Ghost Hero

A pause. “Searching for the Chaus?”

“Yes.”

“For another collector?”

“No. For Kah Ching.” To his blank look, I said, “The Columbia professor?”

“Oh. Oh, right, of course.”

“He wants to debunk them. He thinks they’re phonies. I also thought you should know that someone took a shot at him.”

Dunbar’s beer stopped halfway to his mouth. “Took a— What are you talking about? At who? The professor?”

“At the other PI. Through his office window. Made a mess, but didn’t hit him.”

“Who? Who shot at him?”

“I don’t know. And a couple of other things I don’t know. For example: Who are you?”

“I—wait, what’s going on here?”

My cranberry juice arrived, perfectly timed. I steered the straw to my mouth, gave my client another moment to stew. “Jeff Dunbar’s not your name and you’re not a collector. There’s no such person as Jeff Dunbar. For your information there’s no Professor Kah Ching, either. There is another PI on the case, though, and if you knew anything about the art world you’d have hired him, not me. I don’t know what your real interest is, whether it’s the paintings, because they’re worth a fortune, or something else.” I sipped again, gave him just enough time to open his mouth, and went on before he could speak. “Now, that doesn’t necessarily matter. You’re not required to tell me the truth. But I’m also not required to tell you anything. I’ve picked up a few leads. Since people are shooting guns around, though, and since someone came to my office and tried to buy me off, and threatened me when I refused—”

“Threatened you?”

“Yes. So you can understand that I’m reluctant to take this any further until I know what’s really going on.”

Jeff Dunbar looked at me with a steady gaze. “You took my money. Anything you learned, you learned on my dime.”

“And the man who came to my office and told me I’d be sorry if I didn’t stop? He was on your dime, too.”

A slight pause. “Who was he?”

“I don’t know. A Chinese gent calling himself Samuel Wing, though I have a feeling that’s as phony as ‘Jeff Dunbar.’” I met his eyes and I shut up.

After a few long moments, Dunbar nodded. He drank some beer and said, “You’re right.” His tone was conciliatory. “Jeff Dunbar’s an alias. For reasons I don’t want to go into I’d rather keep my name out of this. My interest in the paintings is legitimate. I don’t know anyone named Wing, I don’t know why someone would threaten you, and I certainly have no idea who’d shoot at some other detective. I’m absolutely sure, in fact, that that has nothing to do with me.”

“You could be right.” I softened, too, to show that while we may not be on the same page, we might be able to arrive there. “But that doesn’t mean it has nothing to do with the paintings.”

“But it does mean I can’t be held responsible for it.”

“Maybe you can’t, but it did happen. In view of that, and of Mr. Wing’s visit and his threats, your blamelessness doesn’t necessarily make me feel secure. And ‘legitimate’ is a nice-sounding word but I’m not sure what it means in this context.”

Dunbar looked to the windows. Cars whizzed by on the highway; beyond them, the river gleamed in the late sun. “The other investigator. Do you know who hired him?”

“Yes, but I’m not sure why. And I’m not going to tell you.” He started to object, so I added, “Any more than I told him who you are.”

“He knows I exist?”

“He knows I have a client interested in the same thing he is. His PI told him. That’s one of the reasons I wanted to get together with you. To even up the flow of information.”

We sat in our own cone of silence in the noisy bar. Finally, Dunbar said, “You say you’ve picked up some leads. Information about where the paintings are?”

“Possibly. I haven’t checked them out yet.”

“Why don’t you give them to me? That can be the end. I’ll follow through. You’ll be out of it, and no one will have any reason to threaten you. It’s only been one day, but you can keep the whole retainer. To compensate for the trouble this has caused you.”

From the corner of my eye I saw Jack take out his phone, slip off his barstool, and thread his unhurried way to the door. I wondered what was up. He’d gotten a call and it was too noisy to talk in here? With my back to the door I couldn’t see him leave, but I did see a brightening in the bar when the door opened. Whatever. He was a grown-up. I turned my focus back to my client. “That’s a generous offer.”

“No more than deserved, I’d say.”

“Samuel Wing, before he tried very elegantly to bully me, offered me ten times what you’d paid.”

“I see.” Jeff Dunbar took a long pull on his beer. “All right, point taken. You can’t be bought.”

“Yes, I can. Just not with money. I want to know what’s going on. Why you want me to find these paintings, why Samuel Wing doesn’t, what the other PI’s client wants.” Or wanted. And doesn’t now. “Who you are. Whether Ghost Hero Chau is still alive.”

He gave a small smile. “That last question, that’s the big one, isn’t it? The rest, I know some of those answers, and I don’t know others. But I’m not going to tell you any of them until you tell me what you know about where the paintings are.”

“I don’t know anything. I have some leads. They might turn out to be total dead ends.”

“Still, I want them.”

“And I want to know who I’m giving them to.”

“The client who’s paid for them.”

After a stand-off moment I slung my bag up from the floor. “I’ll return your money.” I ran the zipper. It was one heck of a bluff; of course I wasn’t carrying his thousand dollars around.

“No,” he said quickly. “No, don’t do that.”

Slowly, I zipped the bag again. “What, then?”

He looked across the room, across the highway. “Samuel Wing. I may know who that is.”

“You just said you didn’t.”

“I said I don’t know anyone by that name. But I might know who’s using it. If I’m right, I promise you he’s not dangerous.”

From the ineptitude of Samuel Wing’s menace I’d come to the same conclusion, but I didn’t see why I should share that. “Maybe he’s not. But maybe he is. And maybe he’s not who you think. Tell me about him.”

“No. But I’ll find out. If I’m wrong I’ll let you know.”

“And if you’re right?”

“I’d like you to continue your investigation.”

“Just like that? I’m supposed to believe you that Samuel Whoever’s not a threat, and the guy who is, who’s spraying bullets around, isn’t going to come for me? And that you’re the good guys and this whole investigation’s ‘legitimate’?”

Jeff Dunbar sighed. “Ms. Chin, it’s important those paintings be found. Not just to me. There are other … interested parties. I can’t tell you why, not right now. I can tell you, it’s not about money.”

“No?”

“No.”

“What is it about?”

He shook his head. “I’m sorry.”

I considered digging in, but the set of his mouth told me that would go nowhere. “All right,” I said. “Maybe I believe that: It’s not about money to you. Or your interested parties. But Samuel Wing claimed to be representing interested parties, too. And the guy with the bullets? Or the other PI’s client? It could be about money to them, couldn’t it?”

And speaking of the other PI, where had Jack gone?

“I don’t know,” Jeff Dunbar said. “But I’ll try to find out.”

“You can find out what those people want, but you can’t find the Chaus?”

He shook his head. “No. What I can try to find out is whether any of my interested parties are any of those people. Wing, or the shooter, or the other client.”

“Well,” I said after a long pause, “you do that. And here’s what I’ll do. I’ll keep looking. As long as no one shoots at me.” Not that that’s ever stopped me before, but that was another thing I felt no need to share. “But if I find the Chaus, I’ll need more than ‘it’s important’ before I give the information to someone whose name I don’t even know. Is that a deal?”

He nodded. “For now.”

He took a last swig of his beer, dropped a twenty on the table—from a money clip, not a wallet, which was just as well, because I might have swiped it to get at the driver’s license—and stood. “Why don’t you stay and finish your drink? Instead of following me.” He smiled. “I’ll be in touch.”

“Fine,” I said. “But one more thing.”

He paused, waited.

“What should I call you?”

He cocked his head. “Jeff Dunbar. I always liked the name Jeff.”

He turned and left.

I had, of course, been planning to count to ten, dash out after him, and tiptoe up the sidewalk to see where he went. But he’d stuck a pin in that idea.

So I stayed, drank up my cranberry juice, and let Jimmy Buffett work his way through “Margaritaville.” Jack wasn’t anywhere. Maybe that meant he’d stayed outside, and had at least seen which direction my client had fled in. I hefted my bag and gave up my chair, to the smiling gratitude of the young couple who’d been vulturing this spot ever since Jeff Dunbar left.

Outside, no Jack. The guy abandoned me? That call had better have been important. A cruising taxi slowed, but nuts to him. I headed for the subway.

On the way I called Bill. Voice mail yet again. His date must be going swimmingly. I left a message. Then I tried Jack.

“Lee.”

“Chin. You hate that bar that much?”

“You have to admit I was right about it.”

“So what?”

“Good point. No, I’m tailing your boy.”

“You’re doing what?”

“As soon as I saw you sit down I’d answered the main question, which was that I don’t know him. I wasn’t sure you were getting anywhere, though. I might be wrong, but it didn’t look like he was giving much away.”

“No, almost nothing.”

“So it occurred to me this might be a chance we didn’t want to miss. You strike me as tough enough to fight your way alone out of a candy-ass bar if you need to.”

“Thanks, I think.”

“No problem. So I got in a cab and told the driver to wait until I pointed out a guy and then follow him. Meter plus fifty bucks. If it turned out Dunbar told you everything, no harm done except I’m out a few bucks. Should I knock it off?”

“No,” I said. “No, I’m in awe. Are you still on him?”

“Yes. Going up the highway, near Lincoln Center.”

“Stay with him. Let me know what happens. What about the phone call?”

“What phone call?”

“You took out your phone when you left.”

“You saw me?”

“Hey, I’m not just a pretty face.”

“Um. Well, no phone call, and not just your face, pretty as it is. Dunbar’s. I snapped a few pix. You’re in one, though. Sweet.”

I clicked off, pocketed the phone, and walked through the Village in the last of the light. Bill was right, it seemed to me. Jack was good at his job.

And speaking of Bill, the phone gave out with “My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys” just as I reached Sheridan Square. I grabbed it and flipped it open. “Oh ho ho, is this you?”

“Hey, I’ve been working really hard here.”

“Don’t tell me about what’s been hard.”

“Oh my God, is that a dirty joke from you?”

“I’ve changed. I’ve spent the afternoon drinking in a dive bar on the waterfront.”

“The whole afternoon?”

“No. First I had to give a stranger some perfectly good oolong tea in my office so he could threaten me without mentioning my mother, then I had to go watch a robot crashing into a pole.”

“Are you speaking English?”

“Where are you? Still tied up with Shayna?”

“You think she’s into that?”

“Why does everyone want to know that?”

“Well, it’s an interesting question. No, she had dinner plans.”

“You weren’t charming enough for her to cancel them?”

“I didn’t want to waste the charm if I didn’t need to.”

“Yes, I can see you’d want to conserve scarce resources. Why didn’t you need to?”

“You know, I don’t think drink agrees with you.”

“It was cranberry juice.”

“That changes things? I didn’t need to because I got what we wanted.”

I drew a sharp breath. “The Chaus? You found out where they are?”

“Where they were, when Shayna saw them. That was a one-week show, though, so they may not be there now.”

“Still, that’s huge. Where are you?”

“Upper East Side. Where are you?”

“West Village. You want to meet in Chinatown? I’m starving.”

“Good idea. What about Aramis?”

“He’s in a cab near Lincoln Center. I’ll call him.”

He didn’t even ask me how I knew that.

* * *

I called Jack, who reported that the cab caravan had left the highway at Seventy-second Street and was heading across town.

“This driver’s a rock star,” he said. “Changes lanes, hangs back, all the good stuff. Rajneesh Jha, from Hyderabad. Grew up on American movies. Thinks he died and went to heaven, tailing another cab for a PI.”

“Lucky you, lucky him,” I said. “When you’re done, Bill and I are going for noodles to New Chao Chow on Mott, north of Canal. Bill knows where the Chaus were when Shayna saw them.”

“You think you have enough Chaus there?”

“If you spoke Chinese like a New Yorker you’d be able to tell them apart.” I spelled the restaurant for him.

“If I spoke Chinese like a New Yorker my mother wouldn’t understand me.”

“Does she understand you now?”

“Everything but my profession. She shudders. She wishes I were respectable, like my older sisters.”

“Mine, too! How many sisters?”

“Two. An endocrinologist and a lawyer. You have sisters?”

“No, four older brothers. Also a doctor and a lawyer, and two more besides.”

“All respectable?”

“Spotlessly.”

“My sympathies. Hey! Hey, I think Dunbar’s cab’s pulling over. Rajneesh, go around the corner and stop.”

“Where are you?”

“Second and Seventy-third. Save me a bowl of noodles. I’ll call you.”

He clicked off.

11

Bill was waiting when I got to New Chao Chow. Rich aromas of pork and fish circled around me. I greeted the chubby manager. “Hey, Tau.”

“Hey, Lydia. You bring appetite? Got good rice stick today. You eat two bowls?” We spoke in English because Tau’s dialect is Fujianese, as incomprehensible to a native Cantonese speaker as, say, Russian would be.

“I’m starved, Tau, so maybe.” There was no possible way I could eat two bowls of Tau’s soups, not rice stick fish soup, pork tendon stew, or anything else, but he was always hopeful.

I dropped into the chair opposite Bill and eyed him critically. “You look worn out. The charm thing takes it out of you, huh?”

“You kidding? I feel great. Like Maurice Chevalier in Gigi.”

“Am I glad I don’t get the reference?”

“Probably.” He took out his phone, handed it to me. “Somewhere in here are the photos.”

“You really should learn to do this,” I said, poking buttons. “Against the day when I’m not around.”

“Am I expecting that day?”

I looked up, thinking I’d heard an odd note in his voice. He seemed normal, though. Not even tired, actually; that had just been me giving him the regular hard time. “No.” A brief mutual pause, then I went back to his phone. A grumpy waiter came over and tried to hand us menus. Bill waved his away, ordered the beef stew noodle soup and a beer. I asked for fish cake rice stick soup and jasmine tea, but then grabbed one of the menus as the waiter turned to leave. “For Jack,” I told Bill.

“He’s joining us?”

“When his workday’s done.”

“Where is he now?”

“Still uptown, tailing Jeff Dunbar.”

“How did that come about?”

“Because he’s as smart as you said. I’d tell you but I can’t do two things at once and I want to see these famous photos. How did you get her to send them to you?”

“Shayna? I told her I was interested in moving into the Chinese-American area. That I was attracted by the hybridized, mongrel nature of it. I implied I was ready to spend money, but I wasn’t sure of myself in the field so I’d need an advisor, a specialist. Threw a bunch of art words around, then said I’d gotten the idea from Doug Haig, my drinking buddy, that Shayna Dylan was the person to ask about contemporary Chinese-American.”

“Her ego’s big enough that she bought that? A big-time dealer directing you to a temporary gallery assistant?”

“Without blinking. Like your client said, Chinese contemporary’s a small world. Haig has no interest in Chinese-American but he’d know who does. Why not throw some business her way? Doesn’t cost anything and now she owes him.”

“The idea of owing Doug Haig almost makes me feel bad for her.”

The waiter plunked down our beer and tea. “Shayna sipped her way through a cosmo and a half, explaining the difference between what the mainland Chinese are doing and what’s happening here. She’s not an airhead, you know.”

“Please don’t feel required to enumerate her good points. I bet you’re planning to put in for a reimbursement for the drinks.”

“Damn right I am. She mentioned one of the artists Linus had me buying. Just in passing, probably to prove we were on the same wavelength.”

“Did she say she’d Googled you?”

“Does anyone ever?”

“Say it or do it? Everyone does it, but mostly people don’t talk about it. She probably assumes you Googled her, too.”

“Really? Maybe I should have.”

“If only someone taught you how.”

He raised his beer in a toast. “She described the newest developments on the Chinese-American scene and offered to take me around looking. She even asked whether I thought you’d want to come.”

“Would I?”

“Not a chance. You only like tomb trash. Fusty stuff.”

“That explains why I hang out with you, no doubt.”

“She said she’d gotten that idea about you, but of course everyone has a right to their own taste. She said that with a lovely, tolerant smile.”

“Showing her pointy little teeth.”

“I kept asking for descriptions of the art, this absolute newest cutting-edge stuff, and finally she remembered she had some photos on her phone. She’d shown them to Doug. He’d actually been interested in one, but she didn’t think anything had come of it.”

“‘Doug’? ”

“Hey, Shayna’s on a first name basis with the best.”

“She call you Vlad?”

“Of course. So she showed me what she had—”

“Meaning the photos—”

“And I oohed and aahed over about a dozen—”

“I’d like to have seen that. You oohing and ahhing.”

“—and I asked her to send them to me. Including but not making a big deal out of the one she said Doug liked.”

“Here.” I finally found Shayna’s e-mail in the mess on Bill’s phone, and downloaded the photos. “You know you have two text messages from her, too?”

“No, I didn’t. What do they say?”

I opened them. “The first says, ‘Here u go. Thnx 4 the drink—had a gr8 time.’ The next says, ‘When u want 2 see work, call me.’” I clicked through the photos, stopped when Bill said, “That one. There, in the background on the right.”

“Well.” I squinted. “Well. The mummy’s treasure. Okay, they definitely look like what I saw when I Googled Chau. He had a distinctive style. I suppose if you were Haig and you knew his work you’d know whether you’d ever seen them, and if you hadn’t you’d think they might be new. But in the background and tiny like this—how could anyone be sure they were real?”

“I don’t think anyone could. Given their value if they were, though, they’d be worth checking out.”

“So where were they when she took this?”

“At an open studio in Flushing. About two dozen artists rent a warehouse communally out there. It’s Chinese Artist Central—ABCs, Chinese-born immigrants, a couple of Taiwanese, a pair of twins from Singapore. The place calls itself East Village, after an artist’s district in Beijing in the eighties that named itself after the East Village here in New York. Very meta, you know?”

“I don’t know, but okay. Go on.”

“Two weeks ago another two dozen artists moved in for the week, and everyone hung work all over the place and waited for the buyers and dealers and critics to come.”

“Did they?”

“To a certain extent, apparently. Not the biggest names, but the hip and the cool. That’s why Shayna went. Contemporary’s her passion, remember, not antiquities.”

“And yet she dated you. So whose studio were these in?”

“She doesn’t know. What she was shooting was that sculpture there. The aluminum foil one? She gave me his name, that artist. But the papercuttings where the Chaus are, she wasn’t interested so she doesn’t remember who made them.”

“And this was what Doug Haig was excited about? This photo?”

“Yes, though Shayna thinks it was the aluminum foil that lit his flame. She tried to get me worked up about it, too. I think I disappointed her when I asked about the papercuttings.”

I studied the tiny photo. “It must be one of the artists who rent the building,” I said. “That must be his studio.”

“Or one of the visitors.”

“Well, but why would anyone bring phony Chaus to a temporary show? If they were trying to get people to notice their own work? And even less, why would they bring real ones? I think that’s someone’s studio and, real or fake, the artist put them up for inspiration while he works. Artists do that, right?”

“They do. Or they may be his. Not in the sense that he owns them, but that he made them. It’s a Chinese tradition to copy famous works. It helps train the artist’s eye.”

“Really?” I sat back. “So maybe that’s all these are, then. Somebody’s really good copies. And everybody got carried away.” I frowned. “They’d have to be awfully good, though, to fool Doug Haig.”

“If he’s actually seen them.”

“He has. He’s the one spreading the rumors.”

“He is?”

I recounted what Jack and I had been told by Eddie To. “And the whole thing about the political content, too. You can’t tell that from these tiny photos. If he’s saying that he’d have to have seen them.”

Our soup arrived. The monster basins of steaming broth sloshed over with noodles, rice sticks, meat, fish, and greens. The briny tang of my soup and the gamey scent of Bill’s nearly knocked me over.

“But,” I said, arguing with myself as I doctored my bowl with fish flakes, “if the Chaus were hanging in someone’s studio for who knows how long, how come no one noticed them before? Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe they really were brought out to Flushing for that show.”

“Or maybe all these cutting-edge people don’t know what a Chau looks like. Shayna went right past them.”

“The artists, though? You’d think they would. He’s part of their cultural heritage.”

“Maybe not. They’re young. Chau may have been a hero around Tiananmen, but that was more than twenty years ago. Especially if he worked in traditional media with traditional subjects—”

“—politicized, though—”

“—doesn’t matter. I bet he’s been pretty much forgotten. You know,” he said, winding noodles onto his chopsticks, “that group studio and that show, they sound right up Jack’s alley. Even if he didn’t go, I’ll bet he heard about it.”

“We can ask him when he gets here.”

“Ask him what? Because he’s here,” said Jack, his shadow falling over the fluorescent-lit table. “Wow. I’ll have one of each.”

“The soup? Or us?”

