Artifact (3 page)

P
rofessor Michael Wells, right across the bay in Berkeley, was an old family friend. I grew up in Berkeley after leaving India, and my hippie father knew just about everyone there, it seemed to me at the time. My father taught sitar music lessons out of our house, and the Indian instrument was quite popular in Berkeley. Most people didn’t stick with sitar lessons for long, since there’s a steep learning curve. But lots of people tried it. Michael was a graduate student at Berkeley who used to come around the house for lessons when I was a kid. Now he’s a professor of South Asian art history.

It was late enough that I was betting Michael would be heading into the office, even if he wasn’t teaching summer term. He’d always been a workaholic. I’m not being judgmental when I say that. If it hadn’t been for the mystery Rupert had thrust upon me, I would be heading to my own office. Even though it was summer, I needed to work on a research paper. I only started my tenure-track job a year ago, and I wouldn’t keep it long if I didn’t keep up my publishing.

My car was parked on a side street only two blocks away from my apartment, so I was on the Bay Bridge within ten minutes. I turned up the volume on the stereo, blasting modern tabla beats out the windows of my vintage silver Mercedes-Benz roadster. The gears screeched as I accelerated. The old car needed more servicing than I could afford, but I couldn’t bear to part with it. The car had been left to me by an old friend of my father’s who thought of me like a daughter. Shortly before he died, I moved back to the Bay Area for a teaching job in San Francisco. He was the one who put me in touch with my landlady, Nadia. He knew her from when she sold medical marijuana.

When Nadia first converted her attic into the freestanding room that’s now my apartment, she did it to grow marijuana plants in the space. The Russian free spirit had come to San Francisco in the 1960s and never left. Her pot-growing business was quite successful, and she found herself most dedicated to medical marijuana. Nadia hated waste, so after she retired from the business she turned the space into an apartment.

I drove around several side streets on the south side of the Berkeley campus before I squeezed the car into a semi-legal parking space right off Telegraph Avenue. I stopped to buy myself a double espresso and gave my change to a homeless man with a “Starvin’ Like Marvin” sign before I stepped onto the grounds of the sprawling campus.

Walking through Sproul Plaza, I was reminded of one of my first childhood impressions of my new home in the United States. When I moved to Berkeley, Sproul Plaza was no longer the hotbed of political activity that it had been in the 1960s, but I remembered the plaza well because I learned to ride a bike there.

I found Michael in his office, staring at his computer screen with his brows drawn together. He didn’t notice me until I knocked.

“Jaya, is that you?” He pulled off his reading glasses and greeted me with a hug. “It’s been a while, hasn’t it?”

“It’s been a busy year. You know how it is when starting out as a first-year professor.”

“Right,” he said, glancing back at his computer. “Yes, of course.”

“I can tell you’re busy, and this isn’t actually a social visit. I need some help identifying a piece of old jewelry from India.”

“Lane Peters.”

“What?”

“A graduate student here,” Michael said. “He’s the best person to talk to about Indian jewelry.”

“I thought that you could take a quick look—”

“Lane Peters is your man,” Michael said, cutting me off.

“—at a photograph,” I finished. “It’ll just take a minute.”

“If Lane can’t help you, why don’t you email this photo of yours to me?”

Before I could give a proper answer or farewell, I found myself back in the hallway.

It had been almost a year since I’d seen Michael. We attended an exhibit at the San Francisco Asian Art Museum shortly after I moved back to the Bay Area, and he dropped me off at home afterwards even though I lived well out of his way. At the time he’d been a really nice guy, an older version of the carefree young man I’d known when I was a kid. I heard he’d recently divorced. He must not have taken it well.

I shook off the rejection and followed the labyrinthine hallway in the direction Michael had pointed. I found Lane’s office in the midst of a stark basement hallway of identical doors. They were all closed. Not the most social bunch.

I knocked on the door and heard a squeaking chair and faint footsteps. The door swung in a few inches. A lanky man with a lit cigarette in his hand looked out at me through the slit. He watched me for a few moments as smoke curled up from the cigarette. It didn’t look as if the highly esteemed Lane Peters was going to say anything or invite me in.

“Michael Wells sent me to you,” I said.

“Ah.” He pulled open the door, revealing one of the smallest offices I’d ever seen. Once I stepped inside, he closed the door and expertly maneuvered the small space to return to the chair behind his desk. Piles of faded books filled the office. Most of them were stacked on the sole bookshelf, with the overflow on the desk as well as two stacks on the floor. A small plastic fan hummed from the edge of the desk, and a small folding chair rested against the wall.

Lane Peters’ attire matched the office. He wore thick horn-rimmed glasses, baggy cargo pants, and a similarly loose-fitting dress shirt. Silky hair between blond and brown obscured his eyes, which might have been hazel. I glanced up at the smoke detector not far above his head in the closet-sized office.

“It’s disabled,” he said, stubbing out his cigarette in what I guessed was an ashtray, although my view was blocked by a stack of books. With a quick jerk of his head, he motioned for me to sit in the folding chair. “How can I help you...?”

