Ghost Hero (8 page)

“Not yet. We were interrupted at a delicate moment.” Bill looked at Jack, who shrugged an apology. “But I’m buying her a drink later.”

“You’re kidding me.”

“Hey, she’s not the kind of girl who shows her phone to a guy on the first date.”

“Why not? She shows everything else.”

“Oh, snap,” said Jack. “Do I smell the sickly sweet scent of jealousy?”

“Impatience. What good is later going to do us? Why didn’t you just swipe the phone?”

“I thought about it. But seeing the photos wouldn’t have told us where they were taken. Or would it? Is there some way—could Linus—”

“You ask that as though, if there
were
some way and Linus could, you’d actually go back up and steal it.”

“I would.”

“Who’s Linus?” Jack asked.

“Well, there’s not, so don’t bother.”

“Who’s Linus?”

“My cousin.”

“Ah.” Jack nodded sagely, as though that had clarified something. “Who’s Linus?”

“Linus Wong,” Bill said. “Runs a computer security business. His motto is, ‘Protecting people like you from people like us.’”

“He’s a hacker?”

“At heart.”

“Really. Is he good?”

“The best,” I said stoutly.

“In that case,” Jack said, “I think we could use him anyway.”

“Why?”

Jack leaned beside me on the planter. “Shayna’s the daughter of one of Jen’s big collectors. Jen’s assistant is out on maternity leave, so she gave Shayna the fill-in job to keep Shayna’s daddy happy. Shayna knows enough about the art to avoid making a fool of herself, and she’s decorative enough that a lot of collectors don’t care what she knows. But she’s also wildly ambitious. According to Jen, who’s counting the days, she’s everything you think she is.”

“You mean, a man-eating coldhearted calculating—”

“Yes.”

“—backstabbing brownnosing—”

“Exactly.”

“—kind of woman who, if she had a date with a new guy, would totally Google him.”

“Totally.”

“Ah. And might share valuable information with the new guy, if she thought there was something in it for her?”

Bill said, “Getting to spend an hour with me at Bemelmans Bar isn’t enough in it for her?”

“If you’re planning to expense this you’d better choose someplace cheaper than Bemelmans Bar.” I took out my phone. “I’m not sure we have time, though. She’s probably Googling already.”

“No,” said Bill. “I thought of that. I never quite gave her my last name.”

I stared. “You thought of that? I had no idea you even knew what Google was.”

“I don’t know how to play the accordion, either, but I’ve seen it done often enough to know it’s possible.”

I looked at Jack. “Two Chinese people standing here, and the white guy talks in convoluted metaphors.” I called Linus.

“Hey, Cuz! What’s going on? Hey, Trell, it’s Lydia!”

I heard Linus’s friend Trella call a greeting across the room—his parents’ garage, actually, where Wong Security operates from—and I said “hi” back, which Linus passed on. “I’m calling on business, Linus. I have a job for you guys. You busy?”

“We’re always busy. Big growth industry I’m in here. But never too busy for you. Especially if it’s gonna be fun.”

“Well, you tell me. Bill needs a new identity.”

“Awesome! He steal a billion from the Colombian cartel? Or he’s on the run from the FBI?”

“He wants to date a pretty lady.”

“Oh. You know, lots of people do that without being in Witness Protection. Besides, I thought … I mean…”

“It’s business, Linus. We have a case.
I
have a case. Anyway,” I said, suddenly annoyed at myself and not sure why, “we think she’ll Google him, and we want to be careful about what she finds.”

“Business. Gotcha. Way cool.” Linus sounded a little unconvinced, but he asked, “What do you need? I can’t do, like, Social Security numbers. I can do a driver’s license, but it’ll take time.”

“I don’t think we need that. This isn’t a background check. I just want whatever she finds to make him look like what he says he is. Vladimir Oblomov, Russian with cash. Probably in import-export, something where there’d be money sloshing around. If you implied he was connected to the Russian mob that would be okay. He collects contemporary Chinese art, that’s the important detail. He can keep a low profile, she’ll believe that, but we want him to pop up enough that when she searches, she takes him for real, a collector, and rich.”

“Rich?”

“Loaded.”

“Excellent. How long do I have?”

“A couple of hours.”

“Piece of cake. Call you when I’m done.”

I thanked him and pocketed the phone and, his “piece of cake” echoing in my ears, I said to the guys, “I’m hungry.”

