Tell Me No Lies (3 page)

Catlin was quiet for a long time. Then he took a final sip of tea, swirled the residue in a dark spiral and set the cup aside.

"There are several possibilities," said Catlin, his words clipped. "One: Qin bronzes are being stolen and sold in America. Two: Qin forgeries are being sold in America. Three: rumors are being sold in China. If number one is correct, then obviously someone in the Chinese government is involved. Someone very high up in the bureaucracy of Xi'an. You, perhaps. If not you, then someone you trust. The betrayal wouldn't stop there, either. It would go all the way to Beijing. Theft of a chariot, charioteer and horses simply would not be possible without the complicity of powerful people within China's government."

Yi waited, watching Catlin through an expanding spiral of smoke.

"If forgeries are being sold," continued Catlin, "government officials may or may not be involved. It wouldn't matter. Face is not lost over the sale of forgeries." He paused, smiling thinly. "Except by the buyers, of course. But that isn't the PRC's problem, is it?"

Yi's cigarette glowed and dulled again, quickly, like a heartbeat.

"Number three is more tricky," said Catlin neutrally. "Rumors can undermine governments faster than any truth, no matter how damning. It's the old saw about not being able to disprove a negative. You can't prove that bronzes have not been stolen and sold. As you said, Mount Li is huge."

Yi nodded curtly.

"So the odds are against you two to one," Catlin pointed out calmly. "If there are real Qin bronzes being sold in the U.S. the prodevelopment forces in China lose to the Maoists, and so do you. If there are rumors of such sales, you still lose, because you can't prove that the rumors aren't true." Catlin shrugged. "Unless you can find Qin bronzes in America and prove that they're forgeries, you're shit out of Suck, my friend. The Maoists will hang your ass so high you'll think you're Peking duck."

2

Lindsay Danner sat in her office, seeing nothing of the exquisite Oriental teak desk with its Chinese lacquer pen boxes and an appointment calendar graced by elegant calligraphy. Lindsay's eyes were fixed on her hands, but it was the past that she was seeing, voices and scenes that would never come again, times and people gone as surely as yesterday's sunlight.

Yet the nightmare would not go into the past where it belonged. The nightmare not only endured, it grew stronger, feeding on the irrational sadness that had all but overwhelmed Lindsay at her mother's recent death. There was no need for such grief. Her mother had died quickly, painlessly, cherished by the people she had loved more than she had loved anything except God.

Nor was there need for the nightmare that came more and more frequently, claiming the dark hours after midnight, making Lindsay twist and turn helplessly while a faceless Chinese man pursued her through a world that was black and silver and red, blood red, her hands warm and sticky and she was screaming, screaming.

No! Lindsay told herself harshly, clenching a gold pen in her fist. I'm not a child anymore. If I wake up screaming, no one Witt come and comfort me and tell me that it's all right and that – what? What did I want my mother to tell me? What was the question I never found the courage to ask and ask and ask until it was answered?

In the next instant Lindsay shivered, feeling as though the nightmare were turning over inside her, sliding up from the black well of the past.

Whatever the question was, it doesn't matter anymore. It's too late. Somehow I always thought that the next time I saw mother I would have the courage to ask. But she's dead now. There's no one left who even knows what it was like in China then. It's as though it never happened.

But it did happen. Ask the nightmares.

"Miss Lindsay Danner?"

The voice was unusual in that, though polite, it held an underlying command. Lindsay's head jerked up. A man stood in the doorway of her office. Automatically she summed him up: medium height, blue eyes, pale skin, a few years older than her own thirty years. He was dressed in the manner of Washington, D.C. professionals, with conservative clothing conservatively cut. In a city where politics and rumor ruled supreme, most professionals left stylish dressing to their less vulnerable counterparts in Manhattan or L.A.

"May I help you?" asked Lindsay, her voice neutral, controlled, belonging to the curator of Ancient Chinese Bronzes for the Museum of the Asias rather than to a vaguely frightened, grieving daughter. Discreetly Lindsay checked her calendar. For the past three days she had been in Vancouver, British Columbia, appraising a minor collection of early Chou bronzes. No names had been penciled onto her appointment calendar during her absence.

"Steve White assured me that you would be able to solve a little problem we have," said the man.

Lindsay registered the first-name familiarity of her visitor with Mr. L. Stephen White, director of the Museum of the Asias – and not incidentally, a man of considerable inherited wealth and arrogance.

"I'll be glad to help Mr. White in any way I can," Lindsay said dryly. "He is, after all, my boss. Please sit down Mr. – "

The man closed the door behind him and walked over to the massively elegant teak desk that dominated the room.

