The Chinese Alchemist

Ten

I kept my promise to Lingfei that I would not reveal the subject of her work. Our life together, however, was soon to come to an end. That is because the gathering storm finally reached Chang’an.

The buffoon, An Lushan, was proving himself a poisonous element in the empire. When Yang Guozhong was made first minister on the death of Li Lin-fu, An Lushan began to fear that he would lose the Son of Heaven’s patronage. I could see no reason that he should think that. The Son of Heaven regularly sent An Lushan women from the imperial harem for his pleasure, and still made sure that he was well rewarded financially as well.

Despite or perhaps because of royal favor, An Lushan was sent north to curtail the activities of the barbarians on the northern frontier. It is not possible to know the inner thoughts of someone like An Lushan. Perhaps so far from Chang’an he began to imagine plots against him. For whatever reason, he turned on the emperor whose favor he had so long enjoyed. With a large army, An Lushan began to march, not against the barbarians, but toward Chang’an.

It was possible that the armies of the Son of Heaven might have prevailed were it not for a disastrous decision. Our army was ordered to advance and engage An Lushan. We were defeated absolutely. This left the route to Chang’an undefended, and it became char that An Lushan would take the capital. The Son of Heaven, who had neglected affairs of state for so long, was forced to flee west. I was one of the eunuchs who went with him. You can imagine the terrible time that was, the chaos, the fear. Before I left I went to Lingfei’s home, but she wasn’t there. I did not even say good-bye.

At a relay station west of the city, generals killed First Minister Yang and forced the emperor to order the execution of his beloved Yang Guifei. The Son of Heaven had to agree, anguished though he must have been. The Son of Heaven then began a terrible journey to Chengdu, where, in despair, he abdicated in favor of one of his sons.

An Lushan, who had seemed to be in the ascendancy, instead became painfully and desperately ill, and died. Some said it was murder, others merely his just desserts. The rebellion was over. Still, it was a very long time before I returned to Chang’an.

An obsession in the early days of archaeology and anthropology was the hunt for the origins of man and the so-called missing link between Neanderthals and us. Scientists scoured the globe in an effort to find this elusive creature. One of the most exciting finds in this regard occurred right outside Beijing, near a village called Zhoukoudian, where a tooth dating back to something between two hundred and thirty and five hundred thousand years ago was found in 1921. The tooth was followed by thousands of bones. It was different from examples of early man found elsewhere, and some thought it the link they all were seeking, naming it homo erectus Pekinensis, or more popularly, “Peking Man.” The story of Peking Man is fraught with intrigue, the skull and bones disappearing as they were being transported for safekeeping as the Japanese invaded. Some said they were ground up as an aphrodisiac, others that they were merely misplaced. Still the story has a spellbinding quality to it, even if they were wrong about it.

It was not lost on me that there was a missing link in all of this for me as well, something that would bring together the two threads, Dory and her silver box and Golden Lotus and indeed everything that had happened over the past several weeks, just one fact that would cause everything to make sense to me, which at that very moment it did not. Yes, I could see where there were intersections between the two, but they could easily be coincidence rather than cause and effect. I did know of one piece of information that I lacked, and that was the name of the man in black, and his relationship, whatever it was, to this whole affair, but whether this was my missing link or not, I had no idea. There was only one way to find out, and that was to ascertain who he was, if only because it was one of the few avenues left for me to pursue. Dr. Xie had said the man in black was army but not army, which is to say he was one of those people who terrified others into doing what he wanted, ruling his fiefdom through fear was the way Dr. Xie had put it. That sounded like Golden Lotus to me. And someone or something had sent Burton to Xi’an.

As scary as the prospect of getting within even a mile of the man in black was, he had already shown that he was not about to confront me in a public space, so that meant I just had to make sure I was never alone with him. After some thought, I decided that if you can’t learn someone’s name by any other means, and heaven knows I’d asked everyone I thought might know, then as a last resort, you ask the neighbors. These neighbors would not only yield useful information, but they would also afford me some cover. That at least was my plan.

First, though, I had to find the neighborhood. I knew my chances of locating the little store where Burton had eluded le—eluded me, that is, until the lovely old woman with the bound feet pointed me in the right direction—were not good. I’d been quite lost by the time we got there, concentrating as I was on keeping Burton’s taxi in sight rather than keeping track of where I was. I thought, though, that I could find my way in reverse from the Drum Tower.

