A Cup of Light

11

Lia’s train shot through the dense subtropical hills, a rattling stream of mercury against the red earth with its rippling shades of green. It felt good to be alone. Most of the way from Nanchang she’d sat with a family bringing their aged father back from the big city after an operation. They were loud, friendly, all doting on the old patriarch. They insisted she share their elaborate breakfast, stacked up on the little train table in tin containers.

They talked about their lives, about the scenery, and finally at the last town the family had got off after much exchange of addresses and exhortations to come and visit them in China, to bring her own family, her husband; yes, she’d said, of course, she would. She didn’t bother telling them she had no husband, no children. No need to make it real. They did not actually expect to hear from her again. Still, they were all over her in the fullness of Chinese social grace. “Good-bye,” she said again and again, all warmth and smiles, “good-bye.”

And then it was only one more hour to Jingdezhen, an hour to herself. At first all she thought about was Michael. It was like he was there inside her, waiting for a private moment so he could well up and fill her mind again. If they kept seeing each other… but she pushed this warm-flooding premonition away. Maybe it was not real. Even if it was, she was still going to have to leave in a few days.

Then there was the job. She still had some questions to answer. As the train rocked along the rails she turned over and over what she had gotten from Gao, and what she’d dug out on her own. If the collection had not been moved out of the Forbidden City in 1913 for J. P. Morgan, if it had still been inside the Palace as of the 1924 inventory, then it was separated later.

She still thought this most likely happened during the collection’s flight across China, through the war against the Japanese and then the civil war, 1931 to 1947-when the emperor’s art made it to Taiwan. That was a long, arduous struggle in trucks, trains, and boats, often barely hours ahead of the bombs and artillery of advancing armies. It was the Nationalists, the Guomindang, who had the shipment. They moved it by night, sometimes by whatever rough hands could be assembled. How could some of it not have disappeared? The curators of the National Palace Museum in Taiwan, where the collection found its home, always took pride in saying that every one of the six hundred forty thousand pieces moved out of the Forbidden City arrived intact. Oh sure, Lia had always thought. Right.

Of course there were the twenty-one hundred crates that were well known to have been left behind in Nanjing-twenty-one hundred crates with some twenty-six thousand pieces of imperial porcelain. As everyone knew, they remained in deep storage in Nanjing while still, to this day, museum officials from Nanjing and Beijing feuded over who would get them. No one had ever seen them, except for a few curators who weren’t talking. Aside from those crates, she had never heard a definitive story about any part of the collection being lost or separated along the way.

The art had started out on trains. Five trains, thirty-nine sealed cars each. The Japanese occupation of Manchuria had reached all the way down to Liaoning Province, perilously close to Peking. They could sweep in at any time. And so in a single night, in the fall of 1931, all the art was carried out of the Forbidden City and taken away.

She went inside, to her most private door. In deep memory she wanted to see this. She plucked out her hearing aids, rested her head against the train seat, and locked her vision through the glass. Out there were blurring, hurtling banks of green, dissolving. Inside her mind were the gates to the examination yard, great red gates with brass joins. They opened and she walked through.

Liu Weijin, one of the bureaucrats in charge of the Forbidden City in 1931, knew the end was near. They’d been updating inventories and packing boxes for months already, and the advance of the enemy had been as inexorable as lava flow. Now all Manchuria was Japanese.

They couldn’t take all the art out to safety. They could only take the best of it. They worked fast: open the padded silk boxes, check the contents, add to the list, prioritize-staying, or going?-stack them to one side or another. The best workers were those who swiped like lightning with their brushes, methodical, unemotional, who could comb the dusty piles without stopping to gaze at the glory they held in their hands. If they stopped to look, to feel, they could not do it. They could not keep up the pace.

They wrote: a pale celadon vase, crackleware, ring-handled, mark and period from the Southern Song. A pair of mille-fleur wine cups, Qing, mark and period Qianlong. A hanging scroll painting of men crossing a bridge beneath steep mountains, signed by Tai Chin.