“Sorry, but I’m hungry. The soup.” He slid onto a chair and studied the menu. “What’s good here?”

“Anything in a bowl. Tell me who my client is.”

“Hmm,” he said. “What’s wrong with that sentence? Eight treasure soup with bean curd,” he said to the waiter. “And a Tsingtao.” He peered at Bill. “You don’t look any the worse for wear. Have fun?”

“Are you kidding? It was exhausting. Sitting in a hushed bar over a Booker’s, watching a beautiful woman sip a pink drink?”

“Your dedication is noted,” I said. “Jack?”

“Hey, come on. Didn’t you say something on the phone about knowing where the Chaus are? Isn’t that why I came all the way to Chinatown?”

“You came for noodles, don’t lie to me. And we know where they were. Which we’ll share, after you share.”

“Seriously? You’re going to hold out until I tell?”

“I wouldn’t, but you’re obviously bursting to tell.”

“How well you know me. Must be the long acquaintance.” Grinning, Jack sat back and stretched his long legs under the table. “Dennis Jerrold.”

“That’s his real name? He just reversed his initials? That shows a singular lack of imagination. Who is he?”

“I don’t know who he is, and that’s not necessarily his real name. It’s the name he lives under.”

“Talmudic,” I said. “And you know that how?”

“Is this where we start exchanging trade secrets?” The waiter clanked Jack’s beer onto the tabletop. After a long pull on the bottle, he said, “I left my cab around the corner and saw him go into one of those white brick apartment buildings on Second.”

“And someone’s going to tell me how you came to be tailing him in the first place, right?” Bill stuck in.

“Maybe,” I said. “Go on.”

“I gave him a minute and then went to the doorman. ‘Guy just come in,’ I said. ‘Just at my lestalant. Reave his cledit cald.’”

“You didn’t. The Chinese waiter scam? With that accent?”

“Works every time. ‘You mean Mr. Jerrold?’ ‘No, Mistah Dunbal. Medium guy, glay suit, brue tie. Just come in.’ ‘The man in the gray suit who just came in, that was Mr. Jerrold.’ ‘Oh. You shoe?’ Big glare. ‘Oh, so solly. Must be mistaken. Good-bye, got to find Mistah Dunbal.’”

“That’s really, really awful,” I said.

“Reary,” Bill agreed.

Jack drank more beer. “We do what we have to. Some suffer with blondes in dim bars, some use politically incorrect accents. I checked whitepages.com on my way here, found his first name. Haven’t gotten any further than that yet.”

“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “That’s what cousins are for.” I took out my phone and hit the speed-dial number.

“Wong Security.”

“Linus, hi. Thanks for that stuff before. It seems to have worked.”

“Awesome! Bill got the girl?”

“He got the info, which is what we were after. Listen, I know it’s late—you up for another job?”

“He needs to be somebody else now?”

“No, this would be totally different, and easier.”

“We’re thinking of going to a club at, like, nine, can I do it before that?”

“I think you can do it in five minutes. A guy named Dennis Jerrold, lives on Second Avenue.” I relayed the address Jack gave me. “Who he is, what he does—I want to know whatever you can find by whenever you have to leave.”

“Easy peasy, call you later.”

“Wait! I just thought of something. Have to put you on hold.”

“’K.”

I did, checked my outgoing call record, and thumbed him back in. “Can you trace a phone number?”

“Is that a trick question?”

I gave him Samuel Wing’s cell.

“Who’s that?”

“That’s what I want to know.”

As I clicked off, Jack’s soup arrived. “Umm.” He sniffed. “Smells as good as my mother’s.”

“Your mother’s from Fujian?”

“My mother’s from Chicago. She takes a lot of cooking classes. Makes a hell of a pile of potato latkes, too. Now, your turn.”

Bill reached for his phone so I could show Jack the Chaus. Before he got it out of his pocket, though, my own phone rang. An unfamiliar number, so I answered in both languages.

“Hello, this is R. T. Singh calling.” The voice spoke English with the lilt of India. “You have said you lost an object in my taxi this afternoon?”

Samuel Wing’s cabbie! I’d just about forgotten. “Yes, Mr. Singh, thank you for calling. Yes, I think I might have lost something. Though it wasn’t an object.”

“I don’t understand, I am sorry.”

“It was my husband.”

Cautiously, he said, “Please?” while the men at my table exchanged surprised looks.

“Mr. Singh, you picked up a Chinese man at four on Hudson Street. He’s thin, with gray hair. He was wearing a gray suit? That’s my husband. I’m afraid—” I let my voice catch, then went on. “I’m afraid he was going to see … He was on his way … Mr. Singh, I think he has a mistress!”

“Oh. Oh, my. I—” said R. T. Singh. Bill and Jack were grinning, so I turned to the wall. Unfortunately, it was a mirror. They were inescapable.

“All I want, Mr. Singh, is to know where he was going. I’ll pay you for that. It’s just, not knowing, do you understand? It’s driving me crazy!” As were Jack’s and Bill’s merry stares.

“Now I see,” R. T. Singh said slowly. “Because when I received the e-mail, I said to myself, you did not have a woman passenger this afternoon at the time the alert is telling you, I think so. But Mrs. Chin—”

“Please, call me Lydia.”

“Mrs. Chin, I do not like to be indiscreet.”

“Of course not. And I wouldn’t ask you. But I have to know! Maybe I’m wrong. That’s what I’m hoping, you see. That I have it all wrong and we can laugh about it later. But I look at the children—our youngest looks just like him—and I start to cry. Please? I’ll send you a reward, I really will. I just have to know! Where did he go?”

After a short pause, he said, “Please. No reward. I prefer not to become involved in affairs such as these. I will tell you where I took the gentleman and after that I will delete your telephone number. If mine has appeared in your telephone record I ask that you delete it, also.”

“I promise! Can you check now?”

“There is nothing I need check. I remember because I was saying a prayer, that he does not want to turn about and go downtown. To get stuck in the Holland Tunnel traffic, you see, that was my worry. Luck was by my side, however. The address the gentleman requested allowed us to take the West Side Highway not south, but north. The Lincoln Tunnel can of course be a problem at that hour, also, but the tie-up was not bad, and we reached his destination soon after passing through that jam.”

To a woodpecker, the world’s a tree. To a cabbie, it’s all about the traffic. “Yes,” I said, with impressive self-control. “His destination, which was where?”

“Right at the next exit beyond the tunnel. Twelfth Avenue, at the foot of Forty-second Street. I left him on the south side, as that was where I turned. But he crossed to the north side while I drove away.”

I was temporarily speechless. “Did he go into the building there? On the northeast corner?”

“I believe he did. I am sorry, Mrs. Chin, if this is what you feared.”

“I—no, Mr. Singh, I’m better off knowing. Are you sure I can’t send you something to show my gratitude?”

“No, as I say, I don’t want to become involved, I think so. I hope for you everything works out well.”

“Thank you,” I said automatically. “I hope the same for you.”

I clicked off and stared at the guys. They exchanged glances. “What’s up?” Bill said. “You look a little stunned. What was that about?”

“I’m not sure,” I said slowly. “Remember I told you someone came to my office and threatened me?”

“Circuitously, yes. I wasn’t sure you were serious. You didn’t sound worried.”

“I didn’t think he was serious, so I wasn’t.”

“Are you now?”

“I honestly don’t know. The guy—he said his name was Samuel Wing—told me he represented some people who wanted me to stop looking for the Chaus. He wouldn’t say who or why they cared but he was ready to hand me ten thousand in cash and when I turned him down he sweetened the offer. When I threw him out he suggested I reconsider or else, but there was no or else.”

“That was when he didn’t mention your mother? Now I get it.”

“Yes.” I pointed at my phone. “That was his cab driver. I left him a message before. He dropped Wing, or whoever he is, on Twelfth and Forty-second and saw him go into the building on the northeast corner.”

“Oh,” said Bill. “Damn.”

“What?” Jack demanded.

I asked, “You’ve never been to the mother ship, have you?”

“Hong Kong,” Jack said. “Not the mainland. Why?”

“You don’t need a visa for Hong Kong. I haven’t been to the mainland, either. But I’ve had relatives go back and forth over the years. Sometimes they need someone to pick up visas, papers, something, at the Chinese Consulate here.”

“At the— Is that it? Where Wing went?”

“Forty-second and Twelfth. Northeast corner. There’s nothing else there.”

Silence covered our table in the clinking and slurping around us. “You called it,” Jack said. “You said, from the mainland, but here a long time.”

“You knew about this guy?” Bill asked Jack.

“You’d have known, too, if the bar you were in hadn’t been quite so hushed,” I retorted. “Listen, you guys. The Chinese government?”

“Or, one diplomat, freelancing,” Bill said.

“To what end?”

“The same end as our other interested parties? He sees a chance to hit it big?”

“Well, but hold it,” Jack said. “Maybe we’re jumping to the wrong conclusion. Why can’t it be just one guy, a civilian, doing two errands in one afternoon? Trying to buy you off: bad. And picking up papers from the Consulate: innocent. Unrelated.”

I shook my head. “Nice try, but too late in the day. They close to the public at three. I’ve been on lines there often enough. If he got in the building this late, he works there. But come on. The Chinese government?”

Bill shook his head. “If he’s really a diplomat he’s got to be freelancing. If the Chinese government wanted you to knock something off they’d go to our government. The State Department or the CIA.”

“Maybe they tried, but the State Department doesn’t want to do the PRC’s dirty work.”

“I have to think they’d rather do that than let the PRC do its own, going up in the face of an American citizen.”

“Or maybe this is about something the PRC doesn’t want to share with the State Department,” Jack said.

“Like what?” I asked.

“Chau was a political pain when he was alive. Maybe he’d be a pain again if he were alive again.”

“But then, wouldn’t Wing be trying to buy my information, not scare me off? Wouldn’t he want to find out where the paintings are and whether he has a problem?”

Bill said, “Not if he knows already.”

“Oh.” I stopped a spoonful of salty broth on its way to my mouth. “Oh.” I was considering the ramifications of that when my phone rang again. In some restaurants this much cell phone usage might fetch dirty looks, or even get us ejected. But this was a Chinatown noodle dive. Half the customers, the waiter, and Tau at the front, were working their own hustles on their own cell phones. “Linus,” I answered it. “You have something?”

“I’m still working. But I found some stuff you want right away.”

“I do? Tell me.”

“I don’t know what you’re into, but you might want to, like, tiptoe. First, that phone number. I hit a wall. But not a regular wall. My phone company dude said, ‘Dude, you can’t have that and you don’t want it.’”

“What does that mean?”

“Well, see, most of what my phone company dudes do for me, it’s technically, you know, illegal?”

“Technically?”

“Yeah, but, see, there’s like a line. Stuff they’ll do, and the other stuff. Like, this number, giving me anything about it, it’s not just illegal. It’s, like, deeply illegal. You dig?”

His earnestness as he tried to explain the nuances was almost funny. “Okay, I get it, and back off it. I don’t want you doing anything deeply illegal because of me. But what does it mean?”

“It means it’s, like, a government phone.”

“It’s like a government phone? Or it is a government phone?”

“No, not it is, necessarily. But it’s, like, a phone the Feds care about. Guys like me can’t trace it and neither, by the way, can the NYPD, unless the Feds say they can. Not the owner or the call history. By ‘can’t,’” he added quickly, “I mean my phone company dude won’t help. But I know some other dudes. Serious guys.” Reestablishing his bona fides. “You want me to find someone, or what?”

“Don’t sound so eager. I don’t think we need to. Just tell me, is this the kind of protection a foreign diplomat’s phone would have?”

That made him pause. “’Zactly. What, you’re like, Dancing with Spies?”

“It would be a spy?”

“Not necessarily. Actually, probably not a spy, they’d have their own tech. This, it’s just to be polite. Something our guys do for VIPs when someone asks them to, so when they make a date to go to, like, Stringfellows, it doesn’t end up on Page Six. But what I mean, they don’t just do it for anybody. If this dude that has this phone is from somewhere else, he’s probably pretty high up in whoever’s government we’re talking about. What’s going on?”

“I’m not telling you so you don’t have to deny anything.”

“Hey! Uncool! I—”

“Did you say you had something else?”

“Oh, man, I should hold out on you until you talk. Uh-oh, Trella’s giving me a look. Never mind, here’s the rest: the government. They’re, like, everywhere. Your Dennis Jerrold dude? That’s where he works. But not some foreign government. Our government. He’s with the State Department.”

12

Linus filled me in, I told him to keep digging, hung up, and turned to the guys. “Hoo boy.”

“What’s up?” Bill echoed himself from my last phone call.

“I wish I knew.” I told them what Linus had said about Samuel Wing’s phone, and then about Dennis Jerrold. “Chances are this won’t surprise you, but Linus says Jerrold’s on the China desk. Cultural affairs. Mid-level. Not a newbie, but not senior.”

Jack gave his drawn-out, “Re-eally?” Then he said, “But the PRC guy, Wing, he is senior. According to Linus.”

“To have that phone protection. Seems that way.”

Jack looked at Bill. “You said if the PRC government wanted to stop Lydia, they’d have gone to the State Department. Well, here’s the State Department.”

“But not trying to stop me,” I objected. “Dunbar, or Jerrold or whoever he is, is the one who got all this started in the first place.”

Bill said, “Unless he’s freelancing, too.”

“You think there’s that much of that going around?”

“It makes sense. Otherwise why meet you in a tea shop and use a phony name? If the State Department wants to find the Chaus, they have all kinds of resources. Why go to a PI? But if Dunbar heard about the Chaus in the course of his work and is trying to get over without his bosses finding out, that makes the stakes pretty high if he gets caught. Even if he’s not committing a crime, it would be the end of his diplomatic career.” Bill turned to Jack. “I wonder if your client’s working for someone’s government, too.”

Quick swallow of soup. “You must have missed it. I don’t have a client.”

“What?”

“I got canned.”

“I thought you specifically didn’t get canned.”

“Until Dr. Yang thought about it. He called about five-thirty and told me I specifically was canned.”

“Why?”

“He changed his mind.”

“About?”

“Me. No, I don’t believe it and no, I don’t know what’s going on.” Jack scooped up the last of his eight-treasure tofu.

“So why are you here?”

“Instead of back in my office, washing my hands of all this? You think, just for the chance of finding something to do that might turn out to be both safe and profitable—not to mention actually doable—I’d miss noodles this good?”

“You didn’t know how good they were when you came down here,” I pointed out.

“Hey, do I have to remind you which of us got shot at?” Jack crumpled his napkin into his empty bowl. “I have a stake in this and getting pink-slipped just fanned my flame.”

“I knew I liked you.” I signaled Tau for the check.

Jack grinned. “Almost worth getting shot at, to hear that.”

“Really?”

“No. Well, maybe once.”

Our grumpy waiter dropped a greasy scrap of paper onto the table. Bill picked it up and stood. He took out his phone and handed it to Jack. “Shayna’s photo of the Chaus is on there somewhere.”

“Say what? You’ve been sitting here with photos this whole time and you didn’t tell me?”

“Only one. And it’s not very good. Anyway, there you go. Lydia found it.”

“Is that a dare? How fast?”

“Took her close to two minutes.”

“Piece of cake.”

Bill grinned and headed for the counter to pay up. I grabbed the phone from Jack. “For Pete’s sake, save the chest-thumping for something important.”

“It’s all important,” Jack said. “That’s how guys roll.”

“Don’t I know it. Okay, here. In fact, this show was what we were going to ask you about.” I found Shayna’s photo and turned the phone to face Jack. “It was Chinese-American artists, in Queens. The Chaus are on the right there—what’s the matter?”

Jack’s smile had faded. Silent, he stared at the image on the screen. “These are the Chaus?”

“Don’t they look like Chaus?”

“They sure do.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “And I think they answer another question, too.”

“What question?” said Bill, coming back from the counter.

“Why I was fired. These papercuttings in the studio with the Chaus?” He looked up. “They’re Anna Yang’s.”

* * *

Night had fallen while we ate, and so had the roll-down gates on Chinatown’s shops. The tourists had either gone happily back uptown with their fake Pradas and Rolexes, or were working their way through dinner at Red Egg or the Peking Duck House. The locals were home supervising homework. On the way to Bill’s car we were able to walk side by side by side.

I said to Jack, “So I guess you became superfluous because your client found the Chaus himself. In his daughter’s studio.”

“Looks that way.”

“If those are the ones the fuss is about. They might just be copies of early ones she keeps around for inspiration.”

“No. I know Chau’s work. Maybe not every piece, but enough that if these were a set of repros there’d be something I’d recognize. And remember, they got Doug Haig’s Calvins all in a knot, too, and he knows Chau better than I do. At the very least, and even if they are copies, they’re copies of unknown works.”

“But possibly old ones? That would make sense, for her to have unknown old ones. If her dad brought them from China with him.”

“And she what, stole them out of the attic without telling him?” Bill asked. “To stick on her studio wall in a shared warehouse?”

“Well, when you put it that way … Though maybe she doesn’t know? Maybe she just took some old paintings that she’d always liked one day when she was visiting her mom? Dad wasn’t there, she didn’t think to tell him? Weren’t you just saying this generation might not know about Chau?”

“Anna would,” Jack said. “Bernard Yang’s daughter? Trust me, she’d know.”

“All right, then maybe she knows, but she took them anyway. For inspiration.”

“I have to agree with Bill,” Jack said. “Without telling Dr. Yang? They’re worth a fortune, old or new, if they’re real. You don’t just walk off with that and pin it to your studio wall.”

“Maybe she told him and he said it was cool.”

“Why?”

“Because he feels bad about her husband being in jail in China?”

“Are you serious? And then why the hell hire me?”

“Because these have nothing to do with the ones we’re looking for?”

“Then why the hell fire me?”

“Because your boundless joy in asking unanswerable questions drove him crazy?” Bill suggested. “You two, there’s no point in this. We’ll go see the paintings, Anna will tell us why she has them, and at least we’ll know whether they’re real and whether they’re old.”

“How will we know that?” Jack asked.

“You’re the expert,” Bill said, as we reached the lot where his car was waiting. “You’re going to tell us.”

* * *

Papercutting’s an ancient Chinese art. Flowers, phoenixes, entire lacelike villages emerge under the cutter’s blade. The artist’s skill and patience determine how complex the piece will be. It’s painstaking and slow and one mistake ruins everything. I knew that because kids learn papercutting at Saturday Chinese school, ending up with stars and snowflakes to bring home for the fridge. Unless in their rushed impatience they’ve made that one mistake. I was too young to remember what my two oldest brothers brought home, but stodgy Tim, now a corporate lawyer, excelled in papercutting, smugly crafting trees filled with chirping birds. Andrew, who’s a photographer and was always a little off the wall, made fizzy, wild science-fictiony visions. My torn-and-Scotch-taped snowflakes rarely made it to the fridge.

Jack knew papercutting, too, though he’d never gone to Chinese school. “I did a graduate lab in paper conservation,” he said. “They’re a bitch to work with.”

“Did you ever tear one?”

“Of course not.”

“Silly me for asking.” We were in Bill’s car on our way to Flushing, me riding shotgun, Jack in back. I asked him, “Do many people still do it?”

“There are still classically trained masters in China. That’s who Anna went to study with. And there are papercutters on the streets in China, just like on Canal Street. Tourists love it everywhere. But mostly it’s seen as a craft and artists don’t bother with it, or if they do, it’s just to show off. Anna’s different. She took it up in the first place as a political statement because it’s a non-Western form. And what she does has political content, too.”

“You mean, Mao’s silhouette, things like that?”

“More subtle, and not particularly Chinese. She mostly cuts from advertising posters or magazines. She’ll work against the content of the original image. Last year she did a series of those tiny slippers women used to wear when they had bound feet. They were beautiful. She cut them from glossy ads for spike-heeled shoes.”

“Oh. Now I see why her work didn’t appeal to Shayna.”

Bill said, “Meow.”

“Come on, did you see her shoes?”

“I wasn’t looking at her shoes.”

“Why does that not comfort me?”

“You want to be even less comfortable?” he asked. “We have a tail.”

Jack whipped his head around to peer out the back window. I looked into the rearview mirror, staring at the headlights behind us. “Watch,” Bill said. He steered the car into the passing lane, overtook a cab, and slipped back in.

“Dark SUV?” I said. “Jersey plates? Two cars back now?”

“That’s the one.”

“How long?”

