Ghost Hero (9 page)

The room crackled. “I’m sorry,” Jack said. “But I think I did need to know. I thought you weren’t involved in the democracy movement.”

“In the movement! No. I was a painter. I cared only for my art. My students. And my friends.” Dr. Yang turned to the sardonic canvas of the barren desert with the bright, impossible bloom. After a long moment, he spoke. “The students—Chau’s, and mine, everyone’s, from the universities of Beijing and from the countryside—had been occupying Tiananmen Square for days. With such hopes, such sense of power and possibility! Chau was with them from the first, teaching his classes on the paving stones, believing with them that things could change.” Yang’s face darkened. “I thought he was a fool.”

None of us spoke, waiting.

“Then the rumors: tanks, troops, the army on the way. People laughed. Send the army against a peaceful protest? That was the old way. This is the New China. But people coming in from the countryside reported it breathlessly. Tanks, massing nearby, undeniable. The crowd became uneasy. Then the loudspeakers, the warnings: Clear the Square! Public order will be maintained! The mood changed again. Anger and defiance. The students were doing what the law allowed. They would stay!” He shook his head. “People went to the Square, people of influence, to beg them to leave. I went, also, to Chau, to our students. What you’ve done is noble and courageous, I said, but you’ve lost. Go home, wait for another chance. They wouldn’t go.
This
is the chance! I stayed, trying to persuade. Finally, the tanks came.” Another long pause. “The soldiers were weeping. When the order came, some fired into the air, over the students’ heads.”

In the silence, Dr. Yang stared at the painting, but we could all tell he wasn’t seeing it. Finally he spoke again, in changed, cold tones. “There, Jack. Is that what you needed? Tell me, does that help you?”

In a quiet voice, but a firmer one than I could have found, Jack said, “I’m sorry. I appreciate how hard that must have been. But it does help and I wish you’d told me sooner. For one thing, if you were with Chau when he died, it makes it a lot less likely that he’s alive and painting these paintings.”

“
Less likely?
It was never possible!” Dr. Yang pressed his palms on his desk as though he had to keep it from lifting off. “Is that the hypothesis you’ve been working on since I hired you? That Chau’s not dead and the paintings are real? That’s a problem, Jack.”

“Maybe. There’s another problem, too. Someone shot at me.”

“Someone—what?”

“Shot a bullet through my office window. About two hours ago.”

It took Dr. Yang a moment to catch up. “I—was anyone hurt?”

“No.”

“Who was it?”

“I have no idea. Or what the point was, either.”

“Did you call the police?”

“Of course. Bullets in my ceiling?” Jack added, “I didn’t mention you.”

Dr. Yang’s lips compressed into a thin line. He nodded curtly and said to me and Bill, “Will you excuse us?”

If I’d conjured up a semireasonable excuse to stay I might have tried it, but it wasn’t hard to see that nothing would work. Bill pushed away from the windowsill and I stood from my chair. “Of course,” I said. To Jack: “We’ll be outside.”

Jack gave a distracted nod. He and Dr. Yang sat staring at each other as we left.

*   *   *

I shut the door behind us, then said to Bill, “Can I listen at the keyhole?” He didn’t dignify that with an answer. We sat on a bench and watched students walk by. “What did you think?” I asked.

“Tough customer.”

“I had professors like him in college. I did well in their courses because I was scared not to. But from your
I-Spy
perch by the window, I mean.”

Bill came up with this trick and we do it routinely at interviews now, especially the first time we meet someone: We try to sit far enough apart that the person can’t see both of us at once. Then one talks, the other watches. We can’t always pull it off, but it’s particularly convenient when the interviewee doesn’t have enough chairs.

“He’s way more angry than I’d have expected,” Bill said.

“Jack said he’s an angry kind of guy.”

“Still. Now we know he’s Jack’s client. So what? It may be irritating but it’s not a disaster. He’s overreacting.”

“Maybe.” In my mind I heard Dr. Yang’s dark voice as he told his story. “What he told us; it makes his reason for hiring Jack more convincing, doesn’t it?”

“You mean, protecting Chau’s rep?”

“Protecting Chau, I get the feeling. The way he couldn’t, back then. Maybe he’s so furious out of helplessness. This situation is getting out of control. The way that one did, and look what happened.”

Bill nodded. “Possible.”

“And speaking of protecting people, here’s another question: What about his daughter? Anna? You saw how he stopped Jack from telling her what was up. Why wouldn’t he want her to know?”

