Ghost Hero

“With all respect, sir,” Jack said evenly, “I’m not sure how we could make things worse. Isn’t it already a disaster? What are your options? To junk your principles to save your daughter’s future? Or stick to your guns and watch Anna go down in flames? Ghost Hero Chau—your friend—died for his beliefs, why? So Doug Haig can pay off his house in the Hamptons? And you’d better have negotiated a job as his houseboy, because if you do what Haig wants and it ever comes out, your career’s in the toilet, too.”

From Dr. Yang’s bugging eyes I guessed people didn’t generally talk to him this way. “If it comes out? Are you threatening me, Jack?”

“No,” Jack said. “None of us would stitch you up like that. But it wouldn’t have to be us. Lots of people saw Anna working on those paintings. All the artists out at East Village saw them. Mostly they didn’t know what they were, but as soon as they’re splashed all over ARTnews, sold for half a million each and authenticated by you, you’re toast.”

Dr. Yang replied through clenched teeth. “With all respect. Jack. There is nothing you can do. There is nothing you can do but make things worse. You’re taking a risk you don’t understand. You’ll—”

“You’re wrong! We can take Haig down. At least we can try. Just give us a chance. If we screw up, we come out looking like idiots and your so-called options are still open. What could we make worse?”

It was a persuasive argument, I thought, but it didn’t move Dr. Yang. He looked like he was struggling not to explode out of his chair, leap the desk, and stomp Jack into a puddle.

Chinese standoff, I thought, in the loaded silence that followed. Locked eyes across the generations. Kind of like me and my mother.

“Dr. Yang,” I said, reaching for an answer I thought I was starting to see, “Doug Haig isn’t the only threat here, is he? These paintings have put Anna in some other kind of danger, too. Something to do with Samuel Wing, or Xi Xao, or whoever he is. So something to do with the Chinese government. Is it about her husband? Mike Liu? Is he at risk, or is she, because of these paintings?”

Dr. Yang’s face got darker. I braced for an explosion but it didn’t come. Without warning he slumped back against his chair. “Not Anna.” He spoke low, sounding defeated. I was surprised to see him that way and I wasn’t sure I liked it. “The only threat to Anna is the one you know. Nor Mike. The man in danger is Xi Xao.”

19

“Xi Xao?” I asked. “Samuel Wing?”

After a silence, the professor nodded. “The man who came to you calling himself Samuel Wing is a career PRC government official and a ranking Party member. For the last nine years he’s been in New York, assigned to the Cultural Section of the Chinese Consulate, but at the time of the Tiananmen Square protests he was a middle-level commissioner working out of the central government offices in Beijing.” His words rasped; he reached for his tea, by now long cold. “His father and mine were sworn brothers. Not related by blood, but as close as if they had been. Xi Xao is older than I, but we were each our parents’ only child and we lived on the same lane. We grew up as elder and younger brother, as close as our fathers were.

“I was in Tiananmen Square when the tanks came, trying to persuade my friend and my students to leave. However, my motives didn’t matter. Like the true protestors, I was fired on, I ran, and the next day orders had been issued for my arrest.

“I went into hiding, moving furtively from place to place, thinking I’d be discovered every minute. Almost hoping for it, because at least that would end the fear. But I wasn’t. When weeks had passed and government vigilance had slackened, I went to Xi Xao for help. It wasn’t the right thing to do. It put him in an impossible position. But there were … reasons.” He looked away. “My wife was pregnant. If I had been arrested she might have been, also. A baby born in a Chinese prison…” He trailed off, but it wasn’t a sentence he really had to finish. “Xi Xao helped me hide, and, finally, with false documents, helped Yu-feng and myself leave the country. As an obligation of friendship, his and mine, and our fathers’, too.”

Dr. Yang stopped and picked up his cold tea. “Three days ago he came to see me. He’d heard these rumors, about the new Chaus, and he was bothered. He’d rather that whole era did not get stirred up again. I told him I hadn’t heard anything, but that I’d look into it, something that in his position he couldn’t risk doing.”

“So you came to me,” said Jack.

“Yes, Jack. I went to you.” Dr. Yang drank his cold tea in small, deliberate sips. Just before he spoke again I realized what he was really doing: refilling his reservoir of steely resolve. Now he once more looked around the room, impaling each of us with his you-fail eyes. As though this were a group thesis exam and he were asking the question on which our doctorates would rise or fall, he said, “Do you understand what will happen to this man, my friend, who saved my life, and my wife’s, and my daughter’s, if this becomes known?”

Jack, the only one of us to actually have a doctorate, and thus to have been through this before, was first to break the silence. “Yes, sir, I think we do.”

“Do you, Jack? Well, let me make it clear.” The tea and the break had worked; we were back to full frontal Bernard Yang in all his ferocious glory. “He’ll be called back to China. He’ll be tried, and he’ll be executed. Executed. Are any of you prepared to take responsibility for that? I didn’t think so. Then do as I say. Get up now and leave.” He waved us away with the back of his hand. “Don’t repeat what you’ve just heard, go about your business, forget Chau Chun. It will be better for everyone.”

I looked at Jack, and at Bill. A brief flurry of eyeball discussion, and then I turned to Dr. Yang. “Professor, if Xi Xao were the only person with a stake in this, we might agree to back off. But he’s not. There’s my client, who brings the American State Department in. There are Chinese gangsters who claim to have an investment, in what we’re not sure, but they’re part of this one way or another and they care enough to shoot guns around.”

“Is that who shot at Jack yesterday?”

“Maybe. They for sure shot at him last night.”

“Last night? You didn’t tell me that.” Dr. Yang sent a look at Jack, who shrugged.

“Yes,” I said. “In Queens. They said they wanted to ‘talk.’ We scared them off—Jack did—and we’re not sure what they’re really up to, but it can’t be good. And there’s Doug Haig, and of course, you and your daughter. Our turning our backs won’t make any of those people go away, or make the situation any less complicated.”

“And your continuing to stir up these waters?” Dr. Yang said scornfully. “You can see a way that that will help?”

“If you stir the water vigorously enough,” I said with care, “you can drag mud up from the bottom. In all that swirling, muddy water, a lot of things might be able to escape.”