by S. J. Rozan
He paused, waited.
“What should I call you?”
He cocked his head. “Jeff Dunbar. I always liked the name Jeff.”
He turned and left.
I had, of course, been planning to count to ten, dash out after him, and tiptoe up the sidewalk to see where he went. But he’d stuck a pin in that idea.
So I stayed, drank up my cranberry juice, and let Jimmy Buffett work his way through “Margaritaville.” Jack wasn’t anywhere. Maybe that meant he’d stayed outside, and had at least seen which direction my client had fled in. I hefted my bag and gave up my chair, to the smiling gratitude of the young couple who’d been vulturing this spot ever since Jeff Dunbar left.
Outside, no Jack. The guy abandoned me? That call had better have been important. A cruising taxi slowed, but nuts to him. I headed for the subway.
On the way I called Bill. Voice mail yet again. His date must be going swimmingly. I left a message. Then I tried Jack.
“Lee.”
“Chin. You hate that bar that much?”
“You have to admit I was right about it.”
“So what?”
“Good point. No, I’m tailing your boy.”
“You’re doing what?”
“As soon as I saw you sit down I’d answered the main question, which was that I don’t know him. I wasn’t sure you were getting anywhere, though. I might be wrong, but it didn’t look like he was giving much away.”
“No, almost nothing.”
“So it occurred to me this might be a chance we didn’t want to miss. You strike me as tough enough to fight your way alone out of a candy-ass bar if you need to.”
“Thanks, I think.”
“No problem. So I got in a cab and told the driver to wait until I pointed out a guy and then follow him. Meter plus fifty bucks. If it turned out Dunbar told you everything, no harm done except I’m out a few bucks. Should I knock it off?”
“No,” I said. “No, I’m in awe. Are you still on him?”
“Yes. Going up the highway, near Lincoln Center.”
“Stay with him. Let me know what happens. What about the phone call?”
“What phone call?”
“You took out your phone when you left.”
“You saw me?”
“Hey, I’m not just a pretty face.”
“Um. Well, no phone call, and not just your face, pretty as it is. Dunbar’s. I snapped a few pix. You’re in one, though. Sweet.”
I clicked off, pocketed the phone, and walked through the Village in the last of the light. Bill was right, it seemed to me. Jack was good at his job.
And speaking of Bill, the phone gave out with “My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys” just as I reached Sheridan Square. I grabbed it and flipped it open. “Oh ho ho, is this you?”
“Hey, I’ve been working really hard here.”
“Don’t tell me about what’s been hard.”
“Oh my God, is that a dirty joke from you?”
“I’ve changed. I’ve spent the afternoon drinking in a dive bar on the waterfront.”
“The whole afternoon?”
“No. First I had to give a stranger some perfectly good oolong tea in my office so he could threaten me without mentioning my mother, then I had to go watch a robot crashing into a pole.”
“Are you speaking English?”
“Where are you? Still tied up with Shayna?”
“You think she’s into that?”
“Why does everyone want to know that?”
“Well, it’s an interesting question. No, she had dinner plans.”
“You weren’t charming enough for her to cancel them?”
“I didn’t want to waste the charm if I didn’t need to.”
“Yes, I can see you’d want to conserve scarce resources. Why didn’t you need to?”
“You know, I don’t think drink agrees with you.”
“It was cranberry juice.”
“That changes things? I didn’t need to because I got what we wanted.”
I drew a sharp breath. “The Chaus? You found out where they are?”
“Where they were, when Shayna saw them. That was a one-week show, though, so they may not be there now.”
“Still, that’s huge. Where are you?”
“Upper East Side. Where are you?”
“West Village. You want to meet in Chinatown? I’m starving.”
“Good idea. What about Aramis?”
“He’s in a cab near Lincoln Center. I’ll call him.”
He didn’t even ask me how I knew that.
* * *
I called Jack, who reported that the cab caravan had left the highway at Seventy-second Street and was heading across town.
