“Oh? How’s that?”
I repeated, “We need a meeting.”
Bill showed up at Jack’s office twenty minutes later. I buzzed him in and met him at the door.
“Am I in time?”
“Plenty,” I said. “Jerrold will be here in half an hour.”
“Not for that. To see Jack’s outfit.”
“The outfit, yes,” said Jack, coming out of the bathroom in black jeans and a white Oxford shirt. His wet hair was combed back and his face showed every sign of being freshly scrubbed. He pointed to the padded jacket and discount pants hanging over a chair.
“That’s all I get?”
“Can get accent also.” Jack bowed, speaking in Lin’s nasal tones. “Small scholar of Hohhot does not wish to disappoint.”
“He was great,” I told Bill.
“Vass he chust as great as Vladimir Oblomov, do you tink?”
“Oblomov, forgive me say so, but is coarse man,” Jack said. “Dr. Lin Qiao-xiang, much more refined.”
“Dah, you mean, sissy. Real man tuff like Oblomov.”
“Could you two pretend your native language is English?” I broke in. “We have work to do.”
The English thing was put off a little, though, because for our next trick, Jack and I listened in while Vladimir Oblomov called Lionel Lau.
“Meester Lau, Oblomov here. Pleasure to talk to you.… Chust fillink you in, need to esk a favor.… Good, Meester Voo already told you about Chaus? He did great job, by de vay, keepink his mouth shut.… Oh, yes, two million dollars, cute leetle Lydia says.” I gave Bill the stink-eye, but he was in character, so he just shrugged. “Vun tink, now, Meester Lau. Dose friends I vass tellink you about? Dey vould be very grateful, you do dis vun tink for dem. …”
* * *
Although Dennis Jerrold tried to keep his face pleasantly neutral as he stepped into Jack’s office forty-five minutes later, it wasn’t hard to tell he found the surroundings more congenial than my Canal Street back room. Well, nuts to him. “Hi, Mr. Jerrold,” I said. “Thanks for coming.”
“Thanks for making the meeting place so convenient. Is this your office?” That question, addressed to Bill, must have been diplomacy, because he couldn’t have been serious. Even bling-free, Bill does not look like an uptown- office kind of guy.
“Mr. Jerrold,” I said, “if we’d known from the start where you worked we could have made all our meetings more convenient. No, this is Jack Lee’s office—you met him, remember?—and he was supposed to be back here by now. I don’t see why we shouldn’t start without him, though. Would you like some coffee? Tea?”
He wanted coffee, of course, and so did Bill, and I made myself some green tea from the supplies Jack had replenished specifically to make this afternoon run smoothly.
“The paintings,” I said. “The Chaus you hired me to find. There are four, we found them, they’re fakes, and as I said on the phone, they won’t be authenticated and they won’t be sold. Though they’re really beautiful, as it happens.” I sipped my tea: high-quality, but I’d made it too strong.
“Beauty’s not the point,” Jerrold said.
“That’s the problem with politics,” said Bill.
“Yes, fine, we’ll debate that some other time. Where did they come from?”
“I can’t tell you who made them,” I said. “What I can say is, they do have Mike Liu’s poems on them, and not only would showing them next week have embarrassed the PRC, it seems that was the whole point.”
“That’s why they were made?”
“No, but it’s why they were going to be shown. If you want to tell your boss, and he wants to tell Mr. Jin at the Consulate, and you want to modestly take credit for saving the PRC some serious face, we’ll back you up.”
“Well, I’ll certainly do that if it’s the best I can get. Though I’d really like to know—”
“You’re not going to know, so forget it.”
He pursed his lips. A sticky point in the negotiations; pass it by, accomplish something else so you and the other party can feel good about each other, return later. “But don’t we still have a problem?” We. Give the other party the sense you’re on the same team. “You said there were three real Chaus about to come on the market.”
“Yes. From a private collection.”
“The interest in Chau brought them into the open?”
“In a way, it did. I don’t think we can stop their sale. But forewarned is forearmed. We can tell you where they’ll be shown and who’s doing the authentication. You can tell the people at the Consulate. They can get their own experts, pooh-pooh the whole thing, whatever they want to do. Cast some doubt, be wet blankets.”
“All right,” Jerrold said, setting his cup down. “I think—”
I was interested to know what he thought, but I wasn’t destined to find out. The door popped open and Jack popped through it.
“Hi!” he said. “Mr. Jerrold, sorry I wasn’t here to greet you. Welcome to my world.” He pulled off his leather jacket. “Hey, coffee! What a great idea.”
