A Death in China (27 page)

Wang Bin said, “Of course I gave Miss Greer my consent. ‘I realize when I have been defeated,’ I said. ‘Your terms are very generous and I accept them. Let us leave now.’

“Broom could not contain his glee. Miss Greer seemed surprised—it had been so easy. And after that, who could deny a confused and defeated old man the right to sit alone in the back seat with his thoughts? Miss Greer, you see, was not as clever as she thought. She never looked for a gun—and the price of that mistake was death. The world will think she died as Broom’s lover, mistress to an international crime.”

Wang Bin glowed in self-satisfaction: another victory, among so many.

Now. It had to be now. Stratton tensed to spring.

Too late.

Wang Bin must have had the gun on his lap the whole time. There was no other way he could have leveled it so quickly.

It was a fat, black .45, the kind the United States government issues its agents. Linda Greer’s gun.

“Stratton, you have been maneuvering your hands as I spoke,” Wang Bin said quietly. “If you move again, I shall shoot. I can do it, believe me. I spent many more years in the army than you did.”

Stratton sagged, full of self-disgust.

“It’s hard for me to believe you could actually be David’s brother, or Kangmei’s father,” he said. “You have dishonored your country, your ancestors, your family, all in the name of greed.”

“Ah, Kangmei, my lovely daughter. She excited you, yes? You were not the first, I assure you. It was probably she who made possible your escape. I should have foreseen such a thing, but it is too late. China’s system will deal with her—for that, the system is efficient.”

“This country’s got a system, too,” Stratton said. “You’ll get caught, Bin. The spooks—Linda’s friends—will snatch you up and turn you inside out. You’ll tell them everything, too. You won’t be able to help it—drugs, sensory deprivation, shock. When they’re finished, you’ll be as dead and dusty as your goddamn clay soldiers.”

“I don’t think so, Professor.”

“Believe me.” Stratton fought to keep his voice steady. “I’ll make you a better offer than Linda Greer did. Go now. Run. Get out of here. I’ll give you twenty-four hours before I come looking, and then it’ll just be me. Alone. No police.”

Wang Bin’s response was icy, bemused. “I think not, Stratton. No one is looking for me now, and no one will. I drowned in Peking, you see. Drowned before I could see my ministry dishonored by two thieves—imperialist American running dogs who looted the treasures of the people of China. Harold Broom. And Linda Greer. When she is identified, and the emperor’s soldier is found in the car, her superiors will understand where her true loyalties lay: she was a thief. I was very careful, Stratton. I provided all the pieces to the puzzle: the soldier, the suicide note and the list.”

“What list?”

“The list of Mr. Broom’s buyers, of course. Wrapped up with the soldier, in the trunk of the car. You look surprised.”

“No,” Stratton said. But he was. Sgt. Gil Beckley hadn’t mentioned the list—he was an even better cop than Stratton had thought.

“I had no need for the customers anymore, Professor. The money is quite safe, and so am I. All clues point to Mr. Broom and Miss Greer. There will be no pursuit. But you must accept that on faith, Stratton. I have already anticipated your own quiet removal.”

“People will look for me … ” But Stratton saw that it was useless.

Wang Bin had won.

Thomas Stratton would be the last sacrifice of an ancient funeral rite.

With the speed and deftness of a snake—a cobra—Wang Bin’s hand flicked the coil of rope from the desk. A noose settled over Stratton’s head.

Wang Bin hauled Stratton, wheezing, until he was suspended almost horizontally between the desk and the heavy chair which held his feet. He squirmed and grunted, lamely pawing at the rope on his neck.

“Something else I learned in the army,” Wang Bin said. “Careful, Stratton. The harder you struggle, the worse it will be.”

Stratton felt the rope slacken and instantly he was on the floor, heaving. His shirt was soaked with cold sweat.

“Your original question, Professor Stratton: Why am I here? It’s very simple. I am here to borrow some tools.” Wang Bin stood up. One hand held the gun. With the other hand he fitted a shapeless, faded hat—David’s gardening hat—onto his head. “There is a shovel out on the porch. You will carry it.”