And then the word came. No one had known exactly when it would happen. Now it was here. In an instant, in a single turn of the head, they would have to flee. Today.

Liu Weijin put the phone down and turned to his colleague Tan Hui. “They are at the edge of Liaoning.” It was only a few hundred li away. The orders went out like fire over dry grass. Crating and loading sped to a frenzy.

Now Liu needed soldiers. It was two miles from the Forbidden City to the train station. He could not transport the collection without armed guard. He knew the streets were awash in refugees, people trying to get out, walking, spilling on either side of the puttering string of motorized vehicles, stepping around the iron-wheeled rickshas, the bicycle-pumped carts, the mules pulling entire families heaped up with children and servants and possessions. Liu needed men-a lot of them. He dialed General Tong.

“General Tong, sir,” he said breathlessly. “It is Liu Weijin-“

“Mr. Liu! You have received our message! Everything must be moved tonight.”

“Yes.” Liu said a silent prayer. “General. We need troops.”

“Impossible,” Tong said.

“The art must be guarded.”

“The capital must be guarded,” the General corrected him. “I cannot spare troops.”

Liu swallowed. Most residents, of course, had no choice but to either flee or go inside, lock their doors, and wait for the inevitable. “Sir,” he said, “please listen.”

The General lapsed into reluctant silence.

“No matter what happens, we can get the art out. This is cultural patrimony. This above all we should protect.”

On the crackly phone he heard a long breath. Liu knew his words had flown home.

“All right.” General Tong’s words all but collapsed Liu’s heart with relief. “You’ll have troops.”

So Nationalist soldiers arrived in trucks an hour later and dismounted amid the loading of wheeled carts and the harnessing of mules. Their rifles swung against their khaki puttees as they stepped in and out of the decrepit Palace buildings, across courtyards with roots and tufts of grass heaving up the ancient marble paving stones, listening to the strange bounce of their voices off the timeless stone walls and the whistle of wind on marble, trading cigarettes, laughing. Most had never been inside the Forbidden City before. Most were young. Some seemed like children.

In front of the soldiers, the laborers swarmed the line. They heaved the crates into the big iron-wheeled wooden carts, stacked them like tall, fat coffins, shouting, strapping the cargo down, pulling tight the ropes.

Finally they were ready to move. They had closed the streets running south from the Forbidden City, and they’d closed Jung Hsien Hutong east, all the way from the main corner where the Guomindang Party Headquarters faced the Supreme Court to the station. Thousands of recruits with smart brown straps of leather across their chests lined up shoulder to shoulder along the entire route. They made a human wall two li long.

When the first mule creaked and clopped through this uniformed human tunnel, dragging the first cart, Liu Weijin walked beside it. This was his cart, his most beloved things, and he meant to stay beside it all the way and make sure it reached its destination. In here were his treasured Chenghua chicken cups, his favorite painting, Fan Kuan’s “Travelers by a Mountain Stream,” his favorite Qin bronzes and Yuan Dynasty carvings in white jade.

The mules set a slow, steady rhythm with their hooves against the broad flat stones, the spindly metal wheels creaked, and everything else held its breath in unnatural silence. The people had been ordered inside and away; those in the buildings on either side of Jung Hsien had been told to extinguish all lights. The only glow was from the torches carried by the mule drivers.

But the people were there. All the windows, all the cracks and crannies and peepholes, all the upper floors with their built-out, ornate porches-these were alive with eyes. Liu could feel the avid faces in the shadows, feel the gasping, riveted human energy. Whole clans pressed against windows to watch the emperor’s treasures pass beneath. It was unheard of, it tore heaven and earth apart. Some people unrolled plain white banners from upper floors to signify mourning.

