A Cup of Light (7 page)

It was unwise to exercise outdoors in Beijing, even now, even after they'd improved the air some, but Doyle didn't care. He'd been ill already. It might come back but this was no longer a thing he feared. Not that he wanted it. But he was prepared.

He rode west through the flat, interweaving labyrinth of walled lanes, the mass of his body balanced easily on the thin wheels of the bike. Through the open doors set in stone blocks, worn down by centuries, he peered into the bricked-up tunnels where people lived. There were only a few neighborhoods like this left around the city, this infill of tightly built rooms that had used up every square meter of the old courtyard homes decades ago, as the population swelled and people needed more space.

He remembered the house he'd had in L.A., the flat-angled roof and the little white room next to the kitchen where they ate. But he was here to forget that. He put his mind on sounds. There was the creak of wheels coming up behind him, punched through with the vendor's three-syllable cry. Wind made a shushing ruffle in the overhanging branches. He pedaled under the trees.

Wooden gates passed him with old brass joins, geometric patterns of rivet; tiny shops with sliding aluminum windows selling soda, gum, cigarettes, and local phone service, one
yuan
a call. He thought about all the things that had brought him here, the white wall and the IV drip of his own hospital room; his wife's suitcases, ready. She'd been a saint to him through his illness. Nothing but love. Didn't leave until he got better.

So he'd taken this fellowship. He wanted to cycle for hours in the smoggy hutongs. He wanted to pound the extreme border. He wanted to leave life behind. China forced him awake with its strangeness, despite the dark-gray, head-in-the-yoke heaviness of its quotidian life. He had thought it would be a good place to let go. So far it had been.

Finally his mind felt empty and good as he hurtled west through the leaf-spotted light, legs going, fingers loose on the handles. He breathed deep, as deep as he could, almost feeling the particulates, welcoming them, inviting them in to sear and settle on his lungs. World, he thought, come in.

5

After she'd found the chicken cup she'd called Gao's
shouji,
or handphone, using the number he had written on his card that first night. She left a message that she would like to talk to him. He left her one in return asking her to meet him for dinner, apologizing with precise courtesy for not having invited her to dinner already, he was at fault, he'd been away from Beijing. So she took a taxi that evening to the address he gave her.

The car passed rows of stores selling Mongolian cashmere, Italian shoes, designer watches, and the newest flat-screen televisions. She saw an old man on a wooden stool selling candied crab apples on skewers, the sticks radiating in a sticky red starburst from his pole. Next to him stood another man, leaning on a Mercedes, talking on a cell phone. Just past this they turned into an alley, bouncing on potholes and uneven pavement, past the office blocks and the white-tile apartment buildings. These high-rise palaces were where most Beijingers seemed to be living now. They were full of the things that promised to make life right: rushing elevators, reliable plumbing, and high-floor windows revealing a stationary army of near-identical buildings receding across the city's smoggy plain. But down here the alley twisted between smaller, older buildings, and the car finally stopped in front of one of them with a simple wood-framed entrance in Japanese style.

Inside, Gao Yideng was waiting for her on the floor of a tatami-matted room, shoes off. He rose to greet her. He probably had multiple wireless devices in his pockets connecting him with associates all over China, but here in this little restaurant room he appeared solitary and relaxed. “How do you find the pots?” he asked.

“They are magnificent. As you must know.” They settled in across from each other.

He poured green tea. “I hope you understand why at first we failed to mention the full . . . extent of things.”

“I think I do,” she said. And in fact, despite the shock of arriving here and seeing hundreds of pieces, that aspect of the situation now seemed favorable. Only she and Dr. Zheng knew, and their position was undeniably better for it.

Food he had selected began arriving at the table. They talked about Beijing, the modernization, the rate at which everything was being wiped away. Sake was served. They both leaned back slightly from their cushions to allow the kimonoed Chinese waitress to pour. Neither touched the alcohol. “There is one piece that fascinates me,” she said finally.

“Which?”

“The chicken cup. Do you know it?”

“From the reign of Chenghua, that one?”

“That one.”

“Yes,” he said. “I know it.”

She took her time eating a small piece of eel off the tips of her chopsticks. Interesting, she thought; he knew the piece and he said so, straight out. Moreover, he knew it was Chenghua. She wondered what else he knew. Obviously he had an affinity for pots. Which type was he, the tycoon or the connoisseur?

In her experience, those who collected pots, who owned them, fell often into two types. There were the corporate heads, tycoons, self-made men who had achieved wealth and now wanted discernment. They wanted the best, all at once. It was not necessary for them to love what they bought.

