Eliot Pattison - Beautiful Ghosts

Shan grimaced. “That’s how you’re going to find the emperor’s missing frescoes? Dolan’s missing artifacts? I saw mostly women and children in that village. A mass trial for twenty or thirty women and children. Is that the victory you came to Tibet for?”

Yao frowned. “We don’t have to arrest the youngest or the oldest.”

“Just destroy their lives.”

“Introduce them to the twenty-first century.”

Shan stared at him in silence. “Corbett awakened from a rainbow,” he said at last, “and you? What? You crawled from under a rock?”

Yao glared at Shan again, then turned toward the distant mountains.

“Soldiers will never find them,” Shan continued. “They will probably find the village if they look long enough. But it will be abandoned by the time soldiers get there. They keep lookouts. They will have hiding places even deeper in the mountains.” But once Tan found Bumpari, the damage would have been done. Soldiers would destroy the village in any event, annihilate the mysterious little oasis that seemed to live in several centuries at once. “It will ruin any chance of finding Lodi’s killer, or the lost art.”

The truck stopped to let a flock of goats cross the road. Shan reached into the bag and pulled out the last two apples, tossed one toward Yao, who frowned at it but took a bite. He chewed and swallowed, then broke off small pieces which he tossed to the sheep.

There was something else in the bag, a smaller cloth pouch Shan had not seen before. He extracted the pouch, untied the knot that bound it, and pulled out a rolled-up magazine. Not a magazine, he saw, as he straightened the glossy pages. It was a thin catalog dated the year before, perhaps thirty pages long, a listing in English and Chinese for the special Tibetan exhibit in the Beijing Museum of Antiquities. Ming’s museum. The pages were filled with detailed photographs and descriptions of the artworks. Someone had written Arabic numbers in black ink by several of the photos. He leafed through the pages and found the numeral one near the center of the catalog, by a small seated Buddha, fifteenth-century, in painted brass with an alms bowl in his hand. Number two was near the back, a fifteenth-century protective deity in gold-plated bronze with nine heads and thirty-four arms. Numbers three through five were twelfth-century thangkas of incarnate lamas surrounded by mythical animals. Quickly Shan counted the other entries. Fifteen items in total had been marked, the last a silver statue of Tamdin, the horseheaded protector. On the inside back cover, which held no print, the numbers appeared again, with figures in dollars handwritten beside them. Number one, $10,000, it said, with a date three years earlier. He went back through the pages more slowly, reading the entry for each of the hand-numbered items. The twelfth was a fourteenth-century bronze statue of the saint Manjushri, sword in one hand, lotus flower in the other.

“Liya wants us to find the truth,” he said slowly. “She didn’t send just food, she sent evidence.”

Yao looked back with a scowl. “What do you mean?”

Shan extended the catalog to Yao. He quickly pointed out the numbered items.

“Could be anything,” Yao said. “Someone’s marking of favorite pieces.”

“Not someone’s favorites. Look at them carefully. They are the most detailed, the oldest, the most valuable. And the prices shown are far too high for museum shop reproductions. Far too low to be the true market value for the original pieces.”

“Meaning what?”

“Look at item twelve.”

Yao flipped through the pages and paused, wrinkling his brow. A low curse escaped his lips. “We saw this yesterday, broken. At the fleshcutter’s village.”

“We saw that, or a perfect duplicate. Not a reproduction. If not the original, it was an exact replica.” Shan pointed to the little beauty mark on the forehead, “even the same little patch of corrosion on the shoulder. Done by a true artist.”

“They stole it, the bastards.”

“No,” Shan said. “Look at item fifteen, the statue of Tamdin. We saw that, too, in the workshop. But it wasn’t finished.”

Confusion clouded Yao’s face. “It was here, in Lhadrung, that very sculpture. But the one we saw wasn’t finished.” He quickly leafed through his notebook and turned an open page toward Shan. It was his sketch of the ruined sculpture they had seen the day before. “Lodi had stolen it and his killers destroyed it.” He stared at the catalog. “But Ming never reported it stolen.”

“There’s only one reason someone would make such an exact duplicate, reproducing every tiny imperfection. So the original could be replaced with the duplicate.”

“Ridiculous!” Yao leafed through the catalog, pausing at each of the marked photos. “You’re saying each of these others have been switched? Impossible. They would have been reported as stolen. Someone would have noticed.” But as he spoke Shan saw something deflate in Yao. The inspector knew the answer.

“Not,” Shan said, “if Ming was arranging it. The director can always remove a piece. For cleaning, say, or some special scholarly study. Ming and Lodi were friends,” he added, and explained what Liya had told him about their relationship.

The inspector sighed, and gazed back at the mountains a moment. “But the originals could never be displayed, never be publicized. And they would be priceless.”

“Right. They went to a private collector, for whom money is no object. As the middleman Ming could become wealthy, if he sold to a wealthy collector. A billionaire collector.”

Yao was silent a long time. “You have no proof it was Dolan who bought them,” he said at last in a low voice. “It would make no sense. Lodi stole Dolan’s art. Someone else stole the Qian Long fresco.”

“I was explaining the old crime,” Shan said, “not the new ones. An old one, in which Lodi and Ming were partners. With Elizabeth McDowell,” he added.

Yao gazed at the sheep again. “There is an audit,” he said. “Ming’s museum is being audited. Outside experts are being brought in to examine the collections, spot-check pieces. Special equipment is being brought from Europe, thermoluminescence gear that can verify the age of metal and ceramic pieces.” When he looked at Shan apology was in his eyes.

“When was the audit ordered?”

“Four months ago.”

“Has it started?”

“No. The equipment will arrive soon.”

In the silence Shan reached for the dried cheese in the pack and discovered one more object secreted by Liya: a rolled piece of rice paper, ten inches wide and nearly twice as long. It had been printed from a woodblock in bold, forceful ideograms which had been faded by sunlight along one side. Perplexed, he showed it to Yao, then read the text out loud.

Esteemed subjects of the heavenly empire, it said, let it be known that Prince Kwan Li being lost to us for more than the span of six months we commit to whomsoever shall deliver him unto us a reward equal to his own weight in gold. Whomsoever shall be found to have hidden his holy person shall be punished by slow death. Whomsoever shall be found to know of information and not brought it to us shall be punished by the ax. Be it known in all the lands. Tremble and obey.

At the bottom, reproduced in vermilion ink on the printed page, was a complex seal that Shan had seen years before. “It has the chop of the Qian Long emperor,” Shan said in a slow, incredulous voice.

“Liya’s notion of a joke,” Yao said.

“I don’t think so. Tests could be made. Probably one of those students at the guest house could do so, but I think it is genuine. I think it is from the old imperial court. I think Ming has been keeping many secrets from us.”