He nodded.
“Then I will check into it. I will certainly be able to let you know later.”
“Really,” he said, impressed.
“Really. But one condition. You have to find out more about where these pots have been. At least try. Shuo hao-le ma?” she finished, Are we agreed? And to make sure he understood her touch of levity she raised her sake cup to him.
“Shuo hao-le,” he said, We’re agreed. He picked up his cup; they touched and drank.
When she got back to her room she was still thinking about whether her pots could in fact have been removed from the Palace in 1913. It was distant but conceivable.
Somewhere she had this inside. Once at the Morgan Library she had read through all the files on the failed transaction. All the players had been there, their cables with their crossed-out drafts, all the details of the deal that had almost moved the world’s greatest art collection to the other side of the Pacific.
She turned off the lights and changed into the minimal, clingy things in which she slept. She felt like going to the bottom end of the memory world, to the place where the past played out in her mind. It was tiring to animate memory, but some things were worth seeing. This was one.
She took her hearing aids out and felt the safe, filling swell of silence. She sat on the bed with her knees up to her chest, wide awake, the gates to her personal world open.
The cubicle she sought was down a side lane, in the early twentieth century, before the wars, when a crushingly wealthy American set about acquiring, madly, and built a magnificent collection. When he trained his sights on China, J. P. Morgan sent a young American, a man named F. H. McKnight, to do his bidding.
It was March 21, 1913. The air was filled with clacking Pekingese voices, the roaring hiss of gaslight, and the creak of wheels on the dirt-packed street between the warehouses and the godowns. It was night in the port. Wooden sidewalks bumped and clattered with the streaming passengers. They were dazed to be on land, dazed by the new sounds, the fervid smells, and the terrifyingly strange stalls for food and drink.
Frederick McKnight stood at the end of this street. In front of him swarmed men pulling carts, hauling rickshas, shouldering burdens several times their own size. Light popped and flickered from burning lanterns. The Western women’s faces glowed in the light as they held their bags close to their bodies. Men, high collars, mustaches, eyes down, also picked their way along the slat-boards. Up at the other end waited horses, mules, and drivers.
Not an automobile in sight, Frederick realized. Peking was some miles inland. Travel by cart would take hours.
He realized he would have to apply himself to his arrangements, and did so. For two silver dollars he secured a man with an open, horse-drawn cart to collect his trunks and carry him to the city. Four hours, the man made him understand in pidgin. Frightful, Frederick thought, but what else was there to do? At least the night was fair.
A gentleman, he had naturally offered to make arrangements for Mrs. Grosbeck, the woman he had befriended aboard the Constantinople. She’d informed him she could make her own. She did this with a lilt in her voice, not in the least standoffish. She also said, with an appropriate lightness, that she did hope she’d see him later.
Frederick replayed her words in his mind. He was aware of his arms and shoulders moving under the blue serge of his suit, the perfect posture required by his stiffly starched collar-he was a fool to have worn it. No one cared. Not in this place. He reached behind and unhooked it, slipped it off. Instantly he felt better. He slipped it into his bag.
Mrs. Grosbeck wouldn’t care about his collar.
They both happened to be booked into the Wagon-Lits. He was twenty-nine, unmarried. She was recently divorced. At first her extra-marital state had struck ambivalence into him, but as she had quite briefly and without emotion told him her story, he had come to see that, in her shoes, he might have done quite the same thing. Yes. Quite the same.
And here they were in China.
Frederick climbed into the cart after his luggage. Somehow he had imagined something grander, a regal stride down a gangway into a foreign land, him strong and imperturbable. Not this gloomy dark, the jumping shadows against the mud-walled buildings, the squawking cries and the straw-slapping shoes of the coolies. Amazing. He settled down under a heavy pile of blankets, head propped where he could watch the stars. It was so good to be off the boat.
He slept. When he awoke he saw gliding above him the walls of the city proper. They were rolling down a dark boulevard. On one side were buildings in pagoda shapes, on the other an endless wall, massive and silent.
The driver heard him and looked back. “All gate close,” he called over the hoof-clomping. “Go north side, Xizhimen. Open late.”
Frederick waved a hand and lay back down. Now he could see the curving tiled roofs and trees, so thick, their branches and leaves meeting overhead. After a time they came to the Xizhimen gate and flowed through it with the tide of late-night traffic-carts and rickshas and pedicabs and a bobbing sea of men on foot. He stared. Men in gowns, some very fine, flapping lightly over trousers tight to the ankle.
Inside the city walls they navigated a network of streets lined with low buildings. Stone walls enclosed round gates and turned to follow narrow lanes leading off. Overhanging balconies glowed with colored lanterns. By the time he was unloaded in the Legation quarter, at the Wagon-Lits, the feeling of being in some strange dream was complete.
In the hotel lobby, under the glittering chandeliers, he saw more Chinese men of consequence, in gowns of silk. Mandarins, he thought; look closely. It’s with them you’ll have to make a deal. But he could not think, he could not penetrate, he was dizzy with strangeness. He stumbled to his room, fell on his bed, and slept until the next afternoon.
And now it was ten days later. Now on this night he adjusted his cravat by the fluttering lamplight. He studied himself in the carved rosewood mirror, his hair shining and flat from its center part, his eyes lucid with excitement. He was a gentleman. No one could say any different.
It had been easy here. The world of foreigners was small, interconnected. He’d only had to call on the few people recommended by Mr. Morgan’s office. At once he’d been introduced to Fleisher, a European of vague nationality who published two English-language papers here in the capital. Fleisher in turn brought in White, who did something at the American Charge D'Affaires Office.
This White had a Chinese partner named Shi Shu, who acted as agent for the Chinese imperial family. The Qing Dynasty had fallen two years before, and the emperor’s family continued to live in the rear quarters of the Forbidden City. They were surrounded by art. Priceless, unimaginable art. Paintings, jades, bronzes, calligraphy, porcelains, textiles, jewels. They had palaces in Mukden and Jehol too-same thing, according to Mr. White; art stacked to the ceilings in closed rooms. “My good man,” White had said. “You cannot imagine it.
“And,” White had said, leaning toward him as they strolled the temple grounds of the Shrine of the Star of the Foremost Scholar in the Land, “it is for sale. All for sale.”
Ah, then Frederick had been brilliant. Every cell in his body had screamed with the excitement of acquisition, but he’d kept himself casual. “What did you say to be the purpose of this temple?” he asked. He feigned disinterest in everything, even the little hilltop pavilion in front of them, even, especially, the deal White was preparing to put on the table.