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Shanghai was a little easier, although there seemed to be more security inside the terminal; maybe because it was a more important port. It was definitely much larger. I made certain that we took our lanyards with us and put them on again before we arrived back at the ship. I was still nervous, but the dress-rehearsal at Xiamen stood me in good stead and we had no problems. I went first this time, with Benny bringing up the rear. We brought four of the soldiers on board with us, together with the crystal and agate beads, and the finely carved jade beads which had hung around the general’s neck. I had re-strung the jade beads onto a length of nylon fishing line whilst we had been in Shanghai and they looked just like a cheap and gaudy souvenir. We had also brought the pottery figure of the barking dog back to the ship. The aluminium suitcase was filling up.
I had tried to call Benny on reaching the cabin, but there was no reception and I had to hurry out to the promenade deck before he gave me up as a lost cause and took off. I leaned on the rail and could see him standing off to one side of the door at the gangway end of the departure hall, pretending to check through his pockets as though he had lost something. I pressed the speed dial. The phone was up to his ear in a flash.
“What’s wrong?” he burst out, his head flicking from side to side as though half expecting someone to grab him.
“Nothing,” I replied. “There’s no bloody phone reception once you get inside the cabin. Stop looking so damn suspicious!”
“Huh? Where are you?”
“I’m up here leaning on the rail, you dope. Get a bloody move on before they arrest you for loitering.”
He quickly stuffed the phone in his pocket and hurried over to the gangway. I hoped to hell that his nervousness didn’t show on his face as much as it had in his voice.
Once more my heart had begun its relentless pounding and I was beginning to wonder whether it would outlast all the stress I was putting on it.
At Qingdao it was another four of the soldiers, the jade pig and the large greenish-yellow jade disk, a disk which I reckoned was the most valuable item of the lot. Again there were no problems, no-one questioning what we had brought on board and my nerves were finally handling the excitement. We had it all worked out. We had gone off the ship in the early morning and then come back on board for lunch, setting up a pattern, making ourselves known to the staff and to the Chinese security officers on the wharf; and then off once more in the late afternoon and back again with the crowds, and the pieces of treasure. It was getting to be too easy.
Then it was the turn of the port of Dalian. This time we were back with the loot before lunch, changing our pattern in the knowledge that we had it made. Another four soldiers were brought into our cabin together with the bronze mirror, the rest of the jewellery and the gold bracelets. There was only Tianjin on the following day and then we would be leaving China behind. It wouldn’t mean that all of our troubles were over, but the major one would have passed. If we had been caught in China we would be liable to ten years in prison at the very least. At the worst it would be an execution. They don’t hang you in China. It’s one bullet to the back of the head immediately after the conclusion of the trial. There are no appeals. And they would send my parents a bill for the cost of the bullet. If we were caught unloading the goods into Australia it would be merely a monetary penalty.
“Do you think we should stop now, Charlie?” Benny asked as I closed the lid of the third suitcase, locking our treasures away from prying eyes.
“Huh, what do you mean?”
“Well, everything’s gone so smoothly, maybe we should give Tianjin a miss. It’s only another three of the soldiers and the horse.”
“That horse could be worth twenty to thirty thousand dollars, Benny. That little collection in Tianjin would be worth at least fifty thousand dollars. And anyway, if we leave the suitcase in the hotel’s storeroom somebody is going to open it in a month’s time. They’ve got all our details in the hotel register and it wouldn’t take the authorities long before they came after us. They could follow our trail back to your parents’ village.”
The look on his face changed slightly. I wondered then whether he’d had any conversation with his uncle about the time he had spent in prison, about the conditions, the hardships, the degradation.
“Yes, Charlie,” he said slowly. “But I still think we’re pushing our luck a little too far. We could pick up the suitcase and dump it somewhere.”
“Bloody hell, Benny! I didn’t go to all that trouble just to let some bloody Chinese coolie find it on the side of the road and become rich!”
“Yes, yes, Charlie. Okay, okay, we’ll bring it on board.”
“Don’t worry,” I replied, calming down almost immediately. “I’ll tell you what, let’s grab a quick lunch, go ashore again, and then you can show me the sights of Dalian. This time we really will be tourists. We’ll come back on board with nothing but a couple of smiles on our faces and a half-empty bottle of water in the back-back. The ship doesn’t leave until six or seven this evening, so we’ll have plenty of time to do the tourist bit. There’s a fair bit of history here in Dalian, isn’t there?”
“I’d know as much about it as you would, Charlie.”
“But you’re Chinese. You should know all about it.”
“Who was the first Prime Minister of Australia, Charlie?”
“How the hell would I know?”
“Precisely. You know as much about Australia as I know about China. I’ve lived more of my life in Australia than I have in China, now I come to think of it.”
“Yeah, okay, okay. Don’t get your knickers in a twist. But anyway, what do you say? I’ve had a look at the tour brochure the ship gave us. There’s a lot of history here. There’s some place called Port Arthur that was leased to Russia back in 1898 and heavily fortified by the Russians, and then taken over by Japan when they fought the Russians in 1905. The brochure reckons that there’s still a fair amount of Russian influence in some of the buildings in the city. So let’s go and have a look.”
“Okay, Charlie, why not. We probably need to play the tourist for a few hours at least. Somebody asked me yesterday what I’d seen in China so far and I couldn’t think of a thing to tell them. I finished up telling them about Taiyuan and we haven’t been anywhere near the place.”
“Where’s Taiyuan?”
“It’s in the centre of Shanxi Province, my province. Until I left home it was the only other place I’d ever been to, and that was almost twenty years ago. I probably wouldn’t recognise the city now.”
