A Cup of Light (8 page)

He slept. When he awoke he saw gliding above him the walls of the city proper. They were rolling down a dark boulevard. On one side were buildings in pagoda shapes, on the other an endless wall, massive and silent.

The driver heard him and looked back. “All gate close,” he called over the hoof-clomping. “Go north side, Xizhimen. Open late.”

Frederick waved a hand and lay back down. Now he could see the curving tiled roofs and trees, so thick, their branches and leaves meeting overhead. After a time they came to the Xizhimen gate and flowed through it with the tide of late-night traffic—carts and rickshas and pedicabs and a bobbing sea of men on foot. He stared. Men in gowns, some very fine, flapping lightly over trousers tight to the ankle.

Inside the city walls they navigated a network of streets lined with low buildings. Stone walls enclosed round gates and turned to follow narrow lanes leading off. Overhanging balconies glowed with colored lanterns. By the time he was unloaded in the Legation quarter, at the Wagon-Lits, the feeling of being in some strange dream was complete.

In the hotel lobby, under the glittering chandeliers, he saw more Chinese men of consequence, in gowns of silk. Mandarins, he thought; look closely. It's with them you'll have to make a deal. But he could not think, he could not penetrate, he was dizzy with strangeness. He stumbled to his room, fell on his bed, and slept until the next afternoon.

And now it was ten days later. Now on this night he adjusted his cravat by the fluttering lamplight. He studied himself in the carved rosewood mirror, his hair shining and flat from its center part, his eyes lucid with excitement. He was a gentleman. No one could say any different.

It had been easy here. The world of foreigners was small, interconnected. He'd only had to call on the few people recommended by Mr. Morgan's office. At once he'd been introduced to Fleisher, a European of vague nationality who published two English-language papers here in the capital. Fleisher in turn brought in White, who did something at the American Charge D'Affaires Office.

This White had a Chinese partner named Shi Shu, who acted as agent for the Chinese imperial family. The Qing Dynasty had fallen two years before, and the emperor's family continued to live in the rear quarters of the Forbidden City. They were surrounded by art. Priceless, unimaginable art. Paintings, jades, bronzes, calligraphy, porcelains, textiles, jewels. They had palaces in Mukden and Jehol too—same thing, according to Mr. White; art stacked to the ceilings in closed rooms. “My good man,” White had said. “You cannot imagine it.

“And,” White had said, leaning toward him as they strolled the temple grounds of the Shrine of the Star of the Foremost Scholar in the Land, “it is for sale. All for sale.”

Ah, then Frederick had been brilliant. Every cell in his body had screamed with the excitement of acquisition, but he'd kept himself casual. “What did you say to be the purpose of this temple?” he asked. He feigned disinterest in everything, even the little hilltop pavilion in front of them, even, especially, the deal White was preparing to put on the table.

“Ah. This is the deity who gives success in the imperial examinations. Success or failure!” Despite Frederick's careful aloofness, White was relaxed and charming in his gray striped suit. “The examination candidates flocked here to worship. They came from every province in China. Before going to the examination yards to sit for the
jinshi,
they came here and begged the god for success. With success came riches and position, guaranteed for life. With failure—well, loss of face was the least of it.”

“As to the collection you mentioned,” Frederick said at length, after many quiet minutes of studying the statues of the god within. “How might one inquire further?”

“Let me talk to my Chinese associate,” White had said, and gone on to point out the other nearby temples, the Temple of the Evening Sun and the Hall of Ten Thousand Willows. He chatted politely, filled with zest and knowledge, ultimately surpassing Frederick with a show of bright, courteous apathy.

But he had inquired. The discussion had begun. And that was many days ago and now they were moving toward agreement.

Frederick smiled at himself in the mirror. Welcome to Peking, Frederick Henry McKnight, he thought. His face, his eyes, everything was ablaze with possibility. His heart too.