That is precisely what I did. There was a woman outside the hotel sweeping the driveway. This was beginning to seem not only repetitious but suspicious as well. I found another way out of the hotel, and thence to the Drum Tower and from there into the hutong neighborhood. There were several wrong turns involved, and a lot of backtracking, but in the end I found the doorway with the five posts, the elaborate guardians of the gate, the rather impressive roofline that turned up at the ends, and the long wall that took up most of the lane. This time the man in black was not in the doorway; indeed, he was nowhere to be seen.

I went along the lane to see if I could find someone who might know the name of the lucky residents. My first efforts met with no success, mostly because I couldn’t find anyone who spoke English. At last, though, late in the afternoon, I found a little bar with a rather voluble proprietor on the lane that runs along the north side of an artificial lake not far from the Drum Tower. To prime the proverbial pump, I bought an overpriced glass of imported wine, and went on and on about how lovely the neighborhood was. She told me the area was now rather hip, at least I think that’s what she said, and while it was good for business, she was afraid the neighborhood might be spoiled. I said there looked to be some really lovely homes in the area. She said most of them were pretty small, and most didn’t have toilets.

I mentioned one I’d seen with five posts in the entrance gate, and said whoever lived there must have a truly beautiful home and be very important. She said she expected I was talking about the Zhang residence. I told her I’d seen someone in army uniform at the front gate, and asked if the army was guarding the place. She said no, the army officer lived there. I expressed surprise that someone in the army could afford such a magnificent home. “Zhang Xiaoling,” she said. She didn’t look as if she liked him. “Zhang Yi important man, much money. Zhang Xiaoling, the son, he spend money. Big car. He is no good.”

So there it was, the missing link, one word, Zhang. Dory Matthews, born Zhang Dorothy. Yes, I knew perfectly well that Zhang is one of the most common names in China, maybe even the most common and certainly in the top ten. I didn’t care. This was one coincidence too many. Satisfied, I paid the hip price for my wine and headed off to find a taxi at the Drum Tower. It was time to give George Matthews a call. He had a lot of explaining to do on behalf of both himself and his late wife.

I nearly made it. I really did. As I approached the Drum Tower, the drums began to beat loudly and rhythmically. There was a cab in the distance, I had my arm out, and then I felt myself being pulled roughly into the backseat of a car. I tried to call out, but with the din from the drums, I knew no one would hear me. The car pulled away the minute I was in it, the man who had grabbed me pulling the door shut as we careened away. In the driver’s seat was Mr. Zhang, Zhang Xiaoling if I had understood my informant properly, formerly known to me as the man in black. His henchman, in the backseat with me, had a gun. He fastened my seatbelt as the car screeched away.

I attempted the requisite protests to no avail. The two men spoke to each other in Chinese and said nothing to me. I tried to keep track of where we were. As far as I could tell, we were heading west. Soon we were in an area that looked a bit suburban, more small town than urban core. There were no signs on the roads that I could read.

A short while later, we were heading into hilly country. I’d seen the hills surrounding Beijing when I’d flown in, but still did not have any sense of where we might be. I looked for clues, but there were no highway numbers, just signs that said, in English, things like “Do not drive tiredly.”

Zhang obviously knew where he was. He was driving very fast, and there was no opportunity for me to release the seatbelt and try to get out of the car. Night was falling. I could see the dark outlines of hills, but very few lights now that would indicate a town anywhere near. The road to our left dropped off fairly precipitously, and there were no lights on that side of the road. There were a few cars out, but very few, and those that were soon disappeared behind us as Zhang aggressively passed them all.

It was on a curve that all hell broke loose. Zhang was once again trying to pass another car when a truck appeared on the curve in the oncoming lane. Zhang jerked the wheel hard, just clipping the bumper of the car he was attempting to pass. Our car’s right tire hit the shoulder and we spun out of control, first to one side of the road and then the other. We kept hitting rocks and trees near the shoulders, and I could hear and feel pieces of the car being ripped off. I thought we were dead.

