The Lake Ching Murders - A Mystery of Fire and Ice (21 page)

It wasn’t hard to find the local labourers who had worked on the excavation at the shoal, where the sculpture of the half-horse had been found. At first they were reluctant to answer Fong’s questions, but when it became clear that his only interest was in the cormorant fishermen they spoke more freely.

Over and over again they mentioned one specific elderly fisherman who came by the shoal. Who talked to Dr. Roung, as one of them put it, as if he owned him.

Through his binoculars, Fong saw the elderly fisherman sitting very still in his bamboo-wrapped boat as he waited for the cormorant to emerge from the deep lake. The lantern on the boat’s stern swayed slowly with the roll of the water. Fong thought the man looked like an aged bird himself.

Fong put down his binoculars and climbed cautiously into the boat that Chen had supplied for him. He rowed slowly out to the older man. By the time Fong neared the cormorant fisherman’s boat he was breathing heavily. He waved a greeting. The old man spat in the water and muttered, “City idiot.” Fong let it pass and smiled. The old man didn’t return his smile but did signal Fong to keep his distance. For a moment Fong didn’t understand, then he did. The cormorant was still beneath the water, fishing for his master.

About ten yards to Fong’s left, the cormorant broke the surface. Its elegant head swivelled to see who was in the new boat. The bird’s eyes found Fong and stared at him. Fong returned the gaze and watched the beautiful bird instinctively try over and over again to swallow the fish in its throat. Only when the cormorant broke its eye contact with Fong and headed toward the elderly man did Fong see the glint of the wire that had been twisted around the bird’s neck to stop it from eating its catch.

Some called the relationship between cormorant and fisherman symbiotic. Fong knew better. This was indentured servitude. The cormorant fisherman is present at the hatching of the bird. The first thing the animal sees is the grin on the fisherman’s face. For days the fisherman never leaves the baby cormorant’s side. The bird comes to know the fisherman as warmth, as the source of all food, as his master. After ten days the bird begins to walk. It follows the fisherman around like a gosling does a goose. It is two months before the fisherman takes the bird on his boat. It sits on the fisherman’s lap and watches the other cormorants work. After two years the slender wire is slipped around its neck and tightened so that the bird cannot swallow its catch. In return for two years of child care, the bird works its entire life for the fisherman. Twenty years of service for two years of apparent kindness. The bird will breed as well as fish. And finally, it will die in the lake.

Chinese, Fong thought. Very Chinese. But not kind. Fong’s two years in the country had taught him a lot about the rough realities of living, the rareness of kindness in the wilds.

The old man put his hand on the cormorant’s neck just above the tightened wire and squeezed. The bird gave up its catch and then was committed to the water once again. When the fowl disappeared, the old man looked to Fong. “What?” His voice was oddly high and singsong.

He’d already guessed that Fong was a cop.

“Can I ask you a few questions?” Fong began.

The old man didn’t answer.

“I could impound your birds.” That got the old man’s attention.

“I could tip your boat and no one’d know that your stupid ass had sunk to the bottom of the lake,” the old man growled. “Dumb flat-head.” The man lowered his lantern to the merest glow and began to row away.

Darkness quickly enveloped Fong. The old man could easily do what he threatened. Then anger swept through Fong. He was from Shanghai. He wasn’t some dumb country cop. He wished they’d given him a gun. Then he wished that he’d never been taken from the quiet dustridden village west of the Wall. Then he wished that he knew how to swim. Then he noticed that the ripples of the fisherman’s wake were disappearing, so Fong grabbed his oar, cursed the water and pulled.

After ten minutes of hard rowing Fong saw a lantern flare. The old man was going in a large circle. Of course he was! The cormorant was valuable and it was beneath the water fishing. If it emerged and the fisherman wasn’t there — well, Fong didn’t know what would happen in that case; but he did know that the fisherman was Chinese and Chinese people did not walk away from valuable investments, which is exactly what the cormorant was. So Fong turned his boat and backtracked. Sure enough, the shadowy presence of the fishing boat appeared only moments later.

The old man wasn’t pleased. His assumption of the basic urban dumbness of the cop had proven wrong.

“You row your boat like a girl.”

The man’s accent was so dense that it was difficult for Fong to understand him.

“A girl?”

“A girl, a whore, who’s just had every orifice filled.”

“Like the girl on the lake boat?”

A shadow crossed the old man’s face. Or was it anger? And what kind of talk was it for an old man to refer to women’s orifices being filled?

