Ghost Hero (34 page)

“Oh.” I sank back against the banquette.

Eddie To sat openmouthed and speechless.

After a moment, Bill said, “The same smuggler? Around the same time?”

“That’s right. Exactly what we said. Chau’s been underground for twenty years. Painting, never showing, just the way we had it. He’s a citizen, so he’s not actually in danger, but Yang didn’t want to out him.”

“What made him change his mind?”

“He talked to Chau.”

“Oh,” I said again.

“Chau told him to get over himself. He said this was for Anna, what was the big deal? If a lot of problems could be solved by people thinking he was still alive, so fine. And by the way, don’t use Anna’s paintings from China, here are three actual new ones.”

“Why?”

“He said Dr. Yang had never made a false attribution in his life and he wouldn’t let him start now. If he was going to have to sign off on paintings as new to make gangsters happy—by which, apparently, he meant Jerrold and Jin as well as Lionel Lau—they were going to be new.”

“You know,” I said, “I think he really may be a hero.”

“But not a ghost. The only thing he asked was that Dr. Yang not say where he was if at all possible. He likes his new life.”

“Jack,” said Eddie. “Jack. The Ghost Hero lives, he’s still painting, and Red Sky will be showing the first new Chaus in twenty years? Do I have that essentially correct?”

“You do.”

“Oh. My.
God!
Jack, if I weren’t already married to Frank I’d marry you. You could marry us both! I’m sure Frank won’t mind. Jack, will you marry us?”

“No. But maybe you should go home and break the good news to Frank.”

“I will. I will.” Eddie gulped the rest of his champagne and stood. “Though I get the feeling you’re throwing me out. You want to be alone with your co-conspirators? Are you starting another conspiracy? I don’t want to know. I’m leaving. Will you come to the opening? All of you. The wine will be excellent. It’ll be invitation-only. Yes, I’m going. Frank! Oh, Frank!” He practically ran out of the bar.

29

The next morning I slept in. That’s unlike me, but the celebration had gone on and on. After the drinks, Jack took us to a Lebanese restaurant for
tajines
and loud music from a joyous three-man band. Then I suggested coffee and tea at Silk Road. Then Bill had an after-hours club he recommended. The sun wasn’t yet crawling up over the horizon by the time I got home, but it was nearing it. And I’d had a pink drink.

“Ling Wan-ju,” my mother said, as I stumbled into the kitchen in search of the tea I knew she’d made. “You’ve slept quite soundly. Perhaps you came in late last night. I didn’t hear you.”

Uh-huh. “Pretty late.” I kissed her, grabbed the teapot, and poured a cup.

“How is your case going?”

I took a sip, felt the heat cut its way down my innards. “It’s over, Ma. It worked out well.”

“You were successful?”

“Yes, we were.” Caffeine began kick-starting my brain.

“I see. That is good. Professional success is important. No matter what one’s profession.”

Uh-huh, again.

“Now that the case is over,” my mother said, her back to me as she sorted dishes from the dish rack onto cabinet shelves, “I suppose you will not be seeing the other detective? The Chinese one?”

“Jack? I guess I hadn’t thought about it.” I hadn’t, and I had to say, my first reaction to the idea wasn’t positive. “But Ma, I thought you didn’t like him.”

“Ling Wan-ju.” She turned, wearing the wide-eyed look. “I do not know him.”

This was true, and was the point at which, normally, I’d have given up. Now, though, maybe prompted by the still-circulating remains of my cosmo, or maybe by the not-yet-faded flush of victory, I found myself soldiering on. “Ma, you just seriously flip-flopped on the subject of Jack. A few days ago you were completely disenchanted when you found out he was an investigator, and second generation, too.”

“I do not understand what you mean by ‘disenchanted.’ I have not been under a spell.”

Bilingual communication failure: The Chinese word I’d dredged up to express that thought was obviously not quite right. “If you spoke English I wouldn’t always be using the wrong Chinese word,” I said. “I meant ‘disappointed.’”

“If you spoke better Chinese, you would not, also. I
was
disappointed. I was hoping you had met a young man in a respectable profession. First generation, or possibly Chinese-born. More Chinese than American.” She shut the cabinet. “However, you have not. You have met this Lee Yat-sen. You seem to enjoy his company. He appears to be a respectable young man.”

“How do you—oh, no. You had someone Google him, didn’t you?”

