Murder on the Silk Road (10 page)

Although Larry had offered to pick them up, Bert and Dogie had declined his offer, preferring their introduction to the terrain to be on foot, and the rest of the party had gone along with them. The camp was only a mile and a half away. After crossing over the bridge spanning the stream, which was only a trickle at this time of year, and passing through the poplar grove lining the banks, they joined the main road, which they followed north for about a hundred feet before turning off on the rutted track leading out to Larry’s camp. The turnoff was marked by the twisted corpse of a dead donkey, a lesson on the hardship of the desert. Its skin had mummified in the dry desert air.

Though it was hot, the going was easy and it took them only about ten minutes to climb the series of terraces that led upward from the road to the spot where the pair of tall stupas framed the Cave of Unequaled Height. Though they looked small from the road, the stupas were actually twelve or fifteen feet high—multistoried pagodas in miniature. Unlike the stupas lining the stream bed, these weren’t reliquary stupas, but rather a kind of good luck monument for travelers, Marsha explained. From the stupas, it was another seven- or eight-minute walk across fairly level ground to the base of the foothills.

Unlike the deserts of the Southwest with which Charlotte was familiar from the mercifully few Westerns in which she had appeared, this one was devoid of vegetation: no saguaro, no barrel cactus, no sagebrush—only the occasional patch of a scrubby bush called camel thorn. Nor was the ground dusty, but rather a gravel that crunched beneath, your feet. It was a little like walking across a huge sheet of coarse sandpaper. The only signs of wildlife were the big black birds that hung in the air over the foothills, and the terns that skittered across the sand like sandpipers on a New England beach. Bert and Dogie took the lead, followed by Orecchio, Peng, and Lisa. Charlotte and Marsha brought up the rear. The paleontologists all walked the same way—slowly, with their torsos bent over, their eyes glued to the ground, and their heads swiveling from side to side, as if they were looking for a lost wallet. Occasionally they would squat down to look at something on the ground, and then get up and move on again. “The paleontology stoop,” Lisa called it.

At the foothills, the terrain abruptly became steeper and rockier, and the color of the ground changed from gray-yellow to the rusty red flecked with glittering minerals that produced the illusion in the last rays of the setting sun that the mountain ridge was bathed in flames.

It was here that Dogie made his first find. He had wandered off the track to investigate a little knoll off to one side.

“
Pijiu!
” he yelled as he bent over one side of the knoll, the word “beer” being the agreed-upon signal for a fossil find.

“Looks like Dogie’s sniffed out a bone again,” said Bert as they rushed over to see what he had discovered.

Dogie was squatting at the side of the knoll, brushing the dust off a hollow-eyed skull, about a foot long, with a parrotlike beak. It was resting on a little pinnacle of sandstone, as if nature had neatly presented it to them as a gift.

“Now ain’t that a purty sight,” said Dogie, tilting back his Stetson to wipe his temple with his forearm. “An intact
Protoceratops
skull.” With a flourish, he gave the skull a loving caress with his camel’s-hair brush. “Just a settin’ there, as plain as can be.”

“I assume
Protoceratops
is a dinosaur,” said Marsha.

“Yep,” said Dogie. “
Protoceratops andrewsi
. Named after Roy Chapman Andrews, who found dozens of ’em in Mongolia. A horned dinosaur from the late Cretaceous. Not a big deal, but it’s a good sign.” He looked up at Orecchio. “How’s that for a postage stamp, Gino?”

Orecchio scowled, his heavy black brows drawing together in annoyance.

Squatting down next to Dogie, Bert removed a knife from the holster on his belt, and scraped some encrusted sand from the jaw. “Flag it, Dogie, and we’ll look for the rest later on,” he said.

“Aye, aye, boss,” said Dogie, with a salute.

Once Dogie had marked the site, they continued on. Another hundred feet or so up the mountain, the jeep track turned to the north. Ahead, the faint tracing of a footpath that must once have been used by pilgrims wound upward toward the reliquary stupa near the top of the ridge.

They paused here to rest. Bert removed a leather canteen from his pack and passed it around. As they drank, they looked out at Larry’s camp, which was situated on a small plateau at the edge of a ravine. Though it was probably a hundred yards away, the clear morning air made it look much closer.

“My, my,” said Dogie, who was studying the camp through a pair of binoculars. “Look who we’ve got here.” He handed the binoculars to Bert, and pointed toward the camp. “Beyond Larry’s camp. On the other side of the ridge and a little ways up. It looks like he’s by himself.”

Bert raised the binoculars to his eyes. “Bouchard!” he muttered. “Damn! I wonder how long he’s been here.”

