A Deadly Injustice anzm-2 Read online

  A Deadly Injustice

  ( A Nick Zuliani Mystery - 2 )

  Ian MORSON

  Nick Zuliani hails from Venice, though his mother is English. Estranged from his father, he has become a bit of a wheeler-dealer and conman. An unfortunate incident (told in one of my short stories) results in him fleeing the Serene Republic. But, as bodyguard to Friar Alberoni, he ends up at the heart of the Mongol Empire in the 13th century where he has to solve some unusual murder cases.

  BOOK TWO: A DEADLY INJUSTICE

  A Nick Zuliani Mystery set in Kubilai Khan's court – Cathay, 1268. Nick Zuliani and Lin Chu-Tsai are sent to a provincial town to investigate the case of a young Chinese girl condemned to death for murder. They encounter an acting troupe, and a soon-to-be-famous playwright who is keen to see Mongol justice being taken to task. Zuliani and Lin are faced with a dilemma. Do they confirm the girl's guilt in the face of contrary evidence in order to save themselves? Or stand up to the local Mongol governor, and risk the wrath of the Great Khan?

  Ian Morson

  A DEADLY INJUSTICE

  2011

  PREFACE

  The extraordinary life of Niccolò Zuliani (1232?- 1320?) is only just coming to the notice of scholars as various documents begin to emerge from China. That he preceded Marco Polo to the heart of Kubilai Khan’s Mongol Empire is now undisputed. The details of his life there are a matter for scholarly argument and debate. Much of what we know to date is based on the account known as The Life and Travels of Messer Niccolò Zuliani written by the Chinese scholar Xian Lin in the early 1300s. He claims to have copied down his account ‘from the lips of Messer Zuliani in the last years of his long and varied life.’ However, it now appears that by 1310 Zuliani was no longer in China, but back in Venice, where he lived for at least another ten years. But if Lin’s words about Zuliani’s ‘last years’ are not taken literally, and perhaps as meaning his last years in Cathay, then there is no conflict in these facts.

  How Zuliani arrived in Kubilai’s summer capital, Shang-tu – more dramatically called Xanadu by some – has already been told in the first volume of his travels (City of the Dead, Severn House, 2008). This second volume centres on an investigation undertaken by Zuliani deeper inside Cathay, and is intriguing for scholars for a particular reason. He watches, for the first time, a Chinese play in the genre kung-an, or crime case, and he meets a playwright called Guan Han-Ching. A person called Kuan or Guan Hanqing is now deemed to be one of the most accomplished of the playwrights from Yuan times in China. His best known play is The Injustice to Dou-E or Snow in Midsummer, concerning the unjust execution of a young woman. She is exonerated, and calls down curses on the people who executed her, including a fall of snow in midsummer. If the playwright that Zuliani met was indeed the same person – and the case Zuliani is investigating has some vague resemblance to the story of Guan’s play – then this is a very intriguing insight into a period when the Mongols were patrons of the theatre. Was the playwright we know the one in the chronicles? If so, then Guan emerges as a person concerned with justice and the conflict between Chin and Mongol ways. This is especially intriguing as Zuliani’s chronicler, Xian Lin, claims of his text that ‘every word is accurate.’ After studying it for a year, I have no reason to believe otherwise.

  Dr Brian Luckham

  Manchester Trafford University, 2011

  PROLOGUE

  The old man spooned the last of the nutritious soup into his toothless mouth, and lay back feeling satisfied. Things were working out beautifully. The girl seemed more amenable now he had beaten her. She obviously could not have learned from her previous husband about the Three Duties of a woman. They were obedience to your father before marriage, obedience to your husband after marriage, and obedience to your son after your husband’s death. Always obedience, and always to the male line. He guessed that perhaps her first husband had not lasted long enough to instil the concept of her duties into her properly with a stick as he should have done. It was said that he was a sickly boy, who had grown up into a sickly man not suited to marriage. His mother had arranged for the girl to marry him, probably against her will. At twenty, soon after she got married, she had been made a widow. This naturally made her a tarnished woman, as she had belonged to another. Though he surmised that, being weak and ill, the husband may not have even carried out his obligations as a husband. She could still be a virgin, but he didn’t know. He supposed she might make a fuss if he tried to test her with an egg as many did in rural areas. He thought he would insist on it all the same. But be that as it may, the old man knew he could not be choosy when it came to finding a wife for his stupid son. It had taken him a while, with several rejections and much compromising, before the girl had come to his attention. Yes, this one would do. Especially as she came with a mother-in-law, who would suit his needs. A double wedding could be arranged. And if it didn’t work out for him concerning the old lady, he could have the young girl for himself.

