FOR DINNER IT’S JUST me and Sidney, and I think we’re back in France. Pâté. Oysters. Little tart things with sweet onions and cheese. Baby lamb chops. I lose track pretty fast. There’s too much food, and it arrives too quickly, carried in by a young… waitress? Maid? Along with bottles of French wine, three of them, that Sidney holds up and announces as they are brought to the table by the butler guy: “This one very rare. Very rare! Come, you must try!”
Yeah, okay. But for once I’m trying to be smart. The last thing I need is to get bombed off my ass in the Palace of Versailles. At least not till I figure out what’s going on. So I sip and I nibble and I nod as Sidney narrates the names of the dishes, the origins of the ingredients, the complicated preparation, and, especially, the quality. “Lamb from New Zealand! Fed just on grass. Like my name! Cao! Means ‘grass’!” He laughs.
The dining room, maybe they were going for medievaclass="underline" tapestries on the wall of knights and ladies playing lutes, and I think I spot a unicorn. We’re seated at one end of a long formal table with silver candlesticks and way too many little plates and pieces of silverware. Sidney doesn’t really seem to know what to do with them all either. “This kind of eating, I am still not expert,” he confesses. “But I enjoy trying new things.”
“Great,” I say. Me, I’m trying to figure out how to steer the conversation around to maybe the two dead guys in Guiyang. “So I’m not that familiar with your business,” I finally say. “I know you work with… chemicals?”
Sidney waves that off. “Business not so very interesting. I no longer worry too much about it.”
“I see,” I say, even though I don’t. “But… you’re interested in… seeds?”
“Seeds?” He frowns. “Ni weishenme wen wo?” Why do you ask?
“I, uh…” My heart starts thumping hard. Like maybe I just stepped in it. But if I have, it’s too late now. “Well, I was at a seed company. When your… your workers picked me up. And I thought…”
“Ah. I just wanted to make sure…”
The waitress maid has entered with a fresh platter. Sidney Cao claps his hands. “Time for cheese course!”
WE EAT SOME CHEESE. There are a bunch of different kinds: some hard, some runny, some stinky. There’s also more wine, and port.
“So you like cheese?” Sidney asks.
“Sure. Yeah. I like it fine.”
“I think this is a Western taste. I am trying to learn to like. But still not very sure.”
“Sidney, can I ask you a question?”
He smiles. “Of course! You can ask me anything you like.”
“Why did you bring me here?”
He doesn’t say anything. Just frowns.
So I plunge ahead. “I mean, you went to a lot of trouble. And I really appreciate it. But… it was… kind of extreme.”
He leans back in his chair. Sips his port. He seems truly puzzled. “For the art, of course.”
“FOR A FEW YEARS now, I collect art,” he explains as we walk down another overdressed hallway. “First I buy old Chinese painting and calligraphy. Tang Ying. Shen Zhou. Qi Baishi. Because this is my culture, and I like this work. Then European. Vermeer. Goya. The impressionists. I have Monet, I have Cézanne. Very beautiful. I like them very much.”
We’ve come to what looks like an elevator, with shiny brass doors. Sidney pushes the button.
“Then I think I should buy more modern things. Picasso. Warhol. Jackson Pollock. Other works of this nature. Maybe I don’t understand as well, but I know they are important to the development of artistic tradition.”
The doors slide open. Sidney gestures for me to enter and follows me inside.
“And then I hear more and more about new Chinese artists,” he continues as the doors close. “Many becoming famous. Work selling for big money. But mostly foreigners buy this work.” He pushes the DOWN button. “I decide since I am Chinese I must support my countrymen and keep some of this art inside China. Because, you know, in the past, foreigners take art out of China all the time. They are like robbers.”
I know enough about this stuff now to know that a lot of foreigners were robbers, pretty much. I mean, you can’t live in Beijing for more than a week without hearing how the “Anglo-French forces” looted and burned the old Summer Palace. But there’s also the part where, during the Cultural Revolution, Red Guards smashed the “Four Olds” of traditional Chinese culture, which included a lot of art. And how some contemporary Chinese artists are getting rich while others are hassled and censored, even arrested.
But, I’m thinking, not the time to get into that whole discussion, right?
The elevator opens onto a short hall, which compared to everything else in this place is pretty plain: white walls, painted concrete, I think. Soft lighting, grey carpet. No windows. We might be belowground. I can hear the hum of circulating air.
“This just temporary,” Sidney says.
At the end of the hall are two Plexiglas doors. Sidney opens one and gestures politely for me to enter.
As I do, the lights come up.
White walls. Paintings. Sculptures and smaller pieces in center exhibits.
A gallery space.
“Wow,” I say.
“Do you like?” Sidney asks. He sounds almost anxious.
“I…” I take a few steps in. It’s huge. I can see another gallery beyond this one.
Not a gallery. This is a fucking museum.
“It’s amazing.” And I mean it.
This first gallery is the traditional Chinese art he talked about. Landscape scrolls. Porcelain vases. Horse statuettes. Calligraphy. The next, Renaissance and neoclassical European. After that the Impressionists, then into the moderns. All the artists whose names he rattled off, he’s got their stuff hanging on the wall.
He’s even got a Warhol Mao.
Finally, the last gallery: contemporary Chinese art.
Yue Minjun. Ai Weiwei. Fang Lijun. Zhang Xiaogang.
I can’t begin to add up what this collection is worth. I don’t know enough to even start. But I do know that what this guy has in his basement is better than most museums in China. Maybe most museums in the world.
From behind me Sidney says softly “So, you can see why I must have work by Zhang Jianli.”
By Lao Zhang.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
“THIS CIGAR IS FROM Cuba! You can try it. With this rum, very good.”
“I, uh… sure. Thanks.”
We’re back in the library, or study, or whatever this room with the giant dead deer head on the wall is supposed to be. Vicky Huang has joined us. She’s not sampling the cigar, but she just knocked back a shot of Cuban rum like a pro.
I think about all that wine we left on the table. I bet someone on the kitchen staff is having a nice night.
I’m still trying to take it in, that this guy had me followed all around China and even killed people so he could buy art that he likes. Or is obsessed with. It’s kind of hard to tell.
I guess if you’ve got this much money, so much that you’ve built an entire fucking city that no one lives in, hey, why not?
“So,” Vicky Huang says, getting out her iPad, “now we can arrange for private viewing of Zhang Jianli artwork.”
“To complete the collection,” Sidney says, clasping his hands.
How can I explain the situation? “No” doesn’t seem to be a word in either of these guys’ vocabularies.
Instead I stall.
“It’s an amazing collection. I’ve never seen anything like it. Not in somebody’s house, I mean.”
Sydney smiles proudly. Sips his rum. “I think maybe it is my life work,” he says.
Yeah, I think. A life’s work in an empty city that no one will see.
“And I really want to… you know, support that. So as soon as I can sell you some work, I promise you’re first on the list.”