Dragon Bones (41 page)

“Are you looking for your husband? We don’t have him in here this time, right, Mr. Hu?”

The man stirring the
congee
made a great play of scanning the dark recesses of the cave. “No
yang guizi
here.”

The five chortled, coughed, choked on their tea, spat on the ground. They thought it was all very funny; she thought that in this one regard Ma had been right. These men were vultures.

“Do you know when Dr. Ma will return from Hong Kong?” she inquired as pleasantly as possible.

“No time soon,” Li answered. “He said he went to buy back what Brian and Lily stole, but he’s probably down on Hollywood Road right now selling precious antiquities that should go to our museums. He calls us vultures. We say he is a shark!”

Hulan left them clucking at the loudmouth’s wickedness. She was unsure of what to do next. She wandered down the hill to the pit where Catherine Miller and Annabel Quinby labored. Hulan spent the next three hours scraping at the ground and making small talk as the rain cascaded down around them.

She did as instructed but kept most of her attention on the way Catherine and Annabel interacted. Annabel was more senior, but when Catherine uncovered a shard of pottery, their conversation seemed to be between equals. The piece turned out to be just a couple of centimeters in diameter, but the ancient artist’s design could still be read. Catherine told Hulan that these designs were one of the things that archaeologists and linguists looked for when trying to make the link between artistic patterns and the pictographs that composed the earliest archaic characters of what eventually became the Chinese written language.

This conversation reminded Hulan of something Stuart had said out at the dam site, and she brought it up now. “Your father told me that Brian found some pieces here with motifs that were different from those typically used by the Ba,” Hulan said. “What did he mean by that?”

“The Ba had very distinctive works of art,” Catherine explained. “They made weapons and common articles like pitchers and bowls that suggest a highly developed artistic, though warlike, culture. The Ba’s axes were of particular interest to Brian. They were made from jade or bronze, but they were similar in shape and style to the musical chimes found at Yellow River sites. This made Brian think that the Ba hadn’t developed their ax organically. He thought the shape had been transported—and its original use changed—from a musical instrument of the Yellow River peoples to a weapon.”

Annabel, who’d been listening to the exchange, looked up and added, “But how did that transformation happen, Inspector? Even today, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, we’re secluded within this gorge. So how did the Ba come to interact with the other more established cultures on the Yellow River? Why did the Ba need to be so warlike, and how did their artistry develop?”

“Your Four Mysteries,” Hulan said. As on her first day here, Hulan had picked up something sticky on her hands. It had to be some property in the soil. She thrust her hands out into the rain, rinsed them off, and wiped them on her pants.

“Two of them anyway,” Annabel responded. “Mystery One: How did the Three Gorges, which actually insulate through their geography, become a cultural watershed? And Mystery Three: What caused certain artistic styles to take hold here and continue for millennia? Brian was profoundly interested in those questions, which is why it’s all the more distressing that he chose to take artifacts from the site rather than let us study them in context.”

“What context, Annabel?” Catherine asked. “You know Brian’s pieces didn’t come from here.”

“You’re right as always, my dear,” the older woman admitted.

Hulan was thoroughly confused. “I thought you said that the ax Brian found
was
a Ba artifact.”

The two women looked at her as though she were an imbecile.

“Absolutely not! It looked like a Yellow River chime,” Catherine explained.

“The jade
bi
s weren’t Ba artifacts either,” Annabel added. “The Ba didn’t have an emperor in residence who would have needed to commune with Heaven.”

“Most important,” Catherine picked up, “this is a subsurface site. Now consider the
ruyi.
How long do you think a dried mushroom would last under the soil before it deteriorated?”

Lunch under the large canopy—which had been moved yet again up the hillside—came as a reprieve. The meal was much the same as on the first day—rice, noodles, and a chicken dish. The conversation also bore a striking resemblance to the one Hulan and David had heard that day. As she had back then, Hulan tried to listen for anything that would help her solve the murders of Brian and Lily. But she didn’t see what that could be as the five vultures babbled on to Michael Quon about the patriotic benefits of the dam, a sentiment Catherine tried to shoot down by pointing out that the Chinese already had the Great Wall. Despite his obvious glee at being addressed by the beautiful foreigner, Li Guo felt compelled to correct her: “The Great Wall has always been a bad symbol. Since the days of the evil Qinshihuangdi, it has been a concrete example of our foreign policy—keep outsiders out.”