The cormorant broke the surface with a plop. The fisherman reached down and lifted the sleek bird into the boat, which rocked gently.

Fong changed tack. “It’s a beautiful bird.”

“It’s my last.”

Fong wondered if that was because of age or something else.

“Is it a good bird?” Fong asked.

The fisherman relieved the bird of the contents of its neck — two small fish — then recommitted it to the deep. The man’s hands trembled as he released the creature. Fong was surprised by the gentleness. But it fit somehow and led him to his next question. “Have you got a daughter, Grandpa?”

The old man turned so quickly that his boat almost tipped. The glow from the swinging lantern picked up the rage in his eyes. He reached over and slapped the side of his boat with his open palm. Two quick thwacks.
Seconds later the cormorant surfaced and headed toward the boat. There were no fish in its throat. The fisherman lifted the bird into the boat then stared at Fong. “Go away, stupid man. Go home. Or to hell. Just go.” Before Fong could answer, the old man snapped the glass shut on his lantern. Instantly the darkness was complete.

Fong couldn’t see his hand in front of his face. He strained to hear the man’s oar but couldn’t. The man must be sitting in the dark staring at him. Fong settled back and waited. An odd connection grew between the two men. Finally Fong repeated his question. “Do you have a daughter, Grandpa?”

The plunk of an oar broke the silence. Fong reached for his oar and tried to follow the sound, but every time he paused to listen the noise seemed to be coming from a different direction. Finally he stopped rowing and just listened. He didn’t hear anything.

Hours later Fong managed to reach a rocky point of land. He had no idea where he was. He got out of the boat and did his best to hook the bowline to a tree stump.

He sat on the smooth rocks and listened to the lapping of the lake.

Then, as if from the water itself, the fisherman appeared — a spectre from the nether worlds. He didn’t get out of his boat. He just sat there lolling with the waves and stroking the cormorant. Finally he spoke.

He told Fong everything. The small statue of the horse’s hindquarters he’d found in the cormorant’s throat. Meeting the archeologist. The man’s affair with Chu Shi. The coming of the foreigners. The resistance to them. The Beijing people. The acceptance. The taking of blood. The party high up on the island terrace. The wine. The typhoid. The death. The disinterment of Chu Shi. The celebration on the lake boat. Finally, of saving the whore, Sun Li Cha.

When he was finished, Fong sat quietly looking at the great lake with the island just coming to light in the dawn. All he could think of saying was, “Thank you.”

The old fisherman shrugged and began to row away.

“One more question?”

The old man stopped. “What more could you possibly want to know?”

“Just one thing — why did you tell me?”

A long silence followed. The old man looked away from Fong and stared at the dawn. When he spoke, something had broken in his voice. Something had given up. “You ask why I told you all this — because I have no children left. Because I’m old. Perhaps, because I’m a fool.” He patted the cormorant. The bird nuzzled its beautiful head into the old gnarled hand. Then the man sighed and finally unleashed his burden. “Because Chu Shi, the girl who died from typhoid, was my daughter. Her mother and I met — once — when I was young.” A smile softened his ancient features.

Fong nodded but didn’t speak.

The fisherman reached down and picked up something from the floor of the boat. Then tossed it to Fong. Fong caught the object and turned it in the light.

It was the small bronze of the hindquarters of a horse.

“What . . .?”

“I found that thing, down there.” He pointed vaguely toward the shoal. “I gave it to Dr. Roung. He gave it to Chu Shi. She arranged to get it back to me before she died. I think that thing killed her. No, I lie. My greed killed her.”

He sat very still for a moment then turned away from Fong, toward the rising sun. His shoulders lifted and dropped convulsively. Fong heard nothing but assumed the man was sobbing.

The coroner had the window seat. Lily sat beside him, her head buried in a fashion magazine she’d bought at the airport. As soon as the plane levelled off, he leaned his forehead against the cool Plexiglass — and drank it in.

China.

Home.

Bands of colour melded into the patterns of intricate tapestries — then into rainbows. Hills became the contours of women’s bodies. Space became infinite and soft. Things that do not meet, met.

Then clacking. Clacking. An express train slowing as it passed through a local station. Then him, seated on the express train, looking at the platform across the way through the windows of the stationary local train.

A young man and a woman. Standing on the platform. Holding hands. She facing the tracks, he turned away — peeing through the boards. Simple. Just holding hands and peeing.

