Tell Me No Lies (6 page)

"That is up to you."

"It's your expert we're picking," Stone said.

"Is it? Your government insisted on giving me an expert to help in my search." Yi tossed his cigarette into a nearby ashtray. The butt rolled once, then lay and smoldered like a banked fire. Pungent smoke curled up, disturbed by random currents of air in the room. "I submitted a list of four Americans who are qualified to tell Chou from Qin under the most stringent circumstances. Your government submitted a list of twelve. We agreed to interview eight. You have interviewed six."

The lighter snapped open as Yi turned away from the mirror, shielding the flame with his body and cupped hands. He inhaled, snapped the lighter shut and focused his black eyes on Stone.

"Shall we compromise?" continued Yi in a clipped voice. "Our expert. As soon as we choose him."

Silently Catlin admired Chen Yi, the consummate actor. Catlin knew what Stone did not: Yi would maneuver until the FBI chose Lindsay Danner. Catlin didn't know how the trick would be accomplished, but he was sure that it would be.

"Some experts," Stone said sarcastically. "More than half of them are under suspicion as either crooks or con artists. Wouldn't trust them to tell me if a nickel was wood or metal."

"Caveat emptor," said Catlin, "is the motto of the art trade."

Yi looked sideways at the man he had gently blackmailed into helping him.

"It's Latin. It means let the buyer beware," said Catlin, translating without being asked.

"Ah!" Yi laughed abruptly. "Not every wise man was born in China."

Stone took a deep breath and went back to chipping away at Yi's imperturbable exterior. "The director wasn't entirely clear as to what you expected from me."

Yi puffed on his cigarette, shielding the glowing tip from the glass with his hand, and ignored the conversational gambit.

"How many men will you need?" persisted Stone.

"I requested none."

Catlin smiled slightly. Yi was having an FBI escort shoved down his throat in exactly the same way that Yi was being shoved down Stone's throat. There were polite protestations of brotherhood and helpfulness from everyone involved – and no trust at all. He doubted that Yi and the FBI would get around to dining with each other. No one on earth made spoons long enough for either side to sup comfortably from a communal pot.

"Do you have a plan?" asked Stone, lighting a cigarette of his own with curt motions that said a great deal about exasperation and self-control.

Yi made ambivalent gestures with his hand, leaving a trail of smoke like a dissolving ideograph hanging in the room.

"Well?" pressed Stone.

"I am quite well, thank you," Yi said, deliberately misunderstanding. "And you?"

Catlin spoke swiftly in Mandarin, for he sensed that Stone's patience was right up against its limit. Making an enemy of the FBI at this point in the game wouldn't help Yi at all.

"In the circuses of China, do they have signs warning people not to tease the tigers?" asked Catlin.

Yi bared his teeth in something that only a diplomat would have called a smile. "The tiger is caged."

"At the moment, yes. But there will come a time when the tiger is taken from the cage to perform for its keepers. What then, Chen Yi?"

There was silence, then a reluctant "Ah!" Yi turned to Stone and said in English, "The course we take depends on the expert who is chosen."

Silently Catlin wondered what Yi had in mind for the woman on the other side of the deceptive glass.

Stone looked from Yi to Catlin and back again. The FBI agent's eyes were like clear crystal against the heightened color of anger showing on his skin. There was a long moment in which there was no sound but that of a bronze wine vessel being shifted from one place on the table to another. Finally Stone nodded abruptly and turned back to the two-way mirror.

In silence the three of them watched while Lindsay worked her way down the line of bronzes. O'Donnel followed, asking questions about the various pieces. She worked quickly, confidently, until she came to the final piece. It was a wide, shallow bowl resting on a broad, low foot. Though hardly delicate, the bowl nonetheless gave a feeling of balanced tension rather than earthbound heaviness.

Lindsay picked up the bronze and turned it slowly in her hands.

"Something wrong?" O'Donnel asked casually, leaning his hip against the long conference table.

"A p'an like this has never been found earlier than the Chou dynasty. Yet the execution of this vessel is definitely Shang, not Chou. Monumental yet simple. The designs are less complex, less flamboyant than Chou. The piece as a whole is less… leaden… than most early Chou." Lindsay put down the bowl, stepped back several paces and simply looked at it.

