Murder on the Silk Road Read Online Free PDF Page A

listened.”
    “ Some of them are vulnerable,” the chief corrected. He nodded at the Spirit Path to the east of the sunken garden. The path was lined by a double row of weathered stone tomb figures that must have been ten feet tall, and weighed a couple of tons apiece. “I don’t think anyone’s about to haul those away.”
    “Do you have any leads?” asked Charlotte.
    “One,” said Bunny as she fished around in her big straw handbag. “Which is why we asked you to come here today.” Pulling out an airmail letter with a Chinese postmark, she handed it to Charlotte.
    The letter was from the Bureau of Cultural Properties of the People’s Republic of China, and specifically from a Mr. George Chu, who was identified as the director of the Dunhuang Research Academy at the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas in Dunhuang, Gansu Province.
    Charlotte looked up. “Did the sculpture come from Dunhuang?”
    Bunny shrugged her wide shoulders, from which hung a white cable-stitch cashmere sweater. “All I know is that my in-laws bought the sculptures on their collecting trips to the Far East. It’s very probable that it’s from Dunhuang. I don’t think the Chinese government would go to all this trouble if it wasn’t.”
    Charlotte turned back to the letter, which identified the sculpture as coming from Cave 206, and having been removed in the earlier part of this century. It went on to say that scholars working at the Dunhuang Research Academy had traced the statue to an art dealer in Hong Kong, and from there to the Oglethorpe collection. Apart from restoring the paintings and sculptures in the caves, the letter said, one of the Academy’s major goals was to seek the return of artworks “stolen” by Western museums and art collectors.
    “Therefore, we beg you to restore this precious sculpture to its rightful owner, the People’s Republic of China,” the letter concluded. “What we hope is that Dunhuang can eventually be reconstituted as a single unit with everything intact as it was at the turn of the century and as it should be. The artworks that have been stolen from Dunhuang are China’s national treasures and I feel very strongly in my heart that they should be in China.”
    “I don’t understand,” said Charlotte as she finished reading the letter. “What does this have to do with the fact that the sculpture is missing? Do you think the Chinese stole it back?”
    “I’ll defer that question to Chief Tracey,” said Bunny.
    “Not exactly, but pretty close,” he replied. “There have been a series of international thefts of artworks that originally came from Dunhuang. Some manuscripts were stolen from the British Museum; some temple paintings were stolen from the Louvre; another piece of sculpture was stolen from the Fogg Museum at Harvard. That one’s on Interpol’s list of the twelve most wanted stolen art objects. And there have been others as well. Interpol has succeeded in tracing some of these items back to Dunhuang. The Academy has refused to return them. They claim they were stolen in the first place.”
    “Did they steal them, then?”
    “This fellow Chu denies it,” said Tracey, “and Interpol tends to believe him. A more likely scenario is that they were stolen by an individual or a group of individuals who were using the letters sent out by Chu as guides as to what artworks to target next. Every institution or individual”—he nodded at Bunny—“that has had an artwork stolen has received one of these letters.”
    “What would their motivation be?” asked Charlotte. “Patriotism?”
    “Ayuh,” said Tracey, using the Maine substitute for the affirmative. “There have been a number of cases where the theft of artworks has been motivated by patriotism. For example, a Mexican journalist stole—or liberated, depending on your point of view—an Aztec codex from the French National Library; a group of Scottish nationalists stole the Stone of Scone from Westminster Abbey; and an