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Ghost Hero

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Доступ к книге ограничен фрагменом по требованию правообладателя.

THIS BOOK IS FOR DAVID THOMPSON AND BILL REINKAMISS YA, FELLAS!

CONTENTS

Title Page

Dedication

Acknowledgments

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Also by S. J. Rozan

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A big m’goi, xie xie, and thank you to

Steve Axelrod, my agent

Keith Kahla, my editor

Dr. Qian Zhijian

Xin Song

Reed Farrel Coleman, Nancy Ennis, Ed Lin, Jonathan Santlofer, Lisa Scottoline, Keith Snyder, Joseph Wallace

Steven Blier, Hillary Brown, Belmont Freeman, Max Rudin, James Russell, Amy Schatz

Betsy Harding, Royal Huber, Tom Savage

The Museum of Chinese in America

And a wish for good fortune to

Liu Xiaobo and Ai Weiwei

In a relentlessly chic and tranquil tea shop on the Lower East Side, I sat sipping gunpowder green and trying to figure out what my new client was up to. That the client, Jeff Dunbar, sat across the table laying out the case he was hiring me for, helped not at all.

“It’s about art,” he’d begun, stirring sugar into his straight-ahead American coffee after the pleased-to-meet-yous were over.

“Art?” I’d tried to sound intrigued, as opposed to baffled, by this revelation. Dunbar had called the day before, saying he needed an investigator and had seen my Web site. I’d expected, when we met on this chilly, bright spring morning, to hear a problem that was personal—cheating fiancée, two-timing wife—or professional—industrial espionage, embezzling employees. Straying spouses and shady secretaries are my daily bread and the Web site says so. It doesn’t mention art, a specialty outside any of my areas of expertise. If this case was about art, I had to wonder, why call me?

Dunbar sent a dollop of milk to join the sugar. “I’m a collector. Contemporary Chinese art. Do you know much about that?”

Oh. This had to do with my contemporary Chineseness? “Not much, no.”

He nodded and settled back. “It’s a cutting-edge collecting area. Not really inside the PRC, even among the new rich, but in the West. Chinese painters, especially, but also sculptors, photographers, installation artists—they’re all hot.” His voice was pleasant, measured, as though lecturing at a symposium on the globalized cultural marketplace. He looked the part, too: thirtyish, short dark hair, polished shoes, the only business suit in sight. That his art and his prospective detective were both Chinese couldn’t be coincidence, but the detective’s ignorance seemed okay with him. My antennae went up. There’s a class of Westerners who “like rice”: They’re attracted to Asians, or, really, to their own exotic fantasies. If Jeff Dunbar had chosen Chinese art, and me, for that reason, he was about to get a fast good-bye. And stuck with the check.

But he didn’t look it, and he wasn’t acting it. Those guys invariably wear something Asian, at least a tie with a double-happiness pattern. They order tea. And, during Zen-like pauses, they gaze soulfully into my slanty eyes. Jeff Dunbar came across as a guy in a boring suit conducting a business meeting.

I decided to see where this was going. “Tell me about this art. I don’t think I’ve seen much of it.” I ransacked my brain, came up with little besides misty mountains and pine trees from five or six dynasties back. “Is it like classical art? Ink on paper, that kind of thing?”

“Interesting you should ask that. Mostly, no. A lot of artists now work in Western media—oils, acrylics. But the paintings I’m concerned with happen to be inks.” He set his cup down. “There’s a painter named Chau Chun. Referred to as Chau ‘Gwai Ying Shung’—Ghost Hero Chau. Have you heard of him?”

“I’m sorry, no.” I added, “Your pronunciation is very good. Do you speak Chinese?”

“Thanks. Yes, I minored in it in college. It occurred to me that people who spoke the language would be increasingly in demand.”

“And you majored in?…”

“Art, of course.”

Of course, except for the half-second pause before he said it. “I didn’t mean to interrupt. You were telling me about Ghost Hero Chau.”

“Yes. Well, Chau was a young professor at the Beijing Art Institute in the 1980s. His work from that period is very valuable.”

“How valuable is ‘very’? ”

“A piece will sell for around half a million. A little more, a little less, depending.”

Yes, I thought, that would be “very.”

