Just then a light flipped on in the room. She stepped out of the pool of brightness. A fair-haired man with a boxy chest walked across. He was carrying something. A CD player. He was changing the disc, and he spun the new one as he dropped it in; it caught the light. She held her breath. But he wore headphones. He couldn’t hear her.
He could hear music, though; she could tell by the rhythm in his step as he passed out of view. American, she thought. Though she couldn’t say why. It might have been carriage, or maybe attitude, or a way of wearing clothes. But she could tell.
She backed up. Then she was in the shadows and she slipped back out under the irregular rock gate, into the circle of lamplight, past the geysering fountain and the driveway, through the main gate, to the street.
Lia made her way to one of the theme restaurants currently popular in Beijing. She liked them. Some were based on gimmicks. There was a place called Fatty's, for instance, with a big triple-beam scale right inside the door. Anybody who weighed over one hundred kilos got thirty percent off for their whole table.
Other places were based on historical eras. Those were Lia’s favorites. There were the Maoist places, the Cultural Revolution places, the imperial places. The restaurant she walked into now was a faux-world of 1920s Beijing. The staff sported frog-button tunics, while old-fashioned acrobats, singers, and storytellers entertained from the stage. The food ran to pickled radishes and cabbage in mustard seed dressing and earthy braised soybeans mixed with the chopped leaves of the Chinese toon tree. Her chopsticks roved around the table, and she thought about her eight hundred pots.
She was an experienced appraiser. For nine years she had worked at Hastings. She remembered the job interview. She was given the on-the-spot test. It was the way Hastings always evaluated new hires.
“Don’t be nervous,” Dr. Zheng had said as he laid objects out in front of her. “Just tell me what you think.”
She knew to him she must have looked all wrong. She was tall. Her hair was pulled up in a tight braid, defiantly strict. And her clothes didn’t make sense.
No, as Dr. Zheng often said to her in the years that followed, laughing about it: She didn’t look anything like most of the women he hired. They wore pearls and suits and had pert Anglo-Saxon hair. But that didn’t matter, as he always reminded her. What mattered was the test. “Just tell me what you think,” he had urged her that day. She remembered how he extended his dry fingers to the first pot on the left, a blue-and-white bottle-formed vase, meiping style. They were all blue-and-whites. But not all the same. Not at all.
She remembered how she looked from one to another, comparing them. Then she lit on the first one. “It has a high-shouldered form in good proportion,” she said quietly. “Porcelain smooth, a good clear white-may I?” She moved to pick it up.
“Of course.”
She lifted the vase and rotated it. “No mark and period,” she said, and tilted the base, which was empty, in his direction.
She returned it to the table. She came closer to study the painting, hibiscus blooms framed by ornate medallions of scrolling leaves. “Beautifully rendered, spacing just right. But the blue-the intensity of it-there is something about the heap-and-piling.” She moved right up next to it now, studying the infinitesimal mounding of cobalt grains that fooled the eye into seeing a field of blue.
Yes, he thought. Keep going.
Now she put her hands on it again. She closed her eyes and brushed her fingers over the little mounds of cobalt. She looked like a person reading braille. “It’s just too deliberate,” she said. “It feels contrived. It’s in the right style for the Ming prototype, but it’s troweled on too much. I’d say it was made in the Qing, maybe in the Qianlong reign. Though it wants you to think it’s a vase from the Yongle reign in the middle Ming. That’s what it wants you to think.” She shot him a glance, half questioning.
He would only answer with an encouraging smile, and she turned to the second one, a Ming blue-and-white fruit bowl. “Sturdily made,” she began. “A little thick. The design is lingzhi fungus.” She turned it over and read the six characters, da ming xuan de nian zi. “Made in the Xuande reign, great Ming Dynasty,” she translated. “And this heap-and-piling…” She lifted it to the window, where the natural light was most revealing. “This one is deep, but free. It’s naturalistic.”
“So…?”
“It has that artlessness.” She looked at him. “It might really be from the Ming.” The bowl had a faint filmy coating all over it. She angled her index finger to set the slightest ridge of nail against it and scraped a patch clean.
She held the bowl up to the light. “I have seen more vivid blues,” she admitted. “It’s not quite the best of its type, is it?” She glanced at him for confirmation. “But I think it is from the Ming.”
“Do you think it is real, then?” he said, pushing her. “Made in the Xuande reign?”
She turned the bowl each way in her hands one more time, then replaced it on the table. “I believe so. Though as I said it is not so very fine. Still, I cannot prove its age. I have never seen it anywhere, in any catalog or any listing, no, I am sure of that.”
“As far as you recall.”
“Well, actually, I do recall. I make it a point to retain all such things.”
He raised his brows in a look that said, elaborate.
“It’s just my hobby, memory.”
“Memory,” he said after her.
“Mnemonics. Cultivation of memory. I’ve been working at it since I was small. And, you can see, I happen to be interested in porcelain.”
He looked at her, surprise and calculation twining in his face. He pointed to the third piece. “What about this one?”
Of course, she knew and he knew that memory was only half of what made a great pots expert. Half was the database. The other half was feeling and instinct. Only then could one distill. That was what made a great eye.
She studied the third pot. It was a blue-and-white moon flask with the same kind of overt, studied heap-and-piling she had seen on the bottleneck vase. The Ming style had been much admired in the Qing, but when artisans of that later era had attempted to replicate it, they’d been inclined to go too far. Not that that made the piece a fake, exactly. Fine works from the best Qing reigns had enormous value, whether after a Ming prototype or not. The painting, of a young scholar being carried over the waves on the back of a dragon after a triumph in the imperial examinations, was finely wrought, if a touch mechanical, in the way Qing wares often were. She needed more details.
She turned the flask over and looked at its base. Da qing qian long nian zi. Made in the reign of Qianlong, great Qing Dynasty. Plausible. But then she looked more closely at the character qing. Two parts of the left-hand radical were connected by a diagonal stroke, which was technically incorrect.
That character’s wrong, she thought.
And then in the next instant, blooming over the first thought before her heart even beat again, she knew she had seen it before. This fluke-or signature, whatever it was-was stored in her memory.
So she went inside in her mind, to the examination yards. She visualized a quiet night, a stone walk lined with cubicle doors. On each door was a character, a concept she had chosen out of love: similitude and grace and impersonation. Finally she stood in front of the door marked peng, to flatter, to shower with compliments. Here she kept memories of minor imitative works, the lesser fang gu pieces, the merely decorative. Not here. To the next pair of doors, marked zi and da, which together mean vanity; here were memories of the forgers who could not resist leaving telltale signs on their fang gu… and here-she looked again-here was the man who had written qing this way. He worked in Jingdezhen in the 1840s, in the reign of Daoguang. He’d operated outside the imperial workshop system, a freelancer. He didn’t last. Foolish of him to have always left his signs on the mark and period. What was his name? Ask again. Wait. Wei Yufen. Yes. Wei Yufen.