“But Dorothy did not forget her little brother, whom she had adored. It was not until her mother died and China began to open up to the outside world, that Dorothy felt free to start looking for him, which is to say you, Anthony. The trouble was the family name is Zhang, which has to be one of the most common, if not the most common, names in China. She didn’t know where to start. Furthermore, she was quite determined not to go to China to do so.”
Zhang Anthony had looked a little skeptical up until this point on the subject of his sister, and for that matter everything else I said, but then he nodded. “I remember her,” he said slowly. “My sister. I remember my mother, the way she felt and smelled, although I cannot recall her face, but I remember someone else, a girl. What did you say her name was?”
“Dorothy.” the elderly man said. His son just looked at him. I didn’t know Anthony well enough to read the expression on his face, but I think he was angry.
“Dorothy became a highly regarded specialist in Chinese art and antiquities, curator of the Asian galleries at a small but prestigious Canadian museum,” I went on. “One day, in perusing the Molesworth and Cox Oriental auction catalog, she saw one of the silver boxes she had played with as a child. A relatively short time after that, she saw a second silver box that belonged to the set.”
“Just a moment,” Anthony said rather peremptorily. He then turned to his son and said something in Chinese.
Xiaoling shook his head no. Anthony looked at his son for a moment or two, and then said in a quiet tone that was chilling, “Then where are they?” I suppose he meant the boxes. Xiaoling didn’t answer.
“Seeing these boxes on the market told Dorothy many things. One was that almost certainly the boxes had been put on the market by a relative of hers at some point in time. Furthermore, for them to be auctioned in New York at this time could well have meant that they had been smuggled out of the country. Dorothy told me that it was her stepfather who brought the boxes out of China, but it wasn’t. While she would not have known at such a young age what she was doing, she herself brought one of them out. Dorothy’s brother—her half brother Martin, that is— remembers the little box very well. This was perhaps the first of a series of relatively small lies Dorothy told me which, while relatively innocuous individually, taken together had unforeseen and terrible consequences.” Anthony looked askance at my choice of words.
“Dorothy’s husband actually purchased both of the boxes on offer at her request. She told me that she did not collect in her field of employment, but this was another untruth. As of eighteen months ago, George and Dorothy owned all three of the nesting set of boxes. Dorothy said that when they were all assembled, she was going to donate them to the Shaanxi History Museum in Xi’an. If she had really meant to do so, she could have done it eighteen months ago.
“She didn’t, because all of a sudden she had an idea as to how to track down her brother. One of the boxes on offer came from the collection of Xie Jinghe. Dorothy and George contacted Dr. Xie and learned from him that he had purchased the box several years previously, at least that is what he told them. They contacted the auction house for information on the second seller, but were refused that information. Something Dr. Xie said to them, however, made them believe it was he. Dr. Xie also told them that the box he had sold had been in his possession for many years. Dorothy, who after all was a museum curator, did a provenance check of her own, and she decided that there was no evidence that the box had been in Canada in Dr. Xie’s collection for any significant amount of time. Her husband, who by now considered Dr. Xie both colleague and friend, thought they should take Dr. Xie’s word for it, that the results of Dorothy’s provenance check must have missed something. Dorothy disagreed.”
“It was in my personal collection for many years,” Dr. Xie said rather huffily. “I bought it in Hong Kong before it reverted to Chinese control, perfectly legally, and brought it to Canada with me, also legally.”
“That is hardly the point is it, Dr. Xie?” I said. “It was looted merchandise from a very important tomb.”
“Carry on, please,” Anthony said impatiently. “So far all I have heard are wild and completely unsupported allegations.”
“Dorothy,” the old man said, putting the cricket back into the basket. I suppose he was a little senile.
“I understand why you would like to think that what I am saying is unsubstantiated, but believe me there are ways of proving all of this, and in addition to George Matthews, there are two lawyers who have heard this story from the lips of Dorothy herself, Eva Reti in Toronto and Mira Tetford in Beijing. To continue, Dorothy decided that she would find her Chinese relatives and put a stop to the smuggling at the same time. I think she had a couple of motives. She had an almost pathological fear, according to George, that someone would find out that she came from a family of criminals and that she would therefore be reviled by her colleagues in her chosen field. One might ask why, given the number of museums lately that have had to acknowledge parts of their collection are stolen goods, but that was the way it was for Dorothy. On the other hand, she really wanted to see her little brother again. She remembers you very well, Anthony. I think she missed you her entire life.”
Anthony nodded. He suddenly looked very much older, as if weighed down with regret, maybe, or experiences lost. “I would have liked to have a sister when I was growing up.
I was only allowed one son, of course. That’s the way it is here in China, one couple, one child. Is she really dead?“
“Dorothy dead?” the old man said. He certainly seemed to be following this conversation in English all right. “Sons are better.”
Well there it was, wasn’t it? Vivian could take the daughter, but she would never be allowed to take the son. It had not escaped my notice that almost all the Chinese children put up for international adoptions are girls, which says a lot about Chinese priorities.
“Yes, she’s dead,” I said, through clenched teeth. “To accomplish her plan, Dorothy took the box she had brought with her from China as a child, and had treasured all these years, and put it up for auction at the same place that the other two boxes were sold, assuming the seller would be checking prices in catalogs and would not only see it, but be curious enough to try to purchase it, or at least to find out who was selling it. You may not have noticed it, Anthony, but others did. In a way, though, this all happened too late for Dorothy, who suffered greatly from arthritis and was therefore not sufficiently mobile to fully put her plan into action.” Anthony looked again at this father, particularly his misshapen hands.
“Going to New York to the auction would have been difficult for her, and George, her husband, who was supportive but not actually too keen on this obsession of Dorothy’s, refused to go. Therefore, Dorothy conscripted me to go to New York to buy the box. She didn’t want to lose it, you see, but she wanted to know who intended to purchase it, whoever came out of the woodwork as it were. I think I should have known that Dorothy was not being entirely honest with me. She told me that the set of nesting boxes would have had a fourth box, the largest, that was wood. A wood box couldn’t survive over several centuries, particularly once removed from the tombs. The only way she would know that is if she’d seen the remains of the wooden box before it disintegrated, which means she saw it when it was in the tomb or immediately after. It would have fallen apart when it was moved.