Wang Bin wrapped Stratton’s tether around his right fist and pulled hard.

“Now we shall go for a walk, Mr. Stratton. There is something you must do for me before you die.”

The puppet dangled waist-deep in a grave.

His shovel bit through sodden red clay made heavy and unstable by rainwater that sluiced into the pit. The puppet dug by the dancing light of two hurricane lamps, abetted by stalks of lightning that made him think of deranged Chinese characters.

The rain had stopped, but it would come again. Such was the promise of distant thunder, alien battalions marching, and of the brusque summer wind that chilled without cooling.

The puppet dug awkwardly, his head erect, the position enforced by the rope that arched from his neck over a limb of a lonely oak, and into the darkness below.

In that darkness stood Wang Bin, a furtive scout.

“Kuai-kuaide!” he barked above the wind. “Faster!”

Wang Bin jerked the rope, yanking the puppet’s head, forcing a fresh sob through lips that begged for air.

Thomas Stratton was dying.

He was dying with cruelty and calculated humiliation that no Western mind could fashion.

He could dig, and die when he finished; a shot from Linda Greer’s revolver.

He could refuse to dig and die now at the end of a rope, swinging as lifeless as yesterday’s shirt.

But he could not die with any dignity, any pride. They had been stripped from him by the murderer who supervised his agony.

Professor of stupidity.

Wang Bin had been right. Stu-pid, stu-pid, stu-pid, muttered the wind through the Arbor.

The solution had been there all the time. In the grave of David Wang. It had been there from the beginning, and Stratton had not realized it.

The puppet did not dig to satisfy Wang Bin’s sadism, nor merely to create his own eternal shroud.

He dug because there was something to recover from David’s grave. Not an empty coffin, as Stratton had assumed, or even another carved soldier.

It was to his brother’s coffin that Wang Bin had consigned his real treasure.

What was it?

Stratton was too dazed even to speculate. He dug mindlessly, an ashen marionette.

“Slack,” he gagged. “More slack … I can’t breathe.”

The rope eased a grudging fraction, and in the next aching instant Stratton’s shovel struck the lid of the coffin. The clunk was unmistakable, and it brought Wang Bin bobbing forward to perch at the lip of the grave.

“Careful!” he commanded excitedly. “Xiao xin, fool!”

Gradually Stratton uncovered the coffin lid, the cheap Chinese metal streaked with moisture and freckled with incipient rust. Like a teacher bestowing reluctant favor on a backward child, Wang Bin paid out rope to allow Stratton more movement.

Shovel plunging, the puppet dug his way around the coffin from corner to corner.

“Huang di,” Wang Bin said, a reverent whisper.

“What is it?” gasped .Stratton.

“Do not stop now, Professor. You are about to have the history lesson of your life.”

Wang Bin positioned himself at the foot of the grave. The barrel of the pistol poked from his shadow, an ominous telescope on Stratton’s midsection.

“Pull it out now,” the deputy minister said. “Be careful.”

Stratton staggered to the gentle slope of soil at the peak of the grave. He squatted in the mud, wrapped both blistered hands around the head of the coffin and pulled it toward him. The metal was slick, and Stratton’s purchase poor.

The coffin edged a few inches from its bed and then slid back as Stratton’s legs flew out from under him. The rope stopped his fall, but left him choking and scrambling in a tortuous pushup pose.

Wang Bin played out the rope and Stratton collapsed, prying with nerveless fingers to loosen the noose.

He lay there for what seemed like a long time, his lungs devouring draughts of fresh air. His brain teetered between blackness and reason.

“Pull, you must pull again,” came the thin, ice-pick voice of his captor. “Pull, donkey. Pull.”

Stratton levered himself to a sitting position, encouraged by a fresh jerk on the rope. “I can’t,” he cried. “I need air.”