“Are you done?” she asked.

He looked up into her round, calm face, into her coal black eyes and nodded.

“Then button up, the train’s ready to go.”

“Is it far?” His voice was surprisingly young.

“Beyond the mountain,” she said and smiled.

“That far?”

“It’s not far, dear. In fact, it’s always been very near.”

He wanted to look at her but found himself looking at his hand. And her hand. And recognized it — his mother’s hand. He looked up into his mother’s proud face and grinned.

“You know the way?”

“I do.” She touched his forehead and brushed away his hair. “Do you?”

He felt himself smiling and crying at the same time. He took a deep breath then said, “I do.”

Then he let go.

Lily saw Grandpa’s tears running down the windowpane. She heard him mumble. She heard him take a deep breath then let out the air in one long single line of life. In the reflection, deep in the double Plexiglass windowpane, she saw the smile on his lips. She felt his hand. It was cold and so very still.

When the plane landed in Beijing, she sat beside the dead man until everyone left their seats. A steward came down the aisle to them. “Is he all right?”

Lily looked at the young man. She didn’t know how to answer his question.

* * *

Within six hours Lily had the basic information on the telephone number and was back on a plane to Xian. This time it was she who stared out the window at the terrifying, intense beauty of China from the air.

A small porcelain vase with a sealed top sat on her lap.

A great desert storm cloud enshrouded Xian as Fong approached in the Jeep. There was no water in the dingy cloud, only darkness and sand blown all the way from the vast desert to the west. “Here the West is to the west of you,” Fong thought. “At home, in Shanghai, the West is to the east. Old and new.”

Fong guided the Jeep carefully into the darkness. It was colder than he thought and the streets were empty.
Gaudy tourist hotels, then crumbling Chinese buildings momentarily pierced the gloom as the vehicle’s headlights swept past them.

Fong took a corner and suddenly emerged from the cloud. He stopped the Jeep and hopped out to glory in the beauty of the night sky. Brilliantly bright stars, pinpricks in the black, black dome of the heavens shone down on him. On the horizon, a perfect crescent moon.

For an instant he considered getting back into the Jeep and driving as hard and fast as he could in any direction. Just drive until the gas gave out. Then walk until his legs failed him. Then crawl until — but only for an instant. He checked his street map and got back into the Jeep, slamming the door. He liked the angry sound of the metal against metal. It bespoke action. Maybe even justice.

Dr. Roung wasn’t particularly surprised when Fong barged into his office, but he was definitely not pleased. The man excused himself and went out of the room, leaving Fong alone. Fong fingered the small bronze statue in his pocket. It and the four stacked stones linked the archeologist to Chu Shi. Xian to the island. But he still needed the link back to the rogue in Beijing.

Fong’s eyes scanned the broad desktop and landed on the small bronze of the forequarters of the horse sitting to one side.

Then the man’s cold hand touched his shoulder. Fong hadn’t heard him return. Or perhaps he hadn’t actually left. Just stepped toward the door. Before the taller man could speak, Fong said, “I have a few questions I’d like you to answer.”

The archeologist raised an eyebrow. “Evidently you do.” The light glinted off his heavy steel-framed glasses as he tried to learn what Fong had seen among the objects on his desk. But he wasn’t able to discern what had drawn Fong’s attention.

Fong noticed and smiled openly. He ran his tongue over his smooth teeth.

The archeologist smiled back. That twinkle again.

Fong stepped away from the desk, careful to keep his eyes away from the small bronze statuette.

The older man watched him carefully, then nodded as if he’d made up his mind about something. He tapped the top of an odd-looking, square machine sitting on the office floor. “Do you know what this is, Detective Zhong?”

Fong looked at the squat grey thing. By its bulk and open ugliness he assumed it was Soviet in design, but he couldn’t begin to guess what it was. “World’s most impractical doorstop,” he suggested.

“No, Zhong Fong, it’s a shredder.” A knowing smile blossomed on the man’s face as he added, “A Sovietmade shredder.”

Fong was disconcerted by the latter comment — it was as if the archeologist had read his mind. “What does it do?” Fong demanded, a little too forcefully.

