The Chinese Alchemist

Five

I remember the exact moment when I decided that there was a distinct possibility that Lingfei was my long lost sister. After Wu Peng’s revelation, I spent as little time as possible visiting my family. The necessary obligations met, I sought no further opportunities to see them. My feelings about my family did not extend to Auntie Chang, who had been a most devoted and beloved servant, and a very distant cousin of my mother’s. A chance encounter with Auntie Chang as she was leaving a Buddhist temple after prayers provided the impetus. (My family is Buddhist, my mother devoutly so. Indeed my great-grandfather purchased an ordination certificate from a particularly grasping member of the imperial family of his day, one Princess Anle, for thirty thousand coppers in order to be exempt from taxes, as all priests are. He did not live in a monastery however, nor was he celibate, as his numerous offspring would attest. The current Son of Heaven revoked his exemption and put us back on the tax rolls, which upset my family, but rather impressed me now that I was old enough to understand it.)

Auntie Chang did enjoy a tipple or two, her favorite being Courtier’s Clear Ale of Toad Tumulus. It was an inferior brew, I knew from my sojourn at the palace, but Auntie Chang liked it, and I took her to a pub for a goblet or two. She drank. I ate dumplings. When she was feeling happy, I took the opportunity to ask about my sister.

“All I know,” Auntie Chang said, “is that your father was very angry with her when she stayed out all night. He guessed, and I knew, that there was a young man involved. Your sister had fallen in love with a member of the Gold Bird Guard, one posted to the station at one of the eastern gates. That is why she had no worries about staying out on the streets after the ward had closed. Your father had other plans for her. She was an accomplished musician, and he wished to enhance his status through her, persuading someone in the Imperial Palace to accept her. If the emperor liked her, then your family would rise in status. They might be invited to the palace, become a confidant of the most senior mandarins.”

“Is that what happened then? She is somewhere in the palace?”

“I do not know,” she replied. “I know only that she left with your father. He came back. She did not. That is what also happened to you. Unlike you, I have neither seen nor heard of her since. Your mother never mentions her at all, never utters her name. Nor will she permit others in the household to do so.”

It had never occurred to me until that moment that I should be searching for my sister where I myself labored, in the harem of the Son of Heaven. From there it was, I suppose, a fairly easy leap to suspicions about Lingfei. On every occasion that I saw her, I looked carefully at her features, searching for something that would tell me whether or not she was indeed Number One Sister. There were two difficulties. One was that she always wore makeup in my presence. The other was that I had not seen my sister in almost ten years. Indeed, I had been only five years of age when she left us. Her face was not clear to me, except perhaps in my dreams. I listened most carefully to Lingfei’s voice, but that told me nothing. Hers was the voice of a mature woman, not the young girl’s voice I recalled.

I had more and more opportunity to study her, however. After several months of doing errands for her, she asked me if I would write something for her, I thought it would be a letter to her family, perhaps, which would resolve my dilemma, but it was not. Instead I began writing what I soon realized was a very detailed formula for making artificial pearls. I gave no indication that I understood it, although I did try to memorize it, pearls being a rather valued commodity in the harem.

I was disappointed by her request, however. My sister had learned how to write just as I and my brothers had, so this seemed to indicate quite conclusively that Lingfei was not the woman I sought. I was desolate, until she told me that I had saved her many hours of writing, and allowed her to consult the notes resulting from her experiments. That could only mean that she could read, and I went forward with renewed hope. She asked me to come back two days hence.

From that day on, I spent at least one day a week with Lingfei, writing for her. I would sit cross-legged on one of her wooden couches with my writing table before me while she paced the room, stopping occasionally to consult her notes. Most of the formulas I wrote were for medicines, I decided, for the treatment of various ailments resulting from an excess of either yin or yang, caused by wind, cold, heat, damp, dry, and fire. She told me when I questioned her that she had been a Taoist nun before she caught the Emperor’s eye, and had studied with a master. These formulas that I was writing for her were based on her notes of that time, and the work she had done with the master, and also her observations from the treatment of the women in the harem. It was the first of several confidences that she shared with me.

