realized even as I .said it, that it was true. Not only that, but I realized in an instant that I loved Lingfei in some way I did not understand. “I… I… would do anything for you.”

That was patently untrue, of course, as I had quite definitely demonstrated when she’d asked me to cut her fingers off. Still, it was unfair of her to ask, as she would have to have known, given the absence of harem gossip, that I had told no one of either her petition or her reaction to its rejection. It is possible these thoughts showed in my face. “Not quite anything,” she said, but at least there was a hint of a smile there. “Come with me.”

She took me to a pavilion across the garden from her palace apartment. The garden was treeless, of course, so as not to provide a means to scale the wall and make good her escape to the arms of the man in the Gold Bird Guard. Her living quarters were a prison, beautiful to be sure, but a prison nonetheless, I now began to realize. Until that moment, I believe I had misjudged the grip of the golden threads that bound all of us to the palace and to the Son of Heaven.

The pavilion was hot, as a fire burned, over which a cauldron rested. The smell offended my delicate nostrils. There were three tables lined with vessels of all shapes and sizes, and tools as well. “This is my life’s work,” she said to me.

“But what is it that you are doing here?” I asked. The unpleasant thought that I was in the presence of a witch crossed my mind. I brushed it aside. This was the lovely Lingfei, quite possibly—no, almost certainly—my sister.

“I seek the elixir of immortality,” she said. “I believe I am very close to perfecting it. I have solved the puzzle of the mysterious yellow, the foundation of the elixir, and am now proceeding to formulate the elixir itself. I have tried the ingredients I know to be necessary in different combinations, and I believe the secret is within my grasp.”

Everything became clear to me, the endless hours writing and rewriting formulations with only the most minute changes, the reworking of the same ingredients over and over, the necessity for the precious ingredients. Still, I was astonished, and felt compelled to remind her that the emperor was inclined to Confucian thought, and might find some of the Taoist arts not to his liking. She pointed out that the Son of Heaven knew the words of Buddha and the Tao as well as that of Confucius, and that while he might favor one, he was not averse to the others.

“Whether you have realized this or not, you have become my apprentice. It is you who have worked and reworked the formulations according to my experiments.”

“But how do you know how to do this?” I asked.

“Do you recall I told you of a Taoist convent to which I was sent when I first left my home? It was there that I was trained to be a concubine, but where I was also apprenticed to an adept at the adjoining monastery. Like you, I did not at first realize that I was being initiated into the mysteries of the elixir. However, I was wrenched from the convent too soon. I knew the ingredients for the elixir, but not in what combination. It is only from an adept that one can learn details like that. The exact formulations are never written down, but passed along orally only to those deemed worthy. I tried to contact the adept with whom I studied, but learned that he joined the Immortals soon after I left him. It was a most encouraging event. He was speaking to his new apprentice when suddenly he disappeared. Only his robes remained. It was cause for much celebration, and he is now venerated. Do not forget your promise to me,” she said. “And I will share the secret of the elixir with you.”

It was terrifying, of course, to think that Golden Lotus, the gang that was causing so much trouble at home, was nearby. When I managed to get my fear under control, however, I realized that the people I was up against had made their first mistake.

Rob once told me that the British secret service had an expression to describe the Russian gangsters on British soil, and that was that they, the gangsters, still had snow on their boots, which is to say that they were not local talent per se, but had very strong ties back to their homeland. I don’t know what the Chinese equivalent of snow on boots is, but that one phone call told me that Golden Lotus, too, had ties back to Mainland China. And if I needed more evidence that a gang was operating here, I had only to look at the deaths of Song Liang and the man in the mosque, both of them with slit throats, one of them with severed hands. If ever there was the mark of a gang, surely that was it.

At home, Golden Lotus was, as Rob had told me, engaged in fraud and extortion and was attempting to move into the territory of other gangs, most specifically those who controlled drug trafficking, thus initiating gang wars in which innocent people were being hurt and occasionally killed. Were they calling me in Xi’an because I lived next door to a Canadian police officer, one who spent more time than was absolutely necessary to be neighborly with the woman who lived next door? Had they tracked me all the way to Xi’an to continue to threaten me? I didn’t think so. They were calling because of what I was doing in Xi’an.

