Jade Woman l-12

by Jonathan Gash

  synthetics giving the game away. Marilyn sat where I’d put her, incongruous but lovely on a high stool. She watched poutingly—I’d sent my downstairs amah, Ah Geen, off to her annex, and given Marilyn her first job, brewing up.

  The handmade drawing paper was as I expected, labeled in its correct sizes and protected by polyethylene and thick cardboard. Brenda is a lass in the Mendips who makes for fakers full-time. A hundred sheets. The small sizes were, as always, perfect, but to my annoyance I found an uneven margin on one Columbier and a small thinning in a Double Elephant (these are the only different sizes used in the 1870s).

  I muttered, “Silly cow deserves crippling—” I stopped.

  “Name?” Marilyn said dutifully, writing in a notebook.

  “Eh?”

  “Who to be crippled? The English or the Chinese paper maker?”

  I swallowed, shook my head. “Nobody. I was just… Look, love. Check with me before you order anything like that, understand? Promise?”

  I swear she was disappointed. I’d barely started, and already saved Brenda Gillander a life in a wheelchair.

  The Chinese fake antique papers unfortunately weren’t up to scratch—too similar to the repro tourist stuff sold everywhere. I rejected them. I started to work it out.

  “Now, I’m Song Ping,” I told myself, walking about, getting into character. “Here I am, a young artist born in Canton, 1850. I travel to Europe, am amazed by the first Impressionists.” I paused at the window, trying to feel Song Ping’s response. The entire art world had been thunderstruck, after all. “I’m stunned, okay? I discard my Chinese traditions. I buy these materials, what I can with the little money I’ve got—”

  “Where from?” Marilyn asked.

  “Eh? Oh, good point.” I thought a second. Something plausible. “I worked in a hotel, a café.”

  “What did they pay?”

  I stared. She really believed I was truly telling her some past life I’d had. Exasperated, I said, “No, love. You don’t understand. I’m making it all up—” No use. I returned to reasoning and plotting. It was important, after all. It would be the story concocted for Stephen Surton to authenticate. “I collected what canvases, papers, pigments I could for my return to China on the Trans-Siberian Railroad. In Canton I set up an art school, an atelier of my own. And I paint. I’m the first Chinese Impressionist, see? The first few paintings I use my materials from Paris and London. Eventually they run out. I start using local Pearl River stuff, home-ground pigments, Cantonese paper, silks maybe, board, canvas.”

  “What did you do for money?”

  “Sponged off my sister,” I invented after a second. “Her husband’s a poor foki, works for the foreign merchants in Canton’s Bund factories. We never got on. He’d no sympathy. I arrange a couple of exhibitions—1880 or so by now—in a friend’s shop. He charges me a high percentage when some European merchant buys paintings—”

  “You should have bargained harder,” Marilyn censured sternly, into my tale. “If he was your friend—”

  “Shut it, you silly cow.” I paced, really motoring. “That gives us one, possibly more, paintings to be discovered soon as word gets out. In England best, Hong Kong being near Canton. Then another, maybe in Australia or New Zealand, some British soldier’s descendants unexpectedly comparing Granddad’s old painting with a photo they see in the morning paper—” I was excited, gesticulating and mouthing off as the images rose.

  “We do an early Song Ping painting, put it up for a rigged auction. A display, maybe even have his workbox, like Turner’s in the Tate Gallery! We make sure it goes for a fortune at auction…! Come on, love, quick. Clear that stuff out of the way—”

  She went to call the amah but I stopped her, told her to use her own lily-white hands.

  She was outraged that another woman was to remain idle while she herself did something for a change, but I’m used to this. That little giveaway over Brenda, so nearly a lifelong cripple because of an unconsidered grumble, had shown me something important. Fine, I was a prisoner. But I was also plugged into a source of power more cruel and despotic than any I’d ever heard of. If I could injure at a distance, what could I do close to? Murder, perhaps? Or, more moral, execute?

  We started bringing out the paints, me planning away at the seam’s details. By the time we finished—nine hours that first day—I had planned two robberies that wouldn’t really occur, a phony auction, a non-hijack and non-ransom, a riot, and an execution. Marilyn was in a mood at my silence and the work. We locked up and went for nosh. And I saw something magic. Only a paper doll’s house as it happens, but survival needs every bit of help it can get.

