China Trade (11 page)

I was at a loss, unsure what proper etiquette required of a guest when the host can’t produce a chair; but Bill walked smoothly into the room, moving around precarious-looking piles as comfortably as though he’d put them there himself. He lifted books and magazines off one side of a tiny sofa, didn’t react at all to the clouds of dust that puffed from them as he placed them neatly on the floor. He repeated the performance with a leather armchair and settled in that.

Dr. Browning beamed a grateful look at Bill and gestured me to the sofa.

“May I use your bathroom first?” I asked.

“Oh, my, yes, of course. It’s right through there.”

I thanked him and made my way through there, leaving Dr. Browning to turn to Bill with a flustered smile.

The bathroom was fairly tidy, though obviously the domain of someone unused to guests: a threadbare bathrobe hanging behind the door, towels damp from a morning shower. I spent the bare minimum of time in it that modesty demanded. Then I left it silently and I slipped into the small, dark bedroom, poked quickly into the closet and under the bed.

When I returned to the living room, Bill had Dr. Browning absorbed in a serious conversation about the changes in university education in the city since Bill’s college days.

They both looked up when I came back, and ended that discussion, apparently on a note of agreement. I sat on the sofa I’d been offered before. Dr. Browning, sitting straight in the desk chair, knees and ankles pressed together, looked at me expectantly.

“Dr. Browning,” I began, removing my jacket carefully, laying it across my lap, “what can you tell us about the pieces from the Blair collection that were stolen from CP’s basement?”

“Tell you about them? Well,” he looked at his shoes for
inspiration, “well, they’re really quite wonderful. The entire collection is quite wonderful, quite special.”

“Can you be more specific? Is there anything about them, for example, that would make anyone want to steal them particularly, rather than anything else in the collection?”

“Do you mean, are they perhaps worth more? Can one sell them for a higher price?” A strange overtone echoed in Dr. Browning’s thin voice, something that, in a context where it made sense, I might have called resentment.

“Yes, I suppose that’s what I mean.”

“It isn’t likely. I haven’t gone through the entire collection yet, of course, but all of Mr. Blair’s pieces seem to be of very high quality. The stolen pieces were marvelous, but most of the collection is equal to them.”

“Were they all somehow the same?” My newly acquired knowledge of porcelain was leaving me flat; I couldn’t think of very many ways in which porcelain could be the same. “From the same kiln, or made for the same patron, or something?”

“Oh, I doubt it. They appeared to represent quite a wide range of periods and styles, as far as I’d examined them.”

“What about,” Bill asked, “from the same source? The same seller, I mean? These were all the new acquisitions, weren’t they?”

Dr. Browning pursed his lips. “Yes, they were, but from the same source? I wouldn’t think so. So many diverse pieces … of course, it’s hard to say.” He trailed off, shaking his head at the difficulty of saying.

“Is information about the source of each piece on Mr. Blair’s list?” I asked. “Can we check that?”

Dr. Browning brightened and smiled. “Oh, of course.” His eyes wandered the room. His smile began to fade, but when he spied an old battered briefcase at his feet it rekindled, as though he’d unexpectedly run into an old friend. He extracted a file folder from the briefcase, laid it on his perfectly horizontal lap, ran his finger down a typewritten page. His smile held for a short time, then faded again.

“Oh,” he said. “Oh, dear. That’s a shame.”

“What is?” I asked.

“Well, as it happens, those were the crates where Mrs. Blair had placed the new acquisitions. A lovely lady, Mrs. Blair,” he added, as an aside. “Quite classically patrician.” Eyebrows raised, he asked Bill, “Have you met her?” Bill shook his head. Dr. Browning dropped his eyes to the list again. “And she seems quite methodical. Her late husband, sadly, does not.” He pursed his lips in gentle disapproval.

“They’re not there?” I asked.

Dr. Browning blinked great big owl-eyes at me. I suddenly wondered if he needed the night vision of an owl to live in the permanent dimness of his own living room. “No. They hadn’t been catalogued. The inventory process,” he added quickly, “is, I must admit, rather tedious if it’s done painstakingly, as it should be. One can quite understand Mr. Blair’s reluctance to give time to such an enterprise. I’ve been working on the Blair collection at Chinatown Pride for some days now, and I haven’t yet finished.”

