A Cup of Light

19

In Hong Kong that evening, in a warehouse, Bai waited by the forty crates. He had sold the frozen chickens and stored the truck elsewhere. Naturally he didn’t want Stanley Pao to see his truck.

He heard the knock and crossed the concrete floor to open the door. There stood the plump, perfectly dressed art dealer, just as he had been described, full white hair, slicked straight back. “Mr. Bai?” the old gentleman said.

“Yes, Mr. Pao. Please.” He gestured, and Stanley Pao walked past him, a magnet to iron, straight to the rows of wooden crates.

“May I open one?” His voice was casual over his well-tailored shoulder.

“Of course,” Bai answered. He held out the manifest.

But Stanley signaled for him to wait. He didn’t want to see it yet. He wanted to gamble on one.

He let his eyes roam. Eventually he settled on a particular crate at the edge of his field of vision. He walked toward it and pulled it open.

Inside, a tight nest of wood shavings. Good packing. The old-fashioned kind. He closed his eyes, arms extended, and then followed his will down into the crate, burrowing with both hands. A box called out to him, settled into his fingers. He pulled it out.

He put it gently on the floor and tipped up its lid. Oh. The light showed in his face, reflected. So hoi moon. He lifted it gently out of its silk, just a few inches, never taking it far from safety, just to tip it and turn it, a large doucai jardiniere, incandescently painted in emerald, royal blue, and rusty tangerine. Mark and period of Qianlong.

He replaced it securely in its box and reburied it in the wood shavings. He appreciated the chance to have his face turned away for a few seconds-to regain the diffident control of his age and his position. How long since he’d seen something so beautiful? “I’ll see that list now,” he said, turning to Bai.

He took it and scanned it, flipping the pages. He could feel a smile growing on his face. What a firmament. “The bank is Victoria Shanghai,” he said to Bai. He continued reading. Then he removed a card from an inner pocket. “These are your account numbers,” he said, handing it to Bai. He never looked up from the page. He half listened as Bai called the bank to verify. He saw the excitement that Bai was quite unable to control upon hearing his own balance.

“All is well?” he inquired when Bai had closed his phone.

“Excellent.”

“Thank you for your service.”

“To you the same.” As soon as the ah chan had politely backed out the door, he stopped to dial up Pok Wen, the manager of the Luk Yu. “Friend Bai!” Pok Wen roared with the crafted gaiety that was his job. “How are you? Does fortune favor you today?”

Bai smiled in the dark linoleum hallway-there it was, the door to the outside. He pushed it open. The soft evening bath of Hong Kong wafted over him. It was the heaviest air in the world. It was pulled down, ripened, rotted just right by the power of cash. “Yes, Manager Pok, I am favored.” He laughed. “Start soaking the abalone for me!”

Jack Yuan received a call from his import agent as he stood in his lodge room at Crater Lake, Oregon, looking out through a wall of glass at the dark cascading outlines of mountains, the sky blazing with stars. He liked being up this early, in the dark. The edge of the lake was a sheer wall of granite, hurtling down past a silent mirror of black water.

It was the perfect sight to him. He came here to be alone, to drink coffee in the morning in big pine-pole chairs on the deck, to be where no one expected to find him. Sometimes Anna came with him, but this time she had not. And yet still the evening before he had seen someone he knew-a boisterous redheaded gentleman vintner from Santa Rosa, retired from early days in Silicon Valley and consumed with the pursuit of wine. He had been there with a wealthy gaggle of other grape-growers, and they all ate, and drank, and inside himself Jack was thinking: I could never spend my time thinking about wine. I could never pose at living in some country valley. I could never be white. I could never be them.

But he had his own piece of the universe coming, his porcelain. And finally he’d escaped back up here to the silence of his room and the magnificence of the deal he’d just completed, and he had slept. His phone went off. He flipped it up and glanced at the caller-ID line. Only a few calls were routed to this cell number. This was one. “Yes?”