“Someone” could only be one of my brothers, and her affronted look told me I was right. “Ling Wan-ju, I don’t know that word, goo-goo. I asked your brother on the telephone if he knew this Lee Yat-sen. He called me back to tell me that he had heard good things about him, as far as that is possible in your profession.”

My mother never tells me which brother she’s talking about; I’m supposed to just know. In this case, it could have been any of them, until she hit that last snide remark. That made it Tim, and I snorted.

My mother pursed her lips. “Your brother is concerned about you, Ling Wan-ju. He is interested in your happiness.”

“He just doesn’t want me to embarrass him.”

“Bringing shame to your brother would cause you sorrow, would it not? So in this concern, he is interested in your happiness.”

I could only stare. The woman was a natural wonder.

“Your brother cares for you,” she insisted again. “All your brothers do.”

“I suppose you’re right. Sometimes they have odd ways of showing it, though.” I sighed and finished my tea.

“That is a privilege of family. To express concern and be understood, even if the expression is odd.”

“Yes, Ma.” I got up, kissed her again, and went off to get dressed and face the day.

30

Three nights later, there was another celebration. As Asian Art Week opened with grand fanfare, and Beijing/NYC debuted to critical praise, the East Village communal studio in Flushing threw a party to welcome Mike Liu to New York. The PRC government had already issued a press release to the effect that, for humanitarian reasons involving his health, lawbreaker Liu Mai-ke had been released from his obligation to the Chinese people to serve his sentence and, by the benevolence of the government and the Party, been sent to the West for medical treatment. The press release had been Xeroxed a few hundred times at different sizes and pinned up all over the studio’s corridors, where it had been painted and drawn on by the artists. In some places it was covered with glitter; in others it was folded into origami animals. A giant copy was suspended from the ceiling and hung with bells that tinkled in the breeze whenever the door opened. It kept opening, too, to admit the hippest of the hip; literary and art world stars; Chinese community movers and shakers; and all the downtown glitterati, every one of them dressed in black. The only other color you could see, spotted throughout the crowd, was red, the color of luck and joy.

The party was roaring by the time we arrived, me in black silk pants and sleeveless black blouse, with a chunky red glass necklace; Jack in black suit jacket, black jeans, white shirt and red tie. Bill was a bit out of place, in a charcoal suit with a gray shirt and no tie, but at least he wasn’t wearing Vladimir’s bling.

“I thought about it,” he’d said when he picked me up. “But if Jack won’t wear the fat suit, you’re not getting the bling, either.”

“How is it I’m so lucky?” I’d climbed in the car and we’d fetched Jack and made tracks to Queens.

Unlike our first visit to the studio, entrance tonight was through the loading dock doors. The party and its thumping soundtrack spilled out onto the sidewalk and into the street. “Hey, Jack!” Francie See waved from behind a long outdoor table crowded with wine bottles. “We’re taking turns playing bartender. Hi, Lydia, Bill. What can I get you?”

Jack asked for Cabernet, Bill took a beer, and I got a Pellegrino with lime—I was forced to glare at Jack when he asked if I wouldn’t rather have a cosmo—and we strolled on inside. Almost no one at this shindig understood the part we’d played in freeing Mike Liu, which was how we wanted it. As far as we knew, just he and Anna, Pete Tsang, and Dr. Yang had any idea at all. Of them, Dr. Yang knew the most, but even he was sketchy on the whole Lionel Lau thing. The less anyone knew, we’d decided, the safer everyone would be.

“Is that Mike Liu?” I pointed down the hall to a thin man with glasses. He was animated, laughing, talking. Radiant, you might say, as was Anna, at his side. “Gee, he doesn’t look sick. Let’s go get introduced.” We headed over, but Mike and Anna were swept up by a writer I recognized from a profile in
The New Yorker.
“Oh,” I said. “I guess we’ll be later.”

“That’s the way it goes when you’re on the B list,” Bill shrugged.

Jack said, “Oh, really? I wouldn’t know.”

“Jack?” Someone had stepped out in front of us, an Asian woman in a red cheongsam. She raised her voice over the music to say, “Hello, Ms. Chin. Hello, Mr. Smith.” It took me a moment, then I realized: Anna’s mother.

“Mrs. Yang!” I said. “You look wonderful.”

