China Trade (2 page)

I finished my tea and half-turned to put my cup down on the coffee table. As I did I noticed Dr. Browning smiling slightly, looking at his knees. There was a little color in his cheeks, too.

Mrs. Blair went on: “There were many options for the disposition of the collection, and I had no basis for a decision. I consulted Dr. Browning, whom I had not met but whom Hamilton had greatly respected. After discussions with him and with Nora, I had given the entire collection to the museum here, as a gift.”

I was astounded. “To CP?” I bit my tongue to keep from asking, Something that valuable?

Mrs. Blair smiled. “My family is from Hong Kong, not Chinatown, but I am Chinese. My brother owns an import-export firm further up Mulberry Street, but until Dr. Browning told me about Chinatown Pride, I had no idea there was a museum of any sort in this neighborhood. I feel, and Nora confirms this, that my ignorance is not unusual. If my gift can help raise this museum’s profile in Chinatown and in the city at large, I would consider it an honor.”

Nora turned to me. “When we started the museum,” she said, “we wanted people—kids, especially—to come here to learn about what an ancient civilization they come from. To start being proud of being Chinese, instead of ashamed of being different.”

“And it works,” I said, recalling giggling groups of third graders poking each other in awe at the Peking Opera costume exhibit the day I’d taken my oldest nephews there. “It’s beginning to catch on.”

Nora nodded. She gestured the teapot around, but Mrs. Blair and Dr. Browning didn’t want any more and Tim only drinks Lipton’s. “The museum’s grown slowly,” she said. “The Blair porcelains are the most important gift we’ve ever gotten. There were other museums that were hoping for this collection and consider themselves better equipped to display and protect it. The Blair collection has quite a reputation among porcelain experts, even though almost no one has actually seen it.”

“They haven’t seen it?”

“As I said,” Mrs. Blair spoke in a voice that was used to not having to be raised to be heard, and that was also, it seemed to me, used to being understood the first time, “my husband was a recluse. He found most people tiresome, greedy, and hypocritical. Without honor, and full of secrets. His collection was his refuge. Porcelain, he often said, had no secrets: It is surface beauty applied over a perfect foundation. My husband did not invite other people to share his refuge.”

Nora looked at me with a steady gaze. “Lydia, I don’t know how much you know about the museum world, but if it gets around that we couldn’t hold on to this gift it would mean a tremendous loss of face for us. We might never get another donor to consider us again.”

I began to get the importance of this to Nora and CP. “That’s what was stolen? The Blair porcelains?”

“Not the whole collection,” Nora said. “Two crates.”

“How much is that?”

“Nine pieces,” Dr. Browning unexpectedly answered. His voice was thin and reedy, and almost apologetic. “A tenth of the whole.”

“It’s about as much as two people, or possibly one person, could carry away,” Nora added.

“Crates?”

“About this big.” Nora made a box the size of a small trunk with her hands.

“Where were they stolen from?”

“Our basement. We had an alarm system put in and iron grilles on the windows. The grilles were cut and the alarm system had been disabled. It never went off.”

“Disabled? How?”

“A device that kept the signal transmitting even though the wire was cut. Apparently it’s not hard to do.”

“No, it’s not,” I said absently. I knew that was true, though I didn’t, myself, know how to do it. “But it takes planning ahead. Who knew the porcelains were here?”

Nora glanced at Mrs. Blair. “As far as we know,” Nora said, “only Tim, myself, Dr. Browning, and Mrs. Blair.”

“What about the rest of the Board?”

“Since the theft everyone knows. But they didn’t know when they were coming or when they got here. Those were the kind of details I dealt with, as museum director. No one asked. But,” she added, “whoever took them doesn’t have to be someone who knew what they were stealing.”

“You mean, they might have been just regular old thieves, and they happened on the Blair porcelains?”

“Well, it seems to me if they had come because of them they’d have taken them all. Dr. Browning says the things in those boxes aren’t even particularly special.”

Dr. Browning shook his head. “Not any more than the rest of the collection. It’s all very, very special, of course.” He looked up suddenly, his gray eyes wide, as if he were afraid he’d be misunderstood.

“How did you discover the theft?” I asked Nora.

