Eliot Pattison - Beautiful Ghosts

“Like the Qian Long.” Shan said.

The old man nodded. “That was the professor’s special interest. The Qian Long era. He used to give lectures about it at the university. I would have him recite the lectures for me, here.” He slowly passed his fingers through the flames of the candles, watching with an odd, distant fascination.

“Where is the professor?” Shan asked.

“Now I hear his voice at night, with the others.”

Yao muttered and shifted as though to rise. Shan put his hand out to stop him. “You mean he died. When?”

“They beat him that day when he found them.”

“The police?”

“The thieves.”

Yao froze, then settled back to the floor. “He saw them?”

“But he was already dying,” the old man added. “He had a cancer, he knew. There was a big lump in his belly.” He sighed and gazed at his candles. “In the newspapers the police said it was a perfect crime, said the thieves knew everything about how to get inside. I said the police were fools. But Jiang said no, to the police such men are indeed invisible.”

Shan felt a new sorrow as he studied the old man. It had been a common thing, during the mad years of the Cultural Revolution, when institutions of higher learning had been shut down, for teachers to be assigned to manual labor. Shan’s own father had been a member of the intellectual class which Mao had reviled as an enemy of the people. Most had been rehabilitated and eventually, sometimes ten or twenty years later, gone back to their former jobs. Some, like his father, had not survived the initial round of violent persecutions. Still others had been lost in the ranks of the proletariat, forgotten in back-breaking jobs that were little more than enslavement, left without pensions, without government support, often without surviving family.

“You mean men like Ming,” Shan said.

“I told him to go to the hospital but he said they would think he was involved in the theft. They would interrogate him. He couldn’t stand police. They made him shake, made him so upset he could not speak. The thieves knew he was no threat.”

“What did he see that day?”

The old man did not acknowledge Shan. “They always leave us alone, the professor and me, the two crazy old men. No one cares that we work slowly, stopping often to discuss the artifacts, to do what we can to protect them. I taught about the early dynasties, whose courts were in the south. But Jiang, he was the greater scholar. He knows things about the Qian Long no one else knows, he is always making new discoveries and taking notes.” The old man kept mixing his tenses, as if he weren’t sure that Jiang was actually dead. “He knows how things get protected.”

For the first time Shan became aware of shelves around the top of the room, below the high ceiling. They were packed with hundreds of items: Scrolls, incense braziers. Jade seals. A small bronze horse.

“It isn’t time for everything to be known,” the old man said. “Perhaps one more generation, perhaps then people will not be so greedy.”

Shan found himself looking into the flames. The two old men must have lived in the cramped room for decades, exiles in their own city. They had seldom spoken with him of their past when he had seen them in the gardens years earlier. Shan himself had often hidden from the staff when he saw them, for fear of being ejected from one of his private retreats. Those who had survived the years of Mao had learned to be wary of strangers.

“I remember sitting in one of the old courtyards once,” Yao suddenly said in a slow voice. “I saw a mouse carrying a small jade bead. He took it into a hole in the foundation.”

The old janitor looked up with a grin. “Sometimes we have helpers.”

“So Professor Jiang was worried about the secrets of the Qian Long,” Shan ventured.

“The Qian Long had many reasons for secrets, many places he kept secrets during his last years.” He looked up toward the shelves. “It isn’t stealing what we do. These things don’t belong to us. But they also don’t belong to those others.”

“You mean the men from the museum.”

“That Ming. He would yell if we got too close to their work. They were just children he had working on the restorations, students who didn’t know what they were doing. I don’t think it ever occurred to him that we had keys, too, to clean the buildings at night.”

“They were not supposed to be working at the cottage that day,” Shan said. “But two men came anyway, with a key, a big Mongolian and a small man, a plasterman.”

“Jiang would go and just sit sometimes in the old cottage and read poetry, like a scholar in the old court. He said sometimes it felt like the emperor was listening. It is a big job, removing a fresco. They were probably waiting for some glue to dry so they were walking around the cottage. That’s when those two found him, asleep at a table in a back room. They beat him and kicked him, that big one and his small friend.”

The words brought a brittle silence.

“You must tell us about the emperor’s secrets,” Yao said.

The old professor looked into the flames again. “Near the end, he and the amban played a trick on the court.”

“They corresponded in Tibetan,” Shan suggested, and paused. “How did you know we are interested in the amban?” Shan asked.

“The amban lived in Tibet, the amban correspondence was the most important thing to the emperor in his last year of life. The disappearance of the amban was a tragedy from which the emperor never recovered. Letters about the amban get stolen. Now you arrive from Tibet. It is too big a coincidence, eh Jiang,” he called to the shadows.

Shan reached inside his shirt and pulled out the piece of old cloth, unrolled it, and produced the torn thangka. “We know about the amban’s treasure,” he said. “We know how the thangka was supposed to tell where it could be found.”

The professor emitted a long groan of excitement, his eyes bright as a child’s. “It’s the one, Jiang!” he whispered toward the darkness. “It is the one the emperor waited for, the one thing he ever wanted that he never received.” He gazed at the torn painting a long time, turning it over, examining the pair of handprints, turning it back to the front to hold the deity images close to his face.

“How do you know about it?” Yao asked.

“The Qian Long had several secret compartments. Safes. One was in the wall of the dining chamber with the fresco, several in the Tibetan altar room where he met with his lama teachers. Once, inside the altar, we found letters and secret plans showing the compartment in the wall, and a note saying the Qian Long had placed the torn thankga there, with several of the amban’s letters, but we had left them there in the wall, thinking they were safe, never dreaming what would happen.”

The old professor was lost for a moment in the thankga, taking it from Shan, holding it close to his eyes, grinning like a boy. “You found this in Tibet, where the amban hid.”

Shan and Yao exchanged a glance. “How did you know that?” Yao asked.

“After the fresco was stolen, when Jiang was lying here injured he had me go back for the letters in the altar room, because he said the thieves may come back looking for them. Two letters, in Tibetan, were on the floor of the dining chamber, where the fresco was stolen. We had not bothered to read even all the altar letters before. There were other records, copies of letters, in the Qian Long archives. We collected all those involving the amban. When we finally assembled them all and read the ones in Chinese Jiang was transformed. He forgot all his pain, forgot he was dying even. He had a theory that gave him great joy.”

“What theory?” Shan asked.