Then there was another kind of buyer—the person like her, but with money, who loved pots. Sometimes these clients had art-history knowledge rivaling that of well-known scholars. Sometimes they were obsessive and crazy. From Gao's knowledge, and his clear avidity, she would take him to be the porcelain-lover type. On the other hand, he fit the life-profile of the tycoon. “The Chenghua cup is lovely,” she said. “A wonderful piece.”

“Thank you.”

“But if it is real”—she spoke casually—“if it is real its discovery is rather important. Forgive me if you already know. I have no wish to waste your time outlining the obvious. But only eighteen of these cups are known to have survived in the world. That would make this the nineteenth cup. If it's real.”

He took an edamame pod from the plate and easily, using only the tips of his chopsticks, split the pod and extracted the shiny little bean. She watched with admiration. She couldn't control chopsticks like that. He placed the bean inside his mouth. “If it is real,” he repeated.

“
If
it is real, its discovery is of importance,” she said succinctly, still keeping her voice light, playing out his line.

He looked at her. “Is it not the case that of the eighteen cups, two are here in China? Among the holdings of the Palace Museum?”

“That's so,” she said.

“Most are in Taipei.”

“Yes,” she answered. “Eight. Mr. Gao. Are you saying that this is one of the two cups from Beijing?”

“No,” he said in quick retreat. “I don't know that.”

“I see.” She put down her chopsticks and smiled at him across the table. Her braid had come over her shoulder and she reached up and flipped it back. She could feel him looking at her ears again. Take a good look and wonder about me, she thought. You probably want to know why I use these old-fashioned things instead of implants. You'll never find out.

Of course Lia could have had cochlear implants if she'd wanted them. She didn't. She didn't want a plate surgically implanted in her head. Moreover, she'd be trading one electronic universe of sound for another, neither being the full, natural spectrum experienced by those who could truly hear. She'd gotten used to her set of speakers. They didn't catch the high frequencies—the jingle of keys, the microwave buzzer—as well as implants did, but she really didn't care. She didn't want to change. She liked the ease with which hearing aids could be plucked out. No plate inside you. Your head was yours, your world your own.

“Mr. Gao. I must compliment you. Whether the cup is real or not, it's an exquisite piece. Beautifully made. Very
hoi moon,
” she said, and then repeated in Mandarin: “Very
kai men jian shan,
” Open the door on a view of mountains. “Truly it is one of the nicest works I've ever seen.” She looked at him steadily. “So perhaps on reflection you will decide not to sell it.”

“Perhaps,” he agreed. “Suppose the cup is not real.” He looked back up at her. “Who do you say it is who made it?”

“I don't know the answer to that. Not yet.” She picked up her mottled stoneware cup of green tea and drank from it, left her sake cup alone. Interesting little lagniappe of a power play. Neither touched the alcohol. “But you could help me also, Mr. Gao, if you would be so kind. I can better sell your pots with a full story. Do you mind? A few questions?”

“Of course I do not mind.” He leaned his bare gleaming head forward, the spirit of cooperation.

“If I may—how did the pots come into your hands?” She let the question hang, and waited. She was prepared, of course, for him to lie; that was her departure point, her ground-zero assumption. If he was standing in for a government sale he would have any number of reasons for not wanting to tell her so. The decision-makers behind the transaction would not want it publicly known. In any case he had the visa. That said certain things.

He settled his chopsticks down on their porcelain rest before answering her. “Originally, the collection was bought from a family in southern China. That was some time ago. It has been in storage.”

She wrinkled her brow. Must have been some pretty deep storage, she thought. Things this big were very hard to keep quiet. “Before that,” she said. “Where was it before that?”

“Buried on this family's land.”

“How?”

“No one knew. Everyone who lived there was killed in the war. Another branch of the clan moved to the land later. Many years after
that,
they found all these crates while they were digging a garden.”

Gao and Lia smiled at each other. The smile acknowledged that the tale he'd just told her was a very, very common story in the Chinese art world—a cliché, really. It was a patently predictable story to pass off. It could be false. It could also be the truth. “It is true,” he said as if following her thought.

She felt oddly inclined to believe him—maybe. “Just your own guess,” she said. “How do you feel the pots came to be there?”

He gave her a long look filled with speculation. Finally he shook his head. “No one knows.”

No, she thought, that's wrong. Someone knows. Stories, flares of lightning, surprising events: These were like wafts of smoke or fragrance over a town or a rural district. Many people sensed them. People whispered to each other. And they remembered. It was there.

She waited and watched.

“I'll tell you one thing,” he said at length. “It's possible these pots were separated from the Palace in 1913.”

