“I’m here to look at art.” This was her standard answer; it was truthful but limited. “I do pots.” She took out a card and handed it to him. The card was the quickest way to convey everything, her credentials, her affiliation. Most people didn’t know anything about porcelain, or what it meant to “do pots,” but Hastings was a well-known name. People’s faces always notched with understanding when they glanced at her card.
“Lia Frank,” he read. He slipped a card out of his back pocket and held it out to her. He was broad but she saw his hands were fine, and the hair down to his wrist soft and sand-colored. She took the card. Michael Doyle, Biochemist, Chongwen Children’s Hospital. On the other side the same thing in Chinese. “Are you a doctor, or a researcher?”
“Researcher. On a fellowship. I’m studying children’s lead levels in Beijing.”
“Oh! That’s important. Good for you.”
“Thanks,” he said.
“Sounds depressing, though.”
“It is, if I let it be. At the end of each day I try to forget. You know?”
“I do know,” she said in a soft voice, thinking: Remembering? Forgetting? You have no idea.
“What’s in your duffel?” he said.
“Tools. Everything for looking at pots.” She touched the leather in a note of protection.
“And with all your tools, what is it you look for?”
She looked at him, her big eyes brimming with amusement, long quick fingers twined through her shoulder strap. Her hair was pulled up tight away from her face, and she could feel the faint pleasing weight of her silver hoops in her ears. “Fakes,” she said.
“Ah. You mean forgeries?”
“Exactly what I mean.”
“So forgery must interest you greatly.”
“It does.”
“I have a friend you should meet.”
“Really?” She could feel herself rising out of her long legs, chest against her shirt.
“He’s into fakes.”
“Is he a dealer?”
“No! But he does make money from fakes.”
“You mean that’s his job?”
“No. He works with me. This is a thing he does on the side.”
Her mouth was half open now, interest pulling it up at the corners. “What? Tell me.”
“I could. Or,” he said. He wore the bemused look of someone talking on his feet, half surprising himself. “Or you could come with me and find out.” He moved his weight lightly from foot to foot. “Come look at fakes with me and An. We’re going anyway. Day after tomorrow.”
She gave him a half smile. “How can I resist, if it has to do with fakes?”
“I’ll leave you a note, when and where. What room are you in?”
“Seventeen,” she said.
“Ah. Side court?”
“Side court.”
“I’ve got to go,” he said.
“And believe it or not”-she pointed down the lane to a far-off car whining toward them-“there’s my ride too. It was nice to meet you. Michael, right?”
“Doyle,” he said. “Call me Doyle.”
“Oh?” She turned her gaze on him. “Really?”
“That’s what people call me. See you,” he said, and still smiling, he turned and walked away. He could hear the car grinding to a stop behind him, door opening and slamming, the engine roaring up and then evaporating away down the hutong.
His mind went to the hearing aids. So she had hearing loss. But as soon as they’d started talking he’d forgotten about it. They had just clicked into conversation.
And he made a plan to see her again. That was odd, for him. Especially because he could tell she was smart and offbeat. She was interesting, and thus at the beginning the bar was already bumped up. She was also pretty, in a way. And serious. He saw this from her reserved, intelligent mien and the controlled light in her eyes, and her business card, even. The serious type. Probably looking for a good man. He couldn’t be anybody’s good man. Not in the foreseeable future, anyway.
Since his marriage ended he’d had his liaisons. He still needed to make love; that at least was intact in him. He still had to hold women, please them, and explode in vulnerability with them as much as he ever had. But caring was not something he could reawaken. So he limited himself to women who wanted lighter attachments. That was what he looked for now.
He touched the card in his pocket. There was no point in misleading her. He’d take her to meet his friend An Xing; they would look at fakes, the three of them, together. It would be fun and diverting and then it would be over. How lovely. Lovely to meet you. Good-bye.
He slipped his headphones out of his shoulder bag as he walked and turned on Cheb Khaled. He loved rai music. The Algerian singers were so brave, so irresistible to the part of him that just cockily believed he could do it, walk out on the gangplank and keep living. Rai was vital, secular, sexy, and just for singing it some of the musicians had been shot by Muslim fanatics. The rest of them kept singing.
Especially he loved listening to rai in China. Here he was already out of place. He was thick-bodied and pale in the sea of Chinese, arms swinging loose, the opposite of all the people around him. Yet when he was out in the hutong, if he had that sinuous, wavering voice in Arabic filling his head, everything seemed right. The world was foreign, he was foreign. It fit. He walked lightly over the stones, happy for a few minutes in his music and his otherness and the quality of the north China light.
The ah chan Bai leaned his head against the train window, rattling south on the rail line from Nanchang to Hong Kong. The red dirt walked away from the tracks in neat squares, dividing the rice paddies that terraced down to the river. From the froth of greenery on the other side rose the single tower of Fo Liang Temple, its roofs graduating one atop the other toward the sky.
With his ankles Bai squeezed the tied-together boxes of the few pots he had just procured in Yanjing. None were imperial wares but all were fine heirloom pieces. He had paid well for them-well for inside China, anyway. That sum was nothing compared with what they would fetch for him in Hong Kong.
His eyes followed the slow brown river as the rails clacked and the future spun out in his head. Down by the water, cattails waved in feathery golden clumps and morning glories, brilliant purple, twined up the red-dirt banks. It would take nine hours to reach the border. There would be a heart-pounding moment through Customs, but he had receipts showing that these were reproductions made by manufacturers in Jingdezhen. It was believable. The receipts looked right. The pots were good, though not breathtaking.
He carried the boxes exposed, wrapped in plastic twine. Sometimes the best way to do it was openly, brazenly, with some paperwork to make it look right and a crowd all around him to swirl him through. Stopping at the counter, handing over his passport, holding his breath. Undistinguished. One of the crowd. A stamp, a wave. Then he’d be through, with money, enough for a while.
It was enough cash to get himself a truly superb fake too. He knew exactly what he wanted. When he came back home to Jingdezhen he was going to see the man he considered one of the earth’s greatest living porcelain artists. And he was going to commission a replica of the Chenghua chicken cup.
8
The next day she opened the twenty-eighth crate and took the first pot from it. She drew a sharp breath of joy. It was a Ming moon flask, blue and white, depicting a dragon swimming among scrolled lotus blossoms. She could see it was from the reign of Yongle, the early 1400s.
She lifted it. Ratio of weight to mass was very important. It was invisible to the eye alone, and sometimes overlooked by those who fashioned replicas. The composition and density of clay, the exact mode of firing… everything had to fit. Lia could sense how much a thing should weigh. When she surrounded a piece with her fingers and lifted it, she knew a little more about whether it was real or false.