A Cup of Light

by Nicole Mones

  Okay, she thought . . . interesting. “And the sources of these suppositions are reliable to you?”

  He nodded.

  “Then I will check into it. I will certainly be able to let you know later.”

  “Really,” he said, impressed.

  “Really. But one condition. You have to find out more about where these pots have been. At least try. Shuo hao-le ma?” she finished, Are we agreed? And to make sure he understood her touch of levity she raised her sake cup to him.

  “Shuo hao-le,” he said, We’re agreed. He picked up his cup; they touched and drank.

  When she got back to her room she was still thinking about whether her pots could in fact have been removed from the Palace in 1913. It was distant but conceivable.

  Somewhere she had this inside. Once at the Morgan Library she had read through all the files on the failed transaction. All the players had been there, their cables with their crossed-out drafts, all the details of the deal that had almost moved the world’s greatest art collection to the other side of the Pacific.

  She turned off the lights and changed into the minimal, clingy things in which she slept. She felt like going to the bottom end of the memory world, to the place where the past played out in her mind. It was tiring to animate memory, but some things were worth seeing. This was one.

  She took her hearing aids out and felt the safe, filling swell of silence. She sat on the bed with her knees up to her chest, wide awake, the gates to her personal world open.

  The cubicle she sought was down a side lane, in the early twentieth century, before the wars, when a crushingly wealthy American set about acquiring, madly, and built a magnificent collection. When he trained his sights on China, J. P. Morgan sent a young American, a man named F. H. McKnight, to do his bidding.

  It was March 21, 1913. The air was filled with clacking Pekingese voices, the roaring hiss of gaslight, and the creak of wheels on the dirt-packed street between the warehouses and the godowns. It was night in the port. Wooden sidewalks bumped and clattered with the streaming passengers. They were dazed to be on land, dazed by the new sounds, the fervid smells, and the terrifyingly strange stalls for food and drink.

  Frederick McKnight stood at the end of this street. In front of him swarmed men pulling carts, hauling rickshas, shouldering burdens several times their own size. Light popped and flickered from burning lanterns. The Western women’s faces glowed in the light as they held their bags close to their bodies. Men, high collars, mustaches, eyes down, also picked their way along the slat-boards. Up at the other end waited horses, mules, and drivers.

  Not an automobile in sight, Frederick realized. Peking was some miles inland. Travel by cart would take hours.

  He realized he would have to apply himself to his arrangements, and did so. For two silver dollars he secured a man with an open, horse-drawn cart to collect his trunks and carry him to the city. Four hours, the man made him understand in pidgin. Frightful, Frederick thought, but what else was there to do? At least the night was fair.

  A gentleman, he had naturally offered to make arrangements for Mrs. Grosbeck, the woman he had befriended aboard the Constantinople. She’d informed him she could make her own. She did this with a lilt in her voice, not in the least standoffish. She also said, with an appropriate lightness, that she did hope she’d see him later.

  Frederick replayed her words in his mind. He was aware of his arms and shoulders moving under the blue serge of his suit, the perfect posture required by his stiffly starched collar—he was a fool to have worn it. No one cared. Not in this place. He reached behind and unhooked it, slipped it off. Instantly he felt better. He slipped it into his bag.

  Mrs. Grosbeck wouldn’t care about his collar.

  They both happened to be booked into the Wagon-Lits. He was twenty-nine, unmarried. She was recently divorced. At first her extra-marital state had struck ambivalence into him, but as she had quite briefly and without emotion told him her story, he had come to see that, in her shoes, he might have done quite the same thing. Yes. Quite the same.

  And here they were in China.

  Frederick climbed into the cart after his luggage. Somehow he had imagined something grander, a regal stride down a gangway into a foreign land, him strong and imperturbable. Not this gloomy dark, the jumping shadows against the mud-walled buildings, the squawking cries and the straw-slapping shoes of the coolies. Amazing. He settled down under a heavy pile of blankets, head propped where he could watch the stars. It was so good to be off the boat.