“She seems to have her own problems. Whatever Jack meant when he asked how she was doing and if anyone had heard from Mike. Sounds like her boyfriend ditched her. Maybe Yang doesn’t want to complicate her life right now.”

I thought about Dr. Yang as an overprotective dad. High walls and lattice-screened windows came to mind, but Anna’s affectionate teasing didn’t strike me as coming from either the cowed and timid or resentful and rebellious young woman that that approach would have been likely to produce. She’d probably been wrapping him around her finger her whole life. “Well, maybe,” I suggested, “he really
is
only protecting his investment while he pretends to care about his dead friend, and he feels guilty enough about it that he’d just as soon his daughter doesn’t know.”

“Maybe so.”

“What did you think of the art in his office?” I asked, but my phone rang, so Bill didn’t get a chance to answer. I flipped it open. “Hi, Linus.”

“Hey, Cuz. So, Bill’s all hooked up. Vladimir Oblomov, shady Russian, Chinese art honcho. You want to hear?”

“Of course.” I did; but also, he clearly couldn’t wait to tell me.

“First I went to the Wikipedia pages for two hot Chinese artists. Wow, you know how weird that stuff is? Anyway, I made Oblomov a buyer on one and a seller on the other. Bill might want to check out their stuff, you know, so in case his squeeze wants to talk about them.” He gave me the artists’ names. “Then I made a Web site for Vassily Imports. They sell food from Russia and, like, Eastern Europe and the Stans. Caviar, black bread, pickles, cheese—whatever, I looked up what one of the real sites sells and made it like that. Oblomov is on the board of directors, and he’s also VP for International Corporate Communications. No one ever knows what that means so I figured it was cool. And the Web site, I made it so it sort of takes you in circles if you try to go too deep. So if you were really trying to find who the boss man is, you couldn’t. That’s the shady part, you dig? Then I grabbed a shot of Bill from when we went to the park that time and Photoshopped it into some gallery opening in Hong Kong I found online, then put the whole thing on Flickr and tagged him along with the other VIPs. I got him listed on Yahoo.com and WhitePages, but no address, no phone. You think she’ll pay to do the search? I might be able to get something in there, but only maybe.”

“No, I don’t think she will. By the time she Googles him it’ll be after he’s called her. She won’t be trying to find how to contact him, just to make sure he’s not some kind of phony.”

“Good luck with that.” I could hear Linus’s grin. “So, anyhow, the next thing, Trella opened a blog on JournalScape, backdated like six months: She’s an art student, yadda yadda yadda and OMG she met this Oblomov dude, older but God is he loaded. They kicked it for a while but it cooled.”

“Good, Linus.”

“And I started a Facebook fan page for the Russian mob and made him one of the fans.”

“What?”

“Kidding! Joke! Winking emoticon!”

“Oh.” I breathed out. “Thanks, Linus. This all sounds terrific. Send me a bill.”

“Nah. Family’s free. Just tell me if it works?”

I promised to do that, and clicked off.

“You’re in business,” I told Bill. “When Shayna Googles Vladimir Oblomov, she’ll get more than if she Googled the real you.”

“As it should be.” He checked his watch. “This is probably a good time to call her. She gets off in half an hour.”

“Well, then, absolutely. She has to have time to check out Linus’s hard work.”

Bill did call Shayna, who, from where I was sitting, seemed delighted to hear from him. The first thing he said was, “Eet’s Vladimir Oblomov,” as if he had no idea she didn’t know his last name. Things went all murmuring from there, which was a little revolting, so I got up and checked out the posters and flyers on the walls. This might not have been the Art Department, but apparently a lot of events coming up around Asian Art Week considered themselves of interest to A/P/A Studies students. Auctions, lectures, panels, gallery shows, led off by a glittering benefit gala I couldn’t imagine college students attending except as cater waiters. Capping the week was “Beijing/NYC,” which my client had mentioned: an offering of the government of the People’s Republic to the art lovers of New York. Paintings, sculpture, photography and installations, all so new their paint, or ink, or gluey emulsion, wouldn’t be dry. I was considering the civilized nature of cultural exchange when Dr. Yang’s door opened and closed, leaving Jack standing in the corridor.

“Aramis,” I said. “How’d it go?”

“Wow.”

“You look a little dazed.”

Jack shook his head slowly. “All I could think while he was reaming me out was, thank God he wasn’t on my thesis committee.”