This will be a new Chinese world now, Liu thought. He looked behind him at the caravan of carts stretching away into the darkness pinpointed by the flaming brands, the rolling mule-drawn line he knew would rumble all through the night. Soon they would be Japanese subjects.

In a strange way he felt resignation. When the collection was loaded and had pulled out, he planned to melt away into the city, and from that moment on he’d put everything he had into surviving. He was lucky to have no family. Preservation would be his only goal.

And then they were there, rolling into the dark cavernous hall of P'ing Han Station with its soaring metal struts up under the distant roof, and the soldiers now shouted orders, directing, moving crates on the trains. Five full trains to load. Thirty-nine cars each. And as he watched his cart, his crates, his own personal points of light loaded into the first car, on the first train, he let himself exhale. And then mute, held up by equal parts grief and wonder, he stood witness through all the hours it took the collection to arrive. Nineteen thousand, five hundred fifty-seven crates. One at a time. All night long.

And from there, Lia knew, the art began its journey. Somewhere along those sixteen years lay her clue.

Jingdezhen was close. Already outside the train window, rising and receding out of the foaming red earth, she could see the low, sharp-topped green hills around the town. They were familiar to her. Like most porcelain people, she’d been here already. On pilgrimage.

She leaned her head against the glass. Thatched mud and brick homes of villagers raced by. Far ahead, down the track, she could see the charcoal haze that hung like a pall over the town, as it had for a thousand years. It was the smoke of pots cooking, an indescribably exciting scent.

The train squealed to a stop. Jingdezhen was the end of the line. The passengers dragged their bags over the steamy platform, across the tile floor, and through a low-ceilinged concrete terminal. The big glass windows were streaked with dirt of many years and admitted only a vague light. She was the only foreigner in the crowd, and tall too. She stood out as they all spilled onto the sidewalk, blinking in the hot liquid glare of the south China summer. Yet no one looked twice at her. They were used to outside pots people.

First she’d go to the Jingdezhen Hotel to get a room. She could see the flashes of Jiangxi’s beauty, even here, walking up Zhushan Lu in the center of town. Banana fronds lined the roadway. Trees rustled over the low concrete buildings. Above the noises of traffic and machinery and the modern world rose the cacophony of birds. She raised her hand for a taxi and had the driver take her high on Lianhuatang Lu, over a park with a small lake, to the Jingdezhen Hotel. It was a pretty, leafy spot backed up against the hillside, a backwater modern hotel with blank, inexpensive furniture, which always seemed empty. She checked in for a night.

From there she went straight to the Ceramics Research Institute. The best local professors and historians were here. She knew a few of them.

“Professor Lu Bin, is he by any chance in his office today?” she inquired of a thirtyish male clerk at the front desk.

“Professor Lu is here.”

“Ah, so excellent.” She handed him her card. “Please convey my apologies for visiting unexpectedly. But if he’s free…”

The clerk picked up the phone, punched a code, and began talking in low and rapid Jiangxi dialect. It was a natural, territory-marking response to her having spoken Mandarin. She waited patiently. “He is free,” the clerk told her finally, and she turned for the stairs. They were worn to soft, smooth basins under her feet.

Professor Lu was waiting for her at the top of the stairs. “Fan Luo Na,” he said with his charming, rumpled surprise. Lu had overlong gray hairs he combed across the top of his head. Sometimes, like now, these picked up electric charge and lifted ghostlike from his scalp. He pulled off his brown glasses and smiled and blinked her into his office.

“It’s been a long time,” she said, which was a standard greeting whether it had been one year or ten. “Everything well?”

“Everything’s well. Now, sit down! Have tea.” He pulled her into his office and busied himself briefly with the things. “Now. Here.” He set the cup in front of her. “Ah! But I have something to show you.”

He fetched a catalog from a drawer in a side table and came back with it. She recognized its cover before he even sat down. It was the book from the last spring auction of Armstrong's, their principal rival house.

