China and the world realized the attraction of a vast life-size array of chariots, sculptured horses, ranks upon ranks of soldiers, all utterly authentic and dating from two centuries b.c. And presto! —overnight China became an archaeological Valhalla.
Some twenty thousand prime archaeological sites are known and unexcavated. Tourists troop in. Archaeological digs multiply like the legends that breed them. Do those solid-gold ducks still bob on that river of mercury in the tomb of Emperor Gao Zong somewhere near Xian?—Well, old records say so. No wonder antique dealers drool and collectors’ agents bribe ministries of culture everywhere for licenses to dig…
My chances of dreaming up a scheme to outdo the reality of China’s fantastic finds were nil, of course. And getting even one of those immense terra-cottas would be hopeless—
okay for big organizations like the Triads, but not a one-man band. Relics are different.
They’re small. They’re smuggleable. They’re priceless. They’re divisible.
In 1981, word goes, a researcher happened across a big box of squarish white jade in the Leiyin Cave, a famous site on Shijing Mountain, near the Yunju temple. It’s within fifty miles of Peking. Two shariras, fragments of the Buddha’s bones, were found inside.
Word is they’re pretty well documented, owing to some jiggery pokey by the Emperor Wan Li’s naughty old mother, which I won’t go into. The point is that over fifty shariras were known to have been sent to China when the Buddha passed over. Now fifty’s a lot. And bone’s cheap, no? A posh antique jade box and you’re up and away on a scam.
Good advertising would virtually ensure success. It’s exactly the same nasty con trick pulled between Harold II of Hastings and William of Normandy— Battle of Hastings and all that—before William legitimately took the English crown. There’s nothing new under the sun.
Promising, but an hour later I’d decided against faking sacred relics. It could easily be done with meager resources, but there were too many intangibles. One was holiness.
Not mine, I hasten to add, but other people’s. I’ve never trusted it. It’s risky stuff. I sighed, smiled at my Singaporean lady as she stirred. The scheme wasn’t there yet, but coming, coming…
Well, the great Rodin never carved a single one of his fabled marble sculptures. He had teams of poor sloggers for that.
Back to square one again.
22
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I’VE already said how opposites abound in my world, mainly because preconceptions are always wrong.
The Norwegian lady was an opposite. To me all Norwegians, heaven knows why, should be tall decisive blondes called Olga. Elli was therefore petite, a worrier who afterwards asked if she’d been all right. I was puzzled. Ecstasy’s ecstasy, so where’s the problem?
Bliss by any other name and all that.
“Wonderful, er, Elli.” I remembered her name from its incongruity. She wore a blood-scarlet Chinese amber pendant mounted in gold. I’d persuaded her to leave it on because it was nineteenth century, and I needed distraction from embarrassment. I still couldn’t get over dithering when undressing.
“You don’t have to lie, Lovejoy,” she said dispiritedly. The Wondrous Capital Hotel was that particular night’s pad, chosen by J.S. for cheapness because Scandinavian women were known krone watchers. “I know I’m not up to much ”
This always amazes me. I mean, every woman has her own special beauty. Add her gift of ecstasy and there you have a cert winner. Why they insist on downtalking themselves beats me, but they do. “You were the best I’ve ever, er, met,” I said, truthfully since the best is the most recent by definition. Just as the most desirable is the next.
She spun her head, puzzlement along the pillow. “You say it like it’s true!”
“It is. You were.”
Her eyes filled. “Do you mean it?” She laid her hand on my face as if to keep me there.
“You do, don’t you? I could tell… I meant something… special…”
There was more of this, then she got on to explaining why she wasn’t up to much.
Woman’s song. I nodded and tutted along, half asleep. I was really dropping and wondering how I could get her pendant. Beautiful intaglio carving of a mourning wolfhound among ruins. Portuguese? I love amber.
“… A woman marries because a man is less trouble than her mother,” she was going on. “My husband’s thoughtless… business comes first… What use is business, money, without the real thing?”
“You’re sexy, love. He’s barmy,” I said. Her eyes shone. “You are the real thing, love.
Like your pendant.”
“Pendant?” She watched me hold it. I asked if she’d minded the lamps on and she said a doubtful all right. Lights and love were incompatible seemingly.
“It’s genuine amber, genuine gold, genuinely antique, brilliantly carved. Perfect. Can’t you feel it?” I was carried away. “You give the same ecstasy, love.”
“I do?”
“You just did. All perfection is identical stuff. All bliss is a hundred percent itself, see?
Homogeneous. Oh, you can glam up, wear alluring clothes, perfume, vamp or spurn a bloke. That’s only dressing. Underneath the essence is still pure. Paradise is one of the two unmistakable absolutes.”
“I’ve never heard anyone talk like you before, Lovejoy.” A pause. “What’s the other?”
“The other absolute? Cruelty, love. It has its own attire, too. Hatred, murder. And fraud, my own pet enemy.”
She propped herself up, surprised. Her breasts made that endearing sweet sideways slump the way they do. My eyes dithered between breasts and pendant. “Why fraud?”
“Because it’s treachery. The ultimate tease. It’s a terrible joke played on the despair of others. A jeer at our degradation.” I saw her rapt expression and thought, has she never spoken to anybody before, for Christ’s sake? The prospect of not winning the luscious pendant was making me bitter. “Oh, it’s successful. Especially here in Hong Kong.”
“What a beautiful thought! Paradise against cruelty!”
