Ghost Hero

to beg them to leave. I went, also, to Chau, to our students. What you’ve done is noble and courageous, I said, but you’ve lost. Go home, wait for another chance. They wouldn’t go. This is the chance! I stayed, trying to persuade. Finally, the tanks came.” Another long pause. “The soldiers were weeping. When the order came, some fired into the air, over the students’ heads.”

In the silence, Dr. Yang stared at the painting, but we could all tell he wasn’t seeing it. Finally he spoke again, in changed, cold tones. “There, Jack. Is that what you needed? Tell me, does that help you?”

In a quiet voice, but a firmer one than I could have found, Jack said, “I’m sorry. I appreciate how hard that must have been. But it does help and I wish you’d told me sooner. For one thing, if you were with Chau when he died, it makes it a lot less likely that he’s alive and painting these paintings.”

“Less likely? It was never possible!” Dr. Yang pressed his palms on his desk as though he had to keep it from lifting off. “Is that the hypothesis you’ve been working on since I hired you? That Chau’s not dead and the paintings are real? That’s a problem, Jack.”

“Maybe. There’s another problem, too. Someone shot at me.”

“Someone—what?”

“Shot a bullet through my office window. About two hours ago.”

It took Dr. Yang a moment to catch up. “I—was anyone hurt?”

“No.”

“Who was it?”

“I have no idea. Or what the point was, either.”

“Did you call the police?”

“Of course. Bullets in my ceiling?” Jack added, “I didn’t mention you.”

Dr. Yang’s lips compressed into a thin line. He nodded curtly and said to me and Bill, “Will you excuse us?”

If I’d conjured up a semireasonable excuse to stay I might have tried it, but it wasn’t hard to see that nothing would work. Bill pushed away from the windowsill and I stood from my chair. “Of course,” I said. To Jack: “We’ll be outside.”

Jack gave a distracted nod. He and Dr. Yang sat staring at each other as we left.

*   *   *

I shut the door behind us, then said to Bill, “Can I listen at the keyhole?” He didn’t dignify that with an answer. We sat on a bench and watched students walk by. “What did you think?” I asked.

“Tough customer.”

“I had professors like him in college. I did well in their courses because I was scared not to. But from your I-Spy perch by the window, I mean.”

Bill came up with this trick and we do it routinely at interviews now, especially the first time we meet someone: We try to sit far enough apart that the person can’t see both of us at once. Then one talks, the other watches. We can’t always pull it off, but it’s particularly convenient when the interviewee doesn’t have enough chairs.

“He’s way more angry than I’d have expected,” Bill said.

“Jack said he’s an angry kind of guy.”

“Still. Now we know he’s Jack’s client. So what? It may be irritating but it’s not a disaster. He’s overreacting.”

“Maybe.” In my mind I heard Dr. Yang’s dark voice as he told his story. “What he told us; it makes his reason for hiring Jack more convincing, doesn’t it?”

“You mean, protecting Chau’s rep?”

“Protecting Chau, I get the feeling. The way he couldn’t, back then. Maybe he’s so furious out of helplessness. This situation is getting out of control. The way that one did, and look what happened.”

Bill nodded. “Possible.”

“And speaking of protecting people, here’s another question: What about his daughter? Anna? You saw how he stopped Jack from telling her what was up. Why wouldn’t he want her to know?”

“She seems to have her own problems. Whatever Jack meant when he asked how she was doing and if anyone had heard from Mike. Sounds like her boyfriend ditched her. Maybe Yang doesn’t want to complicate her life right now.”

I thought about Dr. Yang as an overprotective dad. High walls and lattice-screened windows came to mind, but Anna’s affectionate teasing didn’t strike me as coming from either the cowed and timid or resentful and rebellious young woman that that approach would have been likely to produce. She’d probably been wrapping him around her finger her whole life. “Well, maybe,” I suggested, “he really is only protecting his investment while he pretends to care about his dead friend, and he feels guilty enough about it that he’d just as soon his daughter doesn’t know.”

“Maybe so.”

“What did you think of the art in his office?” I asked, but my phone rang, so Bill didn’t get a chance to answer. I flipped it open. “Hi, Linus.”

“Hey, Cuz. So, Bill’s all hooked up. Vladimir Oblomov, shady Russian, Chinese art honcho. You want to hear?”

“Of course.” I did; but also, he clearly couldn’t wait to tell me.

“First I went to the Wikipedia pages for two hot Chinese artists. Wow, you know how weird that stuff is?