It was time to call for backup. I left a long and detailed voice mail for Rob. This time I didn’t care if I worried him. He should be worried. I told him Golden Lotus was here and was again telephoning threats to me. I told him exactly where I was, and what I had been doing, and that I would notify him of every move I made. Then I set out to figure this all out.

Up until that unpleasant telephone call, I’d judged the facts of the case, and my relative safety for that matter, on what was happening in China exclusively. I was in danger because Burton had been murdered. I was safe because he had killed himself. I should be frightened because I knew the man in the alley, or I was invulnerable because he was not the person I thought he was, and so on.

This call said I was quite possibly looking in the wrong place. What happened if I factored Toronto into the equation? When I had first received the threatening phone calls at my home, I had not yet spoken to Dory about the silver box. Did that mean these events were not related to the silver box? The deaths of two men—one the possible thief of the box and the other a contact of Burton’s who was possibly even more determined than I to possess this same box— both killed in a way favored by mobs said they were. The box and Golden Lotus had to be related in some way I did not yet understand. I just had to find out as much as I could about all of them. I decided I could not assume anything, that I had to look very carefully at everything, and not just carefully, but with a jaundiced eye. What part of this whole exercise, right from the first threatening phone call and the moment Dory had invited me to her house for lunch that fateful day, had to be included in my research?

In effect, I had two starting points: the threatening phone calls to my home and Dory’s request to get her the silver box in New York. I would look for intersections of those two streams.

I started with the silver box. Dory and I had had many conversations about China, and I had professed my mixed feelings about the country. She had been born there, and there was no ambivalence whatsoever in her view, or if there was, she never let me see it. I had been in China in the 1980s, right out of school, and I loved it. People were wonderful. They didn’t live well by our standards, but they all believed in the dream, Mao’s dream. I didn’t share their dream, but I admired them for having one. I have that tendency, to admire and possibly envy people who are so clear about what they believe in, when I tend to be a little wishy-washy on the subject of just about anything philosophical. To me China seemed less complicated and more real than the life I was used to.

When I told Dory these things, she had countered by saying that when the Chinese espoused Mao’s particular brand of communism they had merely replaced one set of despotic rulers, by which she meant two thousand years of imperial rule followed by several decades of the tyranny of Koumintang warlords, for another equally despotic leader.

When I said the country seemed to be moving toward democracy, however slowly, she said that China would never be free, that the one republic that had been created, in the early part of the twentieth century, had fallen into complete decay and despotism within a short time. She believed, as Dr. Xie also professed, that Chinese people somehow could never accept a democracy.

I told her that China, for whatever faults that she might see in it, was the most enduring civilization in the world. She said that was because it resisted change, refused to listen to fresh ideas.

I said that I loved everything I had seen, the Great Wall, the Forbidden City, the Ming Tombs, the hutong neighborhoods, and that I thought Chinese art was surely some of the most aesthetically pleasing there was anywhere in the world. Surely, I had said to her, having devoted her career to Asian antiquities, she could not possibly disagree with that.

She replied that might be true, but that rather than cherishing what they had, the Chinese people, specifically the Red Guard, had set out to destroy all that was most beautiful in the country, that during the Cultural Revolution anyone considered to be an intellectual was hunted down, humiliated, and often killed. Anyone who could read was considered an intellectual. “They burned books, Lara!” she would exclaim. “Books! And they turned beautiful paintings, homes, temples into firewood.”

“But for all its faults, the Communist Party lowered the infant mortality rate and raised the level of education in the country,” I countered.

“At first, yes, but then there was the Cultural Revolution. Schools were closed, weren’t they? What do you think that did for the level of education?”

“But you weren’t in China during the Cultural Revolution,” I would sometimes meekly protest.

“I wasn’t there, but I know,” was her standard reply.