“If you haven’t finished,” Bill asked, “how do you know for sure what was in the boxes that were stolen and what’s in the others?”

Dr. Browning turned his eyes to Bill, then quickly back to the paper in his lap. “Well. Well. I haven’t a list or anything of that sort, but I did look through all the crates before I began the actual cataloguing process. I couldn’t help myself.” He said that anxiously, as though Bill and I might think less of him for such unprofessional behavior. “It was all so lovely. And I had heard of the Blair collection for so many years.” The small smile I’d first seen in Nora’s office played on his lips again. Then he seemed to give himself a mental shake. He looked to me. “And I photographed some of them. In those pictures you have.”

“And you remember the others, enough to know they aren’t on this list?” Bill wanted to know.

“Oh, yes. Oh, I remember them all.”

“Dr. Browning,” I asked, “who knew the Blair collection was at the CP building?”

He pursed his lips, folded the file shut. “I told no one. Nora asked me specifically to tell no one.”

“So no one knew but you, Nora, and Tim?”

His owl-eyes blinked at me again. “And Mrs. Blair, of course. And anyone she might have told.”

The icy New York morning, when Bill and I stepped back out into it, shone so brightly I had to pull my sunglasses from my jacket pocket. I looked up at Bill; he was squinting, too.

We walked back toward the subway, breathing in air that suddenly seemed fresh and clean to me. Cars drove by that hadn’t been in the same place for thirty years, and when the wind blew, pushing papers and the smell of frying eggs, I didn’t mind it.

“What do you think of Dr. Browning?” I asked Bill as we walked.

Cupping a cigarette against the wind to light it, he said, “Do you mean do I think he stole the Blair porcelains?”

“Well, I could just mean do you think he’s sort of batty.”

“You could, and he is, but you don’t.”

“Well, then?”

“He could have. He would have had to have hired someone, at least to help, probably to do it for him.”

“Someone who knew how to disable an electronic alarm.”

“Lots of people know how to do that.”

“Yes, and most of them are friends of yours. But how would someone like Dr. Browning find one?”

“You’d be surprised.” We stopped at a light. Both of us, as we talked, scanned the street, looking for anyone who seemed to be looking for us, finding no one. “Or maybe he knows someone who could do that and that’s what gave him the idea. You’re the one who went strolling through his apartment. Did you find anything interesting?”

“No boxes or crates, no recently disturbed dust. Do you think he plays that piano, by the way?”

“I don’t think he knows he has a piano.”

“If he stole them,” I asked, “what’s he going to do with them?”

“Sell them?”

“And do what? Buy a red Miata? Look at his apartment, Bill. I don’t think he cares too much about
things
.”

“Except his porcelains. His little ones.”

“That was weird, that he called them that,” I admitted. “But they were all small. And he’s given bigger things away, like that platter. He could have kept that.”

“That’s true. Are you a p.i. or a defense attorney?”

The light changed. As we crossed, I said, “I guess I don’t want him to have done it. I guess I like him.”

“I guess you do. And maybe he didn’t, and so far nothing says he did. But he’s someone who knew where they were, and knew what they were worth. He’s a possibility.”

“So’s everyone who knew those things. Maybe Nora did it. Maybe Mrs. Blair did it herself. Oh, hey, maybe Tim did it. Oh, I like that. Can you arrange for that to be true?”

“No, but for a price I can probably prove it.”

We’d reached the subway. I searched my pocket for a token. “We really have to look into all those people, don’t we?” I said. “Nora and Tim and everybody. Just to be thorough and eliminate them.”

“Yes.”

“Because any of them might have done it.”

“It’s always possible.”

“It always is, isn’t it?” I sighed. “You always have no real idea what anyone is up to. I hate that.”

“That’s why you love this job.”

I looked up, surprised. “What do you mean?”

“Because in the course of finding out what happened in whatever case you’re investigating, you get to find out what everyone is up to.”

I considered that. “You’re right. Why do you suppose I want to know that?”

“I have no idea. I’ve always found knowing that kind of depressing, myself.”

We stepped from the shadow of a building into a patch of bright sunlight, and I thought of the musty dimness of Dr. Browning’s living room. “But not as depressing,” I told Bill, “as being in the dark.”