“Well,” said Jack, “we could go have lunch. Or, we could grab a pretzel and go downtown and talk to Dr. Yang.”

“I thought he was in class.”

“He was. He called while I was in with Jen. He’s back in his office and available for the next couple of hours.”

I hopped off the planter. “Why didn’t you say so?”

Again, Jack started to hail a cab; again, I stopped him. “You have some elitist problem with mass transit? You enjoy breathing car exhaust? The six train will get us to NYU in ten minutes.”

“Sorry. Occupational hazard. In my business the clients look at you oddly if you come up out of the subway. Like you might be a Martian.”

“Those come down from spaceships. Listen, did Jen Beril have anything to say about the paintings? You asked her, right?”

We stopped, not for pretzels, but for gyros from the Rafiqi’s truck. Garlicky lamb, with white sauce and hot sauce, wrapped in pita—fantastic, if you can keep it from dripping on your shirt.

“I asked her,” Jack confirmed, as we made our many-napkined way down the block. “She said because it was me she’d admit she’d heard the rumors.”

“Nice to be so important,” Bill said.

“Wouldn’t it be? What’s really going on is, she’s major in antiquities and classical but she’s not a name in contemporary. If the Chaus do exist, she has zero chance of getting her hands on them—she wouldn’t know where to look and no one’s going to bring them to her. So she’s watching this action from the sidelines. Some day she might need a favor from me, so why not help me out?”

I asked, “Is it really that calculated? You guys looked like you actually liked each other.”

“What’s love got to do with it? Seriously, sure we like each other. She really would have called me to see that Jin Nong just because she knew I’d be interested, even though I can’t buy it. But if she had any chance at getting her paws on the Chaus, you’d better believe she’d have iced me faster than you can say ‘Frost Jack.’”

“You didn’t just make that up.”

“Not bad, right?”

“He’s used it before,” Bill said.

“So”—I led the descent into the subway—“having decided she could afford to be helpful, how helpful was she?”

“Hard to say. She heard the buzz at an opening last week, but she can’t remember who from. Contemporary Chinese sculpture, at Red Sky Gallery in Chelsea. We can go over there later if you want, though I’ve seen the show and it’s awful.”

“She didn’t hear it from Shayna? Right at her own front desk?”

“Interestingly, no. Possibly interestingly also,” Jack said, swiping his MetroCard, “Red Sky is a couple of ambitious, currently penniless young guys on the top floor of the same building with Baxter/Haig.”

The six train, obviously not wanting to make a liar out of me, swept in, scooped us up, and hauled us down to Astor Place. We picked our way along the student-clogged sidewalks over to Washington Square Park, where we manuevered past a steel band, a fire-eater, a mournful guitarist, and about a million dogs and their walkers to reach the nineteenth-century department store turned temple-of-learning where Dr. Yang was holed up.

Jack took us up to the fourth floor and along a hallway lined with posters of Japanese anime characters and Hong Kong movie stills. Bulletin boards held tacked-up announcements for summer study programs in Taipei, Seoul, and Ulaanbaatar. I stopped at a theater bill featuring an angry Asian woman waving a big dripping knife, for a show called
Alice in Slasherland.

“I can’t help noticing there are no misty mountains.”

“This isn’t the art department.” Jack knocked on a door. “It’s A/P/A Studies. Asian/Pacific/American,” he expanded, ostensibly for Bill’s benefit, though I’d have had to stop and think about it, myself. “Culture in context.”

The door opened, revealing a large park-facing office with bookshelves and big windows. Behind the desk sat a tallish Asian man with brush-cut gray hair. In front of us, her hand on the doorknob, was a young, also tall, Asian woman. Her high-cheekboned face lit. “Jack! Daddy didn’t tell me you were coming.”

“Hi, Anna. He didn’t tell me you’d be here, either.” Jack and Anna exchanged a quick kiss.

“Hello, Jack,” said the man behind the desk, in a deep and Mandarin-inflected voice. He didn’t smile, just gave me and Bill a narrow-eyed glance; apparently we were another thing nobody had been told about.

I looked around. Artwork hung on the walls, divided by bookcases like battling siblings better off separated. I found a canvas of subtle gray stripes soothing, and a calligraphic scroll seemed downright antiquated until I realized the flowing ink strokes formed, not Chinese characters, but character-shaped English words. That struck me as funny, but maybe I was missing some profound point. The neon-colored oil of a garish peony in a parched desert, on the other hand, would definitely take some getting used to.