It was not that I didn’t know what she was talking about. It was just that I didn’t share her pessimism for the future. I am not naive. I enjoyed that first stay in China, but was not unaware that there was another China, one that gradually infiltrated my consciousness. This was the China of communist indoctrination. Government guides, who proved extraordinarily difficult to avoid, insisted that I go to so-called model factories, which had frankly appalled me with their poor working conditions. One in particular, a silk embroidery factory where young women worked long hours in poor light and unpleasantly cool temperatures, bothered me more than most. I was later told they could only work a very few years before their eyesight was destroyed. I’d bought an embroidered panel depicting cranes on a gold silk background in the shop there before I’d seen the factory floor itself. The workmanship was exquisite. I didn’t know whether I was right to support them to the extent that they would continue to be paid their wages if people like me bought the products, or if I was encouraging exploitation of the women. I have the embroidery still, framed, too, and I still don’t know how I feel about it.

I went out into the country, and was shown a bridge that had been built by the common people without the help of engineers. At least that’s what the government guides insisted. The trouble was, I knew enough about the terrible period called the Cultural Revolution, where essentially the country had turned on itself in the most brutal way, to know that anyone considered bourgeois—and that included doctors, teachers, and, yes, engineers—was criticized and sent to the country to be reeducated through hard labor. Individually, they had suffered terribly, of course, unaccustomed to the harshness of their new environment, and in many cases separated from their families forever. The country had suffered even more, the school system essentially shut down for ten years, as Dorothy had maintained, people told what to think. This bridge had been built by engineers, all right, just engineers who now picked cabbage.

But those visits to the village and the factory were nothing compared to how I felt when I went to Tibet. I had a rough time getting there, because while the authorities said I could go, they made it difficult to do so. But I got there, and as spectacular as Tibet is, I was appalled by what I saw. China talks about its “religiously correct” policy toward minorities. They can say all they want. At least as far as Tibet was concerned, it’s garbage. The Tibetans were persecuted relentlessly. Monks were considered dissidents and thrown in jail for twenty years for nothing. After that, I had a couple of run-ins with party cadres, petty officials who thought their position entitled them to treat everyone else like dirt. Still, I know you can’t equate the people with their government, so I left China, feeling on balance that I liked the place, and that eventually things would get better.

Not long after I had returned home, however, there had been that odious moment in recent Chinese history, the massacre in Tian’anmen Square. I remember watching the television as grainy pictures, a lurid red from the night lenses, were beamed around the world, and wondering if some of the wonderful young people I’d met had been hurt or killed. At that moment, I told myself I would never go back to China. Until Dory Matthews spoke to me from the dead, I never had.

Still, I am an optimistic person. Even before my return to China to try to buy Dory’s box, I knew that people clearly lived better lives. The country was modernizing at an unprecedented rate. Where once it had been a crime to be remotely bourgeois, now there was a new government directive: it is glorious to be wealthy. True, there were still the men in black, the army officials who considered themselves above the law, and that continued to make me uncomfortable. Beyond mere wealth, though, the people I’d seen had a degree of freedom they had not had in more than half a century, maybe ever. Dory had heard the same things I had, but it didn’t change anything for her. She said that while she loved Chinese history and culture, had made it her life’s work, really, she would never go back to Mainland China, that her memories of the place were of a war-ravaged country, with zealots of every stripe so determined to rule that they cared not how many people died in the process.

She had plenty of reasons to feel that way, regardless of whether she was right or wrong. It was difficult for me to argue with her when it came to her own experiences, the ones on which she based her opinions. Yes, I could make a case for the big picture, but what influenced her opinion was what she knew on an intensely personal level. True experience trumps theory every time. Dory had left China with her mother at the age of five. Young as she was, she still had very vivid memories, and they were not good ones. She told me that her father was from Shanghai, and had been a successful businessman. Her mother Vivian, also born in Shanghai to British parents, was well-off too. Shanghai was an enticing city in those days before World War II and the Japanese invasion: Chinese, but with some European influence as well; affluent, but also a little decadent. But the proverbial storm clouds were on the horizon, Japan having occupied Manchuria in 1931, putting the last Qing emperor, Puyi, on a puppet throne.

