Murder on the Silk Road (25 page)

After a dessert of apricots and tea, Charlotte and Marsha set out for the caves. Life in the little oasis came to a dead halt during the hour following lunch. The souvenir kiosk was shut up, as were the museum and the library. Even the birds were napping. The only sounds were the trickle of the irrigation stream that ran along the base of the cliff, and the tinkle of wind chimes.

As they mounted the first rock-cut staircase, Charlotte wondered if anyone was observing them, and then dismissed her concern. First, the place was as quiet as a cemetery (an unintentionally apt analogy), and second, if anyone had the right to be looking at the caves, it was Marsha. If anyone did challenge them, she could always claim she was doing research for her lectures.

“I just remembered something odd about the way Peter was dressed,” Charlotte said as they reached the second level. The sight of the cave in which Peter was murdered looming overhead had brought back the memory of their excursion to the lake the evening before.

“What’s that?” asked Marsha.

“He was wearing brown wool slacks and a navy-blue sweatshirt. First, why would he wear slacks in the desert? I’ve only seen him in Bermuda shorts. Second, why would he wear
wool
slacks?”

“Not exactly the clothes for the desert,” Marsha agreed.

“And third, why would he wear brown wool slacks with a navy-blue sweatshirt? He was always impeccably dressed, and the combination of brown and navy-blue isn’t one that’s usually considered sartorially
de rigueur
. Unless he wanted to wear his darkest clothes so that he couldn’t be seen at night.”

“In other words, he was planning to visit the cave,” said Marsha. She supported Charlotte’s hypothesis about Peter being an art thief. There was a lively market in illicit Asian artworks, and Peter’s background and connections made him ideally suited to that trade, she agreed.

“I figure he was killed either by a competitor or by someone who was in league with him,” Charlotte said. “Maybe his partner killed him in an argument, or maybe his partner wanted the whole pie for himself.” When she put it into words, it sounded corny. “Or maybe I’ve seen too many Westerns over the years.”

Marsha smiled.

“It’s something to go on, anyway,” Charlotte continued. “The only other idea I’ve come up with is that Chu killed him because he didn’t like the slant of his book, but that’s pretty farfetched.” She looked up at the cliff face. “Anyway, we’ll soon see. Or at least I hope we’ll soon see.”

After ten minutes, they had reached the top level. At the porch, they paused while Marsha picked out the right key from the bunch on the heavy iron ring. Once inside, they took out their flashlights, and shined them at the frescoed walls of the antechamber.

The processions of elegant Bodhisattvas on the side walls still beckoned them toward the inner chamber. Now that Charlotte knew what had been waiting for them there, their beckoning glances took on an eerie quality.

“I don’t see any jug of wine,” said Charlotte as the beam of her flashlight played over the walls and ceiling of the antechamber. “Do you?”

Marsha shook her head.

They then proceeded into the inner chamber. On the south wall was the big mural of the Western Paradise that had been the subject of Marsha’s lecture. On the north wall was a hunting scene in which gaily clad hunters rode on elegant Tang horses. Stepping around the broken pieces of the toppled statues, they slowly made their way around the central pillar in a clockwise direction, just as the pilgrims had a thousand years before, their flashlights scanning the lively flower-bordered paintings of scenes from everyday life.

“If there’s going to be a painting of a jug of wine and a bowl of rice,” said Marsha, “it’s going to be here.”

It was Charlotte who spotted the painting first, on the right-hand wall, just past the blood-stained spot on the lotus-patterned floor where Peter’s body had rested: a small painting, close to the floor, of a woman passing a jug and a bowl through a window. “Here it is!” she cried. As she crouched down to get a better look, she was struck by its crudeness. Even to her untutored eye, it was clear that it hadn’t been painted by the same artist, or even during the same period, as the other paintings. She turned to Marsha. “Is it my imagination, or is this painting from a different period than the others?”

“It’s not your imagination at all,” said Marsha, who had crouched down beside her. “It’s a different period all right. By about a thousand years. I’d say this is late nineteenth century. Or even early twentieth. The paint looks practically fresh, and the colors are more crude.”

Charlotte now noticed that the paint wasn’t flaking off as it was in the other paintings, but was bright and clear. And instead of the subtle hues that characterized the Tang paintings, these colors were vibrant, if not garish.