“Ready?” he said to Eileen—needlessly, for Mrs. Grosbeck had been dressed twenty minutes or more, sitting by the window in the brocaded chair, watching the pulse of life in the street below. The men in their dark garments, the ricksha carriers loping with their musical cries, the robed gentlewomen, walking wide-legged on their bound feet, everyone talking, laughing. A soft roar seemed to rise from the street in China, only it was like nothing he'd ever heard before, no machine sounds, no traffic; instead a tide of human voices.

“I'm ready,” she said to Frederick.

He felt a surge of gladness. He hadn't sorted out his clear feelings for her, but he liked her. She made few demands. She seemed to want to spend time with him. His abdomen tightened. She'd been married, he knew. She was not untried. She walked and sat and stretched and crossed a room with her whole body.

And she had intelligence. She had helped him compose the cables back to Davison, who worked for Mr. Morgan. The financier's wishes came through Davison. They had talked about removing some items from the Palace for inventorying—this had been the suggestion of Shi Shu—but Mr. Morgan had said no, leave everything intact. They had traded descriptions of the scope of the collection, and many many prices.

How much to say in these cables seemed extraordinarily delicate to him. Even though they were composed and sent in code, one never knew. And they must read just right to Davison and Morgan. Still, he had stiffened at first when she took a pencil to his first draft of block capitals and sketched in edits.

“Doesn't that sound better?” she asked, pushing it toward him. He looked at it. She was right. It was ambivalent in all the right places, toned, diplomatic.

“I stand in your debt,” he said. To which she wrinkled her nose. No dry mentalist, Eileen.

And so tonight he was taking her along for the meeting with Shi Shu—a critical meeting, the most important one yet. Shi Shu had been high in the Manchu bureaucracy, and still went to work every day, for the family, inside the Forbidden City. In the matter of the art collection he was their direct and sole representative.

A week ago, Frederick never would have brought her. In America, he wouldn't have dreamed of it. But now he knew he wanted her there. She helped him. She saw what lay behind words and gestures. Later, when they were alone, she would sit with him and help him sort it out.

Not that he'd tell the others they were friends, a man and a woman. Nothing really improper had happened. Nevertheless, that would not do.

He had already introduced her to White and Fleisher as his cousin. It had been believable. It made it easier for them to go about together. And she'd absorbed it in the best of humor, seeing its utility instantly. They were relatives. This was their protective cover.

Davison had cabled them Mr. Morgan's final line on price. Tonight, if he could bring Shi Shu into that range, they would have a deal. And a new door would open and his new life would start.

He lifted the glass cover of the gaslight and snuffed it out. He turned to her and extended his arm. She rose, brushed imaginary lint from the cream-colored lace overlaying her high-cut, rustling dress. It struck him that most foreign women looked strange in this world. After seeing the layered silk garments of wealthy Chinese women, he found the cinched, fussy dresses and the great hats of the Western ladies overstated. It was never true for Eileen. Her clothes were straight-lined, tailored from fine cloth, simple. She claimed to dislike hats. Stay with me, he thought impulsively, feeling a warm flood inside himself of wanting her.

“I'm ready.” She rose and walked toward him. Before she could reach him they were both caught by the sibilant whoosh of an envelope being pushed under the door.

He walked to it and picked it up. “It's a cable,” he said, tearing it open. He read.

“What is it?” she said, for she saw his face sagging in disbelief.

“Mr. Morgan is dead.”

“What? Was he ill?”

“No. It was unexpected.”

They looked at each other.

“It happened in Italy.” He read the rest of it. “All negotiations canceled.” He looked up at her. “It's finished,” he said. His future had been directly in front of him. Now in a heartbeat it had evaporated.

“I'm so sorry,” she said.

He nodded.

They stood facing each other in silence.

“Let's go tell them,” he said.

“All right.”

He held out his arm. She took it and they walked out.

Lia slipped under the sheet and blanket and stretched out; sleep would reward her now. She felt at ease. She was sure the pots hadn't been moved out in 1913. They were still there when Morgan died.