  We had our nosh at a Lei Yue Mun waterfront place, after a ferry crossing from Shau Kee Wan. Marilyn was in a happy mood—food is one of Hong Kong’s greatest euphorics—and joked at my squeamishness as we went towards the gaggle of seafood restaurants. We walked side by side Chinese fashion, no linked arms. Odd, but absolutely true.

  “You don’t have to pick out the fish alive, Lovejoy. But it’s better value.”

  “You do it for us both.”

  “Why you not interested in food?” She was curious and amused. “Next time I take you to Peking restaurant. Maybe you like Peking duck with plum sauce? Peking chicken baked in lotus leaves is beautiful, but unlucky for us Cantonese—called beggar’s chicken because a hungry beggar stole the emperor’s hen, though not unlucky for gwailo like you.”

  “Glad to hear it.”

  “Peking restaurants Hong Kong side serve teddy bears’ feet.” She laughed. I didn’t. “Six hundred U.S. dollars for two! They skin the snakes at your table, but their egg pork pancakes—”

  “Listen, love. Shut it. Okay?”

  She nodded her lovely head. “I understand, Lovejoy. Peking food too heavy. We eat Cantonese seafood. Tomorrow maybe pussycat—”

  “Eh?” I stopped.

  Anxiously she scanned my face. “You didn’t like it? I agree. Puppy dog is better, gives more stomach heat. You are uneducated about food, Lovejoy. Just because the aubergine belongs to the deadly nightshade family, the Solanaceae, you distrust it—as you do all purple berries. Didn’t you call it ‘mad apple’? We Chinese have used aubergines for whitening our teeth for centuries—”

  “Marilyn.” My threatening tone finally did it. Naturally she fell about but was a bit apologetic when I had to sit outside the restaurant with a drink before hunger finally drove me inside. She managed a table overlooking the bay, my back to the poor fish swimming with terrible patience in tanks. She’d used the future tense about the pussycat meal.

  As daylight faded we were strolling near Yau Ma Tei towards Mongkok. It’s an all-systems-go district of shops, work, clatter, bars, that I was growing to love almost as much as Wan Chai and Causeway Bay. And I mean love. She was still yapping, though I was hardly listening. “… We Chinese have eleven hundred varieties of rice. Strange that we eat only plain rice with meals, ne? Though fried rice after meals cleans the mouth.

  Your rice pudding —milk! Aaaiiiyeee!—is fantastic, ne?”

  She realized I was no longer with her and returned to where I was standing.

  Beside the curb was a doll’s house. Honestly, right there with traffic and hawkers doing their stuff and folk milling. In the gutter. It was three stories, up to my midriff. The astonishment was that it was made of paper. Roof, doors, furniture all in incredible detail. The colors were garish. I knelt and peered in through the windows. The paper beds were made. Tiny paper garments filled the open wardrobes. Paper slippers waited on paper carpets. Paper tables were laid for a paper banquet. And outside the verandas a paper garden, spread with multicolored floral walks and trees.

  “What a beautiful thing!” I was thrilled, looking about. Marilyn was bored stiff, wanting to be among the furniture makers farther along. The doll’s house stood outside a tiny shop doorway that was hung about with huge red wax candles, gold dragons swarming up each. “What’s that?” Next to the wonder was an iron
case on wheels, for all the world like a sedan chair.

  Two Chinese came from the shop as I spoke, rolled the iron edifice to cover the paper house. One jauntily placed eight tiny paper women in the garden while the other flung at it handfuls of toy money, then, quite casually, lit the house’s bottom corner.

  “Christ!” I said, but Marilyn said, “No, Lovejoy,” so I stayed still and aghast as the whole thing took flame. Half a minute and it was gone. One man wheeled the iron cover down the street, leaving only charred black flakes where the lovely paper house had been.

  “Hell Bank Note,” I read on one partially burned piece. It was for a million dollars.

  “What was that all about, Marilyn?”

  “Now ancestors have house, all that money, clothes, garden. Cannot be hungry ghosts.”

  “Does everybody buy one for their ancestors?”

  Pause. “Most.” She was uncomfortable. We went on to the furniture makers, but the memory of that bonny structure, so perfect, so casually burned, stayed with me. It is with me yet.