“Jaya Jones,” I said.

I caught him subtly glance down toward my unadorned ring finger as I unfolded the chair. He was smoother than most, and the obfuscation was aided by his hair and glasses. I still noticed the action. It’s a common one after hearing my surname. At least he didn’t ask me outright. I think that’s why I answered the unspoken question.

“It’s not a married name,” I said. “Only my mother was Indian. My dad is American. Blonder than you are.”

My short stature and dark hair and eyes come from my mother, but my features are more like my father’s. Especially my large eyes and full mouth, both of which I’ve always thought were slightly oversized for my face. My brother is over a foot taller than me at a full six feet, with delicate green eyes, black hair naturally flecked with copper highlights, and skin several shades darker than mine. In one sense we’re exact opposites, yet next to each other you can tell we’re related.

Lane acknowledged my answer with only a flicker of his eyes. I felt a minor lurch in my stomach. I was probably hungry. I’d eaten breakfast early, after all. Plus I was nervous about the situation. That was all.

“How can I help you?” he asked, picking up a pencil and twirling it between his fingers absentmindedly. His deep voice was polite but reserved.

I took the photo out of my bag and set it down on the desk.

“I’m trying to identify this piece of jewelry,” I began. But he wasn’t listening to me. He was staring at the photograph.

His lips parted. The pencil dropped out of his hand and rolled across the desk until a book stopped it from dropping onto the floor. He didn’t seem to notice. He ran his fingers through his hair, pulling it away from his face. I hoped he was as preoccupied as he appeared to be so that he didn’t hear my involuntary intake of breath.

I could see his whole face clearly now. The chameleon shade of his hazel eyes seemed to change in the light as I watched him. Prominent cheek bones rested under his glasses. Their striking structure was diminished by the thick frames, but they were noticeable nonetheless. He had a face of elegant angles, and it was impossible not to see how handsome he was.

It was a few moments before he recovered himself enough to speak. I can’t say I minded the time he took.

“Where did you get this?” he asked, releasing his hair so it fell back over the sides of his face. He folded his hands in a forced effort to appear composed.

“Does it matter?” I asked. “You obviously recognized the anklet.”

“It’s a bracelet.”

“What?”

“It’s a bracelet. Maybe an armlet. But not an anklet.”

“But the size—”

“You can tell because it’s made of gold,” he said, pointing at the photograph. “It’s Indian. In India gold is considered pure, while the foot is impure. People wear silver on their feet instead.”

I should have realized that myself. The Indian notion of the impurity of feet applies elsewhere. With the tabla, you need to make sure your feet don’t touch the instrument when you sit down cross-legged with the pair of drums.

“You can identify the
bracelet
, then.”

He didn’t respond immediately.

“I could see that you recognized it,” I said, trying not to lose my patience.

“Well....”

“You clearly recognized something about it.”

“It’s not that simple.”

“Why not?”

“Because,” he said, “the piece in your photograph isn’t supposed to exist.”

A few minutes later the center of Lane’s desk was cleared off except for the photo, and we were drinking stale coffee he had retrieved from the department lounge. Or at least I was drinking it. Lane was so absorbed in the photo he forgot about his.

I know the annoyance of being interrupted while contemplating your research. Letting the gears in your mind turn over facts that don’t mean much until you’ve put them together to create meaning out of them. I forced myself to sit back and sip my coffee to give Lane time to think.

“If the bracelet in this photograph is real,” he said, tapping on the edge of the photo, “then this is a really big deal.”

“I got that,” I said. “You were going to tell me why.”

“Where did you find this?”

“It’s from a friend.”

He stared at me, waiting for more.

“Someone gave it to me,” I said. “I don’t know where it came from. I came to see Michael to figure that out. Why is it such a big deal?”

“Like I said before,” he said slowly, holding my gaze as he spoke. “It’s apocryphal. It doesn’t actually exist.”

“Then how did you recognize it?”

“It only exists as an
idea
,” Lane said. “In artwork.”

“You’ve seen this bracelet in artwork,” I repeated dumbly.

“It’s very distinctive. This cut of the ruby, and the setting….”

He trailed off, his gaze drawn back to the photograph.

I cleared my throat after a few seconds of silence. He looked back up at me with an arched eyebrow.

“Artists sometimes take liberties in artistic renderings like paintings and sculptures,” he said. “I’m talking specifically about Indian royal court paintings here, where artists were hired to depict the life of royal families in India. It’s called Selective Realism.”

“You mean making someone more or less attractive depending on if the painter liked them or not. Like how artists made Richard III look like a hunchback.”

“Sort of,” he said. “But it’s more than that. Sometimes paintings were purposefully misleading representations to show symbols of wealth. Or the painter thought his painting looked more aesthetically pleasing than the scene that existed in front of him. Who was going to argue with the result?”

