The Corpse Reader

25

During dinner Cí could barely eat even a grain of rice. He was utterly exasperated by the prospect of working with Gray Fox again, but knowing he was on the Kao case was even worse. It would be two weeks until any word would come from Jianningfu that might link Cí to Kao, so he had to find out whatever he could at court. If he managed to solve the case, maybe he’d still stand a chance.

Gray Fox slurped his soup, but when Cí pushed his dish away and got up, Gray Fox was right behind him. They’d been advised that the corpses had been transferred to an examination room, and neither wanted to let them decompose more. Cí hurried ahead, but when he got there, it turned out that none of his materials or instruments had been brought. Bo claimed not to have received the request.

Damn Kan, he thought. Bringing out his pass, and without asking Bo’s permission, he announced that he’d collect his effects personally and was on his way out the door in an instant. Gray Fox stayed behind, but Bo followed after Cí.

At the academy, while Bo and a servant collected Cí’s instruments, Cí rushed around looking for Ming, eventually finding the old man bent over some books in his apartments. His eyes were red-rimmed, and Cí thought he might have been crying. He bowed and begged his old master to talk to him.

“Don’t think I don’t know the emperor’s taken you on. Corpse Reader—the outstanding youth showing up his imbecile master.” He smiled bitterly. “That’s what everyone is saying.”

Ming’s resentment was clear, but Cí still felt he was in the man’s debt. He’d raised Cí up from nothing and never asked for anything in return. Cí didn’t think Ming would believe him if he said he needed his help; he thought it would sound insincere to say he’d asked for him to be brought to the palace—even though both were true. He was trying to find the right words when Bo burst in, urging him to hurry.

Seeing the servant weighed down with Cí’s instruments and books, Ming said, “Oh, I see, that’s why you came. Fine. Go on, get out of here!”

As the old man turned away, Cí thought he saw a tear in his eye.

When Cí returned to the examination room, Gray Fox was nowhere to be seen. Apparently he’d left when a brief examination hadn’t revealed any new information. Cí decided to make the most of Gray Fox’s absence to carry out his own examination. Then he noticed a nervous-looking little man standing quietly by the door. It was the perfumer, Bo said, and his name was Huio.

Cí greeted the man, who was staring at the sentry’s large sword as if he thought he was about to have his head chopped off.

“I already told them, I haven’t done anything! I told the guards when they detained me, but they wouldn’t listen!”

Clearly the perfumer hadn’t been informed why he’d been asked to come. But before Cí could explain, Bo stepped forward and told the man to keep quiet.

“All you need to know is that you have to obey this young man.”

Huio began whimpering and nodding. He got down on the floor and clutched at Cí’s feet, begging not to be killed.

“I’ve got a family, sir…”

Cí helped him gently to his feet. Huio was trembling.

“All I need is your opinion on a perfume. That’s all.”

Huio didn’t seem to believe he could have been detained by Imperial Guards for such a matter, but he began to calm down. That was, until they took him over to the three corpses, which, in their advanced stages of decomposition, immediately caused the man to pass out. Cí managed to bring him around with some smelling salts, and once Huio was calm again, Cí explained his task to him in more detail.

“I believe the perfume each was wearing might have halted the advance of the worms in the flesh.”

Huio approached the corpses again. The stench was really dreadful, and he gagged. Recovering, he asked for three bamboo sticks to be brought; then he rubbed one against the edges of the wounds on each of the three corpses and put the sticks in jars. He rushed out of the room and Cí followed, shutting the door after them.

“I don’t know how you can breathe in there.” Huio gasped. “Awful!”

“How soon can you have answers for me?” asked Cí impatiently.

“Difficult to say. The perfume is obviously mixed up with the smell of the rotting flesh, so I’ll have to separate the scents. Then I’m going to have to compare my findings with thousands of perfumes from around the city. Every perfumer mixes his own scents. Perfumes are all based on similar essences, but everyone proportions them differently. And of course,” said Huio, smiling, “every perfumer’s proportions are his greatest secret.”

“It doesn’t sound hopeful,” said Cí.

“Something has already stood out to me. Something that might make my job easier. The very fact that there are traces of perfume after several days tells me that the fixatives are of the highest quality. That already excludes quite a few. And, though this might not provide a definite answer, I’d also say, judging by the combination of fragrances”—he took the lid off one of the jars and sniffed it—“that we’re not talking about a pure essence here.”

“Which means?”

“We might, just might, be in luck. I’ll get to work. I hope to have an answer within a couple of days.”

