The Chinese Alchemist (22 page)

At first Vivian thought the Koumintang would protect people from the Japanese, but in the end the Koumintang was another despotic force. No matter where she went, she found herself surrounded by fighting no matter how cocooned her existence.

It was during this turbulent time that Vivian met the man who would become her husband and Dory’s father. He had joined the Communist Army very young, in his early teens, according to Dory. His father had been with Mao in Xi’an when Mao became secretary of the Communist Party, and in 1934 had gone on the Long March with Mao. The Long March was one of the most famous strategic retreats in history, an almost five-thousand-mile march through difficult terrain over the course of just over a year. Only twenty thousand of the ninety thousand soldiers who set out with Mao survived. But it gave the army a chance to regroup, and at the end of World War II, Mao was able to push the Koumintang off the Chinese mainland to Taiwan. Those who had been close to Mao during that difficult time, and Dory’s father apparently was one of them, stood to benefit for the rest of their lives.

Dory was born in 1944 in the dying days of World War II. Perhaps Vivian thought that with the defeat of Japan, her life would return to normal. She was wrong. When Shanghai was about to be taken over by the communists, Dory’s mother had had enough. She got the last boat out of Shanghai. Dory’s father chose not to come with them, something that was a terrible blow to the five-year-old child. Instead he had gone to Beijing to take a senior position with the Communist Party. It must have been difficult for Dory’s mother, as well. She might have had British parents, but she’d been born in China and had spent her whole life there. She’d also been married to the same man for a number of years, even if she hadn’t seen much of him. Neither Dory nor her mother were ever to see Dory’s father again, or even to hear from him. Neither ever went back to China.

Dory’s most vivid memory was that of trying to board the ship, a small child surrounded by panicked individuals desperate to get out of the country, and of looking for her father. She’d told me about it more than once, and even after all those years, she’d choked up about it just a little.

And yet, despite all this, Dory wanted to give three silver boxes of inestimable worth back to the country of her birth, one about which she did not have a good word to say. And she wanted to give it to Xi’an, the town where her father formally became a communist. How much sense did that make? I’d felt bothered all along by her request in a kind of fuzzy, unspecific way, sensing that there was something wrong. I still thought so, if for no other reason than it seemed highly unlikely that the box could be first withdrawn from sale and then stolen within a few weeks. I’d tried to tell myself it was a coincidence. Did I really still think it was?

This all said to me that the box had some value way beyond its monetary and historical worth for Dory and possibly for others. But how could that be? As Dr. Xie had pointed out in another context, this was a large country with many millennia of history. There were thousands if not millions of treasures here worth as much, and doubtless a lot more, than one silver box. Yes, it was silver; yes, it was very old; and yes, it was valuable. What else? That it contained instructions for the production of an elixir of immortality? I suppose if you were Ponce de Leon that would be a big selling point. In this Jay and age, however, it was highly unlikely this fact alone explained anything.

Was it a peace offering of sorts on the part of Dory, an indication she’d come to terms with her past? Maybe, but I hadn’t heard anything from her that would indicate this was the case. If anything, her opinion hardened the more we had talked about it.

And if the silver box was so important, was its first owner, the concubine Lingfei, the key to this mystery? I wasn’t prepared to accept the leap to immortality that one of the boxes supported. Lingfei was dead. Maybe her body was stolen. Was this relevant? Assuming someone thought she’d made the transition successfully, would she be buried, or if not, then perhaps the clothes she’d left behind? In other words, was this about a tomb? Chances were, absolutely. The dealer who’d led me to his home for tea and a sales pitch had clearly known where a tomb was located, or at least knew someone who did. Had these silver boxes been looted from a tomb? And where might this tomb be? Lingfei hadn’t made it into the guidebooks or the Internet, so maybe her tomb hadn’t been found—officially, that is. As an imperial concubine in the court of Illustrious August, though, the likelihood of her being buried somewhere near Chang’an, which is to say Xi’an, was pretty high.

What if someone in Xi’an knew where this tomb was? What if several people did? When I’d been in the Muslim Quarter waving the photograph of the silver box around, a shopkeeper had directed me to the stall of the man in the mosque. It was the right place even if I wished I hadn’t seen what I had.

