“Know…? Oh, read it somewhere.” I smiled reassurance, looked out. “Can’t you just see pompous old Sir Henry Pottinger riding along!”
“You see the horses?” Marilyn asked shakily.
“Oh aye,” I said. “Hundreds of the bloody things.” Barmy.
But not quite so barmy. In two days the flat was rebuilt, decorated, fitted out, and spotlessly ready. And the day following I arrived to find the materials I’d asked for from a world away, the boxes laid out in a long line.
After one quick gulp at the power of the taipans, I started work.
28
« ^ »
UNPACKING parcels is a woman’s game, like getting letters. I abhor them (letters, not women). Always bad news. But these seven boxes were fascinating in an ugly kind of way because my scam was dodging and ducking in there somewhere.
Six small cases and one huge teak crate. I began undoing them, only after the studio’s atmospheric and humidity controls were stabilized. I checked that the army of amahs had done their job—I couldn’t risk any telltale fragments of modern decorators’
synthetics giving the game away. Marilyn sat where I’d put her, incongruous but lovely on a high stool. She watched poutingly—I’d sent my downstairs amah, Ah Geen, off to her annex, and given Marilyn her first job, brewing up.
The handmade drawing paper was as I expected, labeled in its correct sizes and protected by polyethylene and thick cardboard. Brenda is a lass in the Mendips who makes for fakers full-time. A hundred sheets. The small sizes were, as always, perfect, but to my annoyance I found an uneven margin on one Columbier and a small thinning in a Double Elephant (these are the only different sizes used in the 1870s).
I muttered, “Silly cow deserves crippling—” I stopped.
“Name?” Marilyn said dutifully, writing in a notebook.
“Eh?”
“Who to be crippled? The English or the Chinese paper maker?”
I swallowed, shook my head. “Nobody. I was just… Look, love. Check with me before you order anything like that, understand? Promise?”
I swear she was disappointed. I’d barely started, and already saved Brenda Gillander a life in a wheelchair.
The Chinese fake antique papers unfortunately weren’t up to scratch—too similar to the repro tourist stuff sold everywhere. I rejected them. I started to work it out.
“Now, I’m Song Ping,” I told myself, walking about, getting into character. “Here I am, a young artist born in Canton, 1850. I travel to Europe, am amazed by the first Impressionists.” I paused at the window, trying to feel Song Ping’s response. The entire art world had been thunderstruck, after all. “I’m stunned, okay? I discard my Chinese traditions. I buy these materials, what I can with the little money I’ve got—”
“Where from?” Marilyn asked.
“Eh? Oh, good point.” I thought a second. Something plausible. “I worked in a hotel, a cafe.”
“What did they pay?”
I stared. She really believed I was truly telling her some past life I’d had. Exasperated, I said, “No, love. You don’t understand. I’m making it all up—” No use. I returned to reasoning and plotting. It was important, after all. It would be the story concocted for Stephen Surton to authenticate. “I collected what canvases, papers, pigments I could for my return to China on the Trans-Siberian Railroad. In Canton I set up an art school, an atelier of my own. And I paint. I’m the first Chinese Impressionist, see? The first few paintings I use my materials from Paris and London. Eventually they run out. I start using local Pearl River stuff, home-ground pigments, Cantonese paper, silks maybe, board, canvas.”
“What did you do for money?”
“Sponged off my sister,” I invented after a second. “Her husband’s a poor foki, works for the foreign merchants in Canton’s Bund factories. We never got on. He’d no sympathy. I arrange a couple of exhibitions—1880 or so by now—in a friend’s shop. He charges me a high percentage when some European merchant buys paintings—”
“You should have bargained harder,” Marilyn censured sternly, into my tale. “If he was your friend—”
“Shut it, you silly cow.” I paced, really motoring. “That gives us one, possibly more, paintings to be discovered soon as word gets out. In England best, Hong Kong being near Canton. Then another, maybe in Australia or New Zealand, some British soldier’s descendants unexpectedly comparing Granddad’s old painting with a photo they see in the morning paper—” I was excited, gesticulating and mouthing off as the images rose.
“We do an early Song Ping painting, put it up for a rigged auction. A display, maybe even have his workbox, like Turner’s in the Tate Gallery! We make sure it goes for a fortune at auction…! Come on, love, quick. Clear that stuff out of the way—”
She went to call the amah but I stopped her, told her to use her own lily-white hands.
She was outraged that another woman was to remain idle while she herself did something for a change, but I’m used to this. That little giveaway over Brenda, so nearly a lifelong cripple because of an unconsidered grumble, had shown me something important. Fine, I was a prisoner. But I was also plugged into a source of power more cruel and despotic than any I’d ever heard of. If I could injure at a distance, what could I do close to? Murder, perhaps? Or, more moral, execute?
We started bringing out the paints, me planning away at the seam’s details. By the time we finished—nine hours that first day—I had planned two robberies that wouldn’t really occur, a phony auction, a non-hijack and non- ransom, a riot, and an execution. Marilyn was in a mood at my silence and the work. We locked up and went for nosh. And I saw something magic. Only a paper doll’s house as it happens, but survival needs every bit of help it