T
W E L V E

B
ill went crosstown, I went downtown. He went to cruise the galleries, just sort of to listen, in case there was anything to hear. I went to see if anyone in Chinatown could tell me anything that might help about the robbery, or about the Main Street Boys, or about anything else.

A bright sunny day in Chinatown brings everybody out, even in the cold. People wove through the packed streets like dancers, finding openings, halting, starting, spinning suddenly to head the other way. Their music came from the words they spoke: the Cantonese and English I understand, the Mandarin and Fukienese and Spanish and Korean that I don’t. The percussion was their footsteps slapping and tapping the pavement in syncopated rhythm. Their costumes were marvelous: bright ski parkas, patterned scarves and mittens, plaid coats, black leather and brown leather and puffy white fur sweeping by one another in intricate, fast-moving choreography. The set was good, too. Crimson New Year’s banners with glittering gold letters snapped in the wind across Mulberry and Mott. In crowded store windows chains of red-wrapped firecrackers hung waiting for the lion dancers who would come to scare away the evil spirits on New Year’s Day.

I stepped into the pattern, took my place. Not a soloist, just another member of the corps, I worked my way down Mulberry close to the corner where CP’s building stood. Then I stepped off stage, into the wings.

I started with the bakery, six doors up. “Couple buildings each direction” was the amount of real estate Trouble had said he was renting out to the Main Street Boys. I didn’t know if the bakery was included, but there was a fifty-fifty chance they would tell me, if I asked.

Warm, scented air enveloped me as I stepped out of the sharp cold and inside the bakery door. It was welcoming, comforting, and a strong reminder that breakfast had been a few hours ago and lunch wasn’t close. I ordered a cup of tea and a lotus-seed cake from the tiny woman behind the counter. I didn’t know her and our transaction was in English, since the people who own that bakery are from Fujian province and it would have taken us hours to puzzle out each other’s dialects.

I had found a table and taken my hat and jacket off by the time the tiny woman brought my tea and cake on a tiny tray. The cake was small too, but the tea was in a big white cup—porcelain, I mentioned off-handedly to myself. Undoubtedly new, with garish colors and sloppy lines. Not the fine workmanship you got in the old days.

“Excuse me,” I said to the woman as I paid her, “may I see the manager?”

She gave me a look full of suspicion and empty of comprehension. “Manager?” She repeated the syllables as though she’d never heard them before.

“The owner,” I said. “The boss.”

“Oh, boss.” Understanding came into her eyes but the suspicion didn’t leave. She nodded quickly and slipped away toward the back of the shop.

The tea was strong and fresh, astringent but not bitter, with a woody taste I didn’t know. I sipped it slowly, enjoying the warm glow. As I took the first bite of my lotus-seed cake a short man with thinning hair and a very round face appeared by my elbow.

“You want see me?” he asked.

My mouth full of sweet lotus-seed paste and light flaky pastry, I nodded and gestured to the chair opposite. He sat. I swallowed and smiled.

“You make wonderful cakes,” I said.

He shook his head, looking glum. “Not so good, like grandfather in China. Not possible here get right things for use.”

He denied the compliment in the good old-fashioned Chinese way. Praise from a stranger is almost rude; to accept it would have obligated him to me. It warmed my heart to see him sticking to the old ways in the new land.

The proprietor said nothing as I took another bite. His eyes were small and the look in them said that he didn’t quite believe I had asked him to my table to compliment his pastry.

And, of course, I hadn’t.

I reached into my pocket, gave him a business card, Chinese side up. He read it, turned it and read the English side too. He flipped back to the Chinese side, then looked at me.

“Investigator?” he said. “Got nothing to investigate, my shop.”

“No,” I said, sipping my tea. “And I’m not INS, FBI, NYPD or the Health Department.” Though it never hurts to remind people you know those names. “And what I’m investigating has nothing to do with you.”

“Okay, then why you here?”

“I’d like to ask you some questions that might help me.”

“How I can help, got nothing to do with me?”

“The building at the end of the block,” I said. “Chinatown Pride. Do you know them?”

He nodded, almost reluctantly. “Sons play basketball there, go to English. Wife also, English class.”