A Cup of Light

5

After she’d found the chicken cup she’d called Gao’s shouji, or handphone, using the number he had written on his card that first night. She left a message that she would like to talk to him. He left her one in return asking her to meet him for dinner, apologizing with precise courtesy for not having invited her to dinner already, he was at fault, he’d been away from Beijing. So she took a taxi that evening to the address he gave her.

The car passed rows of stores selling Mongolian cashmere, Italian shoes, designer watches, and the newest flat-screen televisions. She saw an old man on a wooden stool selling candied crab apples on skewers, the sticks radiating in a sticky red starburst from his pole. Next to him stood another man, leaning on a Mercedes, talking on a cell phone. Just past this they turned into an alley, bouncing on potholes and uneven pavement, past the office blocks and the white-tile apartment buildings. These high-rise palaces were where most Beijingers seemed to be living now. They were full of the things that promised to make life right: rushing elevators, reliable plumbing, and high-floor windows revealing a stationary army of near-identical buildings receding across the city’s smoggy plain. But down here the alley twisted between smaller, older buildings, and the car finally stopped in front of one of them with a simple wood-framed entrance in Japanese style.

Inside, Gao Yideng was waiting for her on the floor of a tatami-matted room, shoes off. He rose to greet her. He probably had multiple wireless devices in his pockets connecting him with associates all over China, but here in this little restaurant room he appeared solitary and relaxed. “How do you find the pots?” he asked.

“They are magnificent. As you must know.” They settled in across from each other.

He poured green tea. “I hope you understand why at first we failed to mention the full… extent of things.”

“I think I do,” she said. And in fact, despite the shock of arriving here and seeing hundreds of pieces, that aspect of the situation now seemed favorable. Only she and Dr. Zheng knew, and their position was undeniably better for it.

Food he had selected began arriving at the table. They talked about Beijing, the modernization, the rate at which everything was being wiped away. Sake was served. They both leaned back slightly from their cushions to allow the kimonoed Chinese waitress to pour. Neither touched the alcohol. “There is one piece that fascinates me,” she said finally.

“Which?”

“The chicken cup. Do you know it?”

“From the reign of Chenghua, that one?”

“That one.”

“Yes,” he said. “I know it.”

She took her time eating a small piece of eel off the tips of her chopsticks. Interesting, she thought; he knew the piece and he said so, straight out. Moreover, he knew it was Chenghua. She wondered what else he knew. Obviously he had an affinity for pots. Which type was he, the tycoon or the connoisseur?

In her experience, those who collected pots, who owned them, fell often into two types. There were the corporate heads, tycoons, self-made men who had achieved wealth and now wanted discernment. They wanted the best, all at once. It was not necessary for them to love what they bought.

Then there was another kind of buyer-the person like her, but with money, who loved pots. Sometimes these clients had art-history knowledge rivaling that of well-known scholars. Sometimes they were obsessive and crazy. From Gao’s knowledge, and his clear avidity, she would take him to be the porcelain-lover type. On the other hand, he fit the life-profile of the tycoon. “The Chenghua cup is lovely,” she said. “A wonderful piece.”

“Thank you.”

“But if it is real”-she spoke casually-“if it is real its discovery is rather important. Forgive me if you already know. I have no wish to waste your time outlining the obvious. But only eighteen of these cups are known to have survived in the world. That would make this the nineteenth cup. If it’s real.”

He took an edamame pod from the plate and easily, using only the tips of his chopsticks, split the pod and extracted the shiny little bean. She watched with admiration. She couldn’t control chopsticks like that. He placed the bean inside his mouth. “If it is real,” he repeated.

“If it is real, its discovery is of importance,” she said succinctly, still keeping her voice light, playing out his line.

He looked at her. “Is it not the case that of the eighteen cups, two are here in China? Among the holdings of the Palace Museum?”

“That’s so,” she said.

“Most are in Taipei.”

“Yes,” she answered. “Eight. Mr. Gao. Are you saying that this is one of the two cups from Beijing?”

