A Cup of Light

8

The next day she opened the twenty-eighth crate and took the first pot from it. She drew a sharp breath of joy. It was a Ming moon flask, blue and white, depicting a dragon swimming among scrolled lotus blossoms. She could see it was from the reign of Yongle, the early 1400s.

She lifted it. Ratio of weight to mass was very important. It was invisible to the eye alone, and sometimes overlooked by those who fashioned replicas. The composition and density of clay, the exact mode of firing… everything had to fit. Lia could sense how much a thing should weigh. When she surrounded a piece with her fingers and lifted it, she knew a little more about whether it was real or false.

Though she herself went by feeling, she had the computer take the weight too. She activated the scale feature and clicked down the top of her laptop, which in this position took readings to a hundredth of an ounce. Weight and dimensions were transferred by the computer into the appraisal report. She took the flask up again and turned it every way. So hoi moon. So ideally shaped. And such a sedate, noble hue to the Yongle cobalt design.

Yet there was something else that had caught her eye about it: its box. Glued along the bottom, on one edge, ran a thin strip of crumbly yellow silk. Some kind of mark, most likely, from an inventory or catalog. She centered the flask on her felt tray and took up the box and turned it over.

After the last royal family moved out, several attempts had been made to list and assess what was in the Forbidden City. Mostly they were sporadic, partial stabs at a job so huge it was almost impossible to complete. And of course, everything had ended on the night in 1931 when Japan had occupied Manchuria and the art had to be carried out of the Palace.

But each time Palace officials had tried to sort through what they had, they’d hired people, made plans-they’d kept records, which were left behind. And they also left all manner of histories and lists and schedules. Lia had seen quite a few of these. They were in her memory.

She sat on the floor against a rolled-up rug that braced her back. She needed a minute of quiet to go down to the bottom. She was looking for this particular cataloging effort-the one that had marked its boxes with strips of yellow silk. She wanted to fix it in time. Then there’d be one more point in the chronology, one more moment when she knew these pots were still inside the Palace walls.

She took her hearing aids out. The emptiness inflated in her and she felt the familiar wash of pleasure and acceptance. There were the gates to the memory world; there was the way inside. She walked the brick lanes, reviewing what she knew. She found discrete nuggets; records, photos, newspaper accounts, Palace documents, and memorials. After a while they came together to form the picture in her mind.

In March, 1924, a young man awoke in Peking.

It was the tapping of his Ayi on the rice-paper-and-wood-lattice window that awakened him, her melodious voice saying his name. He pulled the quilts closer about himself. Not yet.

Then he remembered. Last night his father had spoken to him of a new post, with the Committee for the Disposition of the Qing Imperial Household Possessions. It was perfect for him. His education had been classical, aiming him, as thirty-eight generations before him had been aimed, at success in the imperial examinations. Yet he would be the first of his line not to sit for them. They had been abolished. The old examination yards had been knocked down.

He dressed quickly in the frigid room, lighting only the small oil lamp, leaving the brazier cold. He secured his trousers at the ankles and then fitted a gown shaped like a close sleeveless jacket over his shirt. Out of the room he hurried, across the flagstones and through the open gate to the Chrysanthemum Court. It was not time for chrysanthemums. It was Third Month. The air was wet and spiked with cold. The Gobi dust had not yet blown in to cover everything with its fine silt.

Breakfast was hand-cut noodles in a soup of young chicken, mantou, pickled vegetable, and green tea. The Wens ate lightly in the morning.

Guangyu took his place at the table opposite his white-haired father, in a low wooden chair inset with natural marble that falsely appeared to be an ink painting of mountains among clouds.

“Second Director Tian of the Committee sent his valet here this morning,” said Guangyu’s father.

Guangyu inclined his head.

“You are to go there today and talk to him.” The older man knew this work would suit his son. Guangyu did better with art than anything else. And it was an official post too-of a sort.

