Eight Skilled Gentlemen

3

Master Li was getting weary, and once I had rowed over to Hortensia Island and tied the boat at a dock he had me bend over so he could climb up on my back. He weighs no more than a schoolboy, and his small feet fit easily into my tunic pockets, and I’m so accustomed to carrying the old man around that without him I feel undressed. I took the paths he indicated toward the pavilion where Ma Tuan Lin, according to the Celestial Master, had met his death.

The island has changed beyond belief in the short time since that day. New construction is everywhere, and scarcely an acre of wooded land remains. Then it was almost totally given over to trees and shrubs and grass, and outside of the Yu (much more about which later) there was only the collection of astronomical instruments first established by the great Chang Heng and fewer than twenty secluded pavilions used as retreats by eminent mandarins. It was peaceful and beautiful, and we saw and heard nobody at all as I followed the paths through the trees. Ahead was a grassy clearing and Master Li had me stop and set him down. He reached inside his robe and pulled out his wine flask and swilled moodily, spitting the pulpy residue at flowers. I expected them to shrivel and die beneath the bath of pure alcohol, but for some reason they didn’t.

“Ox, I must congratulate you on your self-control. Not one single question,” he said with a wink. He knows he’s trained me well. “Let’s look around. I’m betting the Celestial Master actually did see our vampire ghoul remove Ma Tuan Lin’s head, thus greatly improving Ma’s appearance, and I’ll be disappointed if proved wrong.”

We’d already learned that the body had indeed been found and removed from here, and as we walked forward I saw the outline of the pavilion and then I saw a huge pile of fresh earth beside it, and finally I saw something black and moving, sharply outlined against a green background. It was a cloud of flies buzzing around sticky black streaks that had recently been red, matting the grass. We walked to the pile of earth and found signs of a very recent disturbance that might have been caused by a creature crawling out, and I found sandal prints in a soft spot in the path close to the pile. The toes had dug in and sprayed dirt backward, which would be consistent with somebody running for his life, and I soon found another soft spot with a huge print on it that might have been made by a creature like a vampire ghoul.

“The Celestial Master would have no reason to invent an item like a birdcage. Let’s find it,” Master Li muttered.

We found the cage in tall grass close to the bloodstains. The sage picked it up and whistled appreciatively as he looked at it, and even I could see the workmanship was superb, and very old. It couldn’t have held a bird, however. The bars were oddly spaced with at least one gap through which a small bird would have escaped, and a peculiar maze of wires ran across them. A single bead was strung on the wires and with a little dexterity it could be made to slide this way and that, but Master Li said one bead couldn’t possibly fulfill enough functions to serve as a primitive abacus. The bars were decorated with a jumble of symbols of every description, from animals to utensils to astronomy, and Master Li shook his head and shrugged.

“I have no idea what it was used for but it’s almost unbelievably ancient,” he said. “Say what one will about Ma Tuan Lin, he had a gift for discovering valuable artifacts. He was a considerable collector and claimed to be an authority, and maybe we’ll find something about this in his papers.”

He tied the cage to his waist with his long yellow sash and stood looking around for a moment with his hands on his hips.

“My dear old friend and teacher rowed over here and took a walk in the moonlight,” he said in a slow melancholy voice. “As fate would have it, he arrived at this spot just in time to see a monster chasing its dinner, meaning Ma Tuan Lin, and he did indeed see the creature rip Ma’s head off. Ox, you’ve heard the Celestial Master. You know he couldn’t stand Ma Tuan Lin. Deep inside he felt guilty for not grieving at a terrible murder, and the guilt worked through a weary mind and projected images, and the result was that he really does believe his story about—pay attention—’a little wrinkled man older than you, maybe even older than me, but he was running as lightly as a child.’ All right, what kind of hat does the Celestial Master wear?”

I thought about it. “It’s a white hat, tall and conical, tapering to a point,” I said.

“It’s called Hat of Nine Yang Thunder,” Master Li said dryly. “It’s meant to resemble the beak of a crane. Did you notice his robe?”

“It was a Taoist robe, except for the First Rank emblem,” I said.

“Which is?”

“A crane.”

“Yes indeed, and did you notice his ring of office?” Master Li asked.

“Some kind of large red stone,” I said.

“It’s a garnet called Ball of Retributive Lightning,” said Master Li.

“Oh-oh,” I said.

“Oh-oh indeed,” said Master Li. “Ox, the Celestial Master projected himself as a tiny wrinkled old man who could throw away his canes and run lightly as a child as he massacred bastards like Ma Tuan Lin, blasting them with his ring of office and then transforming himself into the crane he carried on his robe and hat, flying safely away across the moon, like in dreams. The mandarins feared that the wrong people might take that tale and cause a terrible scandal, but you and I are not going to be the wrong people.”