We left the ship at just on two o’clock, carrying only the one back-pack, and that had hardly anything in it: a couple of rain jackets to throw over our heavy parkas if it started to rain, a bottle of water, and my mobile phone. Benny had his in his pocket. We caught the shuttle bus into the main centre of the city and started walking.
“There’s a guy over there following us,” Benny said maybe twenty minutes later as we strolled down one of the main city streets, heading to where the map told us we would find the old Russian quarter.
“Which guy?” I asked.
“The one with the phone up to his ear, dark grey trousers, dark blue Mao jacket, his other hand rammed down into his pocket. He’s on the other side of the street. He’s almost level with the corner.”
I turned around to look at the man. It took me a minute or so to pick him out. They all looked fairly much the same to me.
“The one with the short haircut?” I asked.
“Yes, that one.”
“Why do you think he’s following us?” I asked.
“I saw him down by the ship when we got off.”
“Same guy?”
“Yes, I’m sure of it. He’s one of the few people not wearing a decent padded coat of some kind. His is old and well worn. He looks out of place in a city.”
“Jesus, Benny. You are worse than me. You’re bloody paranoid. Forget him. Come on, where the hell are these Russian buildings the information sheet was talking about?”
“They’re down the next street according to the map.”
We turned the corner and I looked back at the man with the Mao jacket. He kept on walking straight ahead down the main road, not even looking in our direction once. Benny had been reading too many spy novels.
A hundred metres further on we came to a residential area of town which had been occupied by Russians for a few years during the early nineteen-hundreds. Their houses were still there, although many falling into disrepair, several minaret-shaped turrets crumbling in places, paint long since stripped by the wind. We turned into a narrow laneway, walking slowly, looking up at the roofs of the old houses. We both stepped aside as a small van came up behind us. It stopped close alongside and the driver rolled down his window.
“Qing wen!” the driver called.
“What’s he want?” I asked Benny.
“I don’t know. He hasn’t asked yet.”
Benny turned to the driver and I heard the passenger door open and then close. The driver swung his door wide, blocking our way forward as he climbed out. The passenger suddenly appeared at the rear. It was the same man Benny had reckoned was following us, the knife in his hand a clear indication of his intentions.
“The driver’s got a knife, Charlie,” Benny whispered quietly from the side of his mouth.
“So has this guy behind us!” I replied loudly. There was no need to speak quietly; they probably wouldn’t understand what we were saying in any case. “I think we’re being mugged,” I added, my head swivelling from one thug to the other.
And then a third man stepped out of the driver’s door, this one with an iron bar.
There was a rapid spurt of Chinese from the one at the rear of the vehicle.
“He wants us to get in the van,” Benny said quietly, his voice shaking.
“Get ready to run,” I whispered. Maybe they could understand English after all.
There was a snarl from the one wearing the dark blue Mao jacket. The driver threw an arm around Benny’s neck and pointed the knife up under his chin.
We had no option.
The rear doors were opened and Benny was thrust inside. I looked around the laneway but there was no-one to help us. The street we had been walking down before I had stupidly suggested that we have a look at the buildings in the laneway had been filled with vendors selling everything from fur hats to toys for children. If we had stayed on the course set out in the map there would have been a hundred people who could have helped, both tourists and local Chinese.
Calling out might be useless. We were too far into the lane, but it was worth a try.
Before I could even open my mouth I was shoved inside the back of the van and the doors were slammed shut. I heard the sound of a padlock closing. Twenty seconds later, the van moved off. There was a small window in the partition between us and the front seat, but they blocked that as soon as the van had turned back onto the main street at the far end of the lane.
“Who are they Benny?” I asked. “Are they after money, or ransom, or what?”
“I’ve never heard of foreigners being taken for ransom in China, Charlie. And if they mug someone, they usually take their money and mobile phones and run away. And they don’t usually pick on westerners. It’s too dangerous for them. The penalties are very serious if they harm a westerner, a tourist. It’s bad for the economy.”
Benny looked terrified. We sat and did nothing, although we should have tried to kick the door open while we still had the chance. Jumping out of a moving vehicle would have been better than sitting and doing nothing. At one stage the van stopped and one of the passengers got out, slamming the door, and then a few seconds later I heard another door shut and an engine start up.
“Quick, Benny!” I said. “See if we can burst the doors open!”
I jumped up and rushed at the centre of the rear doors, bashing my left shoulder into the metal, forgetting for the moment about the cut the farmer had inflicted on me in the train. There was a searing pain and I almost fainted as I collapsed in a heap on the floor. I saw Benny get up, but before he could hit the door the van started moving again, throwing him sideways and on top of me.
“Jesus, Benny!” I cried. “For Christ’s sake, get off me!”
He slid sideways and I slouched against the side of the van, holding my right hand to my shoulder.
“Sorry, Charlie.”
“Not your fault, Benny.” I took a deep breath and got up on my knees. “Here give me a hand to get my parka and jacket off.”
The cut had opened up again, but with Benny’s help we were able to re-bandage it again and stop the bleeding. I took another couple of painkillers from the bottle in my pocket. It was almost empty. I had stopped taking them several days ago and hadn’t seen the need to buy any more.
An hour or so later the van came to a halt and the rear doors were jerked open. The three men stood in a semi-circle on the ground in front of us. There was a car parked behind them. There was no-one in it and I guessed that it had been the vehicle we had heard starting up when we had tried to burst the van doors open. One of the three must have been driving it.
I went to climb out and Mao-jacket yelled something.
“He wants us to stay in the van and empty our pockets and the back-pack,” Benny said, his voice breaking.
We took everything out, not that there was much: cruise-cards, some cash, my pills and our mobile phones. Mao-jacket picked everything up. He looked at Benny’s cruise-card, then at mine, and threw mine on the ground together with the pills. Benny’s card went into his pocket.
