Anyway, I made Oblomov a buyer on one and a seller on the other. Bill might want to check out their stuff, you know, so in case his squeeze wants to talk about them.” He gave me the artists’ names. “Then I made a Web site for Vassily Imports. They sell food from Russia and, like, Eastern Europe and the Stans. Caviar, black bread, pickles, cheese—whatever, I looked up what one of the real sites sells and made it like that. Oblomov is on the board of directors, and he’s also VP for International Corporate Communications. No one ever knows what that means so I figured it was cool. And the Web site, I made it so it sort of takes you in circles if you try to go too deep. So if you were really trying to find who the boss man is, you couldn’t. That’s the shady part, you dig? Then I grabbed a shot of Bill from when we went to the park that time and Photoshopped it into some gallery opening in Hong Kong I found online, then put the whole thing on Flickr and tagged him along with the other VIPs. I got him listed on Yahoo.com and WhitePages, but no address, no phone. You think she’ll pay to do the search? I might be able to get something in there, but only maybe.”
“No, I don’t think she will. By the time she Googles him it’ll be after he’s called her. She won’t be trying to find how to contact him, just to make sure he’s not some kind of phony.”
“Good luck with that.” I could hear Linus’s grin. “So, anyhow, the next thing, Trella opened a blog on JournalScape, backdated like six months: She’s an art student, yadda yadda yadda and OMG she met this Oblomov dude, older but God is he loaded. They kicked it for a while but it cooled.”
“Good, Linus.”
“And I started a Facebook fan page for the Russian mob and made him one of the fans.”
“Kidding! Joke! Winking emoticon!”
“Oh.” I breathed out. “Thanks, Linus. This all sounds terrific. Send me a bill.”
“Nah. Family’s free. Just tell me if it works?”
I promised to do that, and clicked off.
“You’re in business,” I told Bill. “When Shayna Googles Vladimir Oblomov, she’ll get more than if she Googled the real you.”
“As it should be.” He checked his watch. “This is probably a good time to call her. She gets off in half an hour.”
“Well, then, absolutely. She has to have time to check out Linus’s hard work.”
Bill did call Shayna, who, from where I was sitting, seemed delighted to hear from him. The first thing he said was, “Eet’s Vladimir Oblomov,” as if he had no idea she didn’t know his last name. Things went all murmuring from there, which was a little revolting, so I got up and checked out the posters and flyers on the walls. This might not have been the Art Department, but apparently a lot of events coming up around Asian Art Week considered themselves of interest to A/P/A Studies students. Auctions, lectures, panels, gallery shows, led off by a glittering benefit gala I couldn’t imagine college students attending except as cater waiters. Capping the week was “Beijing/NYC,” which my client had mentioned: an offering of the government of the People’s Republic to the art lovers of New York. Paintings, sculpture, photography and installations, all so new their paint, or ink, or gluey emulsion, wouldn’t be dry. I was considering the civilized nature of cultural exchange when Dr. Yang’s door opened and closed, leaving Jack standing in the corridor.
“Aramis,” I said. “How’d it go?”
“Wow.”
“You look a little dazed.”
Jack shook his head slowly. “All I could think while he was reaming me out was, thank God he wasn’t on my thesis committee.”
Bill, spotting Jack, whispered some ridiculous sweet nothing into his phone and thumbed it off. I asked Jack, “Why is he so upset? It’s not your fault we went to you. Did you explain your reasoning, why you told us about him?”
“Reasoning’s not high on his list right now. But I gather he’d have preferred door number two: I tell you guys ‘Ghost Hero Chau? Never heard of him,’ and then call Dr. Yang and tell him to hide under his desk if you come by.”
“We wouldn’t have bought it,” Bill said. “Seriously, Jack, an artist who died at Tiananmen, whose paintings are worth hundreds of thousands—”
“Worth nothing, says Dr. Yang.”
“No, I mean the ones from twenty years ago. The real ones. What I’m saying is, this is your field. By the time we got to you we already knew enough about Ghost Hero Chau that we wouldn’t have believed you if you’d said you never heard of him. So we’d have wondered why you were lying.”
“Cool. Would you have tapped my phone or something?”
“We’d have gotten Linus to,” I said.
“Well, don’t bother. I have some pretty fancy blocking equipment up there.”
“On your cell phone, too?”
“He can tap a cell phone?”
“He can do anything as long as it plugs into something.”
“Well, now, that sounds useful.” Jack stuck his hands in his pockets and started down the hall. Bill and I flanked him. “Anyway, in all humility I mentioned that to Dr. Yang. That you guys came to me for the same reason he did. He wasn’t impressed. He doesn’t care what you think of me and he thinks I should’ve stonewalled you until I found the Chaus.” Jack shrugged. “Maybe he’s right.”
“It’s not about what we think of you,” I said. “It’s about what we’d have thought of
