Читать книгу The Color of Jadeite - Eric D. Goodman - Страница 12

4

Forbidden Messages

When people call Chinatown “little China,” they’re right on the money. Standing in Tiananmen Square, at the heart of Beijing, I could feel the weight of being at the center of something huge. The enormous square of cement made a guy feel small—and made the local partner we were supposed to meet hard to find. I’d already been loitering around the square for two hours, looking into face after touristy face, and came up with nothing. Mackenzie and Salvador kept their distances, but they remained within view and ready to approach at my signal.

At least Tiananmen Square was an interesting spot to loiter, all of the enormous buildings with their Communist economy of style. But for every massive building or monument or portrait I spotted, I gazed into a dozen or so faces in the crowd and wondered, “Where the hell is this guy?”

After I accepted Charlie Wang’s assignment a couple days earlier, Gunmetal Mouth’s threesome escorted me, Mackenzie, and Salvador to a swanky hotel in Boston and took their own rooms in the same establishment—so they could drive us to the airport the next morning, they claimed, but we all knew it was so I didn’t have a change of heart about this Chinese puzzle box—and so that I didn’t take the money and run. Just a precaution, because what Wang probably knew well was that I didn’t take this job for the money or even for the challenge. I wanted to find Xuande’s jadeite tablet, to see it, to touch it. I’d forgotten how hungry I’d been in my youth.

Tiananmen Square is the world’s largest public square. As I strolled the huge pedestrian area, over and over again, I shuddered to think of the number of people who’d had their homes and ways of life brushed aside to make way for Mao’s massive vision. Not to mention some of the more recent bloody history here, like the student protests in 1989. In that way, Tiananmen Square is kind of like China’s Kent State tragedy. Only with tanks added since they like to do things big.

Now, under the smoggy Beijing sky of gray, Tiananmen Square seemed both marvel and monstrosity, bulging with tourists from abroad and from all over China. Americans and Europeans and Chinese people alike stopped for family photos and selfies in front of the Zhengyangmen arrow tower, Mao’s mausoleum, the National Museum of China, and—most of all—the gigantic portrait of Chairman Mao hanging on Tiananmen—the very Imperial gate to the Forbidden City where Mao proclaimed his People’s Republic of China as the official law of the land.

I saw Salvador motion to me from across the field of people, and knew someone was approaching from behind. I turned, and a woman attacked me. “Postcard? Chairman’s hat? Book? Five dollars.”

“No, thank you.” I brushed her aside, but she didn’t budge until I stopped saying no thanks and just ignored her. After about the tenth vendor, I learned to stop being polite. But I also understood their persistence. As much as I didn’t want to encourage their pushing junk on me, a few bucks from my expense account could mean a week’s worth of food for a poor family.

I may be a loner much of the time, but I was glad I’d convinced Salvador and Mackenzie to join me. I knew I could use some help. Salvador had more to risk, being on parole and not legally allowed to leave the country—but he was more than willing to tag along when I assured him I’d vouch for him if he got caught, and that he probably wouldn’t since we were flying on a rich man’s private jet and getting special treatment.

Mackenzie had been a little harder to convince. First, she used Harriet as an excuse, but I reminded her that Harriet wasn’t even going to be in town for a few weeks. Then she insisted that she had to pour herself into her work, but I knew better because when she was that swimming in cases she usually asked for my help to dig up some dirt. She was in one of her semi-annual “grab a stack of business cards and go to a party to look for clients” rut.

“I’ll have to find someone to watch Snoopy Doo,” she’d said.

“Your retired parents would love an excuse to stay at your place in Boston for a week or two,” I suggested.

When Mackenzie ran out of excuses, she relented.

So here we were in the center of China’s capital. We’d been strolling around Tiananmen Square for two hours past the designated meeting time, and I was just about to round up Mackenzie and Salvador and go back to the hotel to wait for Wang to contact us. But then, to my astonishment, I saw her. Again.

She was far enough away that, at first, with the field of people between me and her, I thought it was just another tourist in the crowd looking at me. After all, I was the weird one here, the foreigner, the freak, and this wasn’t the first time I was the object of someone’s fascination when visiting a foreign land. But when I focused, and I realized who it was, the dozens of people between her and me blurred, and I only saw her.

In the sunlight that burst through the smog, the young woman was as beautiful here as she’d been in Boston’s Chinatown. She was wrapped in a purple silk blouse and tight black skirt. Purple heels carried her in my direction, her black silky hair too heavy to bounce, snaking behind her like a New Year’s dragon. She clutched tightly at the purse strapped over her shoulder, as though she feared it being dropped or snatched. The closer she came my way, the more intently her stare bore into my face, the clearer it became that she was as focused on me as I was on her.