There was a torrent of words from Mao-jacket. Benny seemed to be throwing answers back at him, both he and Benny getting louder and louder. Benny was holding his own, his voice now clear, without the earlier tremor. I stood and felt totally useless. My fate was being decided and I didn’t have a clue as to which way it might go.
“What’s he saying, Benny?” I asked. “What does the mongrel want?”
He didn’t even bother to turn in my direction. The conversation continued on for another half minute or so and then Benny finally turned to me.
“They are looking for objects from a tomb.”
“How the hell did they know we’d taken the stuff?”
“It’s another tomb, Charlie!”
“Another tomb?”
“Yes, not ours. These are some of the guys who were breaking into that tomb in Yuncheng, the ones the police were still chasing. The police caught most of the gang, but these three and the one you had the fight with on the train managed to elude the police. They want to know where he is.”
“Is that all?”
“No, Charlie. They want what was in their tomb. They think we must have followed them to the tomb when we first arrived and then called the cops when we saw them passing tomb goods to the middleman. And when the cops carted the middleman and their other mates off, they think we broke into their tomb and made off with the rest of their stuff. They want it back.”
“Oh shit! What a bloody mess. Have you told them we haven’t got anything of theirs?”
“Yes.”
“And?”
“They don’t believe me, Charlie.”
“You haven’t told them about the stuff we took from our tomb, have you?”
“No, of course not!”
There was a snarl from Mao-jacket and then more Mandarin or some Cantonese village dialect flying backwards and forwards between him and Benny.
“What’s he saying now?” I asked.
“He says that they followed us to Shanghai. They got the name of the hotel from my mother, as you guessed. One of them then followed you to Xiamen. That’s the one they can’t find. He must have been the farmer on the train. They want to know what happened to him.”
“Tell them he grabbed my briefcase, the one with my wallet, my watch and a few other things, took off at a fast rate of knots, and probably jumped from the train. Tell them he could be anywhere. He might even have broken his bloody neck when he jumped.”
“But you didn’t have a briefcase!”
“That doesn’t matter, Benny!” I yelled. “Just bloody tell them!”
I waited while he passed the message on. It seemed to satisfy them in so far as the whereabouts of the farmer was concerned.
“Why didn’t they grab you in Shanghai?” I asked. Benny rattled off a few more sentences in Chinese, listened, and then turned back to me.
“They tried to follow me. They’d learned from someone in the hotel that I was taking the train. But after you warned me, I didn’t take the train. I took the bus, and that threw them right off the track.
“So?” I asked Benny. “How did they find us here?”
“They got someone to go and ask my parents where we were and my mother must have told them that we were leaving from Hong Kong on the Rose Princess. I guess they just figured it out from there. They found out which ports the ship would be calling in to before it left China. One of the other two guys lives here in Dalian. He’s another cousin, I think. That’s his car.” Benny pointed to the old dark-painted rusty sedan parked a few metres away. “The guy with the Mao jacket says that they watched us come ashore this morning with back-packs which looked as though they were full, but seemed to be very light. They lost us when we went into the hotel. We went out the rear entrance, remember.” I nodded my head. “They waited by the terminal and saw us go back on board with heavy back-packs. I think he’s figured it out, he just has the wrong tomb, Charlie.”
“No he hasn’t. He just thinks he has. Tell him that the back-packs contained some clothes which you’d left at the hotel.”
Benny passed the message on and then turned back to me.
“They spoke to the porter at the hotel. They probably bribed the bugger. He told them about the suitcase and how heavy it was. They know it didn’t contain just clothes.”
“Damn! Ask them how they got the picture of us outside the hotel in Linfen.”
There was more backwards and forwards in Chinese.
“We were out of place, or at least you were, Charlie. It’s not a tourist town. They thought that maybe you were a buyer of antiques, so they took our picture. They were going to offer their stuff to you instead of the middle-man. They reckoned they’d get a better price from a laowai.”
“So, what happens now?”
“I offered to go on board with him and show him our cabin and prove that we haven’t got anything.”
“He’d never get on board. He’d never pass the photo check-in.”
“I know that, and you know that. But he doesn’t.”
“So, what does he say?”
“He doesn’t think it’s a good idea. He doesn’t trust me. He thinks I’ll call security down on him, or maybe even take him to the wrong cabin.”
“So how is he going to get the gear off the boat then, the gear that isn’t really there, or which isn’t really his, or theirs, or whatever?”
Once more I was forced to stand with my mouth shut tight and listen to a lot of unintelligible yelling as Benny and Mao-jacket tried to sort each other out.
“He’s going on board,” Benny finally said, shrugging his shoulders.
“How’s he going to do that?” I asked.
“Simple. He’s going to use my cruise-card.”
“Yours?”
“Yes. Your card is no good. Yours is a laowai card.”
“Bloody hell, Benny! Will you stop using that bloody word? It makes me feel like an imbecile.”
“Okay, Charlie. But all it means is foreigner. It’s not an insult.”
“It is the way you bloody use it.”
“Okay, sorry.”
“Forget it. What happens to us in the meantime, and what are the other two monkeys going to do?”
“That’s where it gets interesting,” he replied, trying hard not to smile.
“Oh, yes?”
“We’re going to be tied up in the back of the van and left here. If all goes well, and they manage to get their loot off the ship, one of them will come back tomorrow and let us out.”
“Tomorrow!” I exclaimed. “We’ll freeze to bloody death! And anyway, how the hell is that interesting?”
“That’s not the interesting part.”
“Well, for Christ’s sake will you get to the interesting part?”
“Okay, but you promise not to laugh?”
“What?”
“Promise not to laugh, or even smile. If you do, they’ll know we’re fooling with them.”
