“We just want to go in for a minute,” she called to him.
He looked at her, still blinking surprise.
She knew she wasn’t supposed to be here anymore. “I just want to look,” she said.
He waved them past and went back to his paper.
The two of them ran across the footbridge into the house, through the rooms, and across the back court. Up the steps on the other side, she clicked open the glass-paned doors and flipped on the lights.
The room looked so vast in its emptiness, nothing but scraps, bits of brown paper, wood shavings, and the dust outlines of the crates. This she would also remember. A person could have so much in front of her one moment, and nothing the next.
“Are you ready?” he said.
“Ready.” She gave him her hand.
In his apartment over the racecourse in Happy Valley, Stanley Pao took the call on his cell phone. He was sitting in his back room, the door closed against the humid air and his adored Pekingese dogs. In here the air-conditioning was precisely calibrated. Grouped around him, on the floor, covering the shelves and every available surface, were priceless porcelains and reproductions of priceless porcelains-indistinguishable from each other. “Wei,” he said calmly, one hand resting on his protuberant midsection.
“Mr. Pao,” the voice said. Stanley made an instantaneous shift to full attention. This was not a voice he knew. “A shipment consigned to you has arrived.”
“Ah, is that so? And the address?” He reached for a pen and paper, wrote it down. “I’ll be there-” He stopped, looked at his computer monitor on the side table; the racing finals were scrolling down. All today’s bets had summed up adequately. “I’ll be there in half an hour,” he said. “Accepted?”
“Accepted,” the man answered.
Pao hung up. He dialed a number he had been given. “Wei,” he heard. It was Gao Yideng. This was the tycoon’s direct line.
“Wei,” Pao answered politely. “Your stray dog has come home.”
“Ah, good,” he heard the man say softly, and they both hung up.
In the back of the taxi, they leaned against each other. She felt she had exhausted every possible human feeling with him. All she could do was rest on his shoulder. She would remember it just like this, she thought, the quiet at the end of it. The silence before saying good-bye.
They crossed the north end of Beijing and turned onto the Jichang Expressway, which soared through the high-rise forest to the airport. It wasn’t until they were almost to the terminal, right outside the departure gate, that she pulled back and looked at him. His eyes were soft. She had never seen him look so defenseless.
“Okay,” she said. She gathered up her bags. He moved to get out but she stopped him. She leaned over everything, her satchel, her suitcase, and her computer, and kissed him one more time, final. “Stay here,” she said. “Keep the cab.”
He nodded. They both knew it was better. She got out, shouldered her stuff, turned around, and walked in. He watched her. He waited until she was all the way in, then asked the driver to go back to town. They wheeled onto Jichang. Twilight had faded. The expressway unrolled out in front of them. He felt empty and dense, a dark star, as if he could sink right through the seat. His right hand moved to the empty leather where she had been a few minutes ago. After a while he put his head back and closed his eyes. It was hard to believe that a couple of weeks ago he had not even met her.
In the airport, she went straight to the women’s rest room. She squeezed into a toilet stall with all her things and threw the latch. Then she leaned her forehead against the painted metal divider and cried as long and as hard as she had ever cried in her life.
When she came out she winced at how awful she looked: Her eyes were puffy, her nose red, her hair undone. Errant strands flew past her waist. She covered her eyes with her big German sunglasses and left everything else. It was all she could do to walk out of there.
She made it first to the Immigration line. But she didn’t want to leave the country, that was the problem. She wanted a parallel world in which she would not get on the plane but would turn around and go directly back to his room, and knock, and tell him that she wasn’t willing to leave. She wouldn’t go. And if he did not care for her he would have to tell her so right to her face. This started tears again. Her turn came and she pushed her sunglasses tight against her nose and walked up to the booth.
The Immigration agent took her passport, entered a few strokes, and then stared at the computer. He hit another key. “Step to the side, please,” he said calmly.
What is this, she thought, but she did it.
Instantly a uniformed woman was there. “Miss Frank?” she said in good English. “This way please.”
Lia, almost a head taller, followed the woman off the concourse and into a small side office. She felt half out of her body. In the office, behind the desk, sat a flat-headed man with a short neck but quick, penetrating eyes. She was seated across from him.
“I’m Curator Li of the First Beijing Antiquities Museum.” He slid a card across the wood tabletop toward her. He also looked hard at her. No wonder, she thought, with her face swollen and her hair bedraggled. “Your name came up in the computer. You entered the country to look at art. Correct?”
“Relatively,” she said. “Relatively correct.”
He looked at her. “You are a high-level porcelain expert.”
“Not really-“”
“What have you been doing in China?”
“Looking at art.” She knew to stick to the script.
“Where?”
Where? she thought. Where? “In museums.”
He let his eyes rest speculatively on her, then dropped them to some papers in front of him. “I see you are booked on a flight departing in an hour. I would hate for you to miss it.”
“Me too.” Inside, time and the world stopped while she screened rapidly for her best card. Gao, of course. She needed a private minute to use her phone.
She pulled her sunglasses off and laid them on the table. Tears still oozed from her eyes.
He started. “Miss Frank, are you all right?”
“No. I received bad news today.”
“Oh.” He looked uncomfortable. She was really crying now. She didn’t say anything, so finally he spoke again. “What sort of news?”
“A family member passed on,” she managed.
“Oh.” There followed a long, disconcerting silence. He pulled out a handkerchief, which she refused. “Who?” he said.
“My father,” she improvised. In fact her father was still alive, as far as she knew.
“Oh,” he said. “I’m so sorry.”
“Thank you.” She crumpled again. “Mr. Li,” she said, “may I go wash my face?”
He hesitated only a second. “Of course,” he said. He looked over his shoulder. “It’s in the hall.”
She stepped quickly into the hallway and into the bathroom. She pounded out Gao’s private number. Be there.
“Wei,” he answered.
Yes. “Mr. Gao, it’s Lia Frank. I need help.”
“Where are you?”
“At the airport. I’ve been detained by a man named Li, a curator with the First Beijing Antiquities Museum. He knows about me. He wants to know what pots I’ve been looking at in China. They won’t let me through Immigration. I’m-“”
“Please say no more,” Gao said, concealing his anger almost perfectly. “Do not worry. It will be taken care of at once. Accept my thousand pleas and pardon this gross inconvenience.”
“Mei shi,” she rebuked his politeness, It’s nothing.
“No,” he said, rebuking her back, “it’s terrible. Just await me for a minute or two.”