So Guangyu went downtown to an office near the rear gate of the Forbidden City and met Second Director Tian.

The young man found the Second Director preoccupied behind stacks of aging, crumbling inventories, their spidery archaic characters organized according to forgotten systems and principles.

So many back courts in the Palace had been closed off, dust-covered, unused for many decades, and yet were filled, stacked, with boxes from floor to ceiling. Guangyu knew this; it was a thing about which art lovers whispered. There were scrolls, rare books, textiles, porcelains, paintings, bronzes, enamels, calligraphies, diamonds, jade, treasures from all the corners of the empire and from beyond all seven oceans. All of it jumbled together, piled up, half forgotten.

Guangyu stood in the Second Director’s office, nervous in his well-made gown. He was educated. He could recite the Five Classics and develop an elegant eight-legged essay on any Confucian citation. None of that mattered anymore.

“Mr. Wen. How fast can you write?”

“How fast?” Guangyu thought he might have heard wrong. “I suppose… forty characters a minute.”

“Oh! Very good.” Second Director smiled. “The job is yours.”

Guangyu stared. Did the man really not care for his academic rank? His knowledge of art?

Tian pulled out a sheet of paper and swirled his brush. “What objects would you like to list?” He looked up when Guangyu did not answer. “Come!” he said. “Paintings, jade, bronzes, porcelains-“

“Porcelains,” Guangyu said.

“Porcelains.” Tian wrote directions on a piece of paper and handed it to Guangyu with a smudgily printed map. “Go to number twenty-four, the Pavilion for Listening to Cicadas. Rear court, southeast room. Begin there.”

Guangyu looked at the map.

“And here,” said Tian. He handed the young man a roll of yellow silk tape. “Every box you list should have a strip of this glued to the bottom.” Tian held up two fingers to show Guangyu how long the strip was to be. “Otherwise you will lose your way. There are too many works.” He smiled again. “You will see.”

Guangyu made a reverence, offered his thanks, and went away down the hutong, past the gangs of children shouting rhymes, the old men airing caged birds, the women carrying home food. He crossed the street, darting in a youthful pulse of excitement between the rickshas and carts and sputtering motorcars. Men on foot formed a soft, dark-moving tide of gowns and fedoras. Itinerant vendors offered fruit and hot teas. Ruddy-faced market women rearranged their vegetables.

He passed a few girls of his own class too, well-bred girls, avoiding his eyes as they were trained to avoid the eyes of all men, hidden behind robes, nothing of them visible except dark eyes and the slim fluttering ends of fingers. He walked past them, clutching his map and his roll of yellow silk tape, to the rear entrance of the Forbidden City.

A guard examined his paper and waved him through. Guangyu had never imagined he would enter this part of the Palace. Until just recently the last Qing emperor, Pu Yi, had lived here.

Now in front of him lay the imperial garden. He turned away from the artistic arrangement of rocks and twisted trees, the famous viewing pavilion. The marble balustrades, the paving stones of mosaics and fossils, the aged and massive Joined-Together Cypress, all of these he saw, awestruck, but kept walking. Here were the pavilions that had once housed the minor females, the passed-over concubines, their handmaids and eunuchs. Past the Palace of Pure Affection and the Palace of Southern View, then an opening, a turn to the right, and he found himself on a narrow street running north-south, which was flanked by high, tile-roofed walls. Everything was empty and silent. He stepped through a gate in the east wall that took him away from the larger ceremonial buildings-the Hall of Worshiping Ancestors and the Palace in Honor of Talent, in which, if Guangyu remembered correctly, congratulations were traditionally offered on the birth of a son. Away from these he entered a dusty labyrinth of smaller courts, barred by massive ceramic-tile spirit screens and topped by roofline arrangements of guardian animal figures. Between the broken, abandoned paving stones, tufts of grass pushed up. There were acres of this. He still had not seen another person.