Before turning out the light, she slipped one hearing aid back in, picked up her cell, and called Gao's voice mail. “I wanted to let you know the pots could not have been removed from the Forbidden City in 1913. I checked. So please keep looking. And,” she added, “thank you for a most pleasant dinner.”

6

There was a curator named Li, at the First Beijing Antiquities Museum, who sometimes felt he was the only person on earth who cared about the volume of cultural treasure being sneaked out of China. He came to work every day, seeing the steel net of the new, modern, globally denominated world settle over his city and transform it. There was the promise of order and progress. He didn't know if he believed it. It was still China and still a chaotic world underneath.

Illegalities were no secret. The tides of smuggling; the black market; corruption and graft—these were so ubiquitous as to have been taken for granted by most people.

But Curator Li hated seeing his civilization dismantled in front of him. He hated the apathy of the people he saw around him. He hated the art leaving.

When he went to Hong Kong he always visited Hollywood Road. The galleries there were packed with pieces from China. He would stand in front of the windows and feel the pressure rise inside him. None of it could have been legally brought in. There had to be an army of smugglers, a world, a universe.

In porcelain, Li had picked up a little bit about how they worked. There was a loosely knit constellation of cliques and factions, jealous, competing, radiating out from Jingdezhen over a net of Chinese towns. Once in a while Li was able to forge a link with someone in one of these places and soak up gossip about what was going on, what was being moved out, and where it was heading. The connections never lasted, for the ah chans were shadow men. They might talk to him once or twice, then disappear again. All he could do was listen and wait.

This week he'd heard a man say there was a rumor in the south. Something about pots. It made his mouth clench and his slim fingers drum on top of the desk not to know.

Li's
danwei
was a small, well-endowed museum established by the People's Liberation Army. In the late nineties the PLA had been required to divest itself of all its for-profit businesses, which were many, some hugely successful. They then found themselves in possession of an enormous fund of cash. Part of that money went to establish this museum. Everyone knew that, at this time in history, most of China's greatest art treasures, at least those that were movable, were already outside the Mainland. The imperial collection had ended up in Taiwan at the end of the war and, absent reunification, was never coming back. Yet that still left a huge tide of masterpieces in flux around the globe: works owned by museums, by collectors. They came on the market at times. And they could be bought, by the PLA's museum as well as anybody, and brought back to China.

Not that Li and those in the hierarchy overhead were above a little posturing to see if things could be gotten back for free once in a while. A few years back a pair of Qianlong
falang cai
vases, fantastic imperial pieces, had come up for auction at Armstrong's. They were openly advertised as having been looted from the Summer Palace during the opium wars. They had been in European collections in the one hundred and fifty years since.

Somewhat brazenly, the Ministry, at the behest of the army, had publicly demanded that Armstrong's return the vases as war loot, unrightfully stolen. Hadn't similar allowances been made with art taken from Jews during the Holocaust? This was only one hundred years further back. Oh, Li remembered with glee how the art world had held its breath for several tense days. As it should have. The vases were stolen! But Armstrong's had held firm and said no, we are going to sell them, and Li had been forced to attend the auction in Hong Kong and bid, keep bidding, keep upping the offer of the PLA's cash, all under the blessing of his superiors, until in the end he had to pay out more than two million U.S. dollars for the pair. But he got them. He did bring them back.

And while he scraped and budgeted to make such purchases, the smugglers were moving porcelains out of China as fast as they could travel.

Maybe what he'd heard was true. Maybe something big was happening, something about pots. He touched a button on his computer and let his eyes play down the names on his call list, looking for the one, the right one, who might possibly know.

The driver was carrying Lia that morning along the shores of Houhai Lake, the bending trees half obscuring the long finger of water. She remembered that this was the body of water to which candidates who failed the imperial examinations came to drown themselves. There were always those who chose to hurl themselves in the water rather than return home to face their parents. Now their ghosts were here forever, mourning by the banks of the lake.

The idea that anyone could feel so tied to their family interested her. She herself, in her tiny family web, had always seemed to be someone's project, and this was a thing to be escaped as much as a thing to which to cleave. There was only so much that she could endure of being repaired by others. Albert had never done it. Dr. Zheng had never done it. That was one reason she respected them, loved them.

