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Dr. Ma winced. Apparently this was not how he wanted to transmit this information to the Millers. However, they showed neither concern nor shock, which seemed very strange to Hulan.
“Brian was one of my students,” Stuart informed them. “Did you know that? I sponsor graduate students to do archaeological work in China.”
“Why?” Hulan asked.
“He’s a rapacious collector,” his daughter boasted. “Absolutely rapacious.”
“I like fine things.” Stuart’s smile didn’t break for an instant, but then he hadn’t become a billionaire by telegraphing his thoughts or emotions.
Catherine’s laugh floated out like bubbles.
“Cat,” her father warned.
“You can’t take antiquities out of the country,” David pointed out.
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Stuart rubbed his forearm. “I know that. But as you’ll see, everyone here expects the worst of me because I’m a capitalist. The truth is, I support a lot of the archaeological work that’s being done on the river. We’ve got to save as much as we can before it disappears forever.”
“That’s pretty altruistic—”
“If it’s true, you mean?” Stuart finished. David shrugged, and the businessman laughed good-naturedly. “Look, I can help get things out of the ground, but I can’t get them out of the country. However, if they get out some other way and are put up for sale at public auction, what can I do? I’m a collector. If the documentation is in place, I’d be a fool not to buy something I like.”
A loud bell sounded, followed by the clank of shovels and picks being dropped. The day workers walked down the hill. The people who’d been crouching under the canopies stretched their legs, brushed the dirt off their clothes, and also began wandering down the hill.
“Lunch,” Ma explained, eager to break up the conversation. “Come, Mr. Miller. You and your daughter should be first in line.” Ma led his two guests toward an open-sided tent down by the river.
“He seems knowledgeable but awfully territorial,” David said after the threesome set off.
“He’s very clever,” Hulan agreed, “but he’s worried.” She stood and rubbed her hands together. Somewhere along the way she’d picked up something sticky. “I’ll wait for Investigator Lo’s report on the people down here, but I don’t have to read Ma’s dangan to know that he’s probably hiding something. As for Stuart and Catherine Miller—”
“They should be interviewed separately,” David said.
Hulan looked up at him and smiled. He took some loose strands of her hair and gently tucked them behind her ear. “Let’s go down,” he said. “I’m starved.”
And though it broke all rules of professional decorum, they walked down to the eating tent hand in hand.
THE DAY WORKERS GATHERED TOGETHER IN A THIN SLICE OF shade formed by the shadow of the mountain, eating their lunches from tin containers. The official site workers—the Chinese students and the foreigners—sat at long tables under a canopy. A buffet of rice, noodles, and a bland-looking concoction of chicken and vegetables had been set up.
After making sure that Hulan and David had served themselves, Dr. Ma led them farther under the tent. Even here people separated themselves into little hierarchical bands. Ma passed the student tables as too lowly. He stopped at the last table, where Catherine and Stuart Miller were eating. People scooted down the bench to make room for David and Hulan, who sat together, with their backs to the mountain, the river coursing before them. Yet the appearance of two strangers didn’t seem to matter to those at the table, who didn’t pause for even a moment in their heated conversation.
“Are you crazy?” a man with steel-rimmed glasses asked, his German accent heavy. “The Nine Tripods? There’s no way—”
“Why couldn’t they exist? Why couldn’t they be right here?” This came from a blond woman with an English accent.
“How about because eight of them disappeared in a fire over two thousand years ago?” the German shot back. “And by that time one had already been lost on the Sie River, which is not the Yangzi.”
In just these few moments, Hulan realized that the lunch conversation would be sprinkled with specialized interests discussed in professional jargon. She and David would need to listen carefully, discarding what was unimportant and homing in on what was vital to their respective cases.
Catherine seemed to sense this, and she addressed David. “They’re talking about the bronze vessels that Yu the Great made to create a visual map of his empire,” she explained. “Each tripod looked like a bowl standing on three legs. Together they passed from dynasty to dynasty as emblems of power. What happened to the Nine Tripods is intriguing to archaeologists like us, but most people have never heard of them.”
The Englishwoman picked up again as though Catherine hadn’t spoken. “Artifacts have disappeared throughout history. That doesn’t mean that they don’t exist or that they can’t be found or even that they’re where we think they should be. Think of King Tut’s tomb or the terra-cotta warriors—”
Dr. Ma put his hand over the woman’s hand and asked, “Lily, can we put aside Yu the Great and your lost tripods for a few minutes so I can introduce all of you to our newcomers?”
Ma began with team members at the far end of the table. Professor Franz Schmidt, the German, was a heavyset semiologist from the University of Heidelberg. Next to him sat Dr. Annabel Quinby, a dour-looking archaeologist from Harvard. Across from her was a much older man with a bad sunburn and a peeling bald head. Dr. Paul Strong had retired long ago from Cambridge, where his specialty was linguistic anthropology. Six Chinese sat at the table, one of whom was Chinese American. Dr. Michael Quon, Ma explained, had many fields of expertise, and they were honored to have him visiting the site from his home in California. The other five Chinese were representatives from different provincial museums. “We call them the five vultures, isn’t that right, gentlemen?” Ma asked.
The five nodded wearily. Apparently they’d heard this opening many times before and knew where it was going. So had the foreigners, who listened with only moderate interest.