That must have seemed a distant threat at the time, but it came much, much closer. In July of 1937, the Japanese were at the gates of Beijing, and that city fell to them on July 29, 1937, in an incident known to us now as that of Marco Polo Bridge. In late 1937, Shanghai also fell to the Japanese and remained under Japanese control until the end of World War II.

On December 13, 1937, Japanese soldiers captured Nanking, then the capital of China, and slaughtered their way through the city for several weeks, an ignominious event called the Rape of Nanking. It is said that during the war with Japan, something between ten and thirty million Chinese were killed, although there are many who believe that number is much, much higher. The Chinese people have come to regard the Japanese occupation of their country, which lasted through World War II, as the Forgotten Holocaust.

Amazingly enough, Vivian and her family managed very well during the Japanese occupation. In Shanghai, whole areas of the cities had in some sense been ceded to the large and powerful nations of Europe, like Britain, France, Italy, and Russia. The Japanese, at this point not willing to rouse the ire of such powerful foes—that would come later—left them alone. Vivian would recall that time as reasonably happy, home with her parents in a beautiful house on a hill complete with servants. The Japanese were not the only problem, however. The Chinese were fighting among themselves. There were two factions, the Red or Communist Army led by Mao Zedong, and the Koumintang, led by Chiang Kai-Shek.

At first Vivian thought the Koumintang would protect people from the Japanese, but in the end the Koumintang was another despotic force. No matter where she went, she found herself surrounded by fighting no matter how cocooned her existence.

It was during this turbulent time that Vivian met the man who would become her husband and Dory’s father. He had joined the Communist Army very young, in his early teens, according to Dory. His father had been with Mao in Xi’an when Mao became secretary of the Communist Party, and in 1934 had gone on the Long March with Mao. The Long March was one of the most famous strategic retreats in history, an almost five-thousand-mile march through difficult terrain over the course of just over a year. Only twenty thousand of the ninety thousand soldiers who set out with Mao survived. But it gave the army a chance to regroup, and at the end of World War II, Mao was able to push the Koumintang off the Chinese mainland to Taiwan. Those who had been close to Mao during that difficult time, and Dory’s father apparently was one of them, stood to benefit for the rest of their lives.

Dory was born in 1944 in the dying days of World War II. Perhaps Vivian thought that with the defeat of Japan, her life would return to normal. She was wrong. When Shanghai was about to be taken over by the communists, Dory’s mother had had enough. She got the last boat out of Shanghai. Dory’s father chose not to come with them, something that was a terrible blow to the five-year-old child. Instead he had gone to Beijing to take a senior position with the Communist Party. It must have been difficult for Dory’s mother, as well. She might have had British parents, but she’d been born in China and had spent her whole life there. She’d also been married to the same man for a number of years, even if she hadn’t seen much of him. Neither Dory nor her mother were ever to see Dory’s father again, or even to hear from him. Neither ever went back to China.

Dory’s most vivid memory was that of trying to board the ship, a small child surrounded by panicked individuals desperate to get out of the country, and of looking for her father. She’d told me about it more than once, and even after all those years, she’d choked up about it just a little.

And yet, despite all this, Dory wanted to give three silver boxes of inestimable worth back to the country of her birth, one about which she did not have a good word to say. And she wanted to give it to Xi’an, the town where her father formally became a communist. How much sense did that make? I’d felt bothered all along by her request in a kind of fuzzy, unspecific way, sensing that there was something wrong. I still thought so, if for no other reason than it seemed highly unlikely that the box could be first withdrawn from sale and then stolen within a few weeks. I’d tried to tell myself it was a coincidence. Did I really still think it was?

This all said to me that the box had some value way beyond its monetary and historical worth for Dory and possibly for others. But how could that be? As Dr. Xie had pointed out in another context, this was a large country with many millennia of history. There were thousands if not millions of treasures here worth as much, and doubtless a lot more, than one silver box. Yes, it was silver; yes, it was very old; and yes, it was valuable. What else? That it contained instructions for the production of an elixir of immortality? I suppose if you were Ponce de Leon that would be a big selling point. In this Jay and age, however, it was highly unlikely this fact alone explained anything.