“What is it?” asked Marsha, who sat on a rock next to Bert.

“There’s a second camp,” said Bert, handing her the glasses. “On the other side of the ravine.” He pointed. “Hidden behind the ridge.”

Marsha took a look and passed the binoculars to Charlotte, who could just make out the blue top of a small domed tent. Above the tent flew the red, white, and blue flag of France.

“It belongs to Jean-Jacques Bouchard. A French paleontologist.”

“Larry must be madder than a wet hen,” said Dogie.

“Why?” asked Charlotte.

“Bouchard’s a parasite,” Bert explained. “If this were the Gold Rush—which it is in a way, it’s just a different kind of gold—you’d call him a claim jumper. He waits for another prospector to strike it rich, and then he moves in and starts picking out the choicest nuggets.”

It was like lobstering, thought Charlotte. Woe betide the lobsterman who ventured to trespass on another’s lobstering territory.

“That’s the way the guy
has
to operate,” said Dogie. “He couldn’t find a fossil himself if he tripped over it. Now, scorpions are another story.”

“Scorpions?” said Charlotte.

“Yeah, he’s one of the world’s reigning experts. A little interest that he picked up in the field. It just so happens that scorpions and dinosaur fossils occupy the same kind of territory.”

“I wouldn’t even mind him poaching on our territory,” said Bert. “I feel a little sorry for the guy—there’s something pretty pathetic about a fossil hunter who can’t find fossil—except that he’s such a bad scientist.”

“In what way?” asked Charlotte. She was getting a small lesson in the sociology of dinosaur fossil hunting.

“A hundred years of progress in field technique, and he still behaves like a nineteenth-century fossil hunter out picking up specimens on a Sunday afternoon excursion,” Bert explained. “In my mind, his most egregious sin—and he has many of them—is that he doesn’t mark the place that he finds a bone.”

“Meaning that you can’t go back and find the rest of the skeleton?”

“Exactly. Or that you can’t study the ground the fossil came from. He’s a chronic violator of the first law of fossil collecting, which is ‘If you’re not going to mark the location, don’t collect the fossil.’ A fossil without a location is useless; you might as well throw it away.”

“That is not his most egree—whatever—sin,” said Dogie.

“What is?” asked Marsha.

“Destroyin’ fossils. Rumor has it that he smashed the remainin’ fossils at a site in Tanzania after he had picked out the best ones for himself,” he said. “So a rival paleontologist wouldn’t find them.”

“We don’t know for sure that he did that,” said Bert.

Dogie made a face at Bert, mocking his goody-goody attitude.

“But aren’t you all part of the same expedition?” asked Marsha.

“Yes. But we each have our territories, just like you and Victor divide up the manuscripts between the religious texts and the secular ones.”

“I see,” said Marsha. “And that ridge is the DMZ.”

“You’ve got it. Larry tried to get Bouchard excluded from this expedition,” he continued, with a sidelong glance at Peng, who stood a short distance away, out of earshot. “He wrote a letter to Peng describing some of Bouchard’s more memorable stunts, and suggesting that he was an incompetent scientist.”

“Needless to say, Bouchard wasn’t too happy about it,” added Dogie.

“But he’s here,” observed Marsha.

“Politics,” said Dogie disgustedly.

Charlotte sat on a rock, sipping from Bert’s canteen and studying Larry’s camp. It looked more like a movie set. She had seen similar camps erected for indulgent directors in locations which, if they weren’t quite as remote as this, were close to it. But that was the power of the studio, not a university.

“Yale must have a lot of money,” she said, nodding at the camp as she passed the canteen over to Lisa.

“Not Yale,” said Lisa. “Larry’s family. He’s one of
the
Fiskes. He uses his trust fund to fulfill his fantasies of the explorer’s life. Hey, I’d do the same if I had the dough. Bert told you how Bouchard finds fossils; now let me tell you how Larry finds fossils. Or rather,
procures
fossils.”

“How does he procure fossils?” prompted Charlotte.

“Not like Dogie—with his head’ swiveling from side to side like a mechanical doll and his body bent over in the paleontology stoop,” Lisa said.

Dogie stuck his tongue out at her.

“Larry’s technique involves the liberal distribution of cold, hard cash. His typical M.O. is to go to the market in whatever area it is in which he’s looking for fossils, and put out the word that he’s looking for old bones and that he’ll pay cash for them. Then, he sits around and drinks tea for a couple of days and waits.” She paused to take a long swig of water from the canteen. “Then, when somebody brings him some interesting-looking bones—which somebody invariably does—he asks them to lead him to the spot where they found them, and bingo, he’s made a find. No sweat, no aching back, no sore feet.”

