Lorena looks over her shoulder. “I hope it’s a pleasant surprise.”
I’d expected vitrines and shelves and more pedestals. Instead, there’s over a dozen pieces of old, tropical-looking furniture placed artfully throughout the space—sideboards, tables, kitchen and manuscript cabinets—displaying ceramics and bronzes. I recognize teak but not the other woods, and the closest I can get to pinning down the furniture’s origin is “not Europe.” But when I take a moment to let it sink in… “Actually, yes, it is. It’s warm. Comfortable. Not like that museum we went to this morning.”
Savannah says, “King and Company.”
Lorena nods. “They have such a beautiful gallery, but it doesn’t appeal to everyone. Did you see anything there that you liked?”
I bob my head side-to-side. “A couple pieces. Nothing I had to have right away. May I?” I don’t wait for permission to cozy up to a distressed, dark-stained console table and the half-dozen pots peppering its top. Each sits on a low, square plinth covered with figured scarlet silk.
Lorena glides my way. “Of course. Is there anything special you’re looking for?”
“I’m sure there is.” In fact, I know there is: Nam Ton ceramics. The client says he bought his here, and Savannah confirmed that (sort of) outside. It’s the only style I can recognize without a book in front of me. “I’ll know what it is when I see it.”
I browse the displays, trying not to blow past the ones I don’t care about. I can’t afford to be obvious this early in the game. I see lots of different shapes (kendis—a kind of Southeast Asian teapot—mortuary pots, water jars, bowls of different sizes and depths) and lots of finishes (glazed, unglazed, painted, incised, cord-marked, sgraffito). None of the right ones, though.
Savannah appears at my elbow. “Come on. I’ll show you something I think you’ll like.”
The significant look she gives me tells me to let her tow me by the sleeve to the room’s street end. We stop in front of a well-aged cupboard. Its doors are open, and there are almost a dozen pots on its shelves. I ask, “Which one?”
She glances behind us—Lorena’s at the room’s other end, watching—then murmurs, “Any of them. Just ‘ooh’ and ‘aah’.”
“Ooh. Aah. What?”
“I get that you don’t want to tell Lorena what you’re interested in.” Savannah stretches to get her lips next to my ear. “Sometimes I tell my clients to hold back. But you need to tell me. I can’t help you if you don’t. I mean, I don’t mind taking your money, but I’d rather help you buy something with it.”
Usually the first step an art advisor takes with a new client is a meeting where they’ll talk about the client’s goals and tastes. That talk never happened for us. I met Savannah this morning at the Bancarella coffee pavilion on Union Square. After we finished our lattes, we jumped in my town car and took off. The conversation never went deeper than first time here?
Maybe we didn’t have that “what are you looking for?” talk today because Our Client already filled her in. Maybe not. But she’s just an overpriced tour guide if I don’t let her do her job.
“Something fresh and new. Surprising. Something I won’t find in every other collection.”
She frowns at me. “I’m not sure I understand. Should we look next door?”
At the contemporary art, she means. “Not that kind of new.”
As my bought-and-paid-for advisor, her first loyalty’s supposed to be to me. If she’s part of the scam—a possibility I can’t dismiss—showing her what interests me may be too much, too fast. Or—worse—she’ll smell a rat and bolt.
But I have to get things rolling or the project’s dead.
I pull my work phone, sort through the open browser windows, and show her a picture. “I ran across this a while ago. I couldn’t find out much about it. It’s Thai, right?”
Savannah’s ocean-blue eyes widen a few ticks. She gently takes the phone and studies the photo. “It’s from Thailand. There wasn’t such a place when it was made, though.” She glances up at me. “Why didn’t you show this to me earlier?”
“I wanted to see what you’d come up with on your own.”
She nods. “Okay. A test. I get that.” She doesn’t seem put out by it. “I don’t see anything like that here right now, but Lorena’s handled it before.” She gives me my phone with both hands, like it’s a big business card. “Let me talk with her. You look around, see if there’s anything else that catches your eye.”
