Michael had slipped out earlier and caught a taxi on Jiaodaokou. First he spent an hour at a Hunanese restaurant next to the entrance to the Yonghegong Temple, complete with altar to Mao-surely the twentieth century’s most famous native of Hunan-the altar draped in red velvet and decked with candles, incense, cakes, fruits, and brimming miniature glasses of high-octane white liquor. He squeezed into a booth at the end of the room. He couldn’t read Chinese, he didn’t even bother looking at the menu, but he had memorized the names of certain dishes and he ordered food to sear the soul, pungent with whole cloves of garlic, cured pork, tiny smoked fish, and peppers. He wanted it to burn everything out of him, fry him, make his nose run and his eyes water. It did, but when he was through with eating and back on the street the past was there again, still too much with him. He stood shifting from side to side, clearing his mind, thinking about where to go and what to do. Then a taxi was coming along with its light on, and his hand went up in the air. This was a daily wonder of Beijing: Even though the traffic was awful, taxis were ubiquitous and cheap. He would go find some music. He opened the door and clambered into the back.
Where? He closed his eyes. Definitely not Sanlitun. The bar district was dense with loud, light-flashing clubs. There was Japanese techno, Thai grunge, Malagasy trance, reggae, and hip-hop, and Chinese punk bands with names like Anarchy Jerks and Scream Frame and Body Fluid. There were raves almost every night, but they moved around, first one venue, then another, easily found by the hordes of young, hungry avant-garders in face paint, outlandish garb, and two-foot-high hairstyles frosted with glitter. They were on their own group radar. When he went to Sanlitun he would see droves of them, milling, laughing, and hammering in Mandarin, and scattered among them foreigners and all manner of other young Chinese. There were bands from Mongolia, from Qinghai, from all over China. He liked to go sometimes. It felt good to walk through pounding low-register rhythms from the open doors.
But not tonight. He didn’t want a long, curving bar and hordes of laconic, heavily made-up young people. He wanted someplace quiet. “Sen di ka fei,” he told the driver, naming a jazz club called CD Café in English.
When he got there he took a small table upstairs on the balcony. The club was dark, generic, softly lit with yellow arcs of light. He had a light rickety chair at a tiny round table, a brimming beer. He looked down at the small stage. The piano player was Italian, the drummer and stand-up-bass player Chinese-sober clothes. Long hair. They flexed their fingers and shoulders in the manner of reserved jazz players, preparing to play. Then they turned the pages of their music and all held together for a single, counting breath.
The piano player set up an insistent stride of a rhythm, and the bass and drums accented in behind. Doyle felt himself pulled in with them, a river stumbling, sailing, pouring over the rocks. He had come in here to forget, but instead he was remembering.
He remembered the day he had moved out into his own apartment. Daphne had come over to bring some books he’d left behind. She’d come and given him the books and chatted nicely about his apartment-and this had been painful, of course, watching his wife talk to him like he was a stranger. But then she had capped it by asking for his key.
“What do you mean?” He didn’t get it.
“I want you to give me your key back.”
“To our house?”
She flinched. “Yes. I’d be more comfortable.”
They had already separated. He had moved out. Even now, sitting here in China, more than a year later, he didn’t know why this simple request of hers had put him into such an agony of severance, but it did. And one last time he tried, to his misery and regret, to get her back.
“I really want the key,” she had said gently but insistently. Her face was neutral. She looked soft but she was all steel.
He took his key ring out. “We don’t have to do this,” he said.
“It’s just a key.”
“I mean separate.”
“Michael.”
She sounded impatient and sad. There was no conflict in her voice. He could almost feel himself being extinguished. Meanwhile she was waiting. He worked the key off the ring. “Daphne.” He wanted her attention, her real attention. He held up the key and took another key off his ring. “Take it. Take my key too. Come back anytime, any hour you’re ready. I know you have things to work out. That’s okay. Take the key. I want you. I don’t want anyone else. I’ll wait.” He extended both keys.
She took only one key, her own, and slid it in her pocket. “That’s very sweet,” she said. Her eyes filled. “I’m touched. I’ll always remember that you said that.” And then she had turned and left.
He remembered the feeling of being sliced, of an ice pick through the center of him. That was the best she could do? Cry a little as she said it? Even now he still felt the sharp blade of hurt here in this bar, the piano marching around him over the slapping of the bass, the drum with its light, dividing accent beats. Evaporate, he told his memory. Go away. It crinkled to nothing. It would be back, he knew, but not tonight. He tuned in to the music, eyes closed, tapping his fingers softly in his own layer of syncopation, behind and all around the tempo from the stage below.
11
Lia’s train shot through the dense subtropical hills, a rattling stream of mercury against the red earth with its rippling shades of green. It felt good to be alone. Most of the way from Nanchang she’d sat with a family bringing their aged father back from the big city after an operation. They were loud, friendly, all doting on the old patriarch. They insisted she share their elaborate breakfast, stacked up on the little train table in tin containers.
They talked about their lives, about the scenery, and finally at the last town the family had got off after much exchange of addresses and exhortations to come and visit them in China, to bring her own family, her husband; yes, she’d said, of course, she would. She didn’t bother telling them she had no husband, no children. No need to make it real. They did not actually expect to hear from her again. Still, they were all over her in the fullness of Chinese social grace. “Good-bye,” she said again and again, all warmth and smiles, “good-bye.”
And then it was only one more hour to Jingdezhen, an hour to herself. At first all she thought about was Michael. It was like he was there inside her, waiting for a private moment so he could well up and fill her mind again. If they kept seeing each other… but she pushed this warm-flooding premonition away. Maybe it was not real. Even if it was, she was still going to have to leave in a few days.
Then there was the job. She still had some questions to answer. As the train rocked along the rails she turned over and over what she had gotten from Gao, and what she’d dug out on her own. If the collection had not been moved out of the Forbidden City in 1913 for J. P. Morgan, if it had still been inside the Palace as of the 1924 inventory, then it was separated later.
She still thought this most likely happened during the collection’s flight across China, through the war against the Japanese and then the civil war, 1931 to 1947-when the emperor’s art made it to Taiwan. That was a long, arduous struggle in trucks, trains, and boats, often barely hours ahead of the bombs and artillery of advancing armies. It was the Nationalists, the Guomindang, who had the shipment. They moved it by night, sometimes by whatever rough hands could be assembled. How could some of it not have disappeared? The curators of the National Palace Museum in Taiwan, where the collection found its home, always took pride in saying that every one of the six hundred forty thousand pieces moved out of the Forbidden City arrived intact. Oh sure, Lia had always thought. Right.