The car spun one last time and then started sliding backward toward the drop on the lefthand side of the road, but instead of going over the side, the car slammed against a wall of stone and came to a stop, engine still running. Neither Zhang nor the man who was holding me captive had been wearing seatbelts. Zhang was slumped against the wheel, blood pouring from a head wound that I could not help but hope was fatal, and the man beside me had also hit his head on the roof of the car, I think, and looked to have been knocked unconscious. I couldn’t see his gun. Buckled in, I was dazed, but not hurt. It took me a second to pull myself together and move, but then I was out of the seat-belt, and out the door. The headlights of the car, still on, faced down the hill, so I headed uphill into the darkness. The oncoming vehicle and the car that had been clipped by Zhang had disappeared. I wondered why, but didn’t have time to think about it.

I tried to be quiet, but it was dark. I kept tripping on brush, and my breathing sounded very loud to me. I kept climbing, though, trying to put as much space between me and those horrible people before they came to their senses. I saw the headlights of another car, which stopped, its beam on the wrecked car. It was a police vehicle, at least it looked that way to me, and for a minute or two, I thought I’d made a terrible mistake moving away from the road. Zhang, who apparently was not badly hurt, got out of the car and spoke through the window to the occupant of the police car. In a minute, the car pulled away. Zhang had obviously pulled strings again. I heard him call out to the man with the gun, who by now had hobbled out of the car as well, and I was reasonably sure, even in the darkness, that he was looking up the hill. He may have been dazed, but he’d seen which way I’d chosen.

I kept climbing, trying not to crash around like a wounded animal, always on the lookout for some place to hide myself. At last I came to what I thought was a ridge, and staying down so that I wouldn’t show up against the dark sky, went over the top of it. I fell into a ditch or a small gulch of some kind. Something loomed above me, and I almost screamed. It took me a minute, but I decided what I could see above was the outline of roofs against the dark sky. There was even a very slight glow coming from one of the buildings. It was then I heard a shout from the road below, and the sound of someone coming after me.

I seemed to have found myself in a little town built on the side of a hill. I stumbled up stone steps wondering where I would hide. I tried a door or two that didn’t open, and then found one that did. There were no lights inside. I was in a little courtyard with buildings on three sides. There was a large cart of some kind, loaded with something I couldn’t make out. I heard someone cough nearby.

In my haste I banged against the edge of the cart, and let out an involuntary gasp. I could hear footsteps outsides whose I didn’t know. I tried one of the doors that led onto the courtyard, and it opened. In a second, I was inside. I was in a storage area of some kind, I thought, as I felt around in front of me, one that smelled of cat urine. It certainly wasn’t someone’s living room. There were sacks piled up and I crouched down behind them, only to feel something furry rub against my legs. I stifled a scream. There was a purr. Apparently I’d found the cat. A few minutes later, I could hear what I thought to be someone knocking loudly on doors. Whoever it was came closer. Then I heard steps in the courtyard, and then the ominous sound of a key turning in the lock of the building in which I’d hidden. I was trapped.

Zhang—I knew his voice well now—was in the courtyard a minute or two later. He called out in a loud and quite authoritarian tone, and a woman answered. There ensued a conversation that I could not understand. I held my breath as someone tried the door, rattling the handle. It was locked, as I very well knew. I thought I was doomed. The woman said something, and a few seconds later I heard footsteps moving away from my hiding place. Soon all was quiet.

I stayed there hardly daring to breathe for what seemed to be hours, absolutely petrified. I was cold, hungry, and scared beyond reason. Who had locked me in? Did they know I was there? Were they holding me prisoner for Zhang,-and if so, why hadn’t they just told him where I was? Maybe they had, and he was going for reinforcements. Then there were more footsteps outside my hiding place—or my prison, depending on circumstances I didn’t understand—and I heard a key inserted into the lock. The door opened. A woman spoke. I didn’t have a clue what she said, but I stood up. She couldn’t have been speaking to anyone else, and there seemed no point deluding myself with any pretense that I was safely hidden. My legs were aching from the climb and from having crouched down for so long. She took my hand in the dark and led me across the little courtyard and into another small building. This was the house. There was one lantern casting a pale light.

