Murder on the Silk Road (26 page)

“Dammit,” said Marsha, as the slab came away, and her flashlight revealed the empty interior. Replacing the slab, they headed out for the second cave on the list. “Onward with our treasure hunt,” said Marsha.

The second cave yielded the same result, as did the third, fourth, and sixth. But with the seventh cave, they got lucky. There was a cubbyhole in the wall under the painting—in this case, a painting of a goat butting against a hedge, the symbol for being stuck in a predicament—but it hadn’t been opened.

Taking out her awl, Marsha prepared to start prying it open.

“No,” said Charlotte, laying a restraining hand on her arm. “If the murderer was working in the fifth cave two nights ago, I would guess that he was working in the sixth cave last night, and that he’ll be working in this cave tonight.” It suddenly struck her that Peter’s murderer had probably been removing manuscripts from the sixth cave on the list at about the same time that someone else had been returning the stolen temple banner to the secret library. How odd, she thought—two thieves passing in the night.

“Do you want to come back tonight?” asked Marsha.

“You bet I do,” she replied.

Darkness came late in Dunhuang: the sun didn’t set until after ten. Once it was completely dark, Charlotte and Marsha took up their observation posts. They had talked about stationing themselves on the cliff face, but finally decided that they would have a better view from the base of the cliff. Although the moon hadn’t yet risen, they didn’t want to risk being spotted, and whoever was removing the manuscripts from the caves would have to climb up the cliff to the cave and come back down, anyway. Working on the assumption that whoever they were looking for would be coming from the direction of the guest house, they picked a spot about twenty yards to the south of the cave, at the southern end of the cave complex. As their observation post they chose a ledge on the bank of the irrigation channel that ran along the base of the cliff. The spot was concealed from sight not only by the bank of the channel, but also by the twisted bases of a small clump of poplars. It was very still. The only sounds were the occasional croak of a frog and the hoot of an owl. Occasionally the wind would rise, setting the wind chimes tinkling and rustling the branches of the poplars and willows.

It was an ideal location, except for the comfort factor. After fifteen minutes of crouching in the mud, they were ready to start looking for another spot. They were also getting cold. Although the daytime temperature here was in the nineties or above, it dropped quickly when the sun set, and their wet feet made it seem colder than it was. They were discussing the possibility of moving when Charlotte heard a footfall on the plank bridge spanning the irrigation channel to the north. Turning to Marsha, she raised a finger to her lips and nodded in the direction of the sound. At first they couldn’t see anything. But as their eyes adjusted, they could make out the silhouette of a man of medium height and build against the whitewashed surfaces of the stairways and verandas. He was carrying a dark-colored laundry bag. After stopping briefly at another cave—it looked like Cave 291, the third cave on Wang’s list—he proceeded to Cave 294, a few caves away. He paused for a second to unlock the door—they could see the beam of his flashlight play fleetingly on the lock—and then slipped inside.

“Did you get to see who it was?” whispered Marsha.

Charlotte shook her head. Their decision to set up their observation post to the south of the cave had been a bad one. The face of their quarry had always been turned in the other direction.

“I didn’t either. Maybe we’ll be able to see him when he comes out.”

Charlotte figured it would take him about half an hour to open up the cubbyhole and close it again. It had taken her and Marsha only ten or fifteen minutes in Cave 323, but there the seal had already been broken.

They waited patiently, no longer cold now that their vigil had yielded results. After a few more minutes, Charlotte checked her watch. Twenty-five minutes had elapsed. She was just changing her position to get more comfortable when she felt the nudge of Marsha’s elbow in her ribs.

“Look,” she whispered.

The figure had emerged from the cave, but instead of going back the way he had come, he headed down the cliff on the series of staircases and verandas to the north of the cave.

Turning to Charlotte, Marsha mouthed the words,
Where’s he going?

Charlotte shrugged.

Five minutes later, he reached the base of the cliff about twenty yards to their north. Now that he was closer, they could see that his laundry bag was heavy with the weight of its contents.

“The manuscripts,” said Charlotte.

