“You mean, a man-eating coldhearted calculating—”
“Yes.”
“—backstabbing brownnosing—”
“Exactly.”
“—kind of woman who, if she had a date with a new guy, would totally Google him.”
“Totally.”
“Ah. And might share valuable information with the new guy, if she thought there was something in it for her?”
Bill said, “Getting to spend an hour with me at Bemelmans Bar isn’t enough in it for her?”
“If you’re planning to expense this you’d better choose someplace cheaper than Bemelmans Bar.” I took out my phone. “I’m not sure we have time, though. She’s probably Googling already.”
“No,” said Bill. “I thought of that. I never quite gave her my last name.”
I stared. “You thought of that? I had no idea you even knew what Google was.”
“I don’t know how to play the accordion, either, but I’ve seen it done often enough to know it’s possible.”
I looked at Jack. “Two Chinese people standing here, and the white guy talks in convoluted metaphors.” I called Linus.
“Hey, Cuz! What’s going on? Hey, Trell, it’s Lydia!”
I heard Linus’s friend Trella call a greeting across the room—his parents’ garage, actually, where Wong Security operates from—and I said “hi” back, which Linus passed on. “I’m calling on business, Linus. I have a job for you guys. You busy?”
“We’re always busy. Big growth industry I’m in here. But never too busy for you. Especially if it’s gonna be fun.”
“Well, you tell me. Bill needs a new identity.”
“Awesome! He steal a billion from the Colombian cartel? Or he’s on the run from the FBI?”
“He wants to date a pretty lady.”
“Oh. You know, lots of people do that without being in Witness Protection. Besides, I thought … I mean…”
“It’s business, Linus. We have a case. I have a case. Anyway,” I said, suddenly annoyed at myself and not sure why, “we think she’ll Google him, and we want to be careful about what she finds.”
“Business. Gotcha. Way cool.” Linus sounded a little unconvinced, but he asked, “What do you need? I can’t do, like, Social Security numbers. I can do a driver’s license, but it’ll take time.”
“I don’t think we need that. This isn’t a background check. I just want whatever she finds to make him look like what he says he is. Vladimir Oblomov, Russian with cash. Probably in import-export, something where there’d be money sloshing around. If you implied he was connected to the Russian mob that would be okay. He collects contemporary Chinese art, that’s the important detail. He can keep a low profile, she’ll believe that, but we want him to pop up enough that when she searches, she takes him for real, a collector, and rich.”
“Rich?”
“Loaded.”
“Excellent. How long do I have?”
“A couple of hours.”
“Piece of cake. Call you when I’m done.”
I thanked him and pocketed the phone and, his “piece of cake” echoing in my ears, I said to the guys, “I’m hungry.”
“Well,” said Jack, “we could go have lunch. Or, we could grab a pretzel and go downtown and talk to Dr. Yang.”
“I thought he was in class.”
“He was. He called while I was in with Jen. He’s back in his office and available for the next couple of hours.”
I hopped off the planter. “Why didn’t you say so?”
Again, Jack started to hail a cab; again, I stopped him. “You have some elitist problem with mass transit? You enjoy breathing car exhaust? The six train will get us to NYU in ten minutes.”
“Sorry. Occupational hazard. In my business the clients look at you oddly if you come up out of the subway. Like you might be a Martian.”
“Those come down from spaceships. Listen, did Jen Beril have anything to say about the paintings? You asked her, right?”
We stopped, not for pretzels, but for gyros from the Rafiqi’s truck. Garlicky lamb, with white sauce and hot sauce, wrapped in pita—fantastic, if you can keep it from dripping on your shirt.
“I asked her,” Jack confirmed, as we made our many-napkined way down the block. “She said because it was me she’d admit she’d heard the rumors.”
“Nice to be so important,” Bill said.
“Wouldn’t it be? What’s really going on is, she’s major in antiquities and classical but she’s not a name in contemporary. If the Chaus do exist, she has zero chance of getting her hands on them—she wouldn’t know where to look and no one’s going to bring them to her. So she’s watching this action from the sidelines. Some day she might need a favor from me, so why not help me out?”
I asked, “Is it really that calculated? You guys looked like you actually liked each other.”
“What’s love got to do with it? Seriously, sure we like each other. She really would have called me to see that Jin Nong just because she knew I’d be interested, even though I can’t buy it. But if she had any chance at getting her paws on the Chaus, you’d better believe she’d have iced me faster than you can say ‘Frost Jack.’”
“You didn’t just make that up.”
“Not bad, right?”
“He’s used it before,” Bill said.
“So”—I led the descent into the subway—“having decided she could afford to be helpful, how helpful was she?”
“Hard to say. She heard the buzz at an opening last week, but she can’t remember who from. Contemporary Chinese sculpture, at Red Sky Gallery in Chelsea. We can go over there later if you want, though I’ve seen the show and it’s awful.”
“She didn’t hear it from Shayna? Right at her own front desk?”
“Interestingly, no. Possibly interestingly also,” Jack said, swiping his MetroCard, “Red Sky is a couple of ambitious, currently penniless young guys on the top floor of the same building with Baxter/Haig.”
The six train, obviously not wanting to make a liar out of me, swept in, scooped us up, and hauled us down to Astor Place. We picked our way along the student-clogged sidewalks over to Washington Square Park, where we manuevered past a steel band, a fire-eater, a mournful guitarist, and about a million dogs and their walkers to reach the nineteenth-century department store turned temple-of-learning where Dr. Yang was holed up.
Jack took us up to the fourth floor and along a hallway lined with posters of Japanese anime characters and Hong Kong movie stills. Bulletin boards held tacked-up announcements for summer study programs in Taipei, Seoul, and Ulaanbaatar. I stopped at a theater bill featuring an angry Asian woman waving a big dripping knife, for a show called Alice in Slasherland.
“I can’t help noticing there are no misty mountains.”
“This isn’t the art department.” Jack knocked on a door. “It’s A/P/A Studies. Asian/Pacific/American,” he expanded, ostensibly for Bill’s benefit, though I’d have had to stop and think about it, myself. “Culture in context.”
The door opened, revealing a large park-facing office with bookshelves and big windows. Behind the desk sat a tallish Asian man with brush-cut gray hair. In front of us, her hand on the doorknob, was a young, also tall, Asian woman. Her high-cheekboned face lit. “Jack! Daddy didn’t tell me you were coming.”
“Hi, Anna. He didn’t tell me you’d be here, either.” Jack and Anna exchanged a quick kiss.
“Hello, Jack,” said the man behind the desk, in a deep and Mandarin-inflected voice. He didn’t smile, just gave me and Bill a narrow-eyed glance; apparently we were another thing nobody had been told about.