We looked each other over. I expect she saw a very large white woman with fair hair and pale eyes looming over her. I saw a tiny Chinese woman, someone who worked hard, judging from her worn hands. It was a one-room home, with one bed, on which a small child slept. I assume they slept together. She gave me a cup of tea, and even took me in the dark to the communal bathroom—after I said the word “toilet,” one she understood—a concrete structure with four holes in the ground cantilevered over a cliff. It was breezy, but what did I care? Then she took me back to the storage room, arranged some sacks as a bed and gave me a blanket. As I more or less collapsed on the makeshift bed, she locked me in again. Again I wondered whether I was a prisoner or a guest. At this point, it didn’t matter because I wasn’t going anywhere in the dark.

I didn’t think there was the slightest chance that I’d sleep, but I did. As the palest of light showed through the cracks in the walls of the house, I heard the key turn again, and the woman offered me a bowl of something. She signaled me to follow her, and I did, to a chair in the courtyard.

The home in which I had found myself was very basic. The cart in the courtyard against which I’d managed to bang my knee was loaded down with drying cobs of corn, dark gold against the green paint of the cart. Bunches of long, thin red peppers dangled from the rafters. A cat, perhaps my companion of the previous evening, was curled up beneath the cart.

The bowl contained congee, a soupy rice dish. To the rice were added some spring onions, and something a bit spicy I didn’t recognize. I ate every last bite. I kept saying xiexie, thank you, over and over again. Her child, a shy little boy, kept coming up and staring at me, before giggling and running away.

The woman prattled away to me for a while. I couldn’t understand a word. Finally I just said, and I believe there may have been a catch in my voice, “Zhang Xiaoling.”

The woman spat on the ground. I said it again, and she spat again. She obviously knew who he was, and she didn’t seem to like him.

After breakfast, she offered me a bowl of water to clean up a bit, and picked away at some straw that had attached itself to my jacket. “Lara,” I said, pointing to myself. She reciprocated. I think she said Ting, but I couldn’t be sure.

I pulled out my wallet, took out all the cash, the equivalent of close to two hundred dollars, and said “Beijing.” This elicited a stream of conversation. Ting left the house and came back a few minutes later with another woman, who introduced herself, at least that was what I thought she was doing, as Rong. The two of them talked away, and finally Ting took my watch arm, and pointed to two on my watch. I didn’t know what that meant, but I figured she must have thought that this was relevant in some way. It was now only eight.

I spent the next six hours in a state of barely controlled panic. I kept trying my cell phone, but of course it didn’t work. I was in the hills, and far from Beijing. I was fed regularly, and pots of tea were always available, but I didn’t know what was happening. I also didn’t know if Zhang Xiaoling was going to show up again. Every time I heard footsteps crunch against the stones of the lane, I ducked into the storage area.

Two o’clock came and went, and I was getting really frightened. Then, at about two-thirty, I heard a car horn sound several times. Ting gestured to me to follow her, and we carefully made our way down through the village toward the road. She went ahead at every corner, looking carefully about before signaling me to follow. High above the roadway we stopped, and I looked about me. We were in a narrow pass between two dark hills, their slopes brown with winter, in what looked to be a dead end. If so, this could very well be a trap. I tried not to think that way, to concentrate on what I thought had been some real human connection here.

The town clung to the slopes of both hills, with a road at the bottom between the two. The distance between the two hills at this point was just the width of a two-lane road. The town was spectacular. I think it had to be several hundred years old, Ming in style, with lovely rooflines, all gray stone and brick, with only two flashes of color, the red Chinese flag hanging high over the valley, and a red lantern swinging from a porch. Higher up the hill I could see one whitewashed building that looked like a tiny temple of some sort. I could not understand how a village like this got to be here, wherever here was, or how it had stayed like this for so long. The only modern touch was a truck at the bottom of the hill. Far, far below in another direction, on the main road, a white Lexus, at least what was left of it, sat on the shoulder. It was the car, and not the village, that seemed out of place in this setting. There was no one I could see near it. I was surprised how far I’d managed to climb in the dark.

