In porcelain, Li had picked up a little bit about how they worked. There was a loosely knit constellation of cliques and factions, jealous, competing, radiating out from Jingdezhen over a net of Chinese towns. Once in a while Li was able to forge a link with someone in one of these places and soak up gossip about what was going on, what was being moved out, and where it was heading. The connections never lasted, for the ah chans were shadow men. They might talk to him once or twice, then disappear again. All he could do was listen and wait.
This week he’d heard a man say there was a rumor in the south. Something about pots. It made his mouth clench and his slim fingers drum on top of the desk not to know.
Li’s danwei was a small, well-endowed museum established by the People’s Liberation Army. In the late nineties the PLA had been required to divest itself of all its for-profit businesses, which were many, some hugely successful. They then found themselves in possession of an enormous fund of cash. Part of that money went to establish this museum. Everyone knew that, at this time in history, most of China’s greatest art treasures, at least those that were movable, were already outside the Mainland. The imperial collection had ended up in Taiwan at the end of the war and, absent reunification, was never coming back. Yet that still left a huge tide of masterpieces in flux around the globe: works owned by museums, by collectors. They came on the market at times. And they could be bought, by the PLA’s museum as well as anybody, and brought back to China.
Not that Li and those in the hierarchy overhead were above a little posturing to see if things could be gotten back for free once in a while. A few years back a pair of Qianlong falang cai vases, fantastic imperial pieces, had come up for auction at Armstrong's. They were openly advertised as having been looted from the Summer Palace during the opium wars. They had been in European collections in the one hundred and fifty years since.
Somewhat brazenly, the Ministry, at the behest of the army, had publicly demanded that Armstrong’s return the vases as war loot, unrightfully stolen. Hadn’t similar allowances been made with art taken from Jews during the Holocaust? This was only one hundred years further back. Oh, Li remembered with glee how the art world had held its breath for several tense days. As it should have. The vases were stolen! But Armstrong’s had held firm and said no, we are going to sell them, and Li had been forced to attend the auction in Hong Kong and bid, keep bidding, keep upping the offer of the PLA’s cash, all under the blessing of his superiors, until in the end he had to pay out more than two million U.S. dollars for the pair. But he got them. He did bring them back.
And while he scraped and budgeted to make such purchases, the smugglers were moving porcelains out of China as fast as they could travel.
Maybe what he’d heard was true. Maybe something big was happening, something about pots. He touched a button on his computer and let his eyes play down the names on his call list, looking for the one, the right one, who might possibly know.
The driver was carrying Lia that morning along the shores of Houhai Lake, the bending trees half obscuring the long finger of water. She remembered that this was the body of water to which candidates who failed the imperial examinations came to drown themselves. There were always those who chose to hurl themselves in the water rather than return home to face their parents. Now their ghosts were here forever, mourning by the banks of the lake.
The idea that anyone could feel so tied to their family interested her. She herself, in her tiny family web, had always seemed to be someone’s project, and this was a thing to be escaped as much as a thing to which to cleave. There was only so much that she could endure of being repaired by others. Albert had never done it. Dr. Zheng had never done it. That was one reason she respected them, loved them.
Her real father had never tried to fix her, not that she respected him or loved him. She felt a bitter chuckle weave up her throat. She had only met him once. She had tracked him down; the encounter had been so dispiriting that she had often wished she was able to forget it. In her world she kept the door on him closed.
She’d found him living in a single room, subsisting on four or five minor patents. He was her and her mother to the tenth power: junk, piles, effluvia. There were subscriptions to professional journals, indexed, spanning decades. There were years of canceled book-request slips from the public library, alphabetized. He was a prisoner of proliferation. Like her apartment, his was crowded-but it was squalid, not artful. And the last insult: He looked like her. Same columnar frame, same drooping eyes. Although she was beautiful, in her way, she knew: She had long, abundant hair and eyes that may have been a bit sad but also radiated humor and intelligence and warmth. And she knew she had a high-wattage grin. She could always crack the ice with a smile. No, she wasn’t so like him.
Forget him, she thought.
Just then the driver turned away from the lake and into the gate of the villa. Her heart lifted at the thought of today’s pots, just ahead, waiting. She didn’t need to think about her father. He could stay in his memory room. He didn’t have to come out.
In Hong Kong Stanley Pao sat back on a leather couch and talked to Gao Yideng on the phone. “And for what percentage? Mmm, I don’t know. Five more tenths of a point. Yes.” Stanley smiled faintly. He was in his seventies, a sleekly plump, patrician man who wore his white hair pomaded straight back, just long enough to disappear neatly under his collar. He liked to sit with one hand on his rounded stomach. He spoke in slow, measured tones and never dropped his refinement of manner. He lived alone here in this magnificent old apartment in Happy Valley, which looked over the racecourse. He had always lived alone, except for his prized Pekingese dogs. He had never married. He was the sort of man after whose personal life people did not ask and whose partners, whoever they were, did not appear with him in public.
Not that he didn’t let some of his vices show. One of them was horse racing. Not only could he see the track from his windows, he could see the giant screen over the track for simultaneous video close-ups. At dawn he watched the horses exercise as he took his tea. But mostly, he followed horse racing on his computer, which was always kept running on a side table in his porcelain room. A keyboard always lay beside him on the couch. Results from races around the world appeared regularly, and in between, charts of thoroughbred bloodlines and streaming reams of racing data ran endlessly down the screen. Offtrack betting, in some form or another, was available in most cities of the world. Horses raced every day. Stanley played right here, placing bets, paying out or collecting through the keyboard on the sofa beside him. It was one of the games he loved in life. Though business was fun too. He listened to Mr. Gao. Ah, now the commission sounded right. Now he was getting close to feeling satisfied. “I think this will be possible,” he said. Nothing jolted Stanley off his phlegmatic calm. “Of course,” he said, “the porcelain must be fully inside Hong Kong.”
Both men, several thousand miles apart, smiled into their phones. This was the beauty of Hong Kong’s law, as they knew.
“So I transfer it to the American representatives. They’ll contract their own packing and crating?” Stanley knew the details of a job like this well. He had been a private porcelain dealer for many years, receiving selected clients in this room. He only served those lucky enough or powerful enough to be invited here to his home, where his beloved prizewinning dogs ran free in the outer rooms; where here, in his climatically controlled inner chamber with the racetrack view, millions of dollars’ worth of rare porcelain was on casual display, cluttered, grouped on tables and floor and shelves and every available space. Fine pots from the Ming and Qing and the Tang and the Song. Piles of art books with relevant cross-references to museum collections around the world. Yet there were many fake pots in the room too. There were fakes even an amateur could spot, and also fakes that would fool anyone-even him, the éminence, if he didn’t know better. The interplay between doubt and faith, between the eye believing and the eye distrusting-this was the real surge for Stanley Pao. This was what kept his soul afloat.