“Since at least the bridge, maybe since Manhattan. What do you want to do?”

My case, my call. I know Bill’s driving; he could lose the guy without breaking a sweat. I asked, “How close are we to where we’re going?”

“Two more exits, then local streets.”

“Is the next exit a residential neighborhood?”

“Yes.”

“Take it, and drive around like we’re looking for something. Jack, don’t look back again. I don’t want him to know we’re onto him.”

“Them.”

“You sure?”

“The driver and a guy beside him.”

“They got off with us,” Bill reported a few minutes later, on the exit ramp. “He’s hanging back.”

“Okay,” I said. “Make a turn and drop Jack and me off. You drive away. Let’s see who he’s following.”

Bill drove a few blocks, let us out on a corner, and pulled away. Jack and I ambled down a quiet street of small, neat brick houses. We walked uncertainly, checking address numbers. Bill’s taillights dwindled and no one passed us. “Well, it’s not Bill,” I said to Jack. “At the end of the block, you go right.”

We paused at the corner to look like we were conferring. The tail car was down the block behind us and it stopped, too. “What if it’s the guy who shot at me, come to finish the job?” Jack asked.

“I thought we decided he wasn’t really trying to kill you, just scare you. Look at your watch like you’re saying you have to go.”

“That’s the job I meant.” He turned his wrist over.

“A tough guy like you? Okay, now walk away.”

“No, the tough guy’s you. See you around.” Jack headed right. I turned left. A few seconds’ pause. Then headlights swept around the corner.

So. It was me.

The headlights didn’t keep coming, though. Were they just trying to find out where I was headed? Well, then I’d lead them on awhile. I continued down the block. Blue glows in the windows told me a lot of TV-watching was going on. I stopped in front of a house with no lights on, looked up at it, took out my phone and stood there as though I were making a call. Actually, I was.

“You or Jack?” Bill asked when he answered.

“Me. He’s idling at the corner two blocks up from where you dropped us. I went left.”

“I’m three blocks down. Be right there.”

“A door’s opening. One of them just got out.”

“Anyone we know?”

“I can’t tell but I don’t think so. Big. I’m still walking and I’m going to stay on the phone. Maybe he’ll want to wait until I’m not connected to anyone before he clobbers me. See if you can come around and get a look at him first.”

“See you soon.”

But not soon enough. Whoever this guy was, the fact that I was on the phone with someone who could presumably call a cop if I screamed—or suddenly went silent—must not have worried him. He was quiet and quick, and as I turned my head to look at a house number I found him at my elbow.

I took a sharp leap backward, said breathlessly, “You really should learn to knock.” I dropped the phone in my pocket, still on. I thought he might overlook that while he focused on the .25 now in my hand. I checked him out: a big, broadshouldered Asian man, not handsome, not hideous. Sportcoat, white shirt, no tie. In his hand, a gun also, and bigger than mine.

“I can shoot faster,” I said. “Also, I have more incentive.”

He smiled quizzically. “Incentive? For shoot me? You don’t even know me.” His intonations rang of Mandarin.

“That’s the point. You’ve been following me. You could’ve shot me already but you didn’t. So you don’t want me dead, you want something from me. I, on the other hand, don’t like to be followed, don’t know you, and don’t want anything from you. Why shouldn’t I shoot you?”

“But you don’t shoot. Just stand there.”

“Who are you?”

“Oh, now you want something?”

Yes, I wanted to know where the hell Bill was.

“Why are you following me?”

“You want two thing! I only want one. Want to talk to you.”

“Who sent you?”

“Boss. Have couple questions, say, Go ask.”

“You work for the government like everybody else?”

He looked surprised at the question, then laughed. “Government? Can’t make no money, work for government.”

“What do you want to talk about?”

“Got some questions about guy you work for. Also, advice. Come now, dark street dangerous place for lady. I drive you home.”

“I don’t think so.”

But his driver did. He stomped the gas and in three seconds had swerved up the block and onto the sidewalk behind me. His door blew open and I was thinking, Damn, I am going to have to shoot one of these guys when the big guy yelped and spun around, staring wildly into the dark. I didn’t know what was up, but whatever it was, it gave me a chance to spin, too. I slammed my gun up under the chin of the driver, off-balance as he left the car. His head snapped back. I kicked him in the belly and when he folded I smashed him on top of the head. That should hold him. I ducked in case the big guy had solved his problem and decided it was time to shoot me. In fact, I wondered why he hadn’t already. But he wasn’t even looking at me. He was shouting and cursing in the other direction, half-turned, one arm up to ward off a stone flying at his head. It bounced off his shoulder and so did the one after it. He waved his gun around, looking for his target. Another stone came soaring out of the dark and smacked his knee, and when his hand dropped there, he got clonked on the temple.

With a howl he took off after the thrower. He ran into a hailstorm of pebbles. Another big stone hit him square in the face. He fired into the dark, the gunshot thundering. In answer, a stone clipped his ear. He cursed again; when another skipped off his skull he turned back, racing for his car. I stepped to block his way but he plowed into me, then grabbed my jacket to drag me with him. Stumbling, I tried to break his hold. Whether I could have, I don’t know, but it didn’t matter: A rock walloped his back, making him stagger and slacken his grip. I pulled loose and stuck my leg out to trip him. He did a little jig but kept his footing, screaming to his driver as he reached the car door. The driver, still dazed, lurched in behind the wheel. He started the car as the big guy dove into the back under a rain of rocks. The car screeched into reverse, bounced off the curb, and roared away.

I peered after it. It swerved around the corner and vanished. I turned to look in the other direction. A lanky figure was sauntering out of the dark, hands in his pockets.

“That,” I said, “was pretty impressive.”

“Little League all-star,” said Jack. “Middle school travel team. High school all-state. College varsity.”

“Starter?”

“And relief both. Kid Iron, they called me. My high school senior season’s still the Wisconsin state record.”

“So all this whining about flying bullets—”

“I said I couldn’t shoot a gun. I didn’t say I was helpless. As long as there’s a gravel driveway and a little landscaping, I’m good. You think maybe we should keep walking?” He nodded at the houses around us, where lights had come on. One front door was open, a figure silhouetted in it, but no one was saying anything. “One of these citizens might have called the cops.”

“Over some cursing, a few squealing tires, and a single gunshot? They probably all think the neighbors have their TVs on too loud.” But I fell in nonchalantly beside him, a couple enjoying a peaceful stroll, not a care in the world.

Headlights swept around the corner and we both tensed up. “Oh.” I relaxed. “It’s Bill.” He slammed his brakes and threw his door open while I demanded, “Where have you been?”

“Got here as fast as I could. Wasn’t more than two minutes.” He climbed out. “I heard a shot. What the hell happened?”

“A couple of Chinese guys wanted to take me away from all this, but it turns out Jack’s a stone sniper.”

Bill turned to Jack. “Aren’t you the guy who’s been saying all day you don’t know anything about guns?”

“Not ‘stone’ metaphorically,” I said. “Stone, literally. He brained ’em with somebody’s rock garden.”

Jack pulled back his arm, his fingers curled around an imaginary baseball.

“Enterprising,” Bill said.

“The shot came from the bad guy,” I told Bill. “At Jack.”

“Just like the batters I used to fan,” Jack said. “Spun him until he was dizzy. He had no idea where to look.”

“You’re taking this much better than the previous gunshot,” I said.

“Ice water in his veins,” Bill agreed.

“Actually, I think I’m in shock. Wait until the numbness wears off. What?” Jack’s eyes suddenly widened. “Someone shot at me? Again?”

“No,” I said. “It was all a dream. Listen, you guys, I hear sirens. Maybe we should get out of here before the homeowner comes to get his rocks back?”

“There’s a dirty joke in there somewhere,” Bill said.

“I’d rather you didn’t find it.”

We got in the car and drove away.

13

“So,” Bill said as we wound our way through Queens, “who was he, your Mighty Casey?”

“I have an idea, but I don’t like it.”

“In that case, by all means share it.”

“I never saw him before. He said his boss had some questions about, and some advice for, the guy I work for. I asked him if he worked for the government, and he said there’s no money in it.”

“He’s never heard of corruption?” Jack asked.

“I’m sure he has. I’m thinking he’s some kind of Chinese gangster. He’s unhappy about something Jeff Dunbar’s doing—or Dennis Jerrold, or whoever he is—and he wants me to do something about it.”

“Why doesn’t he go to Dunbar?”

“If Dunbar’s really with the State Department, that’s got to be overstepping, no matter how big a deal Mighty Casey’s boss is in China. I got a partial plate, four of, I think, six numbers. Can you find someone to run it?”

I have my own cop contacts, like my best friend Mary, but doing this kind of thing gives her hives. Bill’s contacts are more straightforward: He slips them Knicks tickets and guy stuff like that. He made a call, left a message, made another, left another. “One of those guys will do it,” he said. “But it looks like neither one’s on tonight, so it’ll be tomorrow.”

“I guess we can wait.” I had a thought. “Or not.” I took out my phone, speed-dialed Linus.

“You’ve reached Wong Security,” Trella’s voice told me. “We’re sorry we can’t take your call right now, but it is important to us. Please leave your name and number and we’ll get back to you as soon as we can.”

“It’s Lydia,” I told the microchip. “Sorry to interrupt your night, but I have something I’d like Linus to do. Give me a call?” I clicked off, said to the guys, “Maybe that will get us something,” and found my phone beeping as I started to put it away. It was Linus, but not a call, a text:

Hi cuz, @ club, cant hear a thing. Txt me.

So I did, typing in the partial plate I’d made out while the SUV careened away. Jack looked over my shoulder. I was typing

blck navgtor, late modl

when Jack said, “Last year.”

I raised an eyebrow and he shrugged.

Last yr. C what u cn do. I know this illegal. Dont do deeply illegal. If cant do, ok. If u find sumthing, call whenever.

I put the phone away without interruption this time and said, “That may get us somewhere. Jack, you’re a car guy?”

“It’s a Midwest suburban thing.”

“I see.” I settled back, leaned my head on the seat. “You guys? I’m getting tired of this.”

“Of what?” Jack asked. “Me getting shot at?”

“That, too. Of being confused. Of not knowing who any of these people really are and what they really want.”

“I have an idea,” Jack said, snapping his fingers. “Let’s go to Anna’s studio, find the Chaus, have her tell us what’s going on, and all go out for a drink after the big dance number.”

“Good plan.” I closed my eyes, and opened them briefly to add, “I’ll have a cosmo.”

* * *

Bill meandered randomly through Queens until he was satisfied we weren’t being followed. As that was going on, Jack and I filled him in on what he’d missed while he was exchanging pleasantries with Shayna Dylan. By the time we pulled over in front of the artists’ converted warehouse it was half-past nine, but light still glowed through the industrial windows.

“Behold the midnight oil of inspiration,” I said.

“Most of these people have day jobs,” Jack said. “They make work when they can.”

“It’s more romantic my way.”

Bill said to Jack, “What did I tell you?”

I couldn’t remember what he’d told him but I was sure it was something unflattering about me, so I instructed them both to go jump in a lake.

We’d parked at the building’s long side. Jack led us around the corner to a loading dock with a huge roll-down door and a smaller door beside it. He punched a couple of buttons on the keypad. Only silence, so he did it again. “No answer from Anna. I assume we want to get in even if she’s not here?”

“As opposed to coming all this way,” I said, “exchanging rocks and bullets with who knows who, and then going home empty-handed? You better believe it.”

He read down the list beside the keypad, pressed another combination, and when that didn’t work he tried a third.

“Who’s there?” squawked the speaker.

“Francie, it’s Jack Lee. Can you let me in?”

“Jack Lee? What are you doing in an outer borough at this hour? Don’t tell me there are no hip parties in Manhattan tonight.” The buzzer buzzed and Jack pushed the door open.

We walked into a cavernous space, windowed along the long walls from waist height to the overhead steel beams hung with metal-shaded lights. The broad entryway held a few sagging chairs and battered couches, a bookcase, and a bulletin board covered with announcements and flyers. Off it, in both directions, corridors turned the corner and ran past a series of large, ceilingless cubicles in the center of the paint-splattered concrete floor. Skylights punctuated the roof. The place smelled of turpentine, sawdust, and frying garlic. I could hear the high-pitched whirr of some industrial tool, drifts of music, various bits of unidentifiable clatter, and the opening of a door. Then footsteps, and a compact, cheerful-looking Asian woman appeared around the corner, bowl in one hand, chopsticks in the other.

“Hi, Jack. Want a dumpling? Oh, you didn’t say you brought people. Hi, I’m Francie See.” She shifted the chopsticks to her left hand where the bowl was and stuck out her right.

“Lydia Chin,” I said as we shook. “And this is Bill Smith.”

“Good to meet you. You folks want some dumplings? I have lots.”

“No, thanks,” Jack said. “We just had some great noodle soup.” I was a little sorry to hear him turn her down; the dumplings, seared and glistening with sesame oil, looked great.

“At Lucky Gardens?” Francie See asked.

“No, in Manhattan.”

“Oh, right, I should have known.”

“You outer-borough people, so touchy. Listen, Francie, we’re looking for Anna Yang. Is she here? Bill and Lydia wanted to see her work.”

“I don’t think so. Unless she came back.” Francie See stepped back to peer down the corridor. “Her door’s closed. Want to see mine instead?”

“Sure,” said Jack, as though seeing art were why we’d come. “Still doing landscapes?”

“In a way.” She led us back in the direction she’d come from. “That’s Anna’s studio, down there past the kitchen,” she said over her shoulder. “She came in this afternoon and I thought she was staying to work but she left pretty fast. I got the feeling she was upset about something. Did she know you were coming?”

“No. Bill and Lydia just met her, and we were in the neighborhood so I suggested we come over. Is she okay?”

“I don’t know what’s going on. You could ask Pete, they’re pretty tight.” Francie See turned through an open door. “Voilà.” She waved the chopsticks, then used them to lift a dumpling. “Hope you don’t mind if I eat. I’m starved.”

“No, go ahead,” I said, looking around. Pinned to the walls, covering a table, and on three easels, were watercolor paintings, in every shade of blue imaginable, and all of them paintings of water. Oceans, fog, mist, clouds, waves, pools, pounding rain, racing brooks, water in every possible form, including glaciers, steam, and ice cubes. Serene, threatening, chilly, boiling, soft, hard, fast, and slow, changing from painting to painting but all water and all blue.

“Wow,” said Jack. “This is what one of my professors would’ve called ‘bloody-minded.’”

“Just tightening my focus,” Francie said. “It’s all about water, Jack. The twenty-first century’s all about water.”

“You always were so cutting-edge, Francie.”

“I am, aren’t I? Besides, something’s got to wash down these dumplings. You sure you don’t want any?”

The guys shook their heads, but I couldn’t stand it. “I’d love one.”

“That’s what I’m talking about.” Francie grinned and pointed to a jar of chopsticks beside a can of brushes.

“I don’t believe you,” Jack said. “After that soup?”

“Adrenaline makes Lydia hungry,” Bill said.

“Adrenaline?” Francie asked. “You get a rush looking at art?”

I fetched some chopsticks and dug a dumpling from the bowl she held out.

“Bill does,” Jack said. “The jury’s still out on Lydia. But we had some excitement on the way here. We were sort of mugged.”

“Seriously? Are you okay?”

“We’re fine,” I said, biting down on the salty, gamey dumpling. “I was sort of mugged, and Jack saved me.”

“Ooh, Jack, you caveman, you. But you’re okay?” Francie asked me.

I nodded, swallowed, and said, “This is great.”

“Day job. I’m the dumpling queen of Lucky Gardens. See, this is why you should move to the outer boroughs. No one gets mugged in Flushing.”

“For your information,” Jack said, “we were in Flushing, not all that far from here.”

“Oh. Well, I’m lying anyway. Why do you think we have all that fancy electronic stuff on the doors? None of the windows below ten feet open, either. And we have alarms on the skylights, in case someone tries a Mission: Impossible.”

“Glad to hear it.”

“Yeah, I guess it’s good. It cost a fortune, though. A lot of people resisted, but that was partly because the security commissar’s that jerk, Jon-Jon Jie. Oops, he a friend of yours?” Her smile made it clear she didn’t care if he was or not.

Jack shook his head. “Seen his work, but don’t know him. You have commissars?”

“It’s funnier than ‘committee chair.’ Of course it would help if Big Yellow Hunter had a sense of humor. There were people holding out because he wouldn’t shut up. We had to take an actual vote. Appalling. And now look, after all that, he’s moving out.”

“I didn’t know he had a studio here.”

“Down the hall. He came in with us because he thought we were the hip place to be. As though anything could make him hip. But now he’s kissing us off for some high-rent broom closet in Chelsea. I say good riddance and he can take the armory with him.”

“Armory?” I said. “He has guns in there?”

“He says he does. And bows and arrows, and spears. In case a buffalo herd charges through here, I don’t know. Let his new A-list gallery worry about it.”

“A-list gallery?” said Jack. “You don’t mean Baxter/Haig?”

“You heard?”

“Eddie To said Doug Haig was just leading Jie on.”

“That’s what we all thought, but the deal’s gone through. As of a few hours ago. Ink’s still wet. He’ll be Baxter/Haig’s first Chinese-American. Everyone’s disgusted. Jon-Jon’s the kind of gateway drug that’ll make Haig allergic.”

“Haig’s already allergic. I can’t believe he’s opening the sacred precincts to a hyphenated artist. And it’s Jie? I only saw one show of his, but it was garbage.”

“Literally. He buys Gucci’s scraps.”

Jack shook his head. “Are you sure this is true? Say what you want about Haig, but he has an eye. I’ve never known him to show bad work.”

“Ah, well, he’s not showing him yet, is he?”

“What do you mean?”

“There are reasons to put a horse in your stable even if you’re not planning to ride him.” Bill looked over from a painting he’d been examining. Francie said, “Sorry, it’s Jon-Jon’s Texas thing. I couldn’t resist.”

“No problem,” said Jack. “Can you translate, though?”

“Jon-Jon’s from money.”

“You’re saying he bought his way into Baxter/Haig?”

Francie put the empty dumpling bowl into a paint-streaked sink and turned the faucet on. Reaching for a stained towel to wipe her hands, she paused and cocked her head as water splattered and overflowed the bowl. I followed her gaze, admiring the way light glinted off the rivulets. “Mmm,” Francie said. Leaving the water running and the bowl where it was, she unpinned an ice floe from an easel and laid it on a table. Dragging the easel to the sink, she said, “Just before the rumors about Jon-Jon’s knighthood started, we’d been hearing a better rumor: that Haig was in trouble. Whoever’d loaned him the money to buy Baxter out wanted it back, plus. Or so we heard.”

“We heard that, too. Who was it, do you know?”

“No.” Francie fingered through the jar of brushes. “But inquiring minds agree it was Chinese money.”

“Really? Listen, Francie, it sounds like you hear a lot of rumors. Have you heard that there are unknown Chau Chuns floating around?”

“Chau Chun? Who’s that? Wait—Tiananmen? The Ghost Painter or something?”

“Ghost Hero.”

“I thought he was dead.”

“He is.”

“I haven’t heard anything about him.” She pushed a rolling table over to the easel she’d just set up. Crowding it were pots of cobalt, azure, teal, turquoise, indigo, aquamarine. “That must not have made it out here to the boonies.”

“All right,” said Jack. “I can see we’re losing you. We’ll let you get back to work.”

“Nothing personal.”

“Of course not. I think we’ll find Pete, just to make sure Anna’s okay. Which studio’s his?”

“At the very end. Two down from Anna.” Francie pinned a sheet of paper to the easel. “You can help him celebrate.”

“Celebrate what?”

“That he’ll be able to breathe again. So will Anna. As soon as Jon-Jon packs up his mangy hides and moves out from the studio between them.”

We left Francie’s studio and headed along the corridor. “That was cool,” I said. “I always wondered where artists get their ideas.”

“Just turn on the faucet, they flow right out,” Bill said.

“I was surprised she barely knew who Chau was, though. I guess you’re right—this generation doesn’t necessarily know him. That would explain how Anna could have a couple of Chaus, real or fake, pinned to her studio wall and no one here would notice.”

“It explains how she could, but it doesn’t explain why she does.”

Jack stopped at a black door that said ANNA YANG in small neat red letters and, below them, in equally precise Chinese characters. He knocked, then tried the door, but it was locked. “Well, she’s not here to ask.”

