“Still uptown, tailing Jeff Dunbar.”
“How did that come about?”
“Because he’s as smart as you said. I’d tell you but I can’t do two things at once and I want to see these famous photos. How did you get her to send them to you?”
“Shayna? I told her I was interested in moving into the Chinese-American area. That I was attracted by the hybridized, mongrel nature of it. I implied I was ready to spend money, but I wasn’t sure of myself in the field so I’d need an advisor, a specialist. Threw a bunch of art words around, then said I’d gotten the idea from Doug Haig, my drinking buddy, that Shayna Dylan was the person to ask about contemporary Chinese-American.”
“Her ego’s big enough that she bought that? A big-time dealer directing you to a temporary gallery assistant?”
“Without blinking. Like your client said, Chinese contemporary’s a small world. Haig has no interest in Chinese-American but he’d know who does. Why not throw some business her way? Doesn’t cost anything and now she owes him.”
“The idea of owing Doug Haig almost makes me feel bad for her.”
The waiter plunked down our beer and tea. “Shayna sipped her way through a cosmo and a half, explaining the difference between what the mainland Chinese are doing and what’s happening here. She’s not an airhead, you know.”
“Please don’t feel required to enumerate her good points. I bet you’re planning to put in for a reimbursement for the drinks.”
“Damn right I am. She mentioned one of the artists Linus had me buying. Just in passing, probably to prove we were on the same wavelength.”
“Did she say she’d Googled you?”
“Does anyone ever?”
“Say it or do it? Everyone does it, but mostly people don’t talk about it. She probably assumes you Googled her, too.”
“Really? Maybe I should have.”
“If only someone taught you how.”
He raised his beer in a toast. “She described the newest developments on the Chinese-American scene and offered to take me around looking. She even asked whether I thought you’d want to come.”
“Would I?”
“Not a chance. You only like tomb trash. Fusty stuff.”
“That explains why I hang out with you, no doubt.”
“She said she’d gotten that idea about you, but of course everyone has a right to their own taste. She said that with a lovely, tolerant smile.”
“Showing her pointy little teeth.”
“I kept asking for descriptions of the art, this absolute newest cutting-edge stuff, and finally she remembered she had some photos on her phone. She’d shown them to Doug. He’d actually been interested in one, but she didn’t think anything had come of it.”
“‘Doug’? ”
“Hey, Shayna’s on a first name basis with the best.”
“She call you Vlad?”
“Of course. So she showed me what she had—”
“Meaning the photos—”
“And I oohed and aahed over about a dozen—”
“I’d like to have seen that. You oohing and ahhing.”
“—and I asked her to send them to me. Including but not making a big deal out of the one she said Doug liked.”
“Here.” I finally found Shayna’s e-mail in the mess on Bill’s phone, and downloaded the photos. “You know you have two text messages from her, too?”
“No, I didn’t. What do they say?”
I opened them. “The first says, ‘Here u go. Thnx 4 the drink—had a gr8 time.’ The next says, ‘When u want 2 see work, call me.’” I clicked through the photos, stopped when Bill said, “That one. There, in the background on the right.”
“Well.” I squinted. “Well. The mummy’s treasure. Okay, they definitely look like what I saw when I Googled Chau. He had a distinctive style. I suppose if you were Haig and you knew his work you’d know whether you’d ever seen them, and if you hadn’t you’d think they might be new. But in the background and tiny like this—how could anyone be sure they were real?”
“I don’t think anyone could. Given their value if they were, though, they’d be worth checking out.”
“So where were they when she took this?”
“At an open studio in Flushing. About two dozen artists rent a warehouse communally out there. It’s Chinese Artist Central—ABCs, Chinese-born immigrants, a couple of Taiwanese, a pair of twins from Singapore. The place calls itself East Village, after an artist’s district in Beijing in the eighties that named itself after the East Village here in New York. Very meta, you know?”
“I don’t know, but okay. Go on.”
“Two weeks ago another two dozen artists moved in for the week, and everyone hung work all over the place and waited for the buyers and dealers and critics to come.”
“Did they?”
“To a certain extent, apparently. Not the biggest names, but the hip and the cool. That’s why Shayna went. Contemporary’s her passion, remember, not antiquities.”
“And yet she dated you. So whose studio were these in?”
“She doesn’t know. What she was shooting was that sculpture there. The aluminum foil one? She gave me his name, that artist. But the papercuttings where the Chaus are, she wasn’t interested so she doesn’t remember who made them.”
“And this was what Doug Haig was excited about? This photo?”
“Yes, though Shayna thinks it was the aluminum foil that lit his flame. She tried to get me worked up about it, too. I think I disappointed her when I asked about the papercuttings.”
I studied the tiny photo. “It must be one of the artists who rent the building,” I said. “That must be his studio.”
“Or one of the visitors.”
“Well, but why would anyone bring phony Chaus to a temporary show? If they were trying to get people to notice their own work? And even less, why would they bring real ones? I think that’s someone’s studio and, real or fake, the artist put them up for inspiration while he works. Artists do that, right?”
“They do. Or they may be his. Not in the sense that he owns them, but that he made them. It’s a Chinese tradition to copy famous works. It helps train the artist’s eye.”
“Really?” I sat back. “So maybe that’s all these are, then. Somebody’s really good copies. And everybody got carried away.” I frowned. “They’d have to be awfully good, though, to fool Doug Haig.”
“If he’s actually seen them.”
“He has. He’s the one spreading the rumors.”
“He is?”
I recounted what Jack and I had been told by Eddie To. “And the whole thing about the political content, too. You can’t tell that from these tiny photos. If he’s saying that he’d have to have seen them.”
Our soup arrived. The monster basins of steaming broth sloshed over with noodles, rice sticks, meat, fish, and greens. The briny tang of my soup and the gamey scent of Bill’s nearly knocked me over.
“But,” I said, arguing with myself as I doctored my bowl with fish flakes, “if the Chaus were hanging in someone’s studio for who knows how long, how come no one noticed them before? Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe they really were brought out to Flushing for that show.”
“Or maybe all these cutting-edge people don’t know what a Chau looks like. Shayna went right past them.”
“The artists, though? You’d think they would. He’s part of their cultural heritage.”
“Maybe not. They’re young. Chau may have been a hero around Tiananmen, but that was more than twenty years ago. Especially if he worked in traditional media with traditional subjects—”
“—politicized, though—”
“—doesn’t matter. I bet he’s been pretty much forgotten. You know,” he said, winding noodles onto his chopsticks, “that group studio and that show, they sound right up Jack’s alley. Even if he didn’t go, I’ll bet he heard about it.”
“We can ask him when he gets here.”
“Ask him what? Because he’s here,” said Jack, his shadow falling over the fluorescent-lit table. “Wow. I’ll have one of each.”