“Dah, you mean, sissy. Real man tuff like Oblomov.”
“Could you two pretend your native language is English?” I broke in. “We have work to do.”
The English thing was put off a little, though, because for our next trick, Jack and I listened in while Vladimir Oblomov called Lionel Lau.
“Meester Lau, Oblomov here. Pleasure to talk to you.… Chust fillink you in, need to esk a favor.… Good, Meester Voo already told you about Chaus? He did great job, by de vay, keepink his mouth shut.… Oh, yes, two million dollars, cute leetle Lydia says.” I gave Bill the stink-eye, but he was in character, so he just shrugged. “Vun tink, now, Meester Lau. Dose friends I vass tellink you about? Dey vould be very grateful, you do dis vun tink for dem.…”
* * *
Although Dennis Jerrold tried to keep his face pleasantly neutral as he stepped into Jack’s office forty-five minutes later, it wasn’t hard to tell he found the surroundings more congenial than my Canal Street back room. Well, nuts to him. “Hi, Mr. Jerrold,” I said. “Thanks for coming.”
“Thanks for making the meeting place so convenient. Is this your office?” That question, addressed to Bill, must have been diplomacy, because he couldn’t have been serious. Even bling-free, Bill does not look like an uptown-office kind of guy.
“Mr. Jerrold,” I said, “if we’d known from the start where you worked we could have made all our meetings more convenient. No, this is Jack Lee’s office—you met him, remember?—and he was supposed to be back here by now. I don’t see why we shouldn’t start without him, though. Would you like some coffee? Tea?”
He wanted coffee, of course, and so did Bill, and I made myself some green tea from the supplies Jack had replenished specifically to make this afternoon run smoothly.
“The paintings,” I said. “The Chaus you hired me to find. There are four, we found them, they’re fakes, and as I said on the phone, they won’t be authenticated and they won’t be sold. Though they’re really beautiful, as it happens.” I sipped my tea: high-quality, but I’d made it too strong.
“Beauty’s not the point,” Jerrold said.
“That’s the problem with politics,” said Bill.
“Yes, fine, we’ll debate that some other time. Where did they come from?”
“I can’t tell you who made them,” I said. “What I can say is, they do have Mike Liu’s poems on them, and not only would showing them next week have embarrassed the PRC, it seems that was the whole point.”
“That’s why they were made?”
“No, but it’s why they were going to be shown. If you want to tell your boss, and he wants to tell Mr. Jin at the Consulate, and you want to modestly take credit for saving the PRC some serious face, we’ll back you up.”
“Well, I’ll certainly do that if it’s the best I can get. Though I’d really like to know—”
“You’re not going to know, so forget it.”
He pursed his lips. A sticky point in the negotiations; pass it by, accomplish something else so you and the other party can feel good about each other, return later. “But don’t we still have a problem?” We. Give the other party the sense you’re on the same team. “You said there were three real Chaus about to come on the market.”
“Yes. From a private collection.”
“The interest in Chau brought them into the open?”
“In a way, it did. I don’t think we can stop their sale. But forewarned is forearmed. We can tell you where they’ll be shown and who’s doing the authentication. You can tell the people at the Consulate. They can get their own experts, pooh-pooh the whole thing, whatever they want to do. Cast some doubt, be wet blankets.”
“All right,” Jerrold said, setting his cup down. “I think—”
I was interested to know what he thought, but I wasn’t destined to find out. The door popped open and Jack popped through it.
“Hi!” he said. “Mr. Jerrold, sorry I wasn’t here to greet you. Welcome to my world.” He pulled off his leather jacket. “Hey, coffee! What a great idea.”
He poured himself a cup and joined us, looking particularly bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.
“We were just telling Mr. Jerrold about the new Chaus,” I said.
“The new Chaus!” Jack took a quick sip of coffee. “Hey, this is pretty good. You must have made it.”
“No, Bill did.”
“Oh. Well, it’s good anyway. The new Chaus. I have a couple of things to say about them, myself. They’re new.” He sat back, beaming.
“Yes,” I said. “We know that part.”
“No, you don’t. You mean unknown. I mean new.” He jumped up and went to his desk, where he switched the computer on and rotated the monitor so we could all see. “These photos from the spy camera aren’t great but they’re good enough.” On the screen, with a couple of mouse clicks, he called up the three paintings Dr. Yang had brought to the gallery. He added close-up details from each, and tiled everything on a single screen. “These paintings”—he tapped the screen with the back of his hand—“are new.” He sat back down. “You said in the cab I was quiet. I was thinking. What I was thinking was, if Dr. Yang brought those paintings with him when he left China, I really am Lin from Hohhot.”
“Who’s Dr. Yang? Does he have these? Who’s Lin?” My client was confused.
I ignored him. “What do you mean, Jack? We know he had three. Anna said so.”
“Who’s Anna?”
“He might.” Jack ignored Jerrold, too. “But not those three. You saw them.”
“They’re beautiful.”
“They sure are. Chau never painted like that.”
“I thought all his paintings are supposed to be beautiful.”
“They are. But they don’t look like that. They don’t have that pared-away quality, like the painter knows exactly what matters and what doesn’t. Or that sense that he knows what he wanted to do and he did it and he doesn’t give a damn if you like it.” Jack grinned. “But they would have. In Chau’s mature period. If he’d lived.”
“What are you saying? You think these are fakes, too? Just better fakes?”
“No.” He clearly wanted to keep the suspense going, make us keep asking, but he also clearly couldn’t wait to tell. “This very issue was part of the full and frank exchange of views I had not an hour ago with Dr. Yang. They’re not fakes and they’re not old. They’re Chaus. From his mature period. Painted within the last year. Chau’s alive.”
You could’ve heard a pin drop, if anything as messy as a loose pin were to be found in Jack’s office. Then we all recovered at once.
“Jack—”
“Jack—”
“Mr. Lee!” My client was the guy with the loudest voice. “The Ghost Hero? He’s alive?”
“Dr. Yang admitted it. He’s an old friend of Chau’s. Smuggled out of China around the same time, as it turns out, and by the same smuggler.”
“What?” I said. “No. That story—you were there—”
“He said the story was true. But the man who died was someone else.”
I sat openmouthed. Meanwhile Jerrold, with impressive diplomatic cool, said, “Where is he?”
“Chau? I can’t tell you.”
“Mr. Lee, you—”
“No, I mean I really can’t. Dr. Yang absolutely drew the line at that. I’m assured, though, that he’s been an American citizen for many years, under a shiny new name, living a shiny new life. Painting only in private, never showing. He was more than happy to give his old bud Dr. Yang those three paintings, though, to help him out of a hole. Like everyone else, he’d heard all the rumors about new Chaus, and he felt responsible for Dr. Yang’s troubles.”
“What troubles?”
“Trouble’s all fixed, don’t worry about it,” Jack said, though worried wasn’t how Jerrold looked.
“Whatever that means,” Jerrold said, “this guy’s a fugitive from a friendly foreign power and I want to know where to find him.”
“You won’t find him. You could ask Dr. Yang, but,” Jack surveyed Jerrold, “I guarantee you wouldn’t last a minute.”