“Clive Allan?” she asked me as we stood face to face.

“Yes.” People rushed back and forth around us, along with their noise and friction.

“I’m Wei Wei. Wang told me to meet you here.”

“Wei Wei.” I extended my hand and she timidly took it, as though she feared what sort of foreign germs I might be harboring. I thought about offering to kiss her delicate hand, but that probably would have sent her running away as quickly as she’d come. “Nice to see you ... again.”

“The pleasure is mine.” She clutched her purse and looked around. “Watch your wallet. Pickpockets thrive in Tiananmen Square.”

“Worse than Boston?”

Wei Wei gave me an acknowledging glance. “Much worse.”

She looked a little too jittery. I asked her, “So, have you just been admiring me from afar?”

Wei Wei smirked, and I took in the curved pockets that formed at the edges of her thin pink lips. “Who’s admiring who?” she asked.

“You got me there,” I admitted. “You here to take me to my partner?”

When she frowned, the pockets disappeared at the edges of her mouth and lines formed in her delicate forehead. “Take you to your partner? I am your partner.”

“You’re the person I’m supposed to work with?” I let out an excited laugh that she may have taken as an insult. “I was expecting a seventy-year-old professor with a Confucius beard.”

“Don’t mistake age for wisdom.”

“What are you, twenty?”

She scowled disapprovingly. “Thirty-five, thank you very much.”

“Oh.” I stood back and gave her a quick twice-over. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, but the gal was irresistible. So what if she was young enough to be my daughter—I wanted to get to know her. “You’re … so … lovely.” I felt uncharacteristically foolish—maybe feeling like a teenager in love again was what made me talk like one.

“Don’t be fooled by appearances,” she said with a stern half-smile. “A delicate porcelain doll may conceal a fierce dragon inside.”

She was flirting now, so I gave myself the same liberty. “Sweetie, you’re way too tiny to be fierce.”

“Bamboo looks light and delicate. But it’s stronger than it appears. You’ll find I’m the same.”

I displayed a big sheepish smile. She delighted me and I let her know it. “All right, I’ll take your word for it, Ms. Bamboo.” Mackenzie, in the distance, caught my attention and threw me a confused look, like “what the hell are you doing?” I waved Mackenzie off and refocused on Wei Wei.

Wei Wei got down to business, leading the way as we strolled casually back into the center of the square, past the Monument to the People’s Heroes, toward Mao’s Mausoleum. “So, what is our first step together?” she asked as she quickened our pace.

I could think of a few, but I decided not to push our getting intimate just yet. We’d have time to get to know each other if we were going to be working together. I was still shaking off the euphoric feeling of being with her when I realized the deeper meaning of her question. “You’re asking me?”

Her look was more of shock than confusion. “You mean Wang didn’t give you instructions?”

I shook my head. “I thought you had the game plan.”

“This is going to be worse than I thought,” she mumbled. Her glossy lips played with the words as they fell out. “I know that the person who hid the tablet also hid clues with unrelated people and in unrelated places around China. But I don’t have an inkling where to start.”

“Then you know about as much as I do, honey.” I took her gently by the forearm to stop her quickening step. She was going nowhere fast. Her nerves needed calming and I needed answers. We both pivoted to face one another as though a rehearsed dance step. Now Mackenzie was in the distance behind me, Salvador staring at my front … and at Wei Wei’s backside. I frowned at him and looked Wei Wei in the eyes. “What do you know about this Dr. Wang guy?”

“Nothing much. He’s an agent for wealthy collectors of valuable arts and antiquities. A middle man between the finders and the buyers.”

“Sort of a treasure hunt matchmaker?”

Wei Wei nodded. “Wang told me to meet my American partner here to learn more.”

“And what have we learned, hon?”

She frowned. “Only that American men are as chauvinistic as Chinese men. I prefer Wei Wei to sweetie, honey, or hon.”

I smirked and took it in stride. “Noted, Wei Wei. If Wang didn’t tell either of us what to look for besides each other, then maybe the first clue is supposed to find us.”

I felt more like a tourist than a detective as we looked into the faces of the figures on Mao’s mausoleum, at the armed military guards marching in front of the Great Hall of the People and the National Museum of China. We stopped to rest in the square’s center, between the mausoleum and monument, Mao smiling down at us from his enormous portrait as though he knew all the answers to our questions.

