Picking Bones from Ash (27 page)

No one answered at the first two numbers.

A young man answered at the third. He was difficult for me to understand and I hung up the phone without continuing the conversation. Then
I dialed the fourth number. The minute I heard that curt, almost English voice, I knew I had my man.

“Hello. My name is Satomi Horie. I am in Tokyo. I am calling the collector.”

He made some jokes about a tax collector and something about parking tickets. When he finished rambling on, I started again.

“I am friend of Timothy Snowden. I have antiques to sell to you.”

“You
hyaboo
?” he roared with laughter. “
Hyboo anoo teekoo
. You guys will never learn to stop adding those extra syllables, will you? Can’t even imagine a universe where a consonant isn’t connected to a vowel.”

I persisted. “One is very nice Korean bowl. Also I have plate.”

“Not getting it, are you, girl? Listen. I don’t know how you got this phone number. I’m not surprised that Timothy is sampling local cuisine while he’s in Japan. Hope he tipped you fair and square. Maybe he didn’t. Maybe he didn’t have enough cash and you and your bosses got angry and he handed you this phone number and told you it was worth a million yen. Maybe you stole it from his pocket. Who knows? Point is, I don’t care. Get it? I come to Japan, I have friends who give me the kind of thing you have for sale. They know I like your nice long backs and short little legs and flat asses. But you let
them
take care of me.”

“Antique …,” I began again.

“No more, little
anoo teekoo
. Tell your
yakuza
friends the American says no, a word you might consider adding to that convoluted language of yours. I have friends, by the way. You call again and I’ll have them find you. Understand?”

I hung up the phone. The man was thousands of miles away, yet I shook as though he were staring at me through the window. It was times like this that I hated being Japanese. I could drape myself in shame so quickly, and it was an intractable garment to cast off. I took a shower, felt dirty, then took another. I thought of the mineral baths I’d enjoyed with my mother. I needed one of those, yet here I was stuck in Tokyo with bags of useless merchandise and a collector who would not speak to me.

After twenty-three days, we learned that Timothy had been found guilty and that he would be spending two years in jail. He was being moved immediately to a prison outside Tokyo. The attorney who came to see us
briefly said that in time Timothy would probably be able to send and receive mail, but that visits would always be out of the question. So it was that François and I found ourselves again sitting in the curry restaurant and discussing our next move.

“What will you do now?” he asked.

“I don’t know.”

“I could still help you.”

I employed my Japanese
shirankao
, my
I don’t know
face, to keep him from reading what I was thinking.

“You aren’t the sort of woman who sits idly by wondering what to do with her life, or waiting for someone to rescue her,” François declared. “You are the kind of woman who can’t help but look for a way out of a trap. The same way a cat does.”

“You know my mother has just died.” I lowered my eyelids.

“I find the demure damsel-in-distress routine fascinating, and you are quite good at it.” François smiled. “But you mustn’t think I’m going to be as easy to persuade as some of the other men you’ve met. Like that priest, for example, who is clearly still in love with you.”

My
shirankao
became harder to keep in place. “Who?”

“The priest who performed the ceremony. Couldn’t keep his eyes off you. I see that you know what I’m talking about.”

I thought again of Masayoshi in his temple, of the house in Hachinohe, and then of Timothy. I studied François’ face, watched his bemused expression fade to a blank canvas so it was hard for me to read him, like a room whose light is slowly turned off so you cannot see the corners where the ceiling meets the walls.

I said, “Timothy will be in prison for two years. Even if he is sent to an American territory to finish his sentence, he will have to go to Guam, not to America. It will take him a long time to go home.”

“Yes.

“He is my partner.” I hesitated. “Actually, he is my employee. My translator. I need him to sell merchandise. Now he will be busy for a long time and I still need a translator.”

François brightened. In a patient voice he asked, “And who will you sell these things to?”

“The collector.”

“And where is the collector?’ ”

I smoothed my skirt. “San Francisco.”

