China Trade (10 page)

“We weren’t fighting, Ma.”

“You always fight in English when I’m out of the room. I hope you weren’t provoking him again. He has enough on his mind, all his important responsibilities to his clients and partners. You really have to try to be nicer to him and not add to his burdens. It would be easier on all your brothers if you had a safe, secure job, you know.”

“Oh, Ma!” She’d sneaked that one up on me. I got up, headed toward my room. “Did I get any calls?”

“Yes. One. I think it was from the white baboon.”

That would be Bill. I punched the button on the machine, listened to the chipmunk sound of a message rewinding. Then I listened to the familiar sound of Bill telling me to call him at home or, if he wasn’t there, to try Shorty’s.

He wasn’t at home, but he was at Shorty’s.

“What’s up?” he wanted to know.

“Are you being careful?”

“I always do everything you tell me. Someday you’ll appreciate that in a man.”

“Uh-huh. Someone was tailing me.”

“Shit. When?”

I told him about the hatless guy.

“Damn,” he breathed. “I should have spotted him. Damn.”

“He’s Mr. Anonymous,” I said. “I never would have noticed him myself except in Chinatown. Here he stood out.”

“Well, I’ll watch my back, but there’s no one in here I don’t know. If there’s someone on me he must be out in the cold freezing his butt off.”

“Good.” I liked that idea.

“You have any idea who they are and what they want?”

“No. You?”

“Santa Claus, seeing whether we’re naughty or nice?”

“Christmas is over.”

“Maybe he’s checking for Chinese New Year, to see if you deserve your presents.”

“We don’t give presents on Chinese New Year.”

“Then you can be as naughty as you want. In which case …”

“I’m already as naughty as I want. Good Chinese daughters don’t get any naughtier than this. Speaking of which, my brother Tim came over for dinner to give me a hard time about this case. He wants me to drop it.”

“Tell him he should have thought of that before his organization called you.”

“I’m sure he did. Luckily we didn’t get a chance to really get going, because something else came up.” I told him about my meeting with Mary at Reggio’s. “Of course,” I finished up, “it might be completely unconnected to our case.”

“It might.”

“You don’t think so?”

“It seems strangely coincidental, a Golden Dragon killed on Main Street Boys’ turf the day after you talk to the
dai lo
of one and go looking for the
dai lo
of the other.”

“But it could happen.”

“Happens all the time,” he agreed.

“I don’t think so either.” I sighed. “But I hope so. Mary says all the cops are on alert now, in both precincts.”

“Waiting for the payback?”

“Well, it doesn’t seem likely the Golden Dragons will just let this go.”

“No, it doesn’t.”

“What about the rest of your day?” I asked him. “Did you get anything accomplished?”

“My laundry,” he said. “And twenty new measures of the Bartok. But I’ll bet that’s not what you mean.”

“Astonishing, Holmes. How do you do it?”

“Modesty forbids my mentioning my prodigious—”

“Don’t.”

“I was going to say intellectual capacity. Anyway, yes, I saw all of Roger Caldwell’s porcelain dealers.”

“Do you really know two of them?”

“I really know all three of them, but one might not want to admit that he knows me.”

“Why not?”

“Remember I told you about my friend, who knows a guy who might know a guy who might know what to do with hot porcelain?”

“You’re kidding. That guy is one of these guys?”

“Franco Ciardi, at the Morpheus Gallery.”

“Ah. Did you tell him Caldwell sent you?”

“Uh-huh. And he said the same thing he said yesterday, the same thing the other two said: It’s too soon to expect these things to start turning up. In a way, that’s good. Now they know we’re looking. If they’re offered anything from the Blair collection they won’t get taken in. They’ll know to call us.”

“Do you trust these guys?”

“The other two, sure.”

“And Ciardi?”

“Ciardi owes me, but he’d rather I owed him. If he can put us on to our stolen porcelain he’ll see it as a way of making points with me. It’ll show me what a good, cooperative guy he is.”

“And he thinks you’ll believe that?”

“If he helps us out it’ll be true,” Bill pointed out.

“Doesn’t motive count?”

“Not to me. Pure action, that’s all I’m interested in.”

“Hah. All right, here’s some action: You want to come uptown tomorrow?”

