The Faceless Client

The party that hired Shen Zhaoye to go into that imperial tomb has no face.

The name on the surface is the Global Cultural Relics Preservation Foundation. Registered in Singapore, an office in Switzerland, a board whose nationalities are uniformly impossible to place. The website is clean: a few photographs of grotto restoration, a few of pottery being pieced back together, 3 paragraphs about a cooperative project with UNESCO. It pays, it clears the customs duty, it buys the insurance; the Shanghai middleman in antiquities took 3 jobs from it last year and not one of them went wrong — except that the men who sited the vaults on those 3 jobs cannot be reached now.

The contract runs to 2 sheets with no company letterhead, carrying only a Hong Kong PO box number, a Swiss bank account identifier, and a line saying it is valid for 30 days. The flap of the envelope is perfectly clean, with no embossed seal and no identifying code.

The fee is 5 million US dollars, paid in 3 stages: 300,000 on signing, 1.2 million on reaching the site and fixing the coordinates, and the remaining 3.5 million once the thing they want has been taken out of the tomb and delivered safely. The middleman takes 15%.

What they want is put vaguely: an object outside the official histories, said to have been buried in this tomb. Appearance, material, dimensions — none of it is given; you identify it on site. The location is withheld as well. They hold an old map marked with the rough lie of the mountains and a watercourse that no longer exists, shown to you in person for 10 minutes on the day of signing: no photographs, nothing taken away, no copies.

Another sheet was tucked into the envelope, with photographs of 2 faces on it, one the middleman's and one Shen Zhaoye's own, taken 2 months earlier at the ramen shop on the third floor of Taipei Main Station. On the back of the photograph, 2 lines in small characters:

Mr. Shen, the compass your grandfather brought home from Xi'an all those years ago should, by rights, deflect 3 degrees of its own accord tonight. We have no objection to your confirming that first and deciding afterward whether to sign.

That night the needle began to swing in the ninth minute, counterclockwise, 1 degree first, then 2, 3 in all, and then it stopped.

A client willing to spend that kind of money while refusing to show even who he is does not have gold, silver or jade on his list. Whatever they are collecting, someone has to bring it out of the tomb for them.