Wang Bin fired once. The bullet slapped into the mud between Stratton’s knees.

The puppet lurched back into the grave. Moments later he had dragged the coffin out of the pit onto the muddy slope, bracing it there with a heavy rock.

Wang Bin inched forward along the side of the open grave. “Now break the welds, Professor. Use the point of the shovel.” The rope hung loosely from his left hand now. The time for donkeys was nearly over.

Stratton found the welds soft and accommodating; a child could have fractured them. The lid of the coffin sprang open. Unbidden, Stratton stripped away a protective layer of gray quilts. Then he slumped against the grave wall to stare.

Russian dolls, he thought dully, a game of Russian dolls—one inside the other.

“What is it?” Stratton murmured again.

The gleam of Wang Bin’s smile was visible in the darkness. “It is beauty, Professor—or can you no longer recognize it? It is beauty. It is history. It is mine.”

Inside the coffin that was never meant for David Wang lay another coffin, cushioned by green quilts and chocked with fresh-cut wood.

The smaller coffin was exquisite, a masterpiece of latticework gold studded with gems—diamonds, rubies, pearls—that sparkled even in the sallow lantern light. It was like nothing Stratton had ever seen. Beauty and majesty unsurpassed.

“I know what it is,” Stratton marveled. So this was the deputy minister’s private excavation at Xian. No wonder David had raged. A crime against humanity, he had called it.

Indeed, it was more than that.

“Open it.” The eyes of the old man flashed in triumph. The voice was placid, confident. “Open it, Stratton. There are latches on the side.”

Stratton opened it.

He looked, then spun away and retched into the grave.

“Huang di,” Wang Bin said. “Son of Heaven. Ruler of the Middle Kingdom. Beloved ancestor.”

It was the Emperor Qin.

He lay as serenely as when his vassals had placed him at the heart of his colossal tomb, protected by his army of ceramic soldiers. Twenty-two hundred years ago.

The ultimate artifact.

Thomas Stratton had never imagined anything so macabre. It was hideous, a loathsome caricature of life, a rotted monster that did not belong on this verdant hillside, David’s place.

No one would ever know what secrets the emperor’s alchemists had employed to prepare him for eternal reign. But they had failed. They had not cheated time, but perverted it. A mummy can have dignity, like a man making his own grave. Wang Bin’s emperor had none. It was a green-tinged parody of empty sockets, spore-covered bones, shreds of dusty silk and a rictus grin.

For this abomination men had died. David had died. Stratton would die.

Drenched, fatigued, bleary, Stratton looked up at Wang Bin. “Why?” he ask feebly.

“Think, Professor. As a student of history, as an observer of mankind.” He held the rope and the gun where Stratton could see them. “You know what this is, Professor. It is the most cherished archaeological treasure in all China. Its value is both symbolic and very real. It is—truly—priceless. My government—” Wang Bin caught himself, smiled self-consciously. “Excuse me, my former government will do anything to recover this artifact. It will do anything, in fact, to conceal the circumstances of the theft. You see, Stratton, in China the scandal would be more of a calamity than the actual crime. There is no limit to what my former colleagues might do to prevent such a thing.”

“So you’re a blackmailer, too,” Stratton said derisively.

Wang Bin stiffened. “I am not familiar with that term,” he replied, testing the rope with a sharp twitch. “However, I do intend to seek what is due to me after a lifetime of devotion.”

“The soldiers weren’t enough?”

“Think, Stratton. There are seven thousand celestial soldiers. There is only one imperial casket. There is only one … ” His voice trailed off in the night. His eyes fell to the grave, gazing at the withered creature within.

Stratton watched the gun and waited.

“By now they know,” Wang Bin said smugly. “The comrades know of my achievement. They know what they must do, for I left precise instructions. The men who would have purged me are the same men who will beseech me for this treasure. They will pay enormously for my future comfort, and for my silence. And, in return, I will give them back their precious little corpse.”

“And then you disappear?”