He opened it to a marked page. “Just look at this.” He turned it toward her so she could see a tall, narrow-necked vase in iron-red glaze with a dragon design. Late Qing. She glanced at the caption below the photograph. Reign of Xuantong. She remembered it. It was a good piece, not a great one, but good. It had sold for about fifty thousand dollars.

“I made it,” Lu said, unable to keep the glee from his voice.

“You?”

“I made it!” Lu cried. “I sold it to a businessman for five thousand ren min bi.”

That was about six hundred U.S. dollars. “You sold it to an ah chan?”

“A businessman,” he repeated.

“You know,” she said.

“Yes. I know.” He wagged a finger at her. “But maybe I prefer not to know. Anyway. I sell it as fang gu. That’s why my price is low. After that”-he tilted his head in practiced acquiescence-“I cannot control all that happens, can I? Someone may say it is real. I can’t stop them!”

“Professor Lu, I am glad you make such beautiful pieces, and that happens to be the end of my judgment on the matter. But I am curious. Did you tell Armstrong’s when you found out?”

He laughed. “No! Why should I? It is a good piece. Let its owner enjoy it.”

And she smiled with him. But under her smile there was fear, because fakes slipped through all the time, bringing terror with them. In a flashing domino line of memory, she relived all her beautiful pots in Beijing. Which one had she missed; which would still betray her?

She looked back at the catalog Lu Bin was holding open to her, the glossy professional photo of his own work. His iron-red vase was quite good. The meiping form was correct, if a little too thick-bodied and overt. The iron-red glaze was authentic-looking. It was a good piece. Like most of the academics here in Jingdezhen, he was first and forever a potter. “Professor Lu, truly, you surpass yourself,” she told him.

His glasses had slipped down his nose and his stray hairs crackled up. “This! This is just an old teacher’s hobby.”

“Don’t be polite.” She knew that Lu was a serious artist who held an elite status in that world. He made contemporary pieces too. They were technically accomplished. But that was not what porcelain was for him. In the West, where what was fresh and innovative was always sought and always loved, it was different. Here, the heights were often heights of perfection, not genius. Mastery was greater than genius. It was knowable; it could be held in memory with all of its faces and moods. Never fully understood, perhaps-for there was always more to learn-but held and kept. As she knew. “I love it,” she told him. “It’s very fine.”

“Oh, now you are just passing praise.” To accept her compliment would have been inappropriate, but he was pleased and she could tell as much. “When creating fang gu, one should seek not to express one’s soul, but to subsume it, in the prototype.”

“You’re so right,” she said. “There was the man-ah, what was his name?-Geng, was it not, Geng Jiewu?”

“Geng Jiewu!” said Professor Lu. “He used to make the Persian-style Ming pots after those in the Zhengde reign.”

“Yes!” she cried. “And with his false Arabic, he could never resist making it just close enough to real Arabic to be read, and in his Arabic making puns.”

“Do you remember when that was discovered in London?” the older man said.

“Ei, yes,” she answered. “What a thing! And the piece was in a British museum already.” They both laughed, glee and horror gloriously intermingled, completely at one in the sharing of arcana. “And there are others.” She looked across at him. “Do you know, for example, that artist who always ruffles the tail feathers of the chicken when he paints in the Chenghua style? That one? Do you know the man I mean?”

“Old Yu!” he cried.

“Yes,” she said, hardly breathing. “Does he still live?”

“Potter Yu? Of course.” The professor looked at her, seeing now why she’d come. It was on her face. But that was all right. They had shared so much good face and guanxi, she was entitled to ask. “He lives out on Mian Hua Lu on the north edge of the township-off Mian Hua Lu, actually, up the hill; it’s no more than a dirt road. The people out there know his place.” He smiled thinly. “Yu likes to live in what you might call the suburbs. He needs room to work.”