“No,” he said in quick retreat. “I don’t know that.”

“I see.” She put down her chopsticks and smiled at him across the table. Her braid had come over her shoulder and she reached up and flipped it back. She could feel him looking at her ears again. Take a good look and wonder about me, she thought. You probably want to know why I use these old-fashioned things instead of implants. You’ll never find out.

Of course Lia could have had cochlear implants if she’d wanted them. She didn’t. She didn’t want a plate surgically implanted in her head. Moreover, she’d be trading one electronic universe of sound for another, neither being the full, natural spectrum experienced by those who could truly hear. She’d gotten used to her set of speakers. They didn’t catch the high frequencies-the jingle of keys, the microwave buzzer-as well as implants did, but she really didn’t care. She didn’t want to change. She liked the ease with which hearing aids could be plucked out. No plate inside you. Your head was yours, your world your own.

“Mr. Gao. I must compliment you. Whether the cup is real or not, it’s an exquisite piece. Beautifully made. Very hoi moon,” she said, and then repeated in Mandarin: “Very kai men jian shan,” Open the door on a view of mountains. “Truly it is one of the nicest works I’ve ever seen.” She looked at him steadily. “So perhaps on reflection you will decide not to sell it.”

“Perhaps,” he agreed. “Suppose the cup is not real.” He looked back up at her. “Who do you say it is who made it?”

“I don’t know the answer to that. Not yet.” She picked up her mottled stoneware cup of green tea and drank from it, left her sake cup alone. Interesting little lagniappe of a power play. Neither touched the alcohol. “But you could help me also, Mr. Gao, if you would be so kind. I can better sell your pots with a full story. Do you mind? A few questions?”

“Of course I do not mind.” He leaned his bare gleaming head forward, the spirit of cooperation.

“If I may-how did the pots come into your hands?” She let the question hang, and waited. She was prepared, of course, for him to lie; that was her departure point, her ground-zero assumption. If he was standing in for a government sale he would have any number of reasons for not wanting to tell her so. The decision-makers behind the transaction would not want it publicly known. In any case he had the visa. That said certain things.

He settled his chopsticks down on their porcelain rest before answering her. “Originally, the collection was bought from a family in southern China. That was some time ago. It has been in storage.”

She wrinkled her brow. Must have been some pretty deep storage, she thought. Things this big were very hard to keep quiet. “Before that,” she said. “Where was it before that?”

“Buried on this family’s land.”

“How?”

“No one knew. Everyone who lived there was killed in the war. Another branch of the clan moved to the land later. Many years after that, they found all these crates while they were digging a garden.”

Gao and Lia smiled at each other. The smile acknowledged that the tale he’d just told her was a very, very common story in the Chinese art world-a cliché, really. It was a patently predictable story to pass off. It could be false. It could also be the truth. “It is true,” he said as if following her thought.

She felt oddly inclined to believe him-maybe. “Just your own guess,” she said. “How do you feel the pots came to be there?”

He gave her a long look filled with speculation. Finally he shook his head. “No one knows.”

No, she thought, that’s wrong. Someone knows. Stories, flares of lightning, surprising events: These were like wafts of smoke or fragrance over a town or a rural district. Many people sensed them. People whispered to each other. And they remembered. It was there.

She waited and watched.

“I’ll tell you one thing,” he said at length. “It’s possible these pots were separated from the Palace in 1913.”

“1913?” She was surprised. This date seemed to come from nowhere. The war years, when the collection was in flight, were what she would have expected.

He saw her surprise. “It was because of your countryman! Your American! Mr. J. P. Morgan! It was he who in 1913 tried to buy the contents of the Forbidden City for twenty million dollars.” Gao pronounced the words with pinpoint pleasure.

“Ah yes! You are right. I know that one. A great story. And what if he had succeeded!” And he almost had. Morgan dispatched an American man to Peking to make the deal, and the whole thing came shockingly close to consummation. But then Morgan died-with no warning. The deal stopped in its tracks.

“It has been said that some works were moved out of the Palace for inventory during those talks,” Gao told her. “In such cases there are always things that are never moved back.”

