Beautiful Ghosts (45 page)

Shan looked up with questions in his eyes.

Yao hesitated, glancing toward the young policeman who stood at the entrance and a new figure in a grey uniform who seemed to be waiting for him, then stepped closer.

“I lied,” he said in voice heavy with apology. He seemed unable to look Shan in the eyes. “We didn’t bring you from Tibet just to help in Beijing. You’re going to be arrested. Corbett is getting papers. He is making preparations. He will—” The figure in grey appeared in the door closest to the front hall. The guard called Yao’s name. Yao frowned as he departed. “Read the files. If only you could find something.”

Shan’s throat was suddenly bone dry. Arrested. How could he have been so wrong? Abruptly, it was over. Everything was over. It made no sense but nothing ever did in dealing with those who hated Shan, who had finally reached out across the span of years to snare him one last time. He looked about the chamber again, feeling in his last hours of freedom, a strange connection with the Qian Long emperor. Somehow it felt as though the Qian Long had taken a hand in Shan’s destiny. In his doom.

But then one of the guards appeared at his side, extending a folded paper toward Shan. “Excuse me. Inspector Yao said give this to you. Sir.”

It was a hastily scrawled note.
You are going to America with Corbett as a material witness. The flight is this evening.

Shan read the note twice, turned it over, read it again. It was impossible. With every hour he wanted more to be back in Lhadrung, where he could do some good. But Yao and Corbett were conspiring to take him to the other side of the planet. Gradually he became aware of his fingers. They had formed a mudra, the diamond of the mind. He stared at it a long time. Then he began to read the files.

When Yao returned two hours later Shan had finished with the files. “There really isn’t a question that Ming arranged the theft,” Shan said.

“Only a question of proof. I’m still no closer to recovering the fresco.” Yao walked along the hole in the wall, leaning close to the exposed laths, pausing at the small ten-inch square in the lathwork, running his fingers around its edges. “I thought this was just some defect in the construction. But it’s where Ming got the letters, the ones he encrypted, the ones that changed everything.”

Shan stared at the photograph of the stolen fresco he had found in the files. It was beautiful, a scene of water with reeds and bamboo, and huge cranes that looked as if they were about to fly out of the wall. The wisteria vines that grew along the border were so lifelike they seemed to tremble in the wind. “Did you ever see the letter,” he asked Yao. “The one he reported to the Chairman, the one that suggested the emperor owed tribute to Lhadrung?”

“A photocopy.”

“How did the police lose it?”

“He had a courier from the museum deliver it in an envelope. The envelope was found but it was opened, and empty. Why do you ask?”

“Because Ming’s biggest offense wasn’t taking the fresco, it was lying to the Chairman. You know he fabricated that letter.”

Yao nodded slowly. “But still there is no proof.” He placed a hand on the file. “Ming’s museum was in charge of the restoration of the cottage,” Yao said, reciting the evidence. “Crews from the museum were working here almost every day, here and at two of the small halls on the far side of the complex. Ming approved the assignment of workers, even the schedules, even frequently visited the projects. I checked the full roster of workers cleared by Ming. The last two were added two weeks before the theft. Lu and Khan. No effort was made to hide their identities. They had worked with Ming before, on two expeditions.

“Every worker on duty confirmed that no work crew was assigned here the day of the theft. Khan and Lu were interviewed, said they saw nothing. Ming confirmed Khan and Lu were on the opposite side of the compound. The area was closed off to the public, with no guards except those stationed a hundred yards away. No witness could be found who saw any activity here. A police investigator said the thieves were invisible, that they had not passed through any of the security barriers. They looked for tunnels, for signs of secret egress over the walls, even checked the records of all helicopter flights that day. Ming gave a public statement about how disappointed he was in law enforcement.”

Shan turned and put his hand on the file. “There are interviews of only half a dozen of the maintenance staff. There are more than a half a dozen that work in this quarter.”

“The others confirmed they saw nothing.”

“To you?”

“To policemen.”

“And the ones who gave the statements, how old were they?”

“What could it matter?”

