Fong’s eyes scanned the broad desktop and landed on the small bronze of the forequarters of the horse sitting to one side.
Then the man’s cold hand touched his shoulder. Fong hadn’t heard him return. Or perhaps he hadn’t actually left. Just stepped toward the door. Before the taller man could speak, Fong said, “I have a few questions I’d like you to answer.”
The archeologist raised an eyebrow. “Evidently you do.” The light glinted off his heavy steel-framed glasses as he tried to learn what Fong had seen among the objects on his desk. But he wasn’t able to discern what had drawn Fong’s attention.
Fong noticed and smiled openly. He ran his tongue over his smooth teeth.
The archeologist smiled back. That twinkle again.
Fong stepped away from the desk, careful to keep his eyes away from the small bronze statuette.
The older man watched him carefully, then nodded as if he’d made up his mind about something. He tapped the top of an odd-looking, square machine sitting on the office floor. “Do you know what this is, Detective Zhong?”
Fong looked at the squat grey thing. By its bulk and open ugliness he assumed it was Soviet in design, but he couldn’t begin to guess what it was. “World’s most impractical doorstop,” he suggested.
“No, Zhong Fong, it’s a shredder.” A knowing smile blossomed on the man’s face as he added, “A Sovietmade shredder.”
Fong was disconcerted by the latter comment – it was as if the archeologist had read his mind. “What does it do?” Fong demanded, a little too forcefully.
“It shreds things, Detective Zhong.” The man’s smile grew to offensive proportions as he took a large map of Shaanxi province from his desk and placed it in the feed bin. He pressed a button. A flurry of metal blades made a racket for a few seconds then hundreds of odd-shaped pieces vomited out into a tray. The archeologist tilted the contents of the tray onto his desktop and spread them out flat. He didn’t bother turning over the pieces that were face down. For twenty or so seconds he studied the array before him. Then he began. In less than five minutes he had reconstructed the entire map. As he fitted the last piece of the puzzle, he looked up. “It’s a unique talent. I was born with it. I never worked at it. Never thought about it. Just used it. My talent.”
Fong wanted to say, “I’m impressed,” but didn’t. “I assume you use the same principles to piece together the terra-cotta warriors?”
“I do, indeed,” the archeologist asserted, as if he were being challenged on some fundamental level. His smile was no longer warm. His eyes were piercing. “You too have a unique talent, Detective Zhong. In some ways we are very similar.”
“I don’t follow that.”
“Really?” Dr. Roung’s voice arched upward. “I piece together puzzles. You piece together puzzles. I am treated differently by the Chinese state than most other Chinese males and so are you. After all, how many murderers are allowed to return to the civilized side of the Wall?”
Fong didn’t respond.
The archeologist wasn’t put off by Fong’s silence. “You do agree, don’t you, Detective Zhong?”
Fong tilted his head slightly. Not a real agreement – but enough.
“Good. Then perhaps you’d help me solve a puzzle that’s been bothering me for a very long time, Detective Zhong.” The man seemed suddenly joyful.
Again Fong tilted his head, wondering where this was leading.
Dr. Roung crossed to the shelf behind his desk and pulled down an old, leather-bound book from an upper tier. “Have you read the Italian’s account of ‘discovering’ China?”
“Marco Polo?” Fong asked. Dr. Roung nodded and handed over the well-thumbed text. Fong felt the heft of the thing. It was pleasing.
“Such an odd name, Marco Polo, don’t you agree? Sounds like a child’s food.”
Fong allowed himself a smile despite being totally at a loss as to what was going on. He handed back the book. “Yes, I read this in English. It was part of my training in that language.”
“So you are perfectly prepared to help me with my puzzle.” The man seemed gleeful.
“If you say so,” Fong said warily.
“I do.” He clapped his hands once loudly. “Well, every Chinese person who reads this silly account knows in his heart that it’s a lie. A joke played on some European master by this person with a name that sounds like baby food. Do you agree?”
“Yes,” Fong said without hesitation.
“Good. I hoped you would. Now, tell me how we know that this book is a lie? Know in our heads, not in our hearts.”
Fong thought for a moment. “Because of what Marco Polo left out.”
“Because of what wasn’t in the text?” the archeologist asked, openly fascinated by the idea.
“Yes,” Fong said slowly.
“Like what, Detective Zhong? What was missing in the book?”
Fong looked for a trap but couldn’t find one. Finally he spoke, “How could a man from the West who claimed to have lived in the Middle Kingdom for almost ten years fail to mention in his books the Great Wall, our character system of writing or for that matter, the tiny, bound feet of aristocratic women? How could these fail to impress him? How could Marco Polo have been here and not seen fit to include them in his account? Don’t you find that odd?” He was happy to be asking the questions.
“I do, Zhong Fong.” Dr. Roung smiled warmly. “Now that you mention it . . . I do.” He laughed. An odd, honest laugh. “But before you brought it up, it had escaped my attention.” He took a deep breath as if he was about to cross an invisible divide. He reached up and took off his army-issue spectacles. “I create whole things from their many pieces. It is my gift. Yours, Zhong Fong, is to create whole things from those pieces that are missing. It is another kind of gift. A photo negative of my gift, if you follow.”
Fong considered Dr. Roung’s statement and found some truth in it. More important, for the first time he sensed the man’s deep need to talk. To talk to someone he saw as an equal.
Fong hesitated. Unsure how to lead the conversation.
“Would you like to see my terra-cotta warriors, Zhong Fong?” Dr. Roung said in a surprisingly gentle voice.
It wasn’t lost on Fong that the archeologist hadn’t called him detective. “I would. I would like to see your warriors.”
As Dr. Roung walked ahead of him, Fong realized that he was following a man who had secrets – dark secrets that he needed to share with an equal – with someone who understood his worth.
With the simple flip of a light switch Dr. Roung brought the great sleeping contents of pit #1 to life. Row upon row of standing and kneeling men. Archers, horsemen, foot soldiers – each with its own face. An eerily silent army just about to move or having just moved, only to be stunned into immobility by the rising of the light. The famous terra-cotta warriors – the lasting memorial of Qin Shi Huang, China’s first emperor.
Fong and the archeologist stood on the gallery above the ranks of frozen men. “In April of 1974 I was called by the Ministry of the Interior. Some stupid farmer outside of Xian had reported discovering a few artifacts in his field,” Dr. Roung chuckled. “I thought it would take me a week at most to deal with what I assumed was a useless piece of junk. My first night here I was brought to a peasant’s hut. The old woman had two terra-cotta heads set up beside her fireplace. She was worshipping them as gods. And you know what, Zhong Fong?” Fong looked at him. “I understood why she’d do that. In my heart it seemed to me that those two old heads were as worthy of adoration as anything I’d ever seen – up until that time.” The final words were only wisps of sound – the heart’s breath.
Fong repeated the final four words: up until that time. He’d never heard any admission of loss so deep. He looked at the man. Tears were coming from his eyes.
“It took two years, but by the middle of 1976, my team had unearthed three full pits. A fourth was found late in 1977, but it was empty. Pit #1, down there, has thirty-eight columns of soldiers. Naturally, they all face east. There were originally over six thousand figures. We’ve managed to restore just over a thousand warriors and horses. Pit #2 has fifteen sections. We opened it to the public in 1976 then closed it down.”