Murder on the Silk Road (20 page)

Charlotte wasn’t sure how to take his comments. Was he a reformer who was speaking sarcastically, or a supporter of the Party conservatives?

Marsha assured her later that it was the latter. Only the most ideologically pure students were allowed to study abroad. It was an honor awarded only to Party trustworthies and their sons and daughters.

“Then he was serious about my films being considered spiritual pollution,” said Charlotte as they headed out to the minibus.

“I think he was,” Marsha replied.

Charlotte laughed. “My movies have been called a lot of things over the years, but this is the first time they’ve been called spiritual pollution.” She wondered again if China was ready for
The Crucible
.

The ride to town took about twenty-five minutes. The first fifteen minutes were through the desert. After they had passed the Southern Dunes, they crossed a river and entered the verdant patchwork of green and gold fields on the outskirts of the town. The Chinese had actually moved giant sand dunes, shovelful by shovelful, to reclaim these fields from the desert, a feat that Charlotte found astounding. A few minutes later, they passed through the southern gate of the town. The driver of the minibus dropped them off at the traffic circle at the center of town, where a loudspeaker mounted on a telephone pole blared “Edelweiss.” Why didn’t “Edelweiss” blaring out of a loudspeaker qualify as spiritual pollution? Charlotte wondered. If she were a Party cadre, it would have been first on her “banned in Dunhuang” list.

“What are we supposed to be looking for here?” asked Marsha as they headed down a dusty beaten-earth road crowded with donkey carts and bicycles, their bells ringing, toward the bazaar.

“I’m not sure exactly. If Larry wasn’t murdered by the local ne’er-do-well—and I don’t think he was—that means that Larry’s murderer must have planted the shortwave radio on him, probably while he was drunk.”

“Which means that we’re looking for someone who might have seen a foreigner hanging around this local ne’er-do-well. By the way, do we know the local ne’er-do-well’s name?”

“Yes, it’s Feng.”

By now, a crowd of curiosity seekers was trailing them. For once, it wasn’t Charlotte who was drawing the attention, but rather Marsha, whose blond hair and wide blue eyes made her something of a freak among the ethnically homogenous Chinese, for whom anything but black hair was an oddity.

“You’d think the circus had come to town,” said Marsha, looking around.

As she spoke, a big-wheeled donkey cart with a gay canopy to shield its passengers from the sun came to their rescue, pulling up to a stop with an ear-piercing squeak. It was driven by a sweet-faced young man wearing a green Mao cap, who said, “You ladies go to market?”

Charlotte and Marsha nodded.

“You ladies want ride to market?”

They nodded again.

Hopping down from his perch, the young man gallantly helped them onto the platform of the cart, which was covered with a dirty piece of old carpeting. Then, with a flick of his whip, the cart was off, weaving its way at high speed in and out among the bicycle and pedestrian traffic. Occasionally, the driver yelled something that sounded like “Hoosh, hoosh,” which they concluded from the way pedestrians scattered meant “Get out of the way.”

“This reminds me of a ride through Times Square during five o’clock rush hour with one of those devil-may-care cabbies,” said Charlotte as she gripped the wooden side of the cart for dear life.

Marsha smiled.

They arrived about seven minutes later. After dropping them off, the driver charged them four dollars for the trip—almost as much as the same ride would have cost in New York.

Charlotte thought about what Reynolds had said about peasants getting rich. “If this is the free market at work, maybe they should go back to Communism,” she said, after shelling out the eight yuan.

“I guess we should have bargained first,” said Marsha ruefully.

The bazaar was a broad dirt street lined with market kiosks, a chaotic jumble of street hawkers, food vendors, and milling pedestrians—exotic, colorful, and noisy. Wandering around, they marveled at the wide array of goods and produce for sale. It was here that peasants came to sell the produce they grew on the private plots that had been banned until recently by the government. The produce included tomatoes, peppers, cabbages, carrots, eggplants, melons, dried apricots, and greens—parsley, chives, and scallions—tied into artistic little bundles. A garlic vendor stood motionless, his neck and arms hung with strings of threaded garlic, like a hula dancer covered with leis. A woman passed by with her purchases thrown over her shoulder: a bunch of live chickens bound up by the feet. In addition to the produce there were all sorts of goods: inner soles, combs, nuts and bolts, rolls of plastic sheeting, lengths of rope tied into shanks, and canvas bags full of seeds.