  His stomach rumbled, and he felt some discomfort bubble up. When he tried to ease around on his bed in order to find a more comfortable spot, he found he couldn’t. He realized that his legs seemed to be numb, and he had some difficulty turning over. He cursed his old age, and coughed harshly. His chest felt tighter than usual, and he found it difficult to draw in a deep breath. Once again his bowels bubbled, and he clenched his buttocks against an uneasy feeling of looseness. He felt a wave of nausea suddenly rising, and didn’t know if he would vomit or shit first. He began to panic and tried to rise from his bed but his limbs were useless, not responding to his increasingly sluggish brain. He felt very ill, and tried to call out for help. But the only sound he could make was a sort of rattle in his throat. His vision began to dim, and his head spun. Finally his guts gave up the struggle and gurgled horrendously. His last act before dying was to besmirch himself from both ends at once.

  ONE

  Better a diamond with a flaw than a pebble without one.

  I needed to get away fast. I was being pursued by a mad dog in the shape of a Keshikten Guard. And as you know, the Keshikten are not to be messed with. I mean, anyone whose job it is to be bodyguard to the Great Khan of All the Mongols in the Year of Our Lord 1268 is a fearsome opponent. There are twelve thousand of them reputedly, under the control of four captains, each with three thousand men. Their duty roster lasts for three days and three nights and it keeps them in the Khan’s palace alert, sleepless and on duty all that time. So when they are finally off duty, they are inclined to indulge their personal fancies to an extreme degree. Mongotai’s predilections were drinking and gambling. I came across him in one of the low taverns that thronged the streets of Old Khan-balik.

  The avenues were narrow, and filled with the babble of a mixture of races from all over the world. They were all out to find some brief pleasure in their hard lives. Work hard, play hard was an appropriate creed for those who struggled to survive at the margins of the Great Khan’s empire. Not that anyone in Khan-balik was at the geographical edge of the Mongol Empire, you understand. Far from it. A site to the north of the teeming old city that some Chinee called Yenking and others Tatu had been partially cleared by the Khan. His new winter capital and palace was being built there. So the rest of Old Yenking to the south of the new ramparts now found itself on the doorstep of the hub of the Mongol Empire. But many of those who lived and worked there fed off the scraps of the Khan’s opulence. That’s what I mean by living in the margins. And I should know. I am one of the scavengers.

  My name is Niccolò Zuliani – plain Nick to my friends – once of Venice and more lately Shang-tu, the summer home of Kubilai Khan, the Great Khan of All the Mongols. Shang-tu is better known in the West as the fabled city of wealth and opule
nce, the mystical Xanadu. What drew me there was what would draw any Venetian worth his salt. Wealth, trade, and a chance to con some fool out of his hard-earned cash. But as soon as I had arrived in Xanadu, I had been sidetracked into solving a gruesome murder that had taken place there. A death that tarnished its reputation somewhat, and had brought me to within a whisker of being killed myself. But I survived, and earned the gratitude of Kubilai Khan himself. Now the same enticing possibilities that had taken me to Xanadu caused me to follow the Great Khan to his new winter palace at Tatu, or Khan-balik, or old Yenking. Its name depended on whether you were a Mongol, a Turk or a lowly Chinee. I used them all depending on whose company I was in. Most recently, it had been Tatu, as I foxed Mongotai with the old pot game swindle.