  He slept. When he awoke he saw gliding above him the walls of the city proper. They were rolling down a dark boulevard. On one side were buildings in pagoda shapes, on the other an endless wall, massive and silent.

  The driver heard him and looked back. “All gate close,” he called over the hoof-clomping. “Go north side, Xizhimen. Open late.”

  Frederick waved a hand and lay back down. Now he could see the curving tiled roofs and trees, so thick, their branches and leaves meeting overhead. After a time they came to the Xizhimen gate and flowed through it with the tide of late-night traffic—carts and rickshas and pedicabs and a bobbing sea of men on foot. He stared. Men in gowns, some very fine, flapping lightly over trousers tight to the ankle.

  Inside the city walls they navigated a network of streets lined with low buildings. Stone walls enclosed round gates and turned to follow narrow lanes leading off. Overhanging balconies glowed with colored lanterns. By the time he was unloaded in the Legation quarter, at the Wagon-Lits, the feeling of being in some strange dream was complete.

  In the hotel lobby, under the glittering chandeliers, he saw more Chinese men of consequence, in gowns of silk. Mandarins, he thought; look closely. It’s with them you’ll have to make a deal. But he could not think, he could not penetrate, he was dizzy with strangeness. He stumbled to his room, fell on his bed, and slept until the next afternoon.

  And now it was ten days later. Now on this night he adjusted his cravat by the fluttering lamplight. He studied himself in the carved rosewood mirror, his hair shining and flat from its center part, his eyes lucid with excitement. He was a gentleman. No one could say any different.

  It had been easy here. The world of foreigners was small, interconnected. He’d only had to call on the few people recommended by Mr. Morgan’s office. At once he’d been introduced to Fleisher, a European of vague nationality who published two English-language papers here in the capital. Fleisher in turn brought in White, who did something at the American Charge D'Affaires Office.

  This White had a Chinese partner named Shi Shu, who acted as agent for the Chinese imperial family. The Qing Dynasty had fallen two years before, and the emperor’s family continued to live in the rear quarters of the Forbidden City. They were surrounded by art. Priceless, unimaginable art. Paintings, jades, bronzes, calligraphy, porcelains, textiles, jewels. They had palaces in Mukden and Jehol too—same thing, according to Mr. White; art stacked to the ceilings in closed rooms. “My good man,” White had said. “You cannot imagine it.

  “And,” White had said, leaning toward him as they strolled the temple grounds of the Shrine of the Star of the Foremost Scholar in the Land, “it is for sale. All for sale.”

  Ah, then Frederick had been brilliant. Every cell in his body had screamed with the excitement of acquisition, but he’d kept himself casual. “What did you say to be the purpose of this temple?” he asked. He feigned disinterest in everything, even the little hilltop pavilion in front of them, even, especially, the deal White was preparing to put on the table.

  “Ah. This is the deity who gives success in the imperial examinations. Success or failure!” Despite Frederick’s careful aloofness, White was relaxed and charming in his gray striped suit. “The examination candidates flocked here to worship. They came from every province in China. Before going to the examination yards to sit for the jinshi, they came here and begged the god for
success. With success came riches and position, guaranteed for life. With failure—well, loss of face was the least of it.”

  “As to the collection you mentioned,” Frederick said at length, after many quiet minutes of studying the statues of the god within. “How might one inquire further?”

  “Let me talk to my Chinese associate,” White had said, and gone on to point out the other nearby temples, the Temple of the Evening Sun and the Hall of Ten Thousand Willows. He chatted politely, filled with zest and knowledge, ultimately surpassing Frederick with a show of bright, courteous apathy.

  But he had inquired. The discussion had begun. And that was many days ago and now they were moving toward agreement.

  Frederick smiled at himself in the mirror. Welcome to Peking, Frederick Henry McKnight, he thought. His face, his eyes, everything was ablaze with possibility. His heart too.

