China Trade (26 page)

“The records?” I said.

“Yes. They’re wrong.”

“Wrong in what way?”

“Inaccurate. Incorrect.”

“Professor,” Bill broke in, probably to keep the top of my head from blowing off, “could you give us an example?”

Dr. Browning turned to him, then to the china cabinet. “Do you see,” he said, his eyes and voice softening, “my lovely salt cellar? Not the larger one. The petite one on the top shelf. With the lotus blossom and the silver spoon.”

In the gloom it was hard to pick out details on the individual pieces, but with the help of a gleam of stray light I found a finely painted blue lotus flower on a miniature bowl.

“Yes,” Bill and I said together.

“It is from the collection of a gentleman in Canterbury.”

“Canterbury, England?” Bill asked.

“Yes. One gets the occasional grant, you see. It’s quite possible to travel and stay inexpensively in England and on the Continent, and there are so many important collections.”

Bill said, “So you were in Canterbury studying this gentleman’s collection, and you came home with this piece?”

“Yes, I suppose that’s rather what happened.” Dr. Browning’s voice held a small note of wonder. “The gentleman had inherited his porcelains from a great-uncle, and had very little interest in or knowledge of them. I was studying them for a monograph I was writing. The gentleman was pleased that someone thought them worthy of study. He kept them packed away, you see.”

“Tell us about the relationship between this piece and the Kurtz,” I suggested as mildly as I could.

“Well. My trip to England took place four years ago. Not quite two years ago I had occasion to study some pieces in the Kurtz collection, for a similar monograph. I was given access to all the Kurtz porcelains, those in storage as well as those on display. I believe it was Ms. Atherton who made my arrangements, in fact.”

“And you found … ?”

“To my surprise, I found a number of pieces from the collection of the gentleman in Canterbury.”

Bill and I exchanged glances. “Why is that surprising?” I asked. “Couldn’t he have sold them to the Kurtz? Dr. Caldwell
goes to Europe on acquisition trips at least twice a year, from what I understand.”

“Oh, yes, certainly. I would have felt nothing more than the pleasure of seeing old friends again,” he said, without a trace of self-consciousness, “were it not for the records.”

“What was wrong with them?” Oh, please, I thought, please just tell us.

“As I say, I had been in England two years previous to the period of my study at the Kurtz, and I had seen those pieces at the time. But the records at the museum listed those same pieces as having been acquired nine years before, under the previous Director, from a dealer in Belgium.”

“I don’t get it,” I said. “The acquisition dates were false?”

“Yes, indeed,” Dr. Browning said emphatically.

“Could you be mistaken? Could these be different pieces with the same design, or something?”

In answer, Dr. Browning gave me a brief pitying look, then rose and made his way to the china cabinet once again. He performed the ritual with key and lock, lifted out the salt cellar, and held it in the palm of his hand with the lotus blossom facing him. On the other side was a tiny painting of a house with six chimneys.

“This is the residence of the five-times-great-grandfather of the great-uncle of the gentleman in Canterbury. It was he who ordered the set from Canton in 1783. This house appears on all the set’s pieces. There exist—in Canterbury—very clear records of the set’s contents. Of certain items, platters and tureens for example, there was only one in any given shape and size. The set was complete when I studied it in Canterbury. There is no question of a mistake.”

He carefully replaced the salt cellar and relocked the cabinet. He glanced longingly at the tiger cup, on the bookcase beside me, but said nothing as he returned to his seat.

“The dates are false,” I said, as if by repetition this fact would reveal its own meaning. “But the pieces are genuine?”

“Oh, quite.”

“Did you check with the gentleman in Canterbury, to see
if he had all his pieces?” Dr. Browning’s eyes went to his salt cellar at the same time mine did. “No,” I said. “I suppose you didn’t.”

“I had no reason to,” he murmured by way of apology. “My monograph, after all, concerned the pieces, not their provenance.”

“And so you decided it was none of your business?”

“Well, it wasn’t. Was it?” His voice had an anxious quaver.

“You weren’t just a little curious? You didn’t ask Dr. Caldwell about it, as one professional to another?”

