Tell Me No Lies (5 page)

"Same place you're going to – under Catlin, Jacob MacArthur, in your computer files." Catlin looked at O'Donnel.

"Normal spelling on all three names. Go ahead. We won't miss you."

O'Donnel looked at Stone. Stone jerked his head toward the door. "We'll be down the hall," said Stone. Then he added too softly for anyone else to hear, "Stick her on the bronzes."

"It's been a pleasure meeting you, Mr. Chen, Catlin," said O'Donnel politely before he turned and left the room, shutting the door behind him.

Stone turned to Yi. "Would you like to watch the sixth expert appraise the bronzes we rounded up?"

Chen Yi nodded. "I would like to see them myself."

With a wolfish smile, Stone gestured toward the door. "Are you familiar with two-way mirrors, Mr. Chen?"

"Yes."

"The room we'll use is soundproofed. You'll have a clear view of the bronzes."

"And the appraiser? Who is he?" asked Yi.

"She. Lindsay Danner."

With a quick breath Yi took the last of his cigarette down to a burning stub, which he threw into a sand-filled ashtray. "Ah!"

Only Catlin noticed the slight jerk of Yi's hand when he heard Lindsay Danner's name.

3

Catlin took in the room with a single, sweeping glance. The area was small, soundproofed, well ventilated and dimly lighted. There were chairs scattered about, facing the large pane of glass that dominated one wall. Through the subtle distortion of the special glass, another room was visible. That room was empty but for seventeen bronzes waiting in a row on a long conference table. The table was wide and placed so that whoever looked at the bronzes would face the hidden room. The lighting in the room was so bright as to be just short of pain.

In all, the setup was about as subtle as a sonic boom. Only a total innocent would be unaware of the possibility of watchers hidden on the other side of the mirror.

"Sit down," said Stone, gesturing toward the chairs. "Don't worry about talking. You could set off a bomb in here and nobody would hear it on the other side."

Chen Yi went directly to the window and peered through. "Those bronzes," he said. "Where did you get them?"

"Museum basements from here to Manhattan. You told me that we couldn't use any of the more famous pieces."

"Good." Yi's lighter snapped open and he drew in sharply on the cigarette. The flame surged.

"I wouldn't do that too close to the window when someone's on the other side," said Catlin, remembering a time long ago when the flare of a match coming through a whorehouse "mirror" had given him an inadvertent warning of danger. "A direct, nearby light source bleeds right through."

Stone gave Catlin a measuring glance as Yi snapped shut the lighter and stepped away from the glass.

"You seem to know a lot about two-way mirrors," Stone said. "You spend much time in police stations on the wrong side of the glass?"

"Not if I can help it," said Catlin as he went closer to the window and looked at Chinese bronzes for the first time in years.

"And if you can't help it?" shot back Stone.

"You're the investigator. Read my file," Catlin suggested softly.

The door in the other room opened. O'Donnel ushered in a woman. Hidden microphones picked up each sound, giving the three watchers the eerie sensation that they were immaterial, invisible spirits hovering over the bronzes, seeing but not being seen, hearing but not being heard. Stone was accustomed to the feeling. So was Catlin. Yi was not, and proved it by the sharp intake of his breath when O'Donnel seemed to speak right to him through the glass.

"Mr. Stone had to take a phone call, but he wanted you to get right to the appraisal."

"What does Mr. Stone expect?" asked Lindsay, walking toward the bronzes.

Catlin's amber eyes narrowed as he took in the self-assured elegance of Lindsay's clothes and carriage. Under the bright fluorescent lights her smooth, chin-length hair gleamed like a freshly minted bronze coin. The color was rich, textured, alive with shades that went from pale flax to a deep chestnut gold. The effect was like her voice, shades of silky richness.

"Expect?" asked the agent.

Lindsay looked away from the bronzes and back over her shoulder at O'Donnel. The motion outlined her breasts in silk that was the same clear indigo as her eyes.

"Does he want me to assign an age to the bronzes? A price? What does he expect?" Lindsay's voice was supple, slightly husky, intriguing.

Catlin shot a sideways glance at Yi. "Is she the one?" asked Catlin in Mandarin.

"Yes," answered Yi in the same language.

"He wants to know if the pieces are forged or not," said O'Donnel beyond the mirror. "We're not buying, so the price doesn't matter."

Lindsay moved to the table and bent over the first bronze. Her hair drifted forward gracefully, a motion echoed by the silk dress. A triangle of fine-grained skin was revealed when the wrap front of the dress fell slightly away from her body as she bent to study the bronze. The men in the room were treated to a view of smoothly swelling breasts that were barely concealed by dark blue silk.