“I love to go uptown with you. Why?”

“I want to talk to Dr. Browning.”

“I think that’s a good idea. When?”

“Nine? I’ll have to call him.”

“See you then.”

“Bill?”

“What?”

“Don’t forget to be careful.”

“I won’t.” I could hear his voice smile. “Thanks.”

I took a hot bath with a couple of spoonfuls of Mr. Gao’s relaxing herbs in it. When I settled into bed I was pleasantly tired and finally warm. I don’t remember the dreams I had that night, except that there was sunshine, and peach trees, and a duck and a drake.

E
L E V E N

I
called Dr. Browning early, at home, because that’s what Nora had recommended the day before. First she’d asked, “Why don’t you talk to him here? He comes in in the afternoons, after his seminar, to work on the rest of the collection.”

That had surprised me. “He does? Still?”

“Well, it still has to be done. We put in a new alarm system and bars on the insides of the basement windows.”

“Oh. I guess I just never thought about the rest of the collection.”

“Let’s hope the thieves haven’t thought about it either,” Nora said drily. “Do you want to meet Dr. Browning here tomorrow?”

I considered. “No. I prefer to talk to people in their natural habitats when I can. It gives me a better sense of them.”

“Then get him before he goes in to school. If he gets buried in his research he won’t even answer the phone.”

So I called at eight. At first the soft, hesitant voice on the
other end of the phone seemed unsure of who I was. Then he placed me. “Oh, I’m so sorry! Nora’s detective. Yes, of course, come whenever you like. I’m anxious to help. When should I expect you?”

I suggested nine and he agreed. At eight-thirty I met Bill and we took the IRT to the Upper West Side. We did some doubling back and we did some looking over our shoulders and we both decided we weren’t being followed.

Which was too bad; because if someone isn’t following you, you can’t find out who he is.

The day uptown, like the day downtown, was bright and blue and sunny. We could see the bare trees on the Jersey side of the river through the bare trees in Riverside Park as we walked down the block. Dr. Browning’s address turned out to be one of those old brown brick apartment buildings on a side street off West End. There was fancy tan trim around some of the windows and in a line up by the roof. It looked like stone to me, but Bill said it was terra cotta.

I told the doorman who we were, and he told the handset of an ancient intercom system, and then he hung it up and told us to go up to eight.

The elevator wheezed and creaked and finally got us there. At the end of a hallway whose beige carpet was thinning down the middle we found Dr. Browning’s apartment door and knocked.

Immediately, the door opened a wedge. The thin, spectacled face of Dr. Mead Browning peered out. His eyes fell on Bill first, and he looked him over with a puzzled frown.

“Good morning, Dr. Browning.” I smiled. “This is Bill Smith. He’s working on this case with me. We’d like to ask you some questions, if that’s all right?”

Dr. Browning’s glance shifted to me and his face cleared. I had the funny feeling that he not only hadn’t seen me, he hadn’t remembered I was on my way up. He smiled shyly. “Miss Chin. Yes, please, come in. I was just trying to remember whether I’d met this gentleman. I lose track, you know.”

The shy smile remained on his face and he remained
standing in the doorway. Bill and I stood dopily in the hall for a few more awkward moments. Then Dr. Browning flushed. “Oh, I’m so sorry. Come in, come in.”

This time he moved aside, and I stepped quickly into the vestibule, Bill right behind me. We didn’t want to lose our chance.

As Dr. Browning closed and locked the door behind us I took a look around. The living room was straight ahead, the kitchen to the right. The bedroom and bath, I assumed, were off to the left, through a small archway. I was intimidated at the thought of going that way, because it seemed to me just getting to a living room chair was going to be challenge enough.

Or finding one. Dusty piles of newspapers, magazines, and books rose lumpily in Dr. Browning’s dim living room like snowbanks from a paper blizzard. Dark curtains, possibly blue once, hung half-opened around two grimy windows that might have a view of the river, if you could see through them. My nose wrinkled with the smell of must and mold; I unzipped my jacket, uncomfortable in the close, warm air. Bookcases, books stacked haphazardly, surrounded what was probably a writing desk; across the room, an upright piano held papers and more books. A squat brass vase dropped petals from a bunch of ancient dried flowers onto a graying cloth on a shelf. A hard wooden chair was pulled up to the desk; the other chairs, three of them, were snowed under.

