Ghost Hero (18 page)

So I did, typing in the partial plate I’d made out while the SUV careened away. Jack looked over my shoulder. I was typing

blck navgtor, late modl

when Jack said, “Last year.”

I raised an eyebrow and he shrugged.

Last yr. C what u cn do. I know this illegal. Dont do deeply illegal. If cant do, ok. If u find sumthing, call whenever.

I put the phone away without interruption this time and said, “That may get us somewhere. Jack, you’re a car guy?”

“It’s a Midwest suburban thing.”

“I see.” I settled back, leaned my head on the seat. “You guys? I’m getting tired of this.”

“Of what?” Jack asked. “Me getting shot at?”

“That, too. Of being confused. Of not knowing who any of these people really are and what they really want.”

“I have an idea,” Jack said, snapping his fingers. “Let’s go to Anna’s studio, find the Chaus, have her tell us what’s going on, and all go out for a drink after the big dance number.”

“Good plan.” I closed my eyes, and opened them briefly to add, “I’ll have a cosmo.”

*   *   *

Bill meandered randomly through Queens until he was satisfied we weren’t being followed. As that was going on, Jack and I filled him in on what he’d missed while he was exchanging pleasantries with Shayna Dylan. By the time we pulled over in front of the artists’ converted warehouse it was half-past nine, but light still glowed through the industrial windows.

“Behold the midnight oil of inspiration,” I said.

“Most of these people have day jobs,” Jack said. “They make work when they can.”

“It’s more romantic my way.”

Bill said to Jack, “What did I tell you?”

I couldn’t remember what he’d told him but I was sure it was something unflattering about me, so I instructed them both to go jump in a lake.

We’d parked at the building’s long side. Jack led us around the corner to a loading dock with a huge roll-down door and a smaller door beside it. He punched a couple of buttons on the keypad. Only silence, so he did it again. “No answer from Anna. I assume we want to get in even if she’s not here?”

“As opposed to coming all this way,” I said, “exchanging rocks and bullets with who knows who, and then going home empty-handed? You better believe it.”

He read down the list beside the keypad, pressed another combination, and when that didn’t work he tried a third.

“Who’s there?” squawked the speaker.

“Francie, it’s Jack Lee. Can you let me in?”

“Jack Lee? What are you doing in an outer borough at this hour? Don’t tell me there are no hip parties in Manhattan tonight.” The buzzer buzzed and Jack pushed the door open.

We walked into a cavernous space, windowed along the long walls from waist height to the overhead steel beams hung with metal-shaded lights. The broad entryway held a few sagging chairs and battered couches, a bookcase, and a bulletin board covered with announcements and flyers. Off it, in both directions, corridors turned the corner and ran past a series of large, ceilingless cubicles in the center of the paint-splattered concrete floor. Skylights punctuated the roof. The place smelled of turpentine, sawdust, and frying garlic. I could hear the high-pitched whirr of some industrial tool, drifts of music, various bits of unidentifiable clatter, and the opening of a door. Then footsteps, and a compact, cheerful-looking Asian woman appeared around the corner, bowl in one hand, chopsticks in the other.

“Hi, Jack. Want a dumpling? Oh, you didn’t say you brought people. Hi, I’m Francie See.” She shifted the chopsticks to her left hand where the bowl was and stuck out her right.

“Lydia Chin,” I said as we shook. “And this is Bill Smith.”

“Good to meet you. You folks want some dumplings? I have lots.”

“No, thanks,” Jack said. “We just had some great noodle soup.” I was a little sorry to hear him turn her down; the dumplings, seared and glistening with sesame oil, looked great.

“At Lucky Gardens?” Francie See asked.

“No, in Manhattan.”

“Oh, right, I should have known.”

“You outer-borough people, so touchy. Listen, Francie, we’re looking for Anna Yang. Is she here? Bill and Lydia wanted to see her work.”

“I don’t think so. Unless she came back.” Francie See stepped back to peer down the corridor. “Her door’s closed. Want to see mine instead?”

“Sure,” said Jack, as though seeing art were why we’d come. “Still doing landscapes?”

“In a way.” She led us back in the direction she’d come from. “That’s Anna’s studio, down there past the kitchen,” she said over her shoulder. “She came in this afternoon and I thought she was staying to work but she left pretty fast. I got the feeling she was upset about something. Did she know you were coming?”

“No. Bill and Lydia just met her, and we were in the neighborhood so I suggested we come over. Is she okay?”