"Daughter of a missionary," murmured Catlin in Mandarin. "By the spirits of my ancestors, if the daughter of my minister had looked like that, I would have gone to church seven days a week and twice on Sundays.''

Yi smiled. "The mother was pleasing" he said, also in Mandarin.

"Is the daughter a broken pot?" Catlin asked, his delivery as staccato as Yi's.

Yi shook his head as his soft voice filled the room with the clipped, sliding tones of Mandarin, "After the mother, there is no other woman. Her hair was a golden river. Her voice dreamed in shades of silver. To be near her was to know the serenity of the lotus blooming beneath the summer moon."

Catlin's eyes narrowed as he looked at the Chinese who stood and stared through a two-way mirror into the hidden past. Living in Asia had taught Catlin that Chinese men were not noted for their tender view of women, despite a persistent strain of eros and romance in Chinese poetry. Yet in Yi's voice there was both remembered desire and something else, something deeper and more enduring. If translated into ideographs, Yi's description would have been ambiguous, capable of referring to both the spirit and the flesh. But then, the hallmark of the written Chinese language was that most ideographs had more than one meaning. China's multileveled, evocative, imprecise ideographs were a joy to poets and a curse to scientists.

The sound of Lindsay's words drew Catlin's attention back to the present and the woman who stood on the other side of the mirror.

"Number one is a rather ordinary ich'i of the ting type. Or ding, if you follow the recent spelling and pronunciation guide approved by the People's Republic."

"Whoa," said O'Donnel. "Run that by me again, in English."

"Taking notes?" asked Lindsay, smiling.

"Nope. You're being immortalized on tape. Didn't Mr. Stone tell you?"

Lindsay shook her head, making light run like threads of molten gold through her hair. "The first bronze is a ritual vessel, a three-legged caldron used for serving meat and cereals. Late Shang period."

"Genuine?"

"Yes. There's no particular artistry in it, however. It's simply a bronze vessel made for the grave of a man of middling importance who died three thousand years ago. Excellent pat-ma, if you care."

O'Donnel shrugged. "Not me. My boss might. I don't know."

"Most collectors care more about patina than about the intrinsic artistry of the vessel itself," explained Lindsay. She smiled slightly as she bent over another bronze, remembering collectors she had known. They were a diverse and unpredictable breed, as even the most casual visitor to any museum could see.

Lindsay used both hands as she turned the second bronze toward the light. Though the piece was less than a foot high, the craftsmen hadn't stinted on the bronze. "And if the collector is Chinese," she continued, turning another aspect of the bronze toward the light, "he will probably care more for the quality of the inscriptions than anything else about the piece."

With an expression of distaste, Lindsay returned the bronze to the table. ' This is a kuang, a vessel for wine or water. It aspires to be Shang. It isn't. It's probably a Sung forgery. The Chinese have been faking early Shang bronzes for at least seven hundred years."

"Really? Why?" asked the agent, looking at the bronze and finding nothing worth counterfeiting. To his taste it was squat, overwrought and ugly.

"Fashion." Lindsay's smile turned down at the corners. "And survival. In Sung times there was a very powerful magistrate who would excuse all manner of antisocial behavior in exchange for ancient bronzes that carried inscriptions. Wise crooks cast their apologies in advance. With appropriate inscriptions, of course."

O'Donnel's smile was wide and understanding, if not wholly approving. "But how did you know this one was fake? Wasn't the surface dirty enough?''

Lindsay's laugh was soft, rippling, as sensuous as silk sliding over skin. Catlin sensed Yi's indrawn breath as the Chinese leaned toward the glass like a man seeing a dream condense just beyond his reach.

"Mr. O'Donnel," she murmured, trying not to smile, "that isn't dirt, that's patina, the pride and glory of mature bronze. And no, there's nothing wrong with it. After the first five hundred years, it's almost impossible to date a bronze on the basis of its patina alone."

She turned toward the third bronze.

"Then how did you know that this was a fake?" persisted O'Donnel.

Lindsay glanced up from the table. "The inscriptions."

"Oh."

With a cynical smile of male understanding, Catlin saw O'Donnel admiring Lindsay's legs as she bent over the table again. Catlin himself was watching each of her movements, listening to each nuance of tone and word choice, trying to find the person beneath the smile and the indigo silk. Two things had come through very clearly to Catlin so far: Lindsay handled the bronzes with love; and she disliked the fraudulent Shang bronze with a feeling that went deeper than an art buyer's desire to avoid being cheated.