Jack felt Anna stirring next to him. He had been awake for hours, propped up on pillows in the pine-pole bed on the lower level of their beach house. This bed, like the living quarters upstairs, faced a wall of glass and one hundred eighty degrees of rain-churned ocean. She moved closer to him. Her voice was half awake. “What are you thinking about?”

“Porcelain.” He felt her quiver with laughter.

“You’re obsessed.”

He refocused through the window. The light was growing, coming down over the mountains behind them, making the small line dividing the ocean from the sky linger a moment in incandescence. “You know what the breakdown looks like?”

“What?” She gave in and pushed up on the pillow beside him.

“There are masterpieces in it. Out of eight hundred pieces, eighty or so are masterpieces. Stunning. Worth millions of dollars.”

“And the rest?”

“Many fine, many important, many just good. But”-he repeated something Dr. Zheng had said-“that is the bedrock of any collection.”

“You just want to have it,” she said.

“Yes,” he said. “But don’t you see? Everyone who collects wants to have it. The hard thing is getting it. Here we have a chance to actually get it, a lot of it, the best, uncontested, just like that.”

“Do we get a discount?”

He pushed her gently. He had gone over the sample descriptions until his eyes ached. It was pages and pages of descriptions, of digital photos, of resemblances and relationships to other known works in museums, in catalogs, in collections, and sold at previous auctions-sold “in these rooms” was the way they liked to put it. He began to glimpse the net of connections and references under everything. It was numbing, thrilling. “Prices for this stuff have gone nowhere but up,” he said.

“You keep saying that,” she said. “I know. People have mostly made money.”

“Consistently,” he said, going a little too far.

“Consistently recently. But you’re still talking about… china.”

“People buy paintings for more.”

“Paintings don’t break.”

“Insurance.”

“It just seems-“”

“Two million isn’t even the top,” he told her. “One of the Chenghua chicken cups sold in Hong Kong a few years ago for four million.”

“A cup?”

“A cup.”

She frowned. “We don’t have one of those, do we?”

He couldn’t suppress the start of a grin. “No. We don’t have one of those. There are only eighteen in the world. We have a copy of one in the collection, though-a forgery. Quite masterful, apparently.”

“A copy!” Her voice went up to a squeak.

He laughed. “No, no, the appraiser caught it. It’s offered only as a curiosity. At a fractional price. But they say it’s gorgeous and quite convincing. Actually, there are several copies. The latest e-mail says she has found nine. A little collection of fakes, inside the collection.”

“How convenient. It comes with things we can put on our sideboard.”

“And at our beach house.” He went earnest. “I actually think we should keep some at our beach house. The real ones.” He reached down and pulled a blanket of the Skokomish tribe up over them, settled back with his arm behind her head.

“That’s crazy,” she said.

“Not crazy,” he corrected her. “It’s our life. Listen,” he said. “We’ll have eight hundred pieces. An unparalleled group. We could have a museum with that, just with that, if we wanted. But I think I’d rather keep it private.”

She shrugged. It appealed to her, though. A whole Chinese past. “We could look into it,” she conceded.

The sun’s rim crested the horizon.

“What’s his total estimate?” she said.

“Oh,” said Jack confidently. “I think we could get it for a hundred and fifty million… about the cost of three great Van Goghs.”

“Have you heard anything about Hu and Sun?” Bai asked Zhou over the phone. He knew Zhou had just come back from Guangzhou. Somewhere near there, the two men were being held. It was at Guangzhou they had been arrested, for it was there, the most crowded, most anonymous overland point, that most ah chans these days chose to cross the border.

“I’ve heard nothing,” Zhou replied.

On his end, Bai swallowed. They’d already been arrested. Now only two possible outcomes remained. One was that Hu and Sun had bought their way out and were already free. That could only have happened if they had enough cash on their persons to do it quickly, persuasively, unobtrusively. That was one possibility. The other was that they could not bribe their way out and were already scheduled to be stood up against a wall, maybe tomorrow, maybe the next day, and shot.