Dragon Bones

by Lisa See

  The bidding hit 250,000, and Stuart Miller had yet to raise his paddle. A brief round of applause at one million caused Fitzwilliams to pause in his melody of numbers just long enough to chastise, “Ladies and gentlemen.” Then the bidding resumed, now jumping in increments of 100,000. There was a temporary lull at 1.5 million, with Bill Tang holding that bid, his paddle still held high enough for everyone to see.

  “One million five,” Fitzwilliams said. “Any advance on a million five? No more bids?” Fitzwilliams addressed Ma directly. “You, sir, staying in?”

  Ma shook his head.

  “A million five,” Fitzwilliams picked up. “Fair warning then.”

  Stuart lifted his paddle. The crowd murmured quietly. Fitzwilliams scowled like a scolding parent, immediately silencing the audience.

  “We have a new bidder,” he resumed. “A million six, seven, eight, nine, two million. Two million one, two, three, four, five.” Again the bidding halted, only this time it was Stuart who refused to go on. “Are you sure, sir?” Fitzwilliams asked.

  “Too rich for my blood, I’m afraid,” Stuart conceded.

  Fitzwilliams’s stern gaze squelched the smattering laughter.

  “Two million five Hong Kong dollars. Fair warning.” Fitzwilliams’s eyes swept the room one more time. “Are we all through then?”

  “Sir,” the woman at the phone bank called out.

  “A new bidder?”

  “Yes, Mr. Fitzwilliams, sir.”

  “Two six it is,” the auctioneer announced.

  The price for the lowly ruyi had just passed that for the blue-and-white Ming Dynasty bowl, which had been billed as the most valuable piece in the auction. There were intakes of breath as the audience absorbed this.

  Then the man in the front row said something audible only to Fitzwilliams, who rang out, “Twenty million Hong Kong dollars! Thank you, sir!”

  This was nearly ten times the last bid and well over $2 million U.S.

  “Twenty million,” Fitzwilliams repeated, then gestured casually from the man in the front row over to the woman on the phone, his motions no different than they’d been for the sale of one of Nixon Chen’s snuff bottles. The woman on the phone lifted a finger; the man in the front responded with another tip of the head. Back and forth Fitzwilliams went until the price reached 25 million Hong Kong dollars. Whoever the woman had on the phone held the bid. “It’s to the gentleman in the front row.” Nothing happened. “Want to go once more? You’re here. Whoever’s on the phone is not. His or her top price might be twenty-five million. Want to go one more shot?”

  Bill Tang finally nodded.

  “Twenty-six million,” Fitzwilliams said triumphantly, but before anyone could applaud, the woman at the phone bank lifted her hand. “Twenty-seven.” The audience let out a collective sigh of disappointment. Everyone was caught up in the drama with the man in the front row, even if they didn’t know who he was, while the person on the phone remained nameless and faceless. “We’re at twenty-seven. Coming in again, sir? Want to make it twenty-eight?”

  It seemed to David that Tang’s paddle stayed steady, but Fitzwilliams said, “No? Then fair warning to you. Selling…. Sold for twenty-eight million Hong Kong dollars.”

  The audience that one moment before had been with Bill Tang in spirit now erupted in wild applause. The ruyi had sold for a thousand times its top estimated value, and more than $3 million U.S. But the applause was cut short when Bill Tang jumped to his feet and shouted, “You cheated!”

  Fitzwilliams looked down from the podium with an expression of utter contempt. “It is a sad fact of auctions that we can’t always win.”

  “You didn’t recognize me!” Tang still hadn’t turned around, but his posture was aggressive.

  “Of course I recognized you. You were in the front row. You lowered your paddle. I saw it clearly.”

  “You shouldn’t have closed the bidding! I had my paddle up! I want to see the videotape!”

  “Sorry, Mr. Tang, but we don’t tape our sessions.”

  Fitzwilliams made a slight motion to one of the security guards, which Bill Tang caught. He turned and quickly pushed his way up the center aisle to the row where Stuart Miller sat. Madame Wang had the presence of mind to stand and edge out of the way. Tang threw her chair into the aisle and shoved his face to just inches from Stuart’s.