O'Donnel came closer and bent to peer at the rejected bronze. Catlin noted the brush of bodies and the fact that Lindsay took a small step aside that ended the physical contact without making an issue out of it. O'Donnel noticed, too. Without looking up from the bronze he was studying, he eased away, no longer crowding Lindsay.

"What inscriptions?" asked O'Donnel after a minute, baffled by the mazelike patterns that covered the kuang.

"On the body," Lindsay said absently, "beneath the handle."

She picked up the third bronze and turned it slowly in her hands. The piece looked rather like an artichoke sitting in a bowl, with triangular leaves overlapping in an elegant pattern. Holes were cut in the bronze to allow incense to escape. Unlike the other bronzes, the patina on this one was an even cinnamon color that showed off the gold-inlaid hunting scenes to spectacular advantage.

O'Donnel picked up the rejected kuang, grunted at its weight and peered at the faint line of ideographs. "What's wrong with the inscription?"

With great care, Lindsay set down the hill-censer she was holding. Catlin saw the slow caress of her fingertips up the bronze's curved side as she withdrew her touch and gave her attention to O'Donnel.

"The inscription shouldn't even be there," said Lindsay. "Of all the scientifically excavated Shang sites, not one of them has yielded an early bronze with an inscription. Even a simple tribal mark is rare."

O'Donnel squinted at the damning ideographs and set the kuang back on the table with an audible thump. "What about the third one?"

"Genuine," Lindsay said quietly, her voice husky. She touched the bronze again, savoring it with her fingertips as well as her eyes and mind. "Exquisite. Han dynasty."

Catlin sensed Stone's sudden attention and guessed that Lindsay's estimate of the bronze disagreed with that of the other experts the FBI had brought in. Yi, too, seemed surprised. As was Catlin himself. The patina on the piece was simply too even, too perfect. Suddenly he wished that he were in the room himself, able to question Lindsay personally, and to hear her husky answers.

"But it's smooth, not rough like most of the other bronzes," protested O'Donnel. "And it's a different color."

"Patina forms quickly in water or wet ground, very slowly in air. That hill-censer was a prized family possession passed down from hand to hand through the centuries, and used only for the most important rituals. It was never a funeral offering buried with its owner."

Lindsay smoothed her palm over the incense burner that had been cast to resemble hills rising to a central peak. "And the gold," she added, tracing a hunting scene with a delicate fingertip, "never corrodes. This is an extraordinary piece. Where did you get it?"

"Then the other one must be real, too," said O'Donnel, ignoring her question as he pointed toward a kuang that was twice the size of the one she had rejected and much better preserved. The patina was an even dark brown.

"That's a fifty-footer," said Lindsay, glancing up from the beautifully wrought hill-censer toward the kuang.

"What's that?"

"A fraud you can spot at fifty feet," Lindsay said dryly. "It's trying to be Shang, but the designs are Chou. The patina is a standard vinegar spray job. The proportions of the animal are wrong. Totally inept all the way around."

Behind the mirror Catlin laughed softly. Like Lindsay, he had nothing but contempt for an amateurish job of deception. Unlike her, he had a professional's admiration for a fraud that passed unnoticed. After all, his life had depended on the success of being a living fraud – a covert agent living in enemy territory.

As Lindsay proceeded down the line of bronzes, Catlin divided his attention between the two sides of the deceptive mirror. Stone, in particular, interested Catlin. Whatever Stone's area of expertise in the FBI, it obviously wasn't in art fraud, illicit traffic in antiquities or anything having to do with dubious artifacts of any kind. Beyond scoring Lindsay on a piece of paper, Stone spent his time watching Yi and Catlin rather than the bronzes.

Catlin had a suspicion that amounted to a certainty that Stone was a member of the FBI's elite Foreign Counterintelligence Division. The certainty increased as Catlin listened in amused understanding while Stone tried to get more information from Yi than Stone had gotten from his superiors.

"I hope your comrades will be well soon," said Stone.

Yi acknowledged the conversational gambit with a nod of his head, but his black eyes never wavered from the glass.

"Do you know when they'll join you?"

"No."

Stone watched Yi for a moment, then flicked a glance at the next room, where Lindsay's quiet comments made a counterpart to his own, more pointed, questions.

"Are those bronzes anything like what you're looking for?" asked Stone.

"No."

"Do we have any deadline for finding your missing bronzes?"

"No."

"Where do you want to begin? West Coast? East?"

"We have begun," Yi said simply, watching as Lindsay bent over another bronze.

"Do you want to wait while we go through the whole list of experts?" continued Stone. "Two of them are still out of the country.''