Thai Die (22 page)

When she turned away, she was surprised to see a large and muscular private guard standing by the secretary’s desk. He smiled coolly at her and gestured as if giving her permission to leave. Which she did.

Seventeen

BETSY had meant to go directly back to her shop, but on the elevator going down she buttoned her coat and kept thinking about Dr. Booker’s reaction to the silk. Was it possible the curator wasn’t merely surprised at the ragged old embroidery but astonished? And where had she gone, leaving Betsy alone in the office for all those minutes? Had it been to summon that burly guard? The guard had given Betsy a look that suggested he thought she had some precious artifact hidden in her purse. Had he been there to stop Betsy if she had tried to leave with the embroidery?

Betsy gave an indignant snort. So what if she had picked it up, not surreptitiously but openly? It was hers, after all. The Bangkok exporter had used it as packing material, essentially throwing it away. Doris had literally thrown it away. So Betsy, who had rescued it from the trash, could claim it as hers, right? She was here merely to get an opinion about restoring it, not to present it as a gift. Yet she could not shake the feeling that she would never see that piece of silk again.

What if it’s not just an old rag?
Betsy had thought it worth rescuing and restoring; so, it seemed, had Dr. Booker.

Annoyed with herself for not standing up to the curator and demanding the silk back, or at least demanding to know what the heck was going on, Betsy halted with her hands against the big glass doors that led to the entry hall. Maybe she should go back up there. Someone at the information desk gave her Dr. Booker’s number and directed her to an internal-use phone. But Dr. Booker had left for a luncheon engagement, said her secretary.

Frustrated, Betsy looked around and saw in the outer lobby that the glass wall opposite the entry was also made up of doors. They opened onto the snow-lined walk that went to the new wing.

She’d been over there before. She had come to the grand reception that marked its official opening because one of the galleries in it housed an amazing display of modern fabric art.

But another feature of the new wing was a library. Art history, art auctions, art education, art museums—lots and lots of information, all in one place, and all on one topic.

She was more than halfway up the walk before it occurred to her to ask what she was going to use as the topic of a search. She slowed and would have turned around, except it was by then a shorter walk to the library than back to the main lobby.

The circular atrium in the wing was beautiful, modern without being stark. The volunteer behind the desk just inside the door said the library was to Betsy’s left. Raising a sardonic eyebrow at the large porcelain statue of a snow white dog with a red ring around one eye, Betsy obediently turned left out of the rotunda and entered the library.

It was empty of patrons, and the woman behind a less grand desk than the one at the entrance was pleased to have a conundrum placed before her. “I want to find some information on a piece of embroidered silk,” said Betsy. “I think it might be a valuable antique. It came here from Thailand, but it doesn’t look Thai. Someone suggested it was embroidered by an English missionary in Thailand. I don’t know how old it is. It’s covered with very fine embroidery of odd-looking birds and animals among curling vines of tulip or lotus blooms.”

The young woman at the desk had dark, spiky hair, a silver knob on one nostril, and a tattoo of Betty Boop on her upper arm that was only partly covered by the gray short-sleeved sweater she was wearing. She led Betsy to a low counter with three computers along it, gave her a brief tutorial on how to use the search engine and some suggestions for places to look, then retreated. Betsy took off her coat, sat on the office chair and first followed Ms. Boop’s suggestion that she search for Asian textiles offered at art auctions—it was a revelation to her that there were places online where one could see copies of old catalogs from Christie’s, for example, or Sotheby’s. These had photographs of items, with art-language descriptions, what the estimated value was, and how much the item actually went for. But there was nothing online that resembled the embroidered silk on Dr. Booker’s desk.

She next went on a search for Asian embroidered silk, but it only had more of the things her home computer had shown her, and none of those items resembled her piece.

She sighed and was about to sign off when she got another idea. If the silk was brought into the United States illegally, under the guise of packing, then it might possibly have been an attempt to avoid duty—but it most likely was stolen. Next, she tried searching for a list of stolen art, and the search engine called up three. Each list was heartbreakingly long. After a discouraging journey down the first several dozen screens, she narrowed the search to stolen Asian fabrics, and a much shorter list came up. Most of them seemed to be carpets, with an admixture of robes and kimonos. She scrolled faster—and almost went past the one she was after. She hastily lifted her finger to stop scrolling, then went back three screens.

And there it was: a color photograph of the green embroidered silk, except it wasn’t dirty or frayed. She clicked on it and instead of an enlargement got a detail. It was a close-up of the strange bird Godwin had called a cross between an ostrich and a molting peacock. A brief caption described it as a phoenix.

She clicked to close the detail photo and moved the cursor over to read the text, which began in red letters, STOLEN. Under that she read with growing amazement:

 

Wait: 145 BC? Impossible! That was twenty-two
centuries
ago! She clicked again on the photo. No doubt about it, that was her silk. It was clean and unfrayed, while hers was raggedy and dirty—where had it been?—but that was her silk.

She just sat there for a minute with her hands resting on the keyboard, staring at it. What an astonishing thing, a piece of embroidery over 2,000 years old! What might it say to an archaeologist about the culture that produced it? The noble woman who owned it? The humble stitcher who made it? Her fingers trembled in awe as she remembered how she had handled the thing so casually.

