The gateway was beautiful, walls splayed aside for a huge pair of ornamental gates.
The high walls trailed blossomy fronds. Lanterns glowed. A notice in Chinese and English on burnished brass seemed to be telling the world pretty frankly that this was the residence of one Dr. Chao, MD. I stepped out before a marbled porch, soft lights, and flower perfumes. A fountain played in the walled garden. It looked murderously rich. Instantly the hot night drenched me to a sweaty sag, Hong Kong’s favorite trick.
My guardians pointed to the marble steps.
A small precise lady admitted me into coolth. She wore baggy black trousers and an overlap white tunic and flapped ahead of me to the biggest lounge I’d ever seen.
“You like our view, Lovejoy?”
An elderly man was standing beside the vast window. In fact it was more of a missing wall opening to a veranda. He beckoned me forward. He wore the Chinese man’s long cassocky cheongsam, high neck. Thin, bald, bespectacled, smoking a cigarette.
A smudge of distant midnight hills over a sheen of water, and the city below, reflecting a trillion minute glimmers. We seemed to be hovering in a marble airship over some giant fluorescent shoal. I got his point. Views mean wealth, not beauty.
“Hong Kong’s name is actually fairly recent.” He spoke in a cultured accent a million classes superior to my miserable speech. “It means Fragrant Harbor. A contradiction nowadays, I’m afraid. Harbor, yes. But fragrant…”He smiled, his thin features tautening into a cadaver’s. “Queen Victoria was furious when Captain Elliot took Hong Kong into her empire. She said it would never be a center of trade! The poor hero was punished—
made ambassador to Texas. A cruel joke, ne?”
“It’s exquisite,” I said. His fingers were the sort you sometimes find on ultra-moneyed people, long, slender, and satinskinned, hands that nocturnal slaves beaver to restore.
Watching the lights out in the dark, I suddenly shivered. Such beauty had nearly done for me.
“Cold?” Chao said.
“No. An angel walking on my grave.”
The old man seemed to blanch. “Angel? Grave?”
“A saying. When you tremble for naught. Like ghosts, y’know?” I smiled affably, but Chao stood frozen.
“Ghosts? You see ghosts, Lovejoy?”
“No,” I said, narked. “Just my joke.”
“Joke?” He took a step. I detected a faint quivering of his long robe. “These things are not for joking, Lovejoy. You understand?”
“All right,” I agreed with the old fool.
“Not that one is superstitious, Lovejoy. Ghosts, angels—these are old wives’ tales, ne?
For, as one might say, the birds. Not modern.”
“Right,” I said, relieved we had cleared that up. “Er … ?”
He smiled. We were back on the rails. “You blundered into a sensitive local issue, Lovejoy. Antiques.”
“Great.” I beamed, as ever when antiques loomed.
“It is common knowledge that China, that vast culture, nurtures antiques undreamed of. Superb porcelains, delicate ancient tapestries, carved gold-on-wood screens, terra-cotta figures, jade, precious jewelery of emperors, paintings, manuscripts, calligraphics, the most profound works of man. China currently embargoes their export.” He paused politely.
“Er, sorry.” My moans faded.
“Do not apologize, Lovejoy. I am curious to encounter someone to whom all treasure is not monetary. But your love for these ancient wonders must cause you some uncertainty, ne?”
“A little.” Understatement of the year. “Antiques outweigh money, you see.”
“Outweigh money?” He was amazed. “Can such a madness be?”
“There’s not many of us about,” I admitted. “You smuggle antiques from China into Hong Kong?”
“Of course. Not enough.” He sat, bent in regret, braced himself. “It is dangerous, but our fishing junks do transfers daily.”
“And you thicken them out with fakes?”
“Please, Lovejoy.” He raised hands. “Not fakes. Never that word. No. We merely wish to honor the skills of China’s ancient potters, painters, sculptors. We emulate them.
Naturally, we attempt to dignify our poor efforts by the correct potters’ marks, signatures. You do understand?”
I did. A fake by any other name.
“Imagine, Lovejoy, how many collectors would suffer disappointment, museums remain unsatisfied, the auction houses which would dry up if we didn’t.”
“Imagine,” I said dryly. “So you keep the antiques pipeline flowing with genuine items mixed with fakes—er, replicas.”
“We deplore that word too, Lovejoy. I regard our newly made antiques as testimonial items made in honor of the ancients.”
Oh, aye. “And I exposed some in the viewing as… well, less than ancient?” I felt very uneasy. “Look, er, Doc. I’ll make it up. I didn’t realize there was a scam on, see?”
He was silent so long he made me nervous. I glanced about the room. Modern gunge, quite stylish. And expensive. The rosewood was genuine rosewood, the silk hangings real silk. The air-conditioning hummed gently somewhere—he could afford to run it with the coolth washing away into the night. Still, he hadn’t much taste. I wouldn’t have given a groat for the entire load of furnishings. Don’t misunderstand. It was pleasant enough. Fetching paintings, ornamental chairs, New Zealand jade cutouts in angular ebonized frames. But all in all a decorative lorry-load of modern crud. Nearly.
The amah brought a tea tray and exchanged a few words with him as she set it down.
She grinned, pleased at having a visitor. No lack of eye contact there.
“Amahs are a special entity in Hong Kong, Lovejoy.” He moved so slowly, gesturing me to a chair opposite, that I wondered if he was quite well. He was thin as a lath, an ascetic medieval scholar. “Her plain white tunic indicates a general amah. A tunic with blue piping signifies a baby amah, a nanny. And so on. We Chinese are very systematized.”
He poured, using those overlord’s hands. I’d have sat on mine but remembered in time that I had earlier been hoovered to a bathhouse’s pristine purity. The tea was in miniature bowls, scrolled in reds, yellows, and greens, Cantonese style. Half a toothful.
Elegant, but a waste of time. I sipped politely, pretending that it lasted.
“Your performance with Steerforth was disturbing, Lovejoy,” Dr. Chao said, refilling for us both. “Naturally, your predicament required you to exploit those two American ladies, but—”
“Here. Half a mo.” I was uncomfortable. How much did this bloke know? And which performance? “I was exploited, not them.”
“You?” He seemed astonished and his gaze at last met mine, black-brown irises between ocher folds. They were eyes that had seen everything. Not an ideal opponent for cards. “But you made quite good money, Lovejoy. Above average, I assure you.”
I felt myself go red. “I didn’t realize that I was, er—”
He smiled, his facies parchment on a fidget. “Lovejoy. There are places in the world where prostitution is a thoroughly respectable way of raising money. Morality unfortunately has to swim against the tide of commerce in banks, stock exchanges, or bedrooms. Why be ashamed?”
“Yes, well, er…”
A man entered and stood by the door, my head kidnapper. At a word he crossed the long Tientsin carpet and carelessly folded a wooden screen and propped it on the wall with a bump. A nearby framed piece of silk quivered. I was instantly half out of my chair, spilling my tea.
“What is it, Lovejoy?” Dr. Chao asked as the goon left.
“Silly sod.” I glowered after the unconcerned nerk. “He nearly bashed that silk.”
“Is a piece of cloth worth a display of temper?”
“It’s worth the rest of your furniture, dad.” People are pathetic. The framed fragment was a piece of silk damask, the sort Western collectors call turfans, got from the Sinkiang graves. You get up to eight colors. This one had five. “Fourteen centuries ago some unknown genius worked those trees in that design,” I grumbled. “That nerk should look after it, not shake it to pieces.”