Jade Woman

28

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UNPACKING parcels is a woman’s game, like getting letters. I abhor them (letters, not women). Always bad news. But these seven boxes were fascinating in an ugly kind of way because my scam was dodging and ducking in there somewhere.

Six small cases and one huge teak crate. I began undoing them, only after the studio’s atmospheric and humidity controls were stabilized. I checked that the army of amahs had done their job—I couldn’t risk any telltale fragments of modern decorators’

synthetics giving the game away. Marilyn sat where I’d put her, incongruous but lovely on a high stool. She watched poutingly—I’d sent my downstairs amah, Ah Geen, off to her annex, and given Marilyn her first job, brewing up.

The handmade drawing paper was as I expected, labeled in its correct sizes and protected by polyethylene and thick cardboard. Brenda is a lass in the Mendips who makes for fakers full-time. A hundred sheets. The small sizes were, as always, perfect, but to my annoyance I found an uneven margin on one Columbier and a small thinning in a Double Elephant (these are the only different sizes used in the 1870s).

I muttered, “Silly cow deserves crippling—” I stopped.

“Name?” Marilyn said dutifully, writing in a notebook.

“Eh?”

“Who to be crippled? The English or the Chinese paper maker?”

I swallowed, shook my head. “Nobody. I was just… Look, love. Check with me before you order anything like that, understand? Promise?”

I swear she was disappointed. I’d barely started, and already saved Brenda Gillander a life in a wheelchair.

The Chinese fake antique papers unfortunately weren’t up to scratch—too similar to the repro tourist stuff sold everywhere. I rejected them. I started to work it out.

“Now, I’m Song Ping,” I told myself, walking about, getting into character. “Here I am, a young artist born in Canton, 1850. I travel to Europe, am amazed by the first Impressionists.” I paused at the window, trying to feel Song Ping’s response. The entire art world had been thunderstruck, after all. “I’m stunned, okay? I discard my Chinese traditions. I buy these materials, what I can with the little money I’ve got—”

“Where from?” Marilyn asked.

“Eh? Oh, good point.” I thought a second. Something plausible. “I worked in a hotel, a café.”

“What did they pay?”

I stared. She really believed I was truly telling her some past life I’d had. Exasperated, I said, “No, love. You don’t understand. I’m making it all up—” No use. I returned to reasoning and plotting. It was important, after all. It would be the story concocted for Stephen Surton to authenticate. “I collected what canvases, papers, pigments I could for my return to China on the Trans-Siberian Railroad. In Canton I set up an art school, an atelier of my own. And I paint. I’m the first Chinese Impressionist, see? The first few paintings I use my materials from Paris and London. Eventually they run out. I start using local Pearl River stuff, home-ground pigments, Cantonese paper, silks maybe, board, canvas.”

“What did you do for money?”

“Sponged off my sister,” I invented after a second. “Her husband’s a poor foki, works for the foreign merchants in Canton’s Bund factories. We never got on. He’d no sympathy. I arrange a couple of exhibitions—1880 or so by now—in a friend’s shop. He charges me a high percentage when some European merchant buys paintings—”

“You should have bargained harder,” Marilyn censured sternly, into my tale. “If he was your friend—”

“Shut it, you silly cow.” I paced, really motoring. “That gives us one, possibly more, paintings to be discovered soon as word gets out. In England best, Hong Kong being near Canton. Then another, maybe in Australia or New Zealand, some British soldier’s descendants unexpectedly comparing Granddad’s old painting with a photo they see in the morning paper—” I was excited, gesticulating and mouthing off as the images rose.

“We do an early Song Ping painting, put it up for a rigged auction. A display, maybe even have his workbox, like Turner’s in the Tate Gallery! We make sure it goes for a fortune at auction…! Come on, love, quick. Clear that stuff out of the way—”

She went to call the amah but I stopped her, told her to use her own lily-white hands.

She was outraged that another woman was to remain idle while she herself did something for a change, but I’m used to this. That little giveaway over Brenda, so nearly a lifelong cripple because of an unconsidered grumble, had shown me something important. Fine, I was a prisoner. But I was also plugged into a source of power more cruel and despotic than any I’d ever heard of. If I could injure at a distance, what could I do close to? Murder, perhaps? Or, more moral, execute?

