“In a way.” She led us back in the direction she’d come from. “That’s Anna’s studio, down there past the kitchen,” she said over her shoulder. “She came in this afternoon and I thought she was staying to work but she left pretty fast. I got the feeling she was upset about something. Did she know you were coming?”
“No. Bill and Lydia just met her, and we were in the neighborhood so I suggested we come over. Is she okay?”
“I don’t know what’s going on. You could ask Pete, they’re pretty tight.” Francie See turned through an open door. “Voilà.” She waved the chopsticks, then used them to lift a dumpling. “Hope you don’t mind if I eat. I’m starved.”
“No, go ahead,” I said, looking around. Pinned to the walls, covering a table, and on three easels, were watercolor paintings, in every shade of blue imaginable, and all of them paintings of water. Oceans, fog, mist, clouds, waves, pools, pounding rain, racing brooks, water in every possible form, including glaciers, steam, and ice cubes. Serene, threatening, chilly, boiling, soft, hard, fast, and slow, changing from painting to painting but all water and all blue.
“Wow,” said Jack. “This is what one of my professors would’ve called ‘bloody-minded.’”
“Just tightening my focus,” Francie said. “It’s all about water, Jack. The twenty-first century’s all about water.”
“You always were so cutting-edge, Francie.”
“I am, aren’t I? Besides, something’s got to wash down these dumplings. You sure you don’t want any?”
The guys shook their heads, but I couldn’t stand it. “I’d love one.”
“That’s what I’m talking about.” Francie grinned and pointed to a jar of chopsticks beside a can of brushes.
“I don’t believe you,” Jack said. “After that soup?”
“Adrenaline makes Lydia hungry,” Bill said.
“Adrenaline?” Francie asked. “You get a rush looking at art?”
I fetched some chopsticks and dug a dumpling from the bowl she held out.
“Bill does,” Jack said. “The jury’s still out on Lydia. But we had some excitement on the way here. We were sort of mugged.”
“Seriously? Are you okay?”
“We’re fine,” I said, biting down on the salty, gamey dumpling. “I was sort of mugged, and Jack saved me.”
“Ooh, Jack, you caveman, you. But you’re okay?” Francie asked me.
I nodded, swallowed, and said, “This is great.”
“Day job. I’m the dumpling queen of Lucky Gardens. See, this is why you should move to the outer boroughs. No one gets mugged in Flushing.”
“For your information,” Jack said, “we were in Flushing, not all that far from here.”
“Oh. Well, I’m lying anyway. Why do you think we have all that fancy electronic stuff on the doors? None of the windows below ten feet open, either. And we have alarms on the skylights, in case someone tries a Mission: Impossible.”
“Glad to hear it.”
“Yeah, I guess it’s good. It cost a fortune, though. A lot of people resisted, but that was partly because the security commissar’s that jerk, Jon-Jon Jie. Oops, he a friend of yours?” Her smile made it clear she didn’t care if he was or not.
Jack shook his head. “Seen his work, but don’t know him. You have commissars?”
“It’s funnier than ‘committee chair.’ Of course it would help if Big Yellow Hunter had a sense of humor. There were people holding out because he wouldn’t shut up. We had to take an actual vote. Appalling. And now look, after all that, he’s moving out.”
“I didn’t know he had a studio here.”
“Down the hall. He came in with us because he thought we were the hip place to be. As though anything could make him hip. But now he’s kissing us off for some high-rent broom closet in Chelsea. I say good riddance and he can take the armory with him.”
“Armory?” I said. “He has guns in there?”
“He says he does. And bows and arrows, and spears. In case a buffalo herd charges through here, I don’t know. Let his new A-list gallery worry about it.”
“A-list gallery?” said Jack. “You don’t mean Baxter/Haig?”
“You heard?”
“Eddie To said Doug Haig was just leading Jie on.”
“That’s what we all thought, but the deal’s gone through. As of a few hours ago. Ink’s still wet. He’ll be Baxter/Haig’s first Chinese-American. Everyone’s disgusted. Jon-Jon’s the kind of gateway drug that’ll make Haig allergic.”
“Haig’s already allergic. I can’t believe he’s opening the sacred precincts to a hyphenated artist. And it’s Jie? I only saw one show of his, but it was garbage.”
“Literally. He buys Gucci’s scraps.”
Jack shook his head. “Are you sure this is true? Say what you want about Haig, but he has an eye. I’ve never known him to show bad work.”
“Ah, well, he’s not showing him yet, is he?”
“What do you mean?”
“There are reasons to put a horse in your stable even if you’re not planning to ride him.” Bill looked over from a painting he’d been examining. Francie said, “Sorry, it’s Jon-Jon’s Texas thing. I couldn’t resist.”
“No problem,” said Jack. “Can you translate, though?”
“Jon-Jon’s from money.”
“You’re saying he bought his way into Baxter/Haig?”
Francie put the empty dumpling bowl into a paint-streaked sink and turned the faucet on. Reaching for a stained towel to wipe her hands, she paused and cocked her head as water splattered and overflowed the bowl. I followed her gaze, admiring the way light glinted off the rivulets. “Mmm,” Francie said. Leaving the water running and the bowl where it was, she unpinned an ice floe from an easel and laid it on a table. Dragging the easel to the sink, she said, “Just before the rumors about Jon-Jon’s knighthood started, we’d been hearing a better rumor: that Haig was in trouble. Whoever’d loaned him the money to buy Baxter out wanted it back, plus. Or so we heard.”
“We heard that, too. Who was it, do you know?”
“No.” Francie fingered through the jar of brushes. “But inquiring minds agree it was Chinese money.”
“Really? Listen, Francie, it sounds like you hear a lot of rumors. Have you heard that there are unknown Chau Chuns floating around?”
“Chau Chun? Who’s that? Wait—Tiananmen? The Ghost Painter or something?”
“Ghost Hero.”
“I thought he was dead.”
“He is.”
“I haven’t heard anything about him.” She pushed a rolling table over to the easel she’d just set up. Crowding it were pots of cobalt, azure, teal, turquoise, indigo, aquamarine. “That must not have made it out here to the boonies.”
“All right,” said Jack. “I can see we’re losing you. We’ll let you get back to work.”
“Nothing personal.”
“Of course not. I think we’ll find Pete, just to make sure Anna’s okay. Which studio’s his?”
“At the very end. Two down from Anna.” Francie pinned a sheet of paper to the easel. “You can help him celebrate.”
“Celebrate what?”
“That he’ll be able to breathe again. So will Anna. As soon as Jon-Jon packs up his mangy hides and moves out from the studio between them.”
We left Francie’s studio and headed along the corridor. “That was cool,” I said. “I always wondered where artists get their ideas.”
“Just turn on the faucet, they flow right out,” Bill said.
“I was surprised she barely knew who Chau was, though. I guess you’re right—this generation doesn’t necessarily know him. That would explain how Anna could have a couple of Chaus, real or fake, pinned to her studio wall and no one here would notice.”
“It explains how she could, but it doesn’t explain why she does.”
Jack stopped at a black door that said ANNA YANG in small neat red letters and, below them, in equally precise Chinese characters. He knocked, then tried the door, but it was locked. “Well, she’s not here to ask.”