“Trouble you to come out to the gate, facing the lake. In fifteen minutes I will be there.”
So they drove out through Beijing’s southwestern suburbs until wooded valleys unfurled between jagged green hills. She marveled again at the personal, very private treatment she was getting from this mogul. Obviously the collection mattered to him. She looked at the light from the sunroof gleaming on his bare head, his imported sunglasses. Prada. She smiled. Real, not fake.
They drove up beside a little stone house with a low-walled animal yard; ducks and chickens, pigs. A garden on the south flank of the house teemed with vegetables.
“This place is always kept for me.” He unlocked the door, opened several of the windows to the June air. “That’s better. Let us drink some tea.” He went into the small kitchen to prepare it. She asked if she could help, but no, he would do it. She watched him at the simple stone counter. That was all there was. A sink, a half refrigerator, and a single wok-ring. It was crazy, she thought; it was theater. It was a fake dacha, but the rustic kitchen and the plants pushing up were real, the ducks genuinely clamorous. He poured boiling water into the teapot. Back at the table he let it rest a few minutes and then filled two plain cups with it, frothy, astringent green. He raised his cup to her and they both drank. “Now tell me how you progress with the collection,” he said.
“It’s magnificent. Overall. I have found more copies, though.”
“Really. What?”
“A so-called pair of Daoguang wine cups. Tiny, delicate, quite lovely. But fake. This tea is excellent.”
“It’s just what happened to be here.”
“As forgeries the cups are of no consequence. The pieces that they impersonate are not terribly valuable.” She shrugged as if it were perfectly normal for them to come all the way out here to discuss such a trifle. “Rather it is a matter of… accumulation.” She had found the chicken cup, the Daoguang wine cups, and earlier today two more fakes. It was then she decided to leave him a message. She smiled at him. “Now I’ve seen several more. I thought you’d want to know.”
He looked at her with a faint, constructed touch of a smile. “I am grateful that a collection like this should even pass through my hands, no matter what its flaws.”
“I understand,” she said.
“Both sides depend on you to look at it most carefully.”
“I will. But, Mr. Gao, I think it would really be best if I had one of my colleagues come to Beijing and look everything over with me. In view of the situation.”
“As you wish,” he said.
“Not that I’m not confident,” she said. “I am.” She drew the plain gray fabric of her tunic loosely away from her body. “But forgeries have been found. A second person should go through it.”
“Miss Fan.” Gao was already looking at his watch. “Women gai zou-le,” I think we should go.
Michael took her to An Xing’s place the next night to see the bowl. The Chinese man came to the door in shiny athletic warm-ups and led them in to a couple of rooms, commodious but cramped. “Welcome to my ancestral home,” he joked.
“I love it,” said Lia. She saw that one wall of this main room was all books; the others were hung with Asian minority textiles. There were a few shelves of well-chosen contemporary lacquerware and one especially charming row of ceramic goldfish pots in motley sizes.
“I’m a bad host!” An said delightedly. “Ah, you are looking at my things. There isn’t much.”
“I like it.”
“It really was my ancestral home, for three hundred years.”
“Is that so?” So they had let him stay, she thought, or come back, and now he was down to what was basically a small corner of the place.
“I still have a few things. Books. Family papers. Old records.”
“Records?” Her eyes lit. “What kind of records?”
“Family holdings. Financials. Genealogies.”
“Art collections?”
“Yes.”
“Inventories?”
“Yes.”
“Porcelain?”
“Yes.”
“May I see?”
“Of course!” He pulled out a chair for her at the small table and turned his back to scan the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. He touched his ponytail absently, looking, then after a minute he reached up with a jubilant cry and pulled out a crumbly stack-paged book. It was open-bound in old Chinese style. She and An bent over it. Doyle stood behind. It had a hand-brushed character title. An Family Porcelain Holdings, from the Ivory Fan Study.
“How wonderful that you’ve kept this,” she said.
“It’s come down to me, that’s all,” An said. “I’m not the only descendant, but there are no others in China. Just me. Look. Here are the lists of their art collections.” He opened the first page for Lia.
She scanned through it. “Oh, it’s marvelous.”
She could feel Michael’s eyes on the back of her head and smell him, a spiky brown-eyed smell, softened by his fair hair, individuated by the turns of his life. How old was he? Past forty, by the look of him. But he’d been very sick. He might have been younger.
“Do you want to memorize it?” she heard him say behind her. “Because An and I can go in the other room.”
She smiled back up at him. “That’s nice of you.” Ordinarily she might say yes, please, go away and let me work. There was never enough for the memory world. Never enough histories, gazetteers, catalogs, auction descriptions, records, inventories. But she didn’t want to do it now, in front of him. She’d rather talk to him. “An Xing, thank you for showing me, thank you. Another time perhaps I’ll read it line by line.”
“These are only some old lists, hardly worth an hour of your attention.”
“Nali,” she said, Nonsense. “There have been great collectors in your family.”
“But speaking of porcelains! We are forgetting the bowl I have to show you.”
A ringing sound bleated out. An’s cell phone. He took it from his clip, excusing himself with his eyes. “Wei?” He listened. “Ei. Dui, dui. Deng yixia.” He turned to Michael. “You show her,” he whispered, covering the mouthpiece.
Michael opened a door. “In here,” he said, and slipped ahead of her into a small anteroom lined with shelves, a bathroom at the far end. He switched on a lamp, took down a plain indigo box, unhooked the bit, and opened it. There was the ruby ground Kangxi bowl. He reached in.
“No,” she said. “Let me.” He pulled back. Her long fingers made a net under the bowl and she lifted it out. “Do you mind?”
“Not at all.”
“It’s so beautiful,” she said. “Really hoi moon.”
“Hoi moon?”
“That’s Cantonese. Hoi moon geen san. The Mandarin would be kai men jian shan. Let the door open on a view of mountains. The dealers in Hong Kong, the runners who bring the pots out of China-they all say this. They love to say it.”
“And it means?”
“It means, it’s beautiful. It’s right. It means, look at it! That’s when it’s said admiringly. When it’s said in exasperation it means damn you, don’t you see, don’t you get it? Of course it’s right. You idiot! It’s gorgeous.”
“What does it mean when you say it?”
“When I say it right now, about this piece? My God. It’s lovely.” She looked at him. “Don’t you think so?”
“I do,” he said. “I think so.” He did like the bowl. He had seen it before. But right now he was watching her.
She held it closer to the light and he caught the soft pink of her hearing aid.
She felt his eyes there. That’s me, she thought; take a good look. I wear them to hear, to be like everybody else. She could still hear her mother’s voice: “Don’t ever take them out! Don’t do it! Ever! You’re to leave them in at all times!” But I’m all right in here, she would think. And in time she learned to just take them out when she could, when she was alone. “Do you see the enameling?” she said to Michael. “The painting, the Jesuit style. Very fine. This bowl was fired in the biscuit in Jingdezhen, then brought to the Palace to be painted.”