Lindsay noted the firmly closed door with a sharpening of curiosity. After a childhood in politically torn China, and an adulthood that had included going down dark streets to appraise objects d'art of dubious provenance, Lindsay recognized a naked bid for secrecy when she saw it.

She would have been worried about the possibility of robbery if it weren't for the fact that all the museum's items were meticulously photographed and cataloged, making their resale through normal channels both unlikely and unprofitable. Nor could the contents of the museum be looted and melted down as had too many of Mexico's and South America's pre-Columbian artifacts, a looting that had begun with the Conquistadores and continued unabated to modern times. Much to modern grave robbers' disappointment, ancient Chinese artisans had used little gold and silver in their creations.

That didn't mean Lindsay couldn't recognize gold when it was dangled under her nose. The shield her visitor held out to her was of the expensive, gold-plated, blue-enameled variety that only the FBI carried. Lindsay looked from the gleaming metal to the polite, professionally assured face watching her from across her desk.

"Special Agent Terry O'Donnel," said the man. Then, in case Lindsay hadn't noticed, he added, "Federal Bureau of Investigation."

The smooth, top-quality leather folder closed over the shield as it was returned to the agent's dark blue suit coat pocket.

"Sit down," offered Lindsay, hoping her sudden curiosity wasn't too obvious. "Will you be here long enough for coffee?"

"We were hoping," said the agent, "that you would come with me to the Hoover Building." He smiled suddenly, turning on the Irish charm. "The coffee there isn't great, but it's free."

"Is Mr. White part of the 'we' you mentioned?" asked Lindsay.

"Indirectly."

Lindsay gave the agent a measuring look. Some people hated modern art or rock music or nuclear power plants. She hated evasions, euphemisms and prevarications. Lies. In a profession where many of the artifacts had been looted in one way or another, at one time or another, Lindsay's absolute refusal to deal on the lucrative, pervasive "double market" was rare.

"How indirectly?" she asked bluntly.

Terry O'Donnel reassessed the slender, bronze-haired woman in a single glance. He decided that the elegant lines of Lindsay's face and the generous curves of her mouth concealed an unusual intelligence and will. If he doubted it, all he had to do was look into the cool, assessing clarity of her very dark blue eyes. Abruptly he decided to change his approach.

"I have a feeling that if I gave you the usual your-government-needs-you speech," said the agent, "it wouldn't work."

"It might. The truth would work even better."

O'Donnel's mouth turned up in a wry smile. "In this case, it's the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me God. Your government needs you. And," he added swiftly, seeing a question taking shape on Lindsay's lips, "it's something I would rather not discuss here. If it helps you to make up your mind, your boss is with my boss right now. Want to call him?"

"Why didn't he simply call me?"

O'Donnel shrugged. "Guess he was too busy."

"Too busy to pick up the phone, so he sends an FBI agent to fetch me," muttered Lindsay. "That sounds like L. Stephen." She pulled her purse out of a drawer, locked her desk and stood up. "Your cab or mine?"

"Mine. It doesn't have a meter in it." He smiled again, deciding that Lindsay standing up was even better to look at than Lindsay sitting down. The sensual promise of her mouth was repeated in the curving line of breasts and waist and hips. "Having a car is one of the few perks of a civil servant."

"Is the car air conditioned?" she asked hopefully.

He gave her a pitying look. "You've never worked for the government, have you?"

"The government isn't terrifically interested in ancient Chinese bronzes," Lindsay pointed out, locking her office door after the agent had stepped through.

"It is now," O'Donnel muttered too softly for Lindsay to hear.

Lindsay walked next to O'Donnel through the museum's long, narrow hall. Beneath their feet was a rich Chinese silk carpet designed in the dragon moth that had begun in the Shang dynasty more than three thousand years ago and had continued into the modern age of the People's Republic of China. The passage of time, political dynasties and artistic styles had changed the appearance of the dragon, but not its ubiquitous presence. In some unknown, untouchable way, the dragon was China's soul, unchanging.

"Sherry," said Lindsay, pausing by an open office door and leaning inside, "I'll be out for a while. Could you pick up my phone?"

"Sure thing." Sherry looked at the man waiting next to Lindsay in the hall, wondering if he were a buyer, a seller or a knight in shining armor come to take Sherry away from the boredom and near-poverty of being a museum secretary. When the man looked away from her without so much as a hint of a sexual come-on, Sherry sighed and turned her attention back to Lindsay. "Will you be out long?"

Lindsay didn't know, but from the way O'Donnel shifted impatiently behind her, she assumed that his tolerance for chitchat had just run out. "I'll give you a call," promised Lindsay.

The instant the museum's mahogany door swung open, the outside air draped around Lindsay like wet fur. Immediately the teal-blue silk of her dress molded itself to her body. Even so, the cloth itself felt cool against her suddenly flushed skin. The weaving of silk had been invented and brought to perfection in the south of China, where the climate was even hotter and more humid than Washington's infamous summers.