Different city. Same routine. At least it was a really interesting place. Xi’an and its environs are considered by many to be the cradle of Chinese civilization, and justifiably so. With a history that stretches back at least four thousand years, and its status as capital of several Chinese dynasties, including that of the first emperor, Qin Shi Huangdi, it is a wonderful repository of art and culture. Best known worldwide as the home of the magnificent terra-cotta army of Qin Shi Huangdi, it is a city that seems to me to have managed the transition to the new economic reality better than Beijing, having preserved the old with the new to a much greater extent, as compared to the wholesale leveling of much of old Beijing. It is a walled city, although the urban area has expanded way beyond the walls.

Burton had chosen a hotel within the beautiful old city walls, a little east of the Bell Tower, which would have been the center of the ancient city, positioned where the main north-south and east-west axes meet. He headed out of his hotel around 9 AM when this part of town was just waking up. Once out the front door he stopped briefly to add a surgical mask to his attire, which already included a hat pulled down over his ears, a long scarf that was wound around his neck a couple of times, azure of course, and heavy jacket and gloves. It was cold, that’s for sure, and for once the surgical mask did not look entirely out of place. Xi’an’s air is unfortunately highly polluted, and even some Chinese wore masks.

Health thus attended to, Burton sidestepped the taxi driver who wanted to take him wherever he wanted to go, and headed west on foot along the rather prosaically named Dong Dajie or East Street, past the restaurants selling steamed dumplings and buns from their front windows, past the many clothing shops, most still boarded up for the night, past the banks with their charming English signage—like “Evening Treasure” for their night depository chutes—and then past the man washing the sidewalk in front of the establishment with the inspired English moniker of Sunny Half Past Eight Friend Changing Club. The street was not crowded at all, and as always I was worried Burton would see me. And as always, he never looked back.

When he came to the Bell Tower, he paused only briefly to look at the impressive and beautifully colored structure before taking an escalator down to the subterranean passages that linked the major streets of the city’s central square. During the time that Xi’an, then known as Chang’an, was the capital of the T’ang dynasty, it may well have been the most populous city in the world. These main thoroughfares would have been extraordinarily wide, particularly the main north-south street, wide enough, indeed, for the emperor to leave his Imperial Palace to the city’s north, and make his way south to go about imperial business. City residents would have had to cross huge drainage ditches that lined these impressive avenues. Then they used bridges built over the ditches; now we pedestrians are sent underground to avoid the traffic, and from the underground passage can choose to surface north, south, east, or west of the Bell Tower.

Burton chose to continue moving west, surfacing right near the Drum Tower on the west side of the intersection. He kept to the same street, now called Xi Dajie, or West Street. Suddenly, though, he paused for a few seconds, causing me to find cover behind a staircase leading to a shopping plaza. Then Burton turned north.

I continued to follow him into a quite extraordinary market area. There were tea shops and grocery stores, dumpling stalls, and vendors of piles of sweets of some kind. As we went deeper into the market, the lanes became narrower. Gradually the signs that were in Chinese were replaced, or at least supplemented by signs in Arabic, and the women covered their heads. The smells were now that of mutton. We had entered the Muslim Quarter of Xi’an. Burton stopped to purchase a ticket, and entered a mosque. After a few minutes, I did the same.

Xi’an’s mosque, purportedly the largest in China, a fact I did not doubt, was a soothing, quiet place, with lovely arches that integrated Arabic and Chinese design, pleasant wooden buildings and gates, old gnarled trees, stone stela and fountains. It seemed to me to be a place best suited to quiet contemplation, too quiet, of course, if you happened to be following someone. I had to be very careful not to be seen.

It was also a perfect place for a clandestine meeting. Just in front of the prayer hall, Burton stopped and waited. I held back and watched. For a few minutes he did nothing other than stamp his feet against the cold and pull his scarf tighter around his neck. At one point he removed his surgical mask, there being no germ-ridden person in sight, and his breath could be seen against the cold air. About five minutes after we got there, a man of indeterminate age, not young but not old either, strode right past me and went up to Burton. I ducked into one of the side halls and waited. In a moment or two, I could hear their voices coming toward my position and strained to hear. They stopped right outside the hall in which I was cowering. To my profound irritation, they were speaking Chinese. I had no clue what they were talking about, only that they both sounded angry, as if they were negotiating something and it was not going well. I did manage to catch a glimpse of the face of Burton’s acquaintance, enough that I thought I would recognize him if I saw him again. A moment or two later, they moved on, leaving me wondering whether to wait or go. When I screwed up the courage to look out, neither man was to be seen. Burton had managed to slip away again.

