He looked at her; thirty this year. She glowed with beauty: her skin, her graceful limbs, the life in her eyes. It was impossible to believe she was not healthy in every way. Life should be all but bursting within her. Yet so far, nothing. They should buy the porcelain. Couldn’t she see that? “We’ll talk about the art later,” he said.
She gave him a look that said: You bet we will, Jack. And I’ll end up on top. But then she returned the gentleness in his eyes with a softness of her own, slid the pot into place, pressed the ON button, and moved over to where he stood by the counter.
7
Lia worked through eighty pots that day. By now she had found a table and pushed it over to the window under natural light and covered it with extra felt. She had her lights set up, her camera on its stand. She had everything she needed to appraise treasure from heaven.
Only she was alone. There was no one she could whisper to, no one she could call, no one with whom she could exult.
If she could tell anyone she would tell her friend Aline. She looked at her watch. In L.A. it was three in the morning now. Aline would finally be asleep in her secluded place in Coldwater Canyon. She would have drunk too much, smoked too much, and stayed out with her friends too late, then driven home to her true friends, her Ming jars and her Song plates and her Qing jardinieres, not to mention her collection of masterfully faux Etruscan statuary. Aline had a wonderful eye for fakes. Her prize was a knockoff Stradivarius, which she liked to leave out, on the sideboard, its bow carelessly across it as if its owner had just left off playing for a moment. Oh yes. The very thought made Lia shiver with pleasure. Aline would have the breath knocked right out of her if she heard about this. She would get on a plane and fly to Beijing instantly. Lia would be unable to stop her. What fun it would be to call her, to dial her number and wake her up and tell her how many drop-dead pots were in this room, in Beijing, right now, right in front of her.
But she couldn’t call Aline. She couldn’t call David. “David is doing well,” Zheng had told her. “The Tokyo staff is with him. You concentrate.” Okay, she thought. And took a deep breath and lifted the lid on the twenty-third crate.
Bai made it out of bed at noon. The damp heat of his studio decided for him in the end. The sheets were twisted around his legs when he finally climbed out of them, his face puffy and creased. He dressed and walked in a gravel-crunching rhythm down the hill to town. It was cool, where he was going. It was dark.
He pushed open the door of the Perfect Garden Teahouse. “Ei,” he said to the proprietor, and passed through the next set of doors, to the tearoom.
His friends, his circle of smoking, serpentine men, were already there, talking in a mix of Mandarin and local dialect. He crossed to them. Bai loved to wake up at the Perfect Garden. He liked to be in this dimness when it was past noon and the hot sun was shimmering the sidewalks. To drink tea here, to smoke. To talk about the pots coming in and going out. To lounge on the leather-seated chairs around the tables, to smell the dank, sour note of beer from the night before.
They also liked to be here at night. Often they’d be waiting for the shipment of one man or another to arrive. There was always an agreeable gamble in it. One never knew exactly what the piece would be-how fine its condition, how rare its pedigree. Each time was like the first, a new chance, starting over.
They would drink and smoke through the waiting and the wagering and the laughing banter, then like a clap from heaven it would be time and they would roam outside, milling together. Cars would be waiting. They’d go to the river dock, or the back of the train depot, or to any one of the many warehouses down bumpy dirt-track roads out of town where they waited late at night to meet trucks.
Pots came from all over China. Some had been bought from families who had saved them as heirlooms, or zu chuan. Others had been robbed from graves, especially the more ancient pieces-but never by the ah chans themselves. Plundering tombs was low work. Men like Bai would never do it. It was with reluctant distaste that they even did business with the men who did. Whatever the source, when the goods came into Jingdezhen they would ride out that dusty track at night to meet them, bumping down between the red loam fields, the rice paddies, and the muddy river.
The truck might be small and the load light. Sometimes those cargoes were the most precious. The lid would come up, and then one of them, say Qing-Enamel Kan, would lift out the wares for which he was known: a snuff bottle in the shape of a gourd, painted in overglaze enamel in a curling design of leaves and vines and smaller gourds.
“Hoi moon,” someone would breathe.
Someone else: “Mark and period?”
And Kan would turn it over. A four-character Qianlong mark in seal script.
Who would know, who would be able to connect it? It might be Old Zhang, the most erudite among them. Zhang might say: “See the form of it-the double gourd, covered with a design of smaller double gourds. See the color, the midpoint between tea and gilded gold. Both these aspects are like to a much larger piece, much older, a bronze double gourd inset with jade. It was in the collection of the Shenyang Palace. And in the reign of Qianlong this sort of tribute to it was made.”
“Jiu shi,” they would say, admiring, Just so.
But on this day in the teahouse, they all sat in a circle, slouched low with their feet spread out. All the phones were on the table. Bai ordered tea, five-spice eggs, and preserved cucumber. Old Zhang shook a cigarette from his pack and extended it, along with a relaxed monosyllable of welcome. Bai took it and uttered the briefest, most implicit thanks. They were friends. Most things had already been understood between them.
He took a drink of tea, lit his cigarette, drew in from it. “Any news?” he said.
Old Zhang shook his head. He knew Bai was talking about Hu and Sun. “They aren’t there yet.”
“No one has heard from them?”
“No one.”
“Maybe by the end of the day,” Bai said.
Old Zhang tightened his mouth. He knew, they both knew, it was really too late already. Their two friends should have been in Hong Kong by now, celebrating, having passed their pair of four-foot famille-rose vases down the line to the next owner and pocketed the substantial difference.
But they hadn’t. No one had heard from them. The men around the table passed silent prayers up.
Two younger men from Ningbo went back to paging through a catalog from an art auction house in Shanghai. “See this fine oxblood plate, Xuande reign-“”
“That! You call that fine? That’s only the midrange of fine.”
“Blow gas.”
“It’s so!”
“He’s right,” put in Han Fengyi from across the table. “I’ve seen that plate! I had the chance to buy it five years ago. I turned it down!”
“Suck pustules! You did not!”
They all laughed.
“I did! It was too expensive!”
“Yes, and in Sichuan dogs bark at the sun,” Bai retorted, which was a way of accusing Han of being afraid of his own shadow. They were merciless with Han. He was one of the few among them who attached himself slavishly to one dealer, supplying him as faithfully as a dog. The rest of them freelanced. Their business was fluid. They carried greater risks but their wins were fine, sometimes superb.
“Listen now,” Bai said quietly to his friend Zhou, seated next to him. The others were talking. No one else was listening. Zhou put down his polished wooden chopsticks.
“I have a big job coming up,” Bai said. “Transportation.” He turned his teacup to swirl the last few drops. “I’m going to need help.”
Zhou refilled Bai’s cup.