Jack felt Anna stirring next to him. He had been awake for hours, propped up on pillows in the pine-pole bed on the lower level of their beach house. This bed, like the living quarters upstairs, faced a wall of glass and one hundred eighty degrees of rain-churned ocean. She moved closer to him. Her voice was half awake. “What are you thinking about?”
“Porcelain.” He felt her quiver with laughter.
“You’re obsessed.”
He refocused through the window. The light was growing, coming down over the mountains behind them, making the small line dividing the ocean from the sky linger a moment in incandescence. “You know what the breakdown looks like?”
“What?” She gave in and pushed up on the pillow beside him.
“There are masterpieces in it. Out of eight hundred pieces, eighty or so are masterpieces. Stunning. Worth millions of dollars.”
“And the rest?”
“Many fine, many important, many just good. But”-he repeated something Dr. Zheng had said-“that is the bedrock of any collection.”
“You just want to have it,” she said.
“Yes,” he said. “But don’t you see? Everyone who collects wants to have it. The hard thing is getting it. Here we have a chance to actually get it, a lot of it, the best, uncontested, just like that.”
“Do we get a discount?”
He pushed her gently. He had gone over the sample descriptions until his eyes ached. It was pages and pages of descriptions, of digital photos, of resemblances and relationships to other known works in museums, in catalogs, in collections, and sold at previous auctions-sold “in these rooms” was the way they liked to put it. He began to glimpse the net of connections and references under everything. It was numbing, thrilling. “Prices for this stuff have gone nowhere but up,” he said.
“You keep saying that,” she said. “I know. People have mostly made money.”
“Consistently,” he said, going a little too far.
“Consistently recently. But you’re still talking about… china.”
“People buy paintings for more.”
“Paintings don’t break.”
“Insurance.”
“It just seems-“”
“Two million isn’t even the top,” he told her. “One of the Chenghua chicken cups sold in Hong Kong a few years ago for four million.”
“A cup?”
“A cup.”
She frowned. “We don’t have one of those, do we?”
He couldn’t suppress the start of a grin. “No. We don’t have one of those. There are only eighteen in the world. We have a copy of one in the collection, though-a forgery. Quite masterful, apparently.”
“A copy!” Her voice went up to a squeak.
He laughed. “No, no, the appraiser caught it. It’s offered only as a curiosity. At a fractional price. But they say it’s gorgeous and quite convincing. Actually, there are several copies. The latest e-mail says she has found nine. A little collection of fakes, inside the collection.”
“How convenient. It comes with things we can put on our sideboard.”
“And at our beach house.” He went earnest. “I actually think we should keep some at our beach house. The real ones.” He reached down and pulled a blanket of the Skokomish tribe up over them, settled back with his arm behind her head.
“That’s crazy,” she said.
“Not crazy,” he corrected her. “It’s our life. Listen,” he said. “We’ll have eight hundred pieces. An unparalleled group. We could have a museum with that, just with that, if we wanted. But I think I’d rather keep it private.”
She shrugged. It appealed to her, though. A whole Chinese past. “We could look into it,” she conceded.
The sun’s rim crested the horizon.
“What’s his total estimate?” she said.
“Oh,” said Jack confidently. “I think we could get it for a hundred and fifty million… about the cost of three great Van Goghs.”
“Have you heard anything about Hu and Sun?” Bai asked Zhou over the phone. He knew Zhou had just come back from Guangzhou. Somewhere near there, the two men were being held. It was at Guangzhou they had been arrested, for it was there, the most crowded, most anonymous overland point, that most ah chans these days chose to cross the border.
“I’ve heard nothing,” Zhou replied.
On his end, Bai swallowed. They’d already been arrested. Now only two possible outcomes remained. One was that Hu and Sun had bought their way out and were already free. That could only have happened if they had enough cash on their persons to do it quickly, persuasively, unobtrusively. That was one possibility. The other was that they could not bribe their way out and were already scheduled to be stood up against a wall, maybe tomorrow, maybe the next day, and shot.
12
She saw the older man look up from his worktable at her, a foreign woman standing in the gate to his courtyard. She shouldn’t have just come here. She should have gotten his number and called.
“Huanying, huanying,” he said, standing up, Welcome. “You speak Chinese?”
“I do,” she said. “Is it convenient? May I enter your studio?” Her eyes raked behind him, took in the rows of pots, saw a prevailing harmonic balance that was immediately exciting to her. He was good.
“Come in. Please. You’re a porcelain person?”
“I am. I study pots and appraise them.”
“An artist too?”
“No-just a specialist.” In China it was more commonplace for experts to also make pots themselves. Not her. She dug out her card.
He held up his hand. “Wait.”
She looked up. Cards always came first in China.
“A small joke! An amusement! Listen. I’d like your opinion.” He gleamed with coconspiracy. “I have in mind to make a wucai stem cup after the style of Xuande. I seek among these”-he gestured to the thousands of unfinished pots in straight lines-“the right body, the right set of ratios.”
She understood at once and followed him down the path, between the shelves, the rows, tightly packed, everything in the biscuit. “Flared rim?” she said. “Everted sides?”
“Just so!”
“What for decoration?”
“Four floral medallions. Flowers all the way open, reds, yellows, and greens.”
“Lovely.” They walked a moment in silence, then separated, scanning, sidling up and down the tributary rows by themselves. Both knew the feeling they were looking for.
And then after a time she stopped and stood still. “Pardon me,” she said.
He turned.
“What about this one?” She motioned to it with her chin. It truly was the ideal stem cup. It was finely potted, faintly squat. There were four sides for painting and a bamboo-node stem. “Beautiful,” she complimented him. “So nicely made.” She could see what he would do with it-the iconic flowers, spare, outlined, slightly Islamic, in near-primary colors. The reign mark not enclosed in a shape, as it usually was, but instead free characters, circling the base. Perhaps a single or double blue line around the foot and inside the rim.
Lia looked up from the biscuit cup at the thousands of unfinished pieces aligned around her. He had quite a factory here.
She knew how this game worked. Rich collectors in Hong Kong sought to unearth artists like Yu and then would keep them strictly to themselves. And for a while, one fang gu after another would be commissioned, and everyone would be happy. But eventually the buyer would grow unsure as to whether it was actually the master or only his assistants making the commissions. One would inevitably find that the master did the pieces he wanted to do, and no more. In time the relationship would sputter down. And then someone else would discover the artist, and it would begin again. She wondered who his patrons had been. He was very, very good. “Very hoi moon,” she said.