“Yeah, right, whatever you say, Benny. Just bloody well get on with it!”
“Our friend here with the Mao jacket will take my cruise card. I told him that the number on the card is the cabin number.”
“There are four digits on the card, Benny, and that’s our passenger number, not the number of the cabin. The cabin number isn’t even on the card.”
“I know that. He doesn’t. I told him that the first number is the number of the deck and the last three numbers are the cabin number. He hasn’t checked your card. If he does, I’ll have to come up with a reason for there being one number difference on the cards.”
“That’s easy,” I replied. “Tell him we’ve got adjoining cabins.”
“Good idea.”
“But he won’t be able to get past the security guys.”
“He might get past the guards in the departure shed, Charlie. But once he gets up the gangway and they take one look at his face, and then at my picture on the screen of that portable scanner, that’ll be the end of it. Even if the crew member operating the scanner is totally careless and doesn’t pick him up because all of us Chinese are supposed to look alike, he won’t be able to find our cabin and they’ll soon be on to him.”
“How does that help us?”
“Well, it gets one of them out of the way.”
“Yeah, but when they start to question him and he starts talking about stuff being raided from a tomb, we’ll be right in it! The ship’s security people will take him straight to the police on the wharf.”
“I don’t think so,” Benny replied. “If he’s smart, he’ll keep quiet about the tomb-robbing. Sneaking onto the ship in the hope of stealing a few wallets carries a much smaller penalty than tomb-robbing. He’ll probably tell them he found the card. You dropped yours once already, remember?” He started to grin at the memory of my panic-stricken episode back in the departure shed in Xiamen and then he saw the look on my face and went serious again. “He won’t tell the police anything about us, Charlie. We should be okay.”
“Okay?” I replied. “You reckon we’ll be okay?”
“Yes.”
“Benny, we will not be okay. We will miss the bloody ship! Even if these other guys let us go free tomorrow, which they probably won’t, we will not be able to get across to Tianjin to catch the ship. We’ll have no money, no papers, and no bloody hope.”
“We’ll just have to try and escape from the van as soon as they leave.”
“You don’t think that one of them won’t stay to keep an eye on us?”
“That’s the other interesting thing.”
“Oh yes?” I replied, wondering what else the future held.
“These two other idiots are going to be paddling a dinghy around the stern of the Rose Princess whilst their genius boss lowers the goodies down on a rope.”
“You are kidding!”
“Charlie! I told you not to smile!”
“I’m not. Are these guys for real?”
“Oh yes, they’ve got it all worked out.”
“Don’t they know that the security around that ship will be as tight as a drum?”
“No, Charlie. These guys are simple farmers from Yuncheng.”
“Bloody hell!”
Fifteen minutes later we were tied hand and foot with light twine, the sort of twine which would have been used on the farm to bind bundles of rice stalks together. My feet were then lashed to a strut on the back of the front partition and Benny’s were tied to a bracket at the rear; and they drove off in the car, without another word. The last thing I saw before they slammed and locked the van door was my bottle of pills lying in the dust.
“Jesus, Benny, what the hell do we do now? We are stuffed! We can’t even get to the door to kick it down.”
“Sorry, Charlie.”
“It’s not your bloody fault. It’s both our bloody fault. We should have known there had to be more of these guys and not just the one on the train.”
I was kicking myself. Why hadn’t we pushed past the driver when he had climbed out of the van and run for our lives? They wouldn’t have chased us out into the main street. We might have received a few cuts as we pushed past, but that would have been all. They hadn’t wanted us dead. They probably wouldn’t have even used the knives. They were only there as a threat.
But it was too late for recriminations.
“What’s the time do you reckon?” I asked.
“How should I know?” Benny replied. “The buggers took my watch.”
They had too. They had taken everything: the back-pack, rain-jackets, our mobile phones, money, and even the small change in our pockets. I was glad I had left my wallet on the ship, otherwise my credit cards, driver’s licence, and all the other bits of paper it contained would have been lost as well. They had taken Benny’s cruise-card and left mine lying on top of an ice puddle in the middle of the road. They had taken Benny’s watch, but not mine.
“Hey, Benny?” I called over my shoulder to him. “Why didn’t they take my watch?”
“Because you only paid ten dollars for it and it’s a load of rubbish.”
“Yeah, well if I twist around and you point your squinty little eyes in the direction of my wrist, you might even be able to tell the time, the digital dial should be large enough! Then tell me whether it’s rubbish or not!”
I managed to roll over onto my stomach, straining my injured shoulder in the process. Gritting my teeth, I aimed the face of the watch towards Benny.
“Well?” I said, waiting for him to speak.
“Hang on,” he replied. “I’m trying to focus on the damn thing. You keep moving about. Keep still!”
“Jesus, Benny. Hurry up for Christ’s sake! My bloody shoulder hurts!”
“It’s four-thirty,” he finally said.
“What time does the ship leave?” I asked.
“We’re supposed to be back on board by six, so I suppose it’ll leave at about six-thirty.”
“Like I said, Benny, we are stuffed. Even if we got out of here right now we’d have no chance of getting back to the ship by then. That mongrel is going to try to get on board and he’ll get stopped for certain. They might think you’re involved with him. And if they check our cabin, if they open our cases, even if they just question him, we are stuffed.”
“Why would they think I’m involved?”
“Because he’s got your bloody card! How would he have got your card unless you gave it to him!”
“Calm down, Charlie. They aren’t going to check our cabin, except to see whether we’re already on board. They’d know I wouldn’t give him the card. They know about pickpockets in China. Nothing will happen until the ship gets over to Tianjin. If we don’t turn up by the time the ship is ready to leave Tianjin, its last port in China, then there’ll be trouble. That’s when they’ll unload our suitcases, and probably empty the safe as well when they go looking for our passports.”