The reports from the other examinations of the corpses reminded Cí of one important thing that he’d already noticed himself: The corpse of the older man had a wound beneath his right shoulder blade. It was circular, about the diameter of a coin, and its edges seemed to have been ripped at and torn outward. Cí made a note and continued his investigation.

There were no signs that any of the victims had put up a struggle—either they’d been so completely surprised they didn’t have a chance of defending themselves, or they had been familiar with the killer. It was something to bear in mind. The examination brought only one more detail to light: a strange corrosion between the fingers and on the palms and backs of the older man’s hands. The skin, in spite of the decomposition, was slightly whiter on those parts than anywhere else. There was also a small, reddish tattoo of a flame at the base of the thumb on the right hand. Cí removed the hand using a saw, packed it in ice, and put it in the conservation chamber before going outside for some air.

Soon Bo returned, accompanied by the artist who would be drawing the portrait of the young corpse. Unlike the perfumer, the artist had had his job explained to him, but he shrieked when he saw the state of the corpse. When he recovered, Cí explained what he wanted drawn, emphasizing that the artist was to make his representation as accurate as possible.

As the artist took out his brushes and began, Cí started reading the information Bo had brought. The first was a report on the eunuch, whose name was Soft Dolphin. He had begun working in the Palace of Concubines at age ten. He’d acted as overseer of the harem and as a chaperone, a musician, and a reader of poems. His keen intelligence had apparently made him a favorite of treasury officials. Eunuchs were considered trustworthy with money because they would never have an heir to pass it on to, and at age thirty, Soft Dolphin had been made aide to the administrator. He’d kept the post until his death at forty-three.

According to the report, a week before Soft Dolphin’s disappearance, he’d requested leave to see his sick father. Because he’d been given permission to take leave, there was no immediate alarm when he disappeared.

As far as the eunuch’s vices or virtues went, the report only mentioned an unbounded passion for antiques, a small collection of which he kept in his private quarters. The report closed with notes on his daily activities and the people with whom he tended to have contact—primarily eunuchs of a similar rank.

Cí then studied the map of the palace grounds. His accommodations had been marked out, and he noticed that even though Kan said he wasn’t allowed there, his room adjoined the Palace of the Concubines. He gathered his tools and glanced at the artist’s half-finished sketch; it was turning into a very accurate likeness, and he thought it would be a great help. He gave Bo instructions for a small lance he wanted made, then left.

Cí spent the afternoon and evening exploring the areas of the palace where he was allowed to go. Walking the exterior of the imposing, squarish building, he realized just how isolated the palace was: its crenellated walls were at least the height of six men, and four watchtowers, situated according to the cardinal points, overlooked the four ceremonial gates.

Having completed his tour of the perimeter, Cí made his way to the lush gardens, where he let himself be bathed by the dappled light and the intense emerald tones of the damp mosses, the olive-brown of minerals, the muted reds and paler greens of fruit and leaves—a splendid and exuberant palette. Peonies, orchids, and camellias drew his eye toward groves of pine and bamboo. The fragrance of cherries, peaches, and jasmine scrubbed the stink of rotting flesh from Cí’s lungs. He shut his eyes and breathed it all in. He felt life coming into him anew.

He sat down in a pavilion next to a stream. A goldfinch warbled nearby. He took out the map of the palace, which had with it the palace rules related to the number of workers allowed to remain on the premises after their day’s work. The rules established the hour of shen as between three and five in the afternoon—this was when all workers were required to have their identity papers checked by an official. The same official made sure they all left via the same gates through which they’d entered. It was no light matter: workers caught on the premises beyond their allotted time would be subject to prison and then death by strangulation.

Cí couldn’t understand why this warning was included with his copy of the map; the pass he’d been given meant none of these restrictions applied to him. Maybe it was to impress upon him that his stay wasn’t permanent, or perhaps it was a warning to be careful. It occurred to him that, for all the beauty and opulence of the gardens and the architecture, this was really little more than a prison.

He got to his feet and made his way toward the palace’s southern buildings, where the offices for the executive branch and many government councils were situated. Then he made his way to the siheyuan, the gigantic porticoed patio that formed the facade of the Interior Court, the Palace of Concubines, and the Imperial Palace itself.

He took in the majesty of both of these palaces, whose rooms—two hundred, according to the map—were hidden by the interior facade. The emperor resided in them along with his wives and concubines, the eunuchs, and a permanent detachment of Imperial Guards.

From his view from the portico, he was also able to locate the East Wing, opposite the Palace of Concubines, which held the warehouses and kitchens, and the West Wing, where the stables and grooming yards were located. He thought the dungeon could be beneath them, but given how labyrinthine the underground sections were, they could really have been anywhere. Finally there was the North Wing, which held the two summer palaces: Morning Freshness and Eternal Freshness.

