Ghost Hero (4 page)

“But,” Bill said, “anyone not in the art world searching online for a Chinese PI would have nothing to go on but a Chinese name.”

“Which Chin looks like, and Lee, not necessarily.”

“Plus,” I said, “it comes earlier in the alphabet.”

“She’s very competitive,” Jack said to Bill. “Is she insecure?”

With great dignity I ignored that. “So Jeff Dunbar’s likely not a player in the art world. We’d figured that out, thank you very much. Still, he could know the value of these paintings and be hoping to make a quick buck.”

“Why not just tell you that? Why the song and dance?”

“Good question.”

“But you didn’t ask?”

“Not yet.”

“Because?…”

“The whole situation intrigues me. If he knew I hadn’t bought his lies he’d drop me and find someone else. That would be no fun.”

Jack’s gaze rested on me, level and appraising. He broke into a big grin. “You’re right,” he said to Bill. “Kick-ass.”

“Hey, listen,” I said. “Your client’s not so straightforward, either. If all he’s doing is protecting his investment, why did he give you a story?”

Jack looked surprised. “Face,” he said, as though it were obvious. “Come on, he knew the guy. Chau died standing up to the tanks, Yang’s making a cushy living in the capitalist heartland. Sounds better to tell me he’s offended at the crass attempt to cash in on Chau’s rep than to admit he doesn’t want his nest egg to take a hit.”

“A very Chinese motive,” I admitted. “So. Interesting situation.”

“Generally, or specifically?”

“Both. Specifically: I wonder what your client will do if we find the paintings, and it turns out they’re real?”

“Be unhappy. Just like yours will be, if it turns out they’re fakes.”

*   *   *

We shook hands in the cool spring sun outside the café, wished one another luck, and headed off in opposite directions.

“Nice guy,” I said to Bill. “We’ll clobber him.”

“One of your best qualities,” Bill said. “Your cooperative spirit.”

“I cooperate. I share.”

“You didn’t share our other theory. That Dunbar’s not looking for the paintings at all, just the painter. And you didn’t tell Jack we have a lead on that gallery assistant.”

“You’re his friend, and you didn’t either.”

“I’m your partner. Your case, your choice.”

That was how we worked: The one who brought the case in took the lead. It had been that way since back when we weren’t partners, just PI’s who called each other in from time to time. But not really, I suddenly realized. From the start we’d discussed, argued, poked holes in each other’s theories and plans. We operated from a two-person consensus, not a hierarchy.

“If it were your case,” I asked, “would you have told him that stuff?”

Bill grinned. “Probably not.”

On the next corner I took out my phone and called Baxter/Haig, the gallery where our lead worked. I spoke to an ennui-filled young woman, then clicked off and told Bill, “On the late shift today. In at noon.”

Bill checked his watch. “Okay, then, I have an idea.” He told me about it, I liked it, and we both headed off to fulfill our parts. I went to the Met’s Asian art galleries to inspect classical ink paintings, for an idea of what these new Chaus, real or fake, might look like.

Bill went home to shave.

4

The half hour I spent drifting through the museum’s quiet rooms mostly just reminded me how ignorant I was. I read exhibit labels and bought a book that talked about brushstroke angle and ink saturation. It also discussed the concept of veiled commentary, just enough to confuse me. I looked at the paintings with it in mind, but I had trouble following how plum blossoms that were borderless gray wash instead of opaque white with black outlines expressed the sympathy of Buddhist monks for exiled officials.

What did intrigue me, though, were the poems. Because this was familiar stuff.

Chinese classical paintings often have poems on them, either the poem that inspired the painting, or one inspired by it. Sometimes the poem’s by the painter, sometimes by someone else. I knew that, but I’d never spent much time with the poems. Now I tried reading them as political commentary, too. The ones in the exhibit were mostly short couplets—“Crickets and ants are on the Great Road,” that sort of thing. After a few, it hit me: All the old men of my childhood talked like this. Even today, if I drop in at Grandfather Gao’s herb shop, we’ll sit over tea and he’ll come out with something like, “A swirling feather cannot come to rest until the wind dies down,” or “Beating the grass for game may stir the sleeping snake.” Half the time I have no idea what he’s talking about, but the other half, it turns out he’s saying something I really need to listen to.

