The Chinese Alchemist (18 page)

I also learned that several hundred objects had been found in the princess’s tomb, including lots of gold and silver. Could I safely assume the silver boxes had at some point been in Lingfei’s tomb, even if her body had disappeared? Yet another question for the “Don’t Know” side of the equation.

Quite unexpectedly the most interesting part of the visit was that to Famen Si, a Buddhist temple an hour or so west of Xi’an. During the T’ang dynasty, emperors went to Famen Si to worship, and the temple’s most famous relic, a finger bone purported to be that of the Buddha himself, was also carried in a great procession to Chang’an, now Xi’an, from time to time. It seems that an Indian prince, determined to earn celestial points in his lifetime, had dispersed a number of such relics, and Chang’an had one. The relic was essentially forgotten, but when the stupa at Famen Si collapsed in 1981, an underground chamber was found, and in it, the relic.

What was interesting to me, and had perhaps been for Burton as well, was an exquisite little museum on the site in which I found a series of silver boxes with hinged and rounded lids that were supposed to contain said finger bone. All of these boxes looked to contain a finger bone when they were opened, but only one of them had the real thing. These boxes were not unlike Dory’s missing box, and I found myself wondering once again whether the smallest of Lingfei’s boxes had held anything. There certainly hadn’t been anything in it when it went up for auction, but that didn’t mean much. Whatever it was could have disintegrated over the intervening centuries, or it could have been something more permanent, a particularly costly jewel perhaps, that someone had decided to separate from the box at some point. Was it the contents, and not the box itself that were so important to someone? It did lead me to believe, given the finger bone of the Buddha, that silver casket boxes held important objects.

Once again I was filled with regret that the silver box was gone. I wanted to know who Lingfei had been, partly because it might be relevant to what was happening now, but also because I was interested in her, assuming I was correct in considering her a woman. If she was a princess, I stood a chance of finding her; if not, it would be much more difficult. History records the famous, the victorious, the wealthy, and by and large, the men. If Lingfei was none or these things, her voice might remain silent forever, except, of course for the words and the pictures on the boxes. That made them all the more important.

When I was safely back at the hotel, my first order of business was to call Ruby in Beijing. I asked her if she knew who the man in black at the auction house that day was. She said she didn’t. I said that somebody had to, somebody other than the police.

“I wonder if David knows him?” she mused.

“Can you ask him?” I said, as casually as possible. I didn’t want to ask him myself.

“Sure,” she said. “I’ll call you back.”

She did call back, but only to say that David was in Shanghai for a couple of days. She didn’t know him well enough to have his mobile, so she’d call him in a day or two. I had his mobile number. He’d given me his card at the party at Dr. Xie’s after the auction. I still didn’t want to phone him myself, but I didn’t seem to have any choice. I called, but got his voice mail. I didn’t leave a message.

Next, I went to the business center and searched for Lingfei on the Internet. As always zillions of entries came up, but nothing that helped me. There was a Chinese appliance manufacturer with Lingfei in its name, that’s about all. Then I tried famous Chinese women of history. Once again there was no Lingfei, but there was a Meifei and a Yang Guifei. The latter two were concubines of Illustrious August, Yang Guifei a woman he neglected affairs of state to spend time with, and who was known as Number One Consort. All three names had “fei” as a suffix. I knew two were concubines. Was fei“ a job description as opposed to a name? Was Lingfei a concubine, too? You wouldn’t think an appliance company Would have ”concubine“ in its name, but that, I thought, might be due to the lack of subtlety in translating Chinese into English. This Meifei, for example, was called Plum Concubine, but ”mei“ also meant rose, so maybe there were two meanings for something we would write as ”fei,“ but which would actually be two different Chinese characters with different corresponding meanings.

I had a flashback to New York, to Burton’s exit from the auction house preview. Had he not said something like “Farewell, my concubine”? Had he been talking to Lingfei and the box rather than to me? It would have been a relief at the time to know that, but even now it was useful. Lingfei was an imperial concubine!