I had the feeling I was getting warm here, but I needed a lot more information. I didn’t want to leave the hotel to get it, either. Who, I wondered, would help me get what I sought? Anyone who had been in Xi’an at the time of Burton’s demise, or that of the man in the alley, or the man from the mosque for that matter, was automatically eliminated as too risky, guilty until proven otherwise. That meant I could not look to Dr. Xie, Mira Tetford, and now Liu David, who wasn’t speaking to me in any case. As for Ruby, perhaps that wasn’t the best idea either, given that all I had was her mobile number, and she could have been anywhere.

Was it actually going to be possible for me to avoid asking questions of any of these people if I wanted to get to the bottom of this? Probably not, but I was going to try. I really needed to know more about the history of those silver boxes, their provenance. Where had they been since Dory had seen them when she was young? Dory for sure wasn’t telling me anything. I didn’t want to ask George about it either. So what could I learn without consulting George? That night I called my friend, neighbor, and sometime employee, Alex Stewart. Alex has a deft way of finding out just about anything, and furthermore, he has a good sense of what’s relevant and what’s not. As a bonus, he seemed very happy to hear from me.

“I have a huge favor to ask,” I said. “Is there any way you could go into the shop today?”

“Of course. I was planning to go in any event. Give could use some help.”

“Do you recall where we keep our stash of auction catalogs?”

“Indeed I do. You must have at least ten years’ worth there. Pretty soon you’ll have to occupy the shop next door to have enough storage space for them.”

“And sometimes they come in very handy,” I said. “I need you to check the most recent Molesworth and Cox Oriental auction, the one I went to this fall. In it you will find a photograph of a silver box, T’ang dynasty. That is the one I went to New York to try to buy.”

“I remember, yes.”

“Take a good look at that one, and then if you don’t mind, go through the back issues of the catalog and see if you can find an almost identical silver box that is slightly larger.” I checked my notes and gave Alex the dimensions of George’s box, the one Dory had shown me when I went to visit. “Same shape, same type of decoration, but the smaller one would fit inside the larger. I need to know when that came on the market. It may not be there, but I’m hoping that it will be.”

“Easily done,” he said. “When will I get back to you? How many hours time difference?”

“Thirteen,” I said.

“I’ll call you tonight then, tomorrow morning for you.”

“Call me in the middle of the night,” I said. “I mean it.”

“I’ll leave right now,” he said.

The telephone rang several hours later in the early morning. I wasn’t asleep. “I’m sorry to take so long on this, Lara. It ended up being more complicated that I thought, and perhaps you will also be surprised by what I have found. Shall I just begin?”

“Yes, please, and I’m sorry to put you to so much trouble.”

“It was very interesting, and I’m glad to help. I had no trouble, of course, identifying the box you described to me. I then started to look for something similar. I started with the Molesworth and Cox catalogs, just because that is where the box you were attempting to
get
was to be sold, and I assume people choose auction houses that specialize in the kind of thing they want to sell. That was my theory, anyway. At first I thought that this request of yours was very simple and straightforward. I found a similar box right away, as you suggested I might, in the Molesworth and Cox Oriental auction about eighteen months ago, in the spring. Molesworth appears to hold two Oriental auctions a year. I have the information from that sale, and I’d be happy to give it to you.”

“That’s great, Alex. I’m glad it didn’t take a lot of your time. Except didn’t you say this took longer than you thought it would?”

“Exactly. I thought I was home free when I found the listing, complete with photograph, so there was no mistaking the resemblance. But just to be sure, I took the dimensions you gave me, and I compared them to the listing in the catalog. That was when I knew this was not going to be as easy as I thought: the dimensions you gave me are not the same as the one I identified in the catalog; those are about an inch bigger all ‘round, in fact.”

“Just a minute! There are two boxes in question here, the small one in this fall’s auction catalog, and then one whose dimensions I gave you that belonged to George Matthews. I measured it myself.”

“That is my point. The measurements are not the same as those that you gave me for the George Matthews box. This box is larger than either the Matthews or the stolen box.”

