Ghost Hero (31 page)

“You think you’re getting paid? By Dr. Yang?”

“He gave me a retainer. Damn lucky, because you’re probably right, I shouldn’t expect anything else.”

“He might even sue you,” I said cheerfully. “To get the retainer back.”

I called my client while Jack went off to the bathroom to use his solvent.

“Ms. Chin!” Dennis Jerrold was cautiously eager as ever. “News?”

“Yes, Mr. Jerrold. Things have changed. We need a meeting.”

“What’s wrong? Are the Chaus about to be unveiled?”

“No. The good news for you is, it looks like the fake Chaus with Mike Liu’s poems on them won’t be shown at all.”

“That
is
good news. In fact, it’s terrific and it’s better than I expected. So why do I get the feeling I’m not supposed to celebrate?”

“Don’t pop the champagne yet. As I said, things have changed. There are three real Chaus that just turned up, and they will be shown.”

“Oh. You’re right, that’s not great. Turned up from where?”

“I can’t tell you that. But they’re real, they’re authenticated, and they’re going on the market. However, I think I can still do right by you.”

“Oh? How’s that?”

I repeated, “We need a meeting.”

Bill showed up at Jack’s office twenty minutes later. I buzzed him in and met him at the door.

“Am I in time?”

“Plenty,” I said. “Jerrold will be here in half an hour.”

“Not for that. To see Jack’s outfit.”

“The outfit, yes,” said Jack, coming out of the bathroom in black jeans and a white Oxford shirt. His wet hair was combed back and his face showed every sign of being freshly scrubbed. He pointed to the padded jacket and discount pants hanging over a chair.

“That’s all I get?”

“Can get accent also.” Jack bowed, speaking in Lin’s nasal tones. “Small scholar of Hohhot does not wish to disappoint.”

“He was great,” I told Bill.

“Vass he chust as great as Vladimir Oblomov, do you tink?”

“Oblomov, forgive me say so, but is coarse man,” Jack said. “Dr. Lin Qiao-xiang, much more refined.”

“Dah, you mean, sissy. Real man tuff like Oblomov.”

“Could you two pretend your native language is English?” I broke in. “We have work to do.”

The English thing was put off a little, though, because for our next trick, Jack and I listened in while Vladimir Oblomov called Lionel Lau.

“Meester Lau, Oblomov here. Pleasure to talk to you.… Chust fillink you in, need to esk a favor.… Good, Meester Voo already told you about Chaus? He did great job, by de vay, keepink his mouth shut.… Oh, yes, two million dollars, cute leetle Lydia says.” I gave Bill the stink-eye, but he was in character, so he just shrugged. “Vun tink, now, Meester Lau. Dose friends I vass tellink you about? Dey vould be very grateful, you do dis vun tink for dem.…”

*   *   *

Although Dennis Jerrold tried to keep his face pleasantly neutral as he stepped into Jack’s office forty-five minutes later, it wasn’t hard to tell he found the surroundings more congenial than my Canal Street back room. Well, nuts to him. “Hi, Mr. Jerrold,” I said. “Thanks for coming.”

“Thanks for making the meeting place so convenient. Is this your office?” That question, addressed to Bill, must have been diplomacy, because he couldn’t have been serious. Even bling-free, Bill does not look like an uptown-office kind of guy.

“Mr. Jerrold,” I said, “if we’d known from the start where you worked we could have made all our meetings more convenient. No, this is Jack Lee’s office—you met him, remember?—and he was supposed to be back here by now. I don’t see why we shouldn’t start without him, though. Would you like some coffee? Tea?”

He wanted coffee, of course, and so did Bill, and I made myself some green tea from the supplies Jack had replenished specifically to make this afternoon run smoothly.

“The paintings,” I said. “The Chaus you hired me to find. There are four, we found them, they’re fakes, and as I said on the phone, they won’t be authenticated and they won’t be sold. Though they’re really beautiful, as it happens.” I sipped my tea: high-quality, but I’d made it too strong.

“Beauty’s not the point,” Jerrold said.

“That’s the problem with politics,” said Bill.

“Yes, fine, we’ll debate that some other time. Where did they come from?”

“I can’t tell you who made them,” I said. “What I can say is, they do have Mike Liu’s poems on them, and not only would showing them next week have embarrassed the PRC, it seems that was the whole point.”

“That’s why they were made?”

“No, but it’s why they were going to be shown. If you want to tell your boss, and he wants to tell Mr. Jin at the Consulate, and you want to modestly take credit for saving the PRC some serious face, we’ll back you up.”

