Eight Skilled Gentlemen

6

A short time later we were seated on the bronze platform beside the astronomical instruments sipping wine—meaning Yen Shih and Master Li were emptying the latter’s wine flask while I drank plum juice with vinegar from my own flask. The puppeteer appeared to have insides of solid copper. Alcohol didn’t seem to affect him at all, and he was getting on splendidly with Master Li, who was in an expansive mood.

“Yen Shih, my friend, when you come to this island you scarcely announce your presence,” Master Li said. “By any odd chance did you happen to be here two nights ago, about the double hour of the sheep?”

“No, I was sound asleep in my house at the time,” Yen Shih said.

Master Li pointed in the direction of Ma Tuan Lin’s pavilion. “Something peculiar has been going on down there,” he said. “You’ve heard about the vampire ghoul who caused Devil’s Hand to lose his chance for the record? Well, a few hours earlier, around the double hour of the sheep, that ch’ih-mei was unquestionably right where I’m pointing, at one of the pavilions.”

The puppeteer looked where Master Li pointed, and then raised his eyes to the water of North Lake lapping at the bank beside the pavilion, and his eyes continued to lift to the opposite shore and Peking and the Vegetable Market, where the ch’ih-mei had fallen and died. The terrible smallpox craters deprived the puppeteer of normal facial expressions, but his right eyebrow was eloquent as it lifted toward the top of his head.

“But how…”

“Ah! You see it. I thought you would,” Master Li said happily. He turned to me. “Ox, that’s the most important reason for coming back to the island. We’re now absolutely certain that the vampire ghoul was outside Ma Tuan Lin’s pavilion a few hours before it crawled into its coffin on Coal Hill. All right, how did it get from the pavilion to the cemetery?”

“Why, I suppose it just—”

I halted with the sentence half formed. North Lake was between the pavilion and Coal Hill, and could a ch’ih-mei swim? The idea of such a monster rowing sedately across in a boat with a ripped-off head neatly stored between its feet was ludicrous, and I seemed to hear Auntie Hua on the subject of monsters: “Ox, if you can’t get to sunlight, run toward water! The living dead fear it, and will brave it only as a last resort.”

Master Li shared the last of the wine with the puppeteer, and then pitched the goatskin flask to the water below.

“I would assume you have a pick and shovel stored somewhere,” he said to the puppeteer. “Our meeting has been so fortunate that I’d like to prolong it, and if you have nothing more pressing to attend to you might like to help track the path of a vampire ghoul.”

Yen Shih’s eyes could also be expressive, and they were sparkling. “Delighted! If nothing else I can dine on the tale for a month,” he said.

Master Li got on my back and the three of us made good time to the pavilion, pausing only to collect Yen Shih’s pick and shovel from a ditch where he’d concealed them, and soon we were standing close to the spot where flies still swarmed around grass stained with a mandarin’s blood. I thought Master Li was going to have us fan out and search for claw prints, but he had something more specific in mind and he pointed toward the huge pile of dirt the creature had apparently crawled from.

“That’s supposedly dirt dug for a construction project that was canceled,” he said. “Construction on Hortensia Island is rare, and I hadn’t heard of anything scheduled. See if you can find the hole this stuff came from.”

We worked around the great pile, hacking through weeds. Then we circled out farther and farther until we reached the limit at which dirt could reasonably be pitched where it was, but still we found no hole. There remained the possibility that the workmen had been terrible amateurs who tossed dirt so that half of it slid back on top of them, and we dug a series of holes down through the pile itself, but always the shovel scraped against solid earth and dead matted grass.

“Venerable Sir, the dirt didn’t come from here,” I finally said. “It had to be hauled in from some other location.”

“That,” Master Li said complacently, “is precisely what I expected, and it’s a hundred to one that the other location is across the lake near Coal Hill. Vampire ghouls never stray far from their coffins. This one happened to fall into, or was taking a nap in, a pile of dirt near the cemetery, and it was accidentally carried here, and its homing instinct allowed it to find the path the dirt had taken. If a ch’ih-mei can find a path, so can we.”