As always, the rush of torrid, steamy air made memories stir deep within Lindsay…a child waking in Hong Kong's smothering darkness and screaming, screaming. The nightmare was old, as were the memories of her mother saying Nothing is wrong, Lindsay. Go back to sleep. Forget what happened. Forget. Forget.

Grimly Lindsay turned her mind away from the past with all its irretrievable questions and regrets. And pleasures, too. Despite the nightmare, despite whatever she had finally forgotten, there was much that she loved of the past, and the past was China. She had missed it bitterly when she had been sent to the United States as a teenager. Although she had finally come to love her aunt, the summers spent in Hong Kong with her mother were rich with memories of laughter and voices and the seething humanity that was the Orient.

"This way," said O'Donnel, touching Lindsay's arm, startling her out of her thoughts.

In defiance of local parking regulations, O'Donnel's car was waiting at the curb. The car was American-made, neutral in color and had no visible auxiliary lights or siren. Even so, there was no ticket decorating the windshield. D.C. cops quickly learned how to read government license plates. Some cars would never be ticketed and towed away, even if they were parked right in the lap of the Lincoln Memorial.

As soon as O'Donnel pulled out in traffic for the short drive to the Hoover Building, Lindsay started asking the question that had been tickling her tongue since she had first seen the rich, gold-plated shield.

"Who lost some ancient Chinese bronzes?"

Now that he had Lindsay safely in tow, O'Donnel didn't need to rely on charm, Irish or otherwise. "I'm not free to say any more than I already have, Miss Danner."

"Mr. O'Donnel."

He turned and looked at her quickly, surprised by the self-possession he heard beneath her soft tone. "Yes?"

"If Mr. White isn't on the other end of this drive, you might as well take me back to the museum right now. I won't work with people who lie to me, no matter how pretty their badges are.

O'Donnel's mouth moved in an unwilling smile. "He's there, Miss Danner."

Nothing more was said during the short drive, nor as O'Donnel led Lindsay through the blank-walled, air-conditioned corridors of the Hoover Building. He handed a laminated plastic visitor's badge to Lindsay, which she clipped onto the wrap-front of her dress. O'Donnel clipped his own ID card to his coat pocket and said nothing of interest until he closed an office door behind her.

"Here she is, Steve. You didn't tell me she was a tiger."

"Sharpened her pretty little claws on you, did she?" asked L. Stephen White. "Do you good, boy." Without looking up from the photographs he had been sifting through, White said, "Naughty baby, Lindsay. And from such well-behaved missionary stock, too."

Five months of proximity had accustomed Lindsay to her employer's manner, but she hadn't learned to enjoy it. She doubted that she would ever learn to enjoy being treated like a backward third-grader by the distinguished L. Stephen White. She knew that there was nothing personal in his treatment. He acted toward everyone like that, man and woman alike. It was the result of being raised by parents with more money and less compassion than Fort Knox.

"Was there something you wanted?" asked Lindsay.

White glanced up, looked her over from softly curling chin-length hair to high-heeled sandals, and murmured, "Yes, baby, there most definitely is."

"Then it better be in my job description," shot back Lindsay, impatient with her employer's relentless supply of sexual innuendos.

O'Donnel snickered. "Go get 'em, tiger. If you need any help filing a harassment case, I'll be glad to lend a hand."

"Down, boy," said White, standing and stretching. "Lindsay and I get along just fine, don't we, baby?''

"Especially when I'm not three days behind in my work because of an unscheduled trip to Canada," Lindsay agreed tartly.

"You're cranky. You had lunch yet?" asked White.

"Yes."

"Must be your period, then," he said, yawning.

Lindsay turned and started back toward the hall door.

"They'll arrest you," taunted White.

Lindsay ignored him and opened the door.

"Ah, hell, Lindsay. You know I'm just kidding. Sit down and drink some coffee."

Lindsay looked over her shoulder at her boss. He was tall, dark, very wealthy, twice-divorced and considered handsome by women who lacked the desire or brains to look beyond his surface. His father and grandfather had been avid collectors of Oriental objects d'art. White was an avid collector of weekend affairs. There were days when Lindsay seriously considered becoming one of his two-day stands simply to end the relentless pressure. She had no doubt that once he had bedded her, he would lose interest in her. Again, it was nothing personal. It was simply the way L. Stephen White was with women. Like many collectors, whatever he hadn't yet acquired had far more allure than all the pieces that had been bagged, tagged and filed under Yesterday.

"Cream or sugar?" O'Donnel asked quietly.

Lindsay's indigo eyes measured him and saw only a desire to defuse the situation. "Yes, please," she said. "Both."