“Well, I’ll certainly do that if it’s the best I can get. Though I’d really like to know—”

“You’re not going to know, so forget it.”

He pursed his lips. A sticky point in the negotiations; pass it by, accomplish something else so you and the other party can feel good about each other, return later. “But don’t we still have a problem?” We. Give the other party the sense you’re on the same team. “You said there were three real Chaus about to come on the market.”

“Yes. From a private collection.”

“The interest in Chau brought them into the open?”

“In a way, it did. I don’t think we can stop their sale. But forewarned is forearmed. We can tell you where they’ll be shown and who’s doing the authentication. You can tell the people at the Consulate. They can get their own experts, pooh-pooh the whole thing, whatever they want to do. Cast some doubt, be wet blankets.”

“All right,” Jerrold said, setting his cup down. “I think—”

I was interested to know what he thought, but I wasn’t destined to find out. The door popped open and Jack popped through it.

“Hi!” he said. “Mr. Jerrold, sorry I wasn’t here to greet you. Welcome to my world.” He pulled off his leather jacket. “Hey, coffee! What a great idea.”

He poured himself a cup and joined us, looking particularly bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.

“We were just telling Mr. Jerrold about the new Chaus,” I said.

“The new Chaus!” Jack took a quick sip of coffee. “Hey, this is pretty good. You must have made it.”

“No, Bill did.”

“Oh. Well, it’s good anyway. The new Chaus. I have a couple of things to say about them, myself. They’re new.” He sat back, beaming.

“Yes,” I said. “We know that part.”

“No, you don’t. You mean unknown. I mean new.” He jumped up and went to his desk, where he switched the computer on and rotated the monitor so we could all see. “These photos from the spy camera aren’t great but they’re good enough.” On the screen, with a couple of mouse clicks, he called up the three paintings Dr. Yang had brought to the gallery. He added close-up details from each, and tiled everything on a single screen. “These paintings”—he tapped the screen with the back of his hand—“are new.” He sat back down. “You said in the cab I was quiet. I was thinking. What I was thinking was, if Dr. Yang brought those paintings with him when he left China, I really am Lin from Hohhot.”

“Who’s Dr. Yang? Does he have these? Who’s Lin?” My client was confused.

I ignored him. “What do you mean, Jack? We know he had three. Anna said so.”

“Who’s Anna?”

“He might.” Jack ignored Jerrold, too. “But not those three. You saw them.”

“They’re beautiful.”

“They sure are. Chau never painted like that.”

“I thought all his paintings are supposed to be beautiful.”

“They are. But they don’t look like that. They don’t have that pared-away quality, like the painter knows exactly what matters and what doesn’t. Or that sense that he knows what he wanted to do and he did it and he doesn’t give a damn if you like it.” Jack grinned. “But they would have. In Chau’s mature period. If he’d lived.”

“What are you saying? You think these are fakes, too? Just better fakes?”

“No.” He clearly wanted to keep the suspense going, make us keep asking, but he also clearly couldn’t wait to tell. “This very issue was part of the full and frank exchange of views I had not an hour ago with Dr. Yang. They’re not fakes and they’re not old. They’re Chaus. From his mature period. Painted within the last year. Chau’s alive.”

You could’ve heard a pin drop, if anything as messy as a loose pin were to be found in Jack’s office. Then we all recovered at once.

“Jack—”

“Jack—”

“Mr. Lee!” My client was the guy with the loudest voice. “The Ghost Hero? He’s alive?”

“Dr. Yang admitted it. He’s an old friend of Chau’s. Smuggled out of China around the same time, as it turns out, and by the same smuggler.”

“What?”
I said. “No. That story—you were there—”

“He said the story was true. But the man who died was someone else.”

I sat openmouthed. Meanwhile Jerrold, with impressive diplomatic cool, said, “Where is he?”

“Chau? I can’t tell you.”

“Mr. Lee, you—”

“No, I mean I really can’t. Dr. Yang absolutely drew the line at that. I’m assured, though, that he’s been an American citizen for many years, under a shiny new name, living a shiny new life. Painting only in private, never showing. He was more than happy to give his old bud Dr. Yang those three paintings, though, to help him out of a hole. Like everyone else, he’d heard all the rumors about new Chaus, and he felt responsible for Dr. Yang’s troubles.”

“What troubles?”

“Trouble’s all fixed, don’t worry about it,” Jack said, though worried wasn’t how Jerrold looked.