“Are you hot on the trail of something?” Anna asked Jack.

I shifted my focus from art to people in time to see Dr. Yang flash a warning look behind Anna’s back. “Not really,” Jack said. “These are friends of mine. They’re interested in new Chinese art so I thought they’d better meet Dr. Yang.”

Anna’s smile widened to include me and Bill. “Hi, I’m Anna Yang. The great man’s daughter.” We shook hands all around. “He is a great man, too,” she said. “He can be opinionated, though. But I guess that’s what people want, his opinions. Just don’t let him bully you.”

Professor Yang frowned. “I don’t bully.”

“Yes, Daddy.” As Anna Yang walked back to her father’s desk, I considered her. Her smile seemed genuine enough, but I got the feeling it wasn’t telling the whole story. Her eyes weren’t joining in. Anna kissed her father’s cheek and said to us, “Sorry I can’t stay to offer dissenting views in case you need them. Jack, I’ll see you sometime soon?”

“You have anything new? I’ll come out and take a look.”

“You mean, if I don’t, you won’t?”

“Go all the way to Flushing to see work that’s ten minutes ago? Oh, okay. Soon.”

Anna smiled and left, closing the door behind her.

At a nodded invitation from Dr. Yang, Jack and I settled into the office’s two visitor chairs, leaving Bill to lean against the windowsill overlooking the park.

“How’s she doing?” Jack asked Dr. Yang.

“It’s a difficult situation,” Dr. Yang replied. I didn’t know what the question referred to, but I could tell that wasn’t an answer.

Jack tried another: “Any word from Mike?”

“Would we expect that?” With those words and a sharp shake of his head Dr. Yang closed out the subject of his daughter. “Jack, go down the hall to the faculty lounge and bring your friend a chair.”

“It’s all right, sir,” Bill said. “I like the view.”

Dr. Yang swiveled to Bill for a moment. “Very well.” He turned back to Jack. “Tell me how I can help you.”

Jack paused before he answered. I hadn’t known him long, but I’d gotten the impression that, with the possible exception of flying bullets, nothing fazed him. This hesitation was something I hadn’t seen before.

He plunged. “You probably guessed it’s about Chau Chun.”

Dr. Yang’s face darkened. “Jack. I asked for discretion. Did—”

“I know,” Jack said. “I’m sorry. But Lydia and Bill are also investigators. I didn’t go to them. They came to me.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I brought them here so you could meet them, and they could meet you. In a minute they’ll leave and you and I can talk privately. This morning a man I don’t know, a collector, hired Lydia and Bill to find the new Chaus.”

I’d have given Bill a raised-eyebrow glance, asking if he’d known he and I were going to leave in a minute, but I was busy watching Dr. Yang for his reaction to this news.

He wasn’t delighted, that’s for sure. His brow furrowed and his dark gaze fixed first on Jack, then on me, Bill, me again. He could give Bill’s eye-drill a run for its money. In case he was unsure which of us to address, I helped him out.

“We went to Jack for background. We had no idea he’d been hired to do the same thing.”

“And now you do.” Dr. Yang shot Jack an angry look, then asked me, “What does your client want with the paintings?”

“Just to find them. He wants to beat out the other collectors.”

“How does he know about them?”

“Rumors, he says.”

“He hasn’t seen them?”

“No. How do you know about them, Dr. Yang?”

“The same way. Rumors.” Dismissing the question, as well as, it seemed, my right to ask it, the professor stared at the gray-striped canvas on the wall. Maybe he needed to be soothed. “Who is he?”

“My client? I’m sorry, I can’t tell you anything more than that he’s a collector. New in the field, he says.”

Dr. Yang gave an impatient head shake. “Why does he want the paintings?”

“Because they’re worth a lot.”

“They’re worth nothing. They’re forgeries. He can stop wasting his money.”

Hmm. Paying me was wasting my client’s money? “If you haven’t seen them—”

“Chau Chun is dead!”

“I know that’s what everyone says, but—”

“He is dead!”

“Isn’t it possible—”

“No. It’s not.” The force of his glare almost knocked me off my seat. He pinned me with it another moment, then let out a long breath. “I was there.”

Jack’s eyebrows rose. “You didn’t tell me that.”

“Did you need to know it?” The professor swung the Jupiter-gravity stare to Jack. “That I held my friend’s hand as he died?”