“No, sir,” I said.

“We’ll go through the motions of an investigation,” the old man said. “If nothing else I have the Celestial Master’s authentic signed commission to show for it, which is scarcely to be sneered at.”

“Yes, sir,” I said, and then made something of a point of shutting my mouth. (“That,” I added silently, “is the understatement of the decade. After he finishes doctoring a document like that he can present a pass allowing him to wander in and out of the imperial treasury with forty mule carts, eighty peasants with shovels, and a derrick.”)

There was nothing more to be found at the scene of the murder, so Master Li led the way into Ma Tuan Lin’s pavilion. I was rather surprised to find it was a simple austere place: one large room and a bathing chamber, opening to a small enclosed garden and a vista overlooking the lake. Master Li explained that mandarins like Ma were not allowed to build palatial establishments on the island. All the pavilions were identical, designed for peaceful contemplation, and were the property of the emperor. We looked through the mandarin’s papers and collection of books and scrolls, and all we found were notes in scholarly shorthand I couldn’t read and Master Li said were pure Ma Tuan Lin: idiotic garbage. The only point to the search was to see if there was any information about a peculiar old cage, so Master Li made it quick. Just as we were about to leave he stopped in the doorway.

“I almost forgot,” he said. “Fifty or sixty years ago I took one of these pavilions for a week or two, and since they’re all the same…”

He let the sentence hang in the air as he turned and walked back to the small wooden altar against the east wall.

“They showed me where to stick jewelry or whatever if I didn’t trust the gardeners,” he said, and he reached out and pushed a wooden panel and then slid it aside and stuck his hand into a tiny hole. “I’ll be damned,” he said, because when his hand came out he was holding a small thick notebook.

We sat at the table while he went through it. Not even Master Li could make sense of the entries because they were simply series of numbers and marks indicating percentages, and there was no indication what the numbers represented.

“The total goes up and up, dramatically, and all of a sudden the percentage doubles, and all I can say is if it’s Ma’s money he was getting rich enough to buy an estate on Coal Hill,” Master Li said. Then he turned the last page and pulled something from the notebook. “Ox, look at this!” he exclaimed happily.

There was the cage we had found, in the form of a small ink rubbing apparently taken from an old stone surface. I say stone as opposed to metal because blurred and blotched places indicated a worn chipped surface, but it was clear enough to unquestionably represent the cage. Master Li hoped for some explanatory text when he turned the rubbing over, but instead he found Flying White shorthand, which he translated for me.

“ ‘Eight! I’ve found all eight! Now they cannot deny me the principal share, and my bones shall lie on White Dragon Peak!’ “

“Sir, do you know what that means?” I asked.

“Not really, but the last part is interesting,” he said. “White Dragon Peak is the principal landmark rising above a large and rich valley near Shensi which Ma Tuan Lin—falsely, I always assumed—claimed was once his family’s ancestral estate. This sounds as though he hoped to buy it back, and that would take an incredible amount of money.”

We soon left and I rowed without incident back to the city. We stopped at Master Li’s shack long enough to hide the old cage beneath the platform that keeps our pallets dry when storms send water washing across the floor, and then he had me carry him to the Wineshop of One-Eyed Wong. (I’ve described Wong’s in previous memoirs and it doesn’t play a significant role here, so I’ll simply say it’s a place in the criminal area of Heaven’s Bridge where Master Li can find useful people, and he found some now.) He had a couple of forgers make fast copies of Ma Tuan Lin’s rubbing of the cage, and then he got a pack of street boys to take the copies to every first-rate burglar he could think of.

“You see,” he said when we were eating dinner at his private table, “there’s a chance that Ma was referring to cages rather than a hundred other things when he wrote on the back of the rubbing. If so, he had found eight of them. Where are the other seven?”

I shrugged. “His office, his house.”

“Keep in mind, Ox, that the cage we have is very ancient and superbly made. It’s a remarkable artifact, and if Ma Tuan Lin was holding eight of them he would certainly have made his extraordinary collection the excuse for banquet after banquet, at which he could boast of the infallible instinct and keen trained intellect that enabled him to find treasures where lesser men failed. So far as I know he did no such thing, and let’s remember the wording. ‘Eight! I’ve found all eight! Now they cannot deny me the principal share, and my bones shall lie on White Dragon Peak!’ “

“Sounds like he had partners in a business enterprise,” I said hesitantly. “Sounds like the cages would be valuable to them, so much so he’d get the principal share in whatever the venture was.”