“Do you even know what we’re looking for?” she asked.

“Sure. A jade tablet belonging to Emperor Xuande, fifth emperor of the Ming dynasty.”

She smiled. “At least you know something. The tablet dates to around 1430.”

“It’s old,” I agreed.

Wei Wei lowered one full black eyebrow and raised the other. “It’s old? I can see Wang found just the sleuth for the job.” Attack deployed, she rested into the nervous face I’d already grown accustomed to, looking around us. “The Ming dynasty ruled for almost 300 years, from the 1300s to the 1600s. It was a good time for Imperial China, a golden age. China enjoyed peace and prosperity, and that allowed scholars to focus their efforts on the arts, literature, poetry, architecture. Many Ming emperors enjoyed the arts and allowed them to flourish.”

I interjected, “But Xuande was a real pro, being an artist and poet himself.”

Wei Wei looked surprised that I knew this. “Yes. He was an accomplished artist and poet. Emperor Xuande could create—and appreciate—things of beauty. He was a good emperor.”

She’d set me up for a zinger. I said, “It’s amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness.” Her face contorted quizzically, so I explained. “It’s a Leo Tolstoy quote.”

I could tell she was getting ready to unleash a Chinese proverb on me, but then her face grew from playful to pained as her eyes darted from me to the distance behind me. Between Wei Wei and that obelisk were a hundred tourists ambling to and fro, taking photos and gawking at buildings and monuments, at Communist stars of red and gold and Imperial leftovers of green and yellow. But it only took me seconds to see exactly which one of the locals Wei Wei was stuck on. Once I spotted him, it was obvious—because he was fixed on her and closing the distance between them faster than you could say Tiananmen three times.

I placed my arm around her and swung her behind me, offering myself as a shield against this human missile. Seeing that she had protection, the guy slowed his pace and started to walk casually off path, passing us at a distance. I caught the gazes of Mackenzie and Salvador to put them on alert. I wasn’t about to let this guy go. After looking their way, I’d lost the stranger in the crowd—and then realized he’d maneuvered right behind us! He snatched Wei Wei’s purse and bolted.

“Hey, buddy,” I yelled in his direction. “Hey, Pengyou, I’m talking to you!”

“Don’t let him go!” Wei Wei darted after him faster than a woman in high heels should be able to run. I motioned for Salvador and Mackenzie to join the chase, and they plunged through the sea of people in our direction from two sides. Wei Wei was already tracks ahead of us. I quickened my pace. Between my low-heeled Eccos and high-paced stride, I was at Wei Wei’s side by the time we reached Mao’s enormous portrait on Tiananmen—the gate that separated modern Communist China from the ancient Imperial City of ages past.

Either the guards and ticket sellers didn’t notice or didn’t care; we managed to push our way through the crowds and through Meridian Gate without being stopped—Wei Wei, then me, followed by Mackenzie and Salvador.

The man we were after was subject to the same people-clots in the gate’s arteries, so when we escaped into the Forbidden City, we spotted him straight away. Stretched out before us was the heart and gem of Imperial China—the most magnificent and complex palace city in the world. It was here that emperors lived and ruled for 500 years, and here that the last emperor of China was seized as a boy. For centuries, the only people allowed to set foot in the Imperial City were the emperor, his family, his military leaders, and his eunuchs and concubines. Now, what was once thought to be the center of the universe had become one of Asia’s top tourist destinations.

“Hurry!” Wei Wei cried as our purse snatcher was racing over one of the five bridges crossing a stream. “We can’t let him out of sight!”

“He’s walled up in the palace grounds,” I said. “Where could he go?”

“Lots of places,” Wei Wei answered. “There’s a whole city in these walls.”

“And everything looks the same,” Salvador griped.

Not exactly, but the style was unmistakably period. Red and yellow, orange and green, wood and paint, golden dragons and phoenixes. Not to mention gold and gold and gold. As we chased the sprinter past the Chinese lion statues, through the Gate of Supreme Harmony, and into the main courtyard at the city’s center, I marveled that the Communists hadn’t dismantled this place for its wealth. But then, it probably meant more to them as a whole—historically and culturally—than the individual treasures within could add up to.

Wei Wei didn’t seem concerned that Mackenzie and Salvador were at our heels. Wang had probably let her know I was bringing sidekicks.