Dr. Browning, again unexpectedly, answered that one, too. “I discovered it.” He blushed, as if that had been an improper thing to do, discovering a theft. “When I came in yesterday afternoon to continue my work.”

“Your work?”

That had been enough for Dr. Browning. His eyes were back to examining the floor.

“Dr. Browning is inventorying and cataloging the collection for us,” Nora told me.

Puzzled, I asked Mrs. Blair, “Don’t people who have collections like this have inventories?”

“My husband had a list,” Mrs. Blair answered, “but I’m not entirely sure it’s complete. The new pieces he’d recently acquired had not, I believe, been added to it.”

Dr. Browning shook his head, as though he didn’t believe they had, either.

“I’m surprised,” I said. “I mean, even just for insurance, you’d think someone would want to be up-to-date on his inventory.”

Mrs. Blair’s smile was indulgent and tinged with sadness. When he was alive, I was willing to bet, his casual attitude toward things like that probably drove her crazy. Now she missed it.

“That’s what I thought about the inventory, too,” said Nora. “But apparently this isn’t unusual.” She looked to Dr. Browning.

“No, it’s not.” Dr. Browning answered a second late, as though he wasn’t sure he was the one being spoken to. He smiled the bashful smile again, but kept his eyes on his shoes.
“A true collector knows every piece in his collection. He doesn’t need a list, any more than you need a list of your friends.”

Something I had just said reminded me of a question I hadn’t asked. “Were these pieces insured?”

“The collection is,” Nora said, after a hesitation that was, I assumed, another invitation to Mrs. Blair. “But those particular crates were the new acquisitions. Because Mr. Blair hadn’t gone through the process of adding them to the inventory list yet, those pieces weren’t covered.”

“Those were all the new acquisitions? They all happened to be together?”

“They didn’t ‘happen’ to be together.” For the first time I heard the kind of frost in Mrs. Blair’s voice that I associate with upper-class Hong Kong women. “I had them packed that way, to make Dr. Browning’s task easier.”

“Strange,” I mused. “That that’s what was stolen and nothing else.”

“Perhaps strange,” Mrs. Blair answered. “And perhaps coincidental. Any two crates would have included only certain pieces, about which we could have said it was strange that they, and not others, were stolen.”

“I suppose,” I agreed, not sure I supposed any such thing. I turned my attention back to Nora. “Well, on principle I hate to agree with Tim, but the police have resources I don’t have. Why aren’t you going to them?”

Nora looked at Tim. His jaw was tight and his ears were crimson. Childhood memories of times when his ears were that color gave me a strong urge to hide under the desk.

Nora poured more tea for herself and for me. She warmed her hands around her teacup. “Dr. Browning tells me it’s almost impossible to recover stolen art. And the police have other priorities. We decided that the damage it would do our reputation if we made this public would far outweigh whatever advantage the police would have over our doing this privately.”

I looked over at Mrs. Blair, wondering how she felt about
the theft of Hamilton’s porcelains being handled without benefit of law enforcement.

As if reading my mind, Mrs. Blair smiled. “I concur completely in this decision, Miss Chin. Nora consulted me on behalf of the Board before the decision was final. The police, as Nora said, have their own priorities and restrictions. As there is no possibility of an insurance recovery, I see no advantage in calling them in.”

“Restrictions?” I looked from her to Nora.

“The police,” Nora said, replacing a stray freshly-sharpened pencil into her freshly-sharpened-pencil cup, “are limited in the methods they’re permitted to use. In the sense, I mean, that if a crime’s been committed, they have to be as interested in catching and prosecuting the criminals as in recovering the property. We’re not. We want the porcelains back first. We’d like to see the criminals caught if possible, but that’s secondary.”

“Do you mean,” I said, “that you’d be willing to deal with whoever has them?”

Nora glanced at Tim, who scowled.

“We might,” she told me.

“Can you afford to do that? Buy them back?”

“Not for their market value, absolutely not. But maybe we could … work something out.”

“That’s where I come in?”

“Well, we have to find them first. Someone on the Board suggested hiring a private detective, and of course you were the one we all thought of right away.”

Of course, I thought. Even poor Tim must have thought of me right away and frantically tried to find some way to keep his busybody, embarrassing little sister out of his business.

