We talked mostly about families and the bar girls she was friends with, while I searched my memory of recent sales for ideas on Backhouse lines. The Countess von Bismarck’s two superb T’ang pottery horses averaged a quarter of a million. Promising? Not really, because these figures, usually accompanied by pottery grooms in matching glazes, are of known origin—dug up from definite graves, and horribly well documented. And scientists can tell you if the clay and minerals match the genuine locality. Sigh. No to T’ang pottery and its ancient lookalikes.
Worse, many antiques wobble in value. Ten years ago an exquisite Nicholas Hilliard miniature portrait, about one and a half inches across, went for a fortune. This year Sotheby’s sold it for 34 percent less. Take inflation into account and it’s a disaster for that lovely 1572 masterwork which Charles I had owned. Not good for me to lead the Triad into a tumbling market.
Luckily, antiques have ups as well as downs. Everybody in the game had been thrilled in 1987’s rotten summer to hear of Hong Kong’s great T. Y. Chao sale. Fine Oriental porcelain was bound to be flavor of the month. So get the correct reign marks of the right empress on the right fakes and you’re guaranteed a killing. But enough to satisfy the Triad?
“You worried, Lovejoy?” Tracy was asking.
“No, love. Just life and death.”
She laughed mechanically. Somebody called her over to the bar. She went immediately without a glance.
But Impressionist paintings rose 16 percent per annum for the past decade. You can tell your time by their regular dollar hikes. The average all-collectibles’ score is a full three points less.
My spirits rose with each thought, and I paid a fortune for my brimming untouched glasses without dismay. If art can rescue the human race as the ancients believed, why shouldn’t Lovejoy fake the Monet and run?
Time to earn my Oscar. I got a taxi.
Nothing’s built like Hong Kong. Like, one in four slopes daunt any architects, right?
Wrong. To Hong Kong’s mighty builders a vertical mountainside is a casual incline.
Want a reservoir and you’ve only got a cliff top? Easy: scoop out the cliff, and there’s a perfectly good reservoir. And of course cover your reservoir so grass can be grown on the top and sold. Want a skyscraper and you need the one bit of space you’ve got for a children’s convalescent home?—Easy: Reclaim an equal area of the China Sea with the rubble and erect your rehab unit on it, like in Sandy Bay. It’s a madhouse on the surface, but brilliance in practice. Surely these entrepreneurs wouldn’t balk at one more creative tour de force?
The taxi drove out through Kennedy Town, west from Central District past little Green Island onto Mount Davis. We snaked up the road, blissfully shaded for once by flame trees and giant bauhinias all the way to Pok Fu Lam Road.
“Hospital,” the driver pointed out, but averting his eyes as we began the descent past a red-roofed building. A dolorous group of musicians played flutes and gongs by the gullies which descended almost in vertical free-fall. I looked back but didn’t ask.
Funeral? The steep hillside below was a cemetery, stonemasons at work under sacking canopies and armchair graves along contours. He put me down in the scalding heat outside an Edwardian housefront below a walled hillside.
Dr. Surton was a benign elderly Englishman, giving his wife over twenty years. He worked in an echoing but coolish hall situated a way up the hill. Gardens climbed to it, managing paths, fountains, and even ornamental flower beds. He was alone in a side room. For the first time a place felt oldish, Chinese even.
“Lovejoy?” He did one of those half-ashamed English introductions. “Welcome to our humble abode. Before you say anything, I know we’re not quite what you expected. Did the registry give us our full title? Department of Sino- Calligraphics?”
We chatted a little, agreeing on the importance of ignoring preconceptions. A girl brought tea in a mug with a lid. Not as elegant as Ling Ling’s, but by now I was as dehydrated as a crisp. I leaned forward on my chair so my drenched shirt would not stick to the wooden back. The merciful fan wafted on me. I took out my soaked hankie, flicked it open and held it by a corner. Ten minutes under the draught and it would be dry enough to use for more blotting. My hair hung, plastered rats’ tails, sweat trickling and dripping. I’d never been wetter, not even swimming. Marvelous how many anti-sweat tricks I’d learned. He watched me sympathetically.
“Yes, hot today, isn’t it? The very best months lie Christmaswards. Three months of serene skies, lovely days, exquisite sunsets. These months sap everyone. Typhoons misbehave. Landslides, floods, water rationing. Marvelous how everybody keeps going.”
“How long have you been here, Dr. Surton?”
He smiled, wistful. “Too long, perhaps. On mainland in the old days. I’m careful what I say about those times, of course. The Kuomintang, People’s China emerging. One never knows who’s a reporter.”
“Fear not, Doc. I’ve come for advice on your subject.”
“I’m not medical,” he warned. “Some folk misunderstand terribly. Want me to set a fracture, deliver an emergency.”
“Manuscripts, paper, printing. I need to know about them.”
“Excellent!” His aged face creased in delight. “Well, the earliest datable printings come from Japan about a.d. 764—the Empress Shotuku’s ‘Million Charms,’ y’know. Block-printed. Though China actually came first. What period exactly?”
“Late 1860s, range 1850 and 1920.”
“Researching one individual, Lovejoy? A seventy-year span…”
“Well…” I sat akimbo, another local trick to dry all the faster. “Look, Doc. Please don’t think me paranoid…”
“I understand fully, dear chap,” he said earnestly. “Confidentiality’s absolute here.”
I looked about, overdoing the caution a bit, but the side room had no door.
It led into the open hall. The window shutters were ajar onto the hillside walks. Fair enough.
