Thai Die (3 page)

“
What
is it?” asked Betsy, a shade impatiently.

“Yes, let us see!” said Alice.

The reporter, who had been about to put his camera into its bag, instead turned on the flash again.

Doris hesitated. “It’s a Buddha, and it’s stone, not bronze. I don’t know if I should open the box, and not just because it’s not mine. What would I do if one of you dropped it?”

“We’ll be careful!” promised Alice, and the others heartily agreed.

Doris picked up the box and picked away the strips of transparent tape holding it shut. “I think you’ll be surprised when you see it. It’s not really old, but carved in an ancient style.”

The object inside was wound into Bubble Wrap, and under that a length of grimy old cloth, a faded green printed with a complex pattern. Doris laid the statue on the table and carefully removed its wrapping. As she lifted the last fold of fabric away, the camera flashed from behind her left shoulder, apparently catching her in the corner of her eye. She blinked a few times to clear away the spots before she set the figure upright on its low pedestal, turning it to face the group. The camera flashed again.

“That’s a Buddha?” asked Emily. The statue, a pale cream color, was of a slim man in a shin-length robe.

“I don’t know why he used this old thing,” Doris said, leaning sideways to drop the rag into the wastebasket under the table. “The Bubble Wrap was good enough.” She turned the Buddha around so it faced them, then put a steadying finger on its head. “So, what do you think?”

It was nothing like the jolly fat man sitting on a pillow, which is the more familiar depiction of the Buddha. This statue was of a slender man with downcast eyes and just a hint of a smile. He wore his robes fastidiously arranged, covering just one shoulder, reaching halfway down his calves. Both hands were upraised with long, slender fingers. His left hand had the little finger and thumb touching, the right had his forefinger and thumb touching. His hair was done in tiny, tight curls, lifted slightly at the crown.

“Ooooh, he’s gorgeous!” said Emily, reaching for the figure—she was tired of being the last one to be handed something going around the table. “Wow, it’s heavy!”

“Oh, please be careful!” cried Doris, reaching to steady it. “Remember, it’s not mine! I don’t know what I’d do if one of those hands broke off!”

“Yes, of course, you’re right,” apologized Emily, holding it more carefully, using both hands. She put it down on the table and turned it around and around, her head tipped to one side.

“It looks dirty,” Bershada said, leaning sideways to peer at it through the magnifying glasses she wore well down her nose.

“I think that’s called patina,” said Betsy in a dry voice.

“Whatever. If it were mine, I’d give it a good scrubbing. I bet that stone is a nice color under the dirt—excuse me,
patina
.” She reached for it, hefted it—Doris could not quite suppress another gasp—and then put it down and scooted it along the table.

Betsy tried lifting it with both hands. “It is pretty solid,” she said. The grubbiness, she noticed, was lighter on the high surfaces and darker inside the folds of the robe. Whoever carved this copy was careful to get the imitation patina right. She leaned it back to get a look at it and was struck by the expression on its face. “I like this,” she said. “He looks very serene.”

“Didn’t Buddha invent serenity?” asked Bershada.

“
The
Buddha,” corrected Alice before Doris could. “He had some other name. Buddha is like a title. He was born in India five hundred years before Christ and invented a religion that is all about rejecting concern over things of the world. ‘Wakeful serenity,’ they call it.”

“How much is that little statue worth?” asked the reporter.

“About two hundred dollars if you buy it in Bangkok, because it’s hand carved. It would cost about eight hundred here, wholesale.”

“And whatever you can get at retail,” said Bershada.

“That doesn’t seem like very much,” mused Betsy. “I mean, it does, until you think of all the trouble he took to get it here.”

Doris shrugged. “It wasn’t that much trouble. Besides, he said it was for a repeat customer. He told me he wants to keep on the man’s good side.”

Betsy nodded. She understood the value of the repeat customer. Still, she had to ask, “Weren’t you just a little suspicious about this request? I mean, being handed something in a foreign country to bring to the United States?”

“Well, of course, at first!” said Doris, indignant at being thought a willing cat’s paw. “But I went to his office—his other office, where he has his export business. It’s on Silom Road—an important part of the city—though it seemed to be just one room, and half of it was taken up with boxes. He said the statue was to go to Fitzwilliam’s Antiques in St. Paul, which is an actual antiques shop—I looked it up on the Internet. I’ve already talked to Mr. Fitzwilliam on the phone. He asked me to hold it until Friday—he doesn’t want someone else to see it and want it—but he sounded happy and said his customer would be very pleased to hear the piece is here. So see? Nothing secret about it.”

“And you didn’t get questioned about it at customs?” asked Alice.

Doris grinned. “Let me tell you about that,” she said. “I bought another hat besides that fan one. It’s the kind peasant farmers use in the fields. It’s beautiful, but it also looks like a lampshade.” She bent sideways to reach into the grocery bag, which didn’t hold milk and bread after all, but a big stiff hat made of thin blades of rattan. It had a flat top and sides that bent ever more sharply outward into a broad rim about eighteen inches across. She turned it over to show her friends the underside. The rattan strips were supported on the inside with open work of much finer rattan, cleverly woven in small circles. But the interesting part was a beautiful cylinder about six inches across and six deep, woven of even finer rattan into open spirals. It was fastened to the crown of the hat with knots of thread and reached down almost level with the brim. “See,” said Doris, turning the hat over and putting it on, “this is the thing that touches your head, not the hat, so there’s always air moving over the top of your head. You get shade
and
a breeze at the same time.”

The women nodded, smiling, and their smiles kept getting wider and wider until they turned to giggles.