“I thought I was careful. Dory gave me complete access to that box of her husband’s to photograph and measure, so I should have gotten it right. I must have screwed up,” I said.

“Ah, but you didn’t. You usually don’t, that much I learned working at McClintoch and Swain. If Clive measures something, measure it again. If Lara measures it, relax. That’s what piqued my interest.”

“I’m flattered, I guess, but where are you going with this?”

“There is a third box,” he said. “Given that the measurements didn’t jive, I went on looking for one that did. I found it, too, up for auction about three years ago. These boxes are coming on the market at eighteen month intervals, and there are three of them, not two.”

“I see. So if Dory wanted to put the set of three together, she missed one?”

“I have no idea, but there are three boxes. I thought perhaps that meant they are fakes. Having found this anomaly, I started looking for more boxes, just in case. That was when I began to notice something interesting about T’ang dynasty objects. I went back through your entire stash of catalogs, which covers pretty well a decade of the major auctions in New York and Toronto. I can tell you that there has been a sharp increase in T’ang objects offered for sale in the last five years, running perhaps four times the average for the previous five years. Do you see what I mean? Most of the increase is at Molesworth and Cox, incidentally.”

“It could be that more people are selling T’ang objects as prices rise, simple as that. They see other items similar to what they have fetching attractive sums, so they put theirs on the market, too. Is there anything you can tell me about the two boxes, other than size and the fact they look right?”

“Both sold at Molesworth and Cox, one in New York, one in Toronto. Both are supposed to have belonged to someone by the name of Lingfei. The seller of the first box to come on the market, the one sold three years ago, was someone by the name of, just a minute, I won’t pronounce this well, Dr. Jinghe Xie.”

“No kidding,” I said.

“You know him?”

“I do. He’s here. In China, he’s Xie Jinghe, of course, but it’s the same man. And the second box?”

“No owner listed. Does this mean something significant?”

“I’m sure it does, but right now I don’t have a clue what that might be. What it does do is link Dr. Xie with the silver box, one of them at least. George Matthews obviously bought one of Xie Jinghe’s boxes, given the dimensions of the first match the one I saw at his home. It should also mean that Dr. Xie was not the mystery buyer on the telephone in New York, because he’d already sold a box. Why would he want another only slightly smaller than the one he’d had in his possession and chosen to sell? It’s also possible that George and Dory just missed the second box up for sale. Dory would just have been leaving the Cottingham, and she didn’t purchase in her area of employment on principle, and George might have decided one was enough, not realizing his wife would be more than a little interested in all of them.”

“You should know that many of the T’ang objects up for sale in the past five years are from the collection of this Dr. Xie.”

“Not sure what that means either. It was legal to buy and sell Chinese artifacts at that time. He has a tremendous number of them. Maybe he was just unloading a few to make room for more. When we talked about the silver box at the preview in Beijing, he didn’t mention that he’d once owned a similar one. I don’t know about that. Maybe he simply didn’t think it was relevant. Still, you’d think he’d say something. Did he suddenly realize that his box was part of a nesting set, more valuable that way, and maybe he’d try to buy the other one back again? I can’t really ask him. What I do need to know, and short of someone getting a court order I never will, is who put the box up for sale in New York and then withdrew it from sale.”

“Dr. Xie also?”

“Maybe. Burton Haldimand had Dr. Xie down as a possible buyer, not the seller, but who knows? I can’t ask him that, either.”

“You are on bad terms with this Dr. Xie?”

“No, but if his name keeps popping up in this connection, I may be. Thank you for this, Alex. As usual you have been wonderful.”

“Take care of yourself,” he said.

“I plan to do that.” I did, too. As I completed the call, I parted the curtains carefully and looked out on to the street, Dong Dajie. It was still early enough that the stores were not open. The street cleaners were out, though, one in particular just sweeping away in front of the hotel. As I Watched, she looked up, shielding her eyes slightly. It was the woman with the scar on her face. It occurred to me she’d been there almost every day, except maybe when she was following me to the market. I just hadn’t really looked at her. “Whose side are you on?” I said to her through the curtain. I was going to have to be very careful getting out of this hotel.