We did not have the collector’s name. Timothy’s notebook included only a phone number. François tried to call again from Japan, but this time no one answered. “I think,” he said, “that we should just go to San Francisco.”

“It’s far.”

“Not as far as it used to be.”

I glanced outside. How comforting it was to see signs in Japanese instead of French. Even though I’d already decided that my future here was going to be somewhat limited, I felt extremely reluctant to leave the place I associated with my mother, with Masayoshi, with university life—in short, with everything that had at one point been important to me. Grief will play tricks on you. If I left Japan, then my mother would truly be dead. If I stayed here in the hotel room, I’d forever be close to the moment when I’d learned she was dead, which was almost like going back in time to a period when she had been alive and my direction in life had been clear.

“Look,” François said, “you already know that leaving Japan doesn’t mean you won’t ever come back.”

“If I leave,” I said, “things might change.”

“Everything is always changing, whether we want it to or not. Staying here won’t bring your mother back to life, or get Timothy out of jail. But if we find the collector and sell off these antiques, then we’ll both have more than we have right now. And how could that be anything but positive in the long run?” He was happy to leave Japan and abandon his academic career, which he said wasn’t amounting to much in the first place. He saw helping me to sell off the antiques as an opportunity, a chance to change his fortune. He promised, out of deference to his friendship with Timothy, to treat me respectfully and equally.

François tried to call the collector as soon as we arrived in San Francisco, but he was abruptly cut off. When he tried to call back, the line was busy. A day later, the line had been disconnected.

“The problem,” François said to me, “is that we need an introduction. I will take care of that.”

“What about me?”

He smiled. “If I were you, I’d play tourist. Go see the Golden Gate Bridge.
Haight-Ashbury. Don’t worry. I’ll take care of everything else.” It might take more than a few months to get an introduction, but he would make certain that we survived. We wouldn’t be wealthy for a while, but the wonderful thing about California and its climate was that it was possible to be poor and still live comfortably. We would live north of San Francisco in a van in a town called Bolinas. While I acclimated to the United States, he would dedicate himself to selling a few of the smaller pieces and to building what he called “connections.”

I suppose that in other circumstances, I might have enjoyed San Francisco. When I look at photos of it now, or when I see it on television programs or movies, it strikes me as a colorful, decorative town with rich sunlight and eccentric characters. I should have been happy in such a place. If Timothy had been with me, I might have found a way to enjoy its easygoing culture.

Instead, I found it to be an unruly city, and far too cheerful for its own good. In California, people seemed to believe that anything actually was possible and anything imagined could be turned into reality. Flying saucers. Rock-and-roll superstardom. Finding a mysterious collector in the unfamiliar world of Asian art connoisseurship among Westerners.

I wasn’t happy; I was scared. What if we didn’t find the collector? What would happen to us then? “You must have some faith, Satomi,” François would say, “in me if in nothing else.” I told him that I didn’t know what he meant. Having faith, as far as I could see, meant waiting and waiting for something to happen while I did practically nothing to ensure that it would actually come about. This seemed like a ridiculous way to conduct one’s life. None of my successes had ever been won on the basis of this thing called faith.

I got a job. I humiliated myself by working at a vegetable shop in the Inner Richmond neighborhood near Golden Gate Park. The job paid me half in cash and half in vegetables. While I rang up bags of carrots and beans, François claimed to be out making “connections” and observing the few other dealers who had already set up shop in town. Some days he returned home not having made a sale, but having bought an additional piece of inventory, often with the money I had made, so I needed to work even more to pay for gas and our other expenses.

“How can we ever make any money if you just spend what I earn?” I asked him.

“Be patient,” he said. “One day all this excess inventory will be worth something. I promise you. I didn’t bring you to America so you would end up in a vegetable shop.”

But his unpredictability made me nervous. “Please,” I said. “Just find the collector.”