I do that while the women have their sidebar in the back of the gallery. There really is some pretty stuff here. I like the pieces where the artist didn’t try too hard—simple, clean lines, unfussy decoration. Like that Nam Ton water bottle in the picture I showed Savannah.
They leave me alone longer than I would have in my gallery. Both women eventually join me, one on each side. Lorena asks, “Have you found anything you like, Mr. Hoskins?”
A little aw-shucks usually knocks down defenses. “There’s so much to choose from. I don’t know where to start.”
Savannah, on my right, is texting like crazy. “Well, Lorena had a great suggestion.”
“Buy one of everything?”
Lorena lets out a you’re-the-client-so-everything-you-say-is-witty laugh. “That would work, too. No, I told Savannah that she should take you to the Norris Museum. They have an excellent collection, and she’d be a wonderful guide. You can learn a great deal in a short time. It might help you pick a period or a style to concentrate on. You can never have too much education when you’re starting to collect in a new area.”
The Norris Museum. James Bandineau. The other guy the client mentioned.
Yeah, I should go there.
Chapter 6
58 DAYS LEFT
San Francisco has two Asian art museums. The bigger one calls itself the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, like there’s only one. It’s supposed to be very nice and Savannah tells me it has a little something for everybody. “That means,” she tells me in the back seat of a town car Olivia arranged, “you don’t get a lot of depth in the galleries.”
We don’t go there. We go to the Norris Museum of Southeast Asian Arts in the area called South of Market.
I watch the mutt-mix of newish apartment buildings, slightly scruffy older mixed-use buildings, and the occasional scraper roll by. The walkers are way more downmarket than a few blocks back near Barney’s and the Ferrari Store. It’s frayed but not scary… much. “You know, when I was a kid, I’d come up here with my folks for long weekends. This out here? This was the place tourists weren’t ever supposed to go.”
Savannah nods. “I remember that. It’s crazy how much it’s changed.” She waves toward her window. “This part hasn’t, but when we turn on Folsom? That’s the new SoMa. The galleries are moving here from Union Square.” She points out the driver’s side. “Gagosian’s three blocks that way.”
“Seriously?” Gagosian’s a megadealer with sixteen branches around the world. When somebody drops eight or so figures on a lot at a contemporary art auction, there’s a good chance the artist is part of Gagosian’s stable.
“It’s a whole different city up that way, and it’s moving down here.”
Creeping hipsterization doesn’t seem to bother her much. I suppose it wouldn’t concern Hoskins, either, since he causes it. “You’re a local?”
“I grew up on the Peninsula.”
I’ll figure that out later. Like most Angelenos, I can locate San Francisco, Oakland and maybe San Jose on a map. The rest is all here-be-monsters. People from the Bay Area think L.A. goes all the way to the Mexican border.
The Norris is a handsome three-story, red-brick building taking up half a long block on Folsom. If you don’t look hard, you can believe it’s a cleaned-up turn-of-the-century warehouse. It isn’t.
The driver lets us off at the main entrance on the corner of Sixth Street. We arrive just as they open at ten and breeze through security after Savannah flashes a
card at the guard. “I guess you’re a regular here.”
She almost blinds me with her smile. “This is like Disneyland for me.”
The galleries start on the third floor. They’re arranged chronologically rather than thematically or by nationality. We bust through “The Hunter-Gatherers” to get to “The First Farmers.”
It’s like jumping into one of those books I’d slaved over in my hotel last night. Statues, figurines, jewelry, pottery, nicely displayed in airy vitrines lit by grid-mounted LED spots below an open ceiling. The labels are big and contrasty, easy to read in the subdued lighting. I like this place already.
Savannah parks next to me. She’s in Escada again, a sleek, closely-fitted knee-length black dress overlaid by a tone-on-tone broken plaid pattern. “This is where we start. I’m your audioguide.”
“You’re too big to wear around my neck.”
She peaks an eyebrow. “You’re sure about that?”
