by S. J. Rozan
“Reasoning’s not high on his list right now. But I gather he’d have preferred door number two: I tell you guys ‘Ghost Hero Chau? Never heard of him,’ and then call Dr. Yang and tell him to hide under his desk if you come by.”
“We wouldn’t have bought it,” Bill said. “Seriously, Jack, an artist who died at Tiananmen, whose paintings are worth hundreds of thousands—”
“Worth nothing, says Dr. Yang.”
“No, I mean the ones from twenty years ago. The real ones. What I’m saying is, this is your field. By the time we got to you we already knew enough about Ghost Hero Chau that we wouldn’t have believed you if you’d said you never heard of him. So we’d have wondered why you were lying.”
“Cool. Would you have tapped my phone or something?”
“We’d have gotten Linus to,” I said.
“Well, don’t bother. I have some pretty fancy blocking equipment up there.”
“On your cell phone, too?”
“He can tap a cell phone?”
“He can do anything as long as it plugs into something.”
“Well, now, that sounds useful.” Jack stuck his hands in his pockets and started down the hall. Bill and I flanked him. “Anyway, in all humility I mentioned that to Dr. Yang. That you guys came to me for the same reason he did. He wasn’t impressed. He doesn’t care what you think of me and he thinks I should’ve stonewalled you until I found the Chaus.” Jack shrugged. “Maybe he’s right.”
“It’s not about what we think of you,” I said. “It’s about what we’d have thought of him, meeting him under even less auspicious circumstances than we did, after you led us right to him when we tailed you to find out what you were hiding.”
“Tailed me? The hell you say, little lady. Maybe your hacker cousin’s all that, but a penny-ante surveillance? I’d have slipped you like a greased pig.”
“Who’re you calling a greased pig?”
“He’s the greased pig,” Bill said, peacemaking. “You’re the farmer trying to hold on to the pig.”
“That’s a charming image. Is it a midwest suburban thing?”
“Anyway,” Bill told Jack, “I’ve tried shaking her. She’s hard to lose. And look at it this way: If you’d done that, we wouldn’t owe you a martini.”
“On the other hand,” I said, “if he’d done that, he might still have a client.”
Jack looked at me, surprised. “I still have a client.”
“You do? Up one side and down the other, but he didn’t fire you?”
“Through the steam coming out of his ears he reluctantly conceded I’m still the man for the job. Partly because if he cans me and hires someone else, that’s yet another person who knows he’s looking for these paintings.”
“Why is that such a problem?” Bill asked.
“Beyond the idea that his possible real, as opposed to stated, motivation doesn’t put him in the best light? I don’t know.”
“I’m having second thoughts about my second thoughts about his motivation,” I said. “After that story.”
“I know.” Jack nodded.
“Tell me this,” Bill said. “How much of his anger was with you, and how much was with us for even knowing about the paintings?”
“He’s pretty pissed at you,” Jack admitted. “Especially for not telling him who your client is.”
“Did you tell him?” I asked.
“I thought about it, because we don’t even think Jeff Dunbar is your client’s real name, do we?”
“No, but—”
“Oh, chill. I didn’t. I would’ve, but he threw me out before he got to the bamboo under the fingernails. Anyway, we had a bigger fight to have. He wanted me to ditch you guys from now on.”
“He did? Even though the cat’s out of the bag?”
“Yup.”
“What did you say?”
“I said, I don’t carry a gun and I’m not used to getting shot at.”
“And he said?”
“He went through the whole thing we did, how the gunshot probably had nothing to do with this case. I stopped him halfway and said that wasn’t the real point.”
“It’s not? What is?”
“Come on. If we’re all looking for the same thing, and we know it, how ridiculous is it to be sneaking around trying to outsmart each other?”
“Sneaking around is kind of what we do,” I pointed out. “How did he respond?”