“And I again concurred,” Mrs. Blair assured me. “I understand that you’re young and relatively inexperienced, but Nora gave you quite glowing notices. And being Chinese …”

She didn’t finish that, and I wasn’t sure what she hoped would come of my being Chinese.

I looked around the room. Dr. Browning was gazing at his shoelaces. Tim wouldn’t look at me. Mrs. Blair was smiling gently. I turned to Nora. She looked at me with something like pleading in her eyes. Coming from her, that was startling, and I found myself feeling touched and suddenly protective.

“All right,” I said, in my best client-relations voice. “Art’s not my specialty, but I have a colleague who’s experienced in art cases. I’ll need particulars, and I’ll do what I can.”

After all, I thought directly at Tim, who seemed to find glowering out the window as fascinating as Dr. Browning found staring at his shoes, if I needed a lawyer, I’d go to you. That’s what you do, this is what I do. I don’t have an advanced degree and you don’t have a gun.

And just because I’d never heard of the Blair porcelains didn’t mean I couldn’t find them.

T
W O

P
orcelain,” I said, critically examining the blue willows on the fluted white cup in my hand, then lifting it to sip the ginger tea it held. “What do you know about it?”

“Nothing.” Bill Smith, my sometimes-partner, put out his cigarette as the waitress came back to our table with his double espresso. “Except that you’re going to spill your tea if you keep trying to read the bottom of that cup.”

I’d just about come to the same conclusion, and was about to give up, but when he said that I raised the cup and ducked my head anyway, until I could see the “Royal Doulton” on the bottom. I didn’t spill a drop. The cup matched my saucer, but it didn’t match Bill’s, or the flowered teapot on the table. In fact, nothing in this Greenwich Village cafe matched anything else. That was why I liked it here.

“People steal it,” I offered.

“People steal anything. I had a client once who wanted me to steal his girlfriend’s garbage.”

“You’re kidding. Did you?”

“I told him I’d steal it but he’d have to go through it himself. I figured he was looking for evidence she was seeing another guy.”

“What did he say?”

“He didn’t want to go through it, he just wanted to have it. Something she’d touched and been close to, he said. He wanted me to steal him a fresh batch every Friday.”

“Yuck. What did you do?”

“I suddenly remembered I’d been called out to work on a case in Missoula, Montana. I suggested he get somebody else.”

I sipped my tea and watched steam cloud up the cafe window. “I think that’s what Tim was hoping I’d do,” I said. “Suggest they get somebody else.”

“Your brother Tim? He’s the client here?”

“Well, sort of.” He drank his espresso, I drank my ginger tea, and I told him about CP, the museum, and the missing Blair porcelains.

Bill’s not really my partner. He’s a solo p.i., a one-person shop with a varied caseload, just like me. Only he’s older, taller, and tougher looking—oh, and a male white person—which means he doesn’t go as long between cases as I sometimes do. But most cases are better if you work them in pairs, and he’s usually who I call in when I need someone. Since we met I think he’s pretty much stopped calling in anybody else, too, except when he needs big muscle. I’m a good bodyguard, I’m a great shot, and I can fight; but at five-one, a hundred and ten pounds, I’m not very intimidating.

When
I
need big muscle, I just call him.

“I really hate the idea of working for Tim,” I finished up the story. “But I feel bad for Nora. She’s always been one of those people who put other people first, ever since she was a kid, and the museum matters a whole lot to her. I guess maybe I feel a little guilty, too. I used to date her brother, and we
laughed at her a lot. Behind her back,” I added, so he wouldn’t think I’d been too awful.

“Her brother? That was that guy named Matt? Your first boyfriend?”

Even for Bill, that was surprising. “How did you remember that?”

“He’s the one who threw you over because you were wild but not wild enough?”

“You’re ignoring my question. And
I
broke up with
him
, in case it should happen to interest you.”

“That’s not how you told it the first time. And it interests me deeply. I remember with crystal clarity everything you ever told me about your love life. I search your words for clues, your memories for hints. I examine the smallest detail for the key that will unlock the door to your heart.”

“Well, keep it up.” I yawned. “Don’t let me stop you.”