Here. He stepped over a half-rotted wooden sill, into the Pavilion for Listening to Cicadas. He stepped up on the porch of the southeast room and peered through the dirt-streaked glass. It was impossible to see anything. Were those piles of boxes? He tried the door. It opened.

It was dark. Dust powdered up in his mouth and nose. He lit a small military-style oil lamp. The yellow glow jumped on the cluttered objects that filled the room and threw strange shadows against the high walls. It was cold. The ash on the little charcoal brazier had gone greasy with time.

Guangyu clapped his hands together for warmth. Boxes were stacked up of every size, from the smallest, to hold a miniature carving or an exquisite little inkstone, up to boxes half a meter high that might hold bronzes or urns. Some of the boxes were covered in brocade, but most were the indigo cloth favored by antiquarians, museums, and merchants. The whole heap was dusted with Peking’s yellow silt.

He turned to the pile nearest him, positioned the oil lamp, and opened the first one. He looked in. Time stopped. On its side, in a custom-crafted nest of snowy white, lay a moon flask in underglaze blue. Around its globe-swollen base a dragon swam, its yellow eyes blazing amid the lotuses. From the reign of Yongle, he thought. Or maybe Xuande. He tipped it over to look. Yongle.

He put the flask in its box and laid out his writing things. His best boat-shaped ink stick. It had a poem by Du Fu stamped on it and a most graceful swirl of clouds. It dissolved into water to make wonderful ink, with a pigment that made his characters flow like yifan fengxu, a boat in good wind. He wetted it and ground it in his inkstone.

He pressed back his journal book and began to write: Inventory of the Pavilion for Listening to Cicadas, southeast room. A blue-and-white moon flask, the dragon swimming through the lotus. Made in the reign of Yongle. Then he stopped, and cut a narrow strip of yellow silk ribbon, and glued it on a bottom corner of the box. Done, recorded, marked.

Lia sat in the big room at the villa, amid the crates, holding the Yongle moon flask in underglaze blue on white. The dragon was so delicately delineated. The jar a perfect sphere in her hands, closing to an impossibly narrow and elegant neck. It was a full moon of articulate form, lovely and lovely forever.

Now she knew it had been in the Palace as of 1924. It had been in the inventory done during that year. She was closer. A little closer, anyway. Here in the modern world, the real world, she held the same box marked with a faded strip of yellow silk in her hands.

Doyle was on his way to the Haidian District of Beijing with his friend and colleague An Xing to pick up a child’s baby tooth. The mother had called this morning. Her daughter’s tooth had come out the night before.

They always went out to the homes together. An did the talking in Chinese, and Doyle provided the conservative, calming presence. With his thin, straight, almost colorless hair falling forward in his eyes and his burly, benign physicality, he looked more respectable than An, who kept his long graying hair in a ponytail and on this day wore an African National Congress T-shirt.

All the children in the study had been measured at birth by their cord blood. All of them were worse than that baseline now, according to their shed teeth, every one; this was clear even though the measures for lead in blood and in the solid tissue of a tooth were not directly compatible. A few years before, Beijing had stopped the worst of the air pollution by changing to unleaded gas and closing down some coal power plants, all to win the Olympics. Whatever it took, was Doyle’s opinion. He and An hoped that soon they were going to see the rates of lead toxicity level off.

“Dr. Yang, thank you, thank you,” Michael said politely, and An translated to the woman, dressed and faintly impatient to leave for work. She handed him the tooth wrapped in a bit of paper. She was a university professor, he had noted from the file. Doctorate in meteorology. Seeing the families, meeting them, was a thing that remained hard for him. Sometimes it threw him off track all day. “Tell her we’ll send her a letter in three weeks with the child’s current levels,” he told An.

An translated, and even Michael understood her response.

“Fine,” she said.

The two men briefly locked eyes and bit back other things that might have been discussed, for the mother didn’t want to hear. This was the part Michael Doyle couldn’t really get. If it were his child he would be all over the researcher wanting to know what it meant and what he could do. But it was not his world. Not his child.