"Another fraud?" asked O'Donnell after a long silence.

Slowly, Lindsay shook her head. "No, just a type of p'an I've never seen before, a link between the art of two long-ago dynasties." She smiled softly to herself, remembering her excitement when she had found a genuine bronze that was neither in the Huai style nor yet Han, but rather an elegant combination of the two artistic traditions. "After all," she said quietly, approaching the bowl again, "the break between dynasties is never as clean and quick as the dates in history books make it seem."

"But if you've never seen a bowl like this one before, how do you know it's not a fraud?"

For a time O'Donnel thought that Lindsay wouldn't answer, that she had attention only for the unusual bronze bowl. Finally she turned to him.

"Beyond a professional's trained instinct, you mean?" she asked, her voice light, her dark blue eyes serious.

O'Donnel grinned, understanding instantly what Lindsay was saying. He, too, used instinct in his work. Every good cop did, reflexively dividing the people he met into categories of honest and crooked and in between. "Yeah, that's what I mean."

Lindsay gestured again toward the kuang that was a seven-hundred-year-old forgery. "The Chinese of the Sung dynasty valued inscriptions. The Shang did not. Therefore, when Sung forgers went to work, they made pieces that appealed to the fashions of Sung times. They added inscriptions."

"So it boils down to inscriptions again," said O'Donnel, gesturing toward the bowl.

Lindsay smiled ruefully. "I wish it were that simple. Art inevitably reflects the tastes of the artist's time. Even forged art. Have you ever seen a comparison of Old Masters forged through the ages?"

O'Donnel's blue eyes narrowed intently, but he said nothing, knowing that the question was rhetorical. She no more expected him to be an expert on Old Masters than he expected her to be expert in FBI procedures. He, at least, was correct in his expectations. Before coming to the counterintelligence division, O'Donnel had worked art fraud. He knew a great deal about Old Masters.

"In the times when epic art was in fashion," continued Lindsay, "forgers subtly altered the feel of the Old Masters they imitated until the proportions were more epic, and therefore more pleasing to potential customers. Today, the forgers tend to simplify some of the old paintings that are, to our present tastes, overwrought. If baroque comes back in vogue, the Old Masters will be recast yet again in subtly baroque form and sold to collectors who can't believe that new Old Masters don't turn up in grandma's attic every day."

"I didn't think forgers were that smart," said O'Donnel. "Changing old paintings to please modern tastes. Very clever."

"It's not cleverness," Lindsay said. "It's simply that no matter how hard you try, you can't escape the subtle, pervasive influence of the culture and time you were born into. Forgers paint a subtly modernized version of an Old Master not because they sense that it will be easier to sell, but because they can't help it."

With a graceful motion Lindsay turned back to the table. "That's how I knew that bronzes number twelve and fifteen were frauds. The forgers used the correct designs for the times they were imitating, but they used the symbols themselves incorrectly. For their decorations, Shang bronzes have symbols that make very clear statements about the relationship of man and the universe according to Shang precepts. Sung forgeries of Shang ritual vessels copied aspects of the Shang design quite accurately, but they garbled the underlying philosophical statements every time." She shrugged. "Not surprising. The forgers usually were illiterate peasants. To them, the symbols were simply flourishes to catch the eye, decorations empty of meaning."

O'Donnel looked at the bronzes as though memorizing them before he turned back to Lindsay. "Want to go over them again?"

She shook her head. "I would like to study the last one more closely, though. Could you lend it to the Museum of the Asias? Or at least allow us to photograph it for our own education, perhaps even do an article on it? Ideally, we would like to purchase the bowl, of course. And the hill-censer, too," she added, gesturing toward the incense burner inlaid in gold. "If the owner wants to sell, my museum wants to be among the bidders."

O'Donnel smiled and held his hands out, palm up. "I'll pass it along, but it's really not my department. For all I know, the boss cooked up these bronzes at the local foundry."

There was a distinctly cynical edge to Lindsay's answering smile. She knew that while O'Donnel probably wasn't lying outright, he wasn't telling much of the truth, either. He certainly wasn't telling her what she wanted to know – who owned the bronzes she had just looked at.

