Forbidden City

After only the briefest hesitation, Yuan bowed his head. “It will be as you say.”

“You’re dismissed.”

Without a word, nine of the men left the room. Only Hong remained when the conference room door closed.

“Well,” Ngai said angrily, “you might as well say what’s on your mind.”

“This course of action you’ve chosen for yourself isn’t good,” Hong said.

“It suits me perfectly.” Ngai glared at the old man. “I’ve always been aggressive.”

“You call your actions aggressive. I say that they’re impetuous.”

Ngai narrowed his eyes. “And I say that you’re flirting dangerously with insubordination.”

“Perhaps you inherited your willful ways from me.”

“My father always insisted he was to blame.”

“Your father only provided your bloodline,” Hong said. “I trained your mind. In my youth, I, too, was weak.”

“Do you mean the wine and women you chased after?”

“No.” A faint smile twisted Hong’s withered lips. “Those are follies of a young man. I pursued them with no less zeal than your father. And you.”

Ngai nodded.

“I was weak because I accepted your father’s offer to educate you rather than remain with the university.”

“If you had remained with the university, you would have been living in the streets by now.”

“Or maybe I would have been living with a son or grandson of my own who loved me.” Hong’s eyes were sad. “Your father’s appointment afforded me a lavish living that I couldn’t have gotten anywhere else. I chose to live that life alone so that I could spend it all on myself. Now I have neither sons nor grandsons.”

“Having regrets?”

“Pointing out the downside of a life lived selfishly.”

“I would rather live my life selfishly and have all that I might rather than give it away.” Ngai smiled. “Perhaps you are responsible for this after all.”

“Me?” Hong lifted his eyebrows in surprise.

“You were the one who told me all those old stories of the Three Kingdoms, of Cao Cao’s treasure that was lost to the City of Thieves.”

“The City of Thieves is a myth.”

Ngai hated hearing the old man say such a thing. When he had been a boy, Hong had filled his head with dozens of stories of the thieves who struck along the caravan roads, including the Silk Road, and made off with incredible treasures. He’d imagined streets paved in gold and jewel-encrusted houses. As he’d grown, he scaled the visions of treasure back, but he still believed there were hidden rooms filled with gold, silver and fantastic gems.

Ngai had spent a small fortune ferreting out information about the City of Thieves. It was also sometimes referred to as the City of Assassins for the men emperors and warlords had hired to kill their enemies. For a time in the second and third century, while all the turmoil of the Yellow Turbans was taking place and the Han Dynasty was collapsing, the thieves had struck hard and fast, claiming vast treasures.

Then—they’d disappeared. And no one knew the reason why. Hong had said that the thieves had gathered enough gold to set themselves up as kings in Africa or the Middle East.

Ngai didn’t believe that. He had hired historians to track the tales he’d been able to find. Although the history of those periods was spotty at best, there’d been no mention of the thieves leaving China.

“Even if the stories of the City of Thieves are true,” Hong said, “have you forgotten the curse?”

“I choose not to believe in the curse.” Ngai knew the story well. There had been an emperor’s tax collector who had killed an old man and his wife. Before the old woman had died, she had cursed the tax collector. He and the emperor’s gold had disappeared. One of the guards had survived long enough to talk about the fox spirit that had descended upon the carriage and killed all the guards.

According to legend, the emperor’s greed had summoned vengeance from the celestial plane. Divine retribution for the old woman’s death had come in the form of the fox spirit. The stories told that the fox spirit had grown aware of the City of Thieves and had destroyed it.

“You can’t simply choose to believe whatever you wish.” Hong sounded put out.

“How many fox spirits have you seen?” Ngai asked the question in a mocking tone.

“None,” Hong assured him. “I have been fortunate.”

Ngai made himself a drink. “Spirits don’t exist. They are myth only.”

“How are they any less believable than the City of Thieves?”

Ngai turned to face the old man. “In the studies that I have undertaken, and paid others to do on my behalf, I became aware of two objects that could lead me to the City of Thieves. One of them is Ban Zexu’s belt plaque. The other is the map that Suen Shikai has.”

“If either man knew where the City of Thieves lay, don’t you think they would have gone there?”

“A man has to be strong enough to hold on to his treasure. Doubtless, these men were not. Neither were their fathers before them.”

“Unless their fathers spent what little gold there was before they were born,” Hong said.

“No!” Ngai spoke more sharply than he wanted to. Emotion was weakness, and he hated to let the old man know how much what he said bothered him. “They were not strong enough to get the gold. It’s still there.”

“And if it’s not?”

Ngai didn’t reply. He couldn’t fathom the gold not being hidden somewhere near the archaeological dig sites around the old city of Loulan.

“If it’s not there,” Hong spoke softly, “then you will have killed your father’s friend for no reason.”

“He defied me,” Ngai replied. “That’s reason enough.”

“S HIKAI , DO YOU HAVE ANY good fish?”

Suen Shikai pulled his small fishing boat onto the shore of the Huangpu River, then looked up at the woman standing on dry land. He was wet from the waist down from walking the boat to shore.

“I do have good fish, Mai.” Suen took a handkerchief from his shirt pocket and mopped his face. The weather was particularly humid along the river.

Mai was overweight and in her forties. She had a husband and three children to care for, and that took all of the hours of her day. She lived in a tenement building not far from where he kept his fishing boat. Whenever he went fishing she came out to offer to buy fish.

Mai’s efforts to buy fish amused Suen. She knew he taught music at the university, but she looked at the simple life he chose and felt certain that he wasn’t making enough money to feed himself. Mai blamed his state of disrepair on Suen’s generosity toward his daughter, Kelly, who had gone to school in the United States. The woman believed that Suen gave all his money to an ungrateful daughter who was ashamed of her father’s poor ways.

But he also knew that Mai figured she could buy fish from him more cheaply than she could anyone else on the river or in the local markets. She had never matched market prices, and Suen had never expected it. She had a hungry family to feed.