As they watched, he disappeared into the row of poplars lining the avenue at the base of the cliff. A few seconds later, they spotted him crossing another bridge over the irrigation channel to their north.

“Come on,” said Charlotte.

Leading the way, Charlotte followed the footpath that ran along the bank of the irrigation channel. A few minutes later, they had reached the bridge, where they turned right onto a dusty dirt lane.

Though they couldn’t see their quarry, they assumed that he must have taken this lane, which wound through a settlement of small peasant houses of sun-dried brick hidden away among the old orchards, each with a plot of cabbages, a farmyard with a chicken coop and a pigpen, and a grape trellis covering a courtyard. At the edge of the oasis, the lane ran into a bridge that crossed the stream bed, and then joined the highway that led into Dunhuang town. But the highway was empty. For a moment, they thought they had lost their man. Had he entered one of the peasant houses? they wondered.

But then they spotted him.

As they looked on from the cover of the trees, he clambered up the terraces on the other side of the road. Here, he paused for a moment to take out his flashlight before setting out past the series of reliquary stupas overlooking the road toward the base of the Mountain of the Three Dangers.

“He’s going out into the desert!” whispered Marsha.

Charlotte was really baffled now. Who was this person—they still hadn’t gotten a look at his face—what did he have in his laundry bag, and where the hell was he going? “Come on,” she whispered, waving her arm. “We’re going to see what this guy is up to.”

Marsha looked at her with a skeptical expression, but she followed as Charlotte set out toward the open desert.

Once they got used to it, it wasn’t difficult to find their way. Though there wasn’t a moon, the starlight alone provided enough illumination. It seemed to infuse the air with a glowing transparency that turned the dull brown plain to shining silver and left little shadow puddles under every stone.

The flashlight was easy to follow, a pinprick of light in the clear desert air. After a few minutes, their quarry’s destination became clear. “He’s heading toward Larry’s camp!” said Charlotte, as he came to the track that led out to the camp, and then turned left.

“Either there or the dinosaur quarry,” said Marsha.

But they were both wrong. Leaving the track at the spot where the pilgrims’ path broke off, he wound his way up the mountain trail toward the stupa that marked the spot where Lo-tsun had seen his vision of a thousand Buddhas in a cloud of glory. At the stupa, the light disappeared.

“What do you think he’s doing?” asked Marsha. They had paused to wait where they were. They didn’t want to get too close.

“The stupas are memorials to important monks, right?” asked Charlotte.

Marsha nodded.

“Question: Are they just giant memorial stones, or are they burial chambers for the monks? What I’m asking is, is there a chamber inside the stupa where the monk was buried?”

“Of course!” said Marsha. “That’s where he went. Not a burial chamber, but a reliquary chamber. For objects associated with the monk and related to his teachings, and so on. Usually there’s a statue of the monk, too.”

“How big is the chamber?”

“Small. But big enough to stand up in. About like the secret library. In fact, some scholars think the secret library was a reliquary chamber that was later turned into a storage room for manuscripts.”

“I think we’ve found where the murderer is storing the manuscripts or art objects or whatever it is that he’s been removing from the cubbyholes.”

“I think that’s a very good bet.”

The stupa’s proximity to Larry’s camp gave Charlotte a thought. It may have been absurd to think of Larry as an art smuggler, but it wasn’t at all absurd to think of him as an innocent bystander. Seeing a light in the middle of the night, he wanders over to investigate. The murderer concocts some explanation, and then sneaks back to his camp later on to kill him. It was a theory, anyway—the only one so far that explained both deaths.

Spreading out their sweaters on the gravel, they sat down and waited. They said little. They didn’t want to risk being overheard, but it was more than that: it was as if the big empty spaces demanded silence. Suddenly Charlotte understood those gaping holes in Bert’s conversation.

Lying back, she was amazed at how close the stars looked. They didn’t twinkle in the sky like distant lights, as the stars at home did, but hung low like glowing orbs that you could almost reach out and touch. Instead of a murky gray blotch, the Milky Way was a shower of phosphorescent pinpricks of light that lit up the heavens like a swath of daisies in a field of green.

