I leaned in to study the poems. The crickets and ants, those must be the riffraff you encounter everywhere, even on the Great Road. The wild goose whose call, unanswered, echoes outside the poet’s hut is his yearning for his hometown, far away. The poems made me feel considerably less dim than the paintings did. I was reading one about centipedes and spiders that ended, “Pity the ones caught in the world’s web/Those with poison are not lenient with each other,” when a voice in my ear whispered, “Don’t turn around. There’s a ghost behind you.”
“No, it’s only you,” I said to Bill, whose reflection I’d seen in the glass as he was sneaking up on me. “It’s just that, spiffed up like that, you look so unreal.”
“You’re adorably ephemeral, too. Shall we go?”
A bus, a subway, and a little walking—together faster than a midday cab—put us in the heart of the Chelsea gallery district. This part of lower midtown, way over west, is where the art dealers fled after SoHo went all upmarket.
Baxter/Haig occupied prime real estate, the ground floor of a renovated warehouse on West Twenty-fifth. We pulled open glass doors and strolled into a high-ceilinged space hung with huge, vivid canvases. The paintings all offered clichéd—or, I suppose, iconic, depending on your point of view—images of China. Tiered pagodas, terraced rice fields, moon-gated gardens, the slithering Great Wall. Busy folks swarmed everywhere, numerous as insects. Another icon/cliché: the vast industrious Chinese masses. Only when I looked closely I saw these weren’t people. They were American cartoon characters. Mickey Mouse, in his white gloves, harvested rice. Donald Duck, along with Daisy, Huey, Dewey, Louie, and an army of shirted and pantsless waterbirds, strolled the Wall. Yosemite Sam inspected the terra-cotta warriors. Outside the Temple of Heaven the Simpsons posed for a family photograph.
Bill, jeans exchanged for pressed wool slacks, lifted his eyebrows in bored recognition as we walked around. Giant letters on the wall announced this show as COLONY: NEW WORKS BY PANG PING-PONG.
“Please tell me that’s not his real name,” I whispered.
Bill glanced over a price list and artist’s statement he’d lifted from the reception desk. “You’re in luck. Pang’s his family name. He uses the name ‘Ping-Pong’ as an integral part of the ironic self-referential essence of the meta-situation on which his paintings comment.”
“Oh,” I said. “That’s much better.”
Besides us, the giant room held only five people. Four were in the back, among the canvases: an elegant older woman in high-heeled boots, frowning at the Fantastic Four in Buddhist robes; the rotund man beside her, gesturing and murmuring in what seemed to me a smarmily intimate fashion; and a pair of young men whose clothes and haircuts were so painfully hip they had to be art students. The place had the hushed, intense feel of a library. No: the anxiety-tinged air of a classroom during a final exam.
The gallery’s fifth occupant was a fashionably emaciated, lank-haired young man at the front desk. When we came in he gave us the narrowed eyes of a proctor; when that didn’t chase us out, he iced us, going back to whatever important work he’d been doing before we’d had the effrontery to walk through the door. This charmer, as I knew from my Googling, was Nick Greenbank, the fellow we wanted to see.
We took an unhurried, but in Bill’s case pointedly apathetic, turn around the gallery. I tried to interest him in this painting or that, showing him details like Captain America and Superman in coolie hats. He shook his head and waved me off each time, until finally he sauntered back over to the desk, me in frustrated tow.
It’s hard to ignore Bill when he looms, though Nick Greenbank did a better job than most. Finally looking up from his computer screen in badly hidden exasperation, he asked, “Can I help you?”
Bill leaned on the counter, smiled, waved a hand around, and in a conversational tone and a thick Russian accent, said, “Thees ees crep.”
“Vladimir, please!” I hissed. “I’m sorry,” I said distractedly to the affronted young man. What had affronted him was Bill’s rude dismissal of the work; what was distracting me were the blindingly ostentatious gold rings on Bill’s fingers, which matched the chains around his open-shirted neck, but which I was sure he hadn’t been wearing a few moments ago. “Mr. Oblomov hasn’t had much exposure to recent Chinese works. I brought him here hoping—”
“She vass hoping I buy, den she make fet commission. But I don’t buy crep. Leessen, boychik.” Bill leaned in closer and dropped his voice. “I like beautiful. Vy you tink I let her take me around? She ees beautiful, dah? Now, deess Chinese, dey used to paint beautiful. Pine trees, bamboo, all dat. Not Meekey Fucking Mouse. Now I hear”—he let the smile fade and drilled the young man with his eyes—“I hear det von of dem still does.”
Bill can do a good eye-drill, especially in Russian gangster mode. Nick Greenbank blanched, making his already-pale skin a nice contrast to his black silk shirt.
“You’re talking about classical Chinese art.” He swallowed and tried to recover, drawing on reservoirs of disdain to soothe his rasping voice. “From the dynasty periods. We don’t handle that. I suggest—”
“I suggest you pay attention, boychik. Dere’s a fellow I’m very, very interested in.”
From a position a discreet step behind Bill, I frantically but subtly signaled to little Nick. Don’t cross the dangerous Russian mobster, I tried to say with my eyes. There may be people whose eyes could say that; I’m not one of them, but I did manage to get across some sense of panic. Nick paused, looking both confused and apprehensive.
“He vass dead,” Bill mused. “Now he’s not dead. Chau Chun, but you know dat, dah? Dey call him da Ghost Hero.”
“I don’t know—”
“Dah, you do!” Bill smacked his hand on the counter. The impact wasn’t hard enough to make the art students or the booted lady turn around—the round gent had vanished—but Nick yanked his head back as though he’d been bitch-slapped.
“Now, come on, boychik. Someone hass a bunch of paintings, supposed to be by diss Ghost Hero Chau. You”—Bill’s jabbing finger stopped just short of Nick’s nose—“know who dat iss. You tell me, I buy, you get fet commission, just like her. You play stupid games, I get annoyed. My friends, dey get annoyed, too.” He pulled a cigarette from his pocket and stuck it in his mouth. Then he lit a match. He didn’t bring the flame to the cigarette, though, but instead lifted his arm and swept a slow semi-circle. “Ven dey get annoyed, dey can be very annoying, my friends.” Unhurriedly, he drifted the match in until it was very near Nick’s nose. Nick seemed paralyzed; nothing moved but his eyes, which crossed, watching the flame. After a moment, Bill grinned and shook the match out. “I forget, diss iss America, can’t smoke any damn place.” He opened his fingers and dropped the match on Nick’s desk. “So,” he said, unhurriedly restoring the cigarette to the pack. “Be a good boychik. Who hass dese paintings?”
“I—” Nick shook his head, glancing frantically to the back of the gallery. The art students and the booted woman showed no signs of having noticed. Nick whispered, “I could get fired!”
“Hah!” Bill bellowed, poking me in the shoulder. I staggered. “Fired! Good sense of humor, dah?” Bill’s arm repeated the semicircle. “Fired! He gets fired, gallery gets fired! Ha! Dat’s pretty funny!”