Was it a peace offering of sorts on the part of Dory, an indication she’d come to terms with her past? Maybe, but I hadn’t heard anything from her that would indicate this was the case. If anything, her opinion hardened the more we had talked about it.

And if the silver box was so important, was its first owner, the concubine Lingfei, the key to this mystery? I wasn’t prepared to accept the leap to immortality that one of the boxes supported. Lingfei was dead. Maybe her body was stolen. Was this relevant? Assuming someone thought she’d made the transition successfully, would she be buried, or if not, then perhaps the clothes she’d left behind? In other words, was this about a tomb? Chances were, absolutely. The dealer who’d led me to his home for tea and a sales pitch had clearly known where a tomb was located, or at least knew someone who did. Had these silver boxes been looted from a tomb? And where might this tomb be? Lingfei hadn’t made it into the guidebooks or the Internet, so maybe her tomb hadn’t been found—officially, that is. As an imperial concubine in the court of Illustrious August, though, the likelihood of her being buried somewhere near Chang’an, which is to say Xi’an, was pretty high.

What if someone in Xi’an knew where this tomb was? What if several people did? When I’d been in the Muslim Quarter waving the photograph of the silver box around, a shopkeeper had directed me to the stall of the man in the mosque. It was the right place even if I wished I hadn’t seen what I had.

I had the feeling I was getting warm here, but I needed a lot more information. I didn’t want to leave the hotel to get it, either. Who, I wondered, would help me get what I sought? Anyone who had been in Xi’an at the time of Burton’s demise, or that of the man in the alley, or the man from the mosque for that matter, was automatically eliminated as too risky, guilty until proven otherwise. That meant I could not look to Dr. Xie, Mira Tetford, and now Liu David, who wasn’t speaking to me in any case. As for Ruby, perhaps that wasn’t the best idea either, given that all I had was her mobile number, and she could have been anywhere.

Was it actually going to be possible for me to avoid asking questions of any of these people if I wanted to get to the bottom of this? Probably not, but I was going to try. I really needed to know more about the history of those silver boxes, their provenance. Where had they been since Dory had seen them when she was young? Dory for sure wasn’t telling me anything. I didn’t want to ask George about it either. So what could I learn without consulting George? That night I called my friend, neighbor, and sometime employee, Alex Stewart. Alex has a deft way of finding out just about anything, and furthermore, he has a good sense of what’s relevant and what’s not. As a bonus, he seemed very happy to hear from me.

“I have a huge favor to ask,” I said. “Is there any way you could go into the shop today?”

“Of course. I was planning to go in any event. Give could use some help.”

“Do you recall where we keep our stash of auction catalogs?”

“Indeed I do. You must have at least ten years’ worth there. Pretty soon you’ll have to occupy the shop next door to have enough storage space for them.”

“And sometimes they come in very handy,” I said. “I need you to check the most recent Molesworth and Cox Oriental auction, the one I went to this fall. In it you will find a photograph of a silver box, T’ang dynasty. That is the one I went to New York to try to buy.”

“I remember, yes.”

“Take a good look at that one, and then if you don’t mind, go through the back issues of the catalog and see if you can find an almost identical silver box that is slightly larger.” I checked my notes and gave Alex the dimensions of George’s box, the one Dory had shown me when I went to visit. “Same shape, same type of decoration, but the smaller one would fit inside the larger. I need to know when that came on the market. It may not be there, but I’m hoping that it will be.”

“Easily done,” he said. “When will I get back to you? How many hours time difference?”

“Thirteen,” I said.

“I’ll call you tonight then, tomorrow morning for you.”

“Call me in the middle of the night,” I said. “I mean it.”

“I’ll leave right now,” he said.

