“Don’t call him.”
“Not at all?”
“I’ll tell him you are asking after him.”
“All right,” she said. She put her reluctance away because she trusted Zheng. He had taught her and guided her and he had never, ever tried to fix her. “So who will you send?”
“I have to think. If anyone, it should be Phillip, don’t you think?”
“Definitely. In fact he’s the only one.”
“But I’m not sure it’s the best thing.”
“I was afraid you’d say that again.”
“For every additional person who finds out about this, a thousand points of danger arise.”
“But I need someone with me.”
“We’ll see. At least we should avoid the word getting out as long as possible. In any case, Phillip’s in England. I can get him back and ship him out again if we need to.”
She calculated. “If I did it alone I could finish in ten days. Well, twelve. I’m still not sure that’s a good idea.” A job like this needed more than one pair of eyes. They both knew it.
“I’ll call Phillip. I’ll at least see what it would take to have him close down what he’s doing and come back.”
“I’ll work as fast as I can in the meantime.”
“Good. My God! Eight hundred pieces!”
“If it’s what it looks like,” she said.
“If it’s what it looks like,” he repeated, and they both smiled and hung up.
She checked herself in the mirror. Now she was ready to go out and look for food, look for entertainment, or even just walk. For this she would turn her hearing aids up. She loved walking on the streets of China. She loved controlling the volume on her world, and this was one of the times she liked it up high. Walking through a Mandarin-speaking crowd, hearing the evanescent bubbles of their lives as she passed their pockets of conversation-their jokes, their gossip, their talk about what they were going to eat and whom they were going to see-this was always soothing to her. She liked to feel the ways in which other people were connected with one another. Here she could eavesdrop almost invisibly. She was tall, white, female; people never thought she was listening to them. She could walk with her hands in her pockets and be part of things.
Glancing back at the mirror, she touched her cheek. Her face was too long, her eyes too sad. She had tried makeup, every imaginable way, but it never seemed to really make her look any different. She was getting older too. Lines were showing in the corners of her eyes. She was becoming faintly severe. Sad and severe, bad combination. She smoothed up her hair. Maybe she should stop wearing it in a braid. But it was truly most flattering to her head to have everything come to a point on top. Really, she said to herself, look. She tilted her face. You’re all right. You can’t complain.
In Jingdezhen, the ah chan Bai walked the first of three sets of broad, shallow steps up to the Long Zu Temple. This was a temple to the local god. Towns and villages in China often worshiped gods of local repute. Sometimes these were heroic historical personages who had morphed into legend; sometimes they were spirits who were thought to control the region’s prosperity. The god of wind and fire who inhabited the Long Zu Temple was the latter sort, overseeing the art of porcelain in Jingdezhen and the fortunes of all men who had their hands in it. He was the god of the kilns.
Bai’s European shoes made a satisfying patter up the worn-down stone steps. Large statues of temple dogs guarded each level. At the top, a stone walk divided a grassy terrace where a caretaker raked in a pleasingly ineffective rhythm.
Walking into the temple, Bai’s mind flew back through the hush of spirituality to thoughts of his home. He saw the land his family had occupied since the reign of Jiaqing, given up under Communism, and then reclaimed again. The mountains were fragrant and dense with leaves. It was a place of brushworked beauty. But he was a modern man, a Chinese of the global era, and so he had gone to the city. There was nothing for him back in Hunan.
He stepped into the cavernous main hall. It was dark. The ornate, timbered ceilings were lost above in the shadows.
For hundreds of years this main hall had held the principal altar to the porcelain god. Now it was a museum, open to the public. He strolled past a dusty exhibit, with a fake altar and some token signage; the real altar, for those who still worshiped, was kept quietly in the back. At the end of a short hall he stepped around a sign forbidding passage in both English and Chinese.
Others were forbidden. Not people like him. He entered the small room from the side and stood before the little shrine, eyes lowered before the bronze altar-figure. Electric candles with glowing red bulbs framed the statue, along with bowls of fruit in twin pyramids and incense smoke curling upward. He took three sticks and left a coin in their place.
The first two he lit on the small oil lamp burning next to the incense, chanting under his breath for his two friends, Hu and Sun. He worried for them. The two men were leaving tonight, carrying their futures on their backs. They were transporting a pair of magnificent Yongzheng period famille-rose vases, each four and a half feet high. Neither had ever moved anything of unusual size. They’d been reluctant to bring in partners. Destiny, thought Bai. Safe passage. He rocked the two burning sticks between his hands and stuck them in the bowl of sand. There was so much smuggling in China. Most of it, though-most of the volume and the value-was goods smuggled into China. It was an unstoppable flood, everything from cars to cell phones to tankers full of oil pouring into the country. Billions of dollars’ worth of goods, staggering levels of lost revenues in Customs. Bai always hoped, in his prayers, that this incoming flood would continue to displace governmental attention from the activities of men like him.
Now the third incense stick. This one was for him. He suspended it in the lamp flame until it caught. The glowing tip was his success, the sure burn his safety. If he made it through he could take Lili to Hong Kong. Just take her and go. His own glow started deep inside him, in the pit of his middle, and spread upward.
Bai perched the stick in the sand by the others and brought his offering out, unwrapped it from its layers of cloth. It was a pot, of course, a Wanli blue-and-white stem cup. It was not real. It was fang gu, a copy. This one, of course, was primitive, crude, quite inexpensive. Such a piece was perfectly adequate when dealing with spirits. Spirits were vain, easily fooled, known to be satisfied with even remote facsimiles.
He stared at the rising ropes of fragrance, the glass eyes of the god. Maybe he was going to taste success. If he did, he’d get a new name. That was how it was among the ah chans. A man got his midlife name when he made his big win. Now they just called him Bai, or sometimes Long Neck Bai on account of the birdlike way his head sat on his shoulders. No more of that. Just Emperor. Emperor Bai. Call me Huangdi. Elated, filled with the sweep of blessing, sure all he desired was coming his way, he bowed low to the god and left.
Jack Yuan took the call on the deck of his cliffside house in Cannon Beach, Oregon. The wet wind ruffled the plastic tied over a stack of logs and shivered the salt-air-stunted pines that grew up along the sides. The deck was cantilevered out over five hundred sheer feet of rain-wet rock. “This is Jack,” he said into the phone.
He walked to the rail, listening. It was Dr. Zheng. He leaned over the roiling Pacific. Gleaming piles of black rock materialized, rose, then sank and vanished in the pulse of waves and foam.
“I have some news,” said the age-darkened voice from New York.
“I’m listening.” Jack curled his hand to shield the phone from the roar of the sea. Jack had never met Zheng in person, though he thought he knew him, knew him well, by his voice, by its range of shadings and its manifold moods. Jack had bought through him for several years now. He liked Dr. Zheng. He felt he could rely on the gentleman’s discretion.