There were also clothes, yard goods, and jewelry. Charlotte was especially taken with the silks: bolt after bolt of exquisite brocades interwoven with gold thread. She was tempted to buy some, but what would she do with it? Then there was the food, which reminded her a little of New York City’s Ninth Avenue. A vendor of shashlik, the local version of shish kebab, juggled his skewers on a smoky charcoal grill. Noodle sellers in white caps kneaded long, thick ropes of dough. But the most interesting were the vendors of services. It seemed as if almost any everyday need could be accommodated on the sidewalks or in the open-fronted kiosks. One enterprising tailor had set up his sewing machine on the sidewalk. He could mend a shirt or sew on a button on the spot. Another entrepreneur sat behind a workbench repairing watches. Blacksmiths hammered out farm implements and horseshoes; barbers shaved their customers’ stiff black hair into bristle cuts; carpenters turned out table legs and dresser knobs; knife grinders sharpened daggers with silver hafts inlaid with polished stones at grindstones turned by bicycle wheels; porcelain menders fixed cracked and chipped plates and cups; bootmakers made boots; dentists even pulled teeth.

Charlotte found it fascinating.

They stopped to window shop at the kiosk of an old herbalist with a mouthful of shiny metal teeth. On his shelves were arrayed an assortment of jars of various sizes which reminded Charlotte of the jars that had lined the shelves in her high-school biology lab, with their slimy-looking contents pickled in formaldehyde. Equally disgusting were the tidy rows of dried snakes and lizards that hung from the ceiling. Dried bats that had been mounted on cardboard with their wings outstretched were tacked to the rough board walls. In addition there were collections of various kinds of antlers, dried birds’ heads, and other, unidentifiable, items.

“Not a bottle of aspirin in sight,” said Marsha.

Charlotte was rummaging through a cardboard box on the counter. “Look at this!” she said. “A boxful of dragon bones.” They were large and small. Some were incised with Chinese ideographs; others were not. “I saw one of these at Larry’s camp. Lisa told me they were dinosaur bones.”

“Some of them probably are. The powder is sold as an aphrodisiac. I’ll have to tell Bert that they’re for sale here,” she added with a little smile. “I’m sure he’ll have a professional interest.”

Charlotte laughed, provoking a shiny smile from the herbalist, who was taking a customer’s pulse—not a Western pulse, Charlotte knew from friends who’d had acupuncture, but a reading of the body’s energy patterns.

“I’m going to ask if he has anything for my rash,” said Marsha. Since arriving in China, she had been plagued by a poison-ivy-like rash on her arms and legs. When the health-seeker had left, Marsha explained her problem.

For a minute, they talked. Charlotte presumed that the herbalist was asking Marsha questions about the rash. Then he looked at her tongue and took her pulse. Finally, he gave her his pronouncement.

“He says he has an herb that will cure my rash in three days,” said Marsha as the herbalist mixed up a lotion from the jars lining the shelves.

As Marsha waited for her prescription, Charlotte took in the market scene. At the end of the row of stalls which included the herbalist’s kiosk was an open, dusty area that appeared to be a parking lot for donkey and ox carts. The animals rested on the ground near their carts, sleeping or nibbling on fodder. Under a row of stunted trees on the far side of the parking lot a group of four beggars squatted on the ground. One of them was a boy with a stringed instrument. It was Dunhuang’s equivalent of the Bowery.

She nudged Marsha.

Beggars were few and far between in China. The government viewed them as examples of the failure of Communism, and they were rounded up and stowed away out of sight. But occasionally you did see them. Charlotte had even seen a beggar on a staircase landing in the Beijing Friendship Store.

“I see,” said Marsha, as she paid the herbalist, who calculated her bill on an abacus. “What do you think we should do?”

“Ask the herbalist if he knows of a beggar by the name of Feng, and if he associates with that group over there.”

Turning back to the herbalist, Marsha asked him the question. After he had responded, she translated for Charlotte. “He says he knows him, and that he usually can be found sitting under those trees with the others. But he’s not there now because he’s in jail.”