“How old?” Shan pressed.

“I don’t know,” Yao admitted, staring in confusion as Shan rose from the table and gestured him toward the door.

It had been years since Shan had visited the imperial servants’ chambers, which he had discovered during his first wanderings through the complex nearly two decades before. The rooms, converted to crude sleeping quarters for some of the maintenance staff, were dim and dustladen, accessed through an arched gateway overgrown with wisteria. Shan told Yao to wait near the gate while he probed the interior.

An old man with a crooked back was in one of the chambers at the end of the long corridor, sitting cross-legged by a pallet, heating a tin mug of water over a cluster of three candles. He looked up but seemed to have difficulty seeing his visitor.

“My name is Shan,” Shan said softly. “I used to sit in the small gardens. Sometimes I would play checkers with you and your friend, the one called the professor. You both taught at the university once.”

The old man’s smile revealed several missing teeth. He motioned Shan to sit beside him. “I have only the one cup,” he said, and offered the sooty, dented mug to Shan, who declined it. “That was years ago,” the janitor said. “What happened to you?”

“I had to go away. I live in Tibet now,” Shan said in a slow, conversational tone. “You used to sit in the shade of the wisteria and throw your sticks to recite the Tao te Ching, or sometimes read a book of poetry.”

The old man nodded. “Your father was a professor, too, I recall.”

“A long time ago,” Shan said.

There was a movement in the shadows. Yao appeared, and stood behind Shan.

“I am permitted to live here,” the janitor said, gazing apprehensively at Yao.

Shan gestured for Yao to sit. “You are fortunate,” Shan said, and realized the room was like a meditation chamber, its walls and ceilings lined with wood.

The old man stared at the candle flame, his lips quivering, fear in his eyes.

“We are trying to understand what happened that day the fresco was stolen,” Shan said in a soft voice. “I think there are many secrets in the Qian Long cottage. I think the thieves were surprised at something they found, something other than the fresco. Something in that box in the wall.”

“On National Day,” the old man suddenly said in a hoarse voice, “Professor Jiang likes to go out on the square and sing patriotic songs with the crowds. He brings me back a bag of roasted pumpkin seeds then chides me for not doing my duty.”

Shan could read the glance Yao shot him. They should leave. The old man was crazy, was wasting their time.

“In the night we would sit in the dark and hear the voices of those who used to live in the rooms, from the emperor’s court. Some mornings we would tell each other we were going to work in some official duty in the emperor’s court, and at night speak about how those duties had gone. One of the good emperors.”

“Like the Qian Long.” Shan said.

The old man nodded. “That was the professor’s special interest. The Qian Long era. He used to give lectures about it at the university. I would have him recite the lectures for me, here.” He slowly passed his fingers through the flames of the candles, watching with an odd, distant fascination.

“Where is the professor?” Shan asked.

“Now I hear his voice at night, with the others.”

Yao muttered and shifted as though to rise. Shan put his hand out to stop him. “You mean he died. When?”

“They beat him that day when he found them.”

“The police?”

“The thieves.”

Yao froze, then settled back to the floor. “He saw them?”

“But he was already dying,” the old man added. “He had a cancer, he knew. There was a big lump in his belly.” He sighed and gazed at his candles. “In the newspapers the police said it was a perfect crime, said the thieves knew everything about how to get inside. I said the police were fools. But Jiang said no, to the police such men are indeed invisible.”

Shan felt a new sorrow as he studied the old man. It had been a common thing, during the mad years of the Cultural Revolution, when institutions of higher learning had been shut down, for teachers to be assigned to manual labor. Shan’s own father had been a member of the intellectual class which Mao had reviled as an enemy of the people. Most had been rehabilitated and eventually, sometimes ten or twenty years later, gone back to their former jobs. Some, like his father, had not survived the initial round of violent persecutions. Still others had been lost in the ranks of the proletariat, forgotten in back-breaking jobs that were little more than enslavement, left without pensions, without government support, often without surviving family.

“You mean men like Ming,” Shan said.