“Oh bugger,” I sighed. “They’ll find the disks and the other small stuff.”
“It’s not looking good, Charlie.”
“What do you reckon those other two guys will do when their boss doesn’t turn up?” I asked. “Or when they see him being led away by the cops?”
“I don’t want to talk about that, Charlie.”
“Why not? What else did the bugger say to you?”
“He threatened to do things to us.”
“What things?” I asked.
“Ah.., he said they would use the knives if they didn’t find their treasures on the ship.”
“Oh shit.”
“I’m worried, Charlie.”
“You’re worried! I’m bloody totally pissed off! We’ve gone to all this trouble! I spent two days and nights in that bloody tomb, and nearly froze to bloody death. I’ve worn my nerves to the bone sneaking stuff around China and onto the ship, had my shoulder sliced open, shoved that other bastard out the train window, and now these jokers have totally stuffed everything up!”
Benny was quiet for a few seconds.
“Who did you shove out the train window, Charlie?”
“The other guy. The one who tried to steal the suitcase. Their mate. The guy from Yuncheng.”
“How fast was the train going? You could have killed him!”
“I already had.”
“What?”
“It was an accident, Benny. Well, sort of. He came at me with the knife and slashed my arm like I told you, but then he came at me again, aiming for my chest. I just acted automatically. I punched my hand forward with my fingers pointing straight ahead and caught him in the front of his throat and crushed his larynx. He choked to death.” I paused for a moment, remembering the way he had clutched at the skin around his throat, trying to pull it out, trying to open up the air passage. “And then I pushed him out the window. But that was after I’d called you.”
Benny’s face had paled, his eyes were wide.
“You killed him?” he asked quietly.
“Yes.”
“But, you really killed him?”
“Yes, Benny.”
“And you weren’t going to tell me?”
“I was going to tell you later, when we got home.”
“So, you didn’t really catch hold of his pocket when he ran away?”
“No.”
“You went through his pockets after he was dead?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, Charlie, we are really stuffed!”
The questions had stopped. Benny lay sideways across the floor of the van, his hands tied behind him, legs tied together and lashed to the bracket, his back leaning against the rear door. I was the mirror image, but up at the front. If we wanted to, we could have moved around, bringing our heads closer together in the centre of the van, but our heads would still have been half a metre or so from each other.
“Where do you think they got the van?” I asked after several minutes of silence had gone by.
“Probably stole it, along with the car they’ve gone off in. I don’t believe for a moment that his cousin owns it. These people don’t have money for cars and vans. They probably only had enough for the bus fare from Yuncheng.”
“What’s that bracket like that you’ve got your feet tied to?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, does it have a sharp edge, or is it rusty, or jagged?”
He pulled his body up into a sitting position and tried to look at the bracket in the dim light of the van. We were lucky that they had removed the covering from the window in the partition separating the back of the van from the driving compartment. I think one of them must have hung his jacket over the sheet of glass when we left the lane in Dalian. If he hadn’t needed the jacket we would have been in almost complete darkness. There wasn’t much light seeping underneath the rear doors.
“The bracket is round, but maybe a little rusty. There’s no jagged edge that I can see, and it seems to be fairly strong. I don’t think I can break it.”
“Do you think you can move your legs up and down and try to fray through the cord? I’ll do the same at my end. They’ve used plenty of cord, but it’s thin. We only need to wear through one strand.”
I don’t know how long we struggled, our backs on the hard floor. It seemed to be easy at first, just moving my feet up a few centimetres and then down again, but soon my thigh muscles started to scream and I was grateful for the hardness of the floor under my shoulders. It gave me something else to think about. The only consolation was that the constant movement stopped us from freezing our backsides off.
“This is hopeless, Charlie,” Benny said, groaning.
“Think what the alternative is, Benny,” I replied. “Just keep thinking of the knives two of them were carrying. That’ll keep you moving a while longer.”
He was quiet again and I heard the pace of his moving feet increase.
“Hey! Charlie!”
“What?”
“I think I’ve done it!” There was a pause of a few seconds. “I have! One of the cords is through!”
“Can you move your feet apart?”
“No, not yet.”
“Keep working on it, Benny. See if you can break through another strand.”
Five minutes later he gave another cry of victory. I turned my head and looked back at the bracket by his feet and I saw the strands start to unwind. And then he pushed himself to his knees.
“I’ve done it, Charlie.”
“Good man, Benny. Now slide over here and back up to my hands. I’ll see if I can get your wrists untied.”
Five minutes later I had managed to untie his hands, and then it was my turn.
“How do we get out of the van?” Benny asked. “We tried bashing it down before and that didn’t work.”
“Shouldn’t be too difficult if we both try together,” I replied, getting down on my back again, my legs drawn up to my chest and feet aimed at the seam between the two doors.
“Care to join me, Benny?”
Three or four thumps later, the doors jerked open, the hasp snapping, and we climbed out into the cold of the evening.
“What’s the time?” Benny asked.
“Almost six.”
It had taken us the best part of an hour and a half to free ourselves. I was worried that we might have taken too long. The tomb robbers should have found out by now that they couldn’t get onto the ship. They might be just down the road from us, angry, and trying to figure out how they could get us to bring the items to them. I knew what I would have done if it had been me. They should have thought of it and not raced off with their hair-brained scheme. I would have sent either Benny or me back to the ship with instructions to bring the goodies ashore, with the threat that if the delivery wasn’t made, the other would have his throat cut. They hadn’t thought of that, but they still had the choice. If they drove all night they could take us to meet the ship in Tianjin in the morning. How long would it be before they returned?
I turned to Benny, but he had gone.
“Benny! Where the hell are you?”
“Round here!” he replied. “Check this out.”