“1913?” She was surprised. This date seemed to come from nowhere. The war years, when the collection was in flight, were what she would have expected.

He saw her surprise. “It was because of your countryman! Your American! Mr. J. P. Morgan! It was he who in 1913 tried to buy the contents of the Forbidden City for twenty million dollars.” Gao pronounced the words with pinpoint pleasure.

“Ah yes! You are right. I know that one. A great story. And what if he had succeeded!” And he almost had. Morgan dispatched an American man to Peking to make the deal, and the whole thing came shockingly close to consummation. But then Morgan died—with no warning. The deal stopped in its tracks.

“It has been said that some works were moved out of the Palace for inventory during those talks,” Gao told her. “In such cases there are always things that are never moved back.”

Okay, she thought . . . interesting. “And the sources of these suppositions are reliable to you?”

He nodded.

“Then I will check into it. I will certainly be able to let you know later.”

“Really,” he said, impressed.

“Really. But one condition. You have to find out more about where these pots have been. At least try.
Shuo hao-le ma?
” she finished, Are we agreed? And to make sure he understood her touch of levity she raised her sake cup to him.

“Shuo hao-le,”
he said, We're agreed. He picked up his cup; they touched and drank.

When she got back to her room she was still thinking about whether her pots could in fact have been removed from the Palace in 1913. It was distant but conceivable.

Somewhere she had this inside. Once at the Morgan Library she had read through all the files on the failed transaction. All the players had been there, their cables with their crossed-out drafts, all the details of the deal that had almost moved the world's greatest art collection to the other side of the Pacific.

She turned off the lights and changed into the minimal, clingy things in which she slept. She felt like going to the bottom end of the memory world, to the place where the past played out in her mind. It was tiring to animate memory, but some things were worth seeing. This was one.

She took her hearing aids out and felt the safe, filling swell of silence. She sat on the bed with her knees up to her chest, wide awake, the gates to her personal world open.

The cubicle she sought was down a side lane, in the early twentieth century, before the wars, when a crushingly wealthy American set about acquiring, madly, and built a magnificent collection. When he trained his sights on China, J. P. Morgan sent a young American, a man named F. H. McKnight, to do his bidding.

It was March 21, 1913. The air was filled with clacking Pekingese voices, the roaring hiss of gaslight, and the creak of wheels on the dirt-packed street between the warehouses and the godowns. It was night in the port. Wooden sidewalks bumped and clattered with the streaming passengers. They were dazed to be on land, dazed by the new sounds, the fervid smells, and the terrifyingly strange stalls for food and drink.

Frederick McKnight stood at the end of this street. In front of him swarmed men pulling carts, hauling rickshas, shouldering burdens several times their own size. Light popped and flickered from burning lanterns. The Western women's faces glowed in the light as they held their bags close to their bodies. Men, high collars, mustaches, eyes down, also picked their way along the slat-boards. Up at the other end waited horses, mules, and drivers.

Not an automobile in sight, Frederick realized. Peking was some miles inland. Travel by cart would take hours.

He realized he would have to apply himself to his arrangements, and did so. For two silver dollars he secured a man with an open, horse-drawn cart to collect his trunks and carry him to the city. Four hours, the man made him understand in pidgin. Frightful, Frederick thought, but what else was there to do? At least the night was fair.

A gentleman, he had naturally offered to make arrangements for Mrs. Grosbeck, the woman he had befriended aboard the
Constantinople.
She'd informed him she could make her own. She did this with a lilt in her voice, not in the least standoffish. She also said, with an appropriate lightness, that she did hope she'd see him later.

Frederick replayed her words in his mind. He was aware of his arms and shoulders moving under the blue serge of his suit, the perfect posture required by his stiffly starched collar—he was a fool to have worn it. No one cared. Not in this place. He reached behind and unhooked it, slipped it off. Instantly he felt better. He slipped it into his bag.

Mrs. Grosbeck wouldn't care about his collar.

They both happened to be booked into the Wagon-Lits. He was twenty-nine, unmarried. She was recently divorced. At first her extra-marital state had struck ambivalence into him, but as she had quite briefly and without emotion told him her story, he had come to see that, in her shoes, he might have done quite the same thing. Yes. Quite the same.

And here they were in China.

Frederick climbed into the cart after his luggage. Somehow he had imagined something grander, a regal stride down a gangway into a foreign land, him strong and imperturbable. Not this gloomy dark, the jumping shadows against the mud-walled buildings, the squawking cries and the straw-slapping shoes of the coolies. Amazing. He settled down under a heavy pile of blankets, head propped where he could watch the stars. It was so good to be off the boat.