“Guojiang,” he said modestly, Pass praise. But he wore a wide smile when he picked up the cup and carried it to a worktable. Turning back, with some ceremony, he removed a card from a pocket beneath his apron. She had hers ready too. They both used two hands. It was quite a show of manners.
“Yu Weiguo,” she read from his card.
“Fan Luo Na.” She watched him continue reading and register the name, Hastings. “You must come and see our finished pieces,” he said. “Please. You will enjoy them.”
“With pleasure!”
“You like fang gu?”
“More than you imagine!” At the other end of the work yard they entered a low brick house through double wood doors. Yu snapped on the lights. She stared for a minute and then circled the room, lined with all-glass shelves, the pots loosely organized by dynasty. “Oh, they’re beautiful,” she said to him. Then she stopped in front of a flat-sided moon flask in underglaze blue-and-white, with a scene of musicians playing against a landscape. So rare, for usually moon flasks were painted with birds on flowering branches. But these were musicians, dancing past each other on the path, mountains behind them layered and leveled by mists. “The reign of Yongle,” she said softly. “Am I right?”
“You are right.”
Because she could barely let herself believe it, but this one looked real. It looked right and gorgeous and real. Another fiction? Or the truth?
And then, looking closer, she saw the crack and, dialing in further still, the accumulation of centuries of fine dirt in the crack. So the flask was real-and damaged. “A fantastic piece,” she told him. “So fine. Too pitiable about it.”
He shrugged. “If it was not cracked, how would I be privileged to have it?”
“That’s so.”
He turned to her. “I have an idea,” he said. “Will you allow me…”
She shrugged. “Of course.”
“Sit.” He waved to an armchair upholstered in plastic leather. “Be at ease.” And he moved quickly around the room, collecting pieces from one shelf and then another, clustering them on the table. It was an echo of her on-the-spot test with Dr. Zheng, so many years ago. “Have a look at these,” he said.
Yu had the table covered with pots of every height and shape and description, an ad hoc diagram of the past exhaling the cold clay scent of age. She looked a long time through narrowed eyes, in silence. Finally she went to one end of the table and started touching each pot in turn, wrapping both hands for a moment around each one.
Yu didn’t say anything. He stood and watched her.
When she came to the end she looked at the assemblage for a moment, the whole group, and then with brief economic swipes began shifting the pots’ positions. The low Zhengde dish with fish and water weeds she put to the left; the green box with its domed cover, its soft lingzhi and classic scroll design typical of Chenghua, to the right.
She did this in silence. Real on the left. Fakes on the right. As she shifted each, she held it again for an extra second before releasing it.
She didn’t speak until she was done. “Stunning. So hoi moon.” She picked up a dish with a double vajra design in underglaze blue and switched to Mandarin. “So kai men jian shan,” Let the door open on a view of mountains. “Mr. Yu, this one is the mountain itself.” She pointed to the four dragons carrying lotus blooms in their mouths, each flower centered with the Buddhist vajra emblem, also suggesting the Chinese character shi, or ten.
Then she turned the bottom of the fang gu dish to the light, with its six-character reign mark da ming cheng hua nian zi, made in the reign of Chenghua, in the great Ming Dynasty. The Chenghua emperor had brought back this design, which had not been prevalent since the Yuan Dynasty. Indeed, the reign mark was perfect, encased in a double blue ring. Oh, brilliant. “Excellent. I truly commend you.” She put the vajra dish back on the table.
But was he the Master of the Ruffled Feather?
She covered the table with a look. She didn’t think so. If she had to guess right now she’d say no. She had seen all kinds of designs here, painted flowers and birds of every type, and nowhere had she seen that exact little fillip of style.
She picked up a globular, narrow-mouthed jar with a lotus-pond decoration. It was painted in bright doucai of brick red, yolk yellow, and green. “The Mirgentesse jar!” she exclaimed, naming the current owner of the famous piece this fang gu reproduced. “Incredible.”
“Your eye’s not bad at all. Not in the least!” he said.
“Pass praise.” She put back the jar.
“You missed only one!”
She stood still for a second. “What?”
“I mean, you missed one pot. One only. That is excellent.”
“I missed one?” She turned to her assembly of pieces.
“Come,” he said. “You were marvelous! Who could get every single one correct?”
“I should have.”
He lifted a brow.
“I know pots. I can’t get one wrong.”
“It’s of no consequence.” He raised his hands.
“It is to me.” She couldn’t stop her mind, her memory-already she was flipping through the Beijing pots, one by one. “Mr. Yu. Did you ever-pardon me for asking-did you ever make a blue-and-white rectangular flask, Yuan Dynasty? With cranes and peonies?”
“No,” he said.
Okay, she thought, that one’s safe. But the images continued to parade before her memory. “What about an an-hua-decorated white glazed bowl, incised with dragons, reign of Yongle?”
“No.”
“And a big broad-shouldered famille-rose jar, painted with chrysanthemums, that one, from the reign of Yongzheng?”
“No again.” But now his long lantern face, cut in its folds and crevices, creased up in amusement as a light came into his eyes. “It sounds like you have talked to someone who’s seen the Wu Collection. Is it so? Are we thinking of the same one? More than seven hundred pieces?”
The world seemed to rock a hundred eighty degrees. “Eight hundred,” she said before she could stop herself.
“You know! You have seen it?”
“No.” She hesitated. “Someone I know told me.”
“Ah.”
“What about you?” She turned it around. “Have you ever seen it?”
“No. Wouldn’t that be the good fortune of three lifetimes! But even just hearing about it’s enough to make me so jealous my spittle’s three feet long.”
“What have you heard?”
“Ei, the same thing one always hears, isn’t it so? It was hidden in the countryside and forgotten. Then discovered again, and sold. But no one knows who has it now. That’s why I was excited when you began to describe it! I admit it! I thought perhaps you had seen it.”
“No,” she said, growing comfortable with her falsehood. “But I’d like to know more about it. The Wu Collection, you said?”
“Yes, that’s how they call it.”
“Where did it come from? Did someone have it hidden?”
“I don’t know anything about it. I can try to find out, if you like.”
“Thank you. I’m grateful.”
“Your e-mail’s on your card?” He pulled it out and looked at it.'
“Yes.” E-mail; of course he’d prefer e-mail. She’d seen a satellite dish on top of the little building too. “Thank you for checking into this. Let me know, please.”
“All right, then.”
“Potter Yu.”
“Yes.”
“Which one did I get wrong?”