Instead of taking the stairs like all of the other good tourists, the thief darted right up the carved marble carriageway that spanned the center of the ramp, tromping over carvings of dragons chasing pearls in the clouds. This carriageway was for the emperor alone. Wei Wei and I tromped up after him—using the stairs—right to the Hall of Supreme Harmony. Mackenzie and Salvador followed up the center.

I half-expected our target to run right into that main hall, where the emperor used to receive guests and participate in ceremonies, but that would have been a dead end and a thousand tourists would be watching, so he opted for a less elaborate setting. On the stone doorstep of the main hall, he veered off to the left and passed behind the Hall of Supreme Harmony, past the smaller Hall of Middle Harmony, through the Hall of Preserving Harmony, and down another slab of marble.

A harmonious chase if I’d ever seen one.

The guy ran like he knew where he was going. Wei Wei knew the lay of the palace, so I let her take the lead—easy to do since I was winded. Salvador, a good bit younger, overtook me, too. We all darted through the Gate of Heavenly Purity and veered out of the Forbidden City’s main line, entering its Imperial Gardens.

The gardens offered better hiding places than the Forbidden City’s inner court—instead of wide-open courtyards and massive halls and gates, we now found ourselves in a labyrinth of cultivated trees, flowers, bushes, and temples. But Wei Wei didn’t let her eyes off the target, and we finally caught up with the worn-out petty thief at the Pavilion of a Thousand Autumns—feeling as though we’d been running for as many seasons ourselves.

Salvador overtook Wei Wei, and finally got close enough to knock the purse snatcher off-balance. The sweaty guy fell into the bushes between the pavilion and the naturally formed sculptures of river rocks. Wheezing like an asthmatic, on his back, he looked up at Salvador’s hulking frame with wide, fearful eyes. He began sputtering out words in Chinese that I couldn’t catch. Wei Wei hovered over him and spat some questions back. I hovered behind as her heavy number two, and Mackenzie huffed and puffed between me and Salvador. The four of us stood in a circle over the winded man, probably scaring him half to death.

Fortunately, our captive was more interested in spilling answers than blood. After chattering back and forth, the man in the bush looked a little less frightened and a little more confused.

Wei Wei said, “This is the guy who tried to steal my purse earlier today in Tiananmen Square, about an hour before I spotted you.”

“He almost got what he wanted,” Mackenzie said.

“No. When he went for my purse earlier today, I took him for a common thief. Goodness knows there are plenty of pickpockets and purse snatchers preying on unsuspecting tourists. But we aren’t dealing with a burglar.”

“Then what are we dealing with?” Salvador asked.

“An information thief.” Wei Wei glanced at me. “Looks like Wang’s got rivals, looking for the tablet. Just like us.”

Mackenzie looked confused. “The more the merrier.”

“Not always.” Wei Wei looked at Mackenzie and Salvador. “Who are our new friends?”

“Oh,” I said, figuring this was as good a time as any to make the introductions. I threw their names back and forth.

The pathetic man continued to huff with a worried face, sitting in the bushes below us. Wei Wei said, “This guy was here to intercept the message we were supposed to get. Apparently, Dr. Wang dispatched our first clue here, but this man got to it first. He didn’t know what to make of it and thought the answer may be in my purse.”

“Clue?” Mackenzie looked annoyed. “What is this, Scooby-Doo?”

“Yeah.” Salvador laughed. “Hey, gang, let’s split up and look for clues!”

I threw them the look an embarrassed parent might throw a child.

Wei Wei glanced at them, then at me. “I can assure you this is no joking matter. We must take each clue seriously if we’re to find the tablet.”

“I’m with you,” I agreed. “Did our pick pocket cough up the clue?”

Wei Wei sighed. “I have a bad feeling that what’s left of the message is just a shadow of the intended information.”

“The old game of telephone,” I said with a nod.

She looked at the man and clarified the information one more time, like she was learning a line of poetry for recital. She translated, “Take your first step where the last Ming took his last.”

I considered it. “The last of the Ming emperors died here in the Forbidden City, didn’t he?”

“That’s right,” Wei Wei said.

“Emperor Chongzhen,” I remembered. “He killed himself.”

“Not just himself,” Wei Wei said. “He also killed his daughter and concubines, anticipating an angry mob.”

“Great,” Salvador said. “So it’s here. Shouldn’t be too hard to find.”

“Except for one thing,” Wei Wei said. “There are 9,999 rooms here in the Forbidden City.”

I looked from Wei Wei to Mackenzie and Salvador and watched their spirits sink. Then Mackenzie looked at Salvador, cracked a smile, and repeated the one-liner. “Come on, gang, let’s split up and look for clues.”