  Most of the paints were from fakers’ makers I knew, whom I could trust. They are a motley crew, rivals worse than any businessmen. In the twilight world of fakedom they’re as famous as royalty. They’re pros. Each has a front —for example, Brenda, whose legs I’d saved, has an olde tea shoppe, all prints and chintz. The very best specialize with the refined selectivity of surgeons. Like, Herman’s a stolid Hannover German who specializes in grinding pigments. Ollie Cromwell—no relation—supplies only the containers in which the old artists’ colormen supplied paints—pigs’ bladders stoppered with ivory plugs, or the collapsible tin tubes that a brainy American, John Goffe Rand, thought up in 1840. Ollie’s an obsessional perfectionist— he gives you a prime version of Rand’s early screw caps, but charges you the earth. For once expense didn’t matter.

  The oil was often poppy oil, which is buttery, slow stuff. Fast-drying oils were my need because of time, and these were there in plenty. Mowbray, an English aristocrat with no first name, supplies most fakers’ painting vehicles —oils, waxes. He lives in southern France, grows his own poppies, makes real varnishes from dammar to copal, and gets his resins from all the right places, from India to the Levant. I mean, if he supplies

  “amber varnish,” it’s genuine dissolved amber, none of this modern synthetic clag that any chemist can detect with gas chromatography. You pay through the nose, but honest fakery costs.

  The second day I spent testing the pigments, just to make sure. One particularly dirty trick has been the undoing of more fakes than any. It’s the dilution of genuine red lead.

  Fakers often take a shortcut and use that cellulose-based stuff that garage mechanics spray on cars to stop rust. Governments—no artists—banned red lead because it is toxic. Restorers and fakers perpetuate their ancient skills in spite of all obstacles, I’m happy to say, Spain, Italy, and Birmingham being the home of these stalwarts who defy every known law to keep art alive.

  My supplier was mostly Piccolo Pete, a hybrid Florentine engineer who has his own furnaces and retorts straight out of the mid-nineteenth century. The place he uses was actually an artist colorman’s factory in 1875. Sometimes, however, Piccolo naughtily perpetuates old frauds. Vowing murder if he’d done me, I analyzed the red lead. You heat it in an earthenware crucible, then add nitric acid—a reddish undissolved powder shows if scoundrels have adulterated the pigment with red brick dust. Nope, in the clear. So I tested for red ochre by boiling the red lead in muriatic acid, then some mumbo jumbo with potash solutions, and watched for the colored precipitate. Another no. Honest old Piccolo Pete. He’d just saved his legs.

  Cunning old me, I’d ordered two different sets of test reagents to check on everybody.

  All my checks gave identical results. Three-Wheel Archie from East Anglia was my choice for white lead—flake or “silver” white they called it—because I knew he’d been making a massive batch the old way (thin sheets of lead hung over malt vinegar in closed vessels placed on dung heaps; the lead nicked from old church roofs of the right vintage). I was a bit narked because Archie must have sold his unexpected Chinese buyer his entire stock. This hurt: he’d promised it to me. Friendship, I thought bitterly.

  To my relief, the canvases in the huge crate were sublime, a dream. All were French, not modern stuff phonily antiqued up but genuine handloom weave. The old weavers could only throw the shuttle about a yard, which decided the sizes. Most, of course, were landscape canvases, No. 5 to 30 (these size numbers only meant the original price in sous), and a few marine canvases. I’d ordered some horizontals, No. 40 to 80. I was delighted. The wood stretchers were original oldies. And one or two of the canvases were definitely “cleaners”—old paintings from which the picture had been removed, leaving the ancient canvas waiting for a new but fake antique picture. It’s the crudest of deceptions, for it means killing an antique to replace it by a dud. But my life was at stake. The lost paintings would understand—I hoped.

  “Right,” I told Marilyn. “Dress summery, as a Parisian Lady, 1875. Duty calls.”

  29

  « ^ »

  IS there ever truth in rumor?” Dr. Chao asked the television interviewer. I turned up the volume because of the traffic noise through the balcony window. I’d shot back to Steerforth’s place when Sim the swine sent word Dr. Chao would be on after the news.