“That’s exactly what it sounds like, and thus he would give cages to partners in exchange for percentages of the business. Perhaps the very existence of the cages would be kept secret, perhaps not, and if not, we will consider an interesting possibility,” the sage said. “Ma Tuan Lin would never dream of going into partnership with lesser mortals. His partners would have to be mandarins of his own rank or higher, and such men tend to collect rare items and display them in their homes to envious visitors.”

From his silence I judged he wanted me to see how far my sieve-like brains could carry the thought, so I said, “If Ma Tuan Lin gave cages to his partners and his partners put them on display, the burglars of Peking can tell you exactly where the cages are.”

“Good boy,” said Master Li. “Every mansion in town has been scouted again and again by burglars using inside help. It would be asking too much to find all seven, but if we can find even one I’ll satisfy a bit of curiosity by questioning the owner. If not, I think we’ll just forget about cages and worry about what sort of a report we can give to the Celestial Master.”

Within an hour we had a visit from a gentleman with shifty eyes and an interesting pattern of knife scars where his nose used to be, and an hour after that we were back inside a palatial palanquin, being carried up Coal Hill.

It was night, with a huge round moon that had orange circles around it, and Coal Hill was just starting to come to life. I never cease to be fascinated by the spectacle of the wealthy arranging to be seen seeing people who have been seen seeing people worthy of being seen seeing, if that’s the proper way to phrase it. First it’s a glow of light approaching, and then a rhythmic “Hut-chu, hut-chu, hut-chu!” and the foreman appears leading an army of jogging grooms carrying torches. Another glow follows, and another chant—“Mi-chi, mi-chi, mi-chi!”—comes from trotting servants dressed like royalty who surround aristocratic palanquins and carriages, carrying brilliantly colored lanterns. “Yi-cha, yi-cha, yi-cha!” chant yellow-gowned eunuchs who mince beside the principal palanquin swinging censers of smoking incense, and one may be lucky enough to see a flash of emerald and turquoise, glittering gems and glowing jade, gold-stitched silk and embroidered satins, a crimson gleam from a long lacquered fingernail, a liquid glance from a languid eye, and then trumpets blast “Ta-ta-taaaaa! Ta-ta-taaaaa!” and heralds puffed like peacocks in their pride prance forward and turn down the awaiting lane where other trumpets answer “Tum-teeeee! Tum-teeeee!” and lights appear as if by magic, a thousand paper lanterns illuminating trees that in winter have artificial leaves sewn to them, and an orchestra in a clearing plays a hymn of welcome, and dancers leap and vault ahead of the heralds, and a flock of pink geese hiss and squawk and cackle, and those gorgeous butlers in the courtyard are not spreading yellow sand to receive the illustrious footprint of the eminent guest—oh no, that’s real gold dust forming a path to the door.

I have a cousin who works on Coal Hill. He’s a professional and proud of his mastery of the craft. What he does is dress in black clothes and blacken his face and hands with soot so he won’t be seen at night. Then he takes a long sharp pin—much longer than a knitting needle—and crawls into the pen where the geese are kept, and just at the right moment when guests arrive he jabs the geese in the ass. The hissing and honking of geese is considered a lucky omen, you see, and the trick is to get a chorus of squawks just as wealthy people descend to the lowly cringing earth, and he’s very good at it. I once asked him if he considered expanding his trade to include dyeing the geese pink (also a lucky omen) and he was furious. He’s a master bird-butt jabber, and lowly pinion painters are scarcely in his social class! Besides, they have a closed guild and the only way to qualify is through heredity.

The lane our palanquin turned into wasn’t lit up for guests but our informant had been certain the owner was home. Master Li put on his grandest air of Neo-Confucian superiority and sneered lesser servants out of the way until he got the majordomo, and a flash of the commission from the Celestial Master was sufficient to send the fellow bowing and cringing upstairs to seek the master of the house. We waited in a very elegant room where ancient artifacts were displayed, but Master Li was not impressed.

“Nine tenths,” he stated flatly, “are palpable fakes, and the tenth that isn’t is of little value. The one exception is this toad dropper, which is done in the earliest example of the glaze called Pretty Girl Sky-Clearing I’ve ever seen.”

Toad droppers are little ceramic toads with a chamber to hold water and a built-in dropper. You use them to moisten an ink-stone with just the right amount of ink for a perfect stroke, and Master Li has a very nice collection of them. When he bent over and slipped aside the false heel of his left sandal I turned pale.

“Sir… ah… Venerable Sir, don’t you think it would be unwise to… ah…”

He came up with his lock picks, and a moment later the case held one less toad dropper. I mention this to explain why I was already unnerved when we heard the screams. They were high strangled screams, clearly from somewhere in the house, and I automatically bent over for the old man to leap upon my back.

“Quick! We’ll make a run for it!” I cried.

