Discretion was important to Jack. He bought secretly. He wanted everything anonymous. He had an uneasy relationship with the advent of major money in his life, and he didn’t like people knowing what he had.
In any case it was easy, collecting anonymously. He used proxies. He planted people at the auctions, speaking urgently in multiple languages into their cell phones, knowing that as the bidding went into the stratosphere the art people would be studying them, guessing, trying to connect them to buyers, dealers, and agents they knew. Meanwhile he would place the winning bid through the one person he knew no one would have been watching-the obvious person off on the side, speaking English. It was so easy to predict where people would look and what they would think. He felt a familiar dash of pity. Human society was so much less mysterious than he had once thought, than he’d hoped. It was sad.
He hadn’t always been interested in Chinese antiquities; he’d bought other objets first. But there came a point when he had stared into the mirror at himself every day for too long, at his glossy black flat-combed hair, his cashmere golf shirts, his overengineered athletic shoes. He was neither white nor truly Chinese. Then he bought a few porcelains through Dr. Zheng. They were ancient and exquisite. They made him feel more himself, even though he was a lifelong baseball-cap wearer from Alhambra, California. “Has Miss Frank seen the porcelains?”
“Yes. She’s seen them.”
“And they’re good?”
“Oh yes,” Dr. Zheng said in a voice oddly tickled with laughter. “More than that. Wonderful! But that’s not the thing.”
And the thing is? Jack thought, waiting.
“There are more than you think.”
“What?” A wave crashed down below and poured spray up against the rock face. Jack was straining into the phone. “How many more?”
“Eight hundred.”
“What!”
“Eight hundred,” Dr. Zheng said again, slowly.
I did hear that, Jack told himself wonderingly, staring out at the strip of red molten sun spread under the lowering clouds, fading its last into the ocean. “How is this possible?”
“I don’t know,” Dr. Zheng said.
“Where did they come from?”
“I don’t know that either. Not yet.”
“Eight hundred,” Jack repeated slowly. He had been knocked back for a second. Now his mind cracked open to the sudden and fundamental upshift of possibility. Everything notched forward.
Eight hundred fine porcelains. It would be unthinkably expensive. His wife, Anna, would never permit it.
“You’ll have first right, of course.” Dr. Zheng’s voice jumped straight into his brain. “But you need only take what you like. We have many other buyers.” There was a smile in his voice. “Believe me, we do.”
“Let me think about it,” Jack said. He’d been knocked off balance. He didn’t want to rush. Still, he saw a possibility as he stared out at the churning gray Pacific. He saw a lens dial in, and everything grew clearer, brighter, higher in the air. Gulls flapped and cried. Exaltation surged. He knew this feeling. When he’d been a young man, single, he’d had it every time he fell in love. He was married, he didn’t fall in love anymore, and now this feeling came to him through acquisition. Like this, he thought, fine porcelain: He’d be with friends. They’d have tea. Some of mankind’s most radiant works would be passed from hand to hand. “What would you say is the total worth?” he asked Dr. Zheng.
“Oh. Quite impossible.”
“Ballpark.”
“Really. Lia just got there. She’s alone. It will take days just for her to open all the boxes-”
“Roughly,” Jack said, patient.
“You mean if they’re all authentic. Because there’s that too.”
“Yes.” Jack waited, enjoying it. He could almost feel the old gentleman readying his pencil. He stood on an edge in his life. And this particular precipice, on this deck a tenth of a mile above the waves, would never come again.
Zheng coughed. It was as if he couldn’t bring himself to say it.
“Yes?” Jack said.
“Well over a hundred million dollars. Over a hundred fifty million. I really can’t be more specific.”
Jack took this in. “How long will it take her to do an inventory?”
“Some time. Some days.”
“Let me think, then.”
“Please,” said Dr. Zheng, “be at your ease. We’ll send you selected photos, piece descriptions. These will give you an idea.”
“Great,” said Jack.
He was going to talk to Anna. Already he was thinking strategy. Art made money. It could be an asset to a portfolio. Still. He knew his Wharton MBA wife would not take kindly to so much money being put into delicate, breakable objects. After they hung up, Jack stood a long time staring at the surf boiling in the last gray wash of light.
“It’s amazing,” Dr. Zheng said to her. “I have the feeling he’s considering taking all of it.”
“That would be nice.”
“And quiet.”
They could feel each other smiling. “Is he a big collector?”
“New. Young. He’s been working up to this. He buys silently. Chinese-American, software money.”
“And our seller?”
“I checked. Never bought or sold at auction,” Zheng said.
This sounded right to Lia, though it made this deal even stranger. She was used to seeing the major collectors from the Mainland at the big auctions now in Hong Kong, London, and New York. They were stepping into the vacuum sucked out by the decline of other countries.
But she’d never seen Gao among them. He’d never been to the previews, the cocktail parties. He was never one of the ones they would mention when a delicious new piece turned up for sale. “Fung would pay half a million for this.” And: “What about Toller? Oh no, he’s getting a divorce.” And: “Pity Martinson died! He would have loved this.”
“Is everything real so far?” Dr. Zheng asked her.
“So far,” she said. “I’m pretty sure-no, I’m quite sure. What I’ve seen so far is real.” She made her voice firm to rule out the fear.
Fakes slipped through all the time, and art insiders knew it. She had heard museum people say, late at night after the restaurant had emptied out and the glasses were in disarray upon the tables, that if only ninety percent of their holdings were authentic they’d be happy. That meant a lot of fakes-oh, but they were excellent fakes, fakes that had dazzled everyone. And then they would always fall into the same unanswerable argument: What exactly made a fake a fake, when everyone who saw it was sure it was real? What lay deeper in it to recognize?
The fakes in Chinese art, of course, were different. In Western art, fakes intended to deceive. In China, quite often, they aimed to pay tribute. Reproductions had long been a serious, respected artistic practice. Great works were born from this. They were copies, yes, but made by real artists, out of love. Some changed hands, were lied about, and turned into forgeries-this was inevitable. And some of these in turn were so good that they fooled everybody: buyers, auction houses, experts, people like Lia. This was the thing she most feared.
“I have to believe there’ll be fakes,” she said to him. “So far, though, I haven’t seen one.”
“Are you sure?”
“No,” she admitted. “That’s why I don’t want to do this alone. How’s David?”
“Fine. Getting better every day. He’ll be a few more days in the hospital, then he’ll be flown home. Don’t worry about him. You have enough to think about.”
“Are you going to send Phillip?”
“I’m still thinking about it. Let’s hold off. Day by day, eh?”
“Day by day,” she agreed, and they hung up.
3
Lia came to the bottom of a crate the next midday. Checking it, checking it again, waving her hands through the wood shavings, she found a box she’d almost missed. She brushed it off, unhooked it, tilted up the lid, and then stopped.