If she was, I was soon to learn as I searched further, she was in serious danger of being lost in a crowd. According to what I read, Illustrious August had a harem of approximately forty thousand women. Apparently there was something called the Flank Court where the wives of men who had displeased the emperor were sent. New emperors tended to free the women held by the previous emperor, but since Illustrious August had reigned for more than four decades, from 712 to 756, there were a lot of women in his harem by the time he passed on. They were there on sufferance as it were, both acquired and discarded at his whim. Being of a feminist bent, the whole idea of a harem made me distinctly nauseous, but I read on.

Other than his propensity to keep forty thousand women around for his personal pleasure, Illustrious August looked to have been a good emperor. He had several names; all emperors did. He was born Li Longji. The T’ang dynasty was founded by the Li family, and he was a Li. His dynastic title was T’ang Mingdi, also known as Minghuang. We know him best as Emperor Xuanzong. Emperors got special names after their deaths that encapsulated their reigns. If someone was a bad emperor, he got a bad name. Xuanzong is remembered as Illustrious August, or Profound Ancestor, which spoke well of him. Contrary to my earlier impression, perhaps he hadn’t named himself. From my perspective, he seemed to have had the most glorious reign of all in terms of culture. He loved music, and he even wrote some himself. There is a song he is supposed to have written when he was on a journey to the moon or something like that.

It was interesting to speculate what it would take to become an imperial concubine. People fanned out across the kingdom to find lovely young girls—virgins were esteemed as always—for their emperor. Fathers would want their daughters to be chosen. But being chosen or perhaps offered to the emperor just got you into the pool, as it were, sort of like the secretarial pools of old. Then you had to claw your way up through a ranking system in hopes that you would be an imperial favorite, get your own luxury apartment in the palace and an annual stipend that was generous enough to keep you in cosmetics and finery, and maybe even acquire the opportunity to bestow favors, like homes and titles, on your family. For the few who managed this, others, perhaps the majority, probably never got to even see the emperor. So there had to be something exceptional about this Lingfei. Perhaps she was a singer or dancer, or she wrote exquisite poetry. That would appeal to Xuanzong. Above all, she must nave been extraordinarily beautiful.

After about an hour of searching, I gave up. I’d have to have another go later. But I did look up argyria. Yes, it existed; yes, it was exactly as Dr. Xie had described it; and yes, you could make colloidal silver yourself with some distilled water and a battery to run a charge through it and the silver somehow. I didn’t spend a lot of time on this. It didn’t seem to be a useful life skill from my perspective.

I made another attempt at eating and was marginally more successful than the day before. There was a message on my hotel phone from Rob saying his mobile wasn’t working very well, so he might be hard to reach, but given I’d been delayed for a few more days—that was an understatement—-he and Jennifer were taking a short cruise. He said he didn’t know whether his phone would work there either, but he would try to get in touch. Jennifer came on the line at the end to say how much she wanted to see me, and that I was to hurry up and get there. It was all I could do not to sob uncontrollably. Then, after watching Chinese television, hoping to see a photograph of Song Liang pop up on the screen even if I couldn’t understand a word, I decided to try once again to get some sleep.

I boiled the water for my bedtime cup of Dr. Xie’s tea. It did smell a little strong, as he had said it would, but I had not found it that difficult to drink the previous night, and it certainly worked. As I took a teabag out of the plastic baggie in which Dr. Xie had given it to me, I had a sudden flash of memory: Burton taking a similar plastic baggie out of his pocket that day we’d had tea on Liulichang Street when I’d caught him checking out the antique stores. He’d brought his own tea bags.

I got out my magnifier and had a really good look at the teabag. It was of the sort that has a string attached to it to help you dunk it in the water, with a little tag at the end where you hold it that usually gives the manufacturer’s name and the type of tea. This one was blank. The teabag itself was not of the type that is sealed all around. Rather, the staple attaching the string to the bag also sealed the bag. I painstakingly removed the staple, being careful not to tear the paper in any way. Were there two separate staple marks? There were not. Was it possible that the teabag had been stapled twice? I looked at the holes very carefully through the magnifier. I thought it possible that the teabag had been stapled twice.