“Too bad,” I said. “Do you have her phone number?”

“Yes. But I want to talk to Pete before we call her.”

Bill, examining the door, said, “Maybe not too bad.”

Jack looked at Bill. “What?”

“No one’s here on this end of the building,” Bill pointed out. “Except that guy Pete, who you’re going to see. Francie’s all the way down there with the water running and someone on the other side has music on. Why don’t you two go talk to Pete?”

Jack frowned. “I don’t know.”

“No. And what you don’t know can’t hurt you. Go.”

So we went, past the studio that was still, briefly, Jon-Jon Jie’s—with a curling fragment of brown and white cowhide tacked to the door—and knocked at the open door of the studio beyond it.

Inside, a thin young Asian man in a blue work shirt sat drawing loose, fast pencil lines on a sheet of paper. He glanced up sharply. His intense, silent stare made me think maybe we should get lost. We might be interrupting an artist in the middle of an inspiration. But he relaxed, though he didn’t smile. “Jack. Hey, what’s up?”

“Hey, Pete. This is Lydia Chin. Lydia, Pete Tsang.”

“Hi,” I said. Pete Tsang, sharp dark eyes on me, nodded.

“We were looking for Anna,” Jack told him, “but Francie See said she came and went. She also said she seemed upset. I just wanted to make sure she’s okay.”

Pete put his pencil down. “I didn’t see her, just heard her. Sometimes when she gets in I take a break, we have coffee or something before she sets up. I was half-waiting, but she just locked up again and left.”

“So you don’t know what was wrong?”

“Could be nothing’s wrong. Maybe she just came in to get something.”

“When we saw her before she was headed here, said she had a lot to do. But maybe you’re right. I’ll call her.” Jack turned to me. “Pete’s a painter.” I might have guessed that from the two large canvases, one in burning yellows, one in jagged reds, on opposite sides of the studio. Jack asked Pete, “What are you working on? Anything new?”

“Nothing right now. Planning something out, but I’m not ready to start.” Pete didn’t elaborate, and his glance flicked back to the sketch on his desk. He seemed taut, Pete Tsang did, like an arrow waiting for the bowstring to snap.

It occurred to me, if this case didn’t end soon I’d be talking in nature metaphors, myself.

That wasn’t my immediate problem, though. That was that it was clear Pete Tsang would rather we left. Which would leave Pete Tsang alone with his studio door open, two down from Anna Yang’s, and who knew what was going on there? Jack, obviously thinking along the same lines, had strolled over to examine the yellow canvas. I looked around. There was nothing remotely intelligent I could say about Pete Tsang’s paintings. That was my lack of art vocabulary, not the paintings. I liked the huge range of colors I could now see within what had seemed at first like two or three shades of a single color; and I liked the suggestion of small, shadowy human forms I thought I saw. The canvases struck me as radiating the same tightly coiled vigilance the painter did. Maybe; but that wasn’t a promising conversational path. Then I spied a flyer tacked to the wall: a photo of a handsome young Asian man with wire-frame glasses, smiling on a sunny day. Below the picture, heavy black type read FREE LIU MAI-KE! At the bottom was a Web site address.

“Mike Liu,” I said. “Are you involved in that?”

Pete looked me over as though maybe he’d missed something the first time. “You know about him?”

“He’s that poet. He’s married to Jack’s friend Anna, who we came to see. ‘The world calls this China’s century, but if China’s people are denied the right to think and to express their thoughts, if they cannot count on basic human rights and human dignity, China’s century will be worthless dust.’ He got seven years.”

Jack’s eyes were on me. Pete Tsang asked, “Are you an artist?”

“No. But I’m Chinese.”

“You followed Mike’s case?”

“The sentence was outrageous. It would have been a joke if it hadn’t been a tragedy.”

Pete looked at me another few moments, then reached to a long counter holding neat cans of brushes and pencils. He picked up a couple of sheets of paper, which turned out to be the same flyer as on the wall. “Have you been to our Web site?”

“No.”

“Check it out. There’s a rally next week. It’ll be big. Important. You’ll want to be there. Jack, you will, too.”

Jack didn’t say anything, but he walked over and took a flyer.

“You think it’ll help?” I asked. “The Chinese government doesn’t respond to much. Rallies and letter-writing, with other dissidents it sometimes looks like they don’t even notice.”

Pete’s hard gaze held me. “I don’t know. But I know doing nothing won’t work.” After another moment: “And this time, I’m pretty sure they’ll notice.”

He stood up and walked to the door, where he just waited. So we actually had to leave. By then I wasn’t too worried. Bill’s fast, especially when he’s breaking the law.

Jack and I walked back down the hall the way we’d come. We both threw quick looks at Anna Yang’s door, saw nothing but her name. We waved to Francie See as we passed her studio. She didn’t respond, just kept feathering pale blue onto the emerging painting on her easel.

Jack said, “I didn’t know you could do that. Quote Mike Liu.”

“I read the open letter.”

“I read it, too. But I can’t quote it.”

“I can do it in Chinese, too. You want to hear?”

Jack sighed. “No, I believe you.”

“But actually,” I admitted, “I read it twice.”

We turned the corner and found Bill lounging on an entryway sofa, leafing through a book on the history of Chinese fireworks. A FREE LIU MAI-KE flyer, I now noticed, was pinned to the bulletin board.

“Hey,” Bill said, getting up. “How’s Pete Tsang?”

“Curt,” said Jack.

“Handsome,” said I.

“Really?” said Jack.

“I’m just reporting.” I handed Bill the flyer as we headed for the door. “He wants us to come to a rally next week. He says it’ll be big.”

“For Anna Yang’s husband?” Bill looked at Jack.

“Lydia can quote his whole manifesto by heart. In two languages.”

“I’m translating it into Italian, too, right now in my head. No, seriously, that passage is the only part I can quote. It just grabbed me.” I repeated the passage for Bill. “And now that we’re outside”—which we were, on the sidewalk under the Flushing stars—“tell!” I wheeled on Bill. “Are they there? In Anna’s studio?”

“The Chaus?”

“No, Jimmy Hoffa and Judge Crater! Of course the Chaus!”

“No.”

I stopped. “No? Wait. No?”

“Not on the walls, and as far as I can see, not in the file drawers. That wall you’d have seen from about where Shayna took the photo? It’s empty.”

“Maybe they’re what Anna came to get.”

Jack said to Bill, “What about you? Will there be any way for Anna to know you were there?”

“If I didn’t know you were asking that question out of concern for your friend Anna’s nerves,” Bill said, lighting a cigarette, “I’d take offense.”

“Bill does a very clean B and E,” I reassured Jack. “It’s a point of pride with him. And you’re sure that’s where they were, the Chaus? Those papercuttings were for sure Anna’s?”

The question had been for Jack, but Bill nodded. “I saw the ones in the photo. They’re still there. It’s just the Chaus that’re gone.”

“Well, damn,” I said. I’d have said more, but my phone rang. An unfamiliar number, so I answered in both languages. The voice that replied, speaking in English, was not unfamiliar, but I was glad it was on the phone and not up close and personal.

“Chin Ling Wan-ju, my apology. I think we start on bad foot. I don’t try to scare you, just want to talk.”

I covered the phone and whispered to the guys, “Mighty Casey.” To Casey himself, I said, “How did you get this number?”

“Just want to talk,” he repeated. “About your client.”

“Okay, we’re talking.”

“No, we meet. Have tea, be civilized.”

“Your driver almost ran me down, you pointed a gun at me, you tried to kidnap me, and you shot at my friend. You might have tried this ‘civilized’ approach first.”

“I say, I apologize. Sometime, get too … involved, my work.”

“Who are you?”

“We have tea, I explain.”

I thought. “Okay. Tea. In a public place.”

A pause. “Yes. Okay. You come alone.”

“So do you. And,” I added, “not tonight. Tomorrow. In daylight.” After, maybe, we’d heard from Linus, or one of Bill’s cop friends, and I had some idea of with whom I was having the pleasure.

That didn’t seem to bother him. In fact, he sounded amused. “Tomorrow, nine o’clock. Sun up high enough?”

“Maria’s, on Walker Street.”

“Happy to see you then.”

I didn’t share the sentiment, but I agreed to the time and place and clicked off.

“You set up a meet with that guy?” Jack asked.

“Don’t you want to know why he was shooting at you?”

“He was shooting at me because I was throwing rocks at him. Who is he and what does he want?”

“He’ll tell me tomorrow. Nine o’clock, Maria’s on Walker.”

“Well, you’re not going alone.”

I raised an eyebrow. “For Pete’s sake, you don’t have to get all John Wayne about it. Of course I’m not. You’re going to come and do the same thing you did at the bar. Get there first, blend into the scenery. It could be you,” I said to Bill, “but Jack will blend better at Maria’s.”

Maria’s is a Taiwanese tea shop and Bill’s been there with me any number of times. He’s almost always the only non-Chinese person in the place, and he’s big besides. He sticks out like a buzzard in a flock of swallows. That’s if you ask me. If you ask him, the whole thing has more to do with lions and Hello Kitties.

That settled, Jack checked his watch. “It’s past eleven. Hope Anna doesn’t mind the late call.” He made the late call, and Anna didn’t get the chance to tell us how much she minded because she didn’t pick up. Jack left a message, calm but using the words “really important” twice.

“When she calls back,” I said, “whether it’s tonight or tomorrow morning, let me know.”

“What do you mean? You won’t be with me when it happens? We’re not going to end the night in some enormously chichi boîte over a couple of single malts, discussing exactly where we are in this case?”

“You’ve actually ever been to a boîte? Never mind. Besides, do you have any idea exactly where we are in this case? Me neither. Listen, you guys, this has been fun, chasing around with you, getting shot at and stuff—”

“I don’t recall you getting shot at,” Jack said.

“No, I think that’s right,” said Bill.

“Oh, so sorry. I’ll try to position myself better next time. But right now, I’m going to leave you guys to have all the fun and I’m going home to sleep.”

So Bill, dedicated chauffeur that he was, took me back to Chinatown. Nothing untoward happened on our drive, and the universe was clearly telling me I’d made the right choice because my mother was asleep when I unlocked the door, slipped off my shoes, and tiptoed in. Or at least, she was in bed pretending not to be waiting up. Either way was fine with me.

14

In the morning my mother’s cover was blown. I woke full of energy, pulled on my bathrobe, and headed into the kitchen. My mother wandered in fully dressed suspiciously soon thereafter and with wide-eyed artlessness said, “Oh, are you home? I didn’t hear you come in last night. I thought you were still out, working overnight on your new case.” She says stuff like that to remind me that she’s not interfering in my life, professional or personal. But when I peeked into the teapot I found about five times as much tea as my mother, alone in the apartment, would ever drink before lunch.

Being the big tea drinker in the family, I poured myself a cup, gave her a kiss, and said, “It’s an interesting case. It involves art.” I dumped granola in a bowl and sat down at the table.

“Oh, really?” She spoke offhandedly, puttering around the kitchen doing things that clearly absorbed her attention way more than anything I was saying. “Do you know many things about art, Ling Wan-ju?”

“No, Ma. But I’m learning. I went to a gallery yesterday and saw little red boxes chasing each other around.”

My mother turned to look at me, waiting for the part about the art.

“It was sort of a sculpture. By a Chinese artist, in fact.”

That the home team was responsible for this incomprehensible item didn’t impress her. “Your cousin Yong Xiao is an artist. He painted a beautiful scarf for me.”

My third cousin twice removed, Yong Xiao, is a twenty-year-old fashionista wannabe working for pennies at the atelier of a hot designer barely older than he is. In his off hours he paints chrysanthemums on cheap silk scarves to sell to tourists so he can pay his rent.

Casually, because of course she takes so little interest in that which is not her business, my mother asked, “Are you working alone on your new case?”

“Or, you mean, is Bill working with me?”

She gave me the wide-eyed innocent look again. Her brow has permanent grooves from that look. “Oh, yes,” she said, as though she hadn’t given that possibility a thought. “I suppose you might be getting help from the white baboon.” She hasn’t said Bill’s name in years. She refers to him in other ways that would be endearing if she actually liked him.

“Bill’s on the case, yes.” I poked around for raisins in my granola bowl.

“I see.” She sounded relieved, which surprised me. One of the things she dislikes about my profession is that she thinks it’s dangerous. Almost as high on her dislike list, though, is the people I’m forced by the job to associate with, and on the top of that list is Bill. That he’s big and strong and bodyguardish and could help with the “dangerous” problem has never cut any ice with her. So what was the relief about?

“But this case is not urgent? It allows you time for yourself? Perhaps to see your friends?” She spoke coyly and I had no idea what she was talking about. Keeping a quizzical eye on her, I scooped up another mouthful.

Then I got it. “The Chinatown telegraph.” I put my spoon down. “Someone saw us at New Chao Chow, didn’t they? Me, and Bill, and Jack?” The relief must have been at the idea that I was hanging with Bill out of professional necessity, not personal choice. And the reason for the coyness was now blindingly clear.

Absorbed in measuring rice into the cooker, my mother answered vaguely. “I think your auntie Ying-le might have mentioned it. Yes, I remember now. She saw you when she was shopping on Mott Street yesterday.”

Mao Ying-le, a friend of my mother’s from her sewing days and in no way my aunt, was one of Chinatown’s biggest gossips. But it didn’t matter. If not Ying-le, my mother would have gotten the word from someone else. It should have occurred to me that I couldn’t dine in the neighborhood with a handsome Asian guy and expect my mother not to know about it before the check came.

“Jack Lee,” I said.

“Your auntie said he looked very nice.”

“She did?”

“Not exactly. She said you looked as though you thought he was very nice.”

My face grew hot, which annoyed me. “She stood there and watched us?”

My mother smiled. “Is he very nice?”

Some things you can’t fight. I’d have to talk to myself about the color in my cheeks later. “Yes.”

“And he is Chinese?” Just checking. Because he might be Japanese, or Korean. From a different planet, in her universe, but still light-years ahead of Bill.

“Jack Lee Yat-sen,” I confirmed. “From Wisconsin. He’s second generation, parents born here, too. But, Ma, it was work. Jack’s also on the case. He’s another PI.”

Her face fell. My mother’s been to California twice, to visit relatives, and to New England to view the fall leaves, but she has only a vague idea where Wisconsin is. “Second generation” clearly worried her, too. But Jack’s job was the final blow.

“Chinese, is he?” She sniffed. “Hollow bamboo.” Hollow bamboo: Chinese-looking outside, empty inside.

“Ma, you don’t even know him! He speaks and reads Chinese. And his field is Chinese art.” I didn’t tell her that in most other ways Jack was the guy who put the “A” in “ABC.”

“I thought his field was detecting.”

“In the art world. He finds stolen paintings, things like that.”

“So he’s involved with criminals, then.”

“No more than I am.”

“There, you see?” She plugged in the rice cooker emphatically, with bitter triumph.

I gave up. Whatever we were arguing about, I wasn’t going to win. And why, I suddenly asked myself, did I care whether my mother thought well of Jack Lee, anyway?

I was finishing my tea when the cell phone in my robe pocket chirped out Arcade Fire’s “The Suburbs.” That would be Linus.

“Cuz!” he said. “Too early?”

“Not at all. Have a good time last night?”

“Dudess, it was sick! Dum Dum Girls at the Mercury Lounge! They tore it up! We didn’t get back until, like, five a.m.”

“And you’re up working? I’m impressed.”

“No way. We just didn’t crash yet. A little wired, you know? So I thought I’d check out your dude first, to kinda bring me down.”

“So does he? Bring you down?”

“Well, yeah. I mean, the dude himself, I don’t know anything about him. You didn’t get, like, cell phone pix or something?” His voice was hopeful.

“Linus, we were—” I almost said, pointing guns at each other, but I remembered where I was. “It was dark.”

“Oh. Well.” He sounded like he wasn’t sure why that mattered, and to a tech geek I guess it wouldn’t. But he moved on. “Okay, so, I found the car. This dude I know, he has a dude he rolls with—sorry, TMI. A Navigator—last year’s, like you said. Plate number you gave me plus six-eight at the end? It’s registered to Tiger Holdings, LLC. Addresses in Beijing, Hong Kong, Manhattan, and Basking Ridge, New Jersey.”

“Who are they, Tiger Holdings? What do they do?”

“Well, I don’t know who they are, but a couple of their honchos, you can see photos on their Web site.” He gave me the URL. “Maybe your guy’s there.”

“Okay, I’ll check it out. Anything else?”

“Well, sort of. I mean, I could be wrong.”

“But?”

“Well, you remember that Web site I built for Vassily Imports? So Bill could be a shady Russian?”

“Sure.”

“It kind of … smells the same.”

“What do you mean? You think the Tiger Holdings Web site’s a fake?”

“Not really. There’s got to be a real Tiger Holdings, because they own at least one car, right? But you said, make Bill’s look dubious, so I did. This one, it’s like they’re hiding the same things. Who the boss really is, all that. I mean, I was fake hiding, but I think they’re real hiding. Cuz, I think they’re gangsters.”

* * *

I didn’t finish the tea in my mother’s pot because I was headed out soon to Maria’s to meet Mighty Casey the Gangster. This disappointed my mother, but there’s not much I do that doesn’t. I had about twenty minutes before I needed to leave, so I sat down at my computer and brought up the Tiger Holdings Web site.

Linus’s conclusion didn’t surprise me. We’d figured Casey for a gangster last night. That whole kidnap thing, it was kind of a clue. Interesting to have it confirmed through the smell of a Web site, though. And Linus’s worried tone made me glad I hadn’t gotten to tell him the part about the guns.

I clicked through the bios of Tiger Holdings’s officers, each page topped by a photo of a confident Asian man in a costly suit. A prosperous crowd, though I could see what Linus meant: They made it easy to get in touch with them to discuss investment and partnership opportunities, but exactly what they did was hard to tell.

I did find Casey, though. His broad face and thick shoulders were labeled as belonging to one Woo Long. Title: Corporate Liaison. If last night was illustrative of his liaising technique, I’d be surprised to find Tiger Holdings actually doing all that well.

Figuring Linus had already followed Tiger Holdings as far as he could, I Googled Woo Long, but found nothing. Linus had been heading for bed, an unorthodox sleep schedule being his MO and one of the perks of running your own e-business. This wasn’t worth waking him for, but I sent him a note so when he resurfaced he’d know which of these guys I was interested in. Just because Google came up empty didn’t mean Linus would.

I got dressed, clipping on my small-of-the-back holster with the .25 that had come in so handy last night. I surveyed my closet for a drapey jacket loose enough to hide them. I have a bunch of those, mostly made by my mother. She sews them out of fabric I buy and to specs I describe while I wave my hands around. When I was young she taught me embroidery, knitting, and other handwork, but she never let me touch the sewing machine. Her theory was if I couldn’t sew I wouldn’t end up in the factory. Now that she’s retired, dressing my brothers’ wives and me is her chief joy. Though making things for my sisters-in-law seems to be the more gratifying: When she’s sewing my clothes she never stops grumbling about girls not finding husbands if they walk around wearing trousers and tents.

If she has any idea why I really like my jackets baggy, she’s never said.

I chose one of my favorites, a black cotton twill that swings at the hem. It looks particularly good with black pants and a white shirt, and I added a red scarf because black-white-and-red is a power-color combination and I was, after all, meeting a gangster. The fact that Jack Lee would be sitting at a back table watching me barely crossed my mind.

“So long, Ma,” I called, hopping around one-legged in the foyer, putting on my shoes.

“You are going to work?” She appeared from the kitchen, cleaver in hand.

“Yes.”

“With the white baboon? Or the hollow bamboo?”

“Both. Aren’t I lucky?”

She frowned. “Ling Wan-ju. You think you have been lucky, on your road in life. But take care. What looks like the path to good fortune can often be the opposite. And to bad luck, the same.” With that she turned and walked back to the kitchen. Wow, I thought. All that was missing were crickets and ants.

* * *

In the bright spring sunlight I cut a path—to what kind of fortune, I didn’t know. Pushing through the crowds of morning shoppers and early-bird tourists, I called Jack to ask if he’d heard from Anna Yang.

“Nope. I called her this morning again, just got voice mail. After I get through bodyguarding you here I’ll try again.”

“Here? You’re at Maria’s already?”

“The egg custard tarts come out of the oven at eight-thirty. Didn’t you know that?”