Much as Cí thought it both enjoyable and productive to familiarize himself with the palace grounds and buildings, he knew it was time to get back to work. He sat on the portico and pulled out the reports to compare them again with his own notes. Soon enough he was gritting his teeth in frustration.

His only certainty was that he was up against a dangerous and cruel killer who was also brilliant in his ability to disguise his crimes. That Cí had identified the first corpse as a eunuch was in his favor because he presumed the killer wouldn’t imagine that this would be discovered, but there remained considerable obstacles to the entire investigation. The first, as he saw it, was having absolutely no idea of motive. Given the advanced decomposition of the corpses, it seemed particularly important that he establish this. Then there was Kan’s hostility. But these were mere grains of rice next to his worst problem, which was having Gray Fox around.

Cí went to his quarters, deep in reflection.

His room was clean and private, with a low bed, a desk, and a view of the interior courtyard. Cí liked the simplicity. He intended to put his thoughts in order and try to move the case forward, but he quickly realized that he was relying on others—the perfume maker and the portrait artist, in particular—for any real progress. The results of their tasks weren’t guaranteed to lead anywhere. He had to take charge of the investigation and his own fate. He headed back to the examination room.

He took the corpse hand from the conservation chamber. Now that he had some proper light, he noticed that the fingertips were dotted with dozens of what looked like pinpricks, or perhaps marks from a fu hai shi, he thought, the bumpy Guangdong pumice stone. He guessed that these were old marks, but he wasn’t ready to proclaim that. Then he turned his attention to the fingernails, under which there were several black fragments akin to splinters. When he removed them he found that, unlike wood, they crumbled under a small amount of pressure; they were actually tiny bits of carbon. Putting the hand back in the chamber, he turned his mind to the strange craters the murderer had left in the three main wounds. Why might he have applied perfume to these? Why that brutal scrabbling around inside the wounds? Could he really have been trying to extract something, or might Ming and the magistrate have been right when they said it was the result of some ritual or an animal attack?

He got up, shutting the folder. If he wanted to make any real progress, he knew he had to go back to the first murder and track down people familiar with Soft Dolphin.

An official told Cí that Languid Dawn could be found in the Imperial Library.

Soft Dolphin’s closest friend turned out to be a confident-looking eunuch of no more than seventeen. Though his eyes were red from weeping, his voice was assertive and his answers calm and mature. But when Cí asked him specifically about Soft Dolphin, his tone changed entirely.

“I already told the Councilor for Punishments, Soft Dolphin was very reserved. We spent a lot of time together, but we didn’t actually talk all that much.”

Cí avoided asking him what he spent his time doing. Instead he asked about Soft Dolphin’s family.

“He hardly ever mentioned them,” said Languid Dawn, relieved Cí didn’t seem to be treating him as a suspect. “His father was a lowly lake fisherman, and as with many of us, Soft Dolphin didn’t like admitting it. He’d fantasize.”

“Fantasize?”

“Exaggerate, go off on flights of fancy. He spoke respectfully and admiringly of his family—not out of familial piety but out of a certain conceitedness, I’d say. Poor Soft Dolphin. He never lied out of wickedness. He just couldn’t stand to think about his miserable childhood.”

“I see.” Cí looked up from his notes. “It seems he was very diligent in his work—”

“Oh, yes! He kept careful notes, spent any downtime going over his accounts, and he was always the last to leave. He was proud of having been successful. That was why so many people were envious of him—and me, for that matter.”

“Envious? Who was envious?”

“Everyone, pretty much. Soft Dolphin was good-looking, soft as silk, but also rich. He was careful with money and had saved up.”

Cí wasn’t surprised. Eunuchs who progressed in court often became quite rich. It all depended on how good they were in the arts of flattery and adulation.

“He wasn’t like the rest,” added Languid Dawn. “He only had eyes for his work, for his antiques, and…for me.” At this, the young eunuch broke down.

Cí tried to console him. He decided not to push him further; he could always interrogate Languid Dawn again at a later date.

“One last thing,” said Cí. “Who would you say, apart from you, wasn’t envious of Soft Dolphin?”

Languid Dawn looked in Cí’s eyes as though he appreciated the question. But then he looked down.

“I’m sorry, I can’t tell you that.”

“You’ve nothing to fear from me.”

“It’s Kan I’m afraid of.”