I decided then and there that Burton had been poisoned, not through his own actions, his pathetic although understandable desire for good health. No, there was something in that awful tea he drank, something that shouldn’t be there, something he would not detect because of the extremely strong and bitter flavor and aroma of the tea. The burning question was, had Xie Jinghe given it to him?

I didn’t drink the tea.

Eight

Lingfei’s petition to have leave to marry the man of her choice was denied. There was to be no further appeal. The reason given was that the emperor’s Pear Garden Orchestra would be diminished by the loss of her voice and her consummate artistry on the lute. I thought back to that evening when I had watched the orchestra perform, and in my mind tried to place Lingfei there. Perhaps she had seen me that evening, creeping out of the shadows the better to see and hear. Perhaps that was why she had chosen me.

The next time I went to visit Lingfei, I took sweetmeats and flowers, peonies in remembrance of my sister. I had decided before I went that I would make no reference to her petition. When I arrived there, however, I was in for a terrible shock.

She was standing, hair disheveled, several locks of it scattered about the floor, a pair of scissors on the writing table nearby. She held a cleaver in her hand. “Wu Yuan,” she said. “You will cut one finger off each of my hands.”

I was aghast. “I will not, madam!”

“I demand it!” she said. “You are my servant.”

“You will not be able to play the lute,” I said, rather naively. “That is exactly the point,” she said.

Light dawned. “And will you also ask me to pour acid down your throat so you will be unable to sing, madam?” I said, no longer caring if she might guess that I knew of her petition. “Or cut off your feet so you will be unable to dance?” I was very angry now, almost as angry as she. “I will not do that, either.”

She raised the cleaver, as if to cut off her own finger. But then she dropped it, and burst into tears, collapsing onto a couch. I did not know what to say. I did not know what to do. I simply sat beside her and held her hand for a very long time. When I left her, I reached down and picked up a lock of her hair from the floor and took it with me.

I got my passport back the next morning. Mira and Dr. Xie had obviously been persuasive, because they were still sorting through the toxicology reports on Burton. According to Mira, his blood was a toxic soup. She said he could be the poster boy for a campaign on the risks of self-medication. His suitcase had contained a very large plastic bag full of all sorts of stuff, from vitamins and minerals of every description, to the silver goo, to teas and infusions for almost every ailment you could think of, and some you’ve never heard of. Over and above the nasty substances in his blood like mercury and lead that all of us who live in developed nations can acquire just by living, there was the silver, of course; arsenic, perhaps acquired along with the lead through some environmental pollutants; and a host of other things. It sounded as if he’d been taking the elixir of immortality for far too long.

However, the cause of death was very probably hepatitis C. Burton had been suffering from this terrible condition, acquired who-knew-how and when. Perhaps that explained why he was so obsessed with his health. Sadly, many of the substances he took to make himself healthier just made him worse. As Dr. Xie explained to me, and as he’d hinted when we’d discussed the subject earlier, Burton’s body had identified these substances, such as the silver, as invaders and had in some sense turned their attention to them, neglecting the hepatitis C, which had gained the upper hand.

It was very sad, but I also felt like a fool. I had suspected Dr. Xie of poisoning Burton. He had been nothing but generous with his time with me, and that’s how I’d rewarded him. I had thought my life was in danger because Burton had been murdered. Instead, Burton had very foolishly managed to kill himself. I was very glad I hadn’t left an hysterical message for Rob. He would be too polite to say anything, of course, but he would have been puzzled by my reaction, I was sure.

As for Song Liang, the victim in the alley, did I know for certain that he was the same man who had been at the auction in New York, or had stolen the silver box in Beijing? I was beginning to think maybe I didn’t. I had to admit that I’d been more interested in his suit than his face, and for sure he wasn’t wearing fake Hugo Boss or Armani in that alley in Xi’an. He was better dressed than most of the people in that neighborhood, but that could be because he was from Beijing. I’d found that most of the people I saw in Beijing were well dressed, particularly the people in the part of town I spent time in, around the hotel and the auction house. The only information about him that was a link to Chinese art was his position at the Beijing Cultural Relics Bureau, and given that he died in Xi’an, just how relevant could that be?