I did go looking for him. One of the covered souks in the Muslim Quarter had a high preponderance of shops selling what were purported to be antiques, and that was as likely a place as any to pick up Burton’s trail, if he was following his now normal routine of asking about the silver box and handing out his business card with an accompanying request for them to get in touch if they had it to sell or knew someone who did. When that proved fruitless, I had another idea: the antique market just outside the Baxian Gong. Presumably Burton would be hitting every antique market or stall in town.

The Baxian Gong is a Taoist temple located not far outside the eastern city gates of Xi’an and dedicated to the Eight Immortals. Across a narrow road from the temple is an antique market that is held every Sunday and Wednesday, and Sunday it was. To get to it, you go out the eastern gate at the end of Dong Dajie, then turn left and walk along the outside of the city walls where a narrow urban park has been created between the walls and the moat. On this cold and bright Sunday, a group of older men sat together and listened to their birds singing away in cages that they had hung from branches of the trees along the path. A group of men and women were practicing tai chi. Farther along there was a group of musicians playing traditional instruments and singing. They appeared to be rehearsing, and it was inspiring. I would have liked to just watch and listen, but I was a woman on a mission.

At the northern-most east gate, I crossed the busy roadway that runs parallel to the walls and headed into a much quieter and older district. Guidebooks tend to refer to the area outside the eastern gates and around the temple as shabby, but I didn’t see it that way. What I view as shabby are the rows of hugely unattractive high-rise apartment buildings that tower over the city walls. But slip past them, and you will find real people doing real things, shopping for food, having their bicycles repaired, visiting the cobbler, consulting the doctor.

I had some difficulty finding the Baxian Gong, despite having a map. I took several wrong turns, and nearly got flattened by a man on a scooter, but every corner revealed something new. There were piles of brightly colored plastic washtubs piled up in front of one shop, mountains of oranges and green onions at another. There were pyramids of eggs of the most beautiful soft-blue hue, each one in its own tiny straw nest. The butcher had his meat hanging from hooks outside his shop. Dumplings steamed away in bamboo baskets. All along the street there were fires in old metal drums over which people cooked noodles or steamed vegetables as their customers chatted as they waited.

The market at the Baxian Gong is not large, and definitely not fancy. In a courtyard across from the temple, vendors have laid cloths and bamboo mats on the ground and simply spread out their wares. It was a far cry from the antique markets I usually frequent, but I liked it just fine. The amazing thing was that, unlike Beijing, there really were antiques here. There was old jade and porcelain, some bronzes, beautiful drawings and scrolls; in short, many very attractive objects. There were very few foreigners here, maybe one or two other than me, and vendors kept shouting “Lookie, Mother” at me over and over as I stepped past their displays. One woman in Mao jacket-and-pants with a faint scar across her left cheek was particularly persistent, actually grasping my sleeve tightly at one point. In truth, she had some very interesting merchandise, and I was tempted to buy, but there was also a sign warning purchasers that we required an export stamp if we wished to take any purchase out of the country. What I didn’t see was either a T’ang box or Burton Haldimand. I seemed to have lost him completely.

Still, I kept looking, not because I thought I was going to see Burton, but because I was enjoying myself. To either side of the informal stalls were antique shops, and I visited every one of these. I tried asking about a silver box, but no one could understand me, even when I took out the photograph of George’s box and waved it in front of them. Only in Beijing could I manage such a task in English. I was envious of Burton for his facility with the language.

Burton wasn’t in the temple itself, either. He would have liked it, too, especially a hall devoted to Sun Simiao, a master pharmacist of the T’ang dynasty, and one of the earliest practitioners of Chinese medicine, now worshipped as a Buddha-like god. Sun Simiao was the first to write on the subject of medical ethics, and wrote several texts on medicine with many, perhaps thousands, of formulations for just about whatever might ail you. Apparently he was a sickly child, and managed to cure himself along with everybody else. The walls of the hall were covered in a colorful mural that depicted scenes from the sage’s life. All in all, he seemed to me to be Burton’s kind of guy.

Beyond his more conventional medical talents, though, Sun Simiao was an alchemist who secluded himself on Zhong Nan Mountain to perform practices that would allow him to become immortal. He also believed in exorcism. He wrote a text on these subjects called, more or less, “Essential Instructions from the Books on the Elixirs of the Great Purity,” which was probably based on texts called Taiqing Jing or “Book of Great Purity,” one of the first books anywhere on alchemy, now lost to us. These formulations quite possibly included elixirs that contained mercury and arsenic, which the master pharmacist was said to have administered to himself. Apparently it worked. Legend has it that his corpse had not begun to decompose some months after he died.