Yet there were a few children in the study he had come to care for. Gong Ping, the daughter of another hospital co-worker, and Little Chen, who had developed leukemia and been back to the hospital often. He kept them in a special spot in his mind. But with the others he couldn’t care, he had to release them to their fates-like Xiaoli, the little girl who lived here. He could follow them. He could document. Someone else had to do the rest.

Outside the apartment he pressed his bulky body lightly against the edge of the hall window frame and watched through the glass as Dr. Yang stepped out of the building down below and walked away up the street, her steps snapping against the sidewalk. She was small, compact, professionally dressed. Then An came out with the tiny tooth in a glassine envelope, labeled, in its box. “Zou-ba,” he said, sliding it into his pocket, Let’s go.

Doyle woke up the next morning on his back, not sure where he was for a second, in his old low-slung fifties house in Mar Vista maybe, where the light had poured in through the glass walls over the banana plants, the birds of paradise, the spreading ficus. He had lived there with Daphne, his wife, small and round-shouldered and curly-headed, the opposite of this American woman he’d just met.

Daphne was a lawyer. They’d been satisfied by each other, by who they were and their positions in the world-that was part of their magic. They had the gratification of the well-placed partner. Their love brought that kind of happiness.

But her feeling for him was burned out by the long storm of loving him through his illness. She crawled with him all the way to the wet edge of dying. It was beyond intimacy and fear. He felt she’d give anything to make him live. At times that was what kept him breathing. Much later he realized she was saying good-bye. Maybe both were true. He did survive. And she left, because things never worked between them again.

But now he was a world away, in China. He had a different life. He knew its boundaries. And he knew every inch of himself now too. He put his hands on his abdomen, pressing it, circling the mysterious float of forms and functions inside him, feeling for the grain, the pea, the tiny pebble that did not belong. The tumors could easily come back. The chance of it happening again was high. And so he checked, he felt, he knew his body as well and as far down inside as a man possibly could using his own hands against his skin. He did this to comfort himself. Each time he did it he felt as if he had bought himself another day. He could go forward. And forget what he would never have. Just forget it.

He stretched, letting go of it. He looked at the clock. Time to get going.

On Hollywood Road in Hong Kong, Bai watched as Unloader Ma took the crate out of the back of the truck and walked it gently up to the edge of the sidewalk, under the awning of the building. When it was snug against the wall, out of the sidewalk’s bobbing stream of people, he stepped back and sent a formal nod to Uncrater Leung, who stood off to the side under the awning, relaxed, smoking a cigarette. Leung dropped his cigarette, stepped on it, and walked to the crate. He eyed it a moment, then began taking out delicate little prying tools, producing from his many-pocketed vest everything he needed to tap the crate open and prize out its securing tacks and nails. Everything-every nail, every ounce of packing material, every scrap of wastepaper, every spiral of wood shaving-would be thoughtfully packed away by him for reuse. Now he had the crate open and the pink tissue was flying.

Much as he wanted to stay and see the treasures about to emerge, at that moment Dealer Ng opened the door and beckoned him inside. Bai followed him. “You have something nice for me?” Dealer Ng said over his shoulder.

“Very nice.” Bai smiled because he carried the famille-verte plate, famille-rose vase, and the Qianlong bowl in falang cai. He knew the dealer was going to like them.

Ng took Bai into his back room and poured tea, then set the plate, the bowl, and the vase out on the rimmed, felt-covered table. He turned up the lights, a specially installed spectrum. And only after a careful, harrowing examination did he erupt with admiration and pronounce them, with great pleasure, very hoi moon. They discussed price, at some length, and enjoyed it, and leavened the process further through the prolonged viewing of additional pots. They consumed tea and reached agreement.

And then came the information exchange.

“What’s going on in Jingdezhen?” Dealer Ng asked. His voice was light but he was listening hard. He knew the ah chan understood: Who was making what. What copies were coming down the pipe.

