“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