Then her lips tightened and a slow anger warmed her chest. Such arrogance, exchanging this important piece of history for mere money! This was theft on a grand scale, theft not just of some valuable piece of art but of history, of—what was the word? Patrimony, a country’s very heritage. “Unique,” the announcement said. Suppose it had been delivered to Fitzwilliam in St. Paul? In a year or two the money paid for it would be spent, but the silk’s beauty and historical value would have been lost forever. Good thing that thief was too clever for his own good!

It
was
clever to disguise an item by making it look subservient to something else. Using a soft old rag to soften the shock of travel for a stone carving seemed obvious enough. She looked again at the photo of the silk. The Han silk she had handled seemed to have been in just these proportions, not shorter in length, and there was no additional row of figures on this one missing from the one up in Dr. Booker’s office. You don’t get a couple of inches of loose threads by tearing off a thin slice. Could that mean the fraying was fake? She tried to picture the silk in her mind, but she hadn’t paid close enough attention to it. But it wouldn’t be hard to fake, just pull threads the size and color of the warp of the fabric through the edge with a needle. How stupid of her not to have noticed that!

Her sitting motionless for so long drew the librarian’s attention. She came over to ask, “Is something wrong?”

“No, it’s just that I’m stumped,” Betsy said. “I found this piece and it’s exactly . . . uh, what I’m interested in. How can I find out more about it?”

The librarian leaned closer. “Well, isn’t that an odd-looking thing.” She read the text. “Early Chinese . . . embroidered silk . . . tomb excavation. I could find you a good history of China, but China’s history is so huge, something like this would probably get a one-sentence mention. Maybe a book on silk?”

Betsy said, “I own two books on silk, but they don’t have this piece in it—which surprises me, since this is unique as well as very old.”

“Hold on a minute.” The librarian went to the next computer, sat down, and began a search of her own. Minutes went by. She had a tight little smile on her face, the sign of a huntress hot on the trail. But Betsy began to feel impatient, and not just because she wanted more information. She shouldn’t be spending so much time away from her shop. That pair of young part-timers were almost certainly up to mischief by now. It was Betsy’s fault; she should have realized she might be away longer than she’d hoped. She looked at her watch. If she had started back as soon as she came away from Dr. Booker’s office, she’d be in Excelsior right now, scolding them for whatever they’d done.

But she couldn’t leave, not when this might be the key to the whole mystery. She bit her lips and wriggled on the chair—and thought about knitting. Godwin had once told her that if knitting with the hands wasn’t possible, knitting in the mind was equally soothing. Last week she’d helped a customer choose the yarn to knit a “lover’s knot” afghan from a free pattern offered on the Internet by Lion Brand Yarn. The customer had needed assistance following the pattern for the big clustered-braid panel, but that was too complicated for Betsy to do now just in her head. Instead, she began to construct the smaller OXOX panel, which was only twelve stitches wide. She would imagine knitting a very long, very skinny scarf in, say, mauve or dusty pink.

Twelve stitches was far too narrow, of course. So knit ten, purl eight, knit ten, that was easy. Turn and purl ten, knit eight, purl ten. Easy. Repeat row one. She could feel her fingers twitching as they imitated the knitting movements. So all right then, let’s see, purl ten, slip two stitches onto a humpbacked cable needle, drop it back of the work, knit two, then knit the two on the cable needle back onto the regular needle, and purl two—no, ten. Repeat rows one through three. Then purl ten, slip two stitches to the cable needle and put it in front of the work, knit two, then purl the two from cable—no,
knit
the two from the cable needle. Was she doing it right? It didn’t matter, no one would ever see this scarf. Purl ten. Then—

“Excuse me?” It was the librarian, who was looking at her strangely.
Probably thinking I was having a petit mal attack
, thought Betsy, blinking herself back into reality.

“I’m sorry,” Betsy said, “I was thinking about something.”

“That’s what I thought,” said the librarian politely. “Anyway, here’s an article about that stolen silk.”

“Oh, you found something? How wonderful! Thank you!”

The librarian went back to her desk and Betsy slid into the chair in front of the second computer. The article was brief but enlightening.

This silk piece, it said, is one of the oldest examples of embroidery in existence. It was woven and embroidered during the Eastern Han Dynasty, which ruled a part of China from 174 to 145 BC. The piece was owned by a noble woman named Xiu and was one of many found with her body in a small tomb deep underground. Xiu, who died at about forty-five years of age, was wrapped in many layers of silk, of a quality more suited to royalty. And she held rolls of silk in each hand.

Could it be, thought Betsy, that it was no humble artisan who did the embroidery but Xiu herself? Or perhaps Xiu owned a company that produced the silk, hiring the artisans who spun, dyed, and embroidered it and so felt entitled on her death to be buried in robes like the ones her business had produced for the royal families.

The tomb was opened in 1982 and the silk, amazingly intact, was among the artifacts recovered. The Zhin-Zhou Regional Museum in Hubei was designated to receive the silk, but this piece vanished on its journey there and was thought lost. But it turned up at an unadvertised auction in Hong Kong in April of last year and was purchased for the equivalent of US $25,000—not nearly its real value, but it had no provenance and so only was alleged to be what it was.

The purchaser was the owner of a private museum in Bangkok, but the silk was stolen again, apparently upon its arrival at the Bangkok airport. Its current whereabouts were unknown, concluded the article.

Not anymore, thought Betsy. It currently rests on the desk of Dr. Edyth Booker, of the Minneapolis Art Institute. Unless she had locked it in a safe, which was extremely likely.

Twenty-five thousand dollars was not nearly its real value, noted the article.