“Mr. Yuan. Ashok Navra.”

“Yes, Ashok.”

“Your shipment of Chinese porcelain is in Hong Kong. I’ve talked to the consignee there, a Stanley Pao. He says the pieces are being repacked for airfreight now.” And Jack had felt a daze, talking to him, thanking him, signing off, looking out at the edges of dawn and the lake and the receding forms of glacier-scrubbed rock. The money was transferred. The art would be in his hands in a few days. Before he went downstairs he left a message for the curator he had hired to help him sort things out and make decisions, telling her to be ready to start in four days’ time. He wanted to know exactly what he had. And then he wanted to keep this collection very, very private.

The next day Stanley Pao opened the door to Bai, the man who had brought in the shipment. He had been a bit surprised, an hour before, to get the man’s phone call. But after speaking with him for a few minutes he had agreed to receive him. This ah chan seemed both careful and intelligent. Sometimes the ambitious ones made good allies. But sometimes they were the very ones a man should not trust.

“Jinlai, jinlai,” Come in, Stanley said in Mandarin, for Bai knew neither Cantonese nor English. To get ahead he’d have to learn. Stanley led him into his back room, climate-controlled, carpeted and shelved like an English den, crammed with pots of all shapes and sizes. He noted with satisfaction the widening of the man’s eyes. “You said you had something tasty for me?”

“Yes,” said Bai. He touched the box under his arm, his gaze roving the room. So many pots, and horse races on the computer monitor. “I have this piece,” he said, and extended the box.

Pao eased back the lid with his wrinkled, age-blotched hands. His first reaction was to gasp, for it was a chicken cup, a shockingly good one, and his first impression was all visceral-It can’t be! But it is. Then he looked closer. Of course it wasn’t. But it was almost identical to the chicken cup in today’s cargo! Naturally, he’d gone directly to that one the minute he’d seen it on the manifest, as soon as Bai had walked out of the warehouse. He knew it was fake, for there was a small notation at the end of the document referring back to it-Modern fang gu, included at buyer’s request-and yet it was so hoi moon he himself had been almost swayed by it. And he was never, never fooled.

This was also a fake, but so very good. He turned it in his hand, held it to the light. Even the color of the clay was correct, the warm off-white of the Chenghua reign, so rare to see it done right. Oh, it was fine. “It’s a wonderful piece,” he told Bai. “One of the best reproductions I’ve ever seen. How much do you want for it?”

Bai snapped his head around a little too fast.

Ah! Pao watched him, fascinated. He hadn’t known. He’d thought it was real. Interesting. Now Pao saw it. The ah chan had switched one fake for another, thinking he was taking out a real, Ming Dynasty cup and not a fang gu at all. “Ask another dealer if you don’t believe me. It’s a copy. But fine. Very fine.”

But the ah chan had believed him. It was as if he had known, underneath, that the cup was too good to be true, too much to expect after all the money he’d made. So he shrugged it off with a gambler’s resignation. He accepted a thousand U.S. dollars for the reproduction, protesting that this wasn’t his line of work but taking the money, folding it, and putting it in his pocket. “I hope we meet again,” he told Pao. “Maybe we can work together.”

“Of course, of course,” Stanley answered unhurriedly. “Let us keep in touch.” Stanley was always polite. But in fact he was too careful to ever do business with this ah chan again.

“So then he came back, and brought me the cup-your fang gu from the collection,” Stanley Pao said to Lia Frank later that afternoon. She had arrived in Hong Kong the night before. Now they were in his back room, looking at pots, having taken an instant liking to each other. “He’d switched them. I realized it as soon as I saw the one he brought me here, for I had read your most excellent description in the inventory. I switched them back. This is his copy. Yours is in the collection.” He peered at her eyes. “Am I right? This is his copy?”

“It is,” she said, noting a softer, more translucent quality to the glaze in this cup. No less perfect-only different. This was the one she’d seen Bai purchase from Potter Yu.