“I know, I know,” said Doris with a sigh, taking the hat off. “It looks ridiculous on me. I saw these tiny Asian faces peering out from under these hats and thought they looked adorable. So I bought a hat from a street vendor at a temple called Wat Pho. Our guide almost hurt himself trying not to laugh at me—and the sweet ladies behind the counter at my hotel didn’t even try.” She handed the hat to Emily. “Go ahead, you try it on.”

Emily looked at the design on the inside, then obeyed and they all laughed at her, too. And Alice, and Betsy. Even Bershada, who could wear just about any hat, drew laughter.

“See? It looks ridiculous on anyone but East Asians. Still, I liked it, so I brought it home. I had to carry it in my hand; it won’t fit in a suitcase. Then going through customs I wore it, since I had my hands full of luggage. The customs officer said, ‘What do you have to declare?’ I handed him my list in fear and trepidation—I was two hundred dollars over my limit and just knew I was going to spend the next hour opening suitcases and paying a lot of duty. But he looked at my jet-lagged face under that silly hat and said, ‘Go on through.’ So I don’t care if it looks ridiculous on me, it’s a wonderful hat, a lucky hat, and I say God bless it!”

Two

DORIS slept late on Friday morning, hitting the snooze button on her alarm clock over and over until she woke enough to remember her appointment in St. Paul. Jet lag was still with her, she supposed. She blundered her way around her small kitchen, burning the eggs, putting too many grounds in the little coffeemaker, settling for warm bread from the toaster when she realized how late it was getting.

It had snowed lightly the night before, so morning traffic moved slowly. She was more than fifteen minutes late arriving at Exchange Street near the Xcel Energy Convention Center where Fitzwilliam’s Antiques Shoppe was located. The street, high above a curve in the Mississippi River, was lined with small, old stores in weathered brick. She had to park near the far end of the block, since all the other places were taken. She got out of her aged black car, coming around to the passenger side to get the box with the statue in it. The weather seemed especially cold after four weeks in Thailand, and the biting wind went right through her coat as she tucked the box under one arm while she pulled her knit hat down over her forehead with a mittened hand.

The antiques store looked faded and shabby on the outside—its wooden framework was worn to the point where mere paint couldn’t fix it—but then Doris noticed that the gilt on the wooden letters across the façade was fresh and bright.

The display windows looked like the work of a bipolar window dresser. In one were some old standard lamps whose torn shades were draped with sun-faded scarves. But in the other was a pair of very beautiful bowlegged arm chairs upholstered in green and silver damask. A cardboard sign in the glass of the door, black with Day-Glo red letters, announced that the store was open.

An old-fashioned bell hanging on a curved metal spring announced her entrance. There was a smell of aged wood and vegetable soup. A man, tall and thin, with white hair and a close-cropped silver beard, appeared out of the back room. He wore a blue chambray shirt and tan slacks held up with red suspenders.

“May I help you?” he asked in a tentative voice, as if he thought she might be here by mistake.

“I’m Doris Valentine, and I was asked to deliver this box to you,” she replied, holding it up.

“Ah,” he said, looking more lively. He smiled and his blue eyes shone. “You’re here at last.”

“I’m sorry to be late,” she said.

“That’s quite all right, quite all right.” He might have been Katharine Hepburn’s brother by his accent. “Will you follow me?” He walked stiffly to a glass counter near the back, and Doris noticed when he turned on a goose-necked lamp that his finger joints were swollen. He reached under the counter and came up with a length of old pink velvet which he spread on the glass. “May I see what you have for me?”

Doris handed over the box. He hesitated briefly when he saw that the tape had been broken and replaced, then picked at the new tape, pulled it off, and opened the box. He paused again when he saw the cream-colored hand towel, then carefully scooped the wrapped object out.

“Did it come wrapped in this?”

“No. It was wrapped in a piece of dirty cloth, which I threw away.”

“Hmmm,” he said, frowning as he held it in one hand while gently lifting the folds of the towel. But he nodded when he saw the Buddha, and stood it up on the counter. “Who did you show this to?” he asked, but as he spoke he was looking at it, not her. His voice was quiet, but hard, as if he were angry and trying not to show it.

“Just to some friends.”

“Who are they? Where did this happen?”

Surprised, Doris said, “It was at Crewel World—”

“What did you say? Cruel?”

“Crewel World. It’s a needlework shop in Excelsior. Crewel is a kind of needlework, wool yarn on fabric.”

“I know that,” he said impatiently.

“There’s a group of us who meet in the shop to stitch and talk. I think there were five or six of us, on this past Wednesday. I was showing them the souvenirs I bought when I was in Thailand, and they saw the box in my suitcase and wanted to see what was in it.” He was looking at her with scary intensity. “Was . . . was that wrong?”

The intense look slowly faded. “No, I suppose not. But if you’d dropped it . . .”

“Yes, I know. But I told them to be very careful with it. And you can see, it’s all right.”

The man took a pair of strong magnifying glasses out of his shirt pocket and put them on. He picked up the statue and, holding it under the light, looked it over very carefully. “Yes, it looks fine,” he said at last, and took his glasses off. Doris let loose a breath she hadn’t realized she was holding. “Still, I wish you hadn’t opened the box,” he said.

“I’m sorry, I apologize. I saw the statue in Bangkok when Mr. Corvis showed it to me, and he said it was the Buddha. But it was so different from any statue of the Buddha I’d ever seen, and so beautiful, I couldn’t resist showing it to my friends.”

“You threw the old wrapping away?”

“Yes, it seemed . . . disrespectful, you know? It wasn’t just raggedy, it was dirty. This statue seems holy—I mean, just look at that face—and when I saw that rag, well, I just couldn’t put it back around the Buddha.”

“I see. Would you like the towel back?”

Doris was a little embarrassed to say, “Yes, please.” But the embroidery on one end was one of her better efforts, a row of pink and yellow roses. It would look nice in her bathroom, so she took it when he held it out. “It’s brand new, never used.”