“But what I don’t immediately understand,” he said slowly, “is how the Swiss police might have positively linked ‘Sun’ in Zurich to ‘Sun’ in Geneva.”
“I can only guess,” she said. “And my guess would be this: within their bureaus, this case has attained some importance. And similarly, if they had been more aggressive in retrieving the ATM surveillance photos in Geneva from Tissot’s neighborhood and shown them around the gendarmerie in Zurich where Sun retrieved that body, they might have gotten a match much faster. It’s a hypothesis, but it’s a sound one.”
“But all Asians look alike, right?” he asked facetiously.
“Maybe, but in your case that would work against you, not
“No. Of course not.”
“Are you, as Peter Chang, traveling on a diplomatic passport?”
A pause as he sensed the direction of this. “No,” he said.
“Then you could be detained, couldn’t you? Arrested, actually. And there’s even the fair chance that your arrangement with your government is such that they couldn’t admit who you are. Not for several years.”
“It could happen,” he said, after another pause, “if I were unlucky. Or careless.”
“Then if I were you, I would be very careful,” she said.
“Who else knows about this?” he asked.
“No one.”
“So,” he said, “not to put bad thoughts in the air, if anything happened suddenly to you…”
She laughed. “That would work out poorly for you too.”
“Why’s that?”
“Suppose you were picked up and questioned about the two murders in Geneva. Were your two peers, David and Charles, in Europe yet?”
“No.”
“The date of the murders was September seventh and eighth. I was alone that night, myself. In Barcelona. In my hotel room.”
He smiled.
“So who’s to say I wasn’t there, also?” he said.
She nodded. “And thank you for saving my life in Madrid the other night. What goes around comes around. Karma,” she said.
“Karma,” he agreed. “Now, what did you want to ask me?”
She unloaded. “Why did Lee Yuan want The Pieta of Malta?” she asked. “Why did he personally want it?”
“What makes you think he did?” Peter asked.
“I hate it when I ask a question and get another one in return,” she said. “But the other night you mentioned your personal connection to Lee Yuan. And you mentioned finishing his business for him. Well, if it were just a wealthy collector in China who got swindled, I don’t think you’d be here. So my guess is that Lee Yuan wanted the carving himself. It wasn’t delivered to him, his money was taken by criminals who were out to finance some activity somewhere else. But they didn’t bargain on who he was or the fury they would unleash by harming him.”
“You need to consider who Lee Yuan was,” he said. “Let me explain. Lee Yuan was a man each of us respected greatly in his later years. But he had a very difficult life. The great events of the time, the turbulence of recent history, surrounded him. In one sense, the events gave rise to his greatness as an individual. In another sense, they compromised his time on earth.”
“In what way?” she asked.
“Yuan was a boy during the Great Leap Forward,” Peter said. “He was five years old and his family was sent to camps in the countryside for reeducation, same as millions of others. Same as the parents of David Wong, whom you met the other night. Yuan’s parents were practicing Christians during the Cultural Revolution. Practicing religion was considered social turmoil. But they were devout people who continued to practice. They had come of age in the era of Sun Yat Sen and Chiang Kai Shek. They were products of their time, some say heroic, some say foolish.”
“What do
“I am too smart to say,” Peter said with a smile. “They were what they were, and the past is the past. It can be rewritten, but the truth cannot be erased. They were arrested for owning Bibles. And Yuan’s father was a Christian scholar. He was particularly fascinated by the works of St. Francis of Assisi. He owned books on Saint Francis too.”
“Ah,” she said.
Peter paused, then continued.
“After their books were burned, Lee Yuan’s parents were held in a Beijing detention center for nearly a year as the Red Guard considered what to charge them with. And still they prayed. They were sent to a camp in the freezing northeast of China for reeducation instead. This was maybe in the Western year of 1967 or 1968. Yuan was sent to an orphanage and never saw his parents again. He later learned that his parents had been beheaded by the Red Guard, executed in a public square as an example to others.”
Alex could tell that Peter was choosing his words with great care. She listened to them in the same way.
“It was said that the parents of Yuan were saying prayers to Jesus when the executioners’ swords descended upon their necks,” he said flatly. “And I have no reason to doubt that story. Lee Yuan, however, made the best of his new life,” Peter continued after a moment. “He studied in the orphanage. He became an outstanding officer in the army, then moved to state security and intelligence. As an adult, he didn’t practice religion but he always had an interest in it. And why not? Religion had led him to be who he was, by his parents’ practice of it. So in that way, it may have been part of him too. Who is to say?”
“Did you ever discuss any of this with him?” she asked. “Christianity? His parents?”
“No. I knew the history. There was nothing further I wanted to hear. Equally, I’ve learned in life that there are doors you must not open, windows you should not look through. Questions you do not ask. So I knew not to ask more. When the pieta disappeared from the museum, Lee Yuan took a special interest. He was fascinated by the fact that it may have been touched by a saint, buried with a saint, and the inspiration for Michelangelo’s great Christian work. And it touched upon his parents’ dear St. Francis, as well. You can imagine. Spiritually, it must have made him feel so close to the people he had lost so early in his life. Spiritually, if his parents had connected with this one saint, and then he connected to…well, you see. Superstition? Faith? I do not know. None of us do. But I know he went to Switzerland to acquire this piece on the black market. For himself.”
“And he was double-crossed?”
“Yes. The transaction was to take place in a remote monastery. Yuan liked the idea of that, as he was fascinated with the places where Christianity was kept alive through the Dark Ages. He saw parallels with recent Chinese history. So against his better judgment, he agreed to visit the place and complete the transaction there. He was never seen alive again.”
“But you and your associates have come to complete his mission,” she said.
Peter’s eyes said yes. So did a slight nod of his head.
“Official policy of your government?” she asked. “Or something more personal?”
“Both,” he said, “but neither entirely.”
“What?”
“Well, you see,” Peter said with a smile, “nothing is ever all one thing or all another. Think of it as sunlight shining over a mountain but the mountain is in a valley, and in the valley, Yin and Yang exist, the two opposite parts of the truth, which by themselves are both true and false. Yin is the dark area where the mountain stands and blocks sunlight. Yang is the place of direct sunshine. The sun traverses the sky and Yin and Yang trade places with each other. What was dark becomes light and what was obscured is revealed.”
“Are you answering my question of just obfuscating it?”
“I’m answering it,” he said. “If a Chinese agent is harmed anywhere in the word, a team of us will come after him to finish his work and to serve notice on those who would harm any of us. In the case of the noble Lee Yuan, he was much loved by many of us. So a professional mission became increasingly personal. The dark became light. Is it more of one than another? I don’t know. It changes. The central truth remains-but with gradations.”