“Whatever that means,” Jerrold said, “this guy’s a fugitive from a friendly foreign power and I want to know where to find him.”

“You won’t find him. You could ask Dr. Yang, but,” Jack surveyed Jerrold, “I guarantee you wouldn’t last a minute.”

“I’d like to try.”

“Oh, Mr. Jerrold!” I broke in. “Really, what good would it do? Are you thinking that turning Chau over to the Chinese government would help your chances for promotion? If it’s true he’s a U.S. citizen, the Chinese government can’t touch him.”

“It is true,” Jack affirmed. “Dr. Yang’s one, too. Very efficient smuggler.”

“We could agree to extradite them.” Jerrold wasn’t giving up.

“For Tiananmen crimes?” Jack was enjoying himself. “Just wait until
that
hits the news. You’re with the government, Jerrold, so maybe you don’t know this, but we’re supposed to be the
good
guys. The Chinese government, during Tiananmen, they were the
bad
guys. Friendly foreign power, feh.”

Jerrold fixed Jack with a hard stare. “You said they were smuggled in. If they entered the country illegally I could—”

“No, you couldn’t.” Bill got in the act. “Twenty years ago someone in the INS obviously decided whatever they were using for paperwork was good enough. Maybe even someone in your own Department told them it was. Gave Chau and Yang political asylum. While you were playing Little League.”

“Pop Warner,” Jack corrected. “Pee-wee football, not baseball, right? All thuggery, no finesse. Give it up, Jerrold. We have two smuggled Chinese Tiananmen intellectuals, right under our noses, and you can’t touch ’em.”

Dennis Jerrold, his face grim, watched Jack smile and sip coffee. A few moments of silence, then, “I want the smuggler.”

I took a quick look at Jack, then said, “What?”

“The smuggler, Ms. Chin.” Jerrold sat back in his chair. “Chau and Yang, whoever Yang is, may be U.S. citizens, they may be political heroes, they may be untouchable. Fine, you win. The smuggler’s something else. Undocumented aliens coming into this country, that’s a hot-button topic. For all we know the smuggler has been running a snakehead operation, flooding our shores with undesirables for two decades now.”

“I doubt it.”

“I don’t care. No matter what heroes he smuggled in, no one will think the smuggler’s a hero. The press on netting a human trafficker—it’s all good. The PRC government won’t be happy about Chau being out of their reach, but the smuggler’s a good consolation prize.”

“Forget it.”

“No, you forget it. Entering the country illegally is a felony. If you know the smuggler’s identity and refuse to reveal it you’re committing one, too.”

“You’re not law enforcement,” Bill said.

“So I’ll call the Justice Department.”

“We’ll call our lawyers. This could go on a long time.”

“Are you all prepared for that? Long legal cases are expensive. This office is nice, but it’s a little minimal. And Ms. Chin’s? You don’t strike me as people with a lot of discretionary funds. I doubt if it will be good for the investigation business, either, to be involved in a drawn-out legal proceeding in which I paint you as less than patriotic. Give me his name.”

“How would we know?” I said. “Jack just found out about Chau an hour ago.”

“You’ve all apparently known about Yang, whoever that is, for much longer than that. Tell me who smuggled him in.”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Me either.”

“Me either.”

“For people who lie for a living you all do it pretty damn poorly.”

I sipped my tea. It had grown bitter. “Mr. Jerrold,” I said, “giving the PRC the smuggler’s name might win you a promotion. It could also get the smuggler killed.”

“That’s the risk he took. Listen well. Even before I bring the Justice Department in—which I will do, believe me—I can make your lives miserable. Like to travel? I’ll put you on the terrorist watch list, you’ll never get on a plane again. In fact, no one in your family will. Any of your families. I’ll put them all on the list. Or get a bank loan, a college loan, a mortgage … Not to mention your licenses, gone in a flash. You guys are screwed. Accept it. I want that name. Then we’ll all be friends again.”

“We were never friends,” I said.

“So we’ll never be friends. I don’t give a damn.” He waited another few moments, then took out his phone. “Okay, I’m calling Justice.”

“Wait,” said Jack.

“Yes?” Jerrold lowered the phone. “I’m waiting.”

“I want to make a deal.”

“What deal?”

“Jack!” I yelped.

Jack shook his head. “I’m sorry, Lydia. It would be hard enough on my family if I got arrested, but the rest of this stuff? You’re from a Chinese family, you know. My sisters, their kids. My dad’s an academic, flies everywhere all the time. I can’t let this happen to them.”