“Ah. This is the deity who gives success in the imperial examinations. Success or failure!” Despite Frederick’s careful aloofness, White was relaxed and charming in his gray striped suit. “The examination candidates flocked here to worship. They came from every province in China. Before going to the examination yards to sit for the jinshi, they came here and begged the god for success. With success came riches and position, guaranteed for life. With failure-well, loss of face was the least of it.”
“As to the collection you mentioned,” Frederick said at length, after many quiet minutes of studying the statues of the god within. “How might one inquire further?”
“Let me talk to my Chinese associate,” White had said, and gone on to point out the other nearby temples, the Temple of the Evening Sun and the Hall of Ten Thousand Willows. He chatted politely, filled with zest and knowledge, ultimately surpassing Frederick with a show of bright, courteous apathy.
But he had inquired. The discussion had begun. And that was many days ago and now they were moving toward agreement.
Frederick smiled at himself in the mirror. Welcome to Peking, Frederick Henry McKnight, he thought. His face, his eyes, everything was ablaze with possibility. His heart too.
“Ready?” he said to Eileen-needlessly, for Mrs. Grosbeck had been dressed twenty minutes or more, sitting by the window in the brocaded chair, watching the pulse of life in the street below. The men in their dark garments, the ricksha carriers loping with their musical cries, the robed gentlewomen, walking wide-legged on their bound feet, everyone talking, laughing. A soft roar seemed to rise from the street in China, only it was like nothing he’d ever heard before, no machine sounds, no traffic; instead a tide of human voices.
“I’m ready,” she said to Frederick.
He felt a surge of gladness. He hadn’t sorted out his clear feelings for her, but he liked her. She made few demands. She seemed to want to spend time with him. His abdomen tightened. She’d been married, he knew. She was not untried. She walked and sat and stretched and crossed a room with her whole body.
And she had intelligence. She had helped him compose the cables back to Davison, who worked for Mr. Morgan. The financier’s wishes came through Davison. They had talked about removing some items from the Palace for inventorying-this had been the suggestion of Shi Shu-but Mr. Morgan had said no, leave everything intact. They had traded descriptions of the scope of the collection, and many many prices.
How much to say in these cables seemed extraordinarily delicate to him. Even though they were composed and sent in code, one never knew. And they must read just right to Davison and Morgan. Still, he had stiffened at first when she took a pencil to his first draft of block capitals and sketched in edits.
“Doesn’t that sound better?” she asked, pushing it toward him. He looked at it. She was right. It was ambivalent in all the right places, toned, diplomatic.
“I stand in your debt,” he said. To which she wrinkled her nose. No dry mentalist, Eileen.
And so tonight he was taking her along for the meeting with Shi Shu-a critical meeting, the most important one yet. Shi Shu had been high in the Manchu bureaucracy, and still went to work every day, for the family, inside the Forbidden City. In the matter of the art collection he was their direct and sole representative.
A week ago, Frederick never would have brought her. In America, he wouldn’t have dreamed of it. But now he knew he wanted her there. She helped him. She saw what lay behind words and gestures. Later, when they were alone, she would sit with him and help him sort it out.
Not that he’d tell the others they were friends, a man and a woman. Nothing really improper had happened. Nevertheless, that would not do.
He had already introduced her to White and Fleisher as his cousin. It had been believable. It made it easier for them to go about together. And she’d absorbed it in the best of humor, seeing its utility instantly. They were relatives. This was their protective cover.
Davison had cabled them Mr. Morgan’s final line on price. Tonight, if he could bring Shi Shu into that range, they would have a deal. And a new door would open and his new life would start.
He lifted the glass cover of the gaslight and snuffed it out. He turned to her and extended his arm. She rose, brushed imaginary lint from the cream-colored lace overlaying her high-cut, rustling dress. It struck him that most foreign women looked strange in this world. After seeing the layered silk garments of wealthy Chinese women, he found the cinched, fussy dresses and the great hats of the Western ladies overstated. It was never true for Eileen. Her clothes were straight-lined, tailored from fine cloth, simple. She claimed to dislike hats. Stay with me, he thought impulsively, feeling a warm flood inside himself of wanting her.
“I’m ready.” She rose and walked toward him. Before she could reach him they were both caught by the sibilant whoosh of an envelope being pushed under the door.
He walked to it and picked it up. “It’s a cable,” he said, tearing it open. He read.
“What is it?” she said, for she saw his face sagging in disbelief.
“Mr. Morgan is dead.”
“What? Was he ill?”
“No. It was unexpected.”
They looked at each other.
“It happened in Italy.” He read the rest of it. “All negotiations canceled.” He looked up at her. “It’s finished,” he said. His future had been directly in front of him. Now in a heartbeat it had evaporated.
“I’m so sorry,” she said.
He nodded.
They stood facing each other in silence.
“Let’s go tell them,” he said.
“All right.”
He held out his arm. She took it and they walked out.
Lia slipped under the sheet and blanket and stretched out; sleep would reward her now. She felt at ease. She was sure the pots hadn’t been moved out in 1913. They were still there when Morgan died.
Before turning out the light, she slipped one hearing aid back in, picked up her cell, and called Gao’s voice mail. “I wanted to let you know the pots could not have been removed from the Forbidden City in 1913. I checked. So please keep looking. And,” she added, “thank you for a most pleasant dinner.”
6
There was a curator named Li, at the First Beijing Antiquities Museum, who sometimes felt he was the only person on earth who cared about the volume of cultural treasure being sneaked out of China. He came to work every day, seeing the steel net of the new, modern, globally denominated world settle over his city and transform it. There was the promise of order and progress. He didn’t know if he believed it. It was still China and still a chaotic world underneath.
Illegalities were no secret. The tides of smuggling; the black market; corruption and graft-these were so ubiquitous as to have been taken for granted by most people.
But Curator Li hated seeing his civilization dismantled in front of him. He hated the apathy of the people he saw around him. He hated the art leaving.
When he went to Hong Kong he always visited Hollywood Road. The galleries there were packed with pieces from China. He would stand in front of the windows and feel the pressure rise inside him. None of it could have been legally brought in. There had to be an army of smugglers, a world, a universe.