Women flirt with Hoskins. They haven’t flirted with me since I started working counter service. I’ve missed being Hoskins.
I follow Savannah through the next several galleries as she teaches me about the objects. I listen just enough to tell if she’s asking me a question or wants a comment; most of my attention’s on the labels, which is what I’ll remember. My memory’s visual, not aural. It’s interesting to see contemporaneous objects from different cultures displayed together—it provides some context I don’t have yet. I didn’t really come for that, though.
I came for Nam Ton. I came for James Bandineau.
We’ve just entered the first Northern Thailand gallery—where the Nam Ton works should be—when a man slips through the doorway at the other end. I recognize his hair from a picture on the museum’s website: thick, mostly gray, brushed back from his forehead into what a romance novel would probably call a mane.
He pads up behind us a minute later. “Well, look who’s here. Savannah! What a surprise.”
I doubt that. If she didn’t warn him, Lorena did.
Savannah spins and claps her hands together. “Jim! Hi!” They do the two-cheek air kiss. “What are you doing out in public?”
“I like to see what our guests are seeing.” He turns toward me and holds out a hand. “We haven’t met. Jim Bandineau. I work here.”
“Rick Hoskins.”
We shake. He has a good, firm Chamber-of-Commerce handshake, which isn’t always the way with guys working in the arts. He’s my height—just shy of six feet, some of it hair—and looks like the romantic-hero professor in a Hallmark Channel movie. There’s hardly any correction in the rimless glasses. A prop?
Savannah explains me to him (the other thing I needed her for), then tells me, “Jim’s the museum’s chief curator. Everything you see here is his work.”
Bandineau waves that away. “Hardly all mine. Is this your first visit?”
We do the polite first-date chat for a couple minutes. He wears a V-neck, long-sleeved sweater in heather green over an open-collar white dress shirt. At least there’s no tweed jacket.
According to the client, he’s Lorena’s partner in the looting scheme. He’s certainly in the right position to do it.
He says to me, “Let me show you some of my favorite pieces. I’m sure Savannah’s been talking your ear off.”
“She’s a lot more charming than the audioguide.” That makes her smile. It’s not hard to do, but it’s nice to see.
Bandineau leads us around the gallery, pointing out objects here and there. He talks about the makers like he knows them personally. Sometimes he tells us about the people who found the artifacts—“the real heroes of the story”—making bread-and-butter archaeology sound like high adventure. His favorite phrase seems to be “This is fascinating…” What he says next usually is. No wonder he’s done so much publicity for the museum.
I finally find what I’ve been looking for. “Jim? Can you tell me about this?” Yeah, we’re on a first-name basis now.
He nods as soon as he sees what I’m looking at. “Ah, yes. One of my current favorites, too. Aren’t they extraordinary?”
They are. The vitrine holds eight Nam Ton pots. The shapes are crisp and streamlined. They’re thin-walled, symmetrical, and well-formed. Five of the eight are intact, not 3D puzzles glued together out of sherds like most of the pots here.
But the most striking thing is the decoration. The makers used only two colors—a pure-white slip and cobalt blue—and kept the designs as understated as the forms. A single sharp, uniform blue band below the rim of a bowl. A single blue stripe reaching from the mouth of a tall water bottle to the base, hugging the swell of its body. A vase split exactly in half, the bottom blue, the top white. Five wares have an extra design element: one or two complex, curving blue-line figures that seem to have been dashed off with a single gesture. The colors still pop even after seven centuries in the dirt.
I’ve seen a lot of pictures of Nam Ton over the past couple days, but seeing them in person and in context is almost overwhelming. They’re not the thick-walled, lopsided things I expect from jungle tribesmen. They’re not like the pots in the other cases around us. There are no clumsy drawings of fish or birds or flowers. A lot of technical skill went into making these. It took a sophisticated design eye to come up with the decoration and not overdo it.
It’s like finding a 700-year-old iPhone. Something that shouldn’t exist, but does.
