“The day of the workshop fire,” the boy said, “you told me I could come and claim my money when I found my friend, the cripple who saw what happened.”
“You’ve come late, boy. The case has already been solved.”
“But you promised, sir! If I brought the other boy you said you’d pay me the rest of the reward.”
Cí considered the child; he looked genuinely hard up. Cí took out his purse, but he didn’t take out any money yet.
“Fine. What did your friend see?”
“Come on, then,” the younger boy said to the cripple, “tell him!”
“There were three people,” said the cripple. “One was telling the other two what to do. They never saw me because I was hidden behind some crates, but I could see and hear everything. The one in charge waited outside while the others searched for something inside the building. Then they poured oil everywhere and set the place on fire.”
“Right,” said Cí, not entirely convinced. “And do you think you’d be able to recognize them if you saw them again?”
“I think so, sir. One of the men was called Feng. The other one looked like a Mongol.”
Cí was startled. He came closer to the cripple and knelt down.
“And the third man?”
“It wasn’t a man! The person telling them what to do was a woman.”
“What do you mean, a woman? What woman?” Cí shook the cripple.
“I don’t know! All I saw was that she looked sort of clumsy, and she was leaning on a strange stick. The stick was like…” Suddenly the cripple fell quiet.
“Like what? Damn it, speak!”
“The stick was exactly like yours,” said the cripple.
Cí locked himself in his room for three days and wouldn’t eat or allow the doctors in to look at his wounds. Time seemed to fall away as he agonized over whether Blue Iris could truly be as culpable as the facts suggested, if Feng really had been nothing but a puppet in her quest for revenge, or if she might have had wholly different motives. Cí also tried to come up with a reason why she would have betrayed Feng to save him.
In the evening of the third day, Bo came to see him. There was no news of Blue Iris, but Bo said Cí should consider himself fortunate. In fact, when the emperor offered immunity and a comfortable exile, he’d already decided to have Cí executed, false confession or no. Feng’s suicide had saved him. Bo also reported that the Being of Wisdom from Jianningfu Prefecture had been arrested on charges of embezzlement and corruption. Cí thanked Bo, but none of this information alleviated the bitterness he was feeling.
On the fourth day he decided to put his lamenting behind him and get up. He’d come to Lin’an with a plan, after all, and what he needed to do was start working again to achieve it. His mind was still sharp and ready to be applied to his studies. He headed to the library, where his peers would be.
That afternoon he bumped into Ming, who had improved considerably. Cí was gratified to see him walking again, just as Ming appeared pleased to see Cí once more surrounded by books.
“Studying again?” he said.
“Yes. I have a lot of work ahead.” He held up the bright red treatise on forensics he’d begun compiling.
Ming smiled. “Bo came by,” he said, taking a seat next to Cí. “He brought me up to date on the investigation. It seems that the fortune-teller will be executed, and he told me about Blue Iris’s disappearance, and about what happened with you and Feng in the dungeon. He also mentioned that the emperor has reneged on his offer of a place for you in the judiciary.”
Cí nodded.
“But at least he hasn’t said anything to stop me from taking the exams, and that’s still all that matters to me.”
“Mmm…” said Ming, not seeming convinced. “But it won’t be easy. There are still two years until the next round of exams. I’m not even sure you need to carry on as a student. Your forensic knowledge is exceptional. If you want, I could get you a professorship. You wouldn’t have to struggle so hard.”
The look Cí gave Ming was full of determination.
“I appreciate it, sir, but I just want to study. All I want is to pass those exams. I owe it to myself, I owe it to my family, and I owe it to you.”
Ming smiled, nodding. He got up to leave, but hesitated.
“One last thing that’s been troubling me, Cí. Why did you reject the emperor’s offer when it was still on the table? Bo told me that Ningzong said he’d give you everything you could possibly desire: a generous stipend, your reputation to be restored in the future, maybe a place in the judiciary. Why didn’t you accept?”
Cí looked warmly at his old master.
“Blue Iris once said to me that Feng knew of countless ways to kill a man. And maybe that was true. And maybe there are infinite ways to die. But the one thing I know for certain is that there is only one way to live.”
AUTHOR’S NOTE
I can still remember the day when, coffee in one hand, bundle of papers in the other, I sat down in my office to begin work on my new novel. At that point only two things were clear to me: first, that the plot had to move readers as much as it moved me; second, that until I found my theme, I could not begin.
I have to confess that I spent more than two months marking up dozens of pages. I was in search of a vibrant, captivating story, but in all my scribbling I only managed to come up with ideas that felt unoriginal. This was precisely what I didn’t want. I wanted something more intense, more impassioned.
By chance—which tends to be the way with these things—luck came to me by way of an invitation, in January of 2007, to attend the eighth annual meeting of the Indian Congress of Forensic Medicine and Toxicology in New Delhi. Although not a forensics expert, I have nevertheless always followed such matters out of literary interest. For a number of years, I had been attending similar meetings and formed friendships with some of the members. Dr. Devaraj Mandal invited me to the conference in New Delhi.
For a number of reasons, I was unable to attend, but Dr. Mandal was kind enough to send me an extensive report summarizing the main talks. Primarily these were on toxicology, forensic pathology and psychology, criminology, and molecular genetics. But the one that immediately drew my attention was on the most recent advances in spectrophotometry, or findings in the field of mitochondrial DNA analysis, focusing mainly on its historical origins. Specifically, it was an in-depth study of the person considered worldwide to be the founding father of this forensic discipline. A man from medieval Asia. The Chinese Cí Song.
Immediately, I knew I had it. My heartbeat quickened. I abandoned what I’d been working on and gave my all to a novel that was truly worth the trouble. The extraordinary life of the world’s first forensic scientist. An epic and fascinating story set in exotic ancient China.
The documentation process was exceedingly arduous. There were no more than thirty paragraphs in about a dozen books on Cí Song’s life, and these, though they opened the door for a fictional account, limited the chances of a biographically accurate rendering. Luckily, the same could not be said of his own output; his five treatises on forensics, all published in 1247 as the Hsi yuan lu hsiang I (The Washing Away of Wrongs), have endured through translations in Japanese, Korean, Russian, German, Dutch, French, and English.
With the help of my friend Alex Lima, a writer and adjunct professor at Suffolk County Community College, I obtained a facsimile of the five volumes edited by Nathan Smith of the Center for Chinese Studies at the University of Michigan, from a translation by professor Brian McKnight that includes a useful preface from the Japanese edition of 1854.