  The backstreet tavern where I was drinking didn’t have a name. It didn’t need one, because the brew it served up was so rough that even if a name existed, you wouldn’t recall it after a few bowls of the harsh rice wine. I had been drinking for some time, hunched in the corner of the low-ceilinged hut well away from the other sullen habitues of the place. The other drinkers didn’t like me because I was a barbarian, and therefore, in their eyes, capable of a lack of good manners, or even a mindless act of madness. I was an unknown quantity to them. But at first they tolerated my presence, only occasionally casting worried glances my way. Then gradually, as the night wore on, the room began to clear. Whether it was my foreign presence, or the call of more important pursuits, such as servicing a mistress before returning home to the wife, or cutting open a full purse and robbing someone better off, I know not. Suffice it to say that eventually the only customers of the drinking den were Nick Zuliani and a big bear of a Mongol dressed in the dark red silk shirt and fur-trimmed jacket of a Keshikten guard. Where he had been sitting had made his presence invisible to me when the tavern was full. But as the other drinkers left, I could see him, and he could see me. I should have been warned off as soon as I saw what he was, but the fact he was well in his cups, and therefore incapable of making sense of what was about to happen, drove me on.

  I pushed myself up from the low stool I had inhabited for the last hour or so and, swaying a little unsteadily on my feet to pretend a greater drunkenness than was true, made my way over to where the Mongol had planted himself. He was on a similar stool to mine, and stuck behind a small table. In the way of all inveterate drinkers embarking on a long session, he had managed to wedge himself in place with the furniture. He would not fall over, even when totally incapable of rational thought. Being well down the road to that state, I thought he was ripe for the picking. Bleary-eyed, he looked up as I approached.

  What he saw was a tall, red-haired man, thickly bearded in that manly way that the Chinee consider shockingly animalistic and foreign. He would have guessed I was in my thirties, despite the fine tracery of lines at the corners of my eyes and mouth that made me look older. My cheekbones are high and deeply tanned in the way of seafarers. My green eyes, too, had the faraway look of a sailor. Though some said they could also see in them the distant stare of a man with deep pains buried in his soul. The truth of that I will tell you about later. At this very moment I smiled the smile of a fellow drinker, and flopped down next to him. He seemed to tolerate my barbarian presence, not even suggesting by a wrinkling of the nose that he had smelled something off. The less polite Chinee were prone to do that to foreigners, the Mongols less so. I called for some more rotgut and gestured to my new friend that he could take his share. In the way of a Westerner I stuck out my hand, and offered him my name.

  ‘Tomasso.’

  I wasn’t about to give him my real name, now, was I? The beefy Mongol grunted, took my hand and squeezed hard.

  ‘Mongotai.’

  I gasped and retrieved my mangled fingers from his grasp. He grinned, exposing broken and blackened teeth. I decided to keep well away from his exhalations as even the rotgut wouldn’t be enough to mask the stink from a mouthful of teeth that bad. I poured him a drink from the white porcelain jug, and began my spiel. I had been in this part of the world long enough to have a good grasp of the Mongol tongue, you see. Now was my chance to test it to the limit.

  ‘I’ve had some luck today. I sold a blade that I bought for next to nothing, and made a tidy profit. I’m flush with money, and willing to test my luck further. How about you? Do you feel lucky?’

  Mongotai grunted and threw the brew in his bowl down his throat.

  ‘You speak funny.’

  I thought, well, that’s OK, your breath smells funny. But he was a mark, so I kept my thoughts about his oral hygiene to myself. Besides, I had washed as recently as three weeks ago, and smelled as sweet as a khan’s concubine. In fact, I had been scrubbed by a woman who had almost become one of the Great Khan’s concubines. Her name is Gurbesu, and she had been part of an annual batch of Kungurat girls sent to Kubilai Khan as tribute. And that would have been her fate, except for a chance encounter en-route with an adventurer called Nick Zuliani. I stole her virginity before she got to Kubilai’s summer palace at Xanadu, rendering her useless for his purposes. Once her state was known, she had been smuggled out of the Inner Palace by her chaperone before she embarrassed everyone in front of the Khan. But that’s another story, which you may have heard me tell before. Gurbesu was dark-skinned and with a thick mane of hair so black that when it was oiled it was darker than the darkest night in the Desert of Lop. But I digress. I will return to my complicated love life later, if you like. It makes for exciting reading. For now, I must content you with explaining how I fleeced the smelly Mongol. And ended up with him hounding me out of Khan-balik.