“This driver’s a rock star,” he said. “Changes lanes, hangs back, all the good stuff. Rajneesh Jha, from Hyderabad. Grew up on American movies. Thinks he died and went to heaven, tailing another cab for a PI.”
“Lucky you, lucky him,” I said. “When you’re done, Bill and I are going for noodles to New Chao Chow on Mott, north of Canal. Bill knows where the Chaus were when Shayna saw them.”
“You think you have enough Chaus there?”
“If you spoke Chinese like a New Yorker you’d be able to tell them apart.” I spelled the restaurant for him.
“If I spoke Chinese like a New Yorker my mother wouldn’t understand me.”
“Does she understand you now?”
“Everything but my profession. She shudders. She wishes I were respectable, like my older sisters.”
“Mine, too! How many sisters?”
“Two. An endocrinologist and a lawyer. You have sisters?”
“No, four older brothers. Also a doctor and a lawyer, and two more besides.”
“All respectable?”
“Spotlessly.”
“My sympathies. Hey! Hey, I think Dunbar’s cab’s pulling over. Rajneesh, go around the corner and stop.”
“Where are you?”
“Second and Seventy-third. Save me a bowl of noodles. I’ll call you.”
He clicked off.
11
Bill was waiting when I got to New Chao Chow. Rich aromas of pork and fish circled around me. I greeted the chubby manager. “Hey, Tau.”
“Hey, Lydia. You bring appetite? Got good rice stick today. You eat two bowls?” We spoke in English because Tau’s dialect is Fujianese, as incomprehensible to a native Cantonese speaker as, say, Russian would be.
“I’m starved, Tau, so maybe.” There was no possible way I could eat two bowls of Tau’s soups, not rice stick fish soup, pork tendon stew, or anything else, but he was always hopeful.
I dropped into the chair opposite Bill and eyed him critically. “You look worn out. The charm thing takes it out of you, huh?”
“You kidding? I feel great. Like Maurice Chevalier in Gigi.”
“Am I glad I don’t get the reference?”
“Probably.” He took out his phone, handed it to me. “Somewhere in here are the photos.”
“You really should learn to do this,” I said, poking buttons. “Against the day when I’m not around.”
“Am I expecting that day?”
I looked up, thinking I’d heard an odd note in his voice. He seemed normal, though. Not even tired, actually; that had just been me giving him the regular hard time. “No.” A brief mutual pause, then I went back to his phone. A grumpy waiter came over and tried to hand us menus. Bill waved his away, ordered the beef stew noodle soup and a beer. I asked for fish cake rice stick soup and jasmine tea, but then grabbed one of the menus as the waiter turned to leave. “For Jack,” I told Bill.
“He’s joining us?”
“When his workday’s done.”
“Where is he now?”
“Still uptown, tailing Jeff Dunbar.”
“How did that come about?”
“Because he’s as smart as you said. I’d tell you but I can’t do two things at once and I want to see these famous photos. How did you get her t
o send them to you?”
“Shayna? I told her I was interested in moving into the Chinese-American area. That I was attracted by the hybridized, mongrel nature of it. I implied I was ready to spend money, but I wasn’t sure of myself in the field so I’d need an advisor, a specialist. Threw a bunch of art words around, then said I’d gotten the idea from Doug Haig, my drinking buddy, that Shayna Dylan was the person to ask about contemporary Chinese-American.”
“Her ego’s big enough that she bought that? A big-time dealer directing you to a temporary gallery assistant?”
“Without blinking. Like your client said, Chinese contemporary’s a small world. Haig has no interest in Chinese-American but he’d know who does. Why not throw some business her way? Doesn’t cost anything and now she owes him.”
“The idea of owing Doug Haig almost makes me feel bad for her.”
The waiter plunked down our beer and tea. “Shayna sipped her way through a cosmo and a half, explaining the difference between what the mainland Chinese are doing and what’s happening here. She’s not an airhead, you know.”
“Please don’t feel required to enumerate her good points. I bet you’re planning to put in for a reimbursement for the drinks.”