The telephone rang several hours later in the early morning. I wasn’t asleep. “I’m sorry to take so long on this, Lara. It ended up being more complicated that I thought, and perhaps you will also be surprised by what I have found. Shall I just begin?”

“Yes, please, and I’m sorry to put you to so much trouble.”

“It was very interesting, and I’m glad to help. I had no trouble, of course, identifying the box you described to me. I then started to look for something similar. I started with the Molesworth and Cox catalogs, just because that is where the box you were attempting to get was to be sold, and I assume people choose auction houses that specialize in the kind of thing they want to sell. That was my theory, anyway. At first I thought that this request of yours was very simple and straightforward. I found a similar box right away, as you suggested I might, in the Molesworth and Cox Oriental auction about eighteen months ago, in the spring. Molesworth appears to hold two Oriental auctions a year. I have the information from that sale, and I’d be happy to give it to you.”

“That’s great, Alex. I’m glad it didn’t take a lot of your time. Except didn’t you say this took longer than you thought it would?”

“Exactly. I thought I was home free when I found the listing, complete with photograph, so there was no mistaking the resemblance. But just to be sure, I took the dimensions you gave me, and I compared them to the listing in the catalog. That was when I knew this was not going to be as easy as I thought: the dimensions you gave me are not the same as the one I identified in the catalog; those are about an inch bigger all ‘round, in fact.”

“Just a minute! There are two boxes in question here, the small one in this fall’s auction catalog, and then one whose dimensions I gave you that belonged to George Matthews. I measured it myself.”

“That is my point. The measurements are not the same as those that you gave me for the George Matthews box. This box is larger than either the Matthews or the stolen box.”

“I thought I was careful. Dory gave me complete access to that box of her husband’s to photograph and measure, so I should have gotten it right. I must have screwed up,” I said.

“Ah, but you didn’t. You usually don’t, that much I learned working at McClintoch and Swain. If Clive measures something, measure it again. If Lara measures it, relax. That’s what piqued my interest.”

“I’m flattered, I guess, but where are you going with this?”

“There is a third box,” he said. “Given that the measurements didn’t jive, I went on looking for one that did. I found it, too, up for auction about three years ago. These boxes are coming on the market at eighteen month intervals, and there are three of them, not two.”

“I see. So if Dory wanted to put the set of three together, she missed one?”

“I have no idea, but there are three boxes. I thought perhaps that meant they are fakes. Having found this anomaly, I started looking for more boxes, just in case. That was when I began to notice something interesting about T’ang dynasty objects. I went back through your entire stash of catalogs, which covers pretty well a decade of the major auctions in New York and Toronto. I can tell you that there has been a sharp increase in T’ang objects offered for sale in the last five years, running perhaps four times the average for the previous five years. Do you see what I mean? Most of the increase is at Molesworth and Cox, incidentally.”

“It could be that more people are selling T’ang objects as prices rise, simple as that. They see other items similar to what they have fetching attractive sums, so they put theirs on the market, too. Is there anything you can tell me about the two boxes, other than size and the fact they look right?”

“Both sold at Molesworth and Cox, one in New York, one in Toronto. Both are supposed to have belonged to someone by the name of Lingfei. The seller of the first box to come on the market, the one sold three years ago, was someone by the name of, just a minute, I won’t pronounce this well, Dr. Jinghe Xie.”

“No kidding,” I said.

“You know him?”

“I do. He’s here. In China, he’s Xie Jinghe, of course, but it’s the same man. And the second box?”

“No owner listed. Does this mean something significant?”

“I’m sure it does, but right now I don’t have a clue what that might be. What it does do is link Dr. Xie with the silver box, one of them at least. George Matthews obviously bought one of Xie Jinghe’s boxes, given the dimensions of the first match the one I saw at his home. It should also mean that Dr. Xie was not the mystery buyer on the telephone in New York, because he’d already sold a box. Why would he want another only slightly smaller than the one he’d had in his possession and chosen to sell? It’s also possible that George and Dory just missed the second box up for sale. Dory would just have been leaving the Cottingham, and she didn’t purchase in her area of employment on principle, and George might have decided one was enough, not realizing his wife would be more than a little interested in all of them.”