  “Reports say you paid seven figures for a rare painting—”

  “Impossible,” Dr. Chao interrupted blandly. “Who pays millions for a work by an unknown artist?”

  “Unknown? To Hong Kong and the Western art markets, yes. But reports suggest that the painter is Chinese—”

  “Reports! Rumors!” Dr. Chao spread his hands.

  “So there is no truth in reports that an old painting has arrived, changed hands for a fortune? That China offers a substantial sum for its return?”

  Dr. Chao was astonished. “Why do you ask me these things? Secret shipments of valuable antiques, the payments in gold, these are impossibilities. You should ask Sotheby’s, not a simple doctor.”

  “Thank you,” said the interviewer.

  The taipan smiled with serenity. A cartoon came on.

  Pretty good. There were enough clues to tell Hong Kong that Dr. Chao was fibbing.

  Nothing fails to convince like a denial. Mind you, it was never in doubt, seeing that the Triad owned the interviewer, and the station itself for all I knew. Pawn to king four.

  Game on.

  Freedom too is absolute. I felt king of Hong Kong, now being allowed to roam. There was the odd blip from my two dark-suited watchers, Leung and Ong, but I only had to mention that my wanderings were authorized and they faded like snow off a duck. “The artistic impulse must flourish untrammeled,” Ling Ling said in melodious judgment, so I could go anywhere, anytime—in bounds, of course. The phone was barred; no letters, telegrams.

  There are tales of folk becoming “island-happy,” meaning slightly deranged from claustrophobia brought on by Hong Kong’s smallness. I don’t understand it because the place really is all things to all men. Hong Kong never disappoints. Every feature is larger than life. Turn a corner and you happen on a dancing dragon, its giant head grinning in multicolored celebration and noisily stopping traffic. Another few paces and an entire shop front is covered in artificial flowers and glittering draperies, with musicians and incense calling on the gods for lucky trade. And I learned what truly defined Hong Kong for me: the clack-clack-clack of thick wooden sandals, the clicks of the abacus, mah-jongg counters rattling, the tock of gambling chips. Every side street sounds full of pendulum clocks from the combined sounds of movement, money, gambling, more movement for still more risky money.

  And I started painting.

  Marilyn—I’d given her Chinese name up—sat for me. I used any old oil paper for the sketches. She was nervous but got used to me blundering about, spinning her round, peering at her face hours at a time. I’ve never had a model of my own, so I was learning t
oo. Art fires you up. And, me being me, I naturally rabbited on all the time about past scams, the Impressionists, my past mistakes, the world of fakery we all inhabit, how antiques constitute the only true faith…

  Calling to see how old Surton was managing, I casually introduced my problem.

  “How marvelous to have a place like this,” I said enviously. “To work. I’d love to have somewhere to try out some of Song Ping’s painting techniques.”

  His mezzanine room was done out as a study, with a long bench to lay out work. He was showing me a proof of Song Ping’s first catalog, printed on authentic Chinese paper and in typefaces of Canton in the Victorian era. Dt. Chao’s laborers were worthy of their hire.

  “I do sympathize, Lovejoy. Couldn’t your firm help?” The pillock’s logic irritated me.

  “No.” I was so sad. “Living rents are, er, not tax-deductible. Accountants.”

  “Hey!” His specs gleamed. “We have a roof room, quite unused!”

  “Please.” I restrained him. “Phyllis would—”

  “—be delighted, Lovejoy! You’re practically one of the family!” Forced, I conceded gracefully, working it out. I’d have to smuggle canvas, paints, brushes to the house.

  Those cardboard cylinders, for carrying paper scrolls, might do. The Triad’s ubiquitous goons would assume they contained manuscripts for Surton. Nervously I arranged to use the roof room for a couple of hours most afternoons. There I would make a second version of my masterwork, in solitude. A fake of a fake. Labor of love.

  The next public announcement was made simultaneously in all the media. I thought the newspapers went over the top, the headlines too splashy, but Marilyn translated the Chinese and said they were just right. The television gave a bald announcement that a major Impressionist masterwork had now been confirmed, and was in the possession of a respected local doctor, aha. Television caught Chao on the hoof outside one of his hotels at Sa Tin Heights. He smilingly deprecated his good fortune, admitting that, yes, he now did have personal knowledge of such a masterwork. It was under close guard at a secret place.