“Ask him if he’s seen any foreigners associating with him.”

Again, Marsha put the question to the herbalist. Even without understanding the language, Charlotte could see that he wasn’t going to answer. The wall had come down, and his genial face had frozen into a stiff mask.

“He says he doesn’t know.”

It was one thing to oblige a customer who has just made a purchase, but it was another to be overly cooperative in a matter that was nobody’s business but public security’s.

Marsha raised a hand as if to say “That’s okay” and thanked him for the lotion. After bowing to her, the herbalist gestured in the direction of the beggars. “Why don’t you ask them?” he was clearly saying.

They took his advice. The beggars had nothing to lose by answering a few questions from some nosy foreigners.

As they approached, the boy stood up, revealing a leg that was withered to a spindly stick. He started playing a Chinese melody on his instrument, which looked like a lute. When he had finished, he took off his cap and held it out. Charlotte and Marsha each donated a few fen, and the boy sat down again.

Marsha picked the most alert-looking of the adults to address. In front of him was a dish of dry crumbs, which symbolized his poverty. Despite the heat, he was smothered in layer upon layer of rags. Except for his Chinese features, he might have been a typical New York street person.

In answer to Marsha’s question, he shook his head. Then he turned to the others and repeated it for them.

It was the boy who answered.

“He says he saw a foreigner talking with Feng on Friday morning,” said Marsha. “But he doesn’t know what they were talking about.”

Maybe they were on to something here, Charlotte thought. Larry had been killed Thursday night or early Friday morning. Which meant that whoever killed him had to have planted the shortwave radio on Feng sometime later in the day on Friday. “Ask him what the foreigner looked like,” she urged.

The boy responded to Marsha’s question with a jabber of Chinese. He was a skinny, filthy little thing with an oversized cap and a smile to go with it. He reminded Charlotte of Dickens’ Artful Dodger. She was sure he would have picked your pocket in a trice.

When he had finished, Marsha turned to Charlotte with a discouraged expression. “He says he doesn’t remember.”

“Maybe there was something else. Ask him if there was anything at all about the foreigner that impressed him—his clothing, the way he walked, his tone of voice …”

Marsha repeated the question, but the answer was no.

“That was a bust,” said Marsha, as they headed back to the place where they were scheduled to meet the minibus.

“Oh, well. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. Not that we gained anything.”

They were halfway to the bus stop when Charlotte felt a tug on her leg. She turned around; it was the Artful Dodger. He was chewing a big wad of pink bubble gum, and carrying the lute under one arm. “Hello, lady,” he said with an engaging smile. He then proceeded to blow a gigantic bubble.

After the bubble had popped, covering his grimy face with a layer of sticky pink froth, Marsha squatted down to speak with him. After a moment, she stood up and turned to Charlotte: “He says there is something else he remembers about the foreigner.”

“What?”

“He was carrying a
pipa
. It’s a kind of Chinese lute—a short, pear-shaped lute with four strings. It was popular during the Tang Dynasty.”

The boy held up his instrument as if to say “similar to this.”

Charlotte gave him a few coins, and he was off.

After lunch and a siesta, Charlotte headed out to the cliff for Marsha’s lecture, which was on the influence of the art of Dunhuang on Chinese landscape painting of the Song Dynasty. The idea was that the themes and techniques that brought Chinese landscape painting to its zenith in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries were already apparent centuries earlier in the paintings in the caves at Dunhuang. Though Charlotte should have been doing other things, like finding out where Bert had been on the morning of the murder, or where he claimed to have been, she felt an obligation to put in an appearance. After all the trouble Marsha had taken to arrange the trip for her, the least she could do was attend her lecture.

It was a small group that met at the souvenir kiosk at the foot of the cliff. Maybe it was because the Dunhuang murals didn’t have the drawing power of the secret library or the colossal Buddha. Or maybe it was that the hotels in Dunhuang town weren’t fully booked. But if others had left, the irrepressible Vivian Gormley was still around, this time with her friend in tow. “I’m so glad we ran into you again,” she said. “We’re leaving later on this afternoon for the next oasis.” She yanked her friend forward. “This is my friend, Beverly Watts. She’d like your autograph too.” She turned to her companion: “Give her your notepad, Beverly.”