  “You took what’s mine!”

  “I’m afraid you’re wrong there, Bill,” Stuart responded good-naturedly. “Everyone in this room saw me bow out.”

  A pair of guards reached Bill Tang, but when they tried to take his arms he shook them off and grabbed Stuart by the lapels. “You took what’s mine, and I’ll get it back!”

  Stuart stayed relaxed as he said evenly, “I may have driven up the price a bit. I’ll happily admit to that.” The words and the smile on Stuart’s face further infuriated Tang. He shoved the entrepreneur back with such force that his chair toppled over, which caused the two people behind Stuart to fall as well. Then Tang scuffled with the guards and was led to the back of the room. David helped Stuart to his feet. Madame Wang brushed him off and straightened his jacket and tie. After a little flurry of activity as chairs were righted and more champagne poured, the auction resumed for the last lots as though nothing had happened.

  But something very significant had happened. David had recognized Bill Tang as soon has he’d come barging up the center aisle. The man whom Stuart Miller knew as Bill Tang, a foreign-born high-tech industrialist from the Silicon Valley, David had seen just last night standing on a ledge in a cave on the banks of the Yangzi River. Bill Tang was the man who called himself Tang Wenting, a lieutenant in the All-Patriotic Society, who just four days ago in Tiananmen Square had labeled Hulan “mother killer,” and who last night in the cave had singled out Stuart Miller for special censure.

  David had desperately and repeatedly tried to shift Hulan’s focus away from the All-Patriotic Society in an effort to unlock her heart, but she’d been right all along. The cult was at the center of this, although he still had no idea what this was. The questions were startling and confusing. Who was the unnamed bidder on the other end of the telephone line? Who— what—was Bill Tang? What exactly was this ruyi—which was valued at three thousand dollars but had just sold for more than $3 million? Had last night in the cave been a ruse to push Hulan into investigating Stuart at the dam, thereby delaying or halting entirely the entrepreneur’s trip to the auction? Or had it been designed to get Hulan away from Bashan for some as yet unknown reason? David didn’t know the answers, but he had to get them, because Hulan was up there in Bashan without a clue that any of this had happened.

  He pulled out her cell phone and dialed the Panda Guesthouse just as the hammer came down one last time and people applauded. All he got was an electronic whine, and he tucked the phone back in his pocket. Quickly everyone stood and began heading to the banquet room. David looked around. Bill Tang was still at the back of the room, negotiating with the guards. David had made a terrible mistake in judgment, and he had to act fast. He tried to push his way through the crowd that had suddenly clustered around Stuart to congratulate him on his triumph. It took a few seconds before David realized that Stuart was being congratulated not for the purchase of the cloisonné ruyi but for that of the Site 518 ruyi. Stuart acted charming, effusively accepting praise one moment, then coyly denying that he knew anything about the ruyi the next. “You were in the room,” he said to Nixon Chen. “You saw me drop out.” This elicited raucous laughter from the other well-wishers. Stuart’s show of bidding then dropping out had just been comical pretense for those in the know.

  Dr. Ma waited at the end of the aisle. “Mr. Miller, I hope that you’ll return what is China’s to China.”

  “If I did that, Dr. Ma, then I wouldn’t have anything in my collection.” Stuart beamed happily.

  “I’m not asking for everything, only the Site 518 ruyi.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Stuart
turned to Madame Wang and took her by the elbow. “Come along, dear,” he said, and they swept into the party.

  Ma disappeared into the crowd. David edged forward, then stopped. Ma had told him to get the ruyi. Logic told David to stick with Stuart Miller. He might even be able to convince the entrepreneur to give it back of his own free will tonight. David had several persuasive arguments, and Stuart might want to avoid a lengthy—and public—legal battle. But David wanted answers, and instinct told him that the person he needed them from was Bill Tang, who was just now finishing up with the guards, shaking hands, and smiling. David hurried to the elevator, rode it down to the lobby, and found a place to stand where he hoped he wouldn’t be noticed. Sure enough, a few minutes later Bill Tang stepped into the lobby, purposefully strode across the marble floor, and left through the revolving doors. David waited just a fraction of a second, then followed Tang out into the night.