Her bearing was still subdued, dignified, but she no longer looked grim, as she had when we’d met her in Anna’s living room. “Thank you. May I speak with you for just a minute?” She included all of us in her gaze, so we followed her through the door of the nearest open studio. It happened to be Francie See’s, where the bowl-and-tap painting we’d seen the birth of was pinned to the wall, joining all the other paintings of water, infinitely yielding and yet, in the end, invincible. Mrs. Yang turned to face us.

“I wanted to thank you. For all you’ve done for Anna, and my family.”

I said, “Dr. Yang told you?”

“Yes, he did. He keeps no secrets from me.”

“Oh. Well, you’re very welcome.” The guys seemed to have elected me spokesperson, or maybe I did that myself; so to be properly Chinese about it, I went on, “We’re honored to have had the opportunity to help. We were lucky to be able to come up with a fitting solution to the problem.”

“Fitting.” Mrs. Yang gave a small smile. “Yes, some solutions are more fitting than others. Anna’s so happy now that Mike is here, it’s hard to remember that my husband and I once opposed this marriage.”

“You wanted to protect her,” Bill said. “I’m sure she understood that, even if she didn’t like the way you tried to do it.”

“Of course she did,” I said. To my surprise I found myself channeling my mother. “That’s a privilege of family. To express concern and be understood, even if the expression’s odd.”

The look Mrs. Yang gave me was definitely odd. So was what she said: “And beyond family? Can one be understood, do you think, and maybe even forgiven, for expressions of concern that are … odd?”

I didn’t know what to say because I didn’t know what we were talking about. Bill just drank his beer, so I guessed he didn’t either. Jack, though, leaned down, kissed Mrs. Yang’s cheek, and said, “Forgiveness is always possible, even without understanding. When there’s understanding, it’s inevitable. Go back to your son-in-law’s party, Yang Yu-feng.”

After a moment she smiled; then she bowed. Jack bowed back, and she left the room.

I said, “Um?”

Jack smiled as he watched Mrs. Yang make her way down the hall. “She’s the one who shot at me.”

“What?”

“That’s what she wants to be forgiven for. She said he has no secrets from her. But she kept a few from him. She knew Anna had made the paintings, and what Anna and Pete were planning to use them for. That’s why the target was me, not Dr. Yang. For one thing, I’m not sure she could bring herself to shoot at him, even if no one was supposed to get hurt. For another, it didn’t matter that there are other people who do what I do. By the time Dr. Yang found and hired one of them the Free Mike Liu rally would’ve happened and the paintings would’ve been shown. She just wanted to buy time for Anna by scaring me off.”

“No, seriously? Where would Mrs. Yang even get a gun?”

“Oh, I don’t think she personally did it. She hired it.”

“Okay, then where would she get a person with a gun?”

“A gun, and a high slime factor. Right here, in the studio next to Anna’s.”

“Jon-Jon Jie?”

Jack nodded. “I’m sure Mrs. Yang paid him well. And he probably thought that this would, long-term, give him something to hold over Dr. Yang. For when he wants a show reviewed or something.”

“Gunshots in the middle of the day on Madison Avenue? He’d take that kind of risk?”

“Come on, he’s a Texas cowboy.”

Bill said, “What are you going to do?”

“About her? Nothing. I forgave her. The end. About him?” Jack shrugged.

“Jack, he shot at you!” I said.

“Can’t prove it. Besides,” he grinned, “he’s got enough problems. Every artist here knows he stole the paintings. He has an expensive lease on a Manhattan studio, and he’s about to lose his gallery. He’ll never drink white wine in this town again.”

“You don’t think Eddie To will take him on?”

“Not in this lifetime.”

Probably conjured by my magical powers, Eddie To right then passed the doorway in the company of a familiar-looking Chinese woman. He took a step backward and leaned in. “Hey! Is this you guys’ cabal office?” He led the young woman in. “Hu Mei-fan, this is Jack Lee, Lydia Chin, and Bill Smith. You need to meet them, they’re very dangerous.”

Hu Mei-fan smiled shyly, a smile that suddenly vanished when she got a look at me. Flushing, not meeting my eyes, she said, “We have met.”

In Doug Haig’s office, yes we had. “No,” I said, “I don’t think so.”

“Mei-fan’s a painter, fresh off the boat from Beijing.” Eddie said as the young woman gave me a grateful smile and an almost imperceptible bow of the head. “Really good. We’ll be giving her a show later this year, Frank and I. After, you know…” He winked and touched a finger to the side of his nose. “About which, by the way, Drs. Snyder and Lin said exactly what you said they’d say.”