“Dr. Caldwell was abroad at the time. I’m not even sure he knew I was studying his collection. I did begin to mention to Ms. Atherton that I was uncomfortable with some of the Kurtz’s provenance attributions and suggested she confirm them if she had the opportunity. The scholar in me demanded that. Then I’m afraid I rather backed down. The—the other part of me realized that it would be unfortunate if Ms. Atherton were to do anything that would alert the Canterbury gentleman that something was amiss in his collection.”

“Dr. Browning,” Bill asked, “could those pieces be fakes? A mistake of the previous Director’s, something he was duped into buying?”

“It would be immensely difficult to fake a piece like those I saw,” Dr. Browning assured Bill. “And immensely costly, also. I don’t believe it would be worth it, for financial advantage.”

“What about some other kind of advantage?” Bill asked. “Prestige, for example?”

“I can’t see where such prestige would arise. One couldn’t display a … a ‘forged’ piece of porcelain. We are, as I’ve said, a small fraternity. Such a piece might easily be recognized by someone who’d seen the genuine article the week before in its actual home. In any case, I did study them. As I say, I’m quite satisfied the Canterbury pieces I saw at the Kurtz were authentic.”

Dr. Browning offered that comment half-apologetically,
as though his expertise in his field, while not to be questioned, were as much a source of embarrassment as pride.

Bill reached into his jacket with an automatic motion and lifted his pack of cigarettes halfway out of his shirt pocket. He always says a cigarette helps him think. Then he looked around, at the closed windows and the dusty carpet, the musty drapes. He pushed the pack back down.

Good thing, too, I thought, frustration making me short-tempered. All this room needs is a little cigarette smoke. We’d all end up smelling like my clothes from last night, the clothes my mother was too ashamed to send to the laundry.

A sudden vision of my mother, clothespins in her pursed mouth, burst like a roman candle in the room and was gone. Her scolding voice, though, rebuking me through clothespins, lingered.

“They won’t be clean,” mumbled the stale air. “But at least they’ll smell like it.”

“Laundry,” I said.

Dr. Browning’s great eyes widened. “I beg your pardon?”

Bill was more to the point. “What?”

“Laundry,” I repeated, almost as surprised as they were. “The Kurtz. It’s an art laundry.”

The stuffy room was suddenly electric. “Go on,” Bill said swiftly, straightening in the armchair. “Stolen art?”

“Stolen in Europe, bought cheap on Dr. Caldwell’s ‘acquisition’ trips.” I spoke as fast as I was thinking, and as disjointedly. “Maybe commissioned, maybe Caldwell just drops by to see what’s in stock with a few people he knows, whenever he goes over. Brought here, given an earlier acquisition date and a provenance. Kept in storage awhile, years maybe, until it cools off. Then sold. ‘Deacquisitioned.’ Sold for what it’s worth, because it’s genuine. And bought probably for peanuts, because there’s not much of a market in stolen porcelains. And I’ll bet not silver or any other of those sorts of things. The sorts of things they have at the Kurtz. Am I right, Dr. Browning?”

“Decorative arts,” Dr. Browning said after a moment, in a breathy voice, as if he’d gotten winded following me. “No, I
don’t suppose there is. Decorative objects tend to be bulky and breakable, or at least capable of being damaged: scratched or dented or mildewed. Unlike fine art paintings and drawings, which, once removed from their frames, are light and simple to transport. And the value of the objects is rarely high enough, one would think, to be worth the risk.”

“So Caldwell buys low, because he’s the only buyer. And sells high, because he’s got the real goods,” Bill said. “Is that our theory?”

“And because the goods have such a good provenance,” I said. “They come from the collection at the Kurtz, after all.”

“And as long as he never gets greedy,” Bill said, “never tries to move too many pieces at once or asks too high a price, he can go on like this forever.”

“Unless the pieces are recognized by someone and known to be stolen.”

“And that would depend on the buyer.”

“You mean, that the buyer would recognize them?”

“That might not be a problem. Maybe the buyer already knows and doesn’t care. But you want to avoid too many people seeing them after the buyer buys them.”

“So you don’t sell, for example, to other museums.”

“No.” Bill said it before I could: “You sell to private collectors. The more private, the better.”

We stared at each other. “Wow,” I breathed. “He must have been a godsend, Mr. Blair.”

“A reclusive collector. A man who loves to acquire and hates to have people around him. The perfect customer for stolen art.”

“Dr. Browning?” I turned to the wide-eyed professor. “Is it possible? Could it have happened like that?”