It didn’t take long now that we knew what we were looking for. Yen Shih swung his pick at thick reeds against the bank of a low cliff nearby and almost spiked himself in the left leg as the pick met no resistance and whipped around. We pushed reeds down and found a large dark hole, and any doubts vanished when we found dribbles of loose dirt and marks of large sleds that had been carrying heavy loads. I raced back to the Yu and returned with torches, and then we started down the tunnel that was headed east, toward the Imperial City and Coal Hill.

The path dipped down and down, and finally leveled off, and I nervously lifted my torch and studied the stone ceiling. This tunnel hadn’t been dug recently. It was old, perhaps as old as the Yu, and I saw black spots on the ceiling that seemed to move like giant spiders, and a slow menacing plop-plop-plop sound announced the dripping of water. We were making our way beneath the surface of the lake now, and I didn’t want to think about things like rockfalls. There was no sound except that which we made.

“Hold up,” Master Li said.

He had turned aside and was waving his torch around an alcove that opened on the north side. It was about thirty feet long and ten feet deep, and the floor was littered with fragments of rock. I saw a huge scar in the stone wall, recently made, and Master Li found traces of ancient chisel marks on some of the smashed fragments.

“It almost looks as though somebody discovered an old frieze and then smashed it to pieces before anybody else could see it,” he said. “Ox, do you remember that rubbing we found in Ma’s pavilion? I wonder if it came from here. After all, dirt was carried through this tunnel and dumped right in his backyard, and I doubt that he knew nothing about it.”

There was nothing else to be seen, so we continued on. I was very nervous. For all I knew the ch’ih-mei had his whole family down here, and our torchlight was announcing the approach of dinner. I clutched the pick like a battle-ax, but nothing happened. The path began to rise, and far ahead we saw a flicker of light. We finally came to a flight of steps that led up to a stone landing, and a wooden framework and a pair of large doors confronted us, and the hazy yellow light was coming through the crack between the doors, which stood slightly ajar. Master Li signaled for us to extinguish our torches.

“I think we’ve come up to ground level,” he whispered. “I also think we’re inside the artificial mound of Coal Hill, and that explains why dirt was removed and carted to the island, where it wouldn’t cause comment. This is a cave that was dug recently and secretly, right beneath the palaces of the wealthiest mandarins.”

We slipped silently through the doors into a large room that was piled with packing cases, stacked one on top of another almost to the ceiling. Across from us was another pair of doors and the light in the room was coming in through cracks at the edges, but this wasn’t artificial. It was sunlight, and when we put our eyes to the largest crack we were looking down at water.

“Ha!” Master Li whispered. “That’s it. This is a smuggling operation, and it must involve mandarins of very high rank. That’s the canal at the base of Coal Hill. Their barges pass through customs at Ta Kao Tien, preferably at nightfall, and begin inching up toward Export Clearance at Shou Huang Tien. Halfway through they pass here, where well-trained crews are ready: doors are opened, cargoes are switched, and with scarcely a pause the barges proceed to Export Clearance, and stamps will be applied automatically since the cargoes have just been inspected and couldn’t possibly have been altered in the middle of a canal.”

He paused, and then added, “The point has to be twofold: they pay negligible import duty on cargoes that are practically worthless, and then switch cargoes for goods that are both costly and restricted, meaning forbidden for export. If the goods are coveted by wealthy barbarians they must be making an incredible profit.”

He turned from the doors and we tiptoed toward the back of the room where there was another door, a large single one. As we drew closer we could hear voices, and Master Li gently shoved the door partially open. We were looking at an alchemy laboratory where vast numbers of vials and jars were stacked on worktables, along with burners and mortars and a great number of arcane instruments. Five people were visible.