“You should know that many of the T’ang objects up for sale in the past five years are from the collection of this Dr. Xie.”

“Not sure what that means either. It was legal to buy and sell Chinese artifacts at that time. He has a tremendous number of them. Maybe he was just unloading a few to make room for more. When we talked about the silver box at the preview in Beijing, he didn’t mention that he’d once owned a similar one. I don’t know about that. Maybe he simply didn’t think it was relevant. Still, you’d think he’d say something. Did he suddenly realize that his box was part of a nesting set, more valuable that way, and maybe he’d try to buy the other one back again? I can’t really ask him. What I do need to know, and short of someone getting a court order I never will, is who put the box up for sale in New York and then withdrew it from sale.”

“Dr. Xie also?”

“Maybe. Burton Haldimand had Dr. Xie down as a possible buyer, not the seller, but who knows? I can’t ask him that, either.”

“You are on bad terms with this Dr. Xie?”

“No, but if his name keeps popping up in this connection, I may be. Thank you for this, Alex. As usual you have been wonderful.”

“Take care of yourself,” he said.

“I plan to do that.” I did, too. As I completed the call, I parted the curtains carefully and looked out on to the street, Dong Dajie. It was still early enough that the stores were not open. The street cleaners were out, though, one in particular just sweeping away in front of the hotel. As I Watched, she looked up, shielding her eyes slightly. It was the woman with the scar on her face. It occurred to me she’d been there almost every day, except maybe when she was following me to the market. I just hadn’t really looked at her. “Whose side are you on?” I said to her through the curtain. I was going to have to be very careful getting out of this hotel.

While I’d been on the telephone with Alex, I’d received some calls. One was from Mira telling me that she was on her way back to Beijing and that she hoped she’d see me before I left. The second was from Dr. Xie saying much the same thing. He added that I should not go out by myself at night, as quite uncharacteristically Xi’an had turned violent. “Tell me something I don’t know,” I said to the voice mail.

And there was a third call telling me to get out of China or else. At least I think that’s what he said. Really, if people want to scare somebody into doing something, they should take the socks out of their mouths and enunciate clearly. Actually I thought getting out of China would normally have been a good idea, but given that I was just going back to the haunt of some of this telephone mumbler’s confreres, there didn’t seem much point. Beijing, however, sounded like a good idea to me. I called and booked a flight the next day.

Liu David had still not called me back. Maybe he was still kneeling on a bamboo mat in front of the Baxian Gong, afraid to take his fancy cell phone out lest it attract attention. I didn’t think so, though. The market would reopen next Sunday. I supposed he just was not in any position to return my call. I was reasonably sure he would, eventually.

I went on with my mulling. Alex had given me some very interesting information. I was certain that Dory had told me that she had seen the three boxes together, but that her stepfather had broken them up and sold them off in the mid 1970s. What had happened to them after that? Dr. Xie had obviously acquired one of them. Dory had also said that there would have been an outer wooden box that disintegrated. That continued to bother me even though I’d seen the silver caskets at Famen Si and learned they too had an outer wooden box. How as a young person would she have known that? Did her stepfather just tell her? And how would he know?

What if all these T’ang objects that were turning up in New York had been stolen from Lingfei’s tomb? Was that possible? Was it also possible that this was a business of Golden Lotus, along with their other nefarious activities? Did the fact that many objects had come from Dr. Xie’s collection make him a tomb robber as well as a successful businessman and philanthropist? He was certainly besotted with Chinese antiquities. Just how bad was his infatuation? And even if he were a tomb robber, what did this have to do with anything?

Then the telephone rang. I reached for it, but then drew back my hand. Was this to be another of those awful phone calls that would test my nerve? Should I let them know I was in the hotel? Still there were important calls I wanted to receive. I picked it up but didn’t say anything.

“Are you all right?” Rob said.

“So far.”

“Can you get to Beijing?”

“I think so. I have my passport and I have a flight.”

“It will take me several hours to get out of here.”

“I know.”