“But surely there are ways to tell what’s a true representation and what’s not. Other historical documents—”

“Of course,” Lane said. “There are lots of other historical sources to shed light on what’s real versus what was the artist’s imagination. Portraits are often fairly accurate. And there are other records that are used to determine historical accuracy. For example, Jahangir, a Mughal ruler in the early 1600s—”

“I know who Jahangir is. He played a role in helping establish the East India Company, granting them trading privileges in exchange for prestigious European goods.” I paused as Lane’s expression changed. Was he surprised I knew so much about Indian history?

“I’m not here for an Indian history lesson,” I said. I tapped my finger on the photograph. “Right now I’m interested in this piece.”

“I’m going somewhere with this.” Lane paused to take a sip of coffee, his expression unreadable as he looked across the desk at me. “Jahangir had all sorts of fanciful paintings commissioned that showed his power. One famous painting shows King James of England and a Turkish emperor both visiting Jahangir’s court.”

“They did?”

“No,” Lane said. “That’s the point. It never happened. It’s
painted
like that. And the piece in your photo. I know I’ve seen it—the intact version—in a painting before.”

“That Jahangir commissioned.”

“Possibly.” He shifted in his chair. “I’m not sure. Definitely a Mughal painting, though. I think. Look, this isn’t something I come across every day. But I’ve studied this subject.” He indicated the books around us. “I suspect the photo you’ve got shows something that popped up in multiple paintings—before disappearing.”

“It
was
stolen,” I mumbled mostly to myself.

“I don’t mean ‘disappeared’ in that sense. When something like this happens, the prevailing theory is that the artist who painted it died or was no longer painting in a particular place. There’s an account of some grand pieces of jewelry ceasing to be represented in a court’s artwork.”

“And the painter?”

“Indian artists weren’t always as well documented as European artists. Some Mughal emperors, like Akbar, were interested in their artists receiving credit for their work. Elsewhere, though, many paintings are unattributed. Meaning there’s no way of actually proving that particular theory. But since the jewelry depicted didn’t show up again, that’s the popular understanding. Rather than that the jewelry actually existed.”

“But that’s a theory based on
no evidence
.”

“Personally I thought it was most likely the gold was melted down,” Lane said. “It was, and still is, quite common in India for new techniques and styles to replace traditional ones. Unfortunately, but understandably, they use the existing materials they have on hand. That’s one of the biggest problems of studying the art history of such malleable forms. But if that was the case, it was odd that the distinctive gemstones never resurfaced. They should have. If they existed. Which is why the theory embracing Selective Realism doesn’t seem like such a stretch.”

“When did it disappear?”

“Centuries ago. Long before the advent of photography. That’s why it’s amazing you—” He stopped abruptly.

“What?”

He didn’t answer.

“What is it?”

“I was wondering,” he said slowly, “if it’s possible to fake a photo this good.”

“You’re kidding.”

“I know it
looks
real. But it would prove established belief wrong. That creates a huge motivation to fake something like this.”

I glanced uneasily at the messenger bag at my feet.

“It’s not a fake,” I said.

“How do you know? Photoshop is really good these days.”

“Trust me.”

“No offense,” he said as though he meant the opposite, “but I’m guessing you don’t have a trained eye, since you came here for help.”

“Okay, then don’t trust me. Treat it as a hypothetical exercise.”

He sat perfectly still as he looked at me coldly. “I don’t have time for hypothetical exercises.”

“Then believe me when I tell you it’s real.”

“I don’t know what you expect to learn from whatever game you’re playing.”

“I’m not—”

Lane stood up without warning and squeezed around the desk. He leaned across me and pulled the office door open, leaving his hand firmly planted on the doorknob. “Thanks for stopping by.”

“It’s not a game,” I said. I made no attempt to leave.

He loomed above me, his expression blank. I swiveled in the folding chair and kicked the door shut. It threw him off balance. He nearly fell, but caught himself on the desk and glared at me.

“What if I told you I have it?” I said. “That I was given the bracelet.”

“You can’t be serious.” Lane sat down on the edge of the desk and gaped at me. “You’re
serious
?”

I picked up my bag and extracted Rupert’s handkerchief. I opened the folds and held it out in front of him. Even in the bad florescent lighting, the uncut ruby shone beautifully.

He didn’t presume I’d let him touch it, but he leaned in closer. When he looked up, I saw the awe in his eyes.

“You can’t expect me to believe,” he said, “that your friend casually handed this to you without any explanation.”

“I never said that,” I said. “It did belong to a friend who gave it to me. But I don’t know where he got it. He’s dead, so I can’t ask him.”

“And the rest?”

“It only had the one ruby when I got it.”

“No, I mean the other pieces of the collection. The full treasure. He didn’t leave the rest to you as well?”

I stared openmouthed at Lane. He must have thought the bracelet had been left to me as part of an estate in a will. There was more? My normally expressive vocal chords didn’t want to cooperate. I swallowed and shook my head.

“A treasure?” I whispered.

Rupert had certainly gotten himself into one big mess.