To be fair, I knew that he was working. He kept notes. He listed all the antique stores and the names of the owners and their family members. Every now and then, one of them would buy our smaller dishes. The Butterfield auction house, a very small establishment, held monthly sales of antiques that François attended in order to learn who the major dealers might be. He bought men coffee and drinks.

“You are still spending more money than we are earning,” I said.

“Just be patient.” He smiled at me.

He often came back to the van with a little bouquet of flowers or some little gift he thought I would like. I was usually annoyed when he did this because it meant he had once again spent money on something that we did not need. He would laugh and say, “I do intend to make you like me, Satomi. So don’t expect me to give up.” I often felt that uncomfortable feeling of expectation between us, as though he wanted something from me and was waiting for me to understand what it was. I always shied away from this strange, tense energy. I realize now that we were engaged in a kind of courtship, but at the time, I was too frightened about my circumstances and the future to understand what was happening.

One night, when I thought I could no longer bear living in America in this fashion, and when I thought I might have to humble myself even further by going back to Japan and asking Mineko for help, François came home elated.

“I have the name of the collector.”

San Francisco’s wealthy group lived in a neighborhood known as Nob Hill. Buildings, businesses, and universities were named after these people: Getty, Packard, Stanford. Our collector’s name was Brice. He was descended from an old oil family and lived with his wife and children. To the public, he was a man who donated to the opera and attended his children’s sports games. To the antique dealers, he was a man whose hunger for Asian antiques was as notorious as his thirst for Oriental women. The newspapers didn’t dare acknowledge this side to his life; he sat on all of
their boards. But the dealers knew of his activities and didn’t care. To the dealers, he was simply the big fish, the top prize to catch. Everyone wanted him as a client.

“We need an introduction,” François told me. “He’s a strange, paranoid person and he won’t deal with strangers.”

About a week later, François said, “What we really need is high-quality photos of the best pieces.”

A week after that, we had our invitation.

I still remember going into the collector’s home. My eye was drawn not to the glass case filled with porcelains and the Renaissance tapestries hanging in the entryway, but to the large glass window in the living room framing a clear blue sky, Alcatraz, and an enormous tanker bearing a Japanese flag.

The collector himself was surprisingly short—at least a foot shorter than François. He was wiry and tan and had a full head of white, curly hair, something I’d never seen before. He was also very alert and kept his head tilted up, as though he were sniffing the air like a dog searching for an unfamiliar scent.

It was a quick meeting, all over in half an hour. The collector spoke mostly to François, though he made plenty of references to me.

“There are many forms of connoisseurship,” he said to François. “I see we share the same taste in certain things.”

François grinned. “Isn’t she a treasure though?”

“I’ve sampled many women in Japan.” The collector nodded. “Back in the day, the government had programs for men like me. Pity they’ve ended. But you’ve found yourself a companion anyway.”

“For now,” François said in a way that indicated I might be for sale too.

The collector bought almost all the dishes, then asked if we had anything else.

“Some sculptures,” François said.

“No, no.” The collector shook his head. “Sculpture’s not my thing right now. Tell me something. What are you going to do with the big fat check I’m about to write?”

“Oh.” François pursed his lips and pretended to think. “Buy more inventory, I suppose. Start a proper business.”

“Good. I like to make investments. A word of advice, however.”

“Please.” François nodded.

“Anything you have that might be hot, you keep locked away for a decade or so. Understand? Only bring it out when it’s off Interpol’s radar. In the meantime, you’ll call me when you have something legal and special?” He took out his checkbook. “And to whom shall I make this out? I don’t do cash.”

“François des Rochers,” François answered smoothly.

“I would like 70 percent,” I said to François later when we were alone.

He grinned. “And they say the Japanese aren’t direct. Look, we only sold those pieces because I could speak English without an accent and charm everyone into thinking that I actually knew what I was talking about.”

“We made a sale,” I said slowly, “because I had collected all those objects and I knew what they were.”