This alchemy business I found interesting, given the T’ang box. I’d thought the formula for the elixir of immortality contained in the box was unusual at best, laughable at worst. But clearly no one in T’ang times would have agreed with me. Its loss was more than just the theft of a valuable object, as I had begun to realize that night at Dr. Xie’s celebration. It clearly was an artifact of some great importance, and I felt sad not just for Dory, not just for China, but really for all of us who value the past. I also realized that I had known only two people who were true experts on T’ang China and would not think it odd if I asked them about alchemy. One was Dory Matthews, and it was too late to ask her. The other was Burton Haldimand. To ask him would take much swallowing of pride on my part. I wasn’t sure I was up for it.

Burton was not answering his phone when I got back to the hotel. This annoyed me even more, if that was possible. I chose to deal with this aggravation by going out for the rest of the day, visiting the truly awe-inspiring terra-cotta warriors of China’s first emperor, Qin Shi Huangdi who reigned from 221 to 210 BCE. The terra-cotta warriors are a World Heritage site, deservedly so. They are as spectacular as you might imagine them to be, row upon row of hundreds of men, all life-size and no face the same: generals, archers, light infantry, heavy armored soldiers, cavalry complete with horses, and in a special place, two wonderful chariots for the emperor. The actual mausoleum of the emperor, the place where presumably his body was laid to rest, has never been opened. All we can see is a pyramid-shaped structure near Mount Li. The historian Sima Qian reported, however, that a whole world had been created for the First Son of Heaven, with representations of the Yellow and Yangtze Rivers dug and filled with mercury, flowing somehow mechanically, the heavens above him complete with representations of the constellations. Automatic crossbows were set to kill any tomb robbers. It would be a difficult place to break into. Whether as a tomb robber or an archaeologist, the hazards would be many. Even at the time it was a decidedly unhealthy place to be. Qin Shi Huangdi’s successor had the first emperor’s childless concubines buried with him, and all who worked on the enormous tomb were sealed in it to die. Protecting him through all eternity were the terra-cotta warriors we see today.

Qin Shi Huangdi believed in immortality, and may have taken far too much of the elixir that was supposed to guarantee it. He was reported to have sent several expeditions in search of an island where the Immortals dwelt. The Immortals lived, if that’s the right verb, in special places befitting their status, secret islands or underground cities or, for Taoists especially, on mountaintops. None of these expeditions of Qin Shi Huangdi’s came back. One has to wonder why. Perhaps they couldn’t resist the temptation of escaping the emperor, who was undoubtedly not the most benevolent of rulers.

All in all, Qin Shi Huangdi didn’t have much luck in the immortality department if the stories of his death many miles from home are anything to go by. Rather than making the leap and leaving his clothes behind, his corpse was put into his carriage and began the journey back to the palace. Those in charge did not want anyone to know he had died, so they packed the carriage with rotting fish to cover the smell of rotting emperor. It was an ignominious end, I suppose, for the man who had united China.

Still the warriors are a remarkable sight, and I felt immeasurably better when I got back to the hotel. This pleasant feeling lasted for about ten minutes. Burton still wasn’t answering his phone. After fuming for a while, both about Burton and the sheer uselessness of this trip to Xi’an from a silver-box point of view, I decided that once again the only approach was to go directly to Burton’s room. I’d managed to inveigle the room number from the hotel operator, again with the colleague-from-Toronto story. By the time I’d left to see the warriors, I’d asked her to put me through to him so often that I’m sure she was glad to just give me the number so I’d go away.

The door was open when I got there, a housekeeping cart right outside. The maid was scrubbing the bathroom. I took a quick peek inside. The room was empty. There was no suitcase, no portable air filter buzzing away, no tea apparatus, no clothes, no toiletries in the bathroom. The slug had slipped away from me again!

I stomped back to my room. First I called Air China and tried to get on a flight back to Beijing the next day. That didn’t work, but I could get out the following day. Then I called the hotel in Beijing to tell them when I was coming back. The woman at the desk asked me to hold for a moment, and then came back on the line to tell me there was a message flagged to my room. She had it still, given that they didn’t want to put it in the room until I returned. It was in a sealed envelope. I asked her to open the envelope and fax it to me at my present location. She agreed to do that right away.