“It shreds things, Detective Zhong.” The man’s smile grew to offensive proportions as he took a large map of Shaanxi province from his desk and placed it in the feed bin. He pressed a button. A flurry of metal blades made a racket for a few seconds then hundreds of odd-shaped pieces vomited out into a tray. The archeologist tilted the contents of the tray onto his desktop and spread them out flat. He didn’t bother turning over the pieces that were face down. For twenty or so seconds he studied the array before him. Then he began. In less than five minutes he had reconstructed the entire map. As he fitted the last piece of the puzzle, he looked up. “It’s a unique talent. I was born with it. I never worked at it. Never thought about it. Just used it. My talent.”

Fong wanted to say, “I’m impressed,” but didn’t. “I assume you use the same principles to piece together the terra-cotta warriors?”

“I do, indeed,” the archeologist asserted, as if he were being challenged on some fundamental level. His smile was no longer warm. His eyes were piercing. “You too have a unique talent, Detective Zhong. In some ways we are very similar.”

“I don’t follow that.”

“Really?” Dr. Roung’s voice arched upward. “I piece together puzzles. You piece together puzzles. I am treated differently by the Chinese state than most other Chinese males and so are you. After all, how many murderers are allowed to return to the civilized side of the Wall?”

Fong didn’t respond.

The archeologist wasn’t put off by Fong’s silence. “You do agree, don’t you, Detective Zhong?”

Fong tilted his head slightly. Not a real agreement — but enough.

“Good. Then perhaps you’d help me solve a puzzle that’s been bothering me for a very long time, Detective Zhong.” The man seemed suddenly joyful.

Again Fong tilted his head, wondering where this was leading.

Dr. Roung crossed to the shelf behind his desk and pulled down an old, leather-bound book from an upper tier. “Have you read the Italian’s account of ‘discovering’ China?”

“Marco Polo?” Fong asked. Dr. Roung nodded and handed over the well-thumbed text. Fong felt the heft of the thing. It was pleasing.

“Such an odd name, Marco Polo, don’t you agree? Sounds like a child’s food.”

Fong allowed himself a smile despite being totally at a loss as to what was going on. He handed back the book. “Yes, I read this in English. It was part of my training in that language.”

“So you are perfectly prepared to help me with my puzzle.” The man seemed gleeful.

“If you say so,” Fong said warily.

“I do.” He clapped his hands once loudly. “Well, every Chinese person who reads this silly account knows in his heart that it’s a lie. A joke played on some European master by this person with a name that sounds like baby food. Do you agree?”

“Yes,” Fong said without hesitation.

“Good. I hoped you would. Now, tell me how we know that this book is a lie? Know in our heads, not in our hearts.”

Fong thought for a moment. “Because of what Marco Polo left out.”

“Because of what wasn’t in the text?” the archeologist asked, openly fascinated by the idea.

“Yes,” Fong said slowly.

“Like what, Detective Zhong? What was missing in the book?”

Fong looked for a trap but couldn’t find one. Finally he spoke, “How could a man from the West who claimed to have lived in the Middle Kingdom for almost ten years fail to mention in his books the Great Wall, our character system of writing or for that matter, the tiny, bound feet of aristocratic women? How could these fail to impress him? How could Marco Polo have been here and not seen fit to include them in his account? Don’t you find that odd?” He was happy to be asking the questions.

“I do, Zhong Fong.” Dr. Roung smiled warmly. “Now that you mention it . . . I do.” He laughed. An odd, honest laugh. “But before you brought it up, it had escaped my attention.” He took a deep breath as if he was about to cross an invisible divide. He reached up and took off his army-issue spectacles. “I create whole things from their many pieces. It is my gift. Yours, Zhong Fong, is to create whole things from those pieces that are missing. It is another kind of gift. A photo negative of my gift, if you follow.”

Fong considered Dr. Roung’s statement and found some truth in it. More important, for the first time he sensed the man’s deep need to talk. To talk to someone he saw as an equal.

Fong hesitated. Unsure how to lead the conversation.

“Would you like to see my terra-cotta warriors, Zhong Fong?” Dr. Roung said in a surprisingly gentle voice.

It wasn’t lost on Fong that the archeologist hadn’t called him detective. “I would. I would like to see your warriors.”

As Dr. Roung walked ahead of him, Fong realized that he was following a man who had secrets — dark secrets that he needed to share with an equal — with someone who understood his worth.

With the simple flip of a light switch Dr. Roung brought the great sleeping contents of pit #1 to life. Row upon row of standing and kneeling men. Archers, horsemen, foot soldiers — each with its own face. An eerily silent army just about to move or having just moved, only to be stunned into immobility by the rising of the light. The famous terra-cotta warriors — the lasting memorial of Qin Shi Huang, China’s first emperor.