I was early, too, and as I planned, I hit Maria’s before Mighty Woo Long Casey. Inside the bakery things were only slightly less chaotic than on the street. I found Jack spread out over a cup of coffee, an egg custard tart, and The Times. His leather jacket hung over the back of his chair and he seemed completely absorbed in the news and caffeine, oblivious to the din around him, which included me ordering milk tea and a red bean bun.

I paid and stood with my tray, waiting for a table to clear. Jack, of course, could have gotten up and given me his, but then he wouldn’t have been able to watch over the meeting. If I couldn’t find one, though, Casey and I would have to take this meeting out to the street, in which case, what good was Jack having one? Quite a conundrum. I wondered if Jeff Dunbar, in the delicate diplomacy of the State Department, had ever faced one like it. Maybe after I’d filled him in on Tiger Holdings’s concerns about him, and passed on their advice, I could ask him.

Luckily, as I stood there, a young couple got up from a table by the window. I sped over, plunking my tray down ahead of the countergirl who was coming to pile their dishes up and push their crumbs onto the floor with a cloth. I thanked her. She nodded and turned to leave, nearly bumping into Casey as she did.

“Ms. Chin,” he grinned. “So nice, see you again.”

“Not all that nice.” I tried to play it tough, but it was hard to keep from smiling at the white bandage on his forehead. Nice work, Jack. “I trust you feel all right.”

“Feel great, thank you.” He pulled out a chair and deposited himself in it. Not far from Jack, a squarish young guy looked up from a Chinese-language newspaper and looked down again quickly. So we were both cheating: Casey had a second here, too. Not suprising. I hoped Jack had noticed. I thought he might have, because, still reading his paper, he shifted in his seat to where both our table and the square guy’s were within his sight.

Casey stuck a straw in his plastic cup of bubble tea. I don’t like that stuff anyway, and certainly not for breakfast. And the one he had was purple.

“What do you want?” I said.

“No,” he contradicted me after a slurp. “Question is, what do your client want?”

“That’s private business.”

“Some private business, he telling everybody.”

“Who?” I said, confused. “He’s telling who?”

“Everybody. Go around saying, I looking new Chaus, you know where to find?”

“Not as far as I know, he’s not. That’s supposed to be my job. Do you, by the way? Know where to find them?”

Casey laughed cheerily, as though I’d made a good joke. “Of course. Boss know. But not telling you.” He wagged a finger in front of my face. “Not telling your client, too. You tell him, go away.”

“No.”

The smile dropped from his face. His voice hardened to ice. “Yes.”

What, we’re not friends anymore? Then enough of this. “Mr. Woo—oh, you’re surprised? Don’t be. I know all about you, you and Tiger Holdings.” “All” was exaggerating, but I let it stand. “Mr. Woo, if you want something, you have to give something. That’s how it works. Who is Tiger Holdings, how do you know who my client is, and why do you and your boss care if I find the Chaus for him?” Because they could be worth a ton, I suggested to myself; but I wanted to hear what he had to say.

He stared at me. “Think you pretty damn smart, Lydia Chin?”

“Why, is Tiger Holdings a big secret? Then you shouldn’t have a Web site. Who are you people?”

Eyes still on mine, he took another slurp of his purple bubble tea. Some tough guy, I thought. Except I was glad there were three dozen other people crowded into the shop here. And that one of them was Jack.

“We same people as your client,” Woo finally said.

“Interesting. Last night you said you weren’t.”

His brows knit. “Said I weren’t, what?”

“With the government. When I asked who you worked for. So, what, did Samuel Wing send you because I didn’t fold fast enough?”

“Samuel Wing? Who is he?”

“Yeah, I don’t know his real name either. The skinny guy in the gray suit. Came to see me yesterday afternoon, to tell me to back off. He sent you because I threw him out? You’re the stick?”

“Pah. Stick, what is stick? You don’t make sense. Don’t know Samuel Wing. Boss sends me.” He blotted his thick lips on a napkin. “Last night, you don’t ask who I work for. You ask me, do I work for government. Government, big joke. I work for Tiger Holdings. Tiger Holdings just like…” He paused, searching for the right words. “Just like business interest your client work for.” He gave a humorless smile. “Tiger Holdings want that business interest to go away. Save everybody trouble.”

A light was beginning to dawn for me, but one dawned for him, too, and faster.

“Samuel Wing.” He frowned and held up a thick finger to stop me from saying anything. “You telling this guy come, say you stop looking for Chaus, you telling he work for government? American government?”

“Chinese government. I don’t know his real name or what his job is, but he’s at the Consulate. And you’re telling me you’re not?”

“Of course not.” He dismissed that with a wave of his purple tea. “Chinese government come bother you? Chinese government care about Chaus? Why?”

“I have no idea. You’re a gangster, right?”

His eyes widened. “Lydia Chin—”

“No, don’t bother. Tiger Holdings is a criminal organization, one way or another, and that’s what you mean by, you’re in the same business as my client. And Tiger Holdings is working for itself on this, not for the Chinese government.”

He rested his gaze on me, slurped, and smiled. “Yes. Tiger Holdings don’t want no trouble with Vassily Imports.”

No, who would?

“So you want me to tell Vladimir to back off.”

Because Vladimir Oblomov was a Russian mobster and Lydia Chin, as far as Tiger Holdings was concerned, was the art consultant helping him look for the Chaus. And State Department middle-manager Jeff Dunbar, aka Dennis Jerrold, and Lydia Chin, his PI, were nowhere to be seen.

“And you called me instead of Vladimir,” I said, “because mine was the number you had. He hasn’t been giving his out.” Except to Shayna. But Nick Greenbank and Doug Haig only had mine. Either of those fellows, it seemed to me, would hand it over without a squeak if a guy like Casey rose up on their horizon; but how would he know to rise? “Who told you Vassily Imports is interested in the Chaus?”

“Little birdie.” Woo seemed to relax a bit, now that I was catching on. He leaned back in his chair. “We understand, Vassily Imports want paintings. Chaus very valuable. We regret, Tiger Holdings got to protect investment. Sorry for inconvenience. Maybe Tiger Holdings can make up to Vassily Imports, some other time.”

“Oh? I’m sure Vladimir will be pleased to hear that. It might make your … suggestion … more palatable. Mr. Woo, what investment?”

“Not making suggestion. Giving advice.”

“And I’m asking a question. What investment?”

He shook his head. “Like you say, private business.”

I ignored that. “Your investment in the paintings? I don’t think so. You said you knew where they were but I don’t believe you. If you had them you wouldn’t care what Vladimir’s doing. You might even try to sell them to him. Or is your investment in the artist? Mr. Woo, is Chau alive? Do you know where he is?”

“Too many question.” Woo pushed away from the table and stood, throwing a shadow over my red bean bun. “Ms. Chin, you tell Oblomov, forget about Chaus. He do that, next time he need friends, Tiger Holdings don’t forget about him. He don’t do that…” Woo stared down at me. “He don’t do that, no one be happy.” He nodded, then turned, working his way between tables to the door, not looking back. I sat watching him, sipping my tea. The young square guy with the Chinese newspaper stood when Woo did and followed him out, leaving the paper and mooncake crumbs all over the tabletop. Outside the door he turned right, as Woo had. Jack got up, too. He shrugged into his jacket and left Maria’s as well; though, being a responsible citizen, he bused his tray and took his newspaper with him.

15

Jack didn’t get far. I caught up with him on the corner of Mulberry. He was peering after a black SUV as it disappeared east along Canal.

“I got the plate this time,” he said.

“Don’t worry about it. Linus ran it already.”

“Seriously? From what he had?” Jack stuffed his pen and paper back in his pocket. “I guess he really is all that.”

“And a bag of chips. He’s my cousin, what did you expect?”

“So who is this guy?”

“Who he is is interesting. Who he thinks his competition is is even better.” I gave him the rundown: Tiger Holdings, Vassily Imports, the warning left with me to pass on to Vladimir Oblomov. “Obviously Tiger Holdings isn’t a Chinatown outfit, or they’d know who I am.”

“She says modestly. No, I know what you mean. But you’re telling me that atrocious accent of Bill’s has the Chinese mob on the run from the Russian mob?”

“Well, technically, the Chinese mob is telling the Russian mob to be on the run from them.”

Jack rubbed the back of his neck. “There really ought to be some way we can make something off of this.”

“If you think of it, let me know. I’m calling Bill. Did you hear from Anna Yang?”

“Maybe. Someone called while we were in Maria’s, but I let it go to voice mail so I wouldn’t get distracted. In case I needed to leap to the rescue or something.” He pulled out his cell phone.

“And don’t think I didn’t appreciate it. Did you notice Woo had someone there, too?”

“Messy guy in front of the pastry case?”

“That’s the one. I was concerned he might be between you and your only ammunition if it came to a battle again.”

“I never threw a cream puff in my life.”

“That’s a baseball joke.”

We focused on our phones. I called Bill while Jack listened to his message. “Hey,” Bill said. “Done already? How’d it go?”

“Let me speak to Vladimir. He’s the big star.”

“Vat?”

“Casey’s a Chinese gangster and he never heard of Jeff Dunbar. It’s Vladimir and Vassily Imports he wants off his back. Wait. Hold on.”

I stopped because I was looking at Jack. In the background I’d heard, “Hey, Anna, thanks for getting back to me,” and then watched Jack’s face darken as he listened in silence. Now he was offering an impressively reassuring, “Of course I will. Anna, calm down. Whatever it is, we’ll take care of it. Give us half an hour, we’ll be there.”

“Unless you have other plans, meet us at the car,” I told Bill. “I think we have business.”

* * *

It took Bill, following Jack’s directions, just over twenty minutes to get us from his parking lot to Anna’s apartment in Flushing. It had taken Jack the entire walk from the bakery to the lot to persuade Anna to let me and Bill come along. In the end he had to both throw around the word “partners”—which he was beginning to use with not just abandon but also a certain élan—and to promise he’d toss us out if, after she told us what it was all about, he thought we should go.

“Doesn’t want to know us, huh? Did you ask her about the Chaus?” I’d said when he finally hung up. We stood on the sidewalk waiting for Bill.

“She was too upset for me to ask her anything. And she knows you already. She says it’s bad enough now, and having you involved will only make it worse.”

“Us, anyone? Or us, us?”

“I got the feeling you, you. But remember, she doesn’t know what you already know.”

“When you put it that way, I don’t either. Did she say what was wrong?”

“No. She just said it was bad trouble and there’s no one else she could call.”

“I hate it when people say that. Does it mean their first thought was to send up the Bat Signal and hope you’d come? Or does it mean, if there were anyone else they could have called, they would have called them?”

“Hmmm. Breakfast with a hard case makes you paranoid, does it?”

“I have breakfast at home every day. You only say that because you’ve never met my mother.”

“No,” he grinned, “but I’d like to.”

Luckily, at that moment Bill came loping down the block, saving me from having to answer Jack and, I hoped, from Jack noticing the sudden heat in my face.

* * *

Anna Yang’s apartment was the downstairs of a two-family house in a blue-collar Flushing neighborhood, not far from the East Village communal studio. By the time we got there I’d filled Bill in on Woo, Tiger Holdings, and Vassily Imports.

“And you scoffed at my accent,” he said.

“I still do.”

“Me, too,” said Jack.

“Jack thinks we should find some way to make something off this,” I told Bill.

“Scamming the Chinese mob?” Bill asked. “Well, if you think of a way, I’m in.”

“Seriously?”

“Of course not. You think I’m crazy?”

“I don’t know, you guys,” said Jack. “I think we’re missing a bet here.”

“Give me a break,” I said. “You’re the one who was complaining all day yesterday about how serene your life was until you met us.”

“Met you. I already knew him.”

“Well, if you think this stream’s that much rougher than your peaceful pond was, you are totally not ready for the Chinese mob white water.”

For a moment, silence in the car. Then both Jack and Bill cracked up.

“Hey,” I said huffily. “I’m trying. This nature metaphor stuff, it’s not so easy.”

* * *

Bill found a parking spot on Anna’s block, a well-kept street of narrow houses and tiny yards. We rang the bell and, as she had at her father’s office, Anna Yang opened the door to us. This time she didn’t light up at the sight of Jack, though. She didn’t react at all. She just stayed standing in the doorway. Her eyes were dry, but puffy lids and a red-tipped nose made it clear she’d been crying. Guys sometimes miss that, or pretend they have, but, after a soft, “Hi, Anna,” Jack reached out and hugged her. I think I’d have found that comforting, myself, but Anna started to cry again.

“Come on,” Jack said, moving into the apartment with his arm around her. “Let’s go sit down.” Bill and I followed them through a small entryway into a spare, bright living room: pale wood floor, ivory sofa and chairs, a scroll painting of wild geese in flight on one wall and a hazy, peaceful watercolor of a wooded lakeshore on another. That one had a familiar feel and I wondered if it was Francie See’s, from before she tightened her focus. The coffee table was crowded with photos of Mike Liu: with Anna, with friends, alone. In most, he was smiling.

Anna wiped her eyes, smoothed her skirt under her, and sat on the sofa. Jack sat protectively close beside her. That left me with a choice of armchairs, so I organized myself in one. Bill, as usual, didn’t sit, but wandered a distance away, as though he wanted to examine the paintings.

“Okay,” Jack said to Anna. “Tell us. Whatever it is, we’ll fix it.”

I was a little alarmed to hear him say that so categorically. This was a woman whose husband was in prison in China. It was possible her problems were beyond the three of us.

Or, the four of us. From the hall an older Chinese woman appeared, thin and, while not quite as tall as Anna, not a tiny Cantonese like me. Jack stood immediately, so I did the same. “Mrs. Yang,” he said.

“Hello, Jack.” Her voice was deep, steady, and heavily Mandarin-accented. She wore her salt-and-pepper hair pulled back into a bun. Standing stick-straight, she carried a tray with a white pot and five no-handle teacups, so she couldn’t bow, but she inclined her head to Jack. He, apparently without thinking, bowed to her. This was a well-trained Midwesterner.

“This is Lydia Chin, and Bill Smith,” Jack said. “Yang Yu-feng. Anna’s mother.”

Yang Yu-feng deposited her tray on the coffee table. She shook our hands and now she bowed. She gestured us to sit again, which she also did, back straight, and she poured the tea. Jack picked up a cup, holding it one hand bottom, one hand side as good manners demanded. Whatever he said, I’d bet he’d have passed the lidded-cup test on his first go. “You’re looking well, Mrs. Yang. Anna didn’t say you’d be here. It’s an unexpected pleasure.”

Well, well. Straight-up suburban Jack, suddenly going all Chinese on us. He was smiling at Yang Yu-feng but the message was for Anna: If her mother’s presence wasn’t part of the plan and she didn’t want to discuss her troubles with her there, she should send up a flare. We’d make small talk and get back with her later.

“Jack.” Anna’s mother spoke with a calm that could equally have been born of confidence or despair. “Anna has a problem. She thinks you will be able to help her.”

Okay, so that was our answer. Jack glanced at Anna, and nodded. “I hope so.”

Yang Yu-feng didn’t respond. She waited until we all had our teacups—Bill came across the room, picked one up, and held it correctly, also, just like I’d taught him—and then she lifted her own. After we’d taken our ceremonial first sips—tea before trouble, oh, would my mother have approved—she put her cup on the table and turned to her daughter, waiting.

Anna looked at Jack, and then at Bill and me. She didn’t say anything, but her lip began to tremble.

Jack followed her gaze. “Lydia and Bill and I are working together on a case,” he said evenly. “It has to do with Chau Chun, new paintings that are supposed to be his. If the reason you called me has nothing to do with Chau, they’ll leave. If it does, you need them as much as you need me.” He added, “I promise you can trust them.”

I gave Anna what I hoped was a reassuring smile, Chinese woman to Chinese woman. Jack she already knew and trusted; her mother, she also knew, and had had twenty-two years to decide whether she could trust. That pretty much left Bill on his own, but sometimes he can be just a big, heartening presence. After hearing what Jack said, though, Anna suddenly seemed to stop caring about me and Bill, and even her mom. Pale, she was staring at Jack.

“You already know? Is that—that’s why you came to see Daddy yesterday? To ask him if he knew anything about the Chaus?”

“Sort of. Not really. Lydia and Bill are working for a collector who’s looking for them.”

“Someone’s looking for them already? Who?”

I wasn’t sure what that meant. They shouldn’t be looking for them yet? Later would be better? Later than what? Jack said, “It seems like a number of collectors are. This one hired Lydia to find them. I’m sorry, we can’t tell you his name, but it doesn’t matter. And I’m—I was—working for your dad.”

“What?” Momentarily, she was wordless. “Working for Daddy? He didn’t tell me. Working for him how?”

She hadn’t known that. She had the Chaus, her father wanted the Chaus, and no one in this family talks to each other? Well, almost no one. Either Jack’s client wasn’t news to Anna’s mother, or she had a good poker face.

“He’d heard rumors the paintings existed,” Jack said. “Like the other collectors. He hired me to find out whether it was true.”

“Where did he hear it? Why did he want to know?”

“I don’t know where he heard it. But Chau Chun was his friend.” Jack gave Anna and her mother the party line: “He thinks the paintings are phonies and this is all about someone trying to cash in on Chau’s reputation. He’s trying to protect his friend.”

Mrs. Yang’s gaze remained steady on her teacup. Anna opened her mouth, but covered it with her hand instead of speaking. Jack went on, “Your father’s very protective about Chau. I think they must have been pretty close. He was with Chau when he died.” Watching Anna, ashen and silent, Jack asked, “He’s never told you that story?”

She shook her head. “No. They were close? He was there? Daddy was at Tiananmen? Oh, my God. Mom, did you know that?”

“Yes.” Yang Yu-feng’s dark calm was unshaken. “I knew them both, when we were young.”

“Why didn’t I know? Why didn’t anyone ever tell me that?”

Mrs. Yang raised her eyes to her daughter. “The story of that night? A terrible night in terrible times. Your father and I left it behind us when we left China. You are an American child. A new land, a new life. Why should we burden you with such times?”

After a moment, Anna asked, “Did you know Daddy had hired Jack?”

“Yes.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Anna, tell you what?” Her mother’s voice sharpened. “You were working again, you were eating, sleeping. For months you had been lost, so unhappy. Now you have been going to the studio eagerly, now you have…” She shook her head, said it in Mandarin, then switched back to English. “Come back to life, you have come back to life. Why would I tell you about your father’s troubles, your father’s anger? It had nothing to do with you. Or so I thought.”

Anna didn’t answer.

“Anna,” Jack said gently, after a few moments, “it might help if I tell you we already know you have them. The paintings, the Chaus.”

Anna shook her head without looking at him. “No, I don’t.”

Jack glanced at Bill, who walked over and handed Jack his phone. It took Jack about ten seconds to find Shayna’s photo and show it to Anna. She didn’t reach for the phone, just stared. In a voice almost too low to hear, she said, “What was I thinking? This whole thing, what was I thinking?”

“What were you thinking about what? Anna, are the paintings real? Where are they?”

For a moment, nothing. Then Anna stood unsteadily and began to wander around the room as though she were lost in a strange place. Her mother’s gaze followed her. “They’re not real,” Anna said softly. “I made them.”

Jack glanced at me and at Bill. “Okay.” He nodded. “So someone spotted them and the rumors started and the whole thing got out of hand. But that’s not your fault. I can’t imagine you claimed they were real, right? So what’s going on? What’s wrong?”

When Anna didn’t answer Jack looked to Mrs. Yang. She didn’t turn his way, just kept watching her daughter.

Anna stood at the window, fingering the curtain, gazing at a couple walking down the street. When she finally spoke I had to strain to hear her words. “I always loved Chau. He’s not really taught in art school but I grew up with him.”

Jack threw me a glance. “Does Dr. Yang have paintings? Is that what you mean?”

Anna nodded. “Three. Literally, I grew up with them—they were in my room.”

Paintings that valuable, in the nursery? Mrs. Yang must have spotted me trying to keep my jaw from dropping. She said, “We hung them there to remind us. What was really precious, what was valuable, what could be lost.”

“I see,” I said.

Anna flushed. “But no one ever said anything about him,” she went on. “Chau, I mean. Until I was old enough to go through Daddy’s books and start asking questions. That’s Daddy’s way anyhow, waiting for people to ask things. Then he told me Chau’s story, the outlines of it. And that he knew him, back in China. But that’s all. I never knew … Mom, why didn’t you tell me?”