So this meant Bai had transported her collection. It was strange, but not unheard of. Ah chans were experts at shipping, after all.

“It’s gorgeous, isn’t it?” She held it up to the light and felt a full smile form on her lips for the first time since she had left Michael behind in Beijing. Don’t think about that. She couldn’t control the future. This was happiness, this cup. “Stanley.” Her eyes shone. “Will you sell it to me?”

“Not on your grandmother! How could I let go of this?”

“Oh.” She looked down. “So I don’t even get to say that I’d double whatever you paid? I understand, though. I do. I’d never let go of it either.” And she smiled at him through her hair, which she had decided to leave down today. It felt strange. She had it tucked behind her ears but it kept slipping out.

“What do you say, Lia?” Stanley asked. He gave her a thoughtful look as if he’d been considering the subject for some time. “The repacking will take hours and hours. Shouldn’t we go to Central and look at some pots?”

“Absolutely,” she said.

Another pair of colleagues would have repaired to a restaurant to enjoy a leisurely meal, but Lia and Stanley went instead to Hollywood Road. They started at the top, where the road twisted most tortuously and where the most discriminating, most exclusive shops held court, and worked their way down to the bottom where the shadows were deeper and the deals more murky.

In most of the galleries the owner would lock up, if they were alone, and take them to some back chamber, through a side door or up some narrow set of stairs. In this world there was always the interior room, the private admittance, the exclusivity shared by friends. There were small sofas grouped around a low table specially designed for handling porcelain-felt-padded, with a low lip shielding its edge all the way around. There were hours of shared enjoyment over the perfections that man, in his finest moments, had made of clay. It was a balm to Lia’s heart. It made whole stretches of minutes go by in which she felt the glory of pots, the shared pleasure of connoisseurship, and managed to forget that a part of her felt like it had been torn away.

That night he called her, not knowing quite what to say to her but not able to go any longer without connecting. He went back to his room after work, where it was quiet, and dialed her cell.

“This is Lia,” she said when she picked up.

“It’s me.”

“Hi.” Her voice changed for him, opened, softened.

“How are you?” Already he felt back in her nexus.

“Okay. And you?”

“Not good. I don’t like it here without you.”

“I know,” she said. “I feel the same here in Hong Kong. It'd be better if you were here.”

He felt a wave of pleasure inside him when he heard this. “Then come back,” he said, simple, quick, straight out.

“But I can’t. I have to see the pots off.”

“And then?”

“Then I have to go to New York. Immediately. They’re all waiting for me. This was a big thing for us, this deal.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” he said.

“I know. Me too.”

He felt his longing start to skid. While she was in Hong Kong they were still close, or it seemed that way. They could talk and things could shift in a moment; she could turn around. Going back to New York would change things. Then they’d have to go to lengths. Then if they were going to see each other again they’d have to start climbing that long and arduous ladder of intention.

This was what he’d said he wouldn’t, couldn’t, shouldn’t do. But he kept thinking about her. She was always in his mind. “I have to admit I was hoping it would be easy, it would just happen. You’d come back.”

“I could,” she said. “Not right away, but I could. Michael. What happened meant a lot to me. I would really like to get to know you. I mean that.” She was enunciating. He could tell she was speaking from her center. “I really, really would.”

“I was hoping that too,” he said. “I’m sorry it took so long for things to happen.”

“Never mind that now,” she said.

He knew it was his turn. It was time for him to say, let’s try it. Let’s meet again and see. It was up to him.

But he couldn’t walk out on the plank just like that. He had to have a little time to think. And so he hesitated. He held the silence.

On her end, she felt hope draining away from her as he said nothing. While she waited, she unlatched the sliding glass door and stepped out on her balcony. The damp, briny air made her feel clearer. “Think about what I told you,” she said softly. “Let me know if you feel the same. If you want to see me again, you know, I’ll figure something out. Call me. If that’s what you want, call me.” She was putting the ball firmly in his court. “I’m not leaving for a day and a half.”

