The Chinese Alchemist (28 page)

People to whom I have told this story ask me how I knew that Liu David was a policeman when I saw him in the market outside the Baxian Gong that day. I have a tendency to say it was feminine intuition. That’s really not true. The answer is very simple. I more or less live with a plainclothes cop. Once, early in our relationship, I saw him at a restaurant. He was with two other men. I was about to go over to say hello to him, but he gave me this almost imperceptible shake of the head, and I kept going right past his table. I got the same look, an identical tiny shake of the head from David and I just knew. True, I saw him at a time when I was feeling relatively safe, having just heard the results of the toxicology tests on Burton. Under different circumstances, I might have seen him in an entirely different, and inaccurate, light.

David’s investigation has broadened and caught a corrupt customs agent or three. Several people at Xie Homeopathic are being investigated as well. As for Zhang Anthony, he may well get off scot-free. He says he didn’t know what his son was up to, and maybe he didn’t. He wouldn’t be the first parent to be surprised by an offspring’s extracurricular activities. However, he did sell objects from Lingfei’s tomb over the years. The question is whether it was so long ago that nobody will care. Dorothy’s silver box was found in the trunk of Xiaoling’s car. That would be his second car, after the white Lexus, in this case a red BMW. The wrecked white Lexus by the side of the road in the hills outside Beijing had no plates, but its serial number has been traced to Xiaoling.

Now that the head has been cut off, metaphorically speaking, Golden Lotus, Zhang Xiaoling’s group of thugs, has more or less disbanded. In Toronto several were arrested for their involvement in Dr. Xie’s antiquities smuggling operation. Good riddance is about all one can say.

That meant I could go back home. I love my little Victorian cottage even more than before. I have made one concession to the events of the past many months, which is that I have permitted Rob to put a gate in the fence between our two backyards, so that he can go out his back door and into mine. I tell him that the reason I agreed was so that I could stay in my own house if he managed to annoy some other scum, and that next time he’s on his own in the hotel. Really, though, it’s a small acknowledgment on my part of his importance in my life.

Before we left China, Jennifer came to Beijing and we had an early Christmas together. Rob had to stay for a few days to wrap things up with David, so we sent her a ticket. We went to the Forbidden Palace, the Great Wall, wandered through the hutongs, shopped in the markets, everything in fact that visitors to Beijing should do. Everywhere we went, people were lovely, everything we saw a jewel. I believe that despite all that happened, I fell in love with Beijing all over again.

One of the highlights of our time together was an invitation to dinner at Liu David’s apartment, modest by Xie Jinghe standards, but attractive just the same. It is a real honor to be invited to a Chinese home. One of the other guests was a stylish woman by the name of Li Lily, a fellow officer of David’s. At first I didn’t recognize her without the shabby clothes and the fake scar on her cheek. David may not have returned my phone calls, but he made sure that someone was watching out for me nonetheless.

I did
get
to light some incense for Burton, too, at the lovely Taoist temple called White Cloud, a serene and peaceful place in the bustle and noise of Beijing. Burton was an unusual man, but in his own way he was dedicated to art and history. I think of him every time I enter the doors of the Cottingham Museum where someone else now heads the Asian galleries, galleries named the Dorothy Matthews Asian galleries, thanks to a large donation from George. It’s strange how things turn out sometimes.

I have no idea if Dorothy had any inkling of the danger to which she was exposing me, or whether if she did, she cared. If George knows the answer to that question, he is keeping that information to himself. I suppose she thought that by deciding she would donate Lingfei’s boxes to the Shaanxi Museum, she was not only persuading me to do what she wanted, but was also mitigating her personal sense of guilt. George Matthews is donating the two boxes in his collection to the museum where the three boxes will be reunited for the first time in about sixty years.

Mao Zedong, a man Dorothy despised, often used a strategy that he called “luring snakes from their lair.” He would encourage people to criticize his regime publicly, but when they did so, their words were turned against them. Thus exposed for their beliefs, they became objects of extreme vilification. Many of them died. I suppose that, in a way, was what Dorothy was trying to do, using the lure of the silver box to encourage a smuggler to identify himself. People died as a result of this ploy, too. Perhaps more than anything else, though, she wanted to find her long-lost brother. I try to have some sympathy for that. In a way, she sent the little silver box out as a message to him: I am here. Come and find me. Instead the message was received by people who understood it entirely differently, as a signal that their smuggling operation had been identified.

Regardless of Dorothy’s intentions, I have not worn the pearls she left me. I don’t expect I ever will. My plan is to donate them to a charity auction in exchange for a tax receipt. I’m thinking that an organization that helps women leave their abusive husbands might be just the thing. Every now and then I remember that Diesel, our shop guard cat, didn’t take to Dorothy. I plan to pay more attention now when he sulks off to the back room when someone enters the store.

There was a poem in Lingfei’s tomb, carved into a stone. David had a calligrapher and artist make an illustrated copy of its five lines for me, and had it framed. It’s beautiful, the margins decorated with peonies, and at the bottom a winter scene with a lovely Chinese house with Tang rooflines surrounded by snow. It has a place of honor in my home. The Chinese words sounded lovely when David read them to me, and he gave me a translation of it. He says the translation cannot capture the spirit of the original, only its words. It’s a poem of love, I think, to someone precious who is gone. I value it more highly than any pearls.

I suppose, in wrapping up this story of a Chinese alchemist and her silver boxes, that in all fairness I should point out that if you are looking for the recipe for the elixir of immortality, I’m afraid I’ve told you all I know.