The Chinese Alchemist (25 page)

When everyone had made their purchases, Rong gave Ting a signal and we quickly headed the rest of the way down the hill. I felt terribly exposed there, the two hills looming over me like malevolent giants. Zhang or his henchmen could have been up there, and any moment could come swooping down to get me, probably hurting my newfound friends in the process. I thought it was very brave of them to help me. “Zhang Xiaoling,” I said again, this time to the driver, and all three of them spat on the ground. The feeling in this town appeared to be pretty much unanimous on the subject of Zhang Xiaoling. I thought perhaps this was part of Zhang’s fiefdom, where terrified people were forced to do whatever he asked. These three seemed prepared to defy him, something for which I was exceedingly grateful.

Five minutes later, I was lying on the bed of the truck with sweaters, jackets, pots and pans, and just about everything else piled on top of me. We were underway. It was a really rough ride. I could feel every bone, and at one point the truck stopped, and I heard someone talking to the driver. I held my breath, and soon we were on our way again.

About half an hour later, I think, the truck stopped again, but this time the driver started pulling the merchandise off me, and signaled me to get into the cab of the truck, which smelled very slightly of manure. We sped along for a couple hours that way, he talking to me, me talking back, neither of us understanding a word, but both of us nodding and smiling away.

He dropped me in front of the Forbidden City, at the north end of Tian’anmen Square. I think he would have taken me to the door of my hotel if I could have told him what and where it was. I had given some money to both Ting and Rong, although both had protested. I knew that for these people what was a posh dinner out in my hometown was a fortune for them, and I insisted they keep it. I gave the driver most of what I had left. I had enough for a taxi to the hotel. The woman who swept the sidewalk in front of the hotel was gone. I suppose she didn’t expect me to get back. Twenty minutes after the man dropped me off, I was walking through the door to my room.

Rob was there. I could tell he’d been pacing. “Where have you been?” he demanded in the tone he uses when he’s worried, but would prefer me to think he’s annoyed. “You were supposed to get here first. Was your flight delayed or something?” He looked me up and down with a somewhat perplexed expression—perhaps I wasn’t looking as well turned out as usual, what with the dirt and straw all over my clothes—before coming toward me as if to give me a hug or maybe a shake. I gave him a shake of the head of my own. Unless he liked the smell of manure, he’d regret getting any closer to me than he already was.

“Well?” he said.

I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. “No, my flight was right on time.”

“Then where have you been?”

“I have no idea. I met some wonderful people, though. It’s a long story, but let me summarize it this way: any man who gets between me and the shower is dead meat.”

Later, not only clean but safe, I placed a call to George Matthews. Did I care it was rather early in the morning in Toronto? I did not. I reversed the charges, too. When he heard my voice he did not ask why I was calling, nor did he make any attempt at small talk. I didn’t think, though, that this was because I’d awakened him. He just waited for me to say something.

“You have not been honest with me,” I said, not bothering with small talk myself. “Neither you nor Dorothy have been.” For some reason, my tongue and brain would no longer permit me to call her Dory. “Now you will tell me everything I need to know.”

“I was afraid it might come to this,” George said.

That night I dreamed about Burton and Dorothy. Burton, who was still blue of face and wearing surgical gloves, accused Dorothy of being responsible for his death. Dorothy just kept saying over and over that she was sorry.

El
even

Lingfei was gone. I searched for her everywhere. In some ways I hoped she had used the opportunity provided by the chaos created by An Lushan to escape the bounds of the imperial harem and join the man she loved. I asked if a message had been left for me. There was none. I confess that hurt me deeply. I wondered if perhaps she was angry because I had not said good-bye to her.

I went to her apartment but someone else lived there now. Her workshop too was gone. I looked in every possible hiding place I could think of, but could find no evidence of Lingfei or of her life’s work. It was as if she had never existed.

In many ways, life at the Imperial Palace returned to normal I found I had more influence than ever before and took full advantage of it. Soon I had a splendid home in the countryside outside Chang’an, a wife of sorts, and two adopted sons, one of whom was to follow me into the Imperial Palace, the other to provide me with grandchildren some time later.