Only one thing in the room seemed to gleam: A small china cabinet hung on the wall, all dark polished wood and sparkling glass. Inside it, three shelves displayed a dozen pieces of shiny porcelain.

Gingerly, I stepped closer to examine the cabinet and contents. Dr. Browning hovered just behind me. I let my eyes wander from piece to piece, knowing I had very little idea what I was looking at, knowing also that last week I probably wouldn’t even have stopped to look.

The pieces were all small, teacups and saucers, mustard pots and salt cellars, a sugar bowl, a cream pitcher. A gravy boat stood on tiny clawed feet; a white cup as translucent as a shell
had a red tiger painted on its side and another curling around the knob on its cover. Six salt cellars held miniature silver spoons and were each painted with a different stylized blossom. The pieces’ shapes varied, in ways that I knew told something about their origins, but didn’t tell it to me.

The designs painted on them, also, had meaning: more than one meaning. Each swirling line and lotus leaf, each glowing cobalt phoenix and fierce orange tiger meant something to the artist who’d put them there: a symbol, a talisman, a joke. They meant something else to a scholar like Dr. Browning: a clue to the origin of the piece, and to its destination, its intended fate.

And something else to me, something I was surprised to find myself feeling: a connection to people I’d never known in a place I’d never been to, people who dug this clay out of the ancient earth, formed it and colored it and sent it halfway around the world.

“How do you like my little ones?” Dr. Browning’s wistful voice, close behind me, brought me back with a little jolt to this dishevelled room in this city where I was born.

I turned and smiled. “They’re lovely. I didn’t realize you were also a collector.”

His eyes didn’t meet mine; they rested instead on the china cabinet as he said, half-apologetically, “Oh, I’m not, not at all. On a professor’s salary, I couldn’t possibly collect. But the occasional piece, here and there … something too special to leave behind …” He trailed off, looking lovingly at the porcelains, which stood at attention on their shelves as if on their best behavior to make a good impression on the strangers.

I suddenly recalled the large platter, also standing proudly, in the sun-touched case by the stairway at the Kurtz. “But you’re a donor,” I said. “We saw a plate at the Kurtz Museum that you gave.”

“Oh, hardly a donor. Occasionally I acquire a splendid piece which really must be seen. I do try to find a home for those. It’s quite marvelous, isn’t it, the platter at the Kurtz?
And they’re displaying it so handsomely. So many people are given the chance to admire it. Did Roger Caldwell point it out to you?”

“No, his assistant showed us around. Do you know Dr. Caldwell?”

“Yes, of course. He’s very well known in the field. We were all very proud when he was given the post at the Kurtz.”

“ ‘We’?”

“Those of us involved in the study of export porcelains. Exports are widely considered the field’s stepchildren, you see. Because of the purely commercial intent behind their production. As if the early imperial ware—or Limoges, for that matter—were created for any other reason.” He said this with a sense of resigned bitterness, as though the injustice he was pointing out was so entrenched he had given up all hope of redress. “In any case,” he went on, “that a member of our small fraternity has been given the opportunity to direct a museum is quite gratifying. Even a museum such as the Kurtz.”

“ ‘Such as the Kurtz’?” I repeated, not sure what he meant.

“Well, for all its virtues, the Kurtz is not widely accepted as an institution of the first rank, is it? My understanding, in fact, is that that is a source of frustration for Dr. Caldwell: that he cannot quite get the museum taken seriously in the professional world.”

“Because it’s directed by an export porcelain person?”

“Sad, isn’t it? And a man like Roger Caldwell, with so much to offer. I’m given to understand that he feels his professional career to be rather stymied.”

I thought about Roger Caldwell, stymied and growing bitter in his beautiful office in his Upper East Side townhouse; and about Nora, dreaming and planning and working late into the night in her vinyl-floored room with the peeling paint.

“Oh.” Dr. Browning suddenly turned away from the cabinet.

“Oh, but you haven’t come here to talk about my little ones, or the intricacies of the museum world. I’m so sorry. You
have questions for me. Why don’t we …” He looked around helplessly, taking in the book mounds, the magazine hillocks, the paper snowbanks.