I found myself in a window seat, with an old Chinese couple beside me. It was immediately apparent they hadn’t been on an airplane before. The seatbelt perplexed them utterly. I showed them how to use it. When the flight attendant brought drinks, they couldn’t figure out what to do with them. I showed them the tray, and how to operate it. They kept smiling and she, in the middle seat, kept patting my arm, and chatting away. I smiled and nodded. She got out a Thermos and offered me some tea. I declined, having rather gone off tea of late.
I noticed the old man straining to see past me and I offered, via hand motions, to change seats with him. At first he shook his head, but I offered again, and when I’d managed to get both of them out of their seatbelts, in his haste to look out the window he practically sat on my lap. I had to crawl past both of them to get to the aisle seat. The flight attendant had a rather bemused expression on her face, but then came and thanked me. At the window, the old man kept exclaiming and pulling on his wife’s arm so she’d lean over and look too. It was a very clear day, and I expect the view was extraordinary. Watching their enthusiasm, I almost forgot my worries for awhile.
The flight was not the end of our adventure together, however. There was still the escalator to be mastered. The woman was about to fall over backward before I realized that they didn’t know how to negotiate this newfangled contraption either. I lunged for her, keeping her upright, and then I held on to both of them until they were safely off the escalator. Then there was the marvel of the baggage carousel. I had to help them with their luggage because the old man grabbed one suitcase, a huge plaid number, and was dragged along by it, nearly falling over in the process. Somehow I’d forgotten how complicated these things are.
I was about to take my leave, having managed to get them both, along with their luggage, to the glass gates that separated the passengers from those waiting for them, when I saw something that made me feel ill. It was the man in black, now in uniform, and he was clearly looking for someone. I had a pretty good idea who that someone might be, and even had a notion or two about how he knew I’d be on this flight. I was not yet prepared to meet him.
I slipped in between the old couple, linking arms with them. The man in black, now in green, stepped toward us, but in an instant we were swept up in a crowd, twelve or fourteen people, I think, including babies, the welcoming party for the old couple. At first everyone looked at me with some puzzlement, but the old man was excitedly chattering away, and then the old woman said something, and I was suddenly being much fussed over. I was given a baby to hold while luggage was sorted, and the youngest couple, grandchildren of the travelers, parents of the infant in my arms, explained in English that the old couple, who had lived and worked on a farm outside Xi’an all their lives, was coming to live with the family in Beijing. The granddaughter thanked me for helping them, and especially for letting her granddad look out the window. She said, rather unnecessarily, that it was their first flight. I thought it was probably their last, too, and that they’d be talking about it for as long as they lived. She said the family had been worried about how they would manage on the airplane, but couldn’t afford to send someone to travel with them. She said they’d hoped that someone nice would look after them, and were grateful I had been there.
All the while, the man formerly in black watched me. Yes, he saw me, and he recognized me, but he didn’t make a move. That told me something: he wasn’t there in an official capacity, despite the uniform. I found that even more chilling than the alternative. I wasn’t sure how I was going to get away, but at least I had cover as far as the curb. I just hoped there was a taxi at the ready.
“Do you have a car arranged?” the young woman asked.
“I’m afraid not,” I said.
“Then we must insist upon driving you to your hotel.”
Normally I would have politely declined, but this time I decided that I should consider this my reward for good behavior and a timely one at that. Surrounded by my new friends, I sailed right past my pursuer. Mentally I informed him I’d be seeing him soon.
Ten
I kept my promise to Lingfei that I would not reveal the subject of her work. Our life together, however, was soon to come to an end. That is because the gathering storm finally reached Chang’an.
The buffoon, An Lushan, was proving himself a poisonous element in the empire. When Yang Guozhong was made first minister on the death of Li Lin-fu, An Lushan began to fear that he would lose the Son of Heaven’s patronage. I could see no reason that he should think that. The Son of Heaven regularly sent An Lushan women from the imperial harem for his pleasure, and still made sure that he was well rewarded financially as well.
Despite or perhaps because of royal favor, An Lushan was sent north to curtail the activities of the barbarians on the northern frontier. It is not possible to know the inner thoughts of someone like An Lushan. Perhaps so far from Chang’an he began to imagine plots against him. For whatever reason, he turned on the emperor whose favor he had so long enjoyed. With a large army, An Lushan began to march, not against the barbarians, but toward Chang’an.
It was possible that the armies of the Son of Heaven might have prevailed were it not for a disastrous decision. Our army was ordered to advance and engage An Lushan. We were defeated absolutely. This left the route to Chang’an undefended, and it became char that An Lushan would take the capital. The Son of Heaven, who had neglected affairs of state for so long, was forced to flee west. I was one of the eunuchs who went with him. You can imagine the terrible time that was, the chaos, the fear. Before I left I went to Lingfei’s home, but she wasn’t there. I did not even say good-bye.
At a relay station west of the city, generals killed First Minister Yang and forced the emperor to order the execution of his beloved Yang Guifei. The Son of Heaven had to agree, anguished though he must have been. The Son of Heaven then began a terrible journey to Chengdu, where, in despair, he abdicated in favor of one of his sons.
An Lushan, who had seemed to be in the ascendancy, instead became painfully and desperately ill, and died. Some said it was murder, others merely his just desserts. The rebellion was over. Still, it was a very long time before I returned to Chang’an.
An obsession in the early days of archaeology and anthropology was the hunt for the origins of man and the so-called missing link between Neanderthals and us. Scientists scoured the globe in an effort to find this elusive creature. One of the most exciting finds in this regard occurred right outside Beijing, near a village called Zhoukoudian, where a tooth dating back to something between two hundred and thirty and five hundred thousand years ago was found in 1921. The tooth was followed by thousands of bones. It was different from examples of early man found elsewhere, and some thought it the link they all were seeking, naming it homo erectus Pekinensis, or more popularly, “Peking Man.” The story of Peking Man is fraught with intrigue, the skull and bones disappearing as they were being transported for safekeeping as the Japanese invaded. Some said they were ground up as an aphrodisiac, others that they were merely misplaced. Still the story has a spellbinding quality to it, even if they were wrong about it.
It was not lost on me that there was a missing link in all of this for me as well, something that would bring together the two threads, Dory and her silver box and Golden Lotus and indeed everything that had happened over the past several weeks, just one fact that would cause everything to make sense to me, which at that very moment it did not. Yes, I could see where there were intersections between the two, but they could easily be coincidence rather than cause and effect. I did know of one piece of information that I lacked, and that was the name of the man in black, and his relationship, whatever it was, to this whole affair, but whether this was my missing link or not, I had no idea. There was only one way to find out, and that was to ascertain who he was, if only because it was one of the few avenues left for me to pursue. Dr. Xie had said the man in black was army but not army, which is to say he was one of those people who terrified others into doing what he wanted, ruling his fiefdom through fear was the way Dr. Xie had put it. That sounded like Golden Lotus to me. And someone or something had sent Burton to Xi’an.