“I don’t know what’s going on. You could ask Pete, they’re pretty tight.” Francie See turned through an open door. “Voilà.” She waved the chopsticks, then used them to lift a dumpling. “Hope you don’t mind if I eat. I’m starved.”

“No, go ahead,” I said, looking around. Pinned to the walls, covering a table, and on three easels, were watercolor paintings, in every shade of blue imaginable, and all of them paintings of water. Oceans, fog, mist, clouds, waves, pools, pounding rain, racing brooks, water in every possible form, including glaciers, steam, and ice cubes. Serene, threatening, chilly, boiling, soft, hard, fast, and slow, changing from painting to painting but all water and all blue.

“Wow,” said Jack. “This is what one of my professors would’ve called ‘bloody-minded.’”

“Just tightening my focus,” Francie said. “It’s all about water, Jack. The twenty-first century’s all about water.”

“You always were so cutting-edge, Francie.”

“I am, aren’t I? Besides, something’s got to wash down these dumplings. You sure you don’t want any?”

The guys shook their heads, but I couldn’t stand it. “I’d love one.”

“That’s what I’m talking about.” Francie grinned and pointed to a jar of chopsticks beside a can of brushes.

“I don’t believe you,” Jack said. “After that soup?”

“Adrenaline makes Lydia hungry,” Bill said.

“Adrenaline?” Francie asked. “You get a rush looking at art?”

I fetched some chopsticks and dug a dumpling from the bowl she held out.

“Bill does,” Jack said. “The jury’s still out on Lydia. But we had some excitement on the way here. We were sort of mugged.”

“Seriously? Are you okay?”

“We’re fine,” I said, biting down on the salty, gamey dumpling. “
I
was sort of mugged, and Jack saved me.”

“Ooh, Jack, you caveman, you. But you’re okay?” Francie asked me.

I nodded, swallowed, and said, “This is great.”

“Day job. I’m the dumpling queen of Lucky Gardens. See, this is why you should move to the outer boroughs. No one gets mugged in Flushing.”

“For your information,” Jack said, “we were in Flushing, not all that far from here.”

“Oh. Well, I’m lying anyway. Why do you think we have all that fancy electronic stuff on the doors? None of the windows below ten feet open, either. And we have alarms on the skylights, in case someone tries a
Mission: Impossible.
”

“Glad to hear it.”

“Yeah, I guess it’s good. It cost a fortune, though. A lot of people resisted, but that was partly because the security commissar’s that jerk, Jon-Jon Jie. Oops, he a friend of yours?” Her smile made it clear she didn’t care if he was or not.

Jack shook his head. “Seen his work, but don’t know him. You have commissars?”

“It’s funnier than ‘committee chair.’ Of course it would help if Big Yellow Hunter had a sense of humor. There were people holding out
because
he wouldn’t shut up. We had to take an actual vote. Appalling. And now look, after all that, he’s moving out.”

“I didn’t know he had a studio here.”

“Down the hall. He came in with us because he thought we were the hip place to be. As though anything could make him hip. But now he’s kissing us off for some high-rent broom closet in Chelsea. I say good riddance and he can take the armory with him.”

“Armory?” I said. “He has guns in there?”

“He says he does. And bows and arrows, and spears. In case a buffalo herd charges through here, I don’t know. Let his new A-list gallery worry about it.”

“A-list gallery?” said Jack. “You don’t mean Baxter/Haig?”

“You heard?”

“Eddie To said Doug Haig was just leading Jie on.”

“That’s what we all thought, but the deal’s gone through. As of a few hours ago. Ink’s still wet. He’ll be Baxter/Haig’s first Chinese-American. Everyone’s disgusted. Jon-Jon’s the kind of gateway drug that’ll make Haig allergic.”

“Haig’s already allergic. I can’t believe he’s opening the sacred precincts to a hyphenated artist. And it’s Jie? I only saw one show of his, but it was garbage.”

“Literally. He buys Gucci’s scraps.”

Jack shook his head. “Are you sure this is true? Say what you want about Haig, but he has an eye. I’ve never known him to show bad work.”

“Ah, well, he’s not showing him yet, is he?”

“What do you mean?”

“There are reasons to put a horse in your stable even if you’re not planning to ride him.” Bill looked over from a painting he’d been examining. Francie said, “Sorry, it’s Jon-Jon’s Texas thing. I couldn’t resist.”

“No problem,” said Jack. “Can you translate, though?”