  HULAN WAS BONE-TIRED, AND SHE WISHED SHE COULD JUST order something simple from the kitchen, but she’d told Michael Quon she’d meet him for dinner. She peeled out of her sweaty clothes and climbed into the shower. She closed her eyes and let the hot water pound the knots in the back of her neck. Then she turned off the hot tap and let the cool water chill the veins that pulsed just under the surface of her skin at her wrists and at the crooks of her elbows. For the first time since she’d gotten here, she dried her hair with the complimentary blow dryer, then put on a little lipstick and a touch of mascara. She slipped into a simple sheath of pale pink silk and strapped on a pair of sandals.

  She found Michael Quon waiting for her on the restaurant’s veranda. The red light from a hanging lantern shone on his hair. The air was hot and wet, but he managed to look utterly cool, utterly serene. Inside the dining room, the Site 518 group huddled together in their usual spot. They were deep into their meal, and bottles of Tsingtao beer rose like a model city in the middle of the table. A couple of the men waved, Angela gave a message-delivered thumbs-up, but that was it.

  Michael and Hulan were seated at a table at the back of the room. A waitress gave them menus, but before Hulan could open hers, Michael began speaking to the young woman in Mandarin, asking what was fresh and what the chef would recommend this evening. He’d been here longer than Hulan and had picked up more of the intricacies of the Sichuan dialect than she had, but this wasn’t what surprised her. His Mandarin was quite good. His American English diluted some of the tones, but beneath that she heard something pure, as though he’d spoken Chinese as a child. Still, it wasn’t a Taiwanese accent or a northern accent, either of which she might have expected given his age and that he was an American citizen by birth.

  He ordered lettuce soup, bitter melon sautéed with beef and black beans, cold soy sauce chicken, and some China pea greens with roasted garlic in chicken broth. It was not an exotic meal, but it sounded perfect after the day she’d had. The lettuce soup would be simple and rejuvenating, the bitter melon would cut through the dust and dirt of the day, the cold chicken would be refreshing and nourishing, and the pea greens—if straight from the vine, which the waitress promised they were—would be bright and new on the taste buds. The waitress picked up Hulan’s unopened menu and disappeared.

  “I hope you don’t mind,” Michael said, switching back to English.

  It had been a long time since someone else had ordered a meal for her in a restaurant, and she didn’t mind at all.

  The waitress came back with a bottle of local chardonnay and an ice bucket. Michael made small talk with the young woman as she uncorked the bottle, poured a little for him to taste, then filled both wineglasses. The liquid that slipped down Hulan’s throat was crisp and lively. It was the coldest thing she’d experienced since leaving Beijing.

  Michael’s seeming disappointment in her at the end of their walk had dissipated, and he effortlessly held up his end of the conversation. In fact, he agreeably answered questions even before she asked them, like how he’d come to be so fluent in Chinese. His parents had left Shanghai, he told her between spoonfuls of soup, and moved to San Francisco at the end of the war. His father had been an engineer, his mother a physician.

  “My brothers and I ran around all over the place,” he recalled as the waitress brought their other dishes. “In the summers, we’d go to a theater that played kung fu movies back-to-back on Monday nights, when all the Chinese chefs were off. My favorites were The One-Armed Boxer and Fist of Fury. Have you seen them?”

  “We didn’t have a lot of films here when I was young.”

  “Then I’m going to have to take you one day, because these are seminal martial arts films.” He said this only half in jest. “My brothers and I had some wild times at those programs. There were all these old bachelor chefs, smoking cigarettes and sipping from pints tucked inside brown paper bags, and then all of us kids, screaming, throwing popcorn, and peeing in the aisles. Afterward the boys would square off. American superheroes like Superman and Batman against the One-Armed Boxer and Bruce Lee—staking out territory, righting wrongs, killing the bad guys, and getting into all kinds of stuff we shouldn’t have.”

  “Like what?” Hulan asked, still visualizing little boys wreaking havoc on a movie theater.