She closed her eyes. Had she done right, or wrong? She had opened her heart and shown her willingness. She couldn’t do any more. She waited.

“You know all about me,” he said.

She knew he meant his illness. “I know all about you.”

“All right, Lia,” he said, with such gentleness in his voice that she felt for a yearning instant everything was going to be okay, “I’ll call you.”

So he wanted time to think. There was nothing else she could say. She looked out over the harbor, crowded with its descending mass of white towers. Night was falling and the water glowed up from beneath, bathing the sampans and junks and massive cargo vessels in pure aquamarine light. “So, then,” she said after a moment. “Even though I don’t want to hang up, even though I want to talk to you all night and do a million other things to you, with you, I guess I should say good-bye.”

“Okay,” he agreed again. He didn’t try to hold her. They hung up.

The line was dead, a blank space ringing down a cold stone floor in an empty hall. She felt her stomach twist. Now she could only wait. She couldn’t let this reduce her. She had work to finish. Some other time, when she had the space and peace, if necessary, she would cry. Not now.

Lia and Stanley saw the crates lifted into the underbelly of the jet and then drove back into Central, weak with satisfaction. “What shall we do?” he asked her.

Lia smiled at the white-haired man. She liked being with him. And it helped keep her mind off Michael. Don’t think, don’t want. Expect nothing. Let go. The car was twisting and veering down along the curving, banana-leafed, terraced two-lane road, down toward the heart of Hong Kong. But how could she let go? After what they had done, how could they just forget? In a minute the car came out in Central, just above the business district. “You know what I’d really like to do?” she said. “Let’s go back to Hollywood Road.”

Pao’s face lifted in a gradual grin of agreement. He spoke in Cantonese to the driver, who turned the car around.

When Michael finished that day, he stopped at the ward on three south. His friend Little Chen had recently been readmitted. Chen had come to Michael’s attention some months before because his levels of lead were so high. He had a high-risk profile; his family lived on a corner of two of Beijing’s busiest streets, and their apartment windows opened on to the intersection with all its exhaust fumes. Little Chen had already been ill from lead poisoning. But then he had also been diagnosed with leukemia. He’d been in for a while, very sick. He’d improved and been discharged. Now, after being home for many weeks, he was back. Michael had stopped and seen him that last day-the day he had met Lia after work. The day they became lovers. The day she left. And now he had to decide whether to risk everything again, or not.

He had hurt her by hesitating on the phone. He didn’t want to hurt her-the opposite. He wanted to make a bed for her to lie on. He didn’t think he would ever feel that again, but now he did.

He pivoted lightly through the door at three south, his footsteps soft on the tile, and strode past the small beds toward the end where his young friend would be waiting.

Suddenly disoriented, he stopped and rocked his weight from side to side. Here was the door to the bathroom, here the wall against which he’d stood the other day when he talked to the boy. He was sure of it. Yet now there was only a row of empty steel carts. He’d missed it. He turned back.

He walked more slowly and looked into the face of each little child. Little Chen was very distinctive, with a triangular face and a wide, thin mouth. Or was he on the wrong aisle? No, Michael was sure; this was right. This had been his bed. Maybe the staff had moved him.

A female worker polished the bed table. “Where’s Little Chen?” he asked her.

She started and turned to look at him, then started again because he was an outsider.

“Little Chen,” he said again, and pointed to the bed.

“Gone,” she said.

Michael frowned and shot back a different word. “Discharged?” he asked.

Color went out of the woman’s face. “No. Gone away.”

Gone away. That meant dead, when they said it.

Tears came up out of him and spilled right over from his eyes before he even knew they were coming, before he could think about stopping them. He wrapped his hand around the spindly bed frame.

The woman looked at him with direct Chinese kindness. “It’s too pitiable.” She handed him a clean square of cloth.