Soft Dolphin’s quarters were situated near the Council for Finance, where he’d worked. Cí had to go by a couple of sentries on the way there, showing his pass. Everything in the space was extraordinarily neat and orderly: The books lining the wall, all of poetry, had been covered in identical silk bindings; the clothes were folded immaculately; the writing brushes were so clean a baby could have sucked on them; the incense sticks were organized according to size and color. The only exception was a diary on the desk that seemed to have been carelessly left open at its midway point. Cí asked the sentry to check the register, and the man confirmed that no one had accessed the quarters since Soft Dolphin’s death. Cí went back through and moved on to the adjacent room.

It was a large salon whose walls looked as if they had been invaded by an entire army of antiques. On the first wall were dozens of bronze and jade Tang and Qin dynasty statuettes. Four delicate Ruzhou porcelain vases flanked the windows that looked out over the Palace of Concubines. Refined landscape paintings on silk covered the opposite wall, and on the fourth wall a single canvas hung, an exquisite piece of calligraphy crowning the door. The vigorous, right-to-left brushstrokes of the poem were stunning. At the bottom were several red seals denoting the previous owners. Cí was drawn to the sloping curves of the frame, and he found himself scrutinizing the piece close-up. It was much too expensive for a eunuch, even a relatively wealthy one like Soft Dolphin.

Cí went through into the third and final room, finding a divan wrapped in chiffon and heavily perfumed. The quilt came very precisely to the corners, like a glove tightly over a hand, and framed silks hung on the pristine walls. Absolutely nothing in these quarters had been left to chance.

Nothing except that diary.

Returning to the first room to examine the volume, Cí found that it consisted of thin paper pages decorated with images of lotus leaves. Cí settled down to read it. He found that Soft Dolphin’s work life wasn’t mentioned in the slightest; he wrote about purely personal matters. It appeared that he and Languid Dawn had been deeply in love. Soft Dolphin wrote in delicate, praising tones about his young lover, as he did when mentioning his parents.

Cí finished reading and put the diary down with a frown. All he could really glean was that Soft Dolphin, in spite of his passionate love life, seemed to have been both sensible and honest.

But he could also infer, he thought, that Soft Dolphin had been tricked by his murderer.

Cí went early the next morning to the finance records office. Gray Fox didn’t sleep on the palace premises, and Cí knew he tended not to be an early riser. So he decided to take advantage of a bit more time without his so-called helper.

According to the files, Soft Dolphin had spent the past year dealing with accounts to do with the salt trade, the import and export of which the state had control over along with tea, incense, and alcohol. Cí had little knowledge of mercantile dealings, but simply by comparing the past year’s reports against the previous year’s, it was easy to see that profits were steadily declining. The downturn could have had to do with market fluctuations, or some illegitimate siphoning of funds, or perhaps even the hugely valuable antiques collection of a certain Soft Dolphin…

To get more information, Cí presented himself at the Council for Finance, where they told him that state profits had been down across the board for the duration of the conflicts with the northern barbarians. Now Cí understood that the Jin invasions had impacted the whole country in one way or another. He bowed, thanking the official, and left to go and clean the corpses.

In the antechamber of the examination room, the stench hit him straightaway; he knew camphor swabs wouldn’t be much good but stuffed his nostrils with them nonetheless. Just then, Bo appeared.

“Here it is; sorry it took a while,” he said, bringing out the lance Cí had asked for.

He looked the lance over, checking its weight and alignment and nodding in satisfaction; it was exactly what he needed. Then he carried on with his preparations, mixing white thistles and bean-tree pods and setting fire to them—another way of counteracting the smell. He also had some ginger to chew, but that was about all he could do. He took a deep breath and entered the examination room.

The corpses were once again crawling with worms, in spite of having been cleaned only the previous day. He picked the larvae and worms off with a wooden stick dipped in vinegar and water and completed the cleansing by pouring bowls of water over the corpses.

He made no new findings with either the corpse of the older man or that of the eunuch; the decomposition had gone so far in both that the blackened flesh had begun peeling away from the muscles in stiff sheets. But on the face of the younger corpse, the one he’d had the portrait made of, he discovered a myriad of tiny pricks like poppy seeds. These scars looked to be old and were scattered across the face like tiny burns or pockmarks. There were also odd squarish rings around each of the eyes. He quickly sketched the marks in his notebook, and then found exactly the same marks on the hands.

Then Cí took the lance and went over to the older man’s corpse, introducing it into the crater wound on the chest and carefully nudging and applying pressure. He asked Bo to help him turn the body and discovered that, as he had suspected, the wound went all the way through from front to back. So, there were not two separate wounds at all. He was about to remove the lance when something gleamed on it, catching his eye. Picking up his tongs, he removed the object; it turned out to be a stone chip. He couldn’t tell where it might be from, but he saved it as evidence.