I ran around to the front of the van. “What?”
“The key is jammed into the ignition. It won’t come out!”
“Huh?”
“The key is jammed in. That’s why they were able to steal it. Those guys wouldn’t have had any idea how to hot-wire a vehicle. They had to grab one with a key in the ignition. Quick, jump in. Let’s get the hell out of here!”
I raced around to the other side and climbed in. Benny turned the key. The motor turned over slowly, and then stopped. He tried again, but it was the same, with the sound of the moving pistons even weaker than before.
“It’s too bloody cold and the battery is nearly dead!” I yelled, and thumped the dashboard with my fist. The road we were on was flat, but full of potholes and corrugations. There was no way we could push-start the vehicle. “Pump the accelerator a couple of times and try it again, and keep the starter-motor going.”
He turned the key again. The motor turned over, slowed, then turned over again, and then a couple of cylinders fired and after a second or two the others joined in, and I let out the breath I had been holding. Benny dropped it into first gear and started to move off.
“Wait!” I yelled and jumped out of the van.
“What?” he yelled after me.
“My cruise-card and my painkillers! Back up and turn the headlights on.”
A minute later I was back in the van, my cruise-card in my pocket.
“Where the hell are we?” I asked after I had swallowed two of the pills. There was now only one left in the bottle, but I could get more on the ship if I needed them. “Do you have any idea where the port is?”
“No.”
We were on a narrow dirt road lined with trees, their branches completely devoid of leaves, their thin trunks painted white and receding into the misty distance. If they had left us and not returned, and we hadn’t managed to get ourselves free, we might have been saved by some farmer travelling along the road, but only if we heard him moving past, and only if we had been able to make sufficient noise to attract his attention, and only if he then bothered to walk across and check inside the van. There were too many ifs and there would be too much time elapsing between each one. We would have died of the cold before help finally arrived.
“Which way should we go?” Benny asked.
“Turn around and go back the way they must have come.”
“What if they’re on their way back and we run into them?”
“We’ll just have to risk it,” I replied. “If they are, aim the van straight at them. They’re only farmers. They’ll chicken-out first and we’ll run them off the road and into the ditch.”
Ten minutes later we left the rutted track and hit the bitumen. There’d been no sign of the farmers. Benny pulled the van to a halt.
“Left or right, Charlie?” he asked.
I stepped out of the van and climbed up onto the roof.
“There’s a bit of a glow on the horizon to the right,” I called down to him. “It might be the lights of Dalian. Head that way. If there’s anyone walking on the road, stop and ask them.”
It didn’t take long, perhaps only ten minutes later.
“We’re about forty kilometres from Dalian,” Benny said after he had finished speaking to the two young men we met walking towards us along the side of the road. “But it’s going to take us the best part of half to three-quarters of an hour to get there, and another ten or so minutes to get to the port.”
I looked at my watch. It was almost six-fifteen. The ship would be leaving in fifteen minutes. I didn’t think they would wait for us.
“We’ll miss the ship,” I told him.
“That’s for certain. So what do we do now?”
“I don’t exactly know,” I replied. “We’ve got to contact the ship, but we can’t tell them what happened.”
“Why not?” he asked.
“Well, let’s face it. Why would someone kidnap us and then try to get on the ship with your card? It doesn’t make sense. It’s not logical. We’ve got to come up with some excuse for us missing the ship and for you losing your card.”
We finally decided that we would tell the ship that we had picked up a couple of girls and they had taken us to some place in a taxi. Let the staff on the ship come to their own conclusions as to what we had in mind. We’d say that we had a few drinks with the girls and the next thing we both knew it was dark and the girls had gone, and so had everything of value that we had been carrying, except my watch of course. My cruise-card had been in the inside pocket of my parka, and they must have missed it.
“Have you still got that copy of the Princess Patter in your back pocket?” I asked.
“The what?”
“The Patter. That bloody daily newsletter thing they hand out every evening on the ship.”
“Oh that. Yes, why?”
“There’s a phone number in there to use if you get into trouble on shore, like missing the bloody ship for instance.”
“We don’t have a phone any more, remember?’
“We’ll borrow one.”
Benny looked at me again, shook his head as though to say that I was the eternal optimist, and then went back to his driving and was silent for five minutes or so.
“What if they ask us what the girls looked like?” he asked at the end of those five minutes.
“They were bloody Chinese! They all look the bloody same!”
“To you they might, Charlie, but not to me!”
“Okay, they were both a bit shorter than you and me, with dark hair, maybe fake boobs, too much eye shadow, and we can’t remember what they were wearing. Will that do?”
“Okay, Charlie. No need to get stroppy!”
“Sorry, mate.”
“What if they ask how we got back to the port?” Benny asked.
“We’ll tell them that a guy in a van just like this one picked us up on the other side of town and gave us a lift into the centre of the city.”
“Sounds logical,” he replied.
“It sounds good to me, Benny. They’ll be so pissed off at us for going with a couple of hookers and getting rolled that they mightn’t bother to think of any other reason why we might’ve missed the ship.”
“It’ll depend on what happened when the farmer tried to get on board,” Benny replied. “Or what happened after he got on board.”
“What farmer?” I asked.
“The boss guy, the tomb robber, the mongrel with the dark blue Mao jacket!” Benny was stirred up. I hadn’t seen him so annoyed. He was usually fairly calm about most things, but these men had really got to him. I guess when someone threatens to cut your throat, it does something to you.”
“Oh yeah,” I said quietly. I’d forgotten about Mao-jacket for the moment.
We were both silent for another few minutes.
“We might have to be ready to cut and run, Charlie.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Well, if he got caught and told the police everything, we are in big trouble.”