“I told him to go to the hospital but he said they would think he was involved in the theft. They would interrogate him. He couldn’t stand police. They made him shake, made him so upset he could not speak. The thieves knew he was no threat.”

“What did he see that day?”

The old man did not acknowledge Shan. “They always leave us alone, the professor and me, the two crazy old men. No one cares that we work slowly, stopping often to discuss the artifacts, to do what we can to protect them. I taught about the early dynasties, whose courts were in the south. But Jiang, he was the greater scholar. He knows things about the Qian Long no one else knows, he is always making new discoveries and taking notes.” The old man kept mixing his tenses, as if he weren’t sure that Jiang was actually dead. “He knows how things get protected.”

For the first time Shan became aware of shelves around the top of the room, below the high ceiling. They were packed with hundreds of items: Scrolls, incense braziers. Jade seals. A small bronze horse.

“It isn’t time for everything to be known,” the old man said. “Perhaps one more generation, perhaps then people will not be so greedy.”

Shan found himself looking into the flames. The two old men must have lived in the cramped room for decades, exiles in their own city. They had seldom spoken with him of their past when he had seen them in the gardens years earlier. Shan himself had often hidden from the staff when he saw them, for fear of being ejected from one of his private retreats. Those who had survived the years of Mao had learned to be wary of strangers.

“I remember sitting in one of the old courtyards once,” Yao suddenly said in a slow voice. “I saw a mouse carrying a small jade bead. He took it into a hole in the foundation.”

The old janitor looked up with a grin. “Sometimes we have helpers.”

“So Professor Jiang was worried about the secrets of the Qian Long,” Shan ventured.

“The Qian Long had many reasons for secrets, many places he kept secrets during his last years.” He looked up toward the shelves. “It isn’t stealing what we do. These things don’t belong to us. But they also don’t belong to those others.”

“You mean the men from the museum.”

“That Ming. He would yell if we got too close to their work. They were just children he had working on the restorations, students who didn’t know what they were doing. I don’t think it ever occurred to him that we had keys, too, to clean the buildings at night.”

“They were not supposed to be working at the cottage that day,” Shan said. “But two men came anyway, with a key, a big Mongolian and a small man, a plasterman.”

“Jiang would go and just sit sometimes in the old cottage and read poetry, like a scholar in the old court. He said sometimes it felt like the emperor was listening. It is a big job, removing a fresco. They were probably waiting for some glue to dry so they were walking around the cottage. That’s when those two found him, asleep at a table in a back room. They beat him and kicked him, that big one and his small friend.”

The words brought a brittle silence.

“You must tell us about the emperor’s secrets,” Yao said.

The old professor looked into the flames again. “Near the end, he and the amban played a trick on the court.”

“They corresponded in Tibetan,” Shan suggested, and paused. “How did you know we are interested in the amban?” Shan asked.

“The amban lived in Tibet, the amban correspondence was the most important thing to the emperor in his last year of life. The disappearance of the amban was a tragedy from which the emperor never recovered. Letters about the amban get stolen. Now you arrive from Tibet. It is too big a coincidence, eh Jiang,” he called to the shadows.

Shan reached inside his shirt and pulled out the piece of old cloth, unrolled it, and produced the torn thangka. “We know about the amban’s treasure,” he said. “We know how the thangka was supposed to tell where it could be found.”

The professor emitted a long groan of excitement, his eyes bright as a child’s. “It’s the one, Jiang!” he whispered toward the darkness. “It is the one the emperor waited for, the one thing he ever wanted that he never received.” He gazed at the torn painting a long time, turning it over, examining the pair of handprints, turning it back to the front to hold the deity images close to his face.

“How do you know about it?” Yao asked.

“The Qian Long had several secret compartments. Safes. One was in the wall of the dining chamber with the fresco, several in the Tibetan altar room where he met with his lama teachers. Once, inside the altar, we found letters and secret plans showing the compartment in the wall, and a note saying the Qian Long had placed the torn thankga there, with several of the amban’s letters, but we had left them there in the wall, thinking they were safe, never dreaming what would happen.”