Bai dropped to a low tone. “There is a potter named Yang Shu making a substantial series of monochromes, borrowing from the Song. Also, someone at the Institute is making a set of twelve-month cups.” Bai would never trade his most prized artist contacts, like his highly esteemed friend Potter Yu, on this modest bargain. “Now if I may have the benefit of your opinion.” Bai brought out a photograph of a Qianlong overglaze enamel vase.

Ng looked at it, tipped down his glasses. “Lovely. It is very like one that has been written up in the Idemitsu collection.” He went to his side wall and pulled an exhibition catalog from a long, tight-packed shelf. “See,” he said, opening the book.

Bai saw. The style of decoration, the range of hues from the famille-verte palette, the particular mustard and brick and green, the pattern along the rim. “Trouble you to copy this page?” he asked.

“Of course.” Dealer Ng processed a few pages through a machine and handed them over, to the ah chan’s ornate thanks.

They settled in cash. As soon as the Mainland man was paid, Ng felt impatient for him to leave. The dealer wanted to be alone with his new acquisitions, to call his most treasured friends. He would close the shop, they’d come over, he’d bring out his best tea. Ah, if others knew the delight of holding objects of divine beauty for a time, having them to show your friends-if others knew, everyone would want them. And everyone would become an art dealer.

Bai sensed the dismissal. He offered a concise string of formal thanks and good-byes. But even as the ah chan turned to the door, his cell phone was ringing and he was digging it out to answer it. “Ei!” he said when he heard his friend’s voice. “Now? Yes? All right. The Luk Yu. I’ll be right there.” He turned back again, inclined his head once more, and was gone.

Ng Fan watched him through the glass until he vanished beyond the edge of the gallery’s windows. The dealer went to the front door and locked it. He dialed down the store lights. Then he drew out his mobile and called his friend Stanley Pao.

“Ei,” Stanley answered.

“It’s me,” Ng Fan said. He listened. Through the phone he could hear the air conditioner going there in Stanley’s porcelain room. He could see Stanley sitting there, white hair slicked back, comfortable paunch, face lined in well-lived elegance. “I have a few things for you,” Ng said. “Some real stars.”

“Mmm.” The older man’s voice took its time, as always, to consider. Then he said: “I’ll come over.”

Michael Doyle had slipped a note under her door with the address of a teahouse on Dizhimen and the time, seven o’clock, and when she got there she found him waiting, talking to a Chinese man in his forties with a gray ponytail. They waved her to their table.

“Lia Frank,” Doyle said with a brief gesture, “meet An Xing.” The American man gleamed with delight. He sat upright, pulled in around his center, hands on the table.

“Fan Luo Na,” Lia said, indicating herself. “Pleased.” She and An exchanged cards.

“Ah, you are a real specialist,” An said, looking at her card.

She laughed, pushing this away as she glanced at his. “You work at Chongwen Hospital too?”

“You speak,” he said. “Very good. Yes. We work in the same research.”

“Right. The lead project.”

“Yes. You know, Tong Madou”-Michael’s Chinese name-“has told me you are very good at spotting fakes.”

“Well,” she said, “I hope so. It’s my job.”

An snapped open a black faux-lizard attaché case. “Take a look at these.”

She started. Inside were dozens of pairs of sunglasses in neat rows, all expensive designer models. “Whoa, some collection.”

“Thank you. Miss Fan, I hope it is some fun we can have. It’s like this. These are the real lines, the current imported designer glasses. Look closely. Then we’ll go out in the street, where they are selling them; we’ll look for fakes.”

“Okay…” She looked again at the glasses, not connecting with the reason for this. Of course they’d find fakes. Fakes were everywhere in China. There was a huge demand for products, especially name brands. Everybody wanted to be a player, and if real props weren’t available, fakes would do. So fakes abounded. “But why?” she said.

Doyle leaned his upper body forward a few inches. “There’s a law in Beijing,” he said in English. “If you catch someone selling you a fake, they have to return you double your money. Double!”