Mrs. Yang stayed silent. Asked and answered already; Anna wouldn’t get a second response. I recognized that Chinese-mother policy.

Anna gave up, started again. “But always, as long as I can remember, I loved those paintings, and Chau’s other work in the books I found. It just … it spoke to me, in some special way. In art school I started copying it, over and over. Chau’s paintings are so beautiful. Do you know them? Graceful, controlled linework, and such precarious composition … and they’re so entirely political. Completely committed, but never at the expense of the art. I wanted to learn from that. I wanted my work to be like that.” She paused. “When I got back from China…” A catch in her voice; she went on, “When I had to leave without Mike, I was so angry, and so helpless. Daddy tried, and other people, and there’s the whole movement here, but it’s all about begging and waiting, isn’t it? It’s horrible.” Another pause, this time longer. “I didn’t know anything to do except make art out of it all. So I tried, but nothing worked out. It was all garbage and I threw it away.

“Then I started to think about Chau. What would he do, what would he make? I started a painting, not a copy but something new, using everything I knew about him. I used the same paper he did, the same inks. You can still get them, they haven’t changed in centuries. It was the discipline, you know? The painting was pine branches, and a wren. Nothing political, just a technique exercise, but it absorbed me. I can’t tell you how grateful I was for that, just to be able to be out of my thoughts for a while, putting ink on paper.” She stopped, fingering the curtain.

“As I was finishing up, wishing it weren’t over, I heard Mike’s voice. Oh, not really.” She shook her head impatiently, though none of us had said anything. “I wasn’t crazy. But he used to read his poems to me, and I heard him reciting one about a tree in autumn, tall against a gray sky, alone as the cold wind blew the leaves away and the birds flew south. So in Mike’s calligraphy, as closely as I could, I put the poem on the painting. Partly just because it kept the painting time going, you understand? That was what I wanted most. Then when it was almost done, I came in to work on it one day and it caught me by surprise. It really looked like a Chau. Not that I’m that good. Obviously I’m not, no matter how hard I work at his techniques or his style. An expert could tell, of course he could.” Her voice caught again; then she went on. “But I realized. The poem was what made it a Chau. The balance of politics and art. The funny thing is, it’s not one of Mike’s political poems, not when he wrote it. You can read it that way now, but then it was only about a tree. Before his trial, if someone had put it on a painting, that’s all it would have meant. But now, a painting in Chau’s style with a poem of Mike’s—in China I’d have been arrested.”

Maybe it was the comfort in telling the story, in saying Mike’s name; maybe it was the relief in getting through it without dissolving in tears; or maybe it was just exhaustion; but Anna now turned back, stood for a moment, and then walked over to once again sit beside Jack. I stole a glance at her mother, found her still face unreadable.

Jack angled toward Anna, elbows on his knees. “I can’t wait to see these paintings. You are that good and I bet they’re spectacular. But I still don’t get the problem.”

Anna reached toward the coffee table, straightening photographs that didn’t need it. “I pinned the painting up and started a second one. That one, I had a poem of Mike’s in mind, about how lions and tigers can rampage through the forest but they can’t stop the cicadas from singing. Tiny bugs, dozens of them, and a wild tiger face, a paw.… I was working on it when Pete came in. Pete Tsang, you know him?”

“Yes. We saw him last night, at East Village.”

She stopped. “You went to the studio?”

“Because of the photo. I knew the papercuttings were yours.” He added, “Can’t miss ’em.”

I was glad he’d said that because it brought a small smile from Anna. Not from her mother, though, and Anna’s smile faded as she went on. “Pete’s been working with an artists’ freedom network for years. The kind of international human rights group the Chinese government hates. They took up Mike’s case as soon as he got arrested. They won’t give up. I don’t know if they can do any good but at least they keep trying.” She ran out of photos to straighten, so she drew her hands back to her lap. “Pete saw the paintings, the pine one and the one I was working on. No one else in the studio had any idea but Pete knew right away what they were and he understood why I was making them. He was the one who suggested, a couple of weeks later, that if people thought they were really Chaus, that might work for Mike.”

“Pete said to claim they were authentic?” Jack asked skeptically. “That doesn’t sound like him. And what did he mean? Help how?”

“We weren’t going to claim they were authentic. But we weren’t going to announce to the world they weren’t, either. We were just going to show them. Next week.”

“Asian Art Week,” I said. I looked at the guys. “That’s the splash.”

Anna said, “Splash?”

“My client thought someone might be planning to unveil them next week, to make a big splash. I think he was thinking more art world than political, though. Or,” I paused, reflecting on who my client was turning out to be, “maybe not.”

Anna nodded. “It would explode. It’s more than just Asian Art Week, it’s Beijing/NYC. You know about that?”

“There was a poster outside your father’s office.”

“The Chinese government’s bringing over a group of officially approved artists. They’re showing off, how vibrant the art scene is in China, all that. It’s a big deal, big opening party, all the critics, everyone.

“Chau may not be taught much, people here might not know him, but everyone in that world, the collectors, the academics, everyone the government’s trying to impress, they all know who he was and what he stood for. How he died. New Chaus with Mike’s poems on them, even if we admitted they weren’t real—‘homages,’ Pete said we’d call them, not ‘fakes,’ ‘homages’—new ones with the poems of a jailed dissident, shown just when the government’s turning the spotlight on their own artists, it would be a huge embarrassment. It would be a big loss of face in the international community.”

“Weren’t you worried?” I couldn’t help asking. “That they’d take it out on Mike somehow?”

“No.” She shook her head emphatically. “To bring attention to Mike, that was the whole point. Since there’s a spotlight, to turn it on him. Keep his name in the news, remind people he’s still in prison, that nothing’s changed. China wouldn’t dare do anything to him while the world was watching. During his trial, the world was. But people forget. Nothing happens and they move on to something else. The government counts on that with dissidents, that people will forget about them. We were going to remind people in a way the government would hate.”

“But they found out,” I said. “And that’s the problem, why you called Jack? Samuel Wing came to you?”

Mrs. Yang looked up. Anna blinked. “Samuel Wing? Who’s that?”

“Maybe he was calling himself something else, because Samuel Wing’s a phony name anyhow. The guy from the Chinese Consulate. The skinny guy. He came to me, too.”

Anna looked completely blank. “What? From the Chinese Consulate? No. What guy?”

It seemed I was having a hard time selling Samuel Wing this morning. “A guy calling himself Samuel Wing said he’d heard I was looking for the Chaus and the people he represented wanted me to stop. He offered me money if I did and trouble if I didn’t. That’s not what this is about? The Chinese government threatening you?”

Anna shook her head. “The government? No. They don’t know yet.”

“I’m afraid they do. Mrs. Yang? Does Samuel Wing mean anything to you?”

“I do not know this man,” Mrs. Yang replied, though I’d asked because she seemed a micron paler than before. “He said he was from the Consulate?”

“No. But he was. Though as of yesterday,” I said to Anna, “he didn’t know where the paintings were. He didn’t know you had them.”

“I don’t have them,” she said wearily. “That’s what’s wrong. That’s not who came to me.”

“Who did?” Jack asked.

“Doug Haig.”

Jack and I looked at each other. “That revolting sleazebag creep?” I said. “What did he want?”

Bill gave up the standing at a distance thing and came over and sat down in the other armchair.

“When he first came he just wanted to see the paintings. I guess someone told him they were there.”

“He’s seen the photo.” Bill spoke for the first time and Anna turned to him. “The woman who took it was showing him the sculpture.”

“Tony Ling’s? The foil?”

“She thought he’d like it. She still thinks that’s what he was excited about.”

“Poor Tony. Haig almost knocked that piece over, bulldozing past it.” She pushed some loose strands of hair back from her forehead. “Haig had probably never been to Queens before in his life. He came in a limo. Someone saw it pull up and word raced through the building before he got to the front door. Everyone ignored him, to not be uncool, but everyone was praying he’d come to their studio. They stuck their heads out after he passed, to see where he was going. We could tell from the way he was galloping along like a hippo in a hurry that he wasn’t there out of curiosity, to check out the show. He was on a mission. It never crossed anyone’s mind, especially mine, that he was coming to see me. I just kept cutting. I looked up when he got to my door, just to watch him pass. I almost sliced my finger when he actually came in.”

“You were papercutting?” I asked. “Not painting Chaus?”

“I’d done four Chaus by then. I had them up in the studio. They were … comforting. But at an open studio show, when people are wandering in and out all day, they like to see you making your work. The work they’ll write up if they’re critics, or the collectors will buy. People like to see it being born. And anyway, the Chaus were just for me.”

“Not for Pete Tsang’s bombshell show?”

“He hadn’t suggested it yet. That came later. Partly because of Haig.”

“I’m not following. Haig knows what Pete’s planning?”

“No, that’s not what I mean. When Haig got to my studio he barely glanced at my papercuttings but he spent a long time with the Chaus. It made me uncomfortable. They were for me, they were about Mike. He was wearing a loupe around his neck on a gold chain, how ridiculous is that? He leaned close and examined them, every inch. Then he turned to me, all oil and smiles, and said those were nice paintings, where did I get them? I almost laughed. It seemed like he actually wasn’t sure if they were real. I got the sense he was hoping they were and I didn’t know what they were worth, so he could steal them cheap.”

“Did you tell him you’d made them?”

“No. He was so taken with them that it felt like bragging to say they were mine. They were none of his business, anyway. I wished I’d thought to take them down. I told him a friend had done them.”

“Did he ask who?”

“And he got really mad when I wouldn’t tell. Bottled-up mad, like he’d have screamed at me except losing it was beneath him. He told me I wasn’t doing my friend a favor, and who did I think I was to stand between an artist and interest from Baxter/Haig? I promised I’d tell my friend. He left steaming, but what could he do? After he’d crashed out through the halls, Pete came to my studio to find out what was going on. ‘You could hear us?’ I asked him. ‘We could feel it,’ he said. ‘Like an electrical storm. Your studio was shooting off sparks.’ So I told him. He thought it was pretty hilarious that the paintings had convinced Haig. Then he got thoughtful, and he came back the next day with the idea of the show. I wasn’t sure I wanted to do it, but I did take the paintings down.”

“Why?”

“Well, first, the open studio was still on and I didn’t want anyone else to drool over them the way Haig had. And if I did decide to go ahead with Pete’s idea, we’d want to spring them on people. We needed them to be a surprise.”

“But Haig had already seen them.”

“Pete said that wasn’t a problem. In case they were real, Haig would keep them to himself for now, until he’d browbeaten me into giving them up. And when we unveiled them, we could count on Haig to add to the hype because he’d go around telling everyone he’d seen them first and known right away what they were.”

“Self-aggrandizement R us,” Jack agreed. “Except didn’t Haig think they were fakes? Didn’t he believe in your ‘friend’? ”

“I think for a while he thought my friend might be Chau himself.”

“Those paintings must be damn good. Haig’s a parasite but he has an eye.”

“No,” said Anna. “Or if they’re good, they’re good imitations. But eye or not, we all see what we want to see.”

“Meaning?” asked Bill.

Anna said, “Haig’s in trouble. He needs money. That’s the rumor, anyway.”

“We’ve heard it,” I said.

“I think the idea that the Chaus might be real, it was like a lifeline. If they were and he could get them cheap and sell them all his troubles would be over.”

“Well, too bad for him, then.”

Anna shook her head again. “That’s the problem. It’s dawned on him that it doesn’t matter if they’re real, as long as people think they are.”

“But people wouldn’t,” I said. “As soon as you said you’d made them.”

She didn’t answer that right away. “I don’t have them,” she said after a pause. “I came in yesterday to work, and opened the drawer I’d had them in, and they were gone.”

Bill and I exchanged glances. Jack said, “Someone stole them?”

“Doug Haig called an hour later. He has them.”

“Someone sold them to him already? That was quick work.”

“No,” said Jack slowly. “Not sold them to him. Stole them for him. Am I right, Anna?”

She nodded. “I think so.”

“Jon-Jon Jie. He has the studio beside you. He climbed over the wall.”

I thought of the quiet building, the ceilingless studios.

“The security commissar,” Anna said bitterly. “We’ve never protected ourselves from each other. Artists? What was someone going to do, steal your brushes? We lend each other everything all the time anyway, who’d steal? The only reason we lock our studio doors is so you don’t have to go round up your stuff every time you come in. But all the real security worries were about the bad guys outside.”

“Jie’s signed with Baxter/Haig,” Jack said. “Francie See told us. Just yesterday. She said she thought he bought his way in.”

“Looks like he did,” I said. “Just not with money.”

“Haig has them,” Anna went on, her voice suddenly urgent, “and he wants to put them on the market. As authentic.”

“But how can he?” I demanded. “You’ll just say you painted them. You’ll show everyone the paper, and the ink, that it’s easily available. And your sketches, don’t you do sketches? How can he pretend they’re real if you do that?”

“He says if I do that, he’ll tell everyone I already sold them to him as authentic, for a lot of money. Because I’m Bernard Yang’s daughter, so I knew he’d believe me. I cheated him and the only reason I’m admitting it now is I’m mad and I want to make him look stupid because Baxter/Haig wouldn’t take me on. He’s got a whole story cooked up, bills of sale and everything.”

“Would people believe that?” I looked to Jack.

“If he’s got paperwork,” Jack said. “And the paintings are good enough. Maybe they would.”

“It would make him look like an idiot,” Bill said. “Buying fakes.”

“A trusting, honest idiot,” said Jack, “bamboozled by a cold-blooded cheap thief trading on her father’s reputation. He’d look stupid but it would pass. But it would end Anna’s career. No gallery would take her on, no one would show her.”

Anna and her mother sat silent, Anna pale, her mother seeming tight-packed, like TNT.

“Still,” I said. “Suppose Anna doesn’t say anything, then. No one will pay Chau’s prices without getting the paintings appraised. Wouldn’t it take more than the supposed word of an expert’s daughter and some old paper to get some other expert to put his reputation on the line, authenticating new work by someone who’s supposed to be dead?”

Jack nodded, as though what I’d said had confirmed something. “Yes.” He looked at Anna, waiting.

“Yes,” Anna also said, and she didn’t look at anyone. “That’s why I called you, Jack. I don’t know what good you can do, though. I don’t know how you can help me. He says Daddy has to authenticate them.”

16

It took Jack as long to persuade Anna to sit still and do nothing until she heard from us as it had to convince her to let me and Bill come along in the first place. As soon as she finished her story she decided we couldn’t, in fact, help her. So she wanted to help herself. She wanted to call her father. She wanted her mother to call her father. She wanted to call Pete Tsang. She wanted to call the police. She wanted to race up to Doug Haig’s gallery with a meat cleaver.

“That’s why Dr. Yang fired me,” Jack said. “We thought it was just because he found out you had the paintings.”

“Haig called Daddy. He was afraid I wouldn’t, that I’d be a martyr no matter what he threatened me with. ‘Like your idiotic husband,’ he said. ‘Two self-righteous peas in a two-bit pod.’” She flushed crimson. “So he called Daddy, and Daddy called me. We had a big fight but I couldn’t lie to him. I guess that’s when he fired you.”

“He’s not really going to do it, is he?” I asked.

She didn’t answer that directly. “Haig says he has until tomorrow morning to decide.”

“If he doesn’t,” Bill asked, “is there someone else Haig could go to?” Jack and I looked at him. “Well, I’m assuming that, much as he’d love to destroy Anna’s career because he’s just a mean SOB, he’d rather get the paintings authenticated and make a fortune.”

“Maybe there’s someone,” Anna said. “I don’t know.”

Jack said, “There aren’t a lot of experts in that area, people who really know Chau’s work. There’s Clarence Snyder, in Chicago—I studied under him, he was on my committee. But he’d spot them for fakes, or at best, if they’re really good, he’d give them a question mark. No, Dr. Yang’s perfect. He’s the biggest name, plus he’s in a corner.”

“He can’t even be considering it,” I said. “He just can’t. This is exactly what he was afraid of. It’s why he hired you. Someone making a big profit off of Chau’s reputation. And for that someone to be Haig, and for him, Dr. Yang, for him to make it possible by lying—he just can’t.”

“I said that,” Anna said. “Not the part about Chau’s reputation, and him hiring Jack—I didn’t know that. But I told him to call Haig’s bluff. I’m such a nobody. What could it matter?” Mrs. Yang stirred, but Anna frowned and her mother said nothing. “But Daddy was so mad. He didn’t hear a word I said. He just told me to stay here and do nothing until he called me. That was last night. But I couldn’t do nothing. I just couldn’t. I didn’t sleep, not at all. When I called you this morning, Jack, I was thinking … I don’t know why. I don’t know what I thought you could do. I just…” She trailed off. “I just needed someone to help me.”

There was silence. In it, I heard my own voice say, “We will.”

* * *

So there we were, Jack and Bill and I, back in Bill’s car, rolling through Queens, trying to find a place where we could think. “There’s a diner over there.” Jack pointed from the backseat.

“Pro,” Bill said. “Coffee.”

“Mrs. Yang’s osmanthus tea didn’t do anything for you?” I asked.

“For me, either,” Jack admitted.

“And just when I was beginning to think you really were Chinese,” I said. “Anyway, veto. Walls have ears.”

“Your paranoia knows no bounds?” Jack asked. “We’re in the middle of Queens. Maybe you’re famous in Flushing, but me, I’m pretty well unknown around here.”

“First: I don’t believe you’re unknown anywhere. Second: around here is where yesterday afternoon the security commissar scaled a wall and stole the paintings, right before the Chinese mob slapped a tail on us, tried to kidnap me, and shot at you.”

“You have such a vivid way of making your points.” Jack sat back with a sigh.

“Compromise,” Bill said. “We stop at the diner, pick up coffee, and sit in the park. Unless you think the trees have ears.”

“Tree ears,” Jack said helpfully. “Those black mushrooms. My mother makes soup from them.”

So with two coffees, a tea, and a giant cherry cheese Danish—Bill had apparently not had breakfast—we repaired to Flushing Meadow Park, where in the middle of a fresh spring morning you can sit on a lawn with toddlers chasing dogs, dogs chasing Frisbees, and, if you’re lucky, no one chasing you.

“Okay, bigmouth,” Jack said to me as he peeled back the tab on his coffee lid. “You told her we’d help her. What’s the plan?”

“Me? You’re the one who said, ‘Whatever it is, we’ll fix it.’”

“I was hoping you’d forgotten that.” He turned to Bill. “How come you didn’t make any promises?”

“I never do.”

I said, “That way when he saves the day it’s more of a wow because no one expects it.”

“But you do have a plan?” Jack asked.

“Nope.” Bill took a bite of the Danish, which was the size of his head. “Don’t you?”

“What, a plan? To quote you, nope.”

“Come on, use your imagination,” I said.

Jack pondered. “Well, how about this? You could distract Doug Haig with your mind-blowing legs while Bill breaks into the gallery and resteals the Chaus.”

“You’ve never seen my legs.”

“You said to use my imagination.”

“Besides, where are you in that plan?”

“Monitoring the proceedings from my office. Wearing a bulletproof vest.”

I sighed. “You mean, it’s up to me as usual? Why is everything my job? Okay, but you’ll have to give me a piece of that.”

Bill held out the Danish. I tore off a fistful. Bill offered the hardly diminished hubcap to Jack, but he declined.

“Okay,” I said. “The problem is, Haig has the paintings. I’m just thinking out loud here. But at least I’m thinking.”

Jack said, “Ouch.” Bill shrugged.

“If he didn’t have them he could yell and threaten to expose people and throw as many hissy fits as he wanted and no one would care.”

“Vladimir Oblomov could go to him, to buy zem,” Bill said.

“If Haig thinks he can get them authenticated, he’ll wait,” said Jack. “He’ll stall any buyers until he knows how high he can go.”

“Besides, we don’t have a couple of million dollars to buy zem vit,” I said. “No, I’m thinking we really might have to steal them. Jack’s idea about my legs was ridiculous, but we could try something like it.”

“How about my legs?” Bill offered.

“You mean, instead of seduction we try terror? No, we need a real idea.”

A Frisbee flew long and landed on the pond with a plop. A shaggy black dog chased it to the shoreline, stood and barked, whined, and then, with a loud yip, charged in after it. He beelined across the water, clamped his jaws around the thing, and swam like hell for dry land.

“Or,” I said.

“Or?”

“Or?”

“Or, we let Haig keep the paintings and get exactly what he wants.”