Her real father had never tried to fix her, not that she respected him or loved him. She felt a bitter chuckle weave up her throat. She had only met him once. She had tracked him down; the encounter had been so dispiriting that she had often wished she was able to forget it. In her world she kept the door on him closed.

She'd found him living in a single room, subsisting on four or five minor patents. He was her and her mother to the tenth power: junk, piles, effluvia. There were subscriptions to professional journals, indexed, spanning decades. There were years of canceled book-request slips from the public library, alphabetized. He was a prisoner of proliferation. Like her apartment, his was crowded—but it was squalid, not artful. And the last insult: He looked like her. Same columnar frame, same drooping eyes. Although she was beautiful, in her way, she knew: She had long, abundant hair and eyes that may have been a bit sad but also radiated humor and intelligence and warmth. And she knew she had a high-wattage grin. She could always crack the ice with a smile. No, she wasn't so like him.

Forget him, she thought.

Just then the driver turned away from the lake and into the gate of the villa. Her heart lifted at the thought of today's pots, just ahead, waiting. She didn't need to think about her father. He could stay in his memory room. He didn't have to come out.

In Hong Kong Stanley Pao sat back on a leather couch and talked to Gao Yideng on the phone. “And for what percentage? Mmm, I don't know. Five more tenths of a point. Yes.” Stanley smiled faintly. He was in his seventies, a sleekly plump, patrician man who wore his white hair pomaded straight back, just long enough to disappear neatly under his collar. He liked to sit with one hand on his rounded stomach. He spoke in slow, measured tones and never dropped his refinement of manner. He lived alone here in this magnificent old apartment in Happy Valley, which looked over the racecourse. He had always lived alone, except for his prized Pekingese dogs. He had never married. He was the sort of man after whose personal life people did not ask and whose partners, whoever they were, did not appear with him in public.

Not that he didn't let some of his vices show. One of them was horse racing. Not only could he see the track from his windows, he could see the giant screen over the track for simultaneous video close-ups. At dawn he watched the horses exercise as he took his tea. But mostly, he followed horse racing on his computer, which was always kept running on a side table in his porcelain room. A keyboard always lay beside him on the couch. Results from races around the world appeared regularly, and in between, charts of thoroughbred bloodlines and streaming reams of racing data ran endlessly down the screen. Offtrack betting, in some form or another, was available in most cities of the world. Horses raced every day. Stanley played right here, placing bets, paying out or collecting through the keyboard on the sofa beside him. It was one of the games he loved in life. Though business was fun too. He listened to Mr. Gao. Ah, now the commission sounded right. Now he was getting close to feeling satisfied. “I think this will be possible,” he said. Nothing jolted Stanley off his phlegmatic calm. “Of course,” he said, “the porcelain must be fully inside Hong Kong.”

Both men, several thousand miles apart, smiled into their phones. This was the beauty of Hong Kong's law, as they knew.

“So I transfer it to the American representatives. They'll contract their own packing and crating?” Stanley knew the details of a job like this well. He had been a private porcelain dealer for many years, receiving selected clients in this room. He only served those lucky enough or powerful enough to be invited here to his home, where his beloved prizewinning dogs ran free in the outer rooms; where here, in his climatically controlled inner chamber with the racetrack view, millions of dollars' worth of rare porcelain was on casual display, cluttered, grouped on tables and floor and shelves and every available space. Fine pots from the Ming and Qing and the Tang and the Song. Piles of art books with relevant cross-references to museum collections around the world. Yet there were many fake pots in the room too. There were fakes even an amateur could spot, and also fakes that would fool anyone—even him, the
éminence,
if he didn't know better. The interplay between doubt and faith, between the eye believing and the eye distrusting—this was the real surge for Stanley Pao. This was what kept his soul afloat.