“Damn right I am. She mentioned one of the artists Linus had me buying. Just in passing, probably to prove we were on the same wavelength.”
“Did she say she’d Googled you?”
“Does anyone ever?”
“Say it or do it? Everyone does it, but mostly people don’t talk about it. She probably assumes you Googled her, too.”
“Really? Maybe I should have.”
“If only someone taught you how.”
He raised his beer in a toast. “She described the newest developments on the Chinese-American scene and offered to take me around looking. She even asked whether I thought you’d want to come.”
“Would I?”
“Not a chance. You only like tomb trash. Fusty stuff.”
“That explains why I hang out with you, no doubt.”
“She said she’d gotten that idea about you, but of course everyone has a right to their own taste. She said that with a lovely, tolerant smile.”
“Showing her pointy little teeth.”
“I kept asking for descriptions of the art, this absolute newest cutting-edge stuff, and finally she remembered she had some photos on her phone. She’d shown them to Doug. He’d actually been interested in one, but she didn’t think anything had come of it.”
“‘Doug’? ”
“Hey, Shayna’s on a first name basis with the best.”
“She call you Vlad?”
“Of course. So she showed me what she had—”
“Meaning the photos—”
“And I oohed and aahed over about a dozen—”
“I’d like to have seen that. You oohing and ahhing.”
“—and I asked her to send them to me. Including but not making a big deal out of the one she said Doug liked.”
“Here.” I finally found Shayna’s e-mail in the mess on Bill’s phone, and downloaded the photos. “You know you have two text messages from her, too?”
“No, I didn’t. What do they say?”
I opened them. “The first says, ‘Here u go. Thnx 4 the drink—had a gr8 time.’ The next says, ‘When u want 2 see work, call me.’” I clicked through the photos, stopped when Bill said, “That one. There, in the background on the right.”
“Well.” I squinted. “Well. The mummy’s treasure. Okay, they definitely look like what I saw when I Googled Chau. He had a distinctive style. I suppose if you were Haig and you knew his work you’d know whether you’d ever seen them, and if you hadn’t you’d think they might be new. But in the background and tiny like this—how could anyone be sure they were real?”
“I don’t think anyone could. Given their value if they were, though, they’d be worth checking out.”
“So where were they when she took this?”
“At an open studio in Flushing. About two dozen artists rent a warehouse communally out there. It’s Chinese Artist Central—ABCs, Chinese-born immigrants, a couple of Taiwanese, a pair of twins from Singapore. The place calls itself East Village, after an artist’s district in Beijing in the eighties that named itself after the East Village here in New York. Very meta, you know?”
“I don’t know, but okay. Go on.”
“Two weeks ago another two dozen artists moved in for the week, and everyone hung work all over the place and waited for the buyers and dealers and critics to come.”
“Did they?”
“To a certain extent, apparently. Not the biggest names, but the hip and the cool. That’s why Shayna went. Contemporary’s her passion, remember, not antiquities.”
“And yet she dated you. So whose studio were these in?”
“She doesn’t know. What she was shooting was that sculpture there. The aluminum foil one? She gave me his name, that artist. But the papercuttings where the Chaus are, she wasn’t interested so she doesn’t remember who made them.”
“And this was what Doug Haig was excited about? This photo?”
“Yes, though Shayna thinks it was the aluminum foil that lit his flame. She tried to get me worked up about it, too. I think I disappointed her when I asked about the papercuttings.”
I studied the tiny photo. “It must be one of the artists who rent the building,” I said. “That must be his studio.”
“Or one of the visitors.”
“Well, but why would anyone bring phony Chaus to a temporary show? If they were trying to get people to notice their own work? And even less, why would they bring real ones? I think that’s someone’s studio and, real or fake, the artist put them up for inspiration while he works. Artists do that, right?”
“They do. Or they may be his. Not in the sense that he owns them, but that he made them. It’s a Chinese tradition to copy famous works. It helps train the artist’s eye.”