“The execution reminds me of the statues that Wang commissioned in Cave 16,” Marsha said. “Maybe he commissioned this painting as well. But why commission such an insignificant painting in such an obscure location? Who’s going to see it behind the central pillar?”

As Marsha spoke, the beam of Charlotte’s flashlight picked out something else unusual about the painting, or rather about the wall just below the layer of brown paint that represented the ground. It was a horizontal crack in the plastered wall. With the beam of her flashlight, Charlotte followed the crack across the bottom of the painting, down nearly to the floor, back across, and up again. It outlined an eighteen-inch-square cavity that had been blocked up and plastered over to look like the cave wall.

“It’s a hiding place of some sort!” said Marsha.

“An old hiding place that’s been recently opened,” Charlotte added. On the floor of the cave beneath the hiding place was a line of fresh plaster dust that had clearly fallen out of the recently opened cracks.

Charlotte felt in her pockets for something they could use to pry open the cavity. She usually carried a small Swiss Army knife in her purse, but her purse was back in her room. Besides her flashlight, the only thing she had taken along with her was the list of hexagrams.

“What are you looking for?” asked Marsha.

“Something to pry this open with.”

“How about a corkscrew? I think I’ve still got the one that we used to open the bottle of wine on the train.” Shining her flashlight into her purse, she rummaged around for a second and then pulled out the corkscrew. “Voila!” she said, holding it up with a flourish.

“You
are
your father’s daughter,” said Charlotte. One thing that you could always count on with Jack: he was prepared for any contingency. He was the kind of person who always carried emergency flares in the trunk of his car.

“Trained from the get, as Dogie would say,” said Marsha. “And if that doesn’t work, we can try this,” she added, pulling out the awl she’d been using to chip the rock away from the dinosaur metatarsal.

“Very good show,” said Charlotte.

“Being an amateur paleontologist can come in handy.”

“Actually, I think we’ll need both.” Taking the corkscrew, Charlotte stuck the tip into the crack at her side of the opening and directed Marsha to do the same with the awl on the other. “When I say three, we’ll both pry at the same time.” Then she counted: “One, two, three.”

The slab of sandstone sealing the opening came away more easily than she would have thought. She had expected it to be thick, like a concrete block, but it was only about two inches deep. After setting it gently down on the floor, they shined their flashlights in the cavity.

“Whatever was here is gone now,” said Marsha.

It was only an empty hole, but it was a deep one—three feet or more. It reminded Charlotte of a safe-deposit box. What would one store in a hole the size of a safe-deposit box? Jewelry, but there was no jewelry at Dunhuang; cash and securities, ditto; and … documents! Documents, and, by extension, manuscripts.

“What is it?” asked Marsha.

“In Victor’s lecture on Cave 17, he talked about how, when the Chinese authorities learned that Wang had sold the manuscripts to Stein, they demanded that he ship the remaining manuscripts to Beijing. But he distrusted them, and only handed over some of the remaining manuscripts.”

“Rightfully so,” said Marsha. “Few of those manuscripts ever made it to Beijing. They were pilfered by petty bureaucrats along the way.”

“According to Victor, the monk sold some of the remaining manuscripts to Stein on his next expedition. But he intimated that some of the manuscripts in Wang’s nest egg may still be hidden away in the caves.”

“And you think they might have been hidden here!” said Marsha. Her glance shifted to the empty cavity.

“Wang might have drawn up the list of hexagrams as a guide to where he had hidden the manuscripts he’d held back. He might have been afraid of forgetting which caves he had hidden them in. With four hundred and ninety-two caves, that wouldn’t be hard to do.”

“Then he commissioned the paintings to go with the list of hiding places.”

“The only trouble is, I can’t figure out why a Buddhist monk would use hexagrams from the
I Ching
as the key to his list. It seems more likely that he would have used Buddhist scriptures.”

“He wasn’t a Buddhist monk; he was a Taoist monk, and he made his living telling fortunes from the
I Ching
.”

Charlotte raised an eyebrow.

“Fortune-telling was traditionally a Taoist enterprise,” Marsha explained. “Taoist fortune tellers were in big demand because the fortune-telling trade in this area had been in the hands of the Mongolians for centuries, and the Chinese had nowhere to go for native Chinese fortunes.”