It seemed like hours before the figure emerged from the stupa, though it was only forty-five minutes. As they watched, he made his way by flashlight back down the winding path, and then headed back along the track to the guest house. When he came to the pair of stupas framing the Cave of Unequaled Height, about halfway back to the oasis, he switched off his flashlight.

They waited until he had reached the guest house, and then continued their trek up to the stupa—sans flashlights, to avoid being seen. Ten minutes later, they had reached their destination.

In shape, Lo-tsun’s stupa was similar to the ones lining the stream bed. It reminded Charlotte of a miniature Palomar Observatory—a rounded dome resting on a square base about eight feet high. The door was on the east wall. It was about three feet square, and stood about three feet off the ground. It was made of rough wood planks, and had a round iron door pull, like the door pull on the moon gate at the Oglethorpe Gardens.

“It reminds me of the door in
Alice in Wonderland
,” said Marsha as they stood there, wondering what lay on the other side.

“I hope we don’t end up falling into a rabbit hole,” said Charlotte.

Reaching out, she tugged gently at the pull. Much to her surprise, it opened right up. Pulling out her flashlight—there was no risk of being seen from this side of the stupa—she shined it into the chamber.

12

The interior of the stupa was similar to that of the secret library—a small chamber about ten feet square with a domed ceiling. As Marsha had said, it was a reliquary chamber: against the wall facing the door was a sculpture of a cross-legged Lo-tsun, meditating. As in the secret library, the walls were painted with a procession of Bodhisattvas carrying offerings. The paintings, surras, and other documents that must have once been stored here were gone, probably carried away by looters centuries ago. But in their place was a new cache of treasure—a stack of manuscripts three feet high and equally as long piled up like logs against the north wall.

“There it is,” said Charlotte, shining her flashlight on the cache. “Wang’s nest egg.” The manuscripts were stored in wrappers made of coarse canvas, which were open at the ends. Each held a dozen or more manuscripts.

The beam of Charlotte’s flashlight continued its swing around the chamber, revealing a makeshift desk that had been set up against the opposite wall, using a slab of plywood and a couple of sawhorses. A large, battery-operated torch at one corner served as a desk lamp. On the other corner were a couple of smoothly rounded rocks and a magnifying glass.

“It looks as if the stupa has been doubling as a photographic studio,” she said, as she shined her flashlight on a battery-operated photographic lamp that was mounted on a metal stand at one side of the desk.

“Why would he need to take photographs?” asked Marsha.

“I don’t know. Maybe he wasn’t going to be able to get the manuscripts out of the country right away. In which case, he could store them here, and try to sell them on the basis of photographs.” She nodded at the manuscripts. “Will you be able to tell what he’s got here?”

“If they’re in classical Chinese. A lot of the manuscripts from Dunhuang were written in obscure Central Asian languages that it would take a linguist to decipher, but I would imagine that the manuscripts Wang held back for himself were in Chinese, since that’s what he read.”

Walking over to the desk, Charlotte switched on the torch, and then gestured to the old cane chair that was pulled up to it. “Have a seat, my dear.” As Marsha sat down, Charlotte chose two of the most antique-looking bundles from the top of the pile, and set them at the left side of the desk.

“This is a sutra,” said Marsha as she removed a manuscript from the first bundle and untied the purple silk cord. “The title is here.” She pointed to the outer fold, which bore an inscription in Chinese. Placing the rounded rocks on the right-hand side of the manuscript, she proceeded to unroll it.

“I wondered what the rocks were for,” said Charlotte.

“These manuscript rolls are awkward to handle. That’s why the book form was such an important innovation,” Marsha explained as she scrutinized the text with the magnifying glass. As she read, she unrolled the manuscript with her left hand and rolled it up with her right, moving the rocks as she went along.

The manuscript was about a foot wide, and neatly wound on a wood roller whose end knobs were inlaid with ivory. It consisted of a series of sheets of paper—each about a foot and a half long—which had been glued together. The sheets were lined with columns of tightly packed Chinese writing.

“The trouble is that the colophon, if there is one, is always at the end,” said Marsha as she continued to unwind the long roll.