Dr. Quinby agreed, adding, “It has also symbolized China’s inability to compromise, its isolation from the outside world, and its assertion of superiority.”

“But, Annabel, you can’t believe that the dam is a good replacement.” This came from old Dr. Strong.

“Ancient China has been my vocation and my avocation,” she admitted, “but I would willingly sacrifice a few relics to change world perceptions.”

The other archaeologists nearly fell off their benches. “You can’t mean it, Doctor,” the professor from Heidelberg blustered, reeling from the betrayal of her words.

“I expect more from
you,
Professor Schmidt!” Annabel retorted. “Your treatise on the symbolism of the Great Wall is still the academic standard.”

Zai had sent Hulan here in part for her ability to see through political code, and she felt something trying to come together in her mind, but her speculations were disturbed when she sensed Li Guo’s dark eyes boring into her. “For the future,” he said, “we will have the dam to remind us of the Confucian ideal of a sage emperor who serves the people.”

Yes, that helped. She almost had it….

“You forget one thing.” It was the first time Michael had spoken, and it completely disrupted Hulan’s train of thought. “The dam, too, is a false symbol. You mustn’t be deceived into thinking that your government isn’t using it for its own corrupt ends. You block the river, you destroy your history and your heritage.”

“You’re a foreigner,” the vulture said to the Chinese American. “You don’t know our country.”

Michael held up his hands in the universal sign of surrender. “I’m only saying that an edifice can’t represent a country’s soul.”

“Matters of soul are a privilege, Dr. Quon,” Li Guo retorted, but his eyes still hadn’t left Hulan’s. “China needs to think about global identity. Brian understood this.”

Catherine brought them all back to safer territory by asking if anyone had been able to phone out, which led to a discussion of the weather and how it would affect their work, which led to the Four Mysteries, which led back to the dam, which would eventually circle back to a discussion of nationalism. No wonder Brian had taken to eating his lunch elsewhere.

As the group slowly broke up and the teams returned to their pits, Hulan decided to retrace Brian’s final movements one more time. Just as she reached the upper path, she spotted Angela, protected by a plastic poncho, kneeling in the mud near a cluster of dead bushes with her backpack at her side.

Angela looked up, and Hulan saw something in the young American’s face she hadn’t seen before. Suspicion or caution, Hulan couldn’t tell which. But before either of them could speak, Michael Quon’s voice came floating over Hulan’s left shoulder. “She’s looking for mushrooms,” he said. “She’s been doing that since she got here. Find anything interesting?”

“These are golden mushrooms,” Angela answered, her voice oddly flat. “They popped up last night.”

“Are you going to give them to the chef tonight?” Michael inquired lightly. “Maybe he could sauté them with butter and garlic.”

“These aren’t for eating.”

“Poisonous, then?”

Angela didn’t bother to respond.

“Aren’t mushrooms usually found in shady areas?” Hulan asked.

“This once was a shady area,” Angela answered, then gestured to the skeletal remains of the nearby bushes. “Something killed the trees and this shrubbery.”

“Too bad those mushrooms aren’t
lingzhi,
” Michael went on. “You would have struck gold.”

Angela’s face reddened. To cover the emotion, she bent her head back down to stare at the little cluster that had surfaced near the trunk of one of the dead bushes. When she didn’t look up again, Michael looked at Hulan and shrugged.

Hulan headed east along the path. Michael followed, although she hadn’t invited him. In fact, she’d wanted time alone to think about what Li Guo had said. She was sure he’d been trying to send her a message. But Michael didn’t ask permission to accompany her, and she didn’t send him away. As he’d shown yesterday, he wasn’t a bad companion. His stride was steady and surefooted. He kept quiet even when they passed the little shack that belonged to the Wu family. The door was closed, but they could hear the baby crying inside.