He wiped his face. “Thank you,” he said.

“Go home, sir.” She patted his arm. “Go home to your wife.”

He looked at her.

“Go home to your wife,” she said again, as if it were obvious.

“All right,” he said, as if he could simply do that, do what she said. He could walk out of here and go to her. Now the hurt he had caused Lia by hesitating, by not stepping over the line right away, tugged at him more than ever. It was almost a physical pain in the center of him. He never wanted to hurt her. Good-bye, he thought to Little Chen. And with an effort he walked back out of the ward.

He felt his cell phone in his pocket. He could dial her. Tell her. Make it right. He kept walking, right out of the hospital. But calling her didn’t seem like enough, not now.

He should go to Hong Kong.

He took a taxi to the head of his hutong and walked in, under the soft-speaking lindens. There, over his worn limestone lintel, in his tiny room, he clicked on the Internet and looked at airlines. There was nothing available to Hong Kong tonight, not in confirmed seating. But he was adept at navigating margins. Two of tonight’s flights had standby potential. He’d go out to the airport and try. He had to leave instantly. And he’d take his cell phone with him. If in the end he couldn’t get on a plane, he’d call her.

It felt right to him to go now. It was the correct seed to plant. Qian yin hou guo, he had heard his friend An say. It’s on the basis of what comes before that what follows bears fruit.

After a long day of studying bank reports, of weighing the life and viability of various loans, some made by him, some borrowed by him, all part of the frighteningly spit-supported structure that was Chinese banking, Gao Yideng went home to his private study. There he logged on to his personal computer, and through a series of proprietary portals brought up a string of accounts one by one. Even his most trusted advisers did not know everything he had. In the United States, on deposit, he now had one hundred twenty-six million dollars. For a moment, he could enjoy this triumph. He had ninety days to make certain delicate decisions about declarations and taxes. In the meantime he had taken at least one substantial asset and turned it into accessible cash, outside China.

He didn’t feel any tugs of remorse over so much treasure leaving the country. In fact he believed it was better. Before he got it, this had been buried in the ground. Let the rest of the world see it. Let it end up preserved and be forever protected from chaos.

A soft knock sounded at his study door. His wife. “Everything’s ready,” she said, and he knew she meant his two sons, his daughter, their evening meal. They would never know the privations he and Peng had endured. He wondered where Peng was tonight. He was certain the other man was alive, on earth; he had faith that he would know if Peng had passed through the gate and gone away. “Wo jiu lai-le,” he told his wife.

And he stood up, turned off his computer, followed his wife down the long wainscoted Shanghainese hallway to the stairs, curving down, and around, to the hallway and the dining room and the eyes of his children waiting under the bright crystal-dripping chandelier. For them, he accumulated. For them he built a future. He met their faces with a smile.

At the airport, Michael was lucky enough to clear standby on a flight that would land in Hong Kong before midnight. That was okay. They’d have some hours together, at least. And they’d go from there.

He kept his cell phone on until they fastened their seat belts on the plane and the order came to turn them off. The crew strapped down, but the plane did not move. They waited, and then they waited some more.

Finally the pilot made a long announcement in Chinese, which was followed by a confusingly brief translation into English. “Because of the crash of China International Flight Sixty-eight, all the flights now are frozen for a new list of safety checks.” Michael rearranged the scrambled words in his head. How many safety checks? How long would it take? All planes? He sank. The crew got up and moved around. The lights flickered up. The passengers sat belted in, and the jet did not move.

An hour ticked by, every minute digging at him. He tagged a stewardess. “Would I be able to use a cell phone?”

“No!” She looked at him sternly. “No cell phone now.”

He had to laugh. Fate always displayed such incredible irony. Belted upright, head back, eyes closed, he laughed silently until his body shook and his seatmate inched away from him.