One dominated the room, even though he was the softest-spoken. He was dressed in costly silks and gold-trimmed satin, and his rings and other jewelry could probably have ransomed a king or two. He was immensely fat, and moved with the peculiar dancer’s grace that some bulky people possess—probably half in the viewer’s imagination, because one expects ungainliness. The next three men obviously deferred to the fat man. Seldom have I seen more unpleasant people than those three, who seemed closer to the world of animals than to that of men. The leader was a man who looked exactly like a wild hog, and Hog I was to call him ever after. The second and third might have been brothers, sneaky, skulking, backstabbing brothers, and I dubbed them Hyena and Jackal.

The fourth man had clerk written all over him. He was on his knees with his hands tied behind him, and a brush was stuck in his topknot and ink stains marked his shabby tunic, and he quivered in terror as the fat man addressed him.

“My agents inform me that in a wineshop you mentioned that I was soon to leave on an important mission,” the fat one said softly, and I realized he had a tiny lisp that gave his voice a purring sound, like a cat.

“I said nothing about purpose or destination!” the clerk protested. “Your Excellency, I swear I—”

“My dear fellow, I don’t doubt it for a moment,” the fat one purred. “Why should you bother to tell what you could show?”

“Show? But I’ve shown nothing!” the clerk cried.

The fat man took a jeweled pillbox from a pocket and opened it. He extracted something I couldn’t make out at that distance and held it up for inspection.

“No? How odd that my agents should pick this up from where you foolishly left it, right on top of your table in that wineshop,” the fat man said.

Hog and Hyena and Jackal leaned forward, licking their lips, and I’ve seen prettier sights at feeding time in the imperial tiger pit.

“Your Excellency, I swear I forgot I had such a thing with me!” the clerk squealed. “It was only an accident, and I have been faithful and hardworking. I ask only the chance to redeem my moment of forgetful stupidity!”

“You shall have your chance, and it shall be more than a moment,” the fat man said in his cat-purr voice. “I grant you all eternity for redemption, unless Hell has other chores that take precedence.”

He hurled whatever he had taken from the pillbox into the clerk’s face and swiveled around and walked gracefully away and through one last door at the rear of the laboratory. The moment he turned the other three had moved forward, and the sounds of the door closing behind the fat man were drowned out by terrible screams. I don’t want to go into details. The three were precisely as animalistic as they looked—with the addition of human ingenuity—and they took their time killing the clerk. It was horrible. At the end they had a gory mess on the floor and they laughed about it as they went to a storeroom to get rags to mop up.

Before I knew what was happening Master Li had slipped through the door. He sidled on tiptoe through the mess so as to avoid prints, and pushed and poked through ghastly pieces of the late clerk, and finally came up with something that made him grunt in satisfaction. He turned and tiptoed back and rejoined us, and we silently shut the door and went back into the shipping room. Master Li whispered to us to find an open case and we split up and went through the rows of stacked boxes. From my end it was a futile endeavor. Every case I found was numbered, nailed tight, and sealed with wax symbols bearing customs stamps that certainly looked real to me. Meaning the wax had melted here and slopped over the imprint there, and been chipped and broken, and at times had been stamped in a totally inappropriate spot: real.

Master Li was doing a great deal of swearing under his breath, and when I passed the puppeteer he lifted his eyes heavenward and shrugged. Not one case was accessible, unless we wanted to leave calling cards in the form of broken seals, and finally we had to give up.

Coarse laughing voices were moving toward us. The door opened. Master Li winced and pointed, and Yen Shih and I followed the sage back toward the tunnel entrance, stooped low behind cases, moving like mice. Hog and Hyena and Jackal were too busy joking about the way the little clerk had screamed to notice. We could probably have walked out carrying a case, but Master Li didn’t want to deal with an alarm from a careful tally clerk and he signaled for us to keep going. We made it easily back into the tunnel, and then I sensed that Yen Shih was going to ask questions, so I put a hand on his arm and squeezed no-no-no. In the last light before darkness closed around us I had seen the old man’s wrinkles twist into tight circles on his face, and I knew he wanted silence for thought.

