Like I say, the champ. Why? Because he boxed clever. And survived. He’s the one that got away. Get the point? The old scamp invented perpetual motion in fakery. And not only that: each new “proof” for his existing fakes was itself worth a fortune.
Remembering the Backhouse legend, I felt tears start at its beauty. I nearly almost practically loved that Norwegian lady for all eternity for nudging my memory.
Inexpressibly moved, I turned to show her loving gratitude. She saw my overwhelming emotion and said brokenly, “Oh, darling.”
A forgery scam like that is sheer perfection.
I’d do the same, but a little bit different.
23
« ^ »
WISELY I also told Marilyn, my first call of the morning, that I was looking up a few things about some scheme I was preparing for Ling Ling. I even asked did she want to come. She said, “Forgive me if I demur. Where are your researches directed, Lovejoy?”
“The city hall. And the university.”
“Very well. You may find the registry in Pok Fu Lam Road of use, Lovejoy. Do not disremember your call.” I swear she was smiling. Did she know I’d already looked the address up?
“I’ll not disremember, love. Tara.”
I too was smiling as I hit the road. You can get fond of people, a bad sign.
The library was air-conditioned, thank God. I stood for five minutes dripping sweat in the blissful coolth before moving. An hour and I’d found it in the local Post.
The time it snowed in Hong Kong, it seems, was one of those legends instantly made and as quickly forgotten. Local people actually roped the snow off and charged a dollar a look, as Ling Ling had said. I read the whole paper. And the ones for the next couple of days after. They cleared the library about then “because of the typhoon signal.” We all trailed out into the sludgy air, me and about thirty Chinese.
The sky was blue but not bright cobalt any more. It looked as if it were trying to become dark, though in fact the day was scorchingly bright. The trees near the bank buildings were swaying now. The air caught and puffed. Lovely. I’d looked up
“typhoon.” It means big wind. I smiled. In East Anglia we’d not even notice this faint zephyr. The City Hall’s near the ferry terminal. I thought I glimpsed a stubby leper poling himself rapidly along among all the legs, but no. Imagination, probably.
My mind still nibbling at forgery for survival, I sat in a Wan Chai bar watching the bar girls over a glass of ale and listening to the pop music.
Forgery. Mankind can’t control antiques. Mankind can’t prevent fakes, either. Oh, I know governments, those starry-eyed fools, try. Even the United Nations has a go. It’s hopeless, cobbling smoke. Forgery is lovely, vital, essential to the well-being of humanity.
The antiques industry is built on duplicity. In it, fables abound. Deceit dominates. The reason is that Mr. Getty, Mme. de Meuil, and Mr. Terra are the modern museum Medicis—they’ve got what the rest of us crave, the wretches. Art critics hate them for their fabulous collections and snap about vanity, selfishness, et cetera, et cetera. The battle rages.
Meanwhile, the world sulks because Lady Lever has the stupendous antiques we all want. So what happens?—We go for the next-best buys, anything in art or antiques.
And there’s not enough. So the universe is stuffed with copies, repros, phonies, duds.
And human beings are as bad. We’re all hybrids saying we’re pure. Nations, races, classes, religions, each pretending they weren’t coined yesterday, with sham lineages back to Adam, phoniest myth of all. There were plenty of phony legends I could choose from.
“Eh?” I said.
“I’m Tracy,” a Cantonese girl said, bringing a supply of ale to my nook. Three glassfuls queued for my attention. Tracy’s accent was pseudo-American.
“Are you American?”
“No,” she said, delighted. “I’m going to marry an American.” She indicated a group of American sailors across the bar. Any one? “You’re not American.”
“Sorry,” I said. More U.S. dazzlement.
We talked mostly about families and the bar girls she was friends with, while I searched my memory of recent sales for ideas on Backhouse lines. The Countess von Bismarck’s two superb T’ang pottery horses averaged a quarter of a million. Promising? Not really, because these figures, usually accompanied by pottery grooms in matching glazes, are of known origin—dug up from definite graves, and horribly well documented. And scientists can tell you if the clay and minerals match the genuine locality. Sigh. No to T’ang pottery and its ancient lookalikes.
Worse, many antiques wobble in value. Ten years ago an exquisite Nicholas Hilliard miniature portrait, about one and a half inches across, went for a fortune. This year Sotheby’s sold it for 34 percent less. Take inflation into account and it’s a disaster for that lovely 1572 masterwork which Charles I had owned. Not good for me to lead the Triad into a tumbling market.
Luckily, antiques have ups as well as downs. Everybody in the game had been thrilled in 1987’s rotten summer to hear of Hong Kong’s great T. Y. Chao sale. Fine Oriental porcelain was bound to be flavor of the month. So get the correct reign marks of the right empress on the right fakes and you’re guaranteed a killing. But enough to satisfy the Triad?
“You worried, Lovejoy?” Tracy was asking.
“No, love. Just life and death.”
She laughed mechanically. Somebody called her over to the bar. She went immediately without a glance.
But Impressionist paintings rose 16 percent per annum for the past decade. You can tell your time by their regular dollar hikes. The average all-collectibles’ score is a full three points less.
My spirits rose with each thought, and I paid a fortune for my brimming untouched glasses without dismay. If art can rescue the human race as the ancients believed, why shouldn’t Lovejoy fake the Monet and run?
Time to earn my Oscar. I got a taxi.
Nothing’s built like Hong Kong. Like, one in four slopes daunt any architects, right?
Wrong. To Hong Kong’s mighty builders a vertical mountainside is a casual incline.
Want a reservoir and you’ve only got a cliff top? Easy: scoop out the cliff, and there’s a perfectly good reservoir. And of course cover your reservoir so grass can be grown on the top and sold. Want a skyscraper and you need the one bit of space you’ve got for a children’s convalescent home?—Easy: Reclaim an equal area of the China Sea with the rubble and erect your rehab unit on it, like in Sandy Bay. It’s a madhouse on the surface, but brilliance in practice. Surely these entrepreneurs wouldn’t balk at one more creative tour de force?
The taxi drove out through Kennedy Town, west from Central District past little Green Island onto Mount Davis. We snaked up the road, blissfully shaded for once by flame trees and giant bauhinias all the way to Pok Fu Lam Road.
“Hospital,” the driver pointed out, but averting his eyes as we began the descent past a red-roofed building. A dolorous group of musicians played flutes and gongs by the gullies which descended almost in vertical free-fall. I looked back but didn’t ask.
Funeral? The steep hillside below was a cemetery, stonemasons at work under sacking canopies and armchair graves along contours. He put me down in the scalding heat outside an Edwardian housefront below a walled hillside.
Dr. Surton was a benign elderly Englishman, giving his wife over twenty years. He worked in an echoing but coolish hall situated a way up the hill. Gardens climbed to it, managing paths, fountains, and even ornamental flower beds. He was alone in a side room. For the first time a place felt oldish, Chinese even.
“Lovejoy?” He did one of those half-ashamed English introductions. “Welcome to our humble abode. Before you say anything, I know we’re not quite what you expected. Did the registry give us our full title? Department of Sino-Calligraphics?”