“Beijing. Your hotel. I’ll be there.”

“So will I.”

I was out the front door of the hotel very fast the next morning. I’d called Peter, the taxi driver who’d pestered me every time I left the hotel, and had him waiting at the door. The woman with the scar was out there, sweeping away. I hoped she didn’t see me because it was pretty clear she was spying on me, whether for ill or good I did not know. She did see me, though, and my bag being loaded into the back. She leaned against her broom and got out a cell phone. Somebody knew I was heading out of town. Still, we sped away the minute my door closed, and the hour plus drive to the airport went without incident. So far, so good.

I found myself in a window seat, with an old Chinese couple beside me. It was immediately apparent they hadn’t been on an airplane before. The seatbelt perplexed them utterly. I showed them how to use it. When the flight attendant brought drinks, they couldn’t figure out what to do with them. I showed them the tray, and how to operate it. They kept smiling and she, in the middle seat, kept patting my arm, and chatting away. I smiled and nodded. She got out a Thermos and offered me some tea. I declined, having rather gone off tea of late.

I noticed the old man straining to see past me and I offered, via hand motions, to change seats with him. At first he shook his head, but I offered again, and when I’d managed to get both of them out of their seatbelts, in his haste to look out the window he practically sat on my lap. I had to crawl past both of them to get to the aisle seat. The flight attendant had a rather bemused expression on her face, but then came and thanked me. At the window, the old man kept exclaiming and pulling on his wife’s arm so she’d lean over and look too. It was a very clear day, and I expect the view was extraordinary. Watching their enthusiasm, I almost forgot my worries for awhile.

The flight was not the end of our adventure together, however. There was still the escalator to be mastered. The woman was about to fall over backward before I realized that they didn’t know how to negotiate this newfangled contraption either. I lunged for her, keeping her upright, and then I held on to both of them until they were safely off the escalator. Then there was the marvel of the baggage carousel. I had to help them with their luggage because the old man grabbed one suitcase, a huge plaid number, and was dragged along by it, nearly falling over in the process. Somehow I’d forgotten how complicated these things are.

I was about to take my leave, having managed to get them both, along with their luggage, to the glass gates that separated the passengers from those waiting for them, when I saw something that made me feel ill. It was the man in black, now in uniform, and he was clearly looking for someone. I had a pretty good idea who that someone might be, and even had a notion or two about how he knew I’d be on this flight. I was not yet prepared to meet him.

I slipped in between the old couple, linking arms with them. The man in black, now in green, stepped toward us, but in an instant we were swept up in a crowd, twelve or fourteen people, I think, including babies, the welcoming party for the old couple. At first everyone looked at me with some puzzlement, but the old man was excitedly chattering away, and then the old woman said something, and I was suddenly being much fussed over. I was given a baby to hold while luggage was sorted, and the youngest couple, grandchildren of the travelers, parents of the infant in my arms, explained in English that the old couple, who had lived and worked on a farm outside Xi’an all their lives, was coming to live with the family in Beijing. The granddaughter thanked me for helping them, and especially for letting her granddad look out the window. She said, rather unnecessarily, that it was their first flight. I thought it was probably their last, too, and that they’d be talking about it for as long as they lived. She said the family had been worried about how they would manage on the airplane, but couldn’t afford to send someone to travel with them. She said they’d hoped that someone nice would look after them, and were grateful I had been there.

All the while, the man formerly in black watched me. Yes, he saw me, and he recognized me, but he didn’t make a move. That told me something: he wasn’t there in an official capacity, despite the uniform. I found that even more chilling than the alternative. I wasn’t sure how I was going to get away, but at least I had cover as far as the curb. I just hoped there was a taxi at the ready.

“Do you have a car arranged?” the young woman asked.

“I’m afraid not,” I said.

“Then we must insist upon driving you to your hotel.”

Normally I would have politely declined, but this time I decided that I should consider this my reward for good behavior and a timely one at that. Surrounded by my new friends, I sailed right past my pursuer. Mentally I informed him I’d be seeing him soon.