“That’s interesting.”

“Theoretically at least, the consumer does have a few rights. But making it happen”-he grinned across the table-“that takes a man like An.”

“Yes,” the Chinese man said. “And it’s true that right now I specialize in sunglasses. But I do whatever interests me at the moment.” He held up a pair of Lauren frames. “These are nice.”

She picked up the soft cable of her hair and looped it back over her shoulder. She could feel the American’s eyes on the expert turn of her hand. “They are nice,” she agreed.

“I will tell you,” An said. “There are more subtle distinctions than you think. This is high academic stuff. Seriously.”

The waitress brought their tea. Lia had ordered pine flavor, a tall frozen-slush mix of tea, milk, sugar, and sweet pine essence. They drank and talked, and all the while she studied the contents of the case. Prada and Fendi and Dior, frames gleaming in the open case.

“Okay,” she said when everyone had drained their glasses, “I’m ready.” They went out and walked down the boulevard, and after a while turned east into Han Leng Hutong. She could see it was a prime spot to look for fakes, a lane crowded with upscale stores. In front of the stores stretched a long bank of stalls selling sweaters and cookware and hairpieces and toys, lots of voices and bantering and people.

“Halfway down on the right,” An said. “See that store? You’re a foreigner. It’s perfect. Go in alone.”

“Okay.” She walked away from him and Michael. The light cloth of her skirt eddied at her knees. She could feel them watching her from behind.

Here was the shop; she turned and went in. The bell tinkled above the door. It was crisply air-conditioned. All the sunglasses were arrayed on Lucite shelves, plenty of space between them as befitted their price tags. Lia walked slowly around the store, taking the glasses in, snapshot-quick at first and then pausing, combing through the details. Armani had the gilt shadow drop behind the logo. Blass had the oval paper label on the earpiece, electric blue. Prada had a certain tag. And this was Western civilization.

Then she came on a sleek pair of black and silver Fendi wraparounds. One glance, nothing. Second glance, she felt the secret righteousness start to rise. Oh yes. This pair was not right.

The tag didn’t have the quota import code. It had to, if it had come from Italy.

She looked at it a little more, then pretended to occupy herself with several more pairs. After a minute she left. She walked up the hutong to them. Michael stood with his hands in his pockets, loose button-down shirt tucked in. In contrast to his top half, she saw he had such narrow hips and legs that his khakis fell all but uninterrupted from his belt.

“Hey,” she said, a quick, smiling American syllable, and then turned to An in Chinese. “Are you ready? Fendis. Center, a little to the right when you walk in. Black and silver. The quota code is missing from the tag.”

“Fan Luo Na!” he said. “You’re keen as a knife.” He handed the case to Michael and was gone.

“Impressive,” Doyle said with a smile.

“Come on.” She saw that his eyeteeth pushed out a little. She liked that. He had a round mouth and it might have been too sweet, on a man, but the teeth gave him an air of license, so she noticed anytime he smiled, she wanted to smile too. “How long have you lived here?” she said.

“Eight months. I’m on a two-year fellowship.”

“It’s a choice.”

“It is.”

“Why China? Just the work?”

“No,” he said. His small brown eyes, deep-set under low brows, glanced away from her. “It’s never just the work, is it?”

“Not usually.”

He gave a small rumbling laugh that said he was weak, only a man, but at least he forgave himself. “Here’s what happened. I had cancer. It was bad. In the end I beat it, at least into remission. Although that’s the thing about cancer, it’s always there with you. Even if it seems to be gone.” He stopped and looked at her. He wanted her to hear him. There was a zing of connection between them, he could feel it, and as he’d learned over time, that meant she could feel it too. But he was a poor risk for any placement of affections. She was nice, he didn’t want to hurt her. He thought of himself as honorable. He was the big-shouldered, well-meaning one who was always kind to women, took care not to use them, was not above taking pleasure just for pleasure but was careful where he took it. He pushed the fine, straight hair off his forehead. “And so you can never really be sure about things. Anyway, then, at least, I got better. And after that my wife and I split up. So.” He pushed his hands deep down in his pockets. “Good time to move.”