“Yet beauty hurts. Like never seeing your beautiful pendant again will break my heart.”
My own eyes filled at the thought. Hers joined in. We nearly drowned.
“Oh, darling,” she said huskily. “Can I give it you? As a present?”
“No, love,” I said nobly. “I couldn’t. Honestly.”
“Please, Lovejoy.” She raised her arms to unclasp the chain, unfortunately a modern rolled gold monstrosity, but recipients can’t be choosers. “Take it. For me.”
Reluctantly I let her insist. Well, you can’t be ungracious. I thanked her profusely, and not only because of the gift. Her astonishment at my loony philosophy had ignited a fuse in my mind. In fact I was so overcome with excitement that I didn’t realize she was asking me a demure question.
“Eh?”
“How much longer do we have, darling?”
“Oh. An hour and twenty minutes.” Steerforth had gone on about timekeeping.
“And if I ask for, well, more, do I have to pay again? Only, the fee…”
The krone syndrome reared its ugly head. “Yes,” I lied, adding nobly, “But it wouldn’t seem right, darling, so . . ”
There followed the longest eighty minutes of my life, even though I desperately tried galloping her out of the way at speed. I’d cracked the problem. Difficult to make frenetic love while jubilant about having found the key to survival, but I made it. Elli woke exhausted and bruised, saying she’d think of me forever. I said me too. I hope I was completely, sincerely convincing, partially at least.
Because all through that last torrid session I was back in old Peking, in the days of the tormented last dynasty, watching by lantern light an elderly recluse as he created the greatest fraud ever perpetrated on earth, which is some record. A work of genius, about which university scholars still do battle.
It was the terrible scandal of the court diaries of Ching Shan.
Wor
n out and headachy, I got down to it, blessing Norway.
Forgery, being the weirdest form of creativity there is, like antiques, costs lives.
Why is it that antiques demand sacrificial victims? Dunno, but if they don’t get enough, forgery does. You want proof? Here it is: Once a faker’s found out, he dies. Truly. It always happens. The great forger Francois Lenormant was a highbrow archaeologist who faked Oriental manuscripts for two decades—he also dashed off a few immortals in Latin and Greek to keep his hand in. He was finally exposed in 1883, and pegged out the same year. And everybody knows Henricus van Meegeren, who faked the artists Vermeer and de Hooch. His jail sentence was only one year, but he didn’t survive long enough to complete it. Then there was young Tom Chatterton, aged seventeen, who faked only in transcript—he died fast. And Jimmy Macpherson, Scottish poet, whose epic, a poem Fingal “by Ossian” was, incidentally, Napoleon’s favorite. It drove Boney on to dreams of ever-greater glory. Odd to think that that rascally Member of Parliament’s prank might have been responsible for Boney’s Russian campaign, but that’s the truth. I’ll bet Mendelssohn felt a twerp too, after composing Fingal’s Cave.
And the man some say was the greatest ever, Tom Wise. From well in Victorian days to the 1930s he was every antiquarian’s supreme scholar. Then he was exposed, and it was good night, nurse almost immediately. See what I mean? Forgers don’t last. Rotten thought, seeing the mess I was in. Forgeries have a hard time of it too, by reason of experts and science. But the Ching Shan Diaries still sail serenely on, baffling everyone.
This is why, of all the forgers known, there’s no question to me of the greatest. The all-time champ is Sir Edmund Backhouse. Daddy of them all, gold medalist. El Supremo, exception that proves all known rules. Even when he was exposed as a fraud, he faked on unrepentantly for another half a century. It’s a simple little tale.
Born in 1873 into a good family, he did Oxford University as a member of one of those queer charmed circles. After some scrapes—bankruptcy, vanishing tricks with jewels, astute borrowing—in 1898 he landed in China and stayed there more or less continuously, living the life of a scholar. All through the Boxers’ siege of the legations, the riotous close of the nineteenth century, the ending of the Manchu Dynasty of the Ch’ing, the stormy republic of Dr. Sun Yat-sen, world wars, good old Sir Edmund Backhouse stuck it out in Peking. On the surface he was everybody’s favorite, the ascetic, bearded recluse, and deeply into the Chinese life-style, robes and all. Beneath, he was a superb forger whose creations set university dons scrapping.
Oxford’s famous Bodleian Library’s roll of honor lauds his name, in Latin, for a gift of some thirty thousand chuans, volumes of Chinese texts. So learned was this remote scholar—fluent in Chinese, Russian, Japanese, Greek, Latin—that even without a degree (he did a bunk before graduation) he was offered a London professorship in Chinese.
His greatest knack was ferreting out old diaries that revealed the secrets of the Manchu Dynasty’s court. The diary of Ching Shan was his main winner. Using its contents, he co-authored famed histories of the Imperial Chinese Court. The trouble was that Backhouse’s “authentic sources” were also fakes. He’d done them himself, with a little help from his friends. Whenever times grew hard or people began to suspect the truth, Sir Edmund managed to “find” yet another diary —still further proof to substantiate his fake originals. Even cruelly frank exposures by modern Oxford dons can’t dim his luster, because Sir Edmund is my con hero of all time. On he went, trying to sell nonexistent battleships, doing snow jobs over false bank-note contracts, quite crazy scams involving the Empress of China’s fabulous pearls. Looking back on him even now, a world away, the old rogue has terrific and hilarious impact. Ask after Sir Edmund Backhouse at the British Museum. They say, with a weary sigh: “Oh, him.”
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 Ba
ckhouse 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.
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