In Jingdezhen, Bai walked along Jinhua Lu at the bottom of the park with its small, picturesque bridges and gazebos. He passed men hauling back empty carts, old women taking slow, duck-footed steps, clots of children giggling, racing home for the night.

Though it was getting dark, the day was early for him. He had just come from his bed. What was more, he had an obscene amount of money in his pocket.

He was holding himself differently. Was it not obvious? People were looking at him with respect. He was a new man now. He didn’t feel like Old Bai anymore.

He covered the winding sidewalk along the bottom of the hill, marked by a stone wall. Up there, somewhere above all that lush foliage, was the Research Institute, where they dispensed with the history of porcelain in a series of desultory cases. Down here, the cars and trucks and buses honked through the street. Exhaust smoked up and joined the kiln grit, in the air for a thousand years. Bai swung his arms with his stride, happy to be walking.

And then he was at the Perfect Garden. He pushed open the double doors and walked into the dim-lit dining room, to his friends, at their usual table. Beer, tea, and food were piled up in front of them. They raised their hands to him. “Emperor Bai!” he heard, Bai Huangdi. “Emperor Bai!” And he shook his own hands back to them, and let his smile of triumph light his face like the sun.

They had sat on the runway for almost two hours when the pilot finally crackled on and said, with no explanation, that safety checks were complete and that they were tenth in line for takeoff.

Michael sensed a light sweat break out all over him as he looked at his watch. He felt like he could melt in his seat. He could make it.

By the time Lia was down to the last few hours, her heart was burning. She hadn’t heard from him. Apparently he didn’t even think he ought to say good-bye. She wanted to kick a hole in the wall, throw something out the window. Instead, she folded all her clothes in tight little squares and stuffed them in her suitcase. She couldn’t believe it. She had been so sure he’d call her. But why? Just because she felt something real with him and she wanted to go on with it, at least try, she couldn’t expect him to want the same. So he didn’t. He had a right to make that choice. That’s what memory rooms were for. They had doors that could be closed. Still. She looked at her silent phone and felt everything well up again. It wouldn’t have been so very hard to say good-bye with love.

Despite him, outside of him, the irony was… she was changed. She felt like a different person, not quite newly minted but restirred. The composition of her cells was altered. She could see it in the mirror. It had been more than two days since she’d been with him, and still she was luminous, perversely so, tragically. Now here was the dress in her hands, the sleeveless, box-necked dress in sage silk.

She dropped her clothes and zipped into it. Made for her, it hugged her all the way down. Oh, she was beautiful in it, with her hair only caught back, and if she wore high-heeled sandals-she looked at herself over her shoulder. She could see the truth and the anguish, the shimmering cloth against her body. Trying to be beautiful was just another form of forgery. The feeling of her and him was a forgery. Admit it. He didn’t want it. So I do need my tired old world, she thought, my maze, my rooms; I do. I’ll put him there. She took the dress off and told herself, let go of hope. Let it go now. But she felt the same, pulled by wanting. Delirious with it. It overwhelmed even her anger. She folded the dress on top of everything else and closed the suitcase.

Then there was a knock on the door, polite, soft, insistent. First shock wiped every thought from her mind, then a smile formed inside her, deep down. That’s why he didn’t call, because he came. Hope was a river, bringing back optimism and acceptance and forgiveness. Thought could not begin to contain her. She yanked the dress out again, hurried back into it. The knock sounded again. “Just a minute!”

She pulled the silk down over her hips and opened the door.

Facing her was the concierge. “Miss Frank?”

She thought she might sink all the way to the ocean floor. “Yes,” she said.

“A package.” He handed her a small box. “From Mr. Stanley Pao.”

“Thank you,” she said. He was gone.

She went inside and opened it. When she lifted the lid her mouth went soft in surprise. It was Stanley’s copy of the chicken cup, the one she had watched Bai buy from Potter Yu. Ah, what genius. She held it up. It gave off a world of grace all its own. For you, read the card, with my regards. So sweet, she thought, her heart running out to Stanley. So kind. As if somehow the elder man knew.