He listened carefully to Gao Yideng, but at the same time he also made a decision about betting on a race at Saratoga. One hundred U.S. dollars on number three in the fifth. An amusement, an intriguing moment he would set up for himself, later when the results of the race came in. “And the Americans and I will arrange air shipment.”

“Yes.”

“And none of the pieces will be sold in Hong Kong?”

“No.”

The elder man allowed himself a long and thoughtful sigh of disappointment. “Regrettable,” he said. Pots of truly celestial quality were so impossible to find.

He himself swept Hong Kong for imperial pots constantly. Daily. He spent a lot of time on Hollywood Road, that narrow looping curve on the hill above Central where the dealers in art and antiquities strung along in constant competition with one another.

When Stanley walked down Hollywood Road, his first clue that a shipment had come through was the sight of Unloader Ma—a big, beefy Chinese who wore balloon-shaped shorts and a billowing T-shirt the year round. He was the man who took the crates off the trucks. He went up and down the street freelancing.

When Unloader Ma had things down and stacked on the sidewalk, Uncrater Leung would take over. Leung was the opposite of Ma. He was a wiry, well-muscled man, older, gray-headed, with attentive, long-fingered hands. In his trademark cargo vest with innumerable pockets, he'd go through the mountains of rough-textured pink paper in the packing crates, removing the pieces in their bubble wrap but also checking every inch, never missing any separated handles or lids or loose pieces. While he worked, the pink paper would twist and wave in the wind down the street. Often this would be the first sign Stanley Pao would see—a skinny, wind-skipping banner of pink paper. And then Pao would walk faster, because he would know Uncrater Leung was working up ahead. And that meant something new was in town.

And with any luck, it might be something good.

There was one other way to find out if something choice had come into Hong Kong, and that was to go down and eat at the Luk Yu. Not at dawn, when the venerable four-story teahouse was packed with Chinese stockbrokers. Not at eight or nine, when the people who kept birds came in. Not at ten or eleven, when the art dealers showed up. The best way to find out was to go at noon, when the ah chans came for breakfast. They always ate at the Luk Yu. They hated for their rivals to see them and know whether they were in town or not, but at the same time they couldn't resist seeing which of
their
rivals was there. So they all went to the Luk Yu.

And when they celebrated, it was special.

They always did it the same way. There'd be abalone spilling over platters, big steaks,
baat-tow
or eight-head, eight to a catty, smothered in oyster gravy. And then there'd be the pig's lung soup with soaked almonds and stewed pomelo skin. Roast squab with Yunnan ham. Then shark's fin. The victorious ah chan, the one who had scored, would treat all his friends. And two thousand Hong Kong dollars would be stuffed in his favorite waiter's pocket on the way out.

“All right,” Stanley said to Gao Yideng. “Until our next meeting.” As soon as he clicked off, he dialed his chauffeur. He had an itch to go to Central and sniff his luck on the humid air, see how his destiny hung around him, open his senses to the bracing aromas of portent. “Ah Yip,” he said in his customary drawl when the second ring clicked over to his driver's voice. “Bring up the car.” He looked at his watch. It was quarter to twelve. “I am of a mind to lunch at the Luk Yu.”

“I'll take this one,” Lia said to the woman behind the counter, and pointed to a tabletop box of fake Peking enamel, topped with a large brass knob shaped like two mandarin ducks. Her mother would love it. She might even give it a spot on the sideboard in her little dining room, where the cream of her animal canisters from around the world was displayed. This was by no means Anita's only collection but one of her longest-running, and it gave Lia real pleasure to unearth something that would make an addition to it. Her mother had spent years acquiring animal canisters, figurines of Depression glass, geometric trivets, and antique photographs of men in military uniform, to name only a few of her obsessions. Anita had been buying these, scheming over them, placing them and rearranging them for years.

It was always a great moment when she presented a new find to Anita. She could feel the glow between herself and her mother, the light of pleasure that could not be faked. Lia sensed at those moments that she was fulfilling her mother's truest desire, for Anita lived through the lines of her collections and wanted Lia to live there too.