we saw at One-Eyed Wong's? Some bright young man who had access to every kind of ling-chih presented a few choice Thunderballs to Lady Hou, and then he whispered something into her lovely ears, and—well, you know Lady Hou. Guess who she approached with her little dagger? Right! The Second Deputy Minister of Finance, that's who, and I rather suspect that his position as king of counterfeiters is temporary. I wouldn't be at all surprised if your precocious nephew and his friends take over, unless somebody decapitates them first.”
The toad dropped his pole into the water. “Li Kao, you wouldn't do that, would you?” he said pleadingly. “He's only a boy.”
“And a delightful one, so I'm told,” Master Li said warmly.
“A trifle wild, perhaps, but that's the way of the young,” the toad said. “You have to allow for a little excess in boyish ambition.”
“Youth will be served,” Master Li said sententiously. “Sometimes after having been stuffed with truffles and basted in bean curd sauce,” he added.
“Li Kao, if you're working for the Secret Service, I can give you a few tips,” the toad said hopefully.
“No need,” Master Li said. “All I want is an expert opinion, and no evasions.” He pulled out the manuscript fragment and passed it over. “Do you know anyone capable of doing this?”
The toad looked at the fragment for no more than five seconds before his eyes bulged even farther and his jaw dropped.
“Great Buddha!” he gasped. “Do I know somebody who could do this? Nobody but the gods could do this!”
He held it up to the light, oblivious to anything else, and Master Li took the opportunity to continue my education.
“Ox, there are no more than ten great men in history whose calligraphy was so prized that kings would go to war to get a sample,” he said. “Such calligraphy is unmistakable, and no connoisseur could look at that fragment without crying, „Ssu-ma Ch'ien!“ Surely you studied some of his texts in school?”
Surely I had, and surely I was not going to give Master Li a frank opinion. I used to love history class. I can still quote whole passages by heart: “When the emperor entered the Hall of Balming Virtue, a violent wind came from a dark corner, and out of it slithered a giant serpent that coiled around the throne. The emperor fainted, and that night earthquakes struck Loyang, and waves swept the shores, and cranes shrieked in the marshes. One the fifth day of the sixth moon a long trail of black mist floated into the Hall of Concubines, and hot and cold became confused, and a hen turned into a rooster, and a woman turned into a man, and flesh fell from the skies.” Now, that is grand stuff, just the thing to give to growing boys, and then we were old enough to read the greatest of all historians. This is what Ssu-ma Ch'ien had to say about the exact same subject: “The Chou Dynasty was nearing collapse.” Bah.
“Nothing is harder to forge than calligraphy, and the calligraphy of greatness is nearly impossible,” Master Li explained. “The writer's personality is expressed through every sweep of the brush, and the forger must become the man who's hand he's faking. Somebody has done the impossible by perfectly forging Ssu-ma Ch'ien, and the baffling thing is that he made the forgery pathetically obvious.”
“Sir?” I said.
“Would you write down your father's name unless you were directly referring to him?”
“Of course not!” I was appalled at the idea. “It would be grossly disrespectful, and it might even open his spirit to attack by demons.”
“Precisely, yet in a fragment supposedly written by Ssu-ma Ch'ien, he refers to a minor government official named T'an no less than three times. T'an was his father's name.”
That stopped me. I couldn't for the life of me imagine why a forger would produce a masterpiece that would be unmasked in an instant. Neither could the toad.
“This is both unbelievable and incomprehensible,” he muttered. “Have you seen the entire manuscript?”
“No,” said Master Li. “I understand it's quite brief, and was perhaps intended to be attached as a footnote to one of the histories.”
The toad scratched his chin. “The parchment is genuine,” he said thoughtfully. “When one thinks of forgery, one thinks of modern works, but what if the forger was a contemporary? Li Kao, we know that Ssu-ma was castrated by Emperor Wu-ti, but are we sure we know why? The official reason has never seemed very persuasive to me, and this forgery is so superb that Ssu-ma would have a hell of a time proving he didn't write it. One can imagine sly courtiers pointing out to the emperor that the Grand Master Astronomer Historian was so impious he would write down his own father's name, and if the text also contained slighting references to the throne—”
At that point his voice was drowned out. One of the reprobates looked at Master Li's venerable wrinkles and decided that somebody might be challenging for the title of Saintliest of Them All, and he took three or four deep breaths and raised his gaping mouth toward the Great River of Stars.
“Hear me, O Heaven, as I pray to the six hundred named gods!” he bellowed. “I pray to the gods of the ten directions, and the secondary officials of the ten directions, and the stars of the five directions, and the secondary stars of the five directions, and the fairy warriors and sages, and the ten extreme god kings, and the gods of the sun and the moon and the nine principal stars!”
The venders perked up. “Worms for sale!” they cried.
“The gods who guard the Heavenly Gates!” the champion roared. “The thirty-six thunder gods who guard Heaven itself, and the twenty-eight principal stars of the zodiac, and the gods for subjugating evil spirits, and the god king of Flying Heaven, and the god of the great long life of Buddha, and the gods of Tien Kan and To Tze, and the great sages of the Trigrams, and the gate gods, and the kitchen gods, and the godly generals in charge of the month and the week and the day and the hour!”
“Worms!” cried the venders. “Take pity upon poor helpless worms, most unfairly condemned to cruel death upon hooks!”
“The gods of the nine rivers!” the saint shrieked. “The gods of the five mountains and the four corners! I pray to the gods in charge of wells and springs and ditches and creeks and hills and woods and lakes and rivers and the twelve river sources! I pray to the local patron gods! Chuang huangs and their inferiors! The gods of minor local officials! The gods of trees and lumber! The spiritual officers and soldiers under the command of priests! The spirits in charge of protecting the taboos, commands, scriptures, and right way of religion!”
“Gentlemen, think of your poor old white-haired grandmothers who may have been reborn as worms!” an enterprising vender shouted.
“Boy!” Master Li yelled, and to my astonishment he bought a bucket of worms.
“I pray to the gods of the four seasons and eight festivals!” screamed His Holiness, “I pray to—”
Master Li reached up and pried the gaping jaws even wider apart and dumped the contents of his bucket inside. Silence descended upon the Eye of Tranquility. The toad was holding the forgery no more than an inch from his eyeballs.
“Forgery of a forgery,” he muttered. “Someone's made a tracing of this, and recently. The oaf left marks where he pressed down too hard.”
He handed the manuscript back to Master Li. “Tracing is an amateur job,” he said contemptuously. “A freak forgery that can make scholars doubt their sanity is worth a fortune, but a tracing of it couldn't fool an illiterate baby, if the idiot tried to sell it to the wrong man, he'd soon be contemplating the pretty fish swimming around his solid stone sandals.”
I had a sudden queasy feeling in the pit of my stomach, but if Master Li was thinking of a dead dice cheater at the bottom of the canal, he gave no sign of it.
“How very interesting,” he said mildly. “Hsiang, the manuscript has apparently been stolen. Any word on the grapevine?”
“Are you serious? Li Kao, if a collector allowed word of something of this quality to get out, he'd have a visit from the emperor's agents inside of a day. There can't be another fraud as good as this in the whole world,” the toad said. “And don't bother looking for the forger. The August Personage of Jade has lifted him to Heaven, and he's now handling the divine correspondence.”
Master Li scratched his forehead and tugged at his beard.
“One last question. I can think of any number of men who would kill to get their hands on the manuscript, but the murder I've been handed appears to have been rather gaudy. Can you think of a man who would use methods suitable for the worst excesses of Chinese opera?”