  He had said I spoke funny. I suppose I did to his ears. I poured more rice wine into his bowl.

  ‘Maybe this will help you understand me.’

  He grunted, and swilled it down in one gulp. I leaned closer, as though I had a great secret to impart to my new-found friend.

  ‘Have you heard of the pot game?’

  He looked puzzled, and my hopes were raised. If he had heard of it, I would not be able to play the con on him. I drank down my rice wine, and wiped the bowl clean with my sleeve. I then placed the bowl on the table between us.

  ‘This is the pot. We each put an equal amount of money in it, say fifty yuan, and then bid on the pot.’

  The Mongol’s beady eyes gleamed at the idea of gaming with a red-haired foreigner. Mongols love gambling, and can’t resist an opportunity to indulge. Their innate sense of superiority makes them overconfident, particularly with foreigners. He was cocksure he could take me, drunk or not. He pulled out a pouch from his fur-trimmed coat and threw the requisite coins in the bowl. I did the same, matching his money with my own.

  ‘Now, there is a hundred yuan in the bowl. We each bid in turn, and whoever bids the highest gets the pot.’

  Mongotai could not take his eyes off the pile of shiny coins in the bowl, so I offered to start the bidding.

  ‘With a hundred in there, I reckon it must be worth offering forty as my starting bid.’

  Mongotai snorted in derision.

  ‘I bid fifty.’

  I grimaced, as though going any higher would cause me a pain in my purse.

  ‘OK. I’m going to bid really high to get this hundred. I bid seventy.’

  I fiddled nervously with the little pile of coins in my fist, as if I was short of funds. I could see the rice wine befuddled brain working hard behind the screwed-up buttons of eyes in the centre of Mongotai’s face. He grinned, reckoning he had me on the run. He laughed a short barking laugh.

  ‘Eighty!’

  I threw up my hands in defeat.

  ‘That’s too rich! You are too good for me. You win. Give me eighty yuan and you can have the pot.’

  Eagerly, the poor fool paid over his eighty, and gathered in the hundred in the stained rice wine bowl. I got up, shook his hand and left the gloomy tavern.

  The first rule of the quick con is to get away as soon as you have fleeced the mark in case he spots how it was done
. Did you see how it worked? Half of the pot was his money already, so he gave me eighty to buy back his fifty along with my fifty. That left me thirty up on the deal. Unfortunately, it was in the street that I made my big mistake. I stopped to count my coins before I was well clear of the tavern. Suddenly I heard a roar like the sound of a gale ripping at the sturdy sails of a trading vessel bound for Venice, tearing them to shreds. And bringing down the mast in the process.

  Mongotai must have been brighter than I thought. He had just worked out the scam. He came out of the tavern so fast that the flimsy walls trembled as though an earthquake was ravaging the city. I took to my heels and ran before he could catch me.

  ‘Where’ve you been, Nick? Chu-Tsai is looking for you. He says it’s urgent. And why are you out of breath?’

  Gurbesu’s shapely figure was a pleasant sight after the hairy demon that was Mongotai. But her face was distorted into a mask of disapproval. She must have smelled the stink of cheap rice wine on me when I tried to plant a kiss on her full, red lips. She pushed me away, and not for the first time I thought of my lost love in Venice. Caterina Dolfin was fair where Gurbesu was dark, and slim and boyish compared to the Kungurat girl’s rounded voluptuousness. But I had not seen fair Cat in a number of years, and she was a thousand miles and a lifetime away. So I put Cat out of my mind, and grabbed at Gurbesu’s accommodating hips, pulling her to me. This time she didn’t protest so much. That was the attractive thing about her – she could not resist my charms for long.

  ‘So many questions. I am out of breath because I thought of you and ran all the way home. As for Chu-Tsai, he can wait. I have some business far more urgent with you, my dear.’