“He was still against it. So I had to use my other big, as it were, gun. I said, maybe it was a mistake not to play dumb when you came to me, and if it was I’m sorry, but that ship’s sailed. Now aren’t I better off if I know what you guys are up to? Your client most likely wants to make off with these paintings, find someone to authenticate them, and sell them fast. If he can, they’ll be on the market with a provenance. Very soon they’ll be almost impossible to debunk. If Dr. Yang’s out to protect the memory of his friend, that would not be the outcome he was looking for.”
“Well, but here’s a question. How could someone authenticate them? If Dr. Yang saw Chau die. How can this still be an issue?”
“They’ll say he’s mistaken. He’s exaggerating. That it was chaos in Tiananmen when the tanks rolled in, he doesn’t know what he saw. They’ll say he was with Chau until the shooting started, then he ran away, now he’s out-and-out lying. How can he prove none of that is true?”
I thought about the clenched muscles in Dr. Yang’s jaw. “When he talked about holding his friend’s hand? I don’t think he was lying.”
“Maybe not. But it’s not proof.”
“But Chau’s buried in his hometown, didn’t you say? What about DNA from the body?”
“You’re going to ask the PRC government to exhume an enemy of the people so you can prove he’s still alive?”
“Besides,” Bill said, “DNA’s only useful if there’s something to compare it against. Unless someone’s got Chau’s toothbrush, that wouldn’t help.”
I thought about it. “Well, so what did Dr. Yang say?”
“He wasn’t happy. He didn’t like being backed into a corner and he was furious at the idea he might not be believed. But he couldn’t argue. He told me to go ahead.”
“With us?”
“With you.” Jack looked from me to Bill. “Though if your client disappears with these paintings before Dr. Yang gets a shot at them, you guys, trust me: I am so dead.”
“So the reason you gave him for going ahead with us, it’s actually true?” I asked. “Not the synergy of shared effort? The serendipitous sparks when bits of data collide? You’re just keeping an eye on us?”
“Damn correct. Also, Athos here still owes me a martini.”
7
We headed north where Bill, to no one’s surprise, knew a quiet bar.
“Let me ask you something,” I said to Jack. “After the Tiananmen story I’m inclined to think Dr. Yang’s motives are legit. But I’m hung up on his reaction when Anna asked what you were doing. If he’s being noble, why doesn’t he want her knowing about it?”
“I’m not sure. But things between them aren’t the greatest right now and she has her own problems.”
“That’s what it sounded like. Can you tell?”
“It’s not a secret. She went to Beijing last year to study. Dr. Yang was against it but she can be bullheaded when it comes to her work. There were old-school masters she wanted to get to before they’re gone.”
“Given his experience, I’m not surprised he felt that way. But things have changed over there.”
“Maybe not so much. She met a poet. Liu Mai-ke. Part of a loose network of activist artists. He—”
“Wait.” I stopped walking. “That’s the Mike? Mike Liu?”
“You know about him?”
“Who’s Chinese and doesn’t?”
“I’m not Chinese,” Bill said. “Fill me in.”
“A dissident,” I said. “He wrote an open letter to the government about artists’ rights. Last fall. They closed down
his Web site, but too late, and the letter went viral. Mike Liu Mai-ke. But he’s in prison.”
Jack said, “And it’s sort of her fault.”
“Hers?” I began to see why Anna might have her own problems. “I thought it was the letter. Wasn’t that what the trial was about?”
“The letter went up a few weeks before he met Anna. They shut down his Web site, followed him, tapped his phone, things like that, but they didn’t arrest him until after they were married.”
“Married? Wait, Jack—Anna Yang’s married to Mike Liu? Why didn’t I know that?”
“They realized their mistake and now they keep it quiet.”
“What mistake?”
We stepped apart for a pair of hand-holding students. “They were married at a wild wedding banquet in a hip café in Beijing,” Jack told us. “Tout le art world, also tout le dissident world, was there. Even Doug Haig.”
“He’s a friend of theirs?” The needle on my Anna Yang respect-o-meter, which had jumped, started to slip.