We started bringing out the paints, me planning away at the seam’s details. By the time we finished—nine hours that first day—I had planned two robberies that wouldn’t really occur, a phony auction, a non-hijack and non-ransom, a riot, and an execution. Marilyn was in a mood at my silence and the work. We locked up and went for nosh. And I saw something magic. Only a paper doll’s house as it happens, but survival needs every bit of help it can get.

We had our nosh at a Lei Yue Mun waterfront place, after a ferry crossing from Shau Kee Wan. Marilyn was in a happy mood—food is one of Hong Kong’s greatest euphorics—and joked at my squeamishness as we went towards the gaggle of seafood restaurants. We walked side by side Chinese fashion, no linked arms. Odd, but absolutely true.

“You don’t have to pick out the fish alive, Lovejoy. But it’s better value.”

“You do it for us both.”

“Why you not interested in food?” She was curious and amused. “Next time I take you to Peking restaurant. Maybe you like Peking duck with plum sauce? Peking chicken baked in lotus leaves is beautiful, but unlucky for us Cantonese—called beggar’s chicken because a hungry beggar stole the emperor’s hen, though not unlucky for gwailo like you.”

“Glad to hear it.”

“Peking restaurants Hong Kong side serve teddy bears’ feet.” She laughed. I didn’t. “Six hundred U.S. dollars for two! They skin the snakes at your table, but their egg pork pancakes—”

“Listen, love. Shut it. Okay?”

She nodded her lovely head. “I understand, Lovejoy. Peking food too heavy. We eat Cantonese seafood. Tomorrow maybe pussycat—”

“Eh?” I stopped.

Anxiously she scanned my face. “You didn’t like it? I agree. Puppy dog is better, gives more stomach heat. You are uneducated about food, Lovejoy. Just because the aubergine belongs to the deadly nightshade family, the Solanaceae, you distrust it—as you do all purple berries. Didn’t you call it ‘mad apple’? We Chinese have used aubergines for whitening our teeth for centuries—”

“Marilyn.” My threatening tone finally did it. Naturally she fell about but was a bit apologetic when I had to sit outside the restaurant with a drink before hunger finally drove me inside. She managed a table overlooking the bay, my back to the poor fish swimming with terrible patience in tanks. She’d used the future tense about the pussycat meal.

As daylight faded we were strolling near Yau Ma Tei towards Mongkok. It’s an all-systems-go district of shops, work, clatter, bars, that I was growing to love almost as much as Wan Chai and Causeway Bay. And I mean love. She was still yapping, though I was hardly listening. “… We Chinese have eleven hundred varieties of rice. Strange that we eat only plain rice with meals, ne? Though fried rice after meals cleans the mouth.

Your rice pudding —milk! Aaaiiiyeee!—is fantastic, ne?”

She realized I was no longer with her and returned to where I was standing.

Beside the curb was a doll’s house. Honestly, right there with traffic and hawkers doing their stuff and folk milling. In the gutter. It was three stories, up to my midriff. The astonishment was that it was made of paper. Roof, doors, furniture all in incredible detail. The colors were garish. I knelt and peered in through the windows. The paper beds were made. Tiny paper garments filled the open wardrobes. Paper slippers waited on paper carpets. Paper tables were laid for a paper banquet. And outside the verandas a paper garden, spread with multicolored floral walks and trees.

“What a beautiful thing!” I was thrilled, looking about. Marilyn was bored stiff, wanting to be among the furniture makers farther along. The doll’s house stood outside a tiny shop doorway that was hung about with huge red wax candles, gold dragons swarming up each. “What’s that?” Next to the wonder was an iron case on wheels, for all the world like a sedan chair.

Two Chinese came from the shop as I spoke, rolled the iron edifice to cover the paper house. One jauntily placed eight tiny paper women in the garden while the other flung at it handfuls of toy money, then, quite casually, lit the house’s bottom corner.

“Christ!” I said, but Marilyn said, “No, Lovejoy,” so I stayed still and aghast as the whole thing took flame. Half a minute and it was gone. One man wheeled the iron cover down the street, leaving only charred black flakes where the lovely paper house had been.

“Hell Bank Note,” I read on one partially burned piece. It was for a million dollars.