"I'd appreciate whatever you could do," she said. "I'm sure L. Stephen White will be more than willing to make the request a formal one."

"Never hurts," said O'Donnel, widening his smile. "More coffee? Or would you prefer to go back to the museum?"

Lindsay hesitated, then shrugged. "The museum, please, if Mr. Stone has no more need for me."

"If he does, you'll be the first to know," O'Donnel assured her.

He led her out the door without even looking over his shoulder at the audience he knew watched behind the mirror.

"Hell of a performance," Catlin said.

"Miss Danner?" asked Stone. He shrugged. "The others have a better score than hers on the bronzes."

"I meant O'Donnel. He didn't look at the mirror once. And he acted like he'd never seen a piece of art in his life."

There was a long pause before Stone asked, "Just what makes you think he has?"

"Instinct," Catlin said laconically.

Yi gave Catlin a swift look that Stone couldn't see. Catlin was certain that Yi was thinking about tigers and teasing. But Catlin knew Stone's type of tiger very well. There was a vital difference between teasing and shouldering for position in the coming battle. Catlin had no doubt that a battle was coming. Stone would get one look at Catlin's file and everything loose would hit the fan. Yi would have to fight hard to keep his undomesticated dragon.

Not that Catlin blamed Stone for the coming battle. In Stone's position, Catlin would have done the same. The last thing a company man wanted was a renegade spook poking his nose into an FBI counterintelligence pie.

"Let's decide on an expert," said Stone, drawing a paper from his pocket. "Then we can get together on a plan."

The paper contained a list of the seventeen bronzes down one side. The sheet had been divided into seven columns. In the first was the information that had come with the bronzes from their various museums. Each of the other six columns contained the name of one of the experts who had been tested. The arrangement made it very easy to score each expert against the rest.

Stone took out his pen, finished filling in Lindsay's column and handed the sheet over to Yi. He studied the paper with every evidence of acute interest, holding it so that Catlin could read, as well.

There was agreement on most artifacts. It was easy enough to justify dismissing the "expert" who had overlooked bogus inscriptions. Four other experts had agreed all the way down the line with the museums' assessments. Two of them were people whose names had been added to Yi's original list by the FBI. The other two had had their names crossed out by Stone.

"Why do you dismiss these?" asked Yi. "They performed as well as the people you selected."

"Their backgrounds don't inspire confidence," Stone said flatly. "Ah!"

Calmly Yi drew out a pen and inked through the names of the two people put forward by the FBI. Stone's mouth flattened into a line, but he said nothing. He knew a quid pro quo when one was politely shoved down his throat.

Yi shrugged. "That leaves us with Miss Danner, I believe."

"But she missed two of the bronzes," protested Stone. "The two people you crossed out – "

"Overlooked what Miss Danner's more sensitive eye discerned," Yi interrupted, impervious to Stone's objections. "The p'an is indeed Shang. I saw photographs of its twin not two months ago. It was found at a newly excavated Shang site. Very worthy. Very rich."

Yi's cigarette glowed once, then made a flat arc from his fingers to the ashtray.

Expressionlessly Catlin watched the final moves of the mental chess game the two men had been playing since the instant they had been introduced. At this point, Stone was checked. There was no way he could argue that Yi was wrong on the basis of archaeological evidence only Yi had access to. Even as Catlin understood the gambit, he admired Yi's shrewdness. Lie, truth, or half-truth, only Yi knew, for only Yi held the proof.

"What about that incense burner?" challenged Stone. "Every one of the other experts declared it a fake."

"The Beijing Museum has some very ancient bronzes whose patinas are of similar color and perfection," Yi said, watching Stone with shrewd black eyes.

Checkmate.

Stone no more had access to Beijing's museum than he did to recent archaeological excavations in China. He could either call Yi a liar or he could accept Lindsay Danner as the FBI's chosen expert on ancient Chinese bronzes.

Stone started to speak, stopped, stubbed out his cigarette and turned smoothly to face Yi again. "Would you buy the incense burner?" asked Stone.

"Is it for sale?"

There was no hesitation. "Yes."

"Ah!" Yi turned to Catlin. "That will be your first acquisition. See that Miss Danner handles it for you. It will be an excellent return to the market for an absent collector."