I click my tongue. “Would I be right in thinking his collection of imperial jade is one of the biggest outside of museums?”
“Yes.”
“And he sells off a piece every now and then, probably at an auction?”
“Usually privately, but every now and then Christie’s or Sotheby’s gets a piece of the action. When they do, it’s a special occasion. People you thought had been dead for years come out of the woodwork. Of course, the bidding is done by proxies, the public doesn’t know who the real bidders are.”
Rosen, frowning, takes up the story. “Washington’s not keen on collecting evidence against Warren, not unless it’s so good all his friends will be forced to disown him, and he’s too smart for there to be evidence like that. Another problem, frankly, is that if there is evidence, it’s likely to originate here in Thailand, and-do I have to go on?”
“He’s too well connected here for such evidence to survive a day after it comes to light?” Nods from the FBI. “How old is Mr. Warren?”
“He’s sixty-two and looks like a young forty.”
“And began his career in his twenties?”
“Got a master’s in gemology and another in Chinese studies, specializing in the late imperial period. He speaks Mandarin well and his Thai is very good.” A pause while Nape moves his finger around the edge of the monitor. “He also speaks the Swatow dialect. That say anything to you?”
“Swatow? Where the Chiu Chow come from? Chiu Chow run Thailand,” I say. “They run our banks, all major businesses. They have Thai names, but they’re Chiu Chow.”
“I think you’ve got the point,” Rosen says.
Nape pauses to check my expression, which I have rendered studious. He coughs and continues. “A possible hypothesis which we don’t want to go into print looks like this. A relatively crass black sergeant in the Marines, with an unexpected eye for beauty, starts a web page shortly after making a trip to Laos, where he bought an experimental lump or two of unprocessed jade sometime after May 17, 1996, probably just a few months after his arrival. Sylvester Warren sees the exhibit on the web page, notes the apparent quality of the workmanship, whatever he might think of the theme, and looks up Sergeant Bradley on one of his visits to Bangkok. Bradley is probably overwhelmed and astonished that his little venture has drawn such a distinguished eye. He also sees an opportunity to put money aside for his retirement. What he’s got that Warren wants is direct on-the-ground contact with local craftsmen, who are probably of Chinese extraction, probably the artistic inheritors of world-class jade workers who fled the Communists in 1949. Warren has his own craftsmen, of course, the best in the world, but he can’t use them for anything illegal. Bradley can provide both a firewall and American-style quality control. We’re talking fakes. Every time a museum or private collector comes out with a catalogue, there are people all over the world who copy the best pieces and sell them. There’s no scientific way to prove a fake jade-carbon-14 dating doesn’t work, neither does thermoluminescence”-to Rosen-“I checked all this out yesterday.”
I look up. “For Bradley’s craftsmen to copy Warren’s pieces properly, they would have to have the original?”
“We thought of that,” Kimberley Jones says. “We talked about Bradley absconding with some priceless piece from the Warren Collection, but it just doesn’t fit. There was nowhere Bradley could hide from Warren, and probably nowhere he could have sold the piece at a halfway decent price. These artifacts are matters of public record, experts know who owns what down to the date of purchase. Only Warren could sell something from the Warren Collection, real or fake.”
“Anyway,” Nape adds, “is Warren going to use snakes in a revenge killing? With his money and contacts here, he could have snuffed Bradley and made it look like natural causes. Why would he want the heat?”
A moment of communal reflection. I say: “What does the word ‘tranche’ mean?”
“Slice. What it probably means here is that Warren was financing the experiment, giving Bradley installments of cash through one of his agents in Bangkok. Like a lot of very wealthy people, Warren is notoriously tight with money. We don’t think he was giving much away. Big bucks was the carrot he was offering only when Bradley had produced a perfect copy of one of Warren’s pieces.”
“A strange game for Warren to play, if he’s so rich.”
Rosen rumbles, “Welcome to American capitalism. It’s a great system, except that no one ever has enough.”
I say, “The horse and rider?” and draw only blank expressions. My strength is fading. I allow myself the luxury of forsaking human consciousness for the bosom of the Buddha.
25
Using the Net and station gossip as tools, it wasn’t too difficult for Pichai and me to piece together our Colonel’s drunken ramblings, even though their deeper meaning continued to elude us.
REMFs were Rear Echelon Mother Fuckers-a standard epithet used by U.S. combat troops for the despised officers who stayed back in Saigon and ran the disastrous war. The Other Theater was Laos, where America was forbidden by international treaty from waging war, and where it waged the most ferocious bombing campaign in history. Ravens were exceptionally gifted American aviators who had come to loathe REMFs and volunteered to fly O-1 spotter planes on secret missions out of Long Tien in the green Laotian mountains to locate the positions of the North Vietnamese regular army, which was steadily encroaching into Laos. The more obscure references to American Breakfast, eggs over easy and Pat Black proved impossible to track down.
Somehow Vikorn had made a small fortune in Long Tien. A good part of this money he used to buy his commission in the Royal Thai Police Force. There were rumors of contacts in the CIA, dark secrets known to our Colonel which the Americans didn’t want to get out.
It takes more than two hours for Nape and Jones to reach Bradley’s teak house and call Rosen to report that the horse and rider is gone. Rosen thrusts his hands in his pockets and goes to the window. “Looks like we found the motive for the attack on you.”
“But he didn’t get away with the horse and rider. He never got further than the corridor.”
Rosen shrugs. “Because you kicked him in the balls. So he came back later, or sent someone else.”
I know what Rosen is thinking. If the horse and rider is an original that Bradley was copying, it’s going to be difficult to keep Warren out of the case. I see the weight of a controversial investigation bear down on his thick shoulders, sloping them still further, driving him more deeply into the negative karma which dogs him. I say: “Did you take pictures, or would you like to borrow mine?”
He makes a face. “Sure, we took pictures.”
By the afternoon my hospital room is turning into a library. Somehow the FBI have got hold of every illustrated book on jade available in Krung Thep. They have also e-mailed the picture of the horse and rider to Quantico. A wonderful hush envelops my room, the hush of concentrated minds following clues as we work carefully through the books, checking the color plates against our photograph of the horse and rider. Is investigation normally like this in the West? I have never done things this way before and I’m finding a subtle pleasure in this novel approach to law enforcement, with no one to shoot, intimidate or bribe.
Almost at the same time Nape and Jones emit deliciously triumphant aahs. Trying not to let his enthusiasm run away with him, Nape shows Rosen a page from the book he is using, while Jones tries to show him hers. Rosen looks at both and turns to me. “What did I tell you?” He shows me the page in Nape’s book, which is a beautiful picture of the piece carrying the cryptic caption: Horse and Rider from the Warren Collection, formerly from the Hutton Collection, believed to be one of the pieces the last Emperor Henry Pu Yi took with him when he fled the Forbidden City. Procured for Hutton by Abe Gump.