“Yeah, well, let’s cross that bridge when we come to it. You just keep your eyes on the road and concentrate on your driving.” Benny was one of those drivers who had to look you in the face when he spoke to you.
The ship had definitely left port when we arrived, although we thought we could see it in the distance, heading west across the sea towards Tianjin.
“Let’s find someone with a mobile and make that phone call,” I said.
“What about the van?” Benny asked.
“What about it?”
“Well, it’s stolen.”
“We didn’t steal it from those guys,” I replied. “We just borrowed it.”
“Yes, but they stole it! If the police find us with it, we’ll be in even bigger trouble!”
“Oh, yeah, good thinking, Benny. Park it over there and we’ll head off on foot.”
We both looked like fugitives from the law as we climbed out of the van and slunk away around the corner and then down the street. Fifty metres further on we turned the corner into a wider road and started looking for someone who would lend us their mobile. The third person we stopped, a young student eager to practice his English, agreed to let us make a local call on his phone. I offered to swap my almost new watch to cover the cost, but he declined. Charlie stifled a grin as he read out the number of the ship’s agent from the Princess Patter.
The phone rang at least ten times and was finally picked up.
“Wei!”
“Do you speak English?” I asked. There was a pause and then another voice came on the phone.
“Yes, please.”
“Hi,” I said. “Ah, we’ve missed the ship, the Rose Princess. We got your number from the Princess Patter.”
“You are Mr Lawson?” the voice asked.
“Yes, that’s right. And I’m with Mr Yee, Benny Yee.”
“You have missed the ship.”
“That’s right.” Who was this idiot? “That’s what I said!” I told myself to calm down.
“Ah, yes. They very worried about you. Where are you?”
“We’re both down near where the ship was docked.” I turned to Benny and the young lad whose phone I was using. “Where are we exactly?” I asked.
The young lad took the phone and started rattling off directions to our friend on the other end, and then passed it back to me.
“Okay. You wait. I come to you. Maybe fifteen minute. Okay?”
“Yeah, great,” I replied. “We’ll see you then.” He had ended the call before I could thank him.
I handed the mobile back to the young student and we chatted with him whilst we waited for the shipping agent to arrive, practicing our story about the two young women and how they had duped us and stolen all our things. He was quite ashamed that such a thing could happen to us in his city.
The shipping agent was grinning as we climbed into his car, me in the front and Benny in the back.
“What’s funny?” I asked.
“Not funny, very serious, but funny all same,” he replied, the grin growing wider.
“Benny,” I said. “Ask him what he’s on about.”
He and Benny seem to chat on for five minutes or more, with both of them laughing every now and then. Every time I butted in and asked Benny what the joke was, he would signal me to be quiet and then turn back to the shipping agent. After what seemed an age, he turned back to me, and related what the agent had told him.
I suppose it would have been funny, if you had been there to see it. The tomb-robber farmer, Mao-jacket, had managed to get past the Chinese security officer at the entrance to the wharf using Benny’s cruise-card, and then past the member of the ship’s security staff standing at the bottom of the gangway, although this young woman wasn’t too sure and had called up to the crew member at the top of the gangway, the one with the hand-held scanner, putting him on notice. The farmer didn’t exactly look like the typical passenger in his dark blue Mao jacket with mismatched patches in the elbows. One glance at Benny’s picture on the screen was enough to tell the Indian crew member that there was a problem. He called security on his radio. The farmer realised he was in trouble, yelled at the Indian, and then took off along the promenade deck with two or three security personnel chasing him. He made it to the stern of the ship, got around to the other side and was half way along the starboard side when he saw another security person rounding from the bow and heading towards him. He did an about-turn, saw that the security people behind him were only metres away, and promptly leapt over ship’s rail and started swimming out into the harbour. If he had jumped over the rail on the other side of the ship he would have landed on the concrete wharf and killed himself. The security people didn’t know what to do. One of them started pulling off his shoes and jacket. The others restrained him. There were hand-held radios spurting messages left right and centre, and then this battered aluminium dinghy came churning across the water, apparently from nowhere, fished the farmer out of the freezing water, and disappeared into the gloom.
“What, and they never caught him?” I asked.
“No,” Benny replied. “They reckon that it’s never happened before, at least not here in Dalian.”
“Well,” I said. “My goodness. How shocking.” And then I started to laugh. It couldn’t have worked out better. We were still in the game. It was just as well the farmer’s two mates had stolen something with an outboard motor and not some leaky plywood dinghy with only a pair of oars. They would have been caught for certain.
“Where are we going now?” I asked Benny.
“I take you to hotel,” the ship’s agent said.
“What about the ship?”
“Tomorrow I take you to airport. You fly to Tianjin and take taxi to port.”
“Hey, that’s great!” I replied. This was service indeed.
“You pay ship for all costs. Ship pay me. Very expensive!” He doubled up with laughter. “Very funny. He run round and round ship and jump in water. Very funny.”
“Yeah, right,” I replied. I was cold, tired, my shoulder had started throbbing again, and I was starving. But I was happy. We’d come out smelling like roses.
He was correct about it being expensive. The hotel was four-star and we paid top tourist price, and the flight was the same. He showed us both accounts before we boarded the aircraft and asked us to sign his invoice.
“No signing, no flying,” he said with a grin. We both signed.
We were back on board the ship in Tianjin just after ten in the morning and then the explanations started. They wanted to know how the farmer had got hold of Benny’s cruise card. We didn’t know. We told them that the girls must have either given it to him or sold it to him. The interview lasted over an hour, with us promising not to even talk to any more girls on shore.
“Oh, boy!” Benny sighed as the door slammed behind us in our cabin. “Am I glad to be back here!” He spread out on the bed, pushing his shoes off with his feet and making himself comfortable.