“Really?” I sat back. “So maybe that’s all these are, then. Somebody’s really good copies. And everybody got carried away.” I frowned. “They’d have to be awfully good, though, to fool Doug Haig.”
“If he’s actually seen them.”
“He has. He’s the one spreading the rumors.”
“He is?”
I recounted what Jack and I had been told by Eddie To. “And the whole thing about the political content, too. You can’t tell that from these tiny photos. If he’s saying that he’d have to have seen them.”
Our soup arrived. The monster basins of steaming broth sloshed over with noodles, rice sticks, meat, fish, and greens. The briny tang of my soup and the gamey scent of Bill’s nearly knocked me over.
“But,” I said, arguing with myself as I doctored my bowl with fish flakes, “if the Chaus were hanging in someone’s studio for who knows how long, how come no one noticed them before? Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe they really were brought out to Flushing for that show.”
“Or maybe all these cutting-edge people don’t know what a Chau looks like. Shayna went right past them.”
“The artists, though? You’d think they would. He’s part of their cultural heritage.”
“Maybe not. They’re young. Chau may have been a hero around Tiananmen, but that was more than twenty years ago. Especially if he worked in traditional media with traditional subjects—”
“—politicized, though—”
“—doesn’t matter. I bet he’s been pretty much forgotten. You know,” he said, winding noodles onto his chopsticks, “that group studio and that show, they sound right up Jack’s alley. Even if he didn’t go, I’ll bet he heard about it.”
“We can ask him when he gets here.”
“Ask him what? Because he’s here,” said Jack, his shadow falling over the fluorescent-lit table. “Wow. I’ll have one of each.”
“The soup? Or us?”
“Sorry, but I’m hungry. The soup.” He slid onto a chair and studied the menu. “What’s good here?�
��
“Anything in a bowl. Tell me who my client is.”
“Hmm,” he said. “What’s wrong with that sentence? Eight treasure soup with bean curd,” he said to the waiter. “And a Tsingtao.” He peered at Bill. “You don’t look any the worse for wear. Have fun?”
“Are you kidding? It was exhausting. Sitting in a hushed bar over a Booker’s, watching a beautiful woman sip a pink drink?”
“Your dedication is noted,” I said. “Jack?”
“Hey, come on. Didn’t you say something on the phone about knowing where the Chaus are? Isn’t that why I came all the way to Chinatown?”
“You came for noodles, don’t lie to me. And we know where they were. Which we’ll share, after you share.”
“Seriously? You’re going to hold out until I tell?”
“I wouldn’t, but you’re obviously bursting to tell.”
“How well you know me. Must be the long acquaintance.” Grinning, Jack sat back and stretched his long legs under the table. “Dennis Jerrold.”
“That’s his real name? He just reversed his initials? That shows a singular lack of imagination. Who is he?”
“I don’t know who he is, and that’s not necessarily his real name. It’s the name he lives under.”
“Talmudic,” I said. “And you know that how?”
“Is this where we start exchanging trade secrets?” The waiter clanked Jack’s beer onto the tabletop. After a long pull on the bottle, he said, “I left my cab around the corner and saw him go into one of those white brick apartment buildings on Second.”
“And someone’s going to tell me how you came to be tailing him in the first place, right?” Bill stuck in.
“Maybe,” I said. “Go on.”
“I gave him a minute and then went to the doorman. ‘Guy just come in,’ I said. ‘Just at my lestalant. Reave his cledit cald.’”
“You didn’t. The Chinese waiter scam? With that accent?”
“Works every time. ‘You mean Mr. Jerrold?’ ‘No, Mistah Dunbal. Medium guy, glay suit, brue tie. Just come in.’ ‘The man in the gray suit who just came in, that was Mr. Jerrold.’ ‘Oh. You shoe?’ Big glare. ‘Oh, so solly. Must be mistaken. Good-bye, got to find Mistah Dunbal.’”
“That’s really, really awful,” I said.
“Reary,” Bill agreed.