“Which is what?”

“To have them authenticated.”

I laid on them the scheme that had come to me. A lot of brow-furrowing and dog- and Frisbee-watching followed, and a great deal of discussion. Bill worked his way through two cigarettes while we did what he and I always do when we’re making a plan: try to poke holes in it, look for solutions to all the problems we were likely to stumble over.

Jack joined in all that but he loved the idea from the start, as I knew he would.

“Because you get to show off,” Bill said.

“Oh, like you didn’t show off already, Lord of the Blings? But I do have an issue to raise.”

I said, “And that would be?”

Jack leaned back on his elbows. “I want to remind you guys that Doug the Slug, Anna, and Dr. Yang aren’t the only people who’re interested in these paintings. For reasons we haven’t even learned yet, the US State Department, the PRC government, and the Chinese mob also care. And Pete Tsang’s human rights group,” he added. “Though them we can probably discount as a threat.”

“And dere’s da Russkie mob, too,” said Bill.

“Please don’t go native on us,” I warned him. “Jack, once all those people know the paintings are fakes, don’t you think they’ll stop being interested?”

“I don’t know. Since we don’t know exactly what they were after in the first place.”

I turned to Bill. He stubbed out his smoke. “He’s right. It’s not clear what we’d be getting in the middle of.”

“But then what are you guys saying? It’s too dangerous, this whole thing, and we should back off? How can we? Leave Anna and Dr. Yang twisting in the wind? That’s just wrong.”

“Back off?” said Jack. “Are you kidding? That’s just wrong. But since it is dangerous—I speak as the guy who’s been shot at twice—”

“Yeah, yeah, okay.”

“—as that guy, what I’m saying is, if we’re going to take Haig on, and whoever else, using this undeniably brilliant strategy you’ve just outlined, then all I’m suggesting is, maybe we should consider playing for higher stakes.”

I cocked my head, regarding him. “You said before, there ought to be some way we could make something off of this.”

“It was one of the things my mentor drilled into me when I was working out my business plan. Risk should be commensurate with reward.”

“You had a business plan? For a PI office?” I turned to Bill. “So much for the whole wild-man thing.”

“He’s crazy,” Bill said. “Not stupid.”

“Thank you,” Jack said gravely.

“Did you have a business plan?” I asked Bill.

“Not a chance. For a PI office? Listen, guys. We don’t know how big the risk actually is. The government men on both sides could still be freelancing. They might easily both just fade away if there were real trouble involved.”

“I question the ‘easily,’” Jack said. “And Mighty Casey Woo didn’t sound like he was going to fade away. And he has a gun.”

“Well,” I said, “if that’s the direction you want to go in…”

So we explored that direction, looking from many angles at a reasonable risk/return ratio. By the time the coffee and tea were gone and even the goliath Danish had disappeared, we’d come up with what we thought was one heck of a plan.

17

Our first step was to get all the good guys on the same page. We ran into trouble right away: We wouldn’t be able to talk to Dr. Yang until lunchtime. “He has a seminar,” Jack said, clicking off from a short conversation with the department secretary. “I made us an appointment. Meanwhile, at least we know where he is.”

“You mean, at least he’s not out trying to do Doug Haig grievous bodily harm? Because that thought crossed my mind, too.”

Next good guy, Anna. Jack put his phone on speaker. He didn’t tell her what we were planning, just to sit tight, not to answer the phone if Haig called, and to wait until she heard from us. She couldn’t believe we really had an idea, and if we did, that it was any good; except she wanted to so badly she was willing to do what we asked.

One of the things we asked was that she call Pete Tsang and tell him about the stolen paintings.

“Haig said not to tell anyone,” she protested. “Daddy did, too.”

“I know,” Jack said. “But if Pete talks to the wrong people he could screw this up. We’ll explain the whole thing later, when we have it all lined up. Just ask Pete to call me, okay? And don’t worry.”

It was a no-brainer that she was going to disobey that last instruction, but she said she’d follow the others. Our next call was to the good guy who’d need the most lead time: Linus. I got his voice mail and told it what we needed. “Another Web site. Call Jack Lee”—I gave him Jack’s number—“and he’ll tell you exactly what to say on it and where to get material. You don’t know him but you can trust him.” Jack delivered a thumbs-up when he heard that. “It can look a little primitive, in fact it probably should. But here’s the important part. I need it by four this afternoon. And Linus, it needs to be in Chinese.”

Bill gave me raised eyebrows as I clicked off. “Is his Chinese up to that? As I recall, it’s kind of primitive itself.”

“That’s okay,” said Jack. “No one who matters who’ll see this site can read Chinese, either.”

The action switched back to Jack’s phone. First, he called Chicago.

He’d objected when I’d first brought up Clarence Snyder. “That other expert,” I’d said. “The one you studied with. Are you on good enough terms to call him?”

“Not to ask him to lie, no.”

“Nothing like that. He’s just insurance.” I explained what I had in mind. Jack was skeptical, but my logic was irrefutably sound. He made the call, skirting the details but letting Dr. Snyder know he was working for the Yangs (which was sort of true) and that Doug Haig was trying to get over on them. In the end, since Jack promised to reveal all once the case was over and since Dr. Snyder wasn’t being asked to do anything except tell the literal truth, he agreed. “More than just agreed,” Jack said, hanging up. “He was impressively enthusiastic.”

“Well, you said he was a friend of Dr. Yang’s.”

“And also, he knows Doug Haig.”

The next event on Jack’s phone happened almost immediately. Pete Tsang called. Jack didn’t put him on speaker but the gist of the discussion wasn’t hard to follow.

“I know,” Jack said. “Well, you could do that. Or you could let Haig hang them out to dry.… Yes, we do.… Anna’s on board. She told you?… No, because she doesn’t know the details.… Pete. If you see Jon-Jon Jie, or Doug Haig … I said if … No, that would screw everything up. Just be your normal warm and fuzzy self.… Pete? Please?… Later on today.… Okay, great. Thanks.”

“Reluctant?” I asked when Jack clicked off.

“Oh, he’s fine. I just had to talk him out of blowing Jon-Jon Jie’s brains out and stuffing what’s left down Doug Haig’s throat.”

“Creative solution.”

“He’s an artist.”

So our first three good guys were relatively easy pickings.

The fourth, we weren’t even sure was a good guy.

“If he is, it’ll be a lot simpler,” I said. “He lied and we don’t know what he’s up to, but if he’s on our side the whole thing will be easier.”

The guys agreed, so I called my client.

He answered on the second ring. “Ms. Chin! News?”

“A whole lot of it. Mr. Jerrold.”

Into the silence while he was thinking up how to respond, I said, “Don’t bother. But we have to talk. I’d like you to meet me at my office.”

A pause, then just, “When?”

“An hour from now.”

What could he say?

We were about to pack up and leave our little paradise when an unexpected good guy called us. Jack’s phone rang, and he answered it with, “Hi, Eddie. What’s up?… Say again?… Seriously?… Holy cow. Eddie, can I put you on speaker? I’m here with Lydia and her other partner.”

That brought a snort from Bill. I swatted him. Jack pressed the button and lowered the phone, holding it so we could all hear. “Guys, this is Eddie To. Eddie, if you hear a voice you don’t know, it’s Bill Smith. Eddie, go ahead and tell Lydia and Bill what you just told me.”

“Hi, Lydia, and good to meet you, Bill,” Eddie To said politely. I pictured him in his gallery surrounded by giant springs and speeding red boxes. “I called Jack because I’m being a source. A gent from the Chinese Consulate was just up here. Wei-mai Jin. Jin Wei-mai it would be in the patois of Mother China, which I don’t speak. He’s the Cultural Attaché.”

“Eddie, it’s Lydia,” I interrupted. “About five-nine, skinny, receding gray hair?”

“No. Smaller, chubby, bald.”

I glanced at the guys. “Okay, go on.”

“He’s been here before, has Mr. Jin, in his position as culture vulture. I’ve also seen him at receptions and such, once or twice in the company of a fellow like you’re describing, if that helps.”

“That other fellow, do you know his name?”

“No. Frank’s fluent in four dialects of the mother tongue, plus Japanese, so he gets the eastern hemisphere VIPs. I get the French and all those stodgy Germans, plus the occasional Argentine, olé. But Frank’s not here today, so Mr. Jin was all mine. I thought it would interest Jack and Co. to know he was after Chau Chun.”

“Chau himself? He said that?”

“No, I’m sorry, the paintings. The rumored ones you and Jack were up here asking about yesterday.”

“Eddie, this is Bill. What did he say, exactly?”

“Hi, Bill. Exactly, he said he’d heard someone was trying to pass off forged Chaus as real and was that a circumstance we here at Red Sky were familiar with?”

“It sounds almost like an accusation,” I said.

“From the PRC Cultural Attaché, it’s always an accusation. Understand, the role of Cultural Attaché is rarely played by anyone cultured. Mr. Jin’s the third in that job since Frank and I opened this gallery. It’s a reward position they give to party-liners who can be trusted out of the country and might enjoy a little capitalist R & R. Just like Ninotchka. There are other people at the Consulate whose job is to actually know things, but knowledge can be dangerous, so they have the Cultural Attaché to keep an eye on those people and to look after the government’s and the Party’s interests. At least that’s what Frank always says, while I’m filling him full of martinis after an afternoon at the Consulate trying to get visas for our artists.”

“So this Mr. Jin, he thought you had the Chaus?”

“I doubt it. It’s a reflex with him, to make threats.”

“Did he make a specific threat?”

“Why waste the opportunity? He told me regretfully that ‘a lot of Chinese artists might have to be protected from the corruption of the Western art markets’—which means they’d have trouble getting visas—‘if forged paintings falsely attributed to a discredited bourgeois counterrevolutionary were exhibited in New York in a blatant attempt by calculating capitalists to embarrass the People’s Republic.’ Which, by the way, is a direct quote. I liked it so much I wrote it down as soon as he left, so Frank could hear it.”

“It sounds to me like he does think you know something about the paintings.”

“No, he’s probably going to all the galleries where they might turn up, to see if he can learn anything and to make sure everyone’s disinclined to get involved with them if they do. Except to call him. That, it seems, would put him in our debt. So? How’d I do? Now you know the Chinese Consulate cares, too. Is that important news? Can I be Deep Throat?”

“Eddie, you’re the very epiglottis,” Jack said. He didn’t mention we already knew the Chinese Consulate, or at least someone up there, was interested in this case. “Thanks. Stand by and keep your ear to the ground. Report in if you hear anything else.”

“Yes, sir, Mr. Bond. Over and out.”

The phone went silent and we all three looked at each other. “Well,” said Jack.

“No kidding,” I answered.

“What now?” Bill asked.

I thought. “We have to go see Dr. Yang, but before that, I have to get back to Chinatown to meet with my client. Maybe after that, we should consider dropping in at the Chinese Consulate.”

“Right up in their faces?” Jack asked.

“Maybe. First things first.”

We gathered up our garbage and our cell phones and headed for the car. Bill unlocked it, said, “Saddle up!” and we were back on the road.

We’d reached the Manhattan Bridge and were admiring the view when Jack’s phone rang once more. He checked it. “A 718 number I don’t know. Maybe it’s your cousin. Jack Lee,” he told the phone. “Yes, hi, Linus, good to meet you.… I know. You ready?… Well, but it doesn’t have to be good Chinese.… No, not even … Great. Here’s what we need. Go to my Web site…” The conversation got art-technical from there, Jack directing Linus to a few places online, listening to Linus’s questions and suggestions, responding with his own. By the time we’d reached Bill’s parking lot they were done. “He thanks you for your faith in him,” Jack said to me, slipping his phone into his pocket.

“Was he being sarcastic?”

“No, just nineteen.”

18

We’d debated whether the guys should be in on my confab with my client.

“I’ve never even seen the guy,” Bill said.

“I have, but I bet he couldn’t tell me from Daniel Dae Kim,” Jack said.

“A common mistake, no doubt.”

“It’s the broad shoulders and smoldering brow. Still, it could be useful. Him not knowing what we look like.”

“You could hide in the closet,” I suggested.

“Both of us?” Jack said. “I think it would have to be the bathroom.”

“What if her client has to pee?” Bill asked.

So we decided to come clean with Dunbar/Jerrold, in the hopes that he’d come clean with us.

Bill stuck his head in at Golden Adventure as we passed and was rewarded with the usual waves and smiles.

“Guess you don’t need panic button today, Lydia!” Andi Gee called.

“No, I’m good,” I agreed, unlocking my door.

“I don’t get it,” Bill complained as he followed me in. “They all like me. Why doesn’t your mother?”

“You flirt with them.”

“I could flirt with your mother,” he offered. The idea did not merit a reply.

“I’m going to hear about you, too,” I told Jack. “You know our dinner last night was all over the Chinatown telegraph? The aunties think you’re cute.”

Jack gave Bill a smug grin.

Bill, in response, went to my desk drawer and retrieved his ashtray. He’d just lit up when the doorbell buzzed. I buzzed back, and we waited.

Dennis Jerrold, aka Jeff Dunbar, pushed my door open but stopped with his hand on the knob when he saw Jack and Bill.

“Come in, Mr. Jerrold.”

“Who’re they?” He showed no sign of recognizing either of them, which I guessed spoke well of Jack’s lurking-and-tailing talents.

“Colleagues,” I said. “Bill Smith, Jack Lee. Guys, this is Dennis Jerrold, who likes to be called Jeff Dunbar.”

“What are they doing here?” Jerrold/Dunbar ignored the introduction.

“Working the same case.”

“What does that mean?”

“I told you there was another investigator with another client. Bill’s my partner; Jack’s the other investigator.” This time the smug smile went from Bill to Jack.

“Who’s the other client?”

“I didn’t tell you before and I’m not going to tell you now. But I do have other things to tell you. And some to ask you.”

“I don’t want them here.”

“I don’t care. The three of us are working on this together. I’m following through on what I’ve found no matter what you think about it and don’t start with the stuff about your dime. I offered you your money back and you said no. Unless you’ve changed your mind, come in and sit down, Mr. Jerrold.”

So much for the whole Jeff Dunbar thing. Another hesitating moment, and Dennis Jerrold shut the door and sat. Jack was in the other chair; Bill, of course, was standing, though there’s not much to be seen through my pebbled alley window.

“We found the paintings,” I said.

Jerrold halfway stood again. “You have them?”

“No. I said we found them. We know where they are but there are complications.”

“What do you mean, ‘complications’?” He settled back down, recognition in his eyes. “A shakedown, is that it? Now that you have them it’s going to cost me?”

I sat back in my springy chair. “Why is it,” I asked the air, “that everyone involved in this case is so hard to help? So suspicious? But come to think of it, maybe this is a shakedown. Yes, sure, call it that. It’s going to cost you, Mr. Jerrold. Just not money. A lot of that going around, too. I’ll tell you what we know if you tell us what you know. And you have to go first. Why did you come to me and why use a false name? Why does the State Department care about a dead Chinese artist?”

He stared. “The State Department?”

“You know, if you start denying everything this could take all morning. State Department, Assistant Deputy Director, East Asia Section, China specialist. And speaking of China: the PRC government, why do they care? The phony Mr. Wing is from the Chinese Consulate and I’m pretty sure you know that, and you were supposed to call and tell me and you never did. The real Mr. Jin, is, too, do you know him? Now either tell me what’s going on or take your money back and get out of here.”

Jerrold’s expression was that of a man trying to choose a path through uninviting but unavoidable terrain. He extemporized. “Is it considered professional in your field to talk that way to people who hire you?”

“Is it in yours, to lie to people you hire?”

“He’s a diplomat,” said Bill. “I think it is.”

“That was unnecessary,” Jack said. “Sorry, Mr. Jerrold. But you can see how it’s frustrating to try to do your job when your client doesn’t even trust you to know his name.”

What was this? They were doing Good Cop/Bad Cop without me?

“Whoever you are, I’m not your client,” Jerrold said.

“And you’re about to not be mine in a minute,” I said. “Unless we get some answers.” When Good Cop and Bad Cop are already taken, there’s always Steamroller. “Besides the guy with the gun I told you about yesterday, there’s the matter of the Chinese gangster.”

“Who also had a gun,” Jack said.

“He suggested I stop looking for the Chaus because he has an investment to protect. What investment, Mr. Jerrold? And the so-called Samuel Wing, who made the same suggestion, though he wouldn’t say why, and the mysterious Mr. Jin, who’d also rather these paintings didn’t see the light of day. Who are all these people and what the hell is going on here?”

The question, besides being phrased in stronger language than I generally use, was admittedly disingenuous. I had, in essence, the information Jerrold had paid me to get: where the paintings were. And the bonus fact, that they were fakes. Nevertheless, we waited, all three of us staring my client down.

Dennis Jerrold drummed his fingers on the arm of his chair. “How did you find out my name? Where I work?”

“Oh, please, Mr. Jerrold. You’re a diplomat, we’re investigators. Would I be surprised if you negotiated a treaty, or whatever it is you people do? Okay, nuts to the whole thing.” I spun in my chair to reach my safe, which doubled as the sideboard with the tea set I wasn’t serving Dennis Jerrold tea from. Turning my back on a client isn’t something I consider good practice, but it’s great drama and with Bill and Jack there I wasn’t worried. I ran the dial, extracted the envelope holding Jerrold’s thousand dollars and tossed it on my desk. “If this is the level of trust we’ve got going you’ll be happier with some other PI anyway.”

He made no move to take it. “The paintings,” he said. “Were you able to ascertain whether they’re real?”

“Yes.”

“And?”

I waited a moment, then gave it to him: “They’re fakes.”

He visibly relaxed.

“But they’re about to come on the market as real. Authenticated by an expert. Next week. Asian Art Week, Beijing/NYC.”

“But you say they’re fakes. What expert would put his reputation on the line like that?”

“That’s not really the question. The question is, how bad would it be for you if it happened?”

After a moment he gave a soft laugh. “The funny thing is, it wouldn’t matter. In my situation, I can be a hero—though that’s looking less and less likely—but I can’t really be the goat. Nice work if you can get it, huh? No, keep the money, Ms. Chin. If it’s true you’ve found the paintings. It would be nice if we could keep them from hitting the market, but if they’re fakes the authentication won’t—”

“We might be able to.”

“What?”

“Keep them off the market. Or maybe not, but we can probably discredit them with a bang. And the person who’s going to be selling them. If we had a reason to. Would that work for you?”

He leaned back in his chair. “Do tell.”

“No, you tell. Give us that reason. What so-called heroics are you engaged in here and how was I supposed to be helping?”

“Well,” he said. “Well.” He looked around. “I suppose it’s reasonable to hope for a certain amount of discretion from all of you, even though I’m only paying Ms. Chin?”

“Actually, you’re paying Bill, too. And Jack’s one of us, so don’t worry about it.” I didn’t look to see who was smug-smiling whom.

“Fine. Not that it really matters. I wasn’t doing anything wrong, just … unauthorized. Going to you could earn me a reprimand, or, on the other hand, a commendation for creativity. If I tell you what I know—which I can already see won’t answer all your questions—then what? You’ll tell me where the paintings are?”

If I’d had any doubt Jerrold was a diplomat I’d be over it by now. Everything was a negotiation. I decided to stonewall.

We sat in silence; then Jerrold smiled. “Okay. Point made.” He crossed one leg over the other, settling in more comfortably. “As you surmised, I’m with the State Department.”

Surmised? We knew his job title.

“I’ve been there eight years. I’m not an art collector, in fact I’m not in the visual arts at all. Literature’s my field. But we all talk, and you hear things.”

“We all talk, who?”

“State Department staff, and our Consulate counterparts. In my case, the PRC Consulate. That’s where I heard about the Chaus, at a reception. Buzz in the air, worried looks, things like that. The Cultural Attaché, Jin, had heard rumors and he wasn’t happy. They have that Beijing/NYC show coming up, the whole Asian art world’s watching. If the PRC gets embarrassed here in New York it’s on Jin’s head. Xi Xao, the guy at my level in the visual arts over there, dismissed the whole thing. He tried to persuade Jin not to worry about it. He said no one could possibly take these paintings seriously, everyone knew Chau was dead. I guess he changed his mind, though, or at least, he couldn’t convince Jin, because I think Xi’s who came to you as Samuel Wing.”

“Older, skinny, receding gray hair?”

“Yes.”

“I’m still not clear. If they decided to look for the paintings after all and asked you for help, why did Xi come to me to get me to lay off?”