  “Ready?” he said to Eileen—needlessly, for Mrs. Grosbeck had been dressed twenty minutes or more, sitting by the window in the brocaded chair, watching the pulse of life in the street below. The men in their dark garments, the ricksha carriers loping with their musical cries, the robed gentlewomen, walking wide-legged on their bound feet, everyone talking, laughing. A soft roar seemed to rise from the street in China, only it was like nothing he’d ever heard before, no machine sounds, no traffic; instead a tide of human voices.

  “I’m ready,” she said to Frederick.

  He felt a surge of gladness. He hadn’t sorted out his clear feelings for her, but he liked her. She made few demands. She seemed to want to spend time with him. His abdomen tightened. She’d been married, he knew. She was not untried. She walked and sat and stretched and crossed a room with her whole body.

  And she had intelligence. She had helped him compose the cables back to Davison, who worked for Mr. Morgan. The financier’s wishes came through Davison. They had talked about removing some items from the Palace for inventorying—this had been the suggestion of Shi Shu—but Mr. Morgan had said no, leave everything intact. They had traded descriptions of the scope of the collection, and many many prices.

  How much to say in these cables seemed extraordinarily delicate to him. Even though they were composed and sent in code, one never knew. And they must read just right to Davison and Morgan. Still, he had stiffened at first when she took a pencil to his first draft of block capitals and sketched in edits.

  “Doesn’t that sound better?” she asked, pushing it toward him. He looked at it. She was right. It was ambivalent in all the right places, toned, diplomatic.

  “I stand in your debt,” he said. To which she wrinkled her nose. No dry mentalist, Eileen.

  And so tonight he was taking her along for the meeting with Shi Shu—a critical meeting, the most important one yet. Shi Shu had been high in the Manchu bureaucracy, and still went to work every day, for the family, inside the Forbidden City. In the matter of the art collection he was their direct and sole representative.

  A week ago, Frederick never would have brought her. In America, he wouldn’t have dreamed of it. But now he knew he wanted her there. She helped him. She saw what lay behind words and gestures. Later, when they were alone, she would sit with him and help him sort it out.

  Not that he’d tell the others they were friends, a man and a woman. Nothing really improper had happened. Nevertheless, that would not do.

  He had already introduced her to White and Fleisher as his cousin. It had been believable. It made it easier for them to go about together. And she’d absorbed it in the best of humor, seeing its utility instantly. They were relatives. This was their protective cover.

  Davison had cabled them Mr. Morgan’s final line on price. Tonight, if he could bring Shi Shu into that range, they would have a deal. And a new door would open and his new life would start.

  He lifted the glass cover of the gaslight and snuffed it out. He turned to her and extended his arm. She rose, brushed imaginary lint from the cream-colored lace overlaying her high-cut, rustling dress. It struck him that most foreign women looked strange in this world. After seeing the layered silk garments of wealthy Chinese women, he found the cinched, fussy dresses and the great hats of the Western ladies overstated. It was never true for Eileen. Her clothes were straight-lined, tailored from fine cloth, simple. She claimed to dislike hats. Stay with me, he thought impulsively, feeling a warm flood inside himself of wanting her.

  “I’m ready.” She rose and walked toward him. Before she could reach him they were both caught by the sibilant whoosh of an envelope being pushed under the door.

  He walked to it and picked it up. “It’s a cable,” he said, tearing it open. He read.

  “What is it?” she said, for she saw his face sagging in disbelief.

  “Mr. Morgan is dead.”

  “What? Was he ill?”

  “No. It was unexpected.”

  They looked at each other.

  “It happened in Italy.” He read the rest of it. “All negotiations canceled.” He looked up at her. “It’s finished,” he said. His future had been directly in front of him. Now in a heartbeat it had evaporated.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said.

  He nodded.

  They stood facing each other in silence.

  “Let’s go tell them,” he said.