I don’t even notice Bandineau arrive until he says, “You could put those on your dining table today and they’d look perfectly at home.”
“Yeah.” I finally look up. “How did they…?”
“Do this? No one knows for certain.” He turns up a hand. “We have a good idea how they made these, of course. It’s likely a variation on how people make pottery in northern Thailand and Laos today. They use a simple spinning platform on a stick…”
If you’re like me and all you know about making pottery is from date night watching Demi Moore and Patrick Swayze play in the mud… well, that ain’t it. There’s no potter’s wheel, for one thing. I soak up the labels while staying partly tuned to Bandineau’s wavelength.
Savannah stands at the end of the vitrine, listening to the lecture while watching me. What does she see? What does she know?
When Bandineau stops, she says, “They could’ve used wheels. India and China had wheels three thousand years before these were made. It’d explain the symmetricity.”
I’m impressed she can make words like “symmetricity” sound perfectly normal.
Bandineau makes a circling motion with his hands. “Well, yes, that’s possible. But we have to look at the record…”
They launch into a debate that gets seriously out there after a minute or so. They’ve done this before—the playful jabs they take at each other seem almost practiced. Since Savannah keeps glancing at me, I figure she’s showing off for a new audience.
They both stop for air. I say, “What about the decoration? The patterns could be mid-20th century, not mid-fourteenth century. That’s what makes these special.”
Bandineau nods like he’s heard this before. “Exactly. I’d argue that the most remarkable thing is the level of craftsmanship in the basic fabrication. I’m sure you’ve noticed—it’s close to what we see with classical Greek ceramics. But the colors do catch the eye, don’t they?”
“They do. Why isn’t there anything else like them? Where do they come from?”
He steps to a mounted poster-sized map of mainland Southeast Asia covered with numbered red dots. “These pieces came from around here.” He points to a spot along a dashed blue line showing the border between northern Thailand and Myanmar. “The archaeologists have been deliberately vague about exactly where to protect the sites from looters.”
It must not be working.
“As for where the Nam Ton culture came from… well, we don’t really know. These wares have been trickling out of Thailand for years, but the first scientific excavat
ions happened only eight years or so ago. The scholarship’s thin so far. I’ve seen only two papers.”
Savannah says, “They’re not as unique as you think. Don’t get me wrong, they’re lovely, but…” She drifts around the case’s corner toward Bandineau. “The forms are pure Southern Song Dynasty. That’s thirteenth-century Chinese. The Song made thin-bodied whiteware in the twelfth century. Qinghua wares—blue-and-whites—started being mass produced at the beginning of the Yuan Dynasty.” She finger-circles the three pots to my right. “See that squiggle? It looks a lot like a form of very abstract calligraphy that developed in China at the end of the thirteenth century.”
I say, “So you’re saying these are Chinese?”
“I’m saying that Chinese potters trying to escape the Mongols may have kept running until they reached northern Thailand. There wasn’t anything to stop them. Once they got there, they started making ceramics again.”
Bandineau says, “There’s no proof of that, though.”
As they bicker, I start thinking big-picture.
Like I told Olivia, I never had to pay attention to ceramics. I dealt with flat art: oils, watercolors, the very occasional litho. The only pottery I had any serious exposure to in art history class was Golden Age Greek. Sculpture’s greatest hits—another “fine art”—showed up in class but always seemed like an afterthought. Art to me was something you hang on a wall. That’s what pulls down the serious money on the market.
Seeing hundreds of pictures of pots over the past few days didn’t make a dent on me. It took seeing ceramics in person yesterday and this morning to make me finally get why they’re different, and special.
They’re real. I can touch them. Even if a piece is a grave good—a lot are—it still has a familiar form and purpose. People have made cups and teapots and jars with their hands for five thousand years. If Bandineau let me, I could pick up one of these bowls and hold it exactly the same way somebody did eight hundred years ago. That’s a direct connection with the past you can’t get with a painting.
“Rick? Are you still there?”
Chasing Clay (The DeWitt Agency Files Book 3) Page 4