He paused, and then added, “The point has to be twofold: they pay negligible import duty on cargoes that are practically worthless, and then switch cargoes for goods that are both costly and restricted, meaning forbidden for export. If the goods are coveted by wealthy barbarians they must be making an incredible profit.”
He turned from the doors and we tiptoed toward the back of the room where there was another door, a large single one. As we drew closer we could hear voices, and Master Li gently shoved the door partially open. We were looking at an alchemy laboratory where vast numbers of vials and jars were stacked on worktables, along with burners and mortars and a great number of arcane instruments. Five people were visible.
One dominated the room, even though he was the softest-spoken. He was dressed in costly silks and gold-trimmed satin, and his rings and other jewelry could probably have ransomed a king or two. He was immensely fat, and moved with the peculiar dancer’s grace that some bulky people possess—probably half in the viewer’s imagination, because one expects ungainliness. The next three men obviously deferred to the fat man. Seldom have I seen more unpleasant people than those three, who seemed closer to the world of animals than to that of men. The leader was a man who looked exactly like a wild hog, and Hog I was to call him ever after. The second and third might have been brothers, sneaky, skulking, backstabbing brothers, and I dubbed them Hyena and Jackal.
The fourth man had clerk written all over him. He was on his knees with his hands tied behind him, and a brush was stuck in his topknot and ink stains marked his shabby tunic, and he quivered in terror as the fat man addressed him.
“My agents inform me that in a wineshop you mentioned that I was soon to leave on an important mission,” the fat one said softly, and I realized he had a tiny lisp that gave his voice a purring sound, like a cat.
“I said nothing about purpose or destination!” the clerk protested. “Your Excellency, I swear I—”
“My dear fellow, I don’t doubt it for a moment,” the fat one purred. “Why should you bother to tell what you could show?”
“Show? But I’ve shown nothing!” the clerk cried.
The fat man took a jeweled pillbox from a pocket and opened it. He extracted something I couldn’t make out at that distance and held it up for inspection.
“No? How odd that my agents should pick this up from where you foolishly left it, right on top of your table in that wineshop,” the fat man said.
Hog and Hyena and Jackal leaned forward, licking their lips, and I’ve seen prettier sights at feeding time in the imperial tiger pit.
“Your Excellency, I swear I forgot I had such a thing with me!” the clerk squealed. “It was only an accident, and I have been faithful and hardworking. I ask only the chance to redeem my moment of forgetful stupidity!”
“You shall have your chance, and it shall be more than a moment,” the fat man said in his cat-purr voice. “I grant you all eternity for redemption, unless Hell has other chores that take precedence.”
He hurled whatever he had taken from the pillbox into the clerk’s face and swiveled around and walked gracefully away and through one last door at the rear of the laboratory. The moment he turned the other three had moved forward, and the sounds of the door closing behind the fat man were drowned out by terrible screams. I don’t want to go into details. The three were precisely as animalistic as they looked—with the addition of human ingenuity—and they took their time killing the clerk. It was horrible. At the end they had a gory mess on the floor and they laughed about it as they went to a storeroom to get rags to mop up.
Before I knew what was happening Master Li had slipped through the door. He sidled on tiptoe through the mess so as to avoid prints, and pushed and poked through ghastly pieces of the late clerk, and finally came up with something that made him grunt in satisfaction. He turned and tiptoed back and rejoined us, and we silently shut the door and went back into the shipping room. Master Li whispered to us to find an open case and we split up and went through the rows of stacked boxes. From my end it was a futile endeavor. Every case I found was numbered, nailed tight, and sealed with wax symbols bearing customs stamps that certainly looked real to me. Meaning the wax had melted here and slopped over the imprint there, and been chipped and broken, and at times had been stamped in a totally inappropriate spot: real.
Master Li was doing a great deal of swearing under his breath, and when I passed the puppeteer he lifted his eyes heavenward and shrugged. Not one case was accessible, unless we wanted to leave calling cards in the form of broken seals, and finally we had to give up.
Coarse laughing voices were moving toward us. The door opened. Master Li winced and pointed, and Yen Shih and I followed the sage back toward the tunnel entrance, stooped low behind cases, moving like mice. Hog and Hyena and Jackal were too busy joking about the way the little clerk had screamed to notice. We could probably have walked out carrying a case, but Master Li didn’t want to deal with an alarm from a careful tally clerk and he signaled for us to keep going. We made it easily back into the tunnel, and then I sensed that Yen Shih was going to ask questions, so I put a hand on his arm and squeezed no-no-no. In the last light before darkness closed around us I had seen the old man’s wrinkles twist into tight circles on his face, and I knew he wanted silence for thought.
When we were far enough down the tunnel and I was tired of groping I lit a torch and the sage made no objection. In fact, he took it from me when we reached the place where the wall of an alcove had been chipped away and examined both the wall and the cracked fragments, swearing monotonously. Then he snapped out of his reverie and turned to the puppeteer.
“Well, Yen Shih, I got you into more than anyone bargained for,” he said. “At least you weren’t spotted.”
Yen Shih flashed that gorgeous, astonishing smile. “I enjoyed it,” he said openly and frankly. “Can you have them arrested?”
“I would tend to doubt it,” said Master Li. “That fat fellow who ordered the murder happens to be the second most powerful eunuch in the empire, commonly called Li the Cat. He holds ministerial rank. I’d need a warrant signed by the Son of Heaven, and by the time I got it the contraband would have vanished and the cave would be a Home for Hapless Orphans and the clerk’s dear old mother would swear her darling boy expired from typhoid fever at the age of four.”
He reached for wine and realized he’d finished it. “I need to nail them for the smuggling racket, not murder, and that won’t be easy. Because of this.” Master Li pulled out a tiny object and held it to the torchlight.
“A tea leaf?” Yen Shih said.
“Indeed yes, and it’s also a very bad tea leaf,” said Master Li. “Good tea is restricted, of course, so fortunes can be and are made smuggling it to barbarians, but this stuff can be shipped out by the ton. It’s ta-cha, the cheapest of all boheas, and on top of that it’s been damaged, probably by a flood. Tea like this is worth no more than ten cash a pound, yet this is what Li the Cat threw in the clerk’s face, and apparently it was so important that leaving the premises with a leaf of it in his possession cost the clerk his life. You figure it out.”
“No, thank you,” said Yen Shih. “I do, however, have a favor to ask.”
“If I can grant it, it’s yours,” Master Li said grandly.
“Consider that I now have a small stake in this affair, and command my services, night or day, when something comes up.” Small points of light flickered deep inside Yen Shih’s eyes, dancing and glowing, and again his sunrise smile belied the ruins of his face. “One gets bored,” said the puppeteer.
We got back to the island, where we left Yen Shih, who had unfinished business, and I rowed back to the city. Master Li still had things to do and wanted to waste no time. He had me rent a palanquin, and then we went to office after office of bureaucrat after bureaucrat, gathering a bit of information here and a trace of a rumor there, and it was long past sundown when we started home. I was starving, but Master Li had at least sated a different sort of hunger.