Okay, she thought… interesting. “And the sources of these suppositions are reliable to you?”

He nodded.

“Then I will check into it. I will certainly be able to let you know later.”

“Really,” he said, impressed.

“Really. But one condition. You have to find out more about where these pots have been. At least try. Shuo hao-le ma?” she finished, Are we agreed? And to make sure he understood her touch of levity she raised her sake cup to him.

“Shuo hao-le,” he said, We’re agreed. He picked up his cup; they touched and drank.

When she got back to her room she was still thinking about whether her pots could in fact have been removed from the Palace in 1913. It was distant but conceivable.

Somewhere she had this inside. Once at the Morgan Library she had read through all the files on the failed transaction. All the players had been there, their cables with their crossed-out drafts, all the details of the deal that had almost moved the world’s greatest art collection to the other side of the Pacific.

She turned off the lights and changed into the minimal, clingy things in which she slept. She felt like going to the bottom end of the memory world, to the place where the past played out in her mind. It was tiring to animate memory, but some things were worth seeing. This was one.

She took her hearing aids out and felt the safe, filling swell of silence. She sat on the bed with her knees up to her chest, wide awake, the gates to her personal world open.

The cubicle she sought was down a side lane, in the early twentieth century, before the wars, when a crushingly wealthy American set about acquiring, madly, and built a magnificent collection. When he trained his sights on China, J. P. Morgan sent a young American, a man named F. H. McKnight, to do his bidding.

It was March 21, 1913. The air was filled with clacking Pekingese voices, the roaring hiss of gaslight, and the creak of wheels on the dirt-packed street between the warehouses and the godowns. It was night in the port. Wooden sidewalks bumped and clattered with the streaming passengers. They were dazed to be on land, dazed by the new sounds, the fervid smells, and the terrifyingly strange stalls for food and drink.

Frederick McKnight stood at the end of this street. In front of him swarmed men pulling carts, hauling rickshas, shouldering burdens several times their own size. Light popped and flickered from burning lanterns. The Western women’s faces glowed in the light as they held their bags close to their bodies. Men, high collars, mustaches, eyes down, also picked their way along the slat-boards. Up at the other end waited horses, mules, and drivers.

Not an automobile in sight, Frederick realized. Peking was some miles inland. Travel by cart would take hours.

He realized he would have to apply himself to his arrangements, and did so. For two silver dollars he secured a man with an open, horse-drawn cart to collect his trunks and carry him to the city. Four hours, the man made him understand in pidgin. Frightful, Frederick thought, but what else was there to do? At least the night was fair.

A gentleman, he had naturally offered to make arrangements for Mrs. Grosbeck, the woman he had befriended aboard the Constantinople. She’d informed him she could make her own. She did this with a lilt in her voice, not in the least standoffish. She also said, with an appropriate lightness, that she did hope she’d see him later.

Frederick replayed her words in his mind. He was aware of his arms and shoulders moving under the blue serge of his suit, the perfect posture required by his stiffly starched collar-he was a fool to have worn it. No one cared. Not in this place. He reached behind and unhooked it, slipped it off. Instantly he felt better. He slipped it into his bag.

Mrs. Grosbeck wouldn’t care about his collar.

They both happened to be booked into the Wagon-Lits. He was twenty-nine, unmarried. She was recently divorced. At first her extra-marital state had struck ambivalence into him, but as she had quite briefly and without emotion told him her story, he had come to see that, in her shoes, he might have done quite the same thing. Yes. Quite the same.

And here they were in China.

Frederick climbed into the cart after his luggage. Somehow he had imagined something grander, a regal stride down a gangway into a foreign land, him strong and imperturbable. Not this gloomy dark, the jumping shadows against the mud-walled buildings, the squawking cries and the straw-slapping shoes of the coolies. Amazing. He settled down under a heavy pile of blankets, head propped where he could watch the stars. It was so good to be off the boat.

He slept. When he awoke he saw gliding above him the walls of the city proper. They were rolling down a dark boulevard. On one side were buildings in pagoda shapes, on the other an endless wall, massive and silent.