“A lot of artists his age were doing experimental work in those days,” Dunbar went on, “but Chau always worked in traditional media with traditional techniques. He made brush-and-ink scrolls: mountains, plum blossoms, lotus ponds. Classical-looking, and also traditional in another sense: They were political, but in arcane ways. Hidden symbols and metaphors, that sort of thing.”

“That’s traditional? I didn’t know that.”

“Nature painting with coded commentary goes back to the Yuan Dynasty. About eight hundred years,” he added, in case I didn’t know my dynasties. “The commentary’s aimed at educated people of the painter’s political persuasion, but the coding gives the painter deniability. But don’t worry, Ms. Chin. I didn’t expect you to have any expertise in this field. That’s not why I called.”

“I have to admit that’s a relief. So tell me, what can I do for you?”

“Recently, some new paintings of Ghost Hero Chau’s seem to have surfaced. Again, inks, and again, political, criticizing the government, the Party, the economic free-for-all going on in China and the social disasters it’s causing.”

“I’m surprised that’s allowed. Criticizing the government can get you in trouble over there.”

“Very much so, if you’re an activist lawyer, say. Or a writer. Artists, less often.”

“What makes them special?”

“Oh, it could be liberalization. Those hundred flowers finally blooming. Or,” he smiled, “maybe it’s that the artists are cash cows. The West loves political work. Collectors pay a fortune and the government takes a cut.”

“It does?”

“Well, so does ours, from our artists. We call it taxes. They call it something else but the result’s the same. Also, there’s national pride. Sky-high prices make China a player in the art world.”

“But if the paintings are critical?”

“Ah, but with visual works, you can always say seeing something as antigovernment misses the point. That it was meant as ironic, tongue-in-cheek.”

“Deniability, like in the Yuan Dynasty.”

“Exactly.”

“And that’s what the artists say? To keep the government off their backs?”

“It’s what the government says, to explain why someone’s allowed to say in paint what a writer gets years of hard labor for saying in words. Of course, writers’ manifestos aren’t going for half a million U.S. dollars. The artists who get in trouble are the ones who don’t keep their mouths shut. The ones who let their work do the talking are pretty safe.”

“I see. So people like this Ghost Hero Chau are insulated by money. I guess I’m not surprised.”

But Dunbar shook his head. “Chau’s a special case. For one thing, if what I hear is true, the new paintings are here, in New York.”

“If what you hear is true? You mean you haven’t seen them?” I was getting a glimmer of what this was about.

“That’s right. I haven’t, and no one seems to know where they are. I’m hoping you can find them.”

“Because I’m Chinese?”

“That sounds like racial profiling, doesn’t it?” He smiled again. “I suppose it is. It occurred to me, if I wasn’t having any luck tracking the paintings through art channels, there might be another way. I did an online search for a Chinese investigator.”

I might have taken offense, but after all, that’s why my Chinese clients come to me, too. “Tell me something, Mr. Dunbar. If no one’s seen these paintings, what makes you think they exist?”

“Rumors. The collecting community’s always full of rumors. Backhanded, of course, because everyone’s trying to beat everyone to the prize.”

“Can you give me an example?”

“Oh, someone sidles up to you at an opening and asks if you’ve heard this nonsense about the new Chaus, the Ghost Hero’s ghost paintings that don’t exist. They’re hoping you’ll say, Yes, they do, I saw them. If you do, they’ll ask where, as if you must be crazy, and when you tell them, they’ll laugh and say you’ve lost your touch, someone’s passing off fakes and you fell for it. Ghost Hero Chau, for God’s sake. Then it’s, Oh, look at the time, I’ve got to go, and before they’re out the door they’re speed-dialing whoever you said had the Chaus.”

“And that’s been going on?”

“Variations of it. For about a week now. But I’ve spoken to the galleries and private dealers—I’m sure everyone else has, too—and I’ve gotten nowhere. Only one gallery assistant even admitted to knowing what I was talking about, and then he backpedaled. I think he realized he was in over his head. The Chinese contemporary world’s pretty small and his boss must be as eager as anyone to find these paintings. If I end up with them because this kid put me on the inside track, and his boss finds out, he’s up a creek. Plus, I just started collecting. He might be willing to go out on a limb for one of the big collectors, but he doesn’t know me from a hole in the ground.”