Dr. Browning sat with his lips pressed tightly shut, his eyes glittering, a very strange expression on his face. Suddenly his lips burst apart. He threw his head back and let out a high-pitched bray and then collapsed into cackling peals of laughter.

“Dr. Browning?” I asked, slightly alarmed. “Are you all right?”

He started to speak. His words got caught in his chortles and they fell out of his mouth together. “A thief,” he gasped with delight. “Roger Caldwell! A bigger thief than I am! Oh, my. Oh, my. Oh, my.” He wiped his eyes, composed himself, then was struck by another fit of giggles. “Oh,” he breathed, when that was spent. “My! Well, you never do know, do you?” He beamed at me and at Bill, with a smile that corrugated his cheeks like layers of soft clay.

“No,” I said. “You never do.”

T
W E N T Y - E I G H T

A
nd we still don’t,” Bill pointed out, as we made our way through the world where the sun shone and the air moved, outside the dim stillness of Dr. Browning’s apartment. “It’s a theory. We may be way off.”

“Uh-huh,” I said happily. My mood couldn’t be wet-blanketed that easily. “But at least now there’s something we’re way off
of
.”

We had left Dr. Browning’s abruptly, trading vows of silence with him. He would tell no one what the scenario was that we’d sketched in his dusty air; in return, we would not speak of his little ones and how he’d come by them. This standoff would continue until Bill and I had made the moves we wanted to make now. Then we’d think about Dr. Browning’s future.

Dr. Browning, seized equally, it seemed to me, by confusion, penitence, anxiety, and the unfamiliar thrill of being a coconspirator, had agreed to this.

“But I have to take the tiger cup,” I told him. “I’m being paid to recover the Blair collection porcelains, and this is the only one I’ve found so far.”

“Must you?” He looked stricken.

“Yes,” I said. “I’m sorry. Perhaps you’d like to pack it up for me?”

He seemed almost grateful to me for the offer. Now, under my arm, as both evidence and insurance, I carried the cup, wrapped by Dr. Browning in two boxes and more layers of protective cloth than you’d swaddle a baby in.

Bill had lit a cigarette as soon as we’d hit the street. He’d finished it by the time we’d come to the crowded diner where we were now, following the path the laundry theory led us down.

The reason for the suddenness of our exit from Dr. Browning’s had as much to do with what I didn’t want him to focus on as with my eagerness to get moving now that we had somewhere to move. Over coffee, tea, and drippingly buttered bagels, Bill and I focussed on those things now.

“Caldwell,” Bill said, thinking out loud for both of us. “He’s laundering stolen art through the Kurtz. He sells it to private collectors like, for example, Blair, on whom he’s recently unloaded a number of pieces. Everything’s fine until Blair dies and his widow, having no idea, donates the collection to another museum.”

“That’s what the scene at the house was about,” said I, struck by a thought. “That Rosie O’Malley told you about. It was Caldwell back from Europe, hearing that Blair had died, coming to make a gentlemanly pitch for the Blair collection. He’ll buy it back, he’s thinking, and no one will have to know. Or maybe she’ll even donate it. Wouldn’t that be a coup? Only it was already gone.”

“No wonder he left on a bad note. So then he stole it back?”

“He sort of had to, if Dr. Browning is right. He couldn’t risk anyone seeing those pieces.”

“So he finds Hsing Chung Wah, renegade Golden Dragon, to do it for him,” Bill went on. “How does he do that?”

I thought about that question, but couldn’t find the answer.
“I don’t know. But,” I said, struck by yet another thought, “maybe that’s how Lee Kuan Yue gets into this.”

“What’s how Lee Kuan Yue gets into this?”

“Damage control. He finds out that the porcelains are gone and that Hsing Chung Wah took them. He’s not really closely tied in to the Chinatown organized crime network, but he does what he can to recover the stolen porcelains, for his sister.”

Bill drained his coffee cup. “Could be. Seems to fit.” Then he asked the question we’d both been skirting. “And what about Trish Atherton?”

I didn’t answer at first, sitting quietly at our little table island, surrounded by a storm of waiters swirling plates of pancakes and omelettes and homefries through the air around us. Then I gave him the answer we both knew. “Caldwell killed her. She found out, and he found out that she found out, and he killed her.”

“How did she find out?”