Still, I thought often of Lingfei. Was she my sister? What had happened to her? No one seemed to know, or if they did, they were not revealing that information to me. I looked for her, as I had looked for Number One Sister, in the marketplaces. I looked for her in the brothels of the Gay Quarter.

Life at the palace now was different, of course, with a new Son of Heaven, but in many ways it was the same. There was a ghost though that now haunted the quarters of the harem. It was an angry ghost, someone who had died violently, without the proper rituals to ensure that the cloud soul would be nourished.

One day, several months after I had returned to the palace, a package was delivered to me. Wrapped in a piece of fabric that I recognized as being cut from the plain robe that Lingfei wore when she worked, were a few pages of notes in my hand. It was some of the last work I had done for Lingfei. The eunuch who delivered the package said a stranger had asked him to do so. He did not know who it was. I could only guess what this would mean.

That night, I had a most disturbing dream. In it, Lingfei appeared to me. “Do you not remember me, Di-Di?” she asked. Then she told me her story.

“I was taken as one of the spoils of war by An Lushan himself,” she said, tears in her eyes. “He was a loathsome man, not refined like the emperor. He had no real love of music and dance, and he did not really care for me. While I was under his control, he became very ill. Painful boils erupted on his body. He died in agony. One of his men blamed me for his death, accusing me of having poisoned him.

“One night as I slept I was wrenched from my bed and strangled by this man, who accused me of witchcraft. He buried me under a large tree in the Imperial Park in the garden where the peonies bloom. My cloud soul roams, Di-Di,” she said. “Help me, please.” I awoke with a start. She had called me “little brother.” I knew then that Lingfei was indeed my sister. I knew what I must do to honor her. The proper rituals must be undertaken to ensure that she could rest.

The gates of the Zhang residence were locked, but I rang the bell as long as it took to get someone to open it. It was Zhang Xiaoling with a bandage on his forehead. He didn’t look happy to see me.

“We’re here to see Zhang Anthony,” I said. He didn’t invite us in. I pushed past him, Rob right behind me, Dr. Xie bringing up the rear.

This was quite the spot the Zhang family had. The gardens were lovely and the houses in the two courtyards very elegant from the outside. One didn’t need to feel sorry for them at all. They had all the modern conveniences. In fact, in the room to which we were eventually directed, an elderly man was sitting in front of a thirty-one-inch television screen, a basket on his knees.

A maid came with a tray of tea, and some candied jasmine blossoms. We waited for a time, important and wealthy people finding it necessary to put unexpected visitors in their place, I suppose, before a man in his late fifties strode into the room. He was taller than average, although still smaller than his son, and he had a Eurasian attractiveness, a lovely bone structure, and interesting eyes. I didn’t think I’d recognize him, but I did. He’d been sitting to the right-hand side of Mira Tetford at the victory dinner at Dr. Xie’s Beijing apartment, the man she’d been chatting up for business reasons, as I sat to her left talking to Liu David. I’d been that close and I didn’t even know it. I had no idea what I was looking for, of course, not then, and I’d been hampered, as Burton hadn’t been, by my total lack of facility in Chinese. I might even have been introduced to him, I couldn’t remember. Somehow it seemed to be a very long time ago.

I introduced myself anyway. “Zhang Anthony, my name is Lara McClintoch,” I said. “And this is Xie Jinghe, of Xie Homeopathic. I’m sure you’ve heard of him. With us is my partner, Rob Luczka. I am a friend of your sister Dorothy’s, who, I regret to tell you is dead.”

Did he speak English? I sincerely hoped so. He’d have spoken English for the first three years of his life, but not, perhaps, after that. But of course his English was impeccable, American-accented. He was a red prince after all, the son of one of Mao’s closest advisors, someone who had gone on the Long March. Zhang Anthony had been educated at Harvard.

“I go by Zhang Yi, now,” he said. “This is a rather presumptuous opening gambit, Ms. McClintoch. I don’t know this Dorothy person. Why should I listen to you?”

“Because your son is trying to kill me.”

Zhang
Anthony looked sharply at Xiaoling, who couldn’t meet his father’s eyes. “Well then, why don’t you proceed?”