I leaned in to study the poems. The crickets and ants, those must be the riffraff you encounter everywhere, even on the Great Road. The wild goose whose call, unanswered, echoes outside the poet’s hut is his yearning for his hometown, far away. The poems made me feel considerably less dim than the paintings did. I was reading one about centipedes and spiders that ended, “Pity the ones caught in the world’s web/Those with poison are not lenient with each other,” when a voice in my ear whispered, “Don’t turn around. There’s a ghost behind you.”

“No, it’s only you,” I said to Bill, whose reflection I’d seen in the glass as he was sneaking up on me. “It’s just that, spiffed up like that, you look so unreal.”

“You’re adorably ephemeral, too. Shall we go?”

A bus, a subway, and a little walking—together faster than a midday cab—put us in the heart of the Chelsea gallery district. This part of lower midtown, way over west, is where the art dealers fled after SoHo went all upmarket.

Baxter/Haig occupied prime real estate, the ground floor of a renovated warehouse on West Twenty-fifth. We pulled open glass doors and strolled into a high-ceilinged space hung with huge, vivid canvases. The paintings all offered clichéd—or, I suppose, iconic, depending on your point of view—images of China. Tiered pagodas, terraced rice fields, moon-gated gardens, the slithering Great Wall. Busy folks swarmed everywhere, numerous as insects. Another icon/cliché: the vast industrious Chinese masses. Only when I looked closely I saw these weren’t people. They were American cartoon characters. Mickey Mouse, in his white gloves, harvested rice. Donald Duck, along with Daisy, Huey, Dewey, Louie, and an army of shirted and pantsless waterbirds, strolled the Wall. Yosemite Sam inspected the terra-cotta warriors. Outside the Temple of Heaven the Simpsons posed for a family photograph.

Bill, jeans exchanged for pressed wool slacks, lifted his eyebrows in bored recognition as we walked around. Giant letters on the wall announced this show as C
OLONY:
N
EW
W
ORKS BY
P
ANG
P
ING-
P
ONG.

“Please tell me that’s not his real name,” I whispered.

Bill glanced over a price list and artist’s statement he’d lifted from the reception desk. “You’re in luck. Pang’s his family name. He uses the name ‘Ping-Pong’ as an integral part of the ironic self-referential essence of the meta-situation on which his paintings comment.”

“Oh,” I said. “That’s much better.”

Besides us, the giant room held only five people. Four were in the back, among the canvases: an elegant older woman in high-heeled boots, frowning at the Fantastic Four in Buddhist robes; the rotund man beside her, gesturing and murmuring in what seemed to me a smarmily intimate fashion; and a pair of young men whose clothes and haircuts were so painfully hip they had to be art students. The place had the hushed, intense feel of a library. No: the anxiety-tinged air of a classroom during a final exam.

The gallery’s fifth occupant was a fashionably emaciated, lank-haired young man at the front desk. When we came in he gave us the narrowed eyes of a proctor; when that didn’t chase us out, he iced us, going back to whatever important work he’d been doing before we’d had the effrontery to walk through the door. This charmer, as I knew from my Googling, was Nick Greenbank, the fellow we wanted to see.

We took an unhurried, but in Bill’s case pointedly apathetic, turn around the gallery. I tried to interest him in this painting or that, showing him details like Captain America and Superman in coolie hats. He shook his head and waved me off each time, until finally he sauntered back over to the desk, me in frustrated tow.

It’s hard to ignore Bill when he looms, though Nick Greenbank did a better job than most. Finally looking up from his computer screen in badly hidden exasperation, he asked, “Can I help you?”

Bill leaned on the counter, smiled, waved a hand around, and in a conversational tone and a thick Russian accent, said, “Thees ees crep.”

“Vladimir, please!” I hissed. “I’m sorry,” I said distractedly to the affronted young man. What had affronted him was Bill’s rude dismissal of the work; what was distracting me were the blindingly ostentatious gold rings on Bill’s fingers, which matched the chains around his open-shirted neck, but which I was sure he hadn’t been wearing a few moments ago. “Mr. Oblomov hasn’t had much exposure to recent Chinese works. I brought him here hoping—”

“She vass hoping I buy, den she make fet commission. But I don’t buy crep. Leessen, boychik.” Bill leaned in closer and dropped his voice. “I like beautiful. Vy you tink I let her take me around? She ees beautiful, dah? Now, deess Chinese, dey used to paint beautiful. Pine trees, bamboo, all dat. Not Meekey Fucking Mouse. Now I hear”—he let the smile fade and drilled the young man with his eyes—“I hear det von of dem still does.”