Charlotte sat down on the edge of the dais, and leaned her head back against the shin of one of the fierce-faced guardian-warrior statues. “Well, I’ll be hot-damned, to use one of Dogie’s expressions.”

“Hot-damned and halfway to hell,” Marsha extrapolated.

“The other question is, If there were manuscripts in this cubbyhole, where are they now? I would bet that whoever has them is Peter’s murderer.” It was the race for the plunder of Central Asia all over again.

“And maybe Larry’s as well,” added Marsha.

“What do you say to checking out the other caves on the list? I’d like to see if they all have cubbyholes. And if they do, if they’re all empty. Maybe we can find one that hasn’t been opened up yet. Did Emily give you the keys to all of the caves?”

“I think so,” Marsha said. Removing the key ring from her pocket, she examined the numbers on the keys. “Each key opens a block of caves. Yes,” she said finally, “it looks like they’re all here.”

After replacing the slab blocking the hole, they headed across the cliff face for the first cave on the list, which was Cave 114.

“Are these manuscripts very valuable?” Charlotte asked as they made their way along a narrow walkway five stories up to the next cave, which was located about fifty feet to the south and two levels down. “Like, are we talking thousands of dollars or hundreds of thousands of dollars, or what?”

“Depends on what it is. The majority of the Dunhuang manuscripts are copies of Buddhist sutras, which are pretty common. They’re surprisingly inexpensive because there are so many of them. A handwritten Tang sutra might be worth, say, six or seven thousand dollars.”

“But there must be some that are worth more.”

“Of course, Look at the
Diamond Sutra
, the earliest printed book. It’s unique. I couldn’t even begin to say what it would be worth, but it must be in the hundreds of thousands, if not millions. It’s not inconceivable that Wang’s nest egg could contain something equally valuable.”

“And how would someone dispose of them?”

“It wouldn’t be hard. As I said, most of the manuscripts that Wang sent to Beijing were pilfered along the way, and others were given away to local officials. Then there are the manuscripts that Wang sold to the Russians and the Japanese. No one knows what happened to the manuscripts that Wang sold to the Japanese. They haven’t been seen since World War Two.”

“Then what you’re saying is that Peter, or his confederate, could claim that the manuscripts had come from one of these mysterious sources.”

“Yes. He could claim that he’d bought them from a small antiquities dealer who didn’t recognize their true worth. As a matter of fact, Dunhuang manuscripts come up for sale pretty regularly in dealers’ catalogues. Hong Kong dealers, usually. But they could turn up anywhere.”

“Victor said one had turned up in a Finnish rare-book dealer’s catalogue just last year,” said Charlotte. “And who buys them, museums?”

“Sometimes, although museums are reluctant to buy manuscripts that don’t have a verifiable provenance. The major market is private collectors. There’s a big market for early Chinese manuscripts in Japan and Taiwan. I’ve even been told the Shah of Iran was a big collector of early Chinese manuscripts.”

Charlotte suddenly remembered Larry’s interest in Asian art, and wondered if it extended to early Chinese manuscripts. And if so, if he could have been involved in the manuscript theft. For some reason, she thought of his Oriental rugs: roll the manuscripts up in them, and ship them home.

But on closer examination, the idea of Larry as an art smuggler struck her as absurd. If he had wanted early Chinese manuscripts, he could simply have bought them, just as he bought everything else.

After crossing the cliff face on a series of verandas, and descending several levels, they came to the cave they were looking for, which was just north of the Cave of Unequaled Height. Pulling out her ring of keys, Marsha picked out the correct one, and unlocked the door.

“It feels good, doesn’t it?” said Marsha as they entered.

The coolness of the cave was a welcome relief from the sweltering heat outside. Charlotte could now see why the caves were closed at midday.

The layout was identical to Cave 323: an antechamber with a narrow doorway leading to an inner chamber. Here they were looking for a picture of a fox crossing the ice, which the
I Ching
described as a symbol for caution.

This time it took only a minute to find the painting. Like the other one, it was located behind the central pillar, near the ground. Again there was the outline of a cubbyhole in the plaster, and again they used the corkscrew and awl to pry out the slab that sealed the opening.