“Thank you. Given that I don’t know how much everyone in this room knows of this story, I
will
summarize. A considerable portion of the information I’m about to impart was told to me by George Norfolk Matthews, Dorothy’s husband and now widower, who has confirmed many of the hypotheses I had with regard to this situation.”

“I do not know these people,” Zhang Anthony repeated.

“Dorothy,” the old man said, taking a cricket out of the basket and holding it in his hand. It was difficult for him to do so, as his hands were gnarled with what looked to be arthritis. Still, that one word from his lips seemed a pretty good indication to me that I was in the right place.

“Dorothy and Anthony Zhang were born in Shanghai in the 1940s, Dorothy being three years older than her brother. Children born in those years after the Japanese left were called ”peace babies,“ and that is what both Dorothy and Anthony were. But peace was a relative term then, and an elusive one at that. The Japanese had gone, but there was still civil war between the Koumintang and the Communist Party. While the Communists were seen as saviors in many ways in the late 1940s, not everyone shared that belief. On the eve of the communist takeover in 1949, Dorothy and Anthony’s mother Vivian decided she had had enough of war, and perhaps of her husband as well, a man she rarely saw, and someone whom Dorothy believes might have been abusive.” When I said this, Anthony looked at his hands. I decided Dorothy’s mother had been right about the abuse.

“Vivian decided she was going to take the children and get out while she could. These were difficult times, however. A determined woman, Vivian managed to book passage for herself, her two children, and a nursemaid out of Shanghai on one of the last ships departing for Hong Kong before the takeover. She was not alone in trying to do so. Somehow, in the crowds on the pier, Vivian and Dorothy became separated from the nursemaid who was holding Anthony. Vivian looked everywhere, but she couldn’t find her son. She left Shanghai with her daughter only. Vivian came to believe that the maid, who had been extraordinarily fond of young Anthony, had simply kept him as her own, or that the boy’s father paid the nursemaid to steal the son.”

“Nothing would surprise me about my father,” Anthony said drily. “He was, and still is, quite a ruthless man, although as you can see he is constrained by age. Having said that, I’m afraid you have the wrong man.” All eyes turned to the old man and his cricket. He looked pretty harmless to me.

“Vivian had very little time to pack, so took what she could. Dorothy, at five years of age, insisted upon taking her very favorite plaything, a small silver box, one of a set of three. She actually wanted to take all three of them, fascinated by the way they fit together, but under the circumstances she was allowed to keep only one small toy. She chose the smallest box. Dorothy could easily recall playing with all three boxes that her father had brought home after one of his lengthy trips away from Shanghai. She didn’t know how her father found the tomb, although as an adult she was convinced he must have done so.”

“Food,” the old man said.

“You just ate,” Anthony said impatiently.

I didn’t think that was what the old man meant. “I think it might have been found while foraging for food. It was wartime, and soldiers had to fend for themselves. However it was located, it proved to be rather lucrative over the years as the contents were sold off. The tomb I am speaking about was that of an imperial concubine by the name of Lingfei.”

“I know nothing about such a tomb.”

“Lingfei,” the old man said. Anthony grimaced. If this were not so serious a matter, the conversation might have been funny, what with Anthony denying everything, and his old father contradicting him with only one word every time.

“To continue, Dorothy would not leave the little box behind, so into the suitcase it went. Vivian and Dorothy eventually ended up in Canada. While Vivian remarried, and indeed had another son named Martin, she never really recovered from the loss of her little Anthony. She would not speak about him to anyone, and forbade Dorothy to ever mention his name. When Dorothy inadvertently did so as a child, her mother would take to her bed for days, and Dorothy would be wracked with guilt at having made her mother ill. Dorothy learned to say nothing, and soon it was as if the little boy had never existed.

“But Dorothy did not forget her little brother, whom she had adored. It was not until her mother died and China began to open up to the outside world, that Dorothy felt free to start looking for him, which is to say you, Anthony. The trouble was the family name is Zhang, which has to be one of the most common, if not the most common, names in China. She didn’t know where to start. Furthermore, she was quite determined not to go to China to do so.”