Fong and the archeologist stood on the gallery above the ranks of frozen men. “In April of 1974 I was called by the Ministry of the Interior. Some stupid farmer outside of Xian had reported discovering a few artifacts in his field,” Dr. Roung chuckled. “I thought it would take me a week at most to deal with what I assumed was a useless piece of junk. My first night here I was brought to a peasant’s hut. The old woman had two terra-cotta heads set up beside her fireplace. She was worshipping them as gods. And you know what, Zhong Fong?” Fong looked at him. “I understood why she’d do that. In my heart it seemed to me that those two old heads were as worthy of adoration as anything I’d ever seen — up until that time.” The final words were only wisps of sound — the heart’s breath.

Fong repeated the final four words:
up until that time.
He’d never heard any admission of loss so deep. He looked at the man. Tears were coming from his eyes.

“It took two years, but by the middle of 1976, my team had unearthed three full pits. A fourth was found late in 1977, but it was empty. Pit #1, down there, has thirty-eight columns of soldiers. Naturally, they all face east. There were originally over six thousand figures. We’ve managed to restore just over a thousand warriors and horses. Pit #2 has fifteen sections. We opened it to the public in 1976 then closed it down.”

Fong was about to ask why when the archeologist beat him to the punch. “You always leap ahead, Zhong Fong.” He wiped the tears from his cheeks with a fine linen handkerchief. “I may get to that in time. Working on the Qin Dynasty warriors teaches patience, if nothing else. Do you know your history, Zhong Fong?” Before Fong could reply, he continued, “Qin Shi Huang declared himself China’s first emperor in 221 BC — this is his tomb. He must have been quite a man. He defeated the six major warring states of China and ascended a throne that he built. He quashed all resistance from the nobles and set to work unifying a land mass that had never been unified before. He established the civil service system complete with examinations and meritocracy, which lasted over two thousand years, right up to the fall of the Manchu government in 1911. He codified weights and measures to permit commerce in the country. He standardized the written language that you and I use to this day. True, he burned any books that were in opposition to his rule, but then again the world has a long tradition of book burners, doesn’t it?”

Dr. Roung reached into his pants pocket and took out a greenish-bronze coin. “He instituted the use of currency. This bronze
ban liang
coin was his creation. We found thousands of them in the pits. They were good for commerce — and taxes, of course. So much easier to collect money than rice. Qin Shi Huang built the Great Wall to keep them away from us. More recently, you, Fong, from me. And he raised a great army by the use of this clever little invention.” From his pocket he produced the small bronze statuette of the frontquarters of a horse that Fong had seen on the desk. He must have palmed it before they left the office. Fong wondered how he’d missed that. “He gave a half to each of his generals. They could only raise troops when they were met by the emperor’s man who had the other half that fit his. In a time of limited communication it allowed the emperor to control the most important communications — those that led to the raising of troops — of potential insurrection.”

Fong noticed the delicate way Dr. Roung handled the bronze and thought he saw a subtle further fall in the man’s features. He resisted the impulse to reach into his own pocket and touch Chu Shi’s statuette. Then he thought about “potential insurrection” — and a rogue in Beijing.

“Of course, Qin Shi Huang’s achievements required huge taxes and hundreds of thousands, maybe even a million, forced labourers. We are sure that more than seven hundred thousand artisans and workers worked on the tomb for thirty-six years. But on some level it was worth it, don’t you think?” The archeologist turned toward the lines of soldiers in the pit. Fong followed his gaze. “A creation that withstands the very movement of time.”

Fong found it both beautiful and appalling. An achievement, no doubt. But at what cost? Over seven hundred thousand lives dedicated to what? Fong felt Dr. Roung’s cold hand on his shoulder again. “Let’s not start here. I think I know how you would best be introduced to my terra-cotta warriors, Zhong Fong.”

With that, he flicked off the switch and the place went ghostly dark.

Fong followed the archeologist out of the building and down a back alley. The night air was quick and chilled. A desert night. Fong found himself happy that Dr. Roung was setting a fast pace in his walk.

They moved through the silent dark for more than half an hour before the man stopped in front of a large, corrugated metal building. He pulled out a set of industrial keys and opened the sheet-metal door. The interior smelled of things old and dusty. Then Dr. Roung hit the light switch. No soft folding light here. High-intensity overhead beams turned night into a glaring day. And brought to life a tableau of a world in pitched battle between birth and decay.