“They didn’t ask for help. First off, it wouldn’t have been me, it would’ve been one of our visual arts people. But they didn’t. Jin just scowled and Xi tried to jolly him up and they both drank scotch. No, what happened was, I was watching Xi fawning on his boss—a guy at least ten years younger than Xi, and nowhere near as educated or as smart—and my boss came over to join us and I had a lightbulb moment. It hit me that if I didn’t watch out I’d be Xi before I knew it. You know the difference between staff jobs and line jobs?” I shook my head. Bill and Jack, I noticed, both nodded. “Well, it’s what it sounds like.” Seemingly instinctively, Jerrold offered his explanation to all three of us, so I wouldn’t feel like the only dummy in the room. Very diplomatic. “Line does. Staff supports. At State you almost always start as staff but, like anywhere, line’s where the action is. Eight years, I suddenly realized, was borderline too long to still be staff. There’s a point beyond which you don’t get promoted because you haven’t been promoted, and I’m getting near it. I needed to make a move.”

“And Chau was your move?”

“Xi kept telling Jin he should ignore the rumors, that the paintings were obviously fakes and any notice they paid would do nothing but stir up interest in them. Jin was unhappy but he agreed that he didn’t want to draw attention. Someone poured another round and the talk moved on to other things.

“And I thought, well, okay. The PRC government looking for these paintings did have the potential to raise the paintings’ profile. Xi was right about that. But if collectors were already looking, one more collector wouldn’t matter.”

“So it wasn’t about their value? And it wasn’t about making a name for yourself?”

He smiled. “It absolutely was, both things. But their value’s not in money, it’s in the PRC’s diplomatic face, and the name I’m looking to make isn’t in the art world.”

“If you had the paintings, what would you do with them? Take them to Xi, at the Consulate?”

“No, to Jin. If I went to Xi he’d go to Jin, and that would get him some of the credit, diluting things for me.”

I nodded, considering that. “Speaking of Xi, Mr. Jerrold, how did Xi find out about me and why did he want me to stop?”

“I don’t know about the first. The second, I suppose it’s because, as he said, he thinks making waves is the wrong approach.”

“It was a lot of money to stop some waves that might turn out not to matter. His, I wonder, or the PRC’s?”

“Well, probably his. Like what I gave you was mine. The PRC isn’t that free with its purse strings.”

I sat back. “All right, Mr. Jerrold. Here’s what I think we can do. The paintings are fakes but they’re about to be authenticated. Then they’ll be shown.”

“I thought you said you might be able to stop that.”

“We’ll be able to keep them off the market. Maybe not to stop their being shown. But they’ll be discredited and the whole thing will look like a high school prank. But you can still be a hero.”

“Oh? How’s that?”

“The paintings have poems on them. Chinese classical paintings often do,” I added loftily. “Since the Yuan Dynasty.”

“I do know that much, Ms. Chin.”

“These particular poems are by Liu Mai-ke. Mike Liu.”

“Ah.” Jerrold rubbed at his chin. “Ah, damn.”

“It’s true, then? That might be a problem?”

“Chau and Liu, together? A dissident double-team. Jin’ll hate it.”

“If it turns out the paintings will be shown, I’ll warn you and you can warn Mr. Jin. Or tell your boss to warn him. At least it won’t be a surprise. The PRC can prepare a response. That should win you points.”

“Interesting thought. Not as many points as I’d hoped for from this, but it can’t hurt. Although if you told me where the paintings are—”

“Not going to happen.” I pointed to the money-stuffed envelope on my desk. “You can take that back if you want to, but right now that’s all you’re getting. If things change, I’ll call you.”

He eyed me. “They might?”

“You never know.”

* * *

Chinatown’s so near NYU that we walked up. As we neared Dr. Yang’s building I called his office. First hurdle jumped: he answered. I asked in a breathy voice for an appointment because I was an undecided student looking for guidance about my major. He blew me off, suggesting—really, ordering—that I talk to Dr. Somebody Else. Didn’t matter, though. By then we were in the building and we knew he was, too.

We caught him eating lunch behind his desk: pork dumplings from the Rickshaw truck accompanied by green tea in a rough pottery cup. The room smelled terrific, salt and onions, very homelike, but the comforting nature of his lunch mellowed Dr. Yang out not one bit.

“What are you doing here, Jack?” Dr. Yang lowered his chopsticks to glare at us.

“We know what’s going on,” Jack said without preamble. “We want to help. We have a plan.”

After a moment: “Get out.”

“No.” Not only didn’t Jack leave, he sat. I admired his courage and then realized I needed to do something, too, so I parked on the other chair. Bill wandered over to the window to look down at the world. “We’ve just come from Anna’s,” Jack told Dr. Yang. “We knew about the paintings before we went, the phony Chaus. We found out about them more or less the same way Doug Haig did. Anna tried not to tell us anything but she was too upset to fake it. We know what Haig wants and we can stop him.”

That was a tricky amalgam of three-quarter truths, but we wouldn’t get anywhere if, as it was threatening to, the top of Dr. Yang’s head blew off.

Dr. Yang, stiff-arming his desk, said in a voice he was obviously trying to control, “You don’t know what you’re dealing with. Or who’s involved. I fired you for a reason. Keep out of this, Jack.”

“You fired me to protect Anna. That’s what I’m trying to do. And we do know. Government people from all directions. Chinese gangsters. And Doug Haig. We can deal. We’re just asking you not to do anything right now. Haig wants you to appraise and authenticate the fake Chaus. Just stall him. That’s all.”

After a six-ton silence, Dr. Yang, oddly, picked up on just one of Jack’s points. “Government people?” He stared as though Jack had turned into a Klingon. “What do you mean, government people? They went to you? You didn’t tell me?”

“Not to Jack. To me,” I said. Dr. Yang snapped his head toward me. His expression made me think I might be a Klingon, too. “From two governments. My client, who isn’t a collector. He’s with the State Department. And a fellow from the Chinese Consulate, too.”

Fury, bafflement, fear, and a need to know battled it out on Dr. Yang’s face. Maybe because he was an academic, the need to know won out. “From the Chinese Consulate? Who?”

“He said his name is Samuel Wing, but we think it’s really Xi Xao.”

It seemed to me a light dawned in Dr. Yang’s eyes and was quickly not extinguished, but hidden. “What did he want?”

“You know him,” I said.

“Don’t be ridiculous. How would I know him? What did he want?”

“He wanted me to stop looking for the Chaus. Who is he?”

“To stop, on behalf of the Chinese government?”

“I don’t know. He didn’t tell me he was a diplomat. He gave me a phony name so I wouldn’t find out. But on the other hand he said he was representing ‘interested parties,’ and he threatened me. Who are his interested parties?”

“He threatened you?”

“If I kept looking. And offered me a lot of money if I’d stop. Why does he care?”

“If he didn’t tell you he was a diplomat, how did you find out?”

“Why do people keep asking how I find things out? I’m a private eye. Like Jack. Like Bill. People hire us to find things out. I looked into Mr. Wing because I don’t respond well to being threatened. Or to being bribed.”

“Like me,” said Jack.

“Or me,” said Bill.

“I can go to the Consulate and ask him what’s going on. Or you can tell us. We want to help. Please let us. Tell us who he is. Tell us why he cares.”

“No.” Dr. Yang looked us over. “You can’t help. You can only create a disaster out of what’s already a bad situation. Clearly worse than I thought, and I can tell you it was already grim. The State Department man. Does he want you to stop looking, too?”

I didn’t anwer, just met his angry eyes. If there’d been a heat differential between our glares there’d have been a thunderstorm in the middle of the room. Surprisingly, Bill stepped in.

“The State Department man doesn’t want us to stop, no. He’s Lydia’s original client. The one who claimed to be a collector. He wanted us to find the paintings. We just came from a meeting with him. We told him we’d found them.”

Dr. Yang went white. “You told him about Anna?”

“No,” I said. “We said we’d found the paintings and ascertained that they were fakes. We told him that’s all he gets right now.”

“Right now? When does he get more?”

“I don’t know. Maybe soon, maybe never. It depends on you.”

After a long stare, Dr. Yang asked, “What was his interest in the paintings?”

“I’m not going to tell you that. But you don’t have to worry about him. You have to worry about Doug Haig and what he wants from you. Just give us an inch or two, Dr. Yang. We really are here to help you. And Anna.”

Dr. Yang, dumplings forgotten, laid his palms carefully on his desk. “All right, I appreciate that you’re trying to help. And that you think you can. But you can’t. As I told you, you can only make things worse. I have to ask you again not to interfere.”

He stared at us, ranged around the far side of his desk, and we all stared back. It’s a good thing stubbornness has no smell or you’d have needed a gas mask to breathe in there.

“With all respect, sir,” Jack said evenly, “I’m not sure how we could make things worse. Isn’t it already a disaster? What are your options? To junk your principles to save your daughter’s future? Or stick to your guns and watch Anna go down in flames? Ghost Hero Chau—your friend—died for his beliefs, why? So Doug Haig can pay off his house in the Hamptons? And you’d better have negotiated a job as his houseboy, because if you do what Haig wants and it ever comes out, your career’s in the toilet, too.”

From Dr. Yang’s bugging eyes I guessed people didn’t generally talk to him this way. “If it comes out? Are you threatening me, Jack?”

“No,” Jack said. “None of us would stitch you up like that. But it wouldn’t have to be us. Lots of people saw Anna working on those paintings. All the artists out at East Village saw them. Mostly they didn’t know what they were, but as soon as they’re splashed all over ARTnews, sold for half a million each and authenticated by you, you’re toast.”

Dr. Yang replied through clenched teeth. “With all respect. Jack. There is nothing you can do. There is nothing you can do but make things worse. You’re taking a risk you don’t understand. You’ll—”

“You’re wrong! We can take Haig down. At least we can try. Just give us a chance. If we screw up, we come out looking like idiots and your so-called options are still open. What could we make worse?”

It was a persuasive argument, I thought, but it didn’t move Dr. Yang. He looked like he was struggling not to explode out of his chair, leap the desk, and stomp Jack into a puddle.

Chinese standoff, I thought, in the loaded silence that followed. Locked eyes across the generations. Kind of like me and my mother.

“Dr. Yang,” I said, reaching for an answer I thought I was starting to see, “Doug Haig isn’t the only threat here, is he? These paintings have put Anna in some other kind of danger, too. Something to do with Samuel Wing, or Xi Xao, or whoever he is. So something to do with the Chinese government. Is it about her husband? Mike Liu? Is he at risk, or is she, because of these paintings?”

Dr. Yang’s face got darker. I braced for an explosion but it didn’t come. Without warning he slumped back against his chair. “Not Anna.” He spoke low, sounding defeated. I was surprised to see him that way and I wasn’t sure I liked it. “The only threat to Anna is the one you know. Nor Mike. The man in danger is Xi Xao.”

19

“Xi Xao?” I asked. “Samuel Wing?”

After a silence, the professor nodded. “The man who came to you calling himself Samuel Wing is a career PRC government official and a ranking Party member. For the last nine years he’s been in New York, assigned to the Cultural Section of the Chinese Consulate, but at the time of the Tiananmen Square protests he was a middle-level commissioner working out of the central government offices in Beijing.” His words rasped; he reached for his tea, by now long cold. “His father and mine were sworn brothers. Not related by blood, but as close as if they had been. Xi Xao is older than I, but we were each our parents’ only child and we lived on the same lane. We grew up as elder and younger brother, as close as our fathers were.

“I was in Tiananmen Square when the tanks came, trying to persuade my friend and my students to leave. However, my motives didn’t matter. Like the true protestors, I was fired on, I ran, and the next day orders had been issued for my arrest.

“I went into hiding, moving furtively from place to place, thinking I’d be discovered every minute. Almost hoping for it, because at least that would end the fear. But I wasn’t. When weeks had passed and government vigilance had slackened, I went to Xi Xao for help. It wasn’t the right thing to do. It put him in an impossible position. But there were … reasons.” He looked away. “My wife was pregnant. If I had been arrested she might have been, also. A baby born in a Chinese prison…” He trailed off, but it wasn’t a sentence he really had to finish. “Xi Xao helped me hide, and, finally, with false documents, helped Yu-feng and myself leave the country. As an obligation of friendship, his and mine, and our fathers’, too.”

Dr. Yang stopped and picked up his cold tea. “Three days ago he came to see me. He’d heard these rumors, about the new Chaus, and he was bothered. He’d rather that whole era did not get stirred up again. I told him I hadn’t heard anything, but that I’d look into it, something that in his position he couldn’t risk doing.”

“So you came to me,” said Jack.

“Yes, Jack. I went to you.” Dr. Yang drank his cold tea in small, deliberate sips. Just before he spoke again I realized what he was really doing: refilling his reservoir of steely resolve. Now he once more looked around the room, impaling each of us with his you-fail eyes. As though this were a group thesis exam and he were asking the question on which our doctorates would rise or fall, he said, “Do you understand what will happen to this man, my friend, who saved my life, and my wife’s, and my daughter’s, if this becomes known?”

Jack, the only one of us to actually have a doctorate, and thus to have been through this before, was first to break the silence. “Yes, sir, I think we do.”

“Do you, Jack? Well, let me make it clear.” The tea and the break had worked; we were back to full frontal Bernard Yang in all his ferocious glory. “He’ll be called back to China. He’ll be tried, and he’ll be executed. Executed. Are any of you prepared to take responsibility for that? I didn’t think so. Then do as I say. Get up now and leave.” He waved us away with the back of his hand. “Don’t repeat what you’ve just heard, go about your business, forget Chau Chun. It will be better for everyone.”

I looked at Jack, and at Bill. A brief flurry of eyeball discussion, and then I turned to Dr. Yang. “Professor, if Xi Xao were the only person with a stake in this, we might agree to back off. But he’s not. There’s my client, who brings the American State Department in. There are Chinese gangsters who claim to have an investment, in what we’re not sure, but they’re part of this one way or another and they care enough to shoot guns around.”

“Is that who shot at Jack yesterday?”

“Maybe. They for sure shot at him last night.”

“Last night? You didn’t tell me that.” Dr. Yang sent a look at Jack, who shrugged.

“Yes,” I said. “In Queens. They said they wanted to ‘talk.’ We scared them off—Jack did—and we’re not sure what they’re really up to, but it can’t be good. And there’s Doug Haig, and of course, you and your daughter. Our turning our backs won’t make any of those people go away, or make the situation any less complicated.”

“And your continuing to stir up these waters?” Dr. Yang said scornfully. “You can see a way that that will help?”

“If you stir the water vigorously enough,” I said with care, “you can drag mud up from the bottom. In all that swirling, muddy water, a lot of things might be able to escape.”

I didn’t dare look at Jack or Bill, though I could hear Bill softly stifling a snort, and from the corner of my eye I saw Jack’s eyebrows shoot up. So what? The look Dr. Yang was giving me had gone from angry disdain to guarded interest. The interest was tinged with desperation, true, but then, his position was desperate. I pressed on before he had a chance to regroup. “When we came in here, we had a plan,” I said. “Now we have new information, so we need to amend it. But I think we can still make it work.”

“You think? ‘Make it work’? No. That’s unacceptable.”

“Sir,” said Jack, cutting me and my frustration off, “Doug Haig gave you until tomorrow morning to answer him. He’s expecting you to stew, look at your options, realize you don’t have any, and agree. All we’re asking you to do is not answer him until then. For our part, once we have things worked out, we won’t make a move until we run the whole plan by you. If you’re afraid it’ll make things worse or you just plain think it won’t work, we’ll drop it and you can handle things however you want.” Jack gazed evenly at Dr. Yang across the desk. “Fair enough?”

After a very, very long silence, Dr. Yang spoke. “Will my daughter be in danger at any time?”

“Danger? You mean, physical danger?”

“There are gangsters and guns involved. From what you say.”

The “from what you say” wasn’t lost on Jack, but he didn’t rise to it. “I don’t think they have any interest in Anna. The biggest danger she’s in is to her career, and it’s from Haig.”

“And Xi Xao?”

“We understand.” Jack leaned forward again. “Please, Dr. Yang. Give us a few hours. That’s all we need.”

Another long silence. Then, almost imperceptibly, Dr. Yang nodded.

* * *

Back outside, us Three Musketeers stood near the fountain, where a trio of jugglers tossed bowling pins and baseball bats back and forth. “So, what do you think, guys?” I said. “Can we run this scam and not jeopardize Xi? I didn’t like his threats and bribes and all, but if his life’s at stake I guess I can cut him some slack.”

Jack said, “I think we can, just the way we set it up. Whatever excitement it creates about the old days, it’ll die down when we’re through and everyone will look silly. That’s the whole point, isn’t it?”

He and I looked at each other, and then both of us turned to Bill. “What do you think?”

“I’m with Jack. If this works no one will be looking past it.”

“If?” said Jack. “Hold it, I didn’t sign on for ‘if.’ We’re not doing ‘if.’”

“Fine. When this works. How’s that?”

“Much better. Because after all, isn’t this a plan of Lydia’s? So the chances of it working, aren’t they like one hundred percent?”

* * *

So we split up. Each of us had work to do. And I had to change.

“Hi, Ma,” I said, leaving my shoes by the door and entering the living room in my slippers.

“Oh, have you come home in the middle of the day? Why, are you ill?” She must not have been too terribly worried because after a glance she went back to ironing in front of the TV, watching two handsome Chinese actors in Tang Dynasty outfits having a low-voiced discussion. The camera lingered on them so portentously that it could only mean a conspiracy was in the making and an emperor was going to fall. Or else these two guys would end up with their heads chopped off.

“I’m fine, Ma. I just need some things.”

She didn’t say a word, so why did I hear disapproval?

In my room I put the phone on speaker, turned the computer on, and called Linus.

“Cuz!” he greeted me. “Just about done. You want to see it?”

“I sure do.”

“’K, here comes the link.”

I opened my e-mail, found the Web site URL he’d sent, and clicked on it. “Wow, Linus, I’m impressed. You did all this in two hours?”

“Hey, it’s what we do here. I used a template I had from some other site I made for a guy. This one wasn’t a big deal, ’cause it doesn’t really say anything.”

“I can see that.” I was scanning the Chinese text.

“You sure that’s okay? I mean, I just stole chunks from Chinese Web sites, I don’t even know about what.”

“Positive, it’s fine.”

“But in case your guys want to check a little deeper I put in a couple of links, like to the University, and to some artists. Even if they don’t read Chinese they can tell they’re links, so they can click. I also put in a bunch that don’t work, they give you an error message. So it looks like they’re supposed to be live but it’s a crappy Web site.”

“Excellent.”

“And I paid a few bucks to a couple of search engine companies, so this site’ll come up first if you Google him. The real guy, he doesn’t have a site, so you lucked out there. He does have a Wikipedia page, so I put a link on it.” Linus burst into song: “If you liked it then you shoulda put a link on it!”

“Okay, thanks, Linus.”

“Sorry. Anyway, the University, I couldn’t hack their site to put a link back to here.”

“I thought you could do anything. No, I’m just kidding, we don’t need that.”

“My Chinese isn’t good enough, is all,” he said defensively. “I could totally hack it if it was English. But I know some guys. Do you—”

“No, really, the people this is for, their Chinese is way worse than yours. I don’t see them bothering with the University site, and if they do they won’t be able to navigate it so they won’t know what they’re not finding. Listen, really, Linus, thanks. The whole thing looks great. Especially the picture.”

“Just a little Photoshop,” he said modestly. “So, Cuz, who is that guy? Is he really another Chinese PI?”

“I’ll tell you all about it. Later.”

“That’s what Trella said you’d say. Does Bill know about him?”

“Know what about him?”

“That’s what Trella said you’d say! Dudess!” I heard him call across the room. “I owe you five bucks! So, Cuz, you need me anymore?”

“I don’t think so, but I don’t know,” I answered truthfully.

“If you do, you know where to find me. I’m going back to bed.”

I changed my clothes, called Jack, got his voice mail, and left him a message to check the new Web site. There was no point in telling Bill that, but I called him anyway, just to say it was done and that I was heading out.

“You okay?” he wanted to know.

“Raging adrenaline. And my feet hurt in these heels.”

“I’ll be right over.”

“To carry me?”

“No, to watch you walk.”

I hung up and headed uptown, passing through the living room where my mother did a double take based on my outfit. “Why do you look so nice?” she asked suspiciously.