“Haig? Somebody’s friend? He goes to China four or five times a year just to scoop up the hot new artists. He was in Beijing then, and it would’ve been mass career suicide for every artist there if he wasn’t invited. The whole thing was less marriage ceremony than art world happening anyway. Everyone drinking, shouting slogans, singing revolutionary songs. Belting out ‘La Marseillaise’ and ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ in Chinese. Tweets flying, photos on Facebook, MySpace, mad blogging.”
“Sounds like fun.”
“Probably was. After the wedding Anna and Mike planned to ship out here to meet the in-laws.”
“The Yangs? They weren’t there?”
Bill said, “I bet they couldn’t get visas. That whole crowd that left after Tiananmen, China doesn’t want them back.”
“Right,” said Jack.
“Even for their daughter’s wedding?” I said. “Hey, you guys, don’t look at me like that. It’s sad.”
“Gets worse,” Jack said. “One reason Anna and Mike got married, besides true love, is they figured marrying a foreigner was the only way a troublemaker like Mike could get a passport. Big mistake.”
“He couldn’t?”
“Not only couldn’t he, when he applied he got arrested. It dawned on them too late that the marrying-a-foreigner thing, the public-wedding-banquet thing, the who’s-who of the dissident world all-together-now on YouTube, that was the problem.”
“Oh. That’s what you meant, realized their mistake?”
Jack nodded. “Mike had been small potatoes. Now suddenly his political writing, his poems, the open letter, they were high-profile. The PRC couldn’t let him travel and they couldn’t ignore him. They decided to deal with him publicly, as a warning. He was convicted of subversion of the state. He got seven years, and Anna got kicked out of the country.”
I looked around at the students strolling under the early spring trees. “Poor Anna. And poor Mike. And why do I get the feeling there was a lot of I-told-you-so when she got back?”
“Great heaping piles of it. Dr. Yang had been against the whole thing from the start. Not that he knew Mike from Adam, or cared. It was the idea of Anna involved with a dissident, on the other side of the world, where he couldn’t protect her—I’m just sayin’, that was no semester to defend your thesis.”
“What about Anna’s mother?” Bill asked. “Did she object, too?”
“She and Anna are pretty close. She was in on it longer than Dr. Yang, watching the romance bloom. She wasn’t happy, either, because she was afraid Anna would get hurt. But she tried to soften Dr. Yang up. When Anna got back, she bombarded the Chinese consulate, her senator, everyone she could think of with phone calls, letters, e-mails. Eventually Dr. Yang gave in. He was furious, but she’s his little girl. He called some people he knows, and he knows some serious people. But no one could do anything. The PRC’s not backing down.”
“Even though Mike Liu’s small potatoes?”
“Because he is. He has no huge international following, no one claiming he belongs to the world, not to China. They’re calling this a purely internal matter and no one’s cashing in the political chips to challenge that.”
The swirling student traffic thinned as we walked north. We stopped for a light a few blocks away, across the street from Union Square.
“Now I get it,” I said. “Why Dr. Yang might not want to tell Anna about the Chaus. Stir up the whole subject of dissident artists.”
“Anna’s sort of back to a normal life. Basically, she’s making art and waiting for Mike. Between you and me I get the feeling Dr. Yang hopes she’ll forget him and fall for somebody else. Also between you and me, though, Anna’s still in touch with dissident groups here and in China, not a word about which she breathes to Dr. Yang.”
“Poor Anna,” I said again. “And poor Mike.”
Jack’s eyebrows went up. “You don’t even know Mike. He might be a self-righteous confrontational jerk with a martyr complex.”
“He’s a political prisoner. That makes him one of the the good guys. And I hardly know Anna, either. Is he really that bad?”
“No idea. I never met him. From what I hear he’s a serious, sweet guy. Talented writer, too.”
“Then why did you say that?”
“You felt bad for him. I was jealous.”
“Go get arrested, I’ll feel bad for you, too.”
“Getting shot at’s not enough?”
“That’s getting old.”
I got no answer because Jack’s and Bill’s phones both rang at once. I wouldn’t have put it past Jack to orchestrate that but it was for sure beyond Bill.