“I guess so. My God.”

“Life,” he said.

“Life. I’m glad you’re okay, though. Really. I am.”

“Well.” He rolled his eyes, the who-knows roll.

She was looking at him carefully. “I understand something about your room now,” she said. “I saw it. It’s very plain. It’s not like the other rooms in the court, is it? It’s more like someone’s way station. At the time, I couldn’t understand it. And now you tell me this, and I do.”

He was a few beats back. “You saw my room?”

“Yes. I was walking through the guesthouse. This was before we met. I just walked back there without thinking. You turned on the light. I stood there for a minute and watched you through the window.”

“Ah.”

“Just for a minute. And then I left.” She paused. “I hoped I’d meet you.”

“And you did.” He liked looking at her, straight across. She was tall. He’d always felt so much bigger than the women he was with. “And what about you?” he said. “What’s your reason for being here?”

“But I’m only here a short time. I live in New York.”

“In your mind,” he clarified. “Work.”

“Oh. Right, that way I’m always here. But not the modern here! I mean”-she raised a long hand to the pounding, honking, chattering street around them where they stood, waiting for An-“this is all strange to me. I’m back in the history of China, the art.”

“You still haven’t told me the reason. I mean, you and China.”

“Oh, I think I knew as soon as I was born that it was time to move someplace else.”

“Did you,” he said, and she thought he was looking at her ears, but actually he was looking beyond her shoulder. “Here he comes.”

“Ei,” said An, walking up. “Success.”

“What'd you get?” Michael said, his broad face public again, his grin social.

“Two pairs! I had the man confirm that they were real, on the receipt, before I said anything.”

“Excellent,” Doyle said.

“Oh yes. Beyond excellent. And now fourteen hundred has become twenty-eight hundred ren min bi.”

Lia raised a hand to protest. “That’s a lot of money for him to pay you.”

“There is a law!” An replied. “If a man sells a fake, he refunds you double! If the law is not enforced, nothing will ever change.”

“Rule of law,” Michael said. “Consistent, systemic rule of law is the road to change in China. My man’s got a point.”

“Okay. Overruled.”

“You see.” He leaned close to her. “An does this as a man of principle.”

“Actually I’m the Robin Hood of Beijing,” An twinkled in Chinese. “You may think of me that way if you like.”

“Oh well,” Lia laughed. “Thanks. I’m honored.” She was aware of standing close to Michael.

An touched the wad of cash in his pocket. “And now let’s go out to dinner. You’ll give your choices, yes or no?”

“Jinyang,” Michael said at once.

“You always want to go to Jinyang,” An said.

“You’re right, I do, I’m hopeless. But it should be what our guest wants.” Michael turned to Lia. “What do you feel like eating?”

“What’s Jinyang?”

“A Shanxi place. They use a brown vinegar on everything.”

“Is it good? Is it authentic?”

“Authentic?” said An. “Oh! Very. They are bringing that special vinegar all the way from Shanxi in gourds.”

“Well then.” She looked around her for a second, at the imported cars, the fast-food chains, the towering Western-style buildings. “Sure.”

“Wonderful!” An was giddy from having made so much money so quickly. “Miss Fan. I know you are a master of porcelain.”

“A student,” she corrected him.

“Don’t be polite. I have a pot you must see. It’s a Kangxi bowl, damaged, but special. From my family’s collection. Will you see it and have tea?”

“With pleasure.”

“An Xing,” Doyle joked. “Are you pressing my social schedule?”

An turned in a show of surprise. “Did I invite you?” he said. “Did I hear myself? However”-he was so magnanimous-“you may come along if you like. If you’re nice to me.”

“Enough,” Lia said. “Let’s go eat.”