“I think it’s dishonest,” said Dogie, with a good-natured grin.

“You’re just jealous,” teased Lisa.

“But he didn’t do that here, did he?” asked Charlotte. “From what Peng said, you expected to find fossils here.”

“Yes,” replied Lisa. “But we didn’t know exactly where.” She waved an arm at the tortured landscape surrounding them. “He managed to find the fossil-bearing rock pretty fast. I’ll bet you twenty to one that a week ago you could have found him in the Dunhuang bazaar passing out the yuan.”

“Judging from what he said last night, his technique must have paid off,” said Charlotte.

“We’ll soon see,” said Orecchio with a hint of skepticism.

A few minutes later they had reached the camp. The working area was a large tent whose sides had been rolled up to let in the breeze. There were three large tables and a mahogany camp desk, of the type from which Napolean might have commanded the troops at Waterloo. Behind the desk was a leather swivel chair. A bar tray held an assortment of fine liquors.

“How did he get all of this stuff out here?” asked Charlotte.

“Has it shipped,” replied Lisa, flopping down in the swivel chair. “There’s nothing that you can’t accomplish if you have enough dough,” she said as she spun herself around in the chair. “He had this same stuff in Tanzania, in Chile, in India. All the comforts of Abercrombie and Fitch.”

Bert and Dogie wandered over to investigate some dinosaur bones that were spread out on the tables. There weren’t many, but Larry had only been here a short time. Orecchio and Peng took seats in a pair of burgundy leather armchairs that were placed on an Oriental carpet in one corner of the tent.

“I wonder where everybody is?” asked Lisa.

“We’re early,” said Orecchio, checking his watch. “It’s still only ten of. He’ll probably be here any minute.”

Standing at the side of the tent, Charlotte looked out at the campsite. In the middle was an old well sheltered by a stone hut. Arrayed around the well were other tents that served as kitchen, sleeping quarters, storeroom, and so on. A white Toyota Land Cruiser was parked at the center near the well.

As she was standing there, Charlotte suddenly became aware of a faint noise coming from the vicinity of a small tent set some distance away from the others, which from its position overlooking the valley she assumed to be Larry’s. It sounded like the high-pitched beep of a household smoke alarm. Nearby was a tiny tent whose size and shape identified it as the latrine.

Using nature’s call as an excuse, she set off down the hill to investigate where the noise was coming from.

As she approached the tent that she thought was Larry’s, the beeping grew louder. On the other side, she suddenly came upon an elegant little tableau. A small table covered with a linen tablecloth held a silver tray with a crystal decanter of brandy and a brandy snifter. Next to the table were a canvas chair and a camp stove on which stood a pot of espresso. Finally, there was a telescope mounted on a stand for gazing at the desert sky.
There’s nothing like a brandy and a cigar under the desert stars
, Bert had said as he reminisced about past digs with Larry.

But, it suddenly struck her, it was now almost ten o’clock. The tableau should have included coffee and croissants, not brandy and a telescope. All at once, she had a sense that something was very wrong. Bert had said that Larry had a cook and several retainers. Where were they? Then she noticed that some papers which must have come from one of the tables in the work tent had blown away and were scattered all over the campsite. If the retainers had been here, they should have picked them up. Also, an animal of some kind had gotten into the garbage.

The camp looked deserted, not just empty.

And why were the flaps of Larry’s tent drawn? In this heat, it must have been stifling inside. The flaps of the other tents were all rolled up.

“Hello,” she said, drawing closer. The beeping was coming from inside. No one answered. After a minute, she repeated herself. “Hello,” she said again, this time a little louder. “Mr. Fiske?” Still no answer. Hesitantly, she opened the tent flap a crack. But it was too dark inside to see. Finally she drew it all the way back. The first thing she noticed was the white veil of a mosquito net draped over the cot. A necessity, she thought, as she waved away the mosquitoes that whined annoyingly around her head. As her eyes adjusted to the dimness, she realized that she wasn’t alone: a man was lying face-up on the cot under the mosquito netting. Moving closer, she took in his elegant silk paisley pajamas, like those the movie stars of her era used to wear for lounging around their elegant on-screen apartments. Then her horrified eyes unwillingly registered the rest: the man was Larry, and he was dead. His mouth was open and his face was contorted in a gruesome expression, like those of the gargoyles that adorned the roof ridges of Chinese temples. He must have been stabbed in the chest. The gold silk of his pajama top had a dark red bloodstain in the center. The smell of the fresh blood was metallic, like the end of a freshly sheared copper pipe.