Chapter Twenty-Two
Brett was in China, in the tent set up at the dig for the archaeological staff. She was asleep, but the sleeping bag was badly placed, and the ground was hard beneath her. The gas heater had gone out again, and the bitter cold of the high-plateau steppe gnawed at her body. She had refused to go to the embassy in Beijing to have the encephalitis shot, so now she was sick with it, sick with the searing headache that was the first symptom, racked with the chills that came as the brain swelled with the infection that brought death. Matsuko had warned her about it, had had her own vaccination when she was in Tokyo.
If she had another blanket, if Matsuko would bring her something for the pain in her head. . . She opened her eyes, expecting to find the canvas side of the tent. Instead, she saw grey stone under her arm, and then a wall, and then she remembered.
She closed her eyes and lay still, listening to see if he was still in the room. She raised her head and judged that the pain was bearable. Her eyes confirmed what her ears had already told her: he was gone, and she was alone in this room with his collection.
She pushed herself to her knees, then, using the chair to steady herself, got to her feet. Her head pounded, and the room swirled around her for a moment, but she stood and closed her eyes until things grew steady. Pain radiated out from beneath her ears, pushing its way into her skull.
When she opened her eyes, she saw that one wall was filled with windows covered with iron gratings. She forced herself to walk across the room to try the door, but it was locked. At first, the pain jolted with every step, but then she forced herself to relax the muscles of her jaw, and it abated minimally. She went back to the windows, pulled the chair over beneath them and very slowly climbed up on to it. Beyond the window, she saw the roof of the house on the opposite side of the
Beyond the window, the rain pounded down, and she was suddenly conscious of her clothing, wet and clinging to her body. She climbed unsteadily down from the chair and looked around the room, searching for some source of heat, but there was none. She sat on the chair, wrapped her arms around her body, and tried to fight off the tremors of cold that racked her. She clutched her hands against her sides, and her hand felt something hard. The belt hook. Through the sodden cloth, she covered it, talisman-like, with her hand and pressed it tight against her body.
A block of time passed; she had no idea how long. The light coming through the windows diminished, changing from the leaden dullness of day to the penumbra of approaching night. She knew there had to be lights in the room, but she lacked the strength to try to find them. Besides, light would change nothing; only warmth would help.
At some point in all of this, she heard a key in the door, and then it opened, allowing the man who had hit her to enter. Behind him came the younger man who had led her up the steps, how long ago she couldn’t remember.
‘Professoressa,’ the older man said, and he smiled, ‘I hope we’ll be able to continue our conversation now.’ He turned and said something to the younger man, speaking in a dialect that she thought was Sicilian but that was so fluid and filled with elided sounds that she understood nothing. Together, they came across the room towards her, and Brett couldn’t resist the impulse to get up from the chair and put it between herself and them.
The older man stopped near the case that held the low brown bowl and turned his attention to that. The younger man stopped beside him, his eyes flitting back and forth between him and Brett.
Once again, with the delicacy of the connoisseur that characterized his every motion when handling the pieces from his collection, he removed the Plexiglas cover and lifted down the low bowl. Like a priest carrying an offering towards some distant altar, he came across the room to her, carrying it in both hands. ‘As I was saying before we were interrupted, I think it’s from Ch’ing-hai Province, though it might well come from Kansu. You understand why I can’t send it for an expert opinion.’
Brett turned up her chin and looked at him, then shifted her glance to the younger man, who had appeared, an acolyte, at his side. She looked at the bowl, saw its beauty, and looked away, uninterested.
‘You can see, just here,’ he said, turning the bowl fractionally, ‘where the rings were sealed together. Strange, isn’t it, that it should look so much like a pot that was thrown on a wheel. And the design. I’ve always been interested in the way primitive people used geometric shapes, almost as if they somehow foresaw the future and knew we’d get back to them.’ He turned his attention, somewhat reluctantly, away from the bowl and glanced down at Brett. ‘As I said, it’s the most beautiful piece in my collection. Perhaps not the most precious, but it’s still the one I love the most.’ He chuckled under his breath, sharing a joke with a colleague. ‘And what I had to do in order to get it.’
She wanted to close her eyes, her ears, and not listen to this lunacy. But she remembered the last time she had ignored him, and so looked up at him and made an inquisitive grunt, not able to risk speech for the pain that she knew it would bring.
‘A collector in Florence. An old man and very obstinate. I had met him because of some common business dealings, and when he learned that I had an interest in Chinese ceramics, he took me to his home to show me his collection. Well, when I saw this piece, I fell in love with it, knew I wouldn’t be happy until I had it.’
He raised the bowl a bit higher and turned it again, studying the fine tracery of black lines that ran along its side and crawled up over the edge and into the centre of the bowl. ‘I asked him if he would sell it to me, but he refused, said he wasn’t interested in the money. I offered him more, made him an offer that was far more than the bowl was worth, and then I doubled the offer when he refused.’ He took his eyes from the bowl and looked down at her, attempting to reconstruct and thus explain his indignation. He shook his head and returned his attention to the bowl. ‘He still refused. So I had no choice. He simply left me no choice. I had made him an offer that was more than generous, but he wouldn’t take it. And so I had to use other methods.’
He looked down at her, clearly willing her to ask him what he had been constrained to do. And as that verb passed through her mind, Brett suddenly realized that all of this was no script he had prepared to justify his actions; this was not a scene he was constructing in order to fool her into taking his part. He believed this. He had wanted something, it had been refused him, and so he had been constrained to take it. As simple as that. And in the same instant she saw where she was: standing in his way, impeding the freedom with which he might possess the ceramics he had gone to so much trouble and expense to take from the exhibition at the Ducal Palace. And she knew then that he was going to kill her, blot out her life as casually as he had struck out at her when she refused to answer his question. Involuntarily, she moaned, but he took it as a question and went on.
‘I wanted to arrange it to look like a simple robbery, but if the bowl had been taken, he would have known that I was involved. I thought of having it removed and then burning down his villa.’ He paused and sighed at the