“Don’t close your eyes, Benny. We’ve still got things to do.”
“You’re not going after the rest of the stuff are you?” he asked, eyes wide.
“Why not?”
“Well, haven’t we made ourselves obvious enough as it is?”
“How? All we’ve done is missed the ship. We haven’t been pulled up by the cops or anything. Anyway, we have to go and get the rest of it.”
“Why do we?” he asked, his voice quiet. “Just leave it there. What we’ve got under the beds is enough.”
“Yes, and in a month or so what happens when they go to sell our unclaimed suitcase?”
I could almost hear the thoughts slowly running around in his brain. He raised himself up and sat at the end of the bed.
“Yes, okay,” he finally replied, as though I had told him that it was his turn to do some unpleasant task and I would be sitting back doing nothing. “We’ll go and get it.”
“Don’t be so negative, Benny.”
“What about the farmer and his mates? What about the knives? They’ll be looking for our blood.”
“They’ll be licking their wounds somewhere back in Dalian,” I replied quickly. “The first thing they would’ve done when they got to shore would be to go back and check out the van. It won’t be there. It’ll be dark by the time they get to where they think they left it. They’ll probably think they’ve forgotten exactly where they put it. They’ll go back again in the morning, when it’s light, and then realise that the van has gone. They’ve got no money. It’s not like they could fly from Dalian to here like we just did. It’s just under four hundred kilometres from Dalian straight across here to Tianjin. It’s too far for them to come in that small boat they got from somewhere. And if they tried to come by public transport, or if they used that car they stole, it would take them at least twelve hours to go right around the bay. It’s over eight hundred kilometres by road. We don’t have to worry about them. Trust me.”
“Maybe they’ve got some friends here, Charlie.”
“Bloody hell, Benny!” I said, yelling, and then realised how thin the walls between the cabins were and lowered my voice. “If they’d had any mates they would’ve been with them back there in Dalian. They’ve got no mates. They are four hundred kilometres away on the other side of the bay. Don’t worry!”
We made another visit to a MacDonald’s after collecting the suitcase from the hotel, and left the suitcase with a beggar on the side of the footpath. I didn’t think he was too impressed. I was on the point of bending down to take it back from him when Benny shook his head. At least I’d had the satisfaction of seeing the beggar’s hand curl around the handle and grip it tight when I’d reached for it.
We headed back to the ship.
“This is it, Charlie,” Benny said as he went to move ahead of me towards the departure hall. “The fifth and final walk. I feel like the condemned man on the way to the scaffold.”
“Jesus, Benny. For Christ’s sake, that’s enough!”
My mind went back to the screen on my laptop a month or so ago, to the pages on the internet describing various penalties which had been imposed on tomb robbers. The penalties for normal run-of-the mill looting ran from three to ten years. The more serious looters got life. But then there were the looters executed in 1987 for trying to sell the head of one of Xian’s famous terracotta warriors to a foreign dealer for $81,000. And then in May 2003 three men had been executed for plundering tombs dating back two thousand years! I asked myself what was the difference in looting a two-thousand-year-old tomb and one dating back only fifteen hundred years. Would they execute only one of us we were caught?
“We’re pushing this thing too far, Charlie,” Benny said quietly. “Maybe we should dump this lot somewhere. All we need is one conscientious customs guy and we will be caught. They will check the cabins and find everything. That’s all it needs, Charlie, just one guy.”
But what was the chance of them catching us? Another web page had told me that an estimated two hundred thousand tombs had been broken into between 1998 and 2003. That was over two hundred and fifty a week! The odds had to be heavily in our favour, even if we were only amateurs.
“Not a problem, Benny,” I said, although I could still feel the leaden sensation in the pit of my stomach. “It’ll all be smooth. Take my word for it.”
I watched him clear through the first Chinese security officer and move deeper into the departure hall, and then he disappeared from view. Without our mobile phones, which the farmers had taken, neither of us could warn the other if something went wrong. Ten minutes later it was my turn to take the long walk. I got through both Chinese security stations and walked confidently up to the bottom of the gangway and kept moving, then presented my cruise-card to the ship’s security officer at the head of the gangway, waited while he scanned it in, and then moved off into the ship itself. We were home, almost. There was just the one final x-ray and we were home free.
“Ah, Mr Lawson,” an official-sounding voice said behind me. “Don’t worry, it’ll probably be okay.” I spun around to see one of the ship’s security officers standing off to one side near the front of the x-ray machine, a frown on his face.
“What?” I said, my voice almost croaking. “What’ll be okay?”
“You and your friend.”
“What about me and Benny?”
“Well, he came on board ten minutes or so ago without you. He didn’t look too happy, so I sort of guessed that you’d had an argument or something. That was certainly some situation the pair of you got yourselves into at Dalian.” And then his face broke out into a grin.
“No,” I replied. “No argument. Well, only a small one. I wanted to stay on shore longer and he wanted to get back early. He won. No big deal.”
I could feel the perspiration running down my back even though the temperature out on the dockside had been down to almost freezing. I laid my back-pack on the conveyor belt and watched it slide into the x-ray machine and out the other side. I kept my eyes straight ahead, grabbed the bag, and kept moving until I reached the cabin.
Benny spun around when I burst in.
“What did you say to the guy operating the x-ray machine?” I demanded.
“Nothing. Why?”
I told him what had happened.
“You know what this means, don’t you, Charlie?”
“Yeah,” I replied. “They know us now. We’re familiar faces. The guys on the gangway know that we share a cabin. When we get off and go through Australian Customs, we have to go together. If we go off separately, somebody is going to notice and start asking questions. What a bugger. I could kill that mongrel farmer!”
“You did, Charlie,” Benny said quietly. “You did exactly that, well, his cousin anyway.”