Bill can do a good eye-drill, especially in Russian gangster mode. Nick Greenbank blanched, making his already-pale skin a nice contrast to his black silk shirt.

“You’re talking about classical Chinese art.” He swallowed and tried to recover, drawing on reservoirs of disdain to soothe his rasping voice. “From the dynasty periods. We don’t handle that. I suggest—”

“I suggest you pay attention, boychik. Dere’s a fellow I’m very, very interested in.”

From a position a discreet step behind Bill, I frantically but subtly signaled to little Nick.
Don’t cross the dangerous Russian mobster,
I tried to say with my eyes. There may be people whose eyes could say that; I’m not one of them, but I did manage to get across some sense of panic. Nick paused, looking both confused and apprehensive.

“He vass dead,” Bill mused. “Now he’s not dead. Chau Chun, but you know dat, dah? Dey call him da Ghost Hero.”

“I don’t know—”

“Dah, you do!” Bill smacked his hand on the counter. The impact wasn’t hard enough to make the art students or the booted lady turn around—the round gent had vanished—but Nick yanked his head back as though he’d been bitch-slapped.

“Now, come on, boychik. Someone hass a bunch of paintings, supposed to be by diss Ghost Hero Chau. You”—Bill’s jabbing finger stopped just short of Nick’s nose—“know who dat iss. You tell me, I buy, you get fet commission, just like her. You play stupid games, I get annoyed. My friends, dey get annoyed, too.” He pulled a cigarette from his pocket and stuck it in his mouth. Then he lit a match. He didn’t bring the flame to the cigarette, though, but instead lifted his arm and swept a slow semi-circle. “Ven dey get annoyed, dey can be very annoying, my friends.” Unhurriedly, he drifted the match in until it was very near Nick’s nose. Nick seemed paralyzed; nothing moved but his eyes, which crossed, watching the flame. After a moment, Bill grinned and shook the match out. “I forget, diss iss America, can’t smoke any damn place.” He opened his fingers and dropped the match on Nick’s desk. “So,” he said, unhurriedly restoring the cigarette to the pack. “Be a good boychik. Who hass dese paintings?”

“I—” Nick shook his head, glancing frantically to the back of the gallery. The art students and the booted woman showed no signs of having noticed. Nick whispered, “I could get fired!”

“Hah!” Bill bellowed, poking me in the shoulder. I staggered. “Fired! Good sense of humor, dah?” Bill’s arm repeated the semicircle. “Fired! He gets fired, gallery gets fired! Ha! Dat’s pretty funny!”

“No! All right, listen, I don’t know who’s got them—”

Bill sighed and shook his head.

“No, really. But I know who knows.”

“Oh?” Bill smiled. “Now vee get someplace.” He leaned on the counter again and placidly waited.

“This girl,” said Nick. “She’s at some gallery uptown, I don’t remember. Wait, Gruber, I think that’s it. Anyway I have her number.” He was thumbing a BlackBerry as he spoke. “I met her at an afterparty, some opening. She was trying to impress me.” He said that as though that was the usual reaction to meeting Nick Greenbank at an afterparty. “She tried to show me work from some studio visit. Bunch of Chinese-American artists, a group open studio. Like I’d care.”

“You vouldn’t? Vy not?”

“Hybridized,” Nick scoffed. “Mongrel work, no real grounding in place. We don’t handle Chinese-American shit, just real Chinese.”

Bill had better wrap this up fast, I found myself thinking, or I might have to shove my Chinese-American fist down Nick Greenbank’s throat.

“Here, Shayna Dylan, that’s her.” Nick turned the phone so Bill could see the screen. Bill entered Shayna Dylan’s number into his own phone. Nick, meanwhile, had managed to reinflate his punctured superiority. “She’s an airhead. Yadda-yadda about this shit, and then she drops that my boss saw her photos, too, and got all excited, wanted to know where the open studio was. So then I said, okay, whatever, and looked at what she was trying to show me. Of course I knew right away what he was hot for. Not the crap she was photographing. There were three Chaus, hanging on the wall behind.”

“You could tell dey were dat? From a tiny picture on a leetle phone?”

“Chinese contemporary is what I do. It’s the hottest area around.” When Bill still looked skeptical, Nick added defensively, “Chau Gwai Ying Shung had a very distinctive style. Unmistakable,
if
you know what you’re looking at.”

“And boychik knows?”

Nick made a comically insincere attempt at a modest shrug.

Bill winked. “Did you tell da pretty girl? Vat she hed pictures of?”