“Thank you,” she said, and they hung up. She thought he was joking, a minute or two, but it had not been very much longer than that when she stepped back into the room and Li asked her if she felt better. She said yes, and then his phone was ringing.
“Wei,” he answered shortly, but his annoyance turned quickly to awe. “Vice Minister Pan,” he said wonderingly. He had never spoken to anyone of so high a rank. “Who? Oh yes, Vice Minister, I have her here now. I’m asking her some-what’s that? Oh yes. Yes, sir. At once, sir.” He clicked off his phone.
“You had better go,” he said to Lia Frank, just a trace of irritation and lost face breaking through his control. “Your flight will be boarding.”
“Thank you.” She stood and gathered up her things before he had a chance to change his mind.
“It’s too sad about your father.”
“Yes, it is. Thank you.”
She backed out of the room and ran down the long corridor toward the gates. She felt almost numb. Her phone rang. “Wei,” she answered it.
“Miss Fan,” said Gao. “Everything’s resolved?”
“Yes. A thousand thanks.”
“Please! You must not thank me. Again I apologize for the inconvenience.”
“That’s nothing.” She could feel herself smiling.
“No. And again my compliments on your work. It has not been easy. Pure gold proves its worth in a fire, you know.”
“That’s kind of you,” she said, surprised.
“Level road,” he said.
“The same.” She turned it off and looked up; yes, they were about to board. Now she was really leaving, it was over. Still, everything about her felt different, her skin, her eyes, her cells. She felt tall and beautiful, miserable with love. She pushed the sunglasses up over her red-rimmed eyes. There was the gate to Hong Kong, before her. People were getting on.
19
In Hong Kong that evening, in a warehouse, Bai waited by the forty crates. He had sold the frozen chickens and stored the truck elsewhere. Naturally he didn’t want Stanley Pao to see his truck.
He heard the knock and crossed the concrete floor to open the door. There stood the plump, perfectly dressed art dealer, just as he had been described, full white hair, slicked straight back. “Mr. Bai?” the old gentleman said.
“Yes, Mr. Pao. Please.” He gestured, and Stanley Pao walked past him, a magnet to iron, straight to the rows of wooden crates.
“May I open one?” His voice was casual over his well-tailored shoulder.
“Of course,” Bai answered. He held out the manifest.
But Stanley signaled for him to wait. He didn’t want to see it yet. He wanted to gamble on one.
He let his eyes roam. Eventually he settled on a particular crate at the edge of his field of vision. He walked toward it and pulled it open.
Inside, a tight nest of wood shavings. Good packing. The old-fashioned kind. He closed his eyes, arms extended, and then followed his will down into the crate, burrowing with both hands. A box called out to him, settled into his fingers. He pulled it out.
He put it gently on the floor and tipped up its lid. Oh. The light showed in his face, reflected. So hoi moon. He lifted it gently out of its silk, just a few inches, never taking it far from safety, just to tip it and turn it, a large doucai jardiniere, incandescently painted in emerald, royal blue, and rusty tangerine. Mark and period of Qianlong.
He replaced it securely in its box and reburied it in the wood shavings. He appreciated the chance to have his face turned away for a few seconds-to regain the diffident control of his age and his position. How long since he’d seen something so beautiful? “I’ll see that list now,” he said, turning to Bai.
He took it and scanned it, flipping the pages. He could feel a smile growing on his face. What a firmament. “The bank is Victoria Shanghai,” he said to Bai. He continued reading. Then he removed a card from an inner pocket. “These are your account numbers,” he said, handing it to Bai. He never looked up from the page. He half listened as Bai called the bank to verify. He saw the excitement that Bai was quite unable to control upon hearing his own balance.
“All is well?” he inquired when Bai had closed his phone.
“Excellent.”
“Thank you for your service.”
“To you the same.” As soon as the ah chan had politely backed out the door, he stopped to dial up Pok Wen, the manager of the Luk Yu. “Friend Bai!” Pok Wen roared with the crafted gaiety that was his job. “How are you? Does fortune favor you today?”
Bai smiled in the dark linoleum hallway-there it was, the door to the outside. He pushed it open. The soft evening bath of Hong Kong wafted over him. It was the heaviest air in the world. It was pulled down, ripened, rotted just right by the power of cash. “Yes, Manager Pok, I am favored.” He laughed. “Start soaking the abalone for me!”
Jack Yuan received a call from his import agent as he stood in his lodge room at Crater Lake, Oregon, looking out through a wall of glass at the dark cascading outlines of mountains, the sky blazing with stars. He liked being up this early, in the dark. The edge of the lake was a sheer wall of granite, hurtling down past a silent mirror of black water.
It was the perfect sight to him. He came here to be alone, to drink coffee in the morning in big pine-pole chairs on the deck, to be where no one expected to find him. Sometimes Anna came with him, but this time she had not. And yet still the evening before he had seen someone he knew-a boisterous redheaded gentleman vintner from Santa Rosa, retired from early days in Silicon Valley and consumed with the pursuit of wine. He had been there with a wealthy gaggle of other grape-growers, and they all ate, and drank, and inside himself Jack was thinking: I could never spend my time thinking about wine. I could never pose at living in some country valley. I could never be white. I could never be them.
But he had his own piece of the universe coming, his porcelain. And finally he’d escaped back up here to the silence of his room and the magnificence of the deal he’d just completed, and he had slept. His phone went off. He flipped it up and glanced at the caller-ID line. Only a few calls were routed to this cell number. This was one. “Yes?”
“Mr. Yuan. Ashok Navra.”
“Yes, Ashok.”
“Your shipment of Chinese porcelain is in Hong Kong. I’ve talked to the consignee there, a Stanley Pao. He says the pieces are being repacked for airfreight now.” And Jack had felt a daze, talking to him, thanking him, signing off, looking out at the edges of dawn and the lake and the receding forms of glacier-scrubbed rock. The money was transferred. The art would be in his hands in a few days. Before he went downstairs he left a message for the curator he had hired to help him sort things out and make decisions, telling her to be ready to start in four days’ time. He wanted to know exactly what he had. And then he wanted to keep this collection very, very private.
The next day Stanley Pao opened the door to Bai, the man who had brought in the shipment. He had been a bit surprised, an hour before, to get the man’s phone call. But after speaking with him for a few minutes he had agreed to receive him. This ah chan seemed both careful and intelligent. Sometimes the ambitious ones made good allies. But sometimes they were the very ones a man should not trust.
“Jinlai, jinlai,” Come in, Stanley said in Mandarin, for Bai knew neither Cantonese nor English. To get ahead he’d have to learn. Stanley led him into his back room, climate-controlled, carpeted and shelved like an English den, crammed with pots of all shapes and sizes. He noted with satisfaction the widening of the man’s eyes. “You said you had something tasty for me?”
“Yes,” said Bai. He touched the box under his arm, his gaze roving the room. So many pots, and horse races on the computer monitor. “I have this piece,” he said, and extended the box.