  “Driving Mrs. Chan, our Chinese-language teacher, crazy.” He brushed a shock of hair from his forehead. “We all grew up speaking Chinese at home, but our parents wanted us to be literate. So off to Chinese school we went. But we were bad! We pulled Mrs. Chan’s laundry off the line so many times that she couldn’t hang it outdoors anymore, which I have to say was a great blessing to all, because her underwear—girdles, I guess you’d have to call them—was scary.” He paused, then added, “Of course you couldn’t be part of the gang unless you peed on Mrs. Chan’s back door. Now, that took real courage.”

  “I’m sensing a theme here….”

  He lifted his glass and toasted the air. “To silly memories.”

  “To bad boys is more like it,” she said, tapping his glass lightly.

  She liked listening to him. His candor—which had seemed forward during her interview with him in the hotel lobby because no native-born Chinese man would ever have spoken to her, an inspector from the Ministry of Public Security, so directly—now lifted her spirits. Michael didn’t know anything about her and wasn’t asking questions either. He was harmlessly entertaining, and she imagined how he might relate this evening at some fashionable Bay Area event sometime in the future: a perfect meal with a surprisingly charming and worldly Ministry of Public Security inspector in a picturesque guesthouse on the north shore of the Yangzi during monsoon season.

  “So how did you go from being a boy who literally left his mark on what sounds like every street corner in San Francisco to being here at the Panda Guesthouse?” Hulan asked.

  “The short answer is I’m a stereotype,” he replied. “My parents expected me to get into a good school and I did. I went to Stanford and got my Ph.D. in math. After graduation I got a job at Hewlett-Packard. You can probably guess the rest. I founded my own company in the early nineties. I took VYRUSCAN public before the bubble burst, and I became a very, very rich man.”

  Which seemed a very un-Chinese thing to say.

  “In a sense that was only the beginning,” he went on. “When you’ve made a lot of money, you feel compelled to make more. I started a REIT to buy land and do development deals. I put up venture capital in start-ups and was very lucky. But making money’s just a game after a while, so what’s the point? I’m not married. I don’t have children. I’ve provided for my brothers, their children, and their future grandchildren, so who was I building it all for? Once I came to that realization, I retired fully from making money.”

  “That still doesn’t explain how you ended up here.”

  “When you’re forty-two, retired, and money’s no object, how do you spend your time? Toys? Sure, I got into that. I bought a Boxster. I bought a boat and put it down in Monterey Bay. Oh, and a house, of course. But all that stuff requires work. The boa
t gets barnacles, and the Porsche is temperamental. The house needs constant upkeep. I’ve got groundskeepers and maids and—I don’t know— people in and out of the place all the time. You laugh, but it’s true!”

  Hulan was laughing, but she was also listening to the subtext. Michael Quon had been serious when he’d said he’d gotten “very, very rich.”

  “Hobbies are the other thing people in my position are supposed to take up,” he continued. “I started buying contemporary art. After that I studied the Song Dynasty poets, even sat in on a couple of classes at Stanford. I give them enough money, so why not?”

  He chatted, she listened. They ate and drank until they were full. When he finally set down his chopsticks, the waitress instantly appeared at his side and asked if they were done. He nodded, and she cleared the table. She returned again and asked if they wanted anything else.

  “Please bring some watermelon,” Michael said in Mandarin. He regarded Hulan questioningly, then asked, “How about another bottle of wine? We don’t have to drink the whole thing, but it would be nice, don’t you think?”

  When Hulan agreed, the waitress slipped away and brought back another icy bottle. She refilled their glasses, then stepped to her spot against the wall. Michael picked up where he’d left off.

  “My mother always wanted me to connect to my roots, but it took the IPO for me to begin searching for my place in the world. The old family and district associations are still operational in San Francisco, but they tend to focus on old-timers—Cantonese speakers from the early days who want only a banquet at Chinese New Year. The Organization of Chinese Americans has done a great job lobbying in Washington, but where do you put someone like me?”

  “The Committee of 100?” Hulan asked. I. M. Pei and Yo-Yo Ma had founded the group in 1989 after the crackdown in Tiananmen Square. Today it boasted 140 of the self-proclaimed most important Chinese Americans. Michael Quon should have been a member.