They crossed over the trail that led down to the cave where the All-Patriotic Society held its meetings. A short way beyond this was another path. Hulan had already explored the main route to Brian’s refuge with David and Dr. Ma the other day, so she dipped down onto this new path, hoping it might give her a different perspective. Soon enough she could see the cove where Brian’s things had been found, though she wondered how much of the beach would be left there given the rising waters. Still, she wanted a closer look and edged down farther.

Michael was right behind her when she heard the Wu infant’s cries again. They sounded as though they came from below her, which meant that there had to be some kind of acoustical anomaly caused by the cliffs around them. She went down another five vertical meters and came to the entrance to a cave. The baby’s cries seemed to emanate from deep within. Hulan ducked inside, pulling her umbrella shut.

“Do you hear that?” she asked.

Michael nodded. “The mother must have taken the baby out, then gone into some other part of the cave.” He listened, then added, “I can remember my mom and dad piling us in the back of the car when my little brother wouldn’t sleep. This woman doesn’t have a car. Maybe walking the kid helps.”

Hulan took a couple of steps farther into the cave and called hello. The sound disappeared into the blackness. The baby continued to cry.

Michael reached into his knapsack and pulled out a flashlight. “I’ve been in here before. Want to take a look?”

To know the killer you had to know the victim, and Brian had spent his lunches and his weekends exploring caves.

“I’ll follow you,” she said.

They hadn’t gone far before the temperature began to drop. The umbrella had kept Hulan’s top half relatively dry, but her legs and feet were wet, so she chilled quickly. Otherwise, this cave was much like the one that she and David had been in the other night, except that there seemed to be many more side tunnels that led in different directions. Hulan and Michael went another fifteen meters past several turns and bends until they reached a room about four by four meters.

“Here’s where you have some choices,” he said. “This shaft used to let out down by the river.” He pointed the flashlight into a narrow opening that looked more like a well than a tunnel. “But now that the river’s risen, it’s running through the lower caverns. Hear it?”

She could. That passage could very well have led to the cave where she and David had talked with Ma on that first day. Now that she heard the water, she focused more clearly on the smell, which was not so much the muskiness of damp soil but something deeper and more primitive, as though the cave were alive.

“Caves
are
alive,” Michael explained, “and filled with organisms similar to those found on the ocean floor.” He swung the flashlight’s beam to another area. “This shaft also goes down, but it narrows into a crawl space very quickly. We’d need some other gear to go that way—headlamps, jeans, and maybe kneepads for you.” He arced the beam to the back of the room. “Or we can continue on. There are other caverns to explore, none of which are that difficult. There’s a hollow ahead with some spectacular formations.”

By now Hulan was very cold, and she was feeling the weight of the mountain all around her. The baby’s cries still echoed through the cave, and she wondered why his mother hadn’t done something to sooth him.

“Did you come here with Brian?” she asked. Her voice reverberated off the walls, and she felt increasingly claustrophobic.

“Once. But Brian preferred to cave alone.”

“I would have thought you’d follow the buddy system, just like swimming.”

“I do when it’s really challenging, but Brian and I didn’t consider this cave to be all that rigorous.” He scrutinized her, read her discomfort, then said, “I think we should go.”

He took a step toward her, and she watched in horrified fascination as he purposely stumbled on a rock and let the flashlight fall from his hand. The flashlight clattered to the floor of the cave and went dead, thrusting them into pitch black.

Hulan stood completely still, waiting for her eyes to adjust. They didn’t. There was nothing to adjust to. Cold fear held her in place. Was Michael Quon the killer? If he was, then she had foolishly walked into his trap. She heard nothing. After all the crying, the baby finally went quiet. Hulan held her breath, listening. She could hear Michael breathing nearby.

“Don’t move,” he ordered. There was absolutely nothing threatening in his tone.

She heard his shoe edge out across the floor. She felt his hand on her arm. He pulled her to him and wrapped his arms around her.

“Don’t be frightened,” he whispered in her ear. His heart beat steadily against her fluttering one. Her body felt how gentle he was, and her heart began to slow to match his rhythm.