As soon as I felt his weight I galloped to the hall and out the door, and I was halfway across the outer courtyard before I realized that Master Li was pounding my head and shoulders and yelling, “Stop, you idiot!” I skidded to a halt and he twisted on my back, and then a gnarled finger shot past the side of my head and pointed. “There!”

It finally dawned on me that I was supposed to run toward the screams, not away from them, and in a way it was fortunate that I’d panicked and run outside. Master Li was pointing to an upper story where the silhouette of somebody who seemed to be fighting could be seen behind a gauzy curtain, and I made a mental note of the location and charged back inside and started up the stairs.

The screams were coming from the majordomo, but I doubt he was aware of the noise he was making. His eyes were wide and glazed with shock and his mouth opened and closed automatically as he stood petrified at an open doorway on the second story. I shoved him out of the way. Master Li slipped down off my back and I heard the sharp click as the rattan coil inside his right sleeve shot the throwing knife from the sheath strapped to his forearm up into his hand. I dove through the door low and fast, hitting the floor and rolling left and jumping up braced for an attack, but there was no attack. I stood there rather like the majordomo had, frozen in place with my mouth gaping foolishly, and from the lack of motion behind me I assumed Master Li was also standing and staring. The scene was complicated, and took a bit of sorting out.

In the foreground, meaning the center of the elegant room, stood a man whose face was covered by the hood of a big old-fashioned cloak. He was methodically using a stone striker to bang the most ancient of all instruments, a set of stone chimes. He was standing on one leg because that’s all he had: one single leg, growing squarely from the center of his body. In front of him a man in elegant mandarin dress was dancing to the chime music, but it was a dance of death.

His robes whipped wildly through the air as he leaped and capered across the floor, twisting and jumping with manic energy, kicking his legs high above his head, whipping his feet down to pound the floor as though attempting to drive holes through it. His eyes were quite insane, driven mad by pain, and he would have been howling if he had the breath. I gasped and jumped back instinctively when I saw white splinters of bone thrusting from his silk-covered thighs, and blood dripped down his knees. This mandarin had danced until both thighs shattered, and he was dancing still, and now blood was bubbling from his mouth and nose and I realized his insides had been pounded to jelly. He leaped even higher. His feet struck the floor even harder as the stone chimes thudded monotonously, and the bone splinters thrust out farther and farther, and then a great gush of blood came from his mouth and the light of insane agony died in his eyes.

When the one-legged creature continued to pound on the old stone chimes he was making a corpse dance for him. That mandarin was dead. I knew it as surely as I knew I was still alive, but I also knew the body was dancing like a doll of straw around the room, head lolling and bouncing lifelessly on his shoulders, arms and hands flapping around without guidance, both broken legs bending almost double where they shouldn’t bend, between knee and hip, blood from the gaping mouth spraying around the room in a fine pink mist.

That, mind you, was only the scene in the foreground. Simultaneously my brain was trying to accommodate the background as well, but it was difficult because with an overdose of grotesque images they tend to cancel one another out. Everything was getting blurred, and I shook my head vigorously—the first motion I’d been capable of—and decided I really was looking at another weird creature. It was a man, yet the face was that of a hideous ape with a silver-gray forehead, a scarlet nose, bright blue cheeks, and a yellow chin. I can’t explain why, but I knew in my bones this wasn’t actor’s makeup. This was real, and the man-ape bared strong white teeth in an expression between a grimace and a smile as it looked at Master Li and me, and then in one powerful bound it was at the wall, and with another effortless leap it was out the window and down into the garden and gone, vanished into the night, but not before I’d seen that it was carrying something.

The weird creature had been carrying a cage precisely like the one Master Li had.

Master Li had stepped up beside me, and now he whirled back toward the center of the room just as the stone chimes stopped playing and the dancing corpse collapsed limply to the floor, as though someone had cut the strings operating a puppet. The one-legged hooded figure stood motionless.

“Careful, Ox.”

As if I needed the warning. I moved forward cautiously, scooping up a heavy bronze figurine as a weapon, and Master Li made a flanking movement with his knife cocked beside his right ear. The chimes player still made no motion. I was at an angle where I could look straight him—or it—and in the dark shadows behind the opening of the hood I thought I saw the gleam of a single eye in the center of a forehead.

Suddenly there was a bright flash that blinded me. I gasped and stepped back, covering my eyes, and gradually the orange haze and black spots cleared, and I stared at the room. So did Master Li, blinking and rubbing his eyes, and there wasn’t any one-legged chimes player. He wasn’t in the room, and he wasn’t in the hall outside, and the wind whipped the curtains away from the window and we gazed out and up at the night sky, where a great white crane was slowly flying away across the face of the moon.