I didn’t have a clue who the hapless young man in the alley was. Of his demise I was certain. He was not going to spend the night in a hospital and then be sent home. His throat had been slit. His heart would have stopped in seconds. Could it have been a random robbery that ended in murder? I didn’t think so. He had looked to me as if he knew very well who was around the corner in that alley, and he’d chosen to come to me. This was quite possible because, of the two, I was clearly the lesser evil, and he probably thought he’d be able to push me out of the way easily enough, which I suppose he could have. He just never got the chance. The other horrible thought was that if I hadn’t been there, standing in one entrance to that alley, he might have gotten away from the motorcycles by retracing his steps and blending into the crowds of a main street. I had stood in his way, slowing him down long enough to doom him.
I had not seen enough of him in the Baxian Gong to clearly identify him with real assurance as the man in New York who had looked to be interested in bidding, nor as the person who had stolen the box in Beijing, just as I didn’t know if the package he held contained the silver box. I did not let this lack of clarity stop me from leaping to conclusions. He was Mr. Knockoff, and the fact that he’d wanted the box, maybe enough to steal it, pointed once again to this entire situation being about the silver box. If that was true, then two people had died for it.
Another big question mark was the identity of the man in black, the smirking army officer. Who was he, and what if anything did he have to do with this? How had Burton known him? Burton apparently knew him well enough to know where he lived. He’d gone to a house in the Beijing hutong neighborhood and, lo and behold, there the man in black was. Did Burton have an appointment? Did he go to confront the fellow about the box? Had the man in black told him something that had sent Burton on a hasty and fatal trip to Xi’an?
I was more and more convinced, again with no real facts to back me up, that the man in black had been blocking the view of the box in the auction house. If I was right, then he too was tied to the silver box. Dr. Xie had told me not to try to find out who the man in black was, but surely I didn’t have much choice now. Someone had told Burton who the man was, and presumably it had been someone in the room when the box was snatched or, I suppose, when the videotape was shown, which would add three police officers. The police seemed unlikely, so that left Dr. Xie, Mira, Ruby, David, or the hapless employee of Cherished Treasures House, who had looked guilty all right, but surely for dereliction of duty and not theft. He had been devastated at losing his job. Dr. Xie had said he didn’t know who the man in black was. Maybe he didn’t, maybe he did. Maybe he was simply trying to protect me when he said he didn’t know.
After almost an hour of pondering all this, one ear cocked toward the hall outside my room, my heart leaping into my throat every time a door opened or closed, I had a “Don’t Know” list that covered the entire column and then some. The “Know” side of the ledger was distressingly short, only one entry in fact: a number of people associated with this silver box were dead.
Along with that came the unwelcome conclusion that I too was now inescapably linked to the silver box. It was not a pleasant thought. Here I was in a country where I didn’t speak the language, didn’t understand anything that was going on around me, and therefore didn’t stand a chance of getting out of the place in one piece unless I thought of something fast. Where to start? Given the hour and the fact that I was afraid to leave my hotel room, it had to be something I had with me. That was the file on the silver box that I had put together an eternity before. I had made a copy of the photograph of the box in the Molesworth Cox catalog, and had several photographs that Dory had given me of the silver box George had purchased some time previously. I had also kept the translation of the box up for auction that Justin at Molesworth Cox had given me at the preview in New York, and I had gone to both New York and Beijing with a translation of the box already in Dory’s possession.
I had not paid any real attention to the file, because I hadn’t needed to. Dory was certain the box on offer at Molesworth Cox was authentic, and once I’d taken a good look at it myself and chuckled at the recipe for the elixir of immortality, I’d shoved the pages into the file. Now I needed to revisit the file.
I got out a small magnifying device I always carry with me in case I need to examine some antique or another closely, and looked carefully at the photographs of the two boxes. George Matthews’s box was lovely. On the sides and the top were a group of women musicians in a gazebo. They were all beautifully dressed, and their instruments were quite discernable—a lute, a flute, chimes of some sort, and so on. The workmanship was very fine. The smaller box showed a woman in a garden talking to another woman while a line of women waited. Once again, they were all well dressed.
It was very clear these went together. The rounded tops of the boxes were the same, both in shape but also in what was depicted on them, unlike the sides of the boxes, on which the scenes were different. I had at first seen only the bird on the lids, a crane, but when I looked more closely, I realized there was another scene, or perhaps more accurately, three of them, one on top of the other. At the bottom was a Woman who looked to be laid out in a tomb of some sort, or perhaps she was sleeping. In the middle there was a woman seated in a pavilion while other women stood in line in front of her, and at the top, yet another woman floated above the rest of them, hovering over a mountain. The woman in each scene wore an identical robe, and could quite possibly be the same person. Woven into the design were flowers, possibly chrysanthemums, but more likely roses or peonies. What was also very interesting to me was that fact that it was quite possible these boxes had been done by different artists, even if they depicted the same thing, or at least something similar. There were variations in the strokes, tiny deviations really, but discernible nonetheless. I’d want to see the originals again and examine them closely, but I thought I was right. I wondered why there would be two artists working on these boxes if they were meant to fit together.
I decided that these three vignettes were of the same woman, in life in the middle, dead at the bottom, and floating above us all, as an Immortal at the top. Justin at Molesworth Cox had said the box belonged to someone named Lingfei, a person of some importance in the court of Illustrious August. Could I safely assume that the woman on the box was Lingfei? I hadn’t given much thought as to the gender of Lingfei before this moment. I’m not really familiar with Chinese names, so that hadn’t been a clue, but there wasn’t a single man depicted on either box that I could see. It wasn’t absolutely conclusive, but from now on, Lingfei, at least in my mind, was a woman.
Next, I read the translation carefully. There was the recipe for the elixir of immortality and instructions for its preparation as I already knew. A more thorough reading of the translation of the text convinced me that someone had cared very much for Lingfei and was perhaps drawing some consolation from the thought that she wasn’t really dead. This conclusion seemed to rest on the fact that her body had not been found, which is to say that she was one of the lucky ones who had made the leap to immortality. I wasn’t prepared to accept these immortal leaps, so what, I wondered, had happened to her body? Had it been stolen along with treasures that had been buried with her? Or had her body not really been buried where the author of the text thought it had? The text did, however, make it pretty clear there was a tomb somewhere with, if not Lingfei’s body in it, then something else.