  “All right.”

  He held out his arm. She took it and they walked out.

  Lia slipped under the sheet and blanket and stretched out; sleep would reward her now. She felt at ease. She was sure the pots hadn’t been moved out in 1913. They were still there when Morgan died.

  Before turning out the light, she slipped one hearing aid back in, picked up her cell, and called Gao’s voice mail. “I wanted to let you know the pots could not have been removed from the Forbidden City in 1913. I checked. So please keep looking. And,” she added, “thank you for a most pleasant dinner.”

  6

  There was a curator named Li, at the First Beijing Antiquities Museum, who sometimes felt he was the only person on earth who cared about the volume of cultural treasure being sneaked out of China. He came to work every day, seeing the steel net of the new, modern, globally denominated world settle over his city and transform it. There was the promise of order and progress. He didn’t know if he believed it. It was still China and still a chaotic world underneath.

  Illegalities were no secret. The tides of smuggling; the black market; corruption and graft—these were so ubiquitous as to have been taken for granted by most people.

  But Curator Li hated seeing his civilization dismantled in front of him. He hated the apathy of the people he saw around him. He hated the art leaving.

  When he went to Hong Kong he always visited Hollywood Road. The galleries there were packed with pieces from China. He would stand in front of the windows and feel the pressure rise inside him. None of it could have been legally brought in. There had to be an army of smugglers, a world, a universe.

  In porcelain, Li had picked up a little bit about how they worked. There was a loosely knit constellation of cliques and factions, jealous, competing, radiating out from Jingdezhen over a net of Chinese towns. Once in a while Li was able to forge a link with someone in one of these places and soak up gossip about what was going on, what was being moved out, and where it was heading. The connections never lasted, for the ah chans were shadow men. They might talk to him once or twice, then disappear again. All he could do was listen and wait.

  This week he’d heard a man say there was a rumor in the south. Something about pots. It made his mouth clench and his slim fingers drum on top of the desk not to know.

  Li’s danwei was a small, well-endowed museum established by the People’s Liberation Army. In the late nineties the PLA had been required to divest itself of all its for-profit businesses, which were many, some hugely successful. They then found themselves in possession of an enormous fund of cash. Part of that m
oney went to establish this museum. Everyone knew that, at this time in history, most of China’s greatest art treasures, at least those that were movable, were already outside the Mainland. The imperial collection had ended up in Taiwan at the end of the war and, absent reunification, was never coming back. Yet that still left a huge tide of masterpieces in flux around the globe: works owned by museums, by collectors. They came on the market at times. And they could be bought, by the PLA’s museum as well as anybody, and brought back to China.

  Not that Li and those in the hierarchy overhead were above a little posturing to see if things could be gotten back for free once in a while. A few years back a pair of Qianlong falang cai vases, fantastic imperial pieces, had come up for auction at Armstrong's. They were openly advertised as having been looted from the Summer Palace during the opium wars. They had been in European collections in the one hundred and fifty years since.

  Somewhat brazenly, the Ministry, at the behest of the army, had publicly demanded that Armstrong’s return the vases as war loot, unrightfully stolen. Hadn’t similar allowances been made with art taken from Jews during the Holocaust? This was only one hundred years further back. Oh, Li remembered with glee how the art world had held its breath for several tense days. As it should have. The vases were stolen! But Armstrong’s had held firm and said no, we are going to sell them, and Li had been forced to attend the auction in Hong Kong and bid, keep bidding, keep upping the offer of the PLA’s cash, all under the blessing of his superiors, until in the end he had to pay out more than two million U.S. dollars for the pair. But he got them. He did bring them back.

  And while he scraped and budgeted to make such purchases, the smugglers were moving porcelains out of China as fast as they could travel.

  Maybe what he’d heard was true. Maybe something big was happening, something about pots. He touched a button on his computer and let his eyes play down the names on his call list, looking for the one, the right one, who might possibly know.