While I waited for the contents of the mysterious sealed envelope to be put into my hands, I went to the hotel bar. The lobby was a hive of activity. The staff was putting up Christmas decorations, garlands were being strung from every pillar and post, an enormous fake tree already fully decorated was being set into place, and Christmas carols, sung by Chinese children, were being piped through the whole place. This did not improve my mood. The bar didn’t either. It was the off-season, December now, and the bar, despite the frenzy of Christmas cheer elsewhere in the hotel, was far from a happening place. In fact, it was empty. I ordered a glass of the house red, something nonspecific from a company called Dragon Seal. If I thought wine would help, it didn’t, but there was nothing that was going to make me happy that evening, that much was certain.

As I sat there in solitary splendor, the staff whispering to each other over in a corner, occasionally casting glances my way, I gave myself a stern talking to. First off, I told myself to calm down. Why exactly was I in Xi’an? What exactly had I hoped to accomplish? Why was I letting Burton Haldimand get to me? Yes, he was scum—lying, deceitful scum, that is—obsessed with getting that silver box ahead of anyone else, including me. Why, though, was I falling into the trap of becoming just as obsessed as he was? Rob tells me that occasionally I am like a little dog with a bone. That’s his polite way of telling me that at times I can be stubborn, willful, and occasionally even obsessed beyond all reason with something. It seemed to me that where Burton Haldimand and the silver box were concerned, this was one of those times. I told myself to take a few deep breaths and let it go.

I was making some, albeit minimal, progress, telling myself how much fun I would have in Taiwan with Rob and Jennifer, when I was joined by two other visitors. That I should know them, in fact know anyone in Xi’an other than Burton, came as a surprise.

“Lara!” Dr. Xie exclaimed when he saw me. “What a pleasant surprise! You know Mira Tetford, of course. May we join you?”

“Hello, Dr. Xie, Mira,” I said. “Please do. It is an unexpected pleasure for me, too.”

“I left a message for you at your hotel in Beijing this morning before I flew down. They said you were still registered. Did you get it?” Mira asked. “And what brings you to Xi’an?”

“The terra-cotta warriors, of course,” I said, without missing a beat. “I decided I couldn’t leave China without seeing them. They are as fabulous as everyone says they are.” I’d seen them on my previous visit many years earlier, but why bother to mention that small detail?

“They are one of the wonders of the world,” Dr. Xie agreed.

“And how about you two? What brings you to Xi’an?” I asked.

“I have a manufacturing facility here,” Dr. Xie said. “I come here frequently. I have an apartment in town, in fact. And Mira is helping me with an acquisition of a company in this area. We meet with the company representatives tomorrow, and have been working on our strategy all day. I have promised Mira that I will take her to one of our famed dumpling buffets. I insist that you join us. My car and driver are right outside to take us when we’re ready.”

I did join them. It’s difficult to imagine a buffet where your meal consists of a choice of twentysomething different Chinese dumplings, but in fact, it was delicious. I tried not to think about either Burton or the silver box, but there was a floor show with song and dance from the T’ang dynasty, which as interesting as it was, I’d just as soon have skipped under the circumstances.

It was on the way back that something interesting happened. My seatbelt had slipped down between the top and bottom of the seat. When I managed to pull it up, something unpleasant-feeling came up with it. I held it up to find a surgical glove.

“Has Burton Haldimand been in this car by any chance?” I asked, wiggling it.

“It would be difficult to think it would be anyone else,” Dr. Xie said, smiling at the glove. “I had my driver take Burton sightseeing this afternoon. He wanted to see the imperial tombs west of the city and tours do not regularly go there this time of year. Not,” he added, “that Burton seems a tour kind of person.”

“I thought I was going to meet him here,” I said, stretching the truth just a tad. “But he doesn’t seem to be in the hotel any longer.”

Dr. Xie spoke to his driver, whose English name was Jackie, chosen for his hero Jackie Chan apparently. “Jackie says that he dropped Burton at the train station at the end of their tour.”

“The train station? I guess he’s not going back to Beijing.”

“That would not be the ideal way to get there, no.” Dr. Xie spoke to the driver again. The man shrugged at first, and Dr. Xie looked about to tell me Jackie had no idea, when the man spoke again.