It came to me that the villagers must surely have heard and most likely seen the accident. In a cut in the hills like this, the sound had nowhere to go but up. They may even have seen or at least heard me running away. Ting knew I was in her home. She could have exposed me, but instead she had protected me by locking me in. When Zhang came to her place, he had called her out and tried the door. Finding it locked, he assumed I couldn’t have been in it. His tone in speaking to her had been so harsh, and yet she had saved me. She’d waited until she was sure he’d gone, perhaps watching in the darkness from a little open porch I’d seen on the back of her house, a porch that afforded the same view of the road that I now had, and then she had come to make sure I was all right, and to make me tea, and to fashion some sort of bed with a blanket, something that was probably in pretty short supply in this place, to keep me warm. I wanted to cry.

Rong was talking to the driver of the truck, which was loaded down with all kinds of merchandise. There were plastic washbowls, running shoes, towels, sweaters, jackets. It was a kind of moveable general store and several people were gathered ‘round it checking out the wares. Others were standing at various places on the slopes of the town. They looked like sentries in a way, and perhaps that’s what they were. It seemed possible to me that the whole town knew I was there.

When everyone had made their purchases, Rong gave Ting a signal and we quickly headed the rest of the way down the hill. I felt terribly exposed there, the two hills looming over me like malevolent giants. Zhang or his henchmen could have been up there, and any moment could come swooping down to get me, probably hurting my newfound friends in the process. I thought it was very brave of them to help me. “Zhang Xiaoling,” I said again, this time to the driver, and all three of them spat on the ground. The feeling in this town appeared to be pretty much unanimous on the subject of Zhang Xiaoling. I thought perhaps this was part of Zhang’s fiefdom, where terrified people were forced to do whatever he asked. These three seemed prepared to defy him, something for which I was exceedingly grateful.

Five minutes later, I was lying on the bed of the truck with sweaters, jackets, pots and pans, and just about everything else piled on top of me. We were underway. It was a really rough ride. I could feel every bone, and at one point the truck stopped, and I heard someone talking to the driver. I held my breath, and soon we were on our way again.

About half an hour later, I think, the truck stopped again, but this time the driver started pulling the merchandise off me, and signaled me to get into the cab of the truck, which smelled very slightly of manure. We sped along for a couple hours that way, he talking to me, me talking back, neither of us understanding a word, but both of us nodding and smiling away.

He dropped me in front of the Forbidden City, at the north end of Tian’anmen Square. I think he would have taken me to the door of my hotel if I could have told him what and where it was. I had given some money to both Ting and Rong, although both had protested. I knew that for these people what was a posh dinner out in my hometown was a fortune for them, and I insisted they keep it. I gave the driver most of what I had left. I had enough for a taxi to the hotel. The woman who swept the sidewalk in front of the hotel was gone. I suppose she didn’t expect me to get back. Twenty minutes after the man dropped me off, I was walking through the door to my room.

Rob was there. I could tell he’d been pacing. “Where have you been?” he demanded in the tone he uses when he’s worried, but would prefer me to think he’s annoyed. “You were supposed to get here first. Was your flight delayed or something?” He looked me up and down with a somewhat perplexed expression—perhaps I wasn’t looking as well turned out as usual, what with the dirt and straw all over my clothes—before coming toward me as if to give me a hug or maybe a shake. I gave him a shake of the head of my own. Unless he liked the smell of manure, he’d regret getting any closer to me than he already was.

“Well?” he said.

I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. “No, my flight was right on time.”

“Then where have you been?”

“I have no idea. I met some wonderful people, though. It’s a long story, but let me summarize it this way: any man who gets between me and the shower is dead meat.”

Later, not only clean but safe, I placed a call to George Matthews. Did I care it was rather early in the morning in Toronto? I did not. I reversed the charges, too. When he heard my voice he did not ask why I was calling, nor did he make any attempt at small talk. I didn’t think, though, that this was because I’d awakened him. He just waited for me to say something.

“You have not been honest with me,” I said, not bothering with small talk myself. “Neither you nor Dorothy have been.” For some reason, my tongue and brain would no longer permit me to call her Dory. “Now you will tell me everything I need to know.”

“I was afraid it might come to this,” George said.

That night I dreamed about Burton and Dorothy. Burton, who was still blue of face and wearing surgical gloves, accused Dorothy of being responsible for his death. Dorothy just kept saying over and over that she was sorry.