“What was that all about, Marilyn?”

“Now ancestors have house, all that money, clothes, garden. Cannot be hungry ghosts.”

“Does everybody buy one for their ancestors?”

Pause. “Most.” She was uncomfortable. We went on to the furniture makers, but the memory of that bonny structure, so perfect, so casually burned, stayed with me. It is with me yet.

Most of the paints were from fakers’ makers I knew, whom I could trust. They are a motley crew, rivals worse than any businessmen. In the twilight world of fakedom they’re as famous as royalty. They’re pros. Each has a front —for example, Brenda, whose legs I’d saved, has an olde tea shoppe, all prints and chintz. The very best specialize with the refined selectivity of surgeons. Like, Herman’s a stolid Hannover German who specializes in grinding pigments. Ollie Cromwell—no relation—supplies only the containers in which the old artists’ colormen supplied paints—pigs’ bladders stoppered with ivory plugs, or the collapsible tin tubes that a brainy American, John Goffe Rand, thought up in 1840. Ollie’s an obsessional perfectionist— he gives you a prime version of Rand’s early screw caps, but charges you the earth. For once expense didn’t matter.

The oil was often poppy oil, which is buttery, slow stuff. Fast-drying oils were my need because of time, and these were there in plenty. Mowbray, an English aristocrat with no first name, supplies most fakers’ painting vehicles —oils, waxes. He lives in southern France, grows his own poppies, makes real varnishes from dammar to copal, and gets his resins from all the right places, from India to the Levant. I mean, if he supplies

“amber varnish,” it’s genuine dissolved amber, none of this modern synthetic clag that any chemist can detect with gas chromatography. You pay through the nose, but honest fakery costs.

The second day I spent testing the pigments, just to make sure. One particularly dirty trick has been the undoing of more fakes than any. It’s the dilution of genuine red lead.

Fakers often take a shortcut and use that cellulose-based stuff that garage mechanics spray on cars to stop rust. Governments—no artists—banned red lead because it is toxic. Restorers and fakers perpetuate their ancient skills in spite of all obstacles, I’m happy to say, Spain, Italy, and Birmingham being the home of these stalwarts who defy every known law to keep art alive.

My supplier was mostly Piccolo Pete, a hybrid Florentine engineer who has his own furnaces and retorts straight out of the mid-nineteenth century. The place he uses was actually an artist colorman’s factory in 1875. Sometimes, however, Piccolo naughtily perpetuates old frauds. Vowing murder if he’d done me, I analyzed the red lead. You heat it in an earthenware crucible, then add nitric acid—a reddish undissolved powder shows if scoundrels have adulterated the pigment with red brick dust. Nope, in the clear. So I tested for red ochre by boiling the red lead in muriatic acid, then some mumbo jumbo with potash solutions, and watched for the colored precipitate. Another no. Honest old Piccolo Pete. He’d just saved his legs.

Cunning old me, I’d ordered two different sets of test reagents to check on everybody.

All my checks gave identical results. Three-Wheel Archie from East Anglia was my choice for white lead—flake or “silver” white they called it—because I knew he’d been making a massive batch the old way (thin sheets of lead hung over malt vinegar in closed vessels placed on dung heaps; the lead nicked from old church roofs of the right vintage). I was a bit narked because Archie must have sold his unexpected Chinese buyer his entire stock. This hurt: he’d promised it to me. Friendship, I thought bitterly.

To my relief, the canvases in the huge crate were sublime, a dream. All were French, not modern stuff phonily antiqued up but genuine handloom weave. The old weavers could only throw the shuttle about a yard, which decided the sizes. Most, of course, were landscape canvases, No. 5 to 30 (these size numbers only meant the original price in sous), and a few marine canvases. I’d ordered some horizontals, No. 40 to 80. I was delighted. The wood stretchers were original oldies. And one or two of the canvases were definitely “cleaners”—old paintings from which the picture had been removed, leaving the ancient canvas waiting for a new but fake antique picture. It’s the crudest of deceptions, for it means killing an antique to replace it by a dud. But my life was at stake. The lost paintings would understand—I hoped.

“Right,” I told Marilyn. “Dress summery, as a Parisian Lady, 1875. Duty calls.”