Jack finished his call first. “That was Jacqueline. At Chocolat. They finished the temporary window and she told them to hang around so I could approve it. About that martini—”
“We’d have to put it off anyway,” Bill said, folding his phone. “I have a date.”
It took Jack a beat, but he caught up. “With Shayna Dylan? Seriously?”
Bill gave a modest shrug. “I’m too sexy for Vladimir’s shirt.”
“Hah,” I scoffed. “You think Shayna dating you is about anything as high-minded as sex?”
“Um, well, good luck,” Jack said to Bill. He glanced at me and added, “With everything. Talk later, when you’re done? I’ll be in my office, doing whatever I was doing when all hell broke loose.” Then, habit overcoming reason, he stepped into the street and hailed a cab.
“I still think it’s weird,” I said as Bill and I crossed to the subway, Bill to go uptown, me to go down.
“That Jack prefers cabs?”
“No, he had a deprived childhood where they don’t have subways. But based on what he said, I can see why Dr. Yang didn’t tell Anna what he’s doing, but it doesn’t seem like it would be a big deal if she found out. And why does he care if we know?” A thought occurred to me. “Uh-oh.”
“Uh-oh what?”
“‘Based on what Jack said.’ Maybe he’s holding out on us. Maybe something completely else went on in there besides what he told us.”
Bill looked at me. “I guess it’s possible. I don’t think so, though. That wouldn’t be like him.”
“You haven’t known him that long, have you? Just a couple of months?”
“No, that’s true. But, for example, I knew you were on the level from the minute I met you.”
“Proving my point: You’re a rotten judge of character.”
“You may be right,” he said. “Because I’m actually looking forward to my date with Shayna.”
8
Bill and I split up at the subway entrance, promising to call each other later. I caught the N and stood the few rattling stops to Chinatown, meditating on my client. I didn’t think Jeff Dunbar had given me his real name, or any reason to trust him, but I’d taken his money. Maybe he had a right to know someone else was on the trail of the paintings and I was working with that someone else’s PI. Or maybe that was just an excuse to call him, beca
use there were some things I wanted to know, too.
I got off at Canal, called, got voice mail, left a message. I wondered if Dunbar was in his office, doing whatever he didn’t want me to know he did, and whether he’d have to slip away to call so the people he did it for wouldn’t find out about me, either. A lot of people in this case, I reflected, not supposed to know about each other. I was putting the phone away when it chimed. That meant that while I was underground someone left a message the phone had just found.
“Ms. Chin? This is Samuel Wing. I’d very much like to speak with you. Would you give me a call at your earliest convenience?” I had no idea who Samuel Wing was, but he had a nice voice, a Mandarin accent, a desire to talk to me, and a phone number. So I called it.
“Ah, Ms. Chin, good to hear from you. I’d appreciate a few moments of your time.”
“Can I know what this is about, Mr. Wing?”
“Certain paintings. I don’t want to say anything more over the phone, but I’m fairly sure you’ll be interested.”
Unless the guy was going to try to sell me a hot Picasso, I was fairly sure he was right.
“I’ll be happy to come to your office,” he said. “Canal Street near Broadway, is that correct?”
He’d done his homework, the well-spoken Mr. Wing. “Yes. six-nine-three Canal, buzzer number two.”
“Fifteen minutes? Is that convenient?”
For me, very. For him, that either meant his base was downtown—office or home—or he was already in Chinatown, hanging at the noodle shop or the tea house, waiting for me to stroll by. I checked the faces of the noodle-eaters and tea-drinkers on my way up the block, so if one of them appeared in my office attached to Samuel Wing I’d know I’d been, if not quite ambushed, at least waited for a little hard.
I pushed through the street door at 693, checked my mailbox, and waved to the ladies at Golden Adventure Travel. This is really their space, this whole ground floor, and their name is on the door. I’m their subtenant and buzzer number two has no name on it at all. That way, if anyone should chance to see a client of mine come in here, he can always claim he was looking into a package tour to the casinos of Macao.