The driver heard him and looked back. “All gate close,” he called over the hoof-clomping. “Go north side, Xizhimen. Open late.”

Frederick waved a hand and lay back down. Now he could see the curving tiled roofs and trees, so thick, their branches and leaves meeting overhead. After a time they came to the Xizhimen gate and flowed through it with the tide of late-night traffic-carts and rickshas and pedicabs and a bobbing sea of men on foot. He stared. Men in gowns, some very fine, flapping lightly over trousers tight to the ankle.

Inside the city walls they navigated a network of streets lined with low buildings. Stone walls enclosed round gates and turned to follow narrow lanes leading off. Overhanging balconies glowed with colored lanterns. By the time he was unloaded in the Legation quarter, at the Wagon-Lits, the feeling of being in some strange dream was complete.

In the hotel lobby, under the glittering chandeliers, he saw more Chinese men of consequence, in gowns of silk. Mandarins, he thought; look closely. It’s with them you’ll have to make a deal. But he could not think, he could not penetrate, he was dizzy with strangeness. He stumbled to his room, fell on his bed, and slept until the next afternoon.

And now it was ten days later. Now on this night he adjusted his cravat by the fluttering lamplight. He studied himself in the carved rosewood mirror, his hair shining and flat from its center part, his eyes lucid with excitement. He was a gentleman. No one could say any different.

It had been easy here. The world of foreigners was small, interconnected. He’d only had to call on the few people recommended by Mr. Morgan’s office. At once he’d been introduced to Fleisher, a European of vague nationality who published two English-language papers here in the capital. Fleisher in turn brought in White, who did something at the American Charge D'Affaires Office.

This White had a Chinese partner named Shi Shu, who acted as agent for the Chinese imperial family. The Qing Dynasty had fallen two years before, and the emperor’s family continued to live in the rear quarters of the Forbidden City. They were surrounded by art. Priceless, unimaginable art. Paintings, jades, bronzes, calligraphy, porcelains, textiles, jewels. They had palaces in Mukden and Jehol too-same thing, according to Mr. White; art stacked to the ceilings in closed rooms. “My good man,” White had said. “You cannot imagine it.

“And,” White had said, leaning toward him as they strolled the temple grounds of the Shrine of the Star of the Foremost Scholar in the Land, “it is for sale. All for sale.”

Ah, then Frederick had been brilliant. Every cell in his body had screamed with the excitement of acquisition, but he’d kept himself casual. “What did you say to be the purpose of this temple?” he asked. He feigned disinterest in everything, even the little hilltop pavilion in front of them, even, especially, the deal White was preparing to put on the table.

“Ah. This is the deity who gives success in the imperial examinations. Success or failure!” Despite Frederick’s careful aloofness, White was relaxed and charming in his gray striped suit. “The examination candidates flocked here to worship. They came from every province in China. Before going to the examination yards to sit for the jinshi, they came here and begged the god for success. With success came riches and position, guaranteed for life. With failure-well, loss of face was the least of it.”

“As to the collection you mentioned,” Frederick said at length, after many quiet minutes of studying the statues of the god within. “How might one inquire further?”

“Let me talk to my Chinese associate,” White had said, and gone on to point out the other nearby temples, the Temple of the Evening Sun and the Hall of Ten Thousand Willows. He chatted politely, filled with zest and knowledge, ultimately surpassing Frederick with a show of bright, courteous apathy.

But he had inquired. The discussion had begun. And that was many days ago and now they were moving toward agreement.

Frederick smiled at himself in the mirror. Welcome to Peking, Frederick Henry McKnight, he thought. His face, his eyes, everything was ablaze with possibility. His heart too.

“Ready?” he said to Eileen-needlessly, for Mrs. Grosbeck had been dressed twenty minutes or more, sitting by the window in the brocaded chair, watching the pulse of life in the street below. The men in their dark garments, the ricksha carriers loping with their musical cries, the robed gentlewomen, walking wide-legged on their bound feet, everyone talking, laughing. A soft roar seemed to rise from the street in China, only it was like nothing he’d ever heard before, no machine sounds, no traffic; instead a tide of human voices.