When we were far enough down the tunnel and I was tired of groping I lit a torch and the sage made no objection. In fact, he took it from me when we reached the place where the wall of an alcove had been chipped away and examined both the wall and the cracked fragments, swearing monotonously. Then he snapped out of his reverie and turned to the puppeteer.

“Well, Yen Shih, I got you into more than anyone bargained for,” he said. “At least you weren’t spotted.”

Yen Shih flashed that gorgeous, astonishing smile. “I enjoyed it,” he said openly and frankly. “Can you have them arrested?”

“I would tend to doubt it,” said Master Li. “That fat fellow who ordered the murder happens to be the second most powerful eunuch in the empire, commonly called Li the Cat. He holds ministerial rank. I’d need a warrant signed by the Son of Heaven, and by the time I got it the contraband would have vanished and the cave would be a Home for Hapless Orphans and the clerk’s dear old mother would swear her darling boy expired from typhoid fever at the age of four.”

He reached for wine and realized he’d finished it. “I need to nail them for the smuggling racket, not murder, and that won’t be easy. Because of this.” Master Li pulled out a tiny object and held it to the torchlight.

“A tea leaf?” Yen Shih said.

“Indeed yes, and it’s also a very bad tea leaf,” said Master Li. “Good tea is restricted, of course, so fortunes can be and are made smuggling it to barbarians, but this stuff can be shipped out by the ton. It’s ta-cha, the cheapest of all boheas, and on top of that it’s been damaged, probably by a flood. Tea like this is worth no more than ten cash a pound, yet this is what Li the Cat threw in the clerk’s face, and apparently it was so important that leaving the premises with a leaf of it in his possession cost the clerk his life. You figure it out.”

“No, thank you,” said Yen Shih. “I do, however, have a favor to ask.”

“If I can grant it, it’s yours,” Master Li said grandly.

“Consider that I now have a small stake in this affair, and command my services, night or day, when something comes up.” Small points of light flickered deep inside Yen Shih’s eyes, dancing and glowing, and again his sunrise smile belied the ruins of his face. “One gets bored,” said the puppeteer.

We got back to the island, where we left Yen Shih, who had unfinished business, and I rowed back to the city. Master Li still had things to do and wanted to waste no time. He had me rent a palanquin, and then we went to office after office of bureaucrat after bureaucrat, gathering a bit of information here and a trace of a rumor there, and it was long past sundown when we started home. I was starving, but Master Li had at least sated a different sort of hunger.

“It’s official,” he said firmly. “Li the Cat has arranged to get the protection of the Wolf Regiment, and he’s traveling to Yen-men, in Shansi, to confer with the Grand Warden. Ox, I’d give a great deal to be a fly on the wall when they meet. That poor clerk was already condemned to death for having even hinted that Li the Cat might be going on a trip, and what’s so secret about a conference with the Grand Warden of Yen-men?”

I had no answers, of course. I concentrated on the rumblings of my stomach until we paid off the palanquin and walked up the narrow winding alley toward Master Li’s shack to change clothes before going to dinner at One-Eyed Wong’s. Again there was a very bright moon, and old Grandmother Ming from the house next door was waiting for us.

“No big monkeys!” she yelled from her window, leaning out to shake a fist.

“Eh?” said Master Li.

“Burglars you got! Pickpockets you got! Cutthroats and grain thieves and robbers come calling day and night! Drunks and mushroom-heads and whores and pirates and jailbirds and embezzlers—all right, all right, all right—but no big monkeys!” screamed Grandmother Ming.

Master Li was standing very still.

“Would this particular big monkey have a rather gaudy face?” he asked.

“What kind of monkey would come calling on you?” the old lady howled. “No big monkeys with red noses and blue cheeks and yellow chins!”

I dove inside the shack, but the damage was already done. The place had been ransacked, and the mysterious old cage was gone.