Because it wasn’t him at her door, the American man she couldn’t stop thinking about. It was this perfect little object. It was easy, profound, hoi moon, just like what she’d had with Michael. Had. Past tense. Let it go, she thought. She balanced the cup on the desk and curled up on the couch looking at it, eye level. It was immortal, whether six hundred years or six days old, the same. A thing perfect and still.

Unlike her. She stood up and pressed her face to the window. The harbor below was a late-night dream of lights, the water glassy and reflective. She had a vision of herself floating down there, alone, safe, spread-eagled on a raft in calm water. Surrounded by lights. It was peaceful and water-silent. She remembered all the good of being alone, the opportunity. She thought of all her fakes back in New York.

And here was the greatest of them all. She picked up her little consolation prize, the cup, her treasure, and packed it safe away in its box. There was kindness in the world after all.

It wasn’t so many hours now until her flight. She clicked the room into darkness and crawled into bed, spreading her loose hair over the pillow behind her. She had given the thought of him all of herself that she could-though she left one hearing aid in, just in case the phone still rang. Now she had to try and sleep.

Stanley prepared the documents. He would send them to San Francisco the next morning, via personal courier. He had a man he could trust. Not an ah chan; an employee. He paged through the documents one last time before putting them in the package. For some reason he stopped to look at the special visa issued by China. He had seen a few of these before. Usually it meant the government was selling off something it owned. Often, as in this case, there was an intermediary.

Yet just as there were famed and noted fang gu artists in the world of pots, each of whom turned out his own distinctive style of reproduction, so there were known masters in the world of forged documents. One did not know their names, of course. They were known by the names of their quirks-the same way he had heard Miss Frank call the maker of that marvelous chicken cup the Master of the Ruffled Feather. Just as these document copiers became known by their peculiarities of lettering, shading, and border.

Stanley leaned closer. He knew this artist. He was one of the document masters people talked about. He worked with a flawed inlay machine, and his documents always had a pale patch in the lower left corner.

Stanley looked at the visa. There it was. The pale patch.

A fake.

So this sale wasn’t for the government at all. It was inauthentic, a private sale with fake paperwork.

Yet this visa in front of him had only been needed to cross from China to Hong Kong. Stanley smiled to himself. This visa was never presented at that border. It would have been spotted. That meant the pots were not brought through openly. They were smuggled. By the ah chan Bai. And so very many of them. Stanley’s esteem for the man, despite everything, increased.

And now the collection was in Hong Kong, legal, unimpeachable. Of course, Stanley thought, with the present tensions between the U.S. and China, if someone on the American side noticed this fake visa, in Customs, say, there might be a problem. More for diplomacy than for legality. Because if the Chinese government found out about this, they would most assuredly strike multiple postures demanding it back. It was just too big, too priceless; and matters between the countries too uneasy.

Well. Stanley Pao slid the visa back into the stack of pages.

He certainly would not be the one to mention it.

He slipped into the lobby of the hotel after two A.M. He felt his chest singing with excitement. He rode the elevator to the fourteenth floor and walked in quick silence down the brilliantly patterned carpet. It was late. Everything was hushed.

He came to her door and knocked. The sound seemed to echo all the way down the wallpapered corridor. He waited. Nothing.

He knocked again.

Inside, Lia sat up in bed. Her hair was down. She got up in the twisted confusion of dreaming. She found the door by its little pinpoint of light that gave out onto the hall. She looked.

Michael. Really? Was it really? His shoulders under his loose white shirt, the sleeves rolled up… now she knew she was dreaming. This was false. But his broad face leaned toward her through the peephole, his hand came up and knocked again.

She opened the door. She stood behind it, pale, half lit by the shafting light from the hallway. Three steps and he was in the room, turning, looking for her. Who knows about me, she thought. The door clicked shut and they found their way to each other in the dark.