“Jon-Jon’s from money.”

“You’re saying he bought his way into Baxter/Haig?”

Francie put the empty dumpling bowl into a paint-streaked sink and turned the faucet on. Reaching for a stained towel to wipe her hands, she paused and cocked her head as water splattered and overflowed the bowl. I followed her gaze, admiring the way light glinted off the rivulets. “Mmm,” Francie said. Leaving the water running and the bowl where it was, she unpinned an ice floe from an easel and laid it on a table. Dragging the easel to the sink, she said, “Just before the rumors about Jon-Jon’s knighthood started, we’d been hearing a better rumor: that Haig was in trouble. Whoever’d loaned him the money to buy Baxter out wanted it back, plus. Or so we heard.”

“We heard that, too. Who was it, do you know?”

“No.” Francie fingered through the jar of brushes. “But inquiring minds agree it was Chinese money.”

“Really? Listen, Francie, it sounds like you hear a lot of rumors. Have you heard that there are unknown Chau Chuns floating around?”

“Chau Chun? Who’s that? Wait—Tiananmen? The Ghost Painter or something?”

“Ghost Hero.”

“I thought he was dead.”

“He is.”

“I haven’t heard anything about him.” She pushed a rolling table over to the easel she’d just set up. Crowding it were pots of cobalt, azure, teal, turquoise, indigo, aquamarine. “That must not have made it out here to the boonies.”

“All right,” said Jack. “I can see we’re losing you. We’ll let you get back to work.”

“Nothing personal.”

“Of course not. I think we’ll find Pete, just to make sure Anna’s okay. Which studio’s his?”

“At the very end. Two down from Anna.” Francie pinned a sheet of paper to the easel. “You can help him celebrate.”

“Celebrate what?”

“That he’ll be able to breathe again. So will Anna. As soon as Jon-Jon packs up his mangy hides and moves out from the studio between them.”

We left Francie’s studio and headed along the corridor. “That was cool,” I said. “I always wondered where artists get their ideas.”

“Just turn on the faucet, they flow right out,” Bill said.

“I was surprised she barely knew who Chau was, though. I guess you’re right—this generation doesn’t necessarily know him. That would explain how Anna could have a couple of Chaus, real or fake, pinned to her studio wall and no one here would notice.”

“It explains how she could, but it doesn’t explain why she does.”

Jack stopped at a black door that said A
NNA
Y
ANG
in small neat red letters and, below them, in equally precise Chinese characters. He knocked, then tried the door, but it was locked. “Well, she’s not here to ask.”

“Too bad,” I said. “Do you have her phone number?”

“Yes. But I want to talk to Pete before we call her.”

Bill, examining the door, said, “Maybe not too bad.”

Jack looked at Bill. “What?”

“No one’s here on this end of the building,” Bill pointed out. “Except that guy Pete, who you’re going to see. Francie’s all the way down there with the water running and someone on the other side has music on. Why don’t you two go talk to Pete?”

Jack frowned. “I don’t know.”

“No. And what you don’t know can’t hurt you. Go.”

So we went, past the studio that was still, briefly, Jon-Jon Jie’s—with a curling fragment of brown and white cowhide tacked to the door—and knocked at the open door of the studio beyond it.

Inside, a thin young Asian man in a blue work shirt sat drawing loose, fast pencil lines on a sheet of paper. He glanced up sharply. His intense, silent stare made me think maybe we should get lost. We might be interrupting an artist in the middle of an inspiration. But he relaxed, though he didn’t smile. “Jack. Hey, what’s up?”

“Hey, Pete. This is Lydia Chin. Lydia, Pete Tsang.”

“Hi,” I said. Pete Tsang, sharp dark eyes on me, nodded.

“We were looking for Anna,” Jack told him, “but Francie See said she came and went. She also said she seemed upset. I just wanted to make sure she’s okay.”

Pete put his pencil down. “I didn’t see her, just heard her. Sometimes when she gets in I take a break, we have coffee or something before she sets up. I was half-waiting, but she just locked up again and left.”

“So you don’t know what was wrong?”

“Could be nothing’s wrong. Maybe she just came in to get something.”

“When we saw her before she was headed here, said she had a lot to do. But maybe you’re right. I’ll call her.” Jack turned to me. “Pete’s a painter.” I might have guessed that from the two large canvases, one in burning yellows, one in jagged reds, on opposite sides of the studio. Jack asked Pete, “What are you working on? Anything new?”