Peter Corris - The Big Drop

Terry writhed in the bed. ‘Oh God,’ she said.

‘I wore rubber gloves, don’t worry.’

‘It’s not funny. What are you going to do?’

I thought of Jessie Stevenson’s tight, strained face as she drove her car, of the boozy, dazed look she wore at 4 o’clock as she stood, aimless in her front garden. I’d watched her do that for an hour, wondering what she was doing until I saw the two girls in the school uniform turn into the street. Then she went inside. I remembered the way she looked at her husband.

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘What would you do?’

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Dr Kangri hit the button on the slide projector and the image flashed up on the metre-square screen.

‘Beautiful, is it not?’ he said.

It was an oriental drawing showing a couple making love. They were both wearing robes and had painted faces and their hair tied back in severe knots. They were smiling; the man had a big erection and the woman had small, pointed breasts. The erection was between the breasts and they both seemed pretty pleased about it. The colours were brilliant blues, reds and yellows and the lovers were on a thin mat in a sparsely furnished room that seemed to be full of sunlight.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Beautiful’s the word.’

He showed the next slide and the next, and half a dozen more. They were all in the same mood and communicated the same feeling: extreme pleasure in leisurely, inventive sex. My mouth was a bit dry when he turned the projector off; I could have managed to look at a few more without too much trouble.

He tidied the slides away and moved the projector aside. Then he sat down behind the big desk in the study crammed with books and paintings and scrolls and I turned my chair around away from the screen and faced him.

‘They are very fine,’ he said, ‘but nothing compared to the impact of the scroll itself.’

‘The subject’s the same all through?’

He smiled. Dr Kangri was a small, smooth-faced man in his late fifties. To judge from his house in Vaucluse, the Jaguar in the garage, the furnishings and the art work, his assets would have been in the early millions. ‘Erotic, you mean? Yes, very, Splendidly so and a very rare scroll. Unique.’

‘Worth?’

He shrugged, moving his shoulders fluidly inside his silk shirt. He seemed to have the movements of a much younger man. Yoga?. I thought.

‘Who can say? Priceless.’

‘I’m sorry to be crude about it, doctor. But I need a price, so will the insurance people. You must have paid…’

A few lines of annoyance appeared on the smooth, brown skin and then vanished as if dismissed by an act of will. ‘It is not insured, Mr Hardy. I paid; yes, indeed I paid, but in favours you understand. Services, not cash.’

I got out a notebook because it looks efficient and can sometimes be useful. I wrote ‘Chinese scroll’ and put a question mark beside a dollar sign. Then I scratched the words out because Kangri proceeded to tell me that it wasn’t a Chinese scroll but a Tibetan scroll in a Mongol style. The scroll was about two metres long and forty centimetres wide; and had thirty-seven sections, each showing an erotic scene. Apparently the scroll was like the Chinese ‘Pillow books’ which were presented to newly weds to give them the right idea and put them in the mood. ‘Almost all Tibetan art is religious,’ Kangri told me. ‘This scroll is a rare exception.’

It sounded like a nice exception to me. ‘Old?’

‘Fifteenth century. Never before reproduced, hardly known. My edition will make big waves.’

It was an oddly contemporary expression to come from such a traditional-seeming man. I doubted whether he knew that it was contemporary. I nodded and listened while he told me that he was planning a lavish book, reproducing the scroll along with a scholarly essay and notes by himself. The slides had come his way ten years before, and the work of acquiring the scroll itself and doing the scholarly investigation and occupied him for twenty years.

‘When did you get the scroll?’ I asked.

‘One month ago. I thought about it for twenty years and had it for a mere thirty days.’

Unique or not, the procedure’s much the same when investigating the nicking of something. Where was it kept? When did you last see it? Who knew it was there? Kangri told me he’d kept the scroll in a locked cupboard in the study and he showed me the broken lock. He’d last looked at his treasure four days before and only his daughter, his housekeeper and an academic named Dr Susan Caswell knew where it was kept. I looked around the over-stocked but tidy room, noted the labels on pots and the classification numbers on the spines of the books.

‘Was anything else taken?’

‘Yes, many things-other scrolls, books, ornaments. Some of value, others not. All insured. A few things were broken, but I have had the study cleaned. I ruminated for several days before taking this action.’

‘I’ll have to talk to these people.’

He nodded. ‘Certainly, but Dr Caswell left Australia for Tibet a week ago on sabbatical leave. Mrs Tsang, my housekeeper, is at your disposal. My daughter may be a little hard to locate, but I assume you have ways of doing that.’

Yes. Before we get into that, could you tell me why you called me in on this? I mean, I haven’t got lot; any connections with the…’

He smiled again and the skin hardly crinkled. ‘You were going to say “Chinese community” although you know that I am a Tibetan. It’s very difficult for you. Well, Mr Hardy. I made some enquiries when this matter arose. I needed someone discreet, of course, and you come highly commended on that score. But I also learned that you fought against the Chinese communists in Malaya.’

‘Yes, well…’

‘The only successful anti-guerilla campaign in history. I wish my poor country had had such allies. You know of the subjugation of Tibet by China?’

I knew that the Dalai Lama wasn’t top dog there anymore and that the Chinese didn’t have any trouble going up mountains from the Tibetan side, but my knowledge ended about there. Kangri took silence for assent and went on, ‘I left my country in 1950 when the conquest began. I went to the United States to study and to go into business.’

‘What business was that?’ I had the notebook at the ready.

‘Importing art objects from my country and India. I prospered, then I came here where I have continued to prosper. My country has been forgotten, overlooked. It is an anachronism, an irrelevance. My edition of the scroll will perhaps correct that. It will show that Tibet had a rich, humanistic culture, that it was not just a society of peasants and priests.’

I had already classified the good doctor as a pretty shrewd number. I had the feeling that his business might have involved some corner-cutting and I’d have bet that his doctorate wasn’t from Harvard. But all the signs were that he could write a good cheque; and if he wanted to think I’d idealistically thrown my young body into the fray against the communistic menace, instead of just wanting to get out of Australia and having the sense to do what I was told for a while, who was I to disillusion him?

‘Does anyone else know you have the scroll? I mean, other Tibetans, scholars?’

‘No. Only the people I have mentioned. My daughter would not be interested enough to tell anyone. Mrs Tsang is totally discreet. Dr Caswell would realise the penalties of any publicity.’

‘Penalties?’

‘Obvious, surely. This is a highly erotic work. The newspapers would fall on it as a spicy story. My edition would be seen in the worst possible light. I shudder at the thought.’

I could see his point; headlines like ‘Sex Scroll Stolen’ wouldn’t strike the right scholarly note. I had a lot of questions, but some of them I could put to other people. I closed the notebook and stood up.