“I’m ready,” she said to Frederick.

He felt a surge of gladness. He hadn’t sorted out his clear feelings for her, but he liked her. She made few demands. She seemed to want to spend time with him. His abdomen tightened. She’d been married, he knew. She was not untried. She walked and sat and stretched and crossed a room with her whole body.

And she had intelligence. She had helped him compose the cables back to Davison, who worked for Mr. Morgan. The financier’s wishes came through Davison. They had talked about removing some items from the Palace for inventorying-this had been the suggestion of Shi Shu-but Mr. Morgan had said no, leave everything intact. They had traded descriptions of the scope of the collection, and many many prices.

How much to say in these cables seemed extraordinarily delicate to him. Even though they were composed and sent in code, one never knew. And they must read just right to Davison and Morgan. Still, he had stiffened at first when she took a pencil to his first draft of block capitals and sketched in edits.

“Doesn’t that sound better?” she asked, pushing it toward him. He looked at it. She was right. It was ambivalent in all the right places, toned, diplomatic.

“I stand in your debt,” he said. To which she wrinkled her nose. No dry mentalist, Eileen.

And so tonight he was taking her along for the meeting with Shi Shu-a critical meeting, the most important one yet. Shi Shu had been high in the Manchu bureaucracy, and still went to work every day, for the family, inside the Forbidden City. In the matter of the art collection he was their direct and sole representative.

A week ago, Frederick never would have brought her. In America, he wouldn’t have dreamed of it. But now he knew he wanted her there. She helped him. She saw what lay behind words and gestures. Later, when they were alone, she would sit with him and help him sort it out.

Not that he’d tell the others they were friends, a man and a woman. Nothing really improper had happened. Nevertheless, that would not do.

He had already introduced her to White and Fleisher as his cousin. It had been believable. It made it easier for them to go about together. And she’d absorbed it in the best of humor, seeing its utility instantly. They were relatives. This was their protective cover.

Davison had cabled them Mr. Morgan’s final line on price. Tonight, if he could bring Shi Shu into that range, they would have a deal. And a new door would open and his new life would start.

He lifted the glass cover of the gaslight and snuffed it out. He turned to her and extended his arm. She rose, brushed imaginary lint from the cream-colored lace overlaying her high-cut, rustling dress. It struck him that most foreign women looked strange in this world. After seeing the layered silk garments of wealthy Chinese women, he found the cinched, fussy dresses and the great hats of the Western ladies overstated. It was never true for Eileen. Her clothes were straight-lined, tailored from fine cloth, simple. She claimed to dislike hats. Stay with me, he thought impulsively, feeling a warm flood inside himself of wanting her.

“I’m ready.” She rose and walked toward him. Before she could reach him they were both caught by the sibilant whoosh of an envelope being pushed under the door.

He walked to it and picked it up. “It’s a cable,” he said, tearing it open. He read.

“What is it?” she said, for she saw his face sagging in disbelief.

“Mr. Morgan is dead.”

“What? Was he ill?”

“No. It was unexpected.”

They looked at each other.

“It happened in Italy.” He read the rest of it. “All negotiations canceled.” He looked up at her. “It’s finished,” he said. His future had been directly in front of him. Now in a heartbeat it had evaporated.

“I’m so sorry,” she said.

He nodded.

They stood facing each other in silence.

“Let’s go tell them,” he said.

“All right.”

He held out his arm. She took it and they walked out.

Lia slipped under the sheet and blanket and stretched out; sleep would reward her now. She felt at ease. She was sure the pots hadn’t been moved out in 1913. They were still there when Morgan died.

Before turning out the light, she slipped one hearing aid back in, picked up her cell, and called Gao’s voice mail. “I wanted to let you know the pots could not have been removed from the Forbidden City in 1913. I checked. So please keep looking. And,” she added, “thank you for a most pleasant dinner.”