Cí turned to Bo.

“I need another corpse,” he said in a serious voice.

“Well,” said Bo, looking worried, “I’m not going to help with that!”

Cí let out a laugh and Bo a sigh; they weren’t going to have to kill anyone, but Cí did ask if it would be possible to have access to a corpse so he could test a hypothesis. Bo immediately suggested they go to the Great Cemetery.

“No. It has to be from somewhere other than the Great Cemetery,” he said, remembering Xu’s threats straight away.

Next he took out two large sheets of paper, one with an anatomical drawing of a human from the back, the other from the front. Bo had never seen anything like them.

“I use them as a screen,” explained Cí. “These black points indicate the places in the body where it is fatal to receive a wound, and the white points are where, though not fatal, wounds would have grave consequences.” He spread them out on the floor and marked on them precisely where the wounds had been inflicted.

Cí cleaned the lance and put away the sketches. After giving the order for the three corpses to be buried, he and Bo left the palace.

They went to the Central Hospital. People died there with such frequency that Cí was sure there would be some corpses on which he could practice. He wanted to find out what kind of wound the lance would make when passed through the body fully. However, the sanatorium director informed them that the most recently deceased patients had already been taken away by their families. When Bo suggested they use a sick person instead, Cí thought surely he was joking, but the director didn’t see why they couldn’t. Still, Cí rejected the idea.

“I don’t know how I could have dared to suggest it,” said Bo apologetically.

“What about convicts who have been executed?” asked Cí.

The prison was located just outside the city walls. Its director, a military man covered in scars, seemed to relish the idea of skewering a dead prisoner.

“We strangled one just this morning,” he said brightly. “I know dead prisoners have been used in the past to test the effects of acupuncture, but nothing like this. At least the scum will be put to good use. And if it’s for the good of the empire, all the better.”

He showed them to where the body of the recently executed prisoner was being kept. It was sprawled out and in tatters.

“The bastard raped two little girls and threw them in the river,” the prison head told them.

Taking out his drawings, Cí tried to mark on this corpse the exact locations of the wounds he had found on the other corpses. He decided against undressing the body so as to better reproduce the conditions of the other deaths.

“And it would be best to stand him up,” he said.

The prison head ordered a number of soldiers to help, and they eventually hoisted the body up with a rope slung over a beam and then under the armpits. The dead man hung there like a rag doll. As Cí approached, wielding the lance, he felt a moment of compassion for the criminal whose half-open eyes seemed to issue a challenge from beyond death. Cí pointed the lance at the body and, bringing to mind the girls this man had killed, thrust the point into the body with all his might. There was a crack, but the blade snagged halfway through the torso.

Cí cursed. He removed the blade and prepared to thrust again. Summoning all his energy and bringing the girls to mind again, he struck harder this time but still didn’t make it through the torso. He removed the lance and spat on the floor.

“You can take him down.” He kicked a stone in frustration, shaking his head.

He didn’t feel the need to explain anything to anyone there, but he thanked them for their efforts and said he was done.

When he met up with Gray Fox later on in the afternoon, Cí had no qualms about keeping his findings secret.

“The only thing I’ve really managed to ascertain is that, in the eyes of his colleagues, Soft Dolphin was an honest person, a good worker,” said Cí. “But that’s about all. What about you?”

“Honestly, this case is a poisoned chalice. A body without feet or head! They haven’t got the slightest idea, and then they’re going to make it seem like you and I are totally inept.”

“Any ideas how to move it forward?”

“I’ve decided to work on something else. The case with the dead sheriff. No way am I going to let these bastards smear my career in shit when it’s only just getting started. I’ve decided to go to Fujian myself and hurry things along. I have a feeling I can work this one out, and that’ll be a good early success to help me make my name.”

“But what about our orders?”

“Oh, I’ve chatted with Kan; he’s fine about it.” Gray Fox smiled nonchalantly. “Blood’s thicker than water and all that…You’re going to have to work this one out without me, I’m afraid!”

Cí couldn’t be happier that Gray Fox was going to be out of his hair, but at the same time he felt sure that Gray Fox would figure out that Kao had been tracking him, and that would be the end of everything.

“So, when do you leave?” Cí asked, trying to keep his voice level.

“Tonight,” said Gray Fox. “The longer I stay here, the more of this disaster gets pinned on me.”

“Well, good luck to you,” Cí said, turning to go up to his quarters. He had a lot to think about.