Bill, spotting Jack, whispered some ridiculous sweet nothing into his phone and thumbed it off. I asked Jack, “Why is he so upset? It’s not your fault we went to you. Did you explain your reasoning, why you told us about him?”

“Reasoning’s not high on his list right now. But I gather he’d have preferred door number two: I tell you guys ‘Ghost Hero Chau? Never heard of him,’ and then call Dr. Yang and tell him to hide under his desk if you come by.”

“We wouldn’t have bought it,” Bill said. “Seriously, Jack, an artist who died at Tiananmen, whose paintings are worth hundreds of thousands—”

“Worth nothing, says Dr. Yang.”

“No, I mean the ones from twenty years ago. The real ones. What I’m saying is, this is your field. By the time we got to you we already knew enough about Ghost Hero Chau that we wouldn’t have believed you if you’d said you never heard of him. So we’d have wondered why you were lying.”

“Cool. Would you have tapped my phone or something?”

“We’d have gotten Linus to,” I said.

“Well, don’t bother. I have some pretty fancy blocking equipment up there.”

“On your cell phone, too?”

“He can tap a cell phone?”

“He can do anything as long as it plugs into something.”

“Well, now, that sounds useful.” Jack stuck his hands in his pockets and started down the hall. Bill and I flanked him. “Anyway, in all humility I mentioned that to Dr. Yang. That you guys came to me for the same reason he did. He wasn’t impressed. He doesn’t care what you think of me and he thinks I should’ve stonewalled you until I found the Chaus.” Jack shrugged. “Maybe he’s right.”

“It’s not about what we think of you,” I said. “It’s about what we’d have thought of
him,
meeting him under even less auspicious circumstances than we did, after you led us right to him when we tailed you to find out what you were hiding.”

“Tailed me? The hell you say, little lady. Maybe your hacker cousin’s all that, but a penny-ante surveillance? I’d have slipped you like a greased pig.”

“Who’re you calling a greased pig?”

“He’s the greased pig,” Bill said, peacemaking. “You’re the farmer trying to hold on to the pig.”

“That’s a charming image. Is it a midwest suburban thing?”

“Anyway,” Bill told Jack, “I’ve tried shaking her. She’s hard to lose. And look at it this way: If you’d done that, we wouldn’t owe you a martini.”

“On the other hand,” I said, “if he’d done that, he might still have a client.”

Jack looked at me, surprised. “I still have a client.”

“You do? Up one side and down the other, but he didn’t fire you?”

“Through the steam coming out of his ears he reluctantly conceded I’m still the man for the job. Partly because if he cans me and hires someone else, that’s yet another person who knows he’s looking for these paintings.”

“Why is that such a problem?” Bill asked.

“Beyond the idea that his possible real, as opposed to stated, motivation doesn’t put him in the best light? I don’t know.”

“I’m having second thoughts about my second thoughts about his motivation,” I said. “After that story.”

“I know.” Jack nodded.

“Tell me this,” Bill said. “How much of his anger was with you, and how much was with us for even knowing about the paintings?”

“He’s pretty pissed at you,” Jack admitted. “Especially for not telling him who your client is.”

“Did you tell him?” I asked.

“I thought about it, because we don’t even think Jeff Dunbar is your client’s real name, do we?”

“No, but—”

“Oh, chill. I didn’t. I would’ve, but he threw me out before he got to the bamboo under the fingernails. Anyway, we had a bigger fight to have. He wanted me to ditch you guys from now on.”

“He did? Even though the cat’s out of the bag?”

“Yup.”

“What did you say?”

“I said, I don’t carry a gun and I’m not used to getting shot at.”

“And he said?”

“He went through the whole thing we did, how the gunshot probably had nothing to do with this case. I stopped him halfway and said that wasn’t the real point.”

“It’s not? What is?”

“Come on. If we’re all looking for the same thing, and we know it, how ridiculous is it to be sneaking around trying to outsmart each other?”

“Sneaking around is kind of what we do,” I pointed out. “How did he respond?”

“He was still against it. So I had to use my other big, as it were, gun. I said, maybe it was a mistake not to play dumb when you came to me, and if it was I’m sorry, but that ship’s sailed. Now aren’t I better off if I know what you guys are up to? Your client most likely wants to make off with these paintings, find someone to authenticate them, and sell them fast. If he can, they’ll be on the market with a provenance. Very soon they’ll be almost impossible to debunk. If Dr. Yang’s out to protect the memory of his friend, that would
not
be the outcome he was looking for.”