It took Dr. Yang a moment to catch up. “I—was anyone hurt?”
“No.”
“Who was it?”
“I have no idea. Or what the point was, either.”
“Did you call the police?”
“Of course. Bullets in my ceiling?” Jack added, “I didn’t mention you.”
Dr. Yang’s lips compressed into a thin line. He nodded curtly and said to me and Bill, “Will you excuse us?”
If I’d conjured up a semireasonable excuse to stay I might have tried it, but it wasn’t hard to see that nothing would work. Bill pushed away from the windowsill and I stood from my chair. “Of course,” I said. To Jack: “We’ll be outside.”
Jack gave a distracted nod. He and Dr. Yang sat staring at each other as we left.
* * *
I shut the door behind us, then said to Bill, “Can I listen at the keyhole?” He didn’t dignify that with an answer. We sat on a bench and watched students walk by. “What did you think?” I asked.
“Tough customer.”
“I had professors like him in college. I did well in their courses because I was scared not to. But from your I-Spy perch by the window, I mean.”
Bill came up with this trick and we do it routinely at interviews now, especially the first time we meet someone: We try to sit far enough apart that the person can’t see both of us at once. Then one talks, the other watches. We can’t always pull it off, but it’s particularly convenient when the interviewee doesn’t have enough chairs.
“He’s way more angry than I’d have expected,” Bill said.
“Jack said he’s an angry kind of guy.”
“Still. Now we know he’s Jack’s client. So what? It may be irritating but it’s not a disaster. He’s overreacting.”
“Maybe.” In my mind I heard Dr. Yang’s dark voice as he told his story. “What he told us; it makes his reason for hiring Jack more convincing, doesn’t it?”
“You mean, protecting Chau’s rep?”
“Protecting Chau, I get the feeling. The way he couldn’t, back then. Maybe he’s so furious out of helplessness. This situation is getting out of control. The way that one did, and look what happened.”
Bill nodded. “Possible.”
“And speaking of protecting people, here’s another question: What about his daughter? Anna? You saw how he stopped Jack from telling her what was up. Why wouldn’t he want her to know?”
“She seems to have her own problems. Whatever Jack meant when he asked how she was doing and if anyone had heard from Mike. Sounds like her boyfriend ditched her. Maybe Yang doesn’t want to complicate her life right now.”
I thought about Dr. Yang as an overprotective dad. High walls and lattice-screened windows came to mind, but Anna’s affectionate teasing didn’t strike me as coming from either the cowed and timid or resentful and rebellious young woman that that approach would have been likely to produce. She’d probably been wrapping him around her finger her whole life. “Well, maybe,” I suggested, “he really is only protecting his investment while he pretends to care about his dead friend, and he feels guilty enough about it that he’d just as soon his daughter doesn’t know.”
“Maybe so.”
“What did you think of the art in his office?” I asked, but my phone rang, so Bill didn’t get a chance to answer. I flipped it open. “Hi, Linus.”
“Hey, Cuz. So, Bill’s all hooked up. Vladimir Oblomov, shady Russian, Chinese art honcho. You want to hear?”
“Of course.” I did; but also, he clearly couldn’t wait to tell me.
“First I went to the Wikipedia pages for two hot Chinese artists. Wow, you know how weird that stuff is? Anyway, I made Oblomov a buyer on one and a seller on the other. Bill might want to check out their stuff, you know, so in case his squeeze wants to talk about them.” He gave me the artists’ names. “Then I made a Web site for Vassily Imports. They sell food from Russia and, like, Eastern Europe and the Stans. Caviar, black bread, pickles, cheese—whatever, I looked up what one of the real sites sells and made it like that. Oblomov is on the board of directors, and he’s also VP for International Corporate Communications. No one ever knows what that means so I figured it was cool. And the Web site, I made it so it sort of takes you in circles if you try to go too deep. So if you were really trying to find who the boss man is, you couldn’t. That’s the shady part, you dig? Then I grabbed a shot of Bill from when we went to the park that time and Photoshopped it into some gallery opening in Hong Kong I found online, then put the whole thing on Flickr and tagged him along with the other VIPs. I got him listed on Yahoo.com and WhitePages, but no address, no phone. You think she’ll pay to do the search? I might be able to get something in there, but only maybe.”
“No, I don’t think she will. By the time she Googles him it’ll be after he’s called her. She won’t be trying to find how to contact him, just to make sure he’s not some kind of phony.”
“Good luck with that.” I could hear Linus’s grin. “So, anyhow, the next thing, Trella opened a blog on JournalScape, backdated like six months: She’s an art student, yadda yadda yadda and OMG she met this Oblomov dude, older but God is he loaded. They kicked it for a while but it cooled.”
“Good, Linus.”
“And I started a Facebook fan page for the Russian mob and made him one of the fans.”
“What?”
“Kidding! Joke! Winking emoticon!”
“Oh.” I breathed out. “Thanks, Linus. This all sounds terrific. Send me a bill.”
“Nah. Family’s free. Just tell me if it works?”
I promised to do that, and clicked off.
“You’re in business,” I told Bill. “When Shayna Googles Vladimir Oblomov, she’ll get more than if she Googled the real you.”
“As it should be.” He checked his watch. “This is probably a good time to call her. She gets off in half an hour.”
“Well, then, absolutely. She has to have time to check out Linus’s hard work.”
Bill did call Shayna, who, from where I was sitting, seemed delighted to hear from him. The first thing he said was, “Eet’s Vladimir Oblomov,” as if he had no idea she didn’t know his last name. Things went all murmuring from there, which was a little revolting, so I got up and checked out the posters and flyers on the walls. This might not have been the Art Department, but apparently a lot of events coming up around Asian Art Week considered themselves of interest to A/P/A Studies students. Auctions, lectures, panels, gallery shows, led off by a glittering benefit gala I couldn’t imagine college students attending except as cater waiters. Capping the week was “Beijing/NYC,” which my client had mentioned: an offering of the government of the People’s Republic to the art lovers of New York. Paintings, sculpture, photography and installations, all so new their paint, or ink, or gluey emulsion, wouldn’t be dry. I was considering the civilized nature of cultural exchange when Dr. Yang’s door opened and closed, leaving Jack standing in the corridor.
“Aramis,” I said. “How’d it go?”
“Wow.”
“You look a little dazed.”
Jack shook his head slowly. “All I could think while he was reaming me out was, thank God he wasn’t on my thesis committee.”
Bill, spotting Jack, whispered some ridiculous sweet nothing into his phone and thumbed it off. I asked Jack, “Why is he so upset? It’s not your fault we went to you. Did you explain your reasoning, why you told us about him?”
“Reasoning’s not high on his list right now. But I gather he’d have preferred door number two: I tell you guys ‘Ghost Hero Chau? Never heard of him,’ and then call Dr. Yang and tell him to hide under his desk if you come by.”
“We wouldn’t have bought it,” Bill said. “Seriously, Jack, an artist who died at Tiananmen, whose paintings are worth hundreds of thousands—”