Wang Bin nodded. “I disappear from history. My name will never again be mentioned in Peking. Those who worked with me … I cannot say what will become of them. The comrades who pursued me, however, will certainly suffer. They were too slow and much too stupid. Their defeat and humiliation is my vindication, Stratton. That much even you can understand.”

Stratton understood. He understood why the celestial soldiers were not enough. He understood the genius of the crime, the genius of the vengeance.

And he knew why Wang Bin—so small and unimposing—frightened him so.

“Close the coffin now,” the deputy minister ordered. “Remove it from the grave.”

“I can’t.”

The rope cracked. Stratton was on his toes, then peddling in the air, gulping for breath. Then he was on his knees, on all fours. Dizzy. Dying.

David, help me.

“Now,” said the brother. “Remove the emperor’s coffin!”

“No.”

For this Thomas Stratton would not die.

With all his strength he hurled a wet handful of dirt in Wang Bin’s face and dove across the grave with a scream.

Sometimes you have to take a shot. It was something you were taught but never spoke of. Sometimes the only remote chance is to give the enemy one shot and hope to survive it. Bobby Ho had remembered, there on the bloody stage at Man-ling.

Diving low, Stratton survived because Wang Bin made a mistake. Logically, he should have jerked on the rope with all his weight; that would have snapped Stratton’s neck.

But Wang Bin chose the gun instead. He fired reflexively, and missed by a hair’s breadth.

The bullet scored the top of Stratton’s shoulder and exploded in the grave behind him. When Stratton hit Wang Bin, the almond eyes were riveted in horror—not at his assailant, but at the coffins.

Then they fought along the rim of the pit. They fought like the maniacs they were, with hands and feet and teeth: Stratton younger, heavier, but exhausted; Wang Bin possessed of unquenchable fury.

Stratton finally saw it—a slow-motion frame—as they teetered on the lip, Wang Bin’s hands like talons on his neck.

The bullet meant for Stratton had found another target: the emperor’s skull. After twenty-two centuries his warriors had failed him. A traitor’s gunshot had reduced the legend to an anonymous pile of powdered bone.

Not for that.

I will not die for that.

With power he had never known, Tom Stratton ripped free of Wang Bin’s clinch. With the heel of his right hand he delivered a killing blow beneath the old man’s chin, a blow that would paralyze the nervous system in the microsecond before it broke the neck.

Stratton hurled Wang Bin into the grave and fell back in the mud.

It was the rain that roused him—fresh rain, thunder and the wind that scoured his wounds, pierced his lethargy. Stratton was sick again. Then, as recognition returned, he cautiously crawled to the edge of the grave.

Wang Bin had joined his emperor forever.

He had crashed on his back into the coffin, smashing beneath him the delicate, lacework-gold bier. The impact had jarred the coffin off the rock and sent it sliding down the slope, back into the muddy tomb.

With a grunt, Stratton reached down and slammed the lid of David’s casket, sealing the two sleepers. Then, determinedly, ignoring throbbing limbs and a bloody shoulder, Stratton set to work.

He had been digging for ten minutes when he heard the sounds. Stratton wiped the water from his eyes and paused to listen: branches chattering in the wind. What else could it be?

Stratton had covered the entire coffin with a foot of wet red earth when he heard it again.

Faint raps. Then a clawing, a muffled disturbance: the scuttle of rats in a barn.

It came from the grave.

Wang Bin was alive.

His body quivering, the rain cascading off his back, Stratton bent for a long and horrible moment over the shovel.

Rap. Rap.

“No!” Stratton screamed. “No! No, you!”

He shoveled relentlessly then, with black fear and desolate conviction. Dig. Lift. Throw. Dig. But don’t think. Lift. Never think. Throw.

Stratton had no memory of finishing. There was but an hour until dawn when he levered the headstone back into its silent place, tucked a shapeless old gardening hat in his back pocket, and left the rain to wash away his traces:

David Wang

1915-1983

Teacher and Friend

Rest in Peace