Walter Jon Williams
The Tang Dynasty Underwater Pyramid
What we might call the Tang Dynasty Underwater Pyramid Situation began in the Stare Mesto on a windy spring day. We were clumped beneath the statue of Jan Hus and in the midst of our medley of South American Tunes Made Famous by North American Pop Singers. The segue from “Cielito Lindo” to “El Condor Pasa” required some complicated fingering, and when I glanced up from my guitarra I saw our contact standing in the crowd, smoking a cigarette and making a bad show of pretending he had nothing better to do but stand in Prague’s Old Town and listen to a family of nine Aymara Indians deconstruct Simon and Garfunkel.
My uncle Iago had described the man who was planning to hire us, and this man matched the description: a youngish Taiwanese with a fashionable razor cut, stylish shades, a Burberry worn over a cashmere suit made by Pakistani tailors in Hong Kong, a silk tie, and glossy handmade Italian shoes.
He just didn’t look like a folk music fan to me.
After the medley was over, I called for a break, and my cousin Rosalinda passed the derby among the old hippies hanging around the statue while my other cousin, Jorge, tried to interest the crowd in buying our CDs. I ambled up to our contact and bummed a smoke and a light.
“You’re Ernesto?” he asked in Oxford-accented English.
“Ernesto, that’s me,” I said.
“Your uncle Iago suggested I contact you,” he said. “You can call me Jesse.”
His name wasn’t Jesse any more than mine was really Ernesto, this being the moniker the priest gave me when the family finally got around to having me baptized. I’d been born on an artificial reed island drifting around Lake Titicaca, a place where functionaries of the Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church didn’t hang out much.
My real name is Cari, just in case you wondered.
“Can we go somewhere a little more private?” Jesse asked.
“Yeah, sure. This way.”
He ground out his cigarette beneath one of his wingtips and followed me into the Church of St. Nicholas while I wondered if there was any chance that we were really under surveillance, or whether Jesse was just being unreasonably paranoid.
Either way, I thought, it would affect my price.
The baroque glories of the church burst onto my retinas as I entered- marble statues and bravura frescos and improbable amounts of gold leaf. Strangely enough, the church belonged to the Hussites, who you don’t normally associate with that sort of thing.
Booms and bleats echoed through the church. The organist was tuning for his concert later in the day, useful interference in the event anyone was actually pointing an audio pickup at us.
Jesse didn’t spare a glance for the extravagant ornamentation that blazed all around him, just removed his shades as he glanced left and right to see if anyone was within listening distance.
“Did Iago tell you anything about me?” Jesse asked.
“Just that he’d worked for you before, and that you paid.”
Iago and his branch of the family were in Sofia doing surveillance on a ex-Montenegrin secret policeman who was involved in selling Russian air-to-surface ATASM missiles from Transnistria through the Bosporus to the John the Baptist Liberation Army, Iraqi Mandaean separatists who operated out of Cyprus. Lord alone knew what the Mandaeans were going to do with the missiles, as they didn’t have any aircraft to fire them from- or at least we can only hope they don’t. Probably they were just middlemen for the party who really wanted the missiles.
I’d been holding my group ready to fly to Cyprus if needed, but otherwise the Iraqi Mandaeans were none of my concern. Reflecting on this, I wondered if the world had always been this complicated, or if this was some kind of twenty-first-century thing.
“We need you to do a retrieval,” Jesse said.
“What are we retrieving?”
His mouth gave an impatient twitch. “You don’t need to know that.”
He was beginning to irritate me. “Is it bigger than a breadbox?” I asked. “I need to know if I’ll need a crane or truck or…”
“A boat,” Jesse said. “And diving gear.”
The organist played a snatch of Bach- the D Minor, I thought, and too fast.
If you hang out in European churches, you hear the D Minor a lot. Over the years I had become a connoisseur in these matters.
“Diving gear,” I said cautiously. “That’s interesting.”
“Three days ago,” Jesse said, “the five-thousand-ton freighter Goldfish Fairy sank in a storm in the Pearl River Delta off Hong Kong. Our cargo was in the hold. After the Admiralty Court holds its investigation, salvage rights will go on offer. We need you to retrieve our cargo before salvage companies get to the scene.”
I thought about this while organ pipes bleated above my head. “Five thousand tons,” I said, “that’s a little coaster, not a real ship at all. How do you know it didn’t break up when it went down?”
“When the pumps stopped working, the Goldfish Fairy filled and sank. The crew got away to the boats and saw it sink on an even keel.”
“Do you know where?”
“The captain got a satellite fix.”
“How deep did it sink?”
“Sixty meters.”
I let out a slow breath. A depth of sixty meters required technical diving skills I didn’t possess.
“The Pearl River Delta is one of the busiest sea lanes in the world,” I said. “How are we going to conduct an unauthorized salvage operation without being noticed?”
There was a moment’s hesitation, and then Jesse said, “That’s your department.”
I contemplated this bleak picture for a moment, then said, “How big is your cargo again?”
“We were shipping several crates- mainly research equipment. But only one crate matters, and it’s about two meters long by eighty centimeters wide. The captain said they were stored on top of the hold, so all you have to do is open the hold and raise the box. ”
That seemed to simplify matters. “Right,” I said. “We’ll take the job.”
“For how much?”
I let the organist blat a few times while I considered, and then I named a sum. Jesse turned stern.
“That’s a lot of money,” he said.
“Firstly,” I said, “I’m going to have to bribe some people to get hernias, and that’s never fun. Then I’ve got to subcontract part of the job, and the ones I have in mind are notoriously difficult.”
He gave me a look. “Why don’t I hire the subcontractors myself, then?”
“You can try. But they won’t know who needs to get hernias, and besides, they can’t do the other things my group can do. We can give you worldwide coverage, man!”
He brooded a bit behind his eyelids, then nodded. “Very well,” he said.
I knew that he would concede in the end. If he was moving important cargo in a little Chinese coaster instead of by Federal Express, then that meant he was moving it illegally- smuggling, to use the term that would be employed by the Admiralty Court were Jesse ever caught. He had to get his job done quickly and discreetly, and for speed and discretion he had to pay.
I told him which bank account to wire the money to, and he wrote it down with a gold-plated pen. I began to wonder if I had undercharged him.
We left the church and made our way back to the square, where Jan Hus stood bleakly amid a sea of iron- gray martyrs to his cause. The band had begun playing without me- our Latin-Flavored Beatle Medley.
“You’ll want to check this out,” I told Jesse. “My brother Sancho does an amaaazing solo on ‘Twist and Shout’ with his malta- that’s the medium-sized panpipe.”
“Is pop tunes all you do?” Jesse asked, his expression petulant. “I thought you were an authentic folk band.”
I must admit that Jesse’s comment got under my skin. Just because he’d bought our services didn’t mean we’d sold out.