“The driver thought Burton a little odd,” Dr. Xie said.

“I can’t imagine why,” I muttered.

“Burton told him that the trip to the tombs had been most educational, and that now he was going to see the Jade Women, something about meeting someone where the Jade Women live. No accounting for tastes, but Burton’s a grown man, and he can do whatever he wants. I’d be happy to have Jackie take you to see the imperial tombs tomorrow. They are worth seeing, and I’m sure you would enjoy them as much as Burton did.”

“Thank you, but I can’t accept your kind offer. You will need the car.” Actually, the new me wasn’t going to look at anything that would get the silver box back on my personal agenda, nor did I think that anything that Burton might like would appeal to me in the slightest.

“Nonsense. I insist. Here is my telephone number in Xi’an, and my mobile as well. I’ll have Jackie take Mira and me to our meeting in the morning, and he will show you around the rest of the day.”

“Thank you,” I said. It seemed churlish to refuse such a gracious offer.

The desk clerk at the hotel called out to me when I came through the doors, having said good night to Mira and Dr. Xie. “Your fax from Beijing is here,” he said. I’d completely forgotten about it.

I opened it in the room. Based on my chance meeting with Dr. Xie and Mira, I had already concluded it was from Mira, telling me she was traveling to Xi’an for a day or two. Instead it was a message from Burton.

Lara, I hope you weren’t waiting for me too long at Panjiayuan Market. My apologies! No doubt you were standing in the cold, cursing my name. I have good news, however. I have received some information about the whereabouts of the silver box. It was too late to call you because you would already have left for the market, hence this note. I am flying out to Xi’an today if I can get to the airport in time for the flight, and will call you from there. Burton.

He’d got the cursing part about right, but the rest of it left me dazed. In fact, I read it three times to make sure I’d understood it correctly. Having concluded that there was only one possible interpretation, I reached two obvious conclusions. The first was that Burton had not intended to lie to me about Panjiayuan Market, and the second was that in this instance the slug was not Burton, but a certain antique dealer.

I called the Beijing hotel again and asked to be put through to my voice mail. Burton had said he would call me. Had he done that as well?

Yes, he had, as had Mira, just as she said. As expected, her call was merely to say she was out of town for a couple of days, but if I needed anything to feel free to call Ruby. There were three messages from Burton. In the first, he said he hoped I’d forgiven him for the Panjiayuan business, and that he would call again. The second indicated that he was making progress, and thought he knew who had the silver box. The third was considerably more unsettling. As soon as I heard it, I headed for the business center and looked up the Jade Women. Apparently they were Immortals who protected alchemical texts, and probably the alchemists, too, and who dispensed cups of the sacred elixir of immortality to those of us below deemed worthy. They awaited the arrival of adepts on the top of the Western Mountain, one of the five sacred mountains that held up the sky. They also came down to Earth from time to time. Apparently they were recognizable because of a tiny grain of yellow jade above their noses.

So where was this sacred Western Mountain? It is now called Hua Shan or Flower Mountain, and it is about seventy-five miles east of Xi’an. I called Dr. Xie. Thirty minutes or so later, Dr. Xie and I were hurtling through the darkness toward Hua Shan in his Mercedes.

The train from Xi’an had come and gone. It was dark, though, so I was almost certain Burton would not yet have headed up the mountain. In the village of Hua Shan, there were a few not-so-choice hotels. That had to be where he was staying.

You wouldn’t think hotels would reveal whether they had a guest by the name of Burton Haldimand, but Dr. Xie is a persuasive, indeed imposing, man. It was at the third cheap hotel near one of the entrances to the route up the mountain that we found Burton. There were no phones in the room. Dr. Xie spoke sharply to the man at the desk. “I’ve told him it is a patient of mine who has called for assistance. As soon as another staff member comes to accompany us, we will go up.”

Burton did not answer to our knock. The hotel employee was persuaded with cash to open the door. We found ourselves in a tiny room with only a cracked sink and two small cots. To find someone like Burton in a tiny room with toilets down the hall, a room that would never come even close to passing his standards of hygiene, was somehow really disturbing in and of itself. But that was by far the least of it. Burton was dead, curled up in the fetal position on a tiny cot. If he met someone, there was no indication of it. If he saw the Jade Women as he passed to the great beyond, we would never know. Most terrifying of all, his face was a horrible dark blue-gray color.