by S. J. Rozan
“Good afternoon,” he said. “May I help you? Have you had tea?”
“Yes, thank you,” I answered. “We’ve just finished.” I didn’t want to start with the whole tea business; we weren’t planning to buy anything, and we had other things to do. “I’d like to ask you something, if I may.”
“Of course.” He smiled at the others and turned his attention politely to me, slightly surprised at the lack of subtlety involved in my dealing directly with him, but wanting to make sure we understood his willingness to work within the current world order, whatever it was. I was a little disappointed to see that his glasses glittered with the same bright glint as the jewels in the window. Bill might be on to something, after all.
“My grandfather,” I said, “has always worn a jade pendant, a carved Buddha. Something like the one you have here.” I pointed to a velvet-covered tray in the glass display case. “It’s about three hundred years old and valued at one hundred thousand dollars, Hong Kong dollars. He bought it in Hong Kong twenty-five years ago. Since I arrived in Hong Kong I’ve seen others, like yours—” He slid open the back of the case and withdrew the velvet tray, placing it on the counter, in case what I’d come to do was buy another one. “—but they’re all new.” As he lifted the pale green Buddha by its golden chain and placed it in my hand it seemed the least I could do to add, “Some of them are beautiful, of course.”
The young man smiled, and looked from Bill to Mark, to make sure they both noticed how much I liked this piece.
“What I was wondering was how rare a piece like my grandfather’s is,” I said. “I mean, something that old. If I wanted to buy one like it in Hong Kong now, could I?”
The young man pursed his lips as he considered my question, and some way to answer it that would end with me walking out of here wearing the laughing Buddha I right now held in my hand.
“Yes, it would be possible,” he answered me. “Pieces of that age are rare but not unknown. Hong Kong has a number of shops that deal in those items. Here, of course, we only carry unique pieces, designed and made for us. A customer purchasing a piece here can be assured that he—or she,” he interjected with a smile, “—is the first to own it.”
Good move, I thought, bringing up that first-owner thing. There’s a risk involved in buying old things, if you don’t know whose they were. They might come with some karma you don’t need, left over from the previous owner.
Smiling to acknowledge his consideration for the spiritual life of his customers, I asked, “Where do those pieces come from? The old ones, I mean? Hong Kong people who don’t want them anymore?”
“Most will come from local collectors, or old families,” he said, almost visibly disappointed that I hadn’t risen to the new-and-unique-piece bait. “Others, despite the laws, are imported from China. Many antiquities were destroyed during the Cultural Revolution, but many were hidden and preserved. Now all China wants to be like Hong Kong, so China’s treasures are being sold abroad. The government disapproves and tries to stop the trade, but who was it who said ‘To be rich is glorious’?”
The answer to that was Deng Xiao-Ping, but it wasn’t a real question, so I moved on.
“So if I wanted a piece like my grandfather’s,” I asked, “I could find it in Hong Kong?”
“Yes,” he acknowledged. “You could.”
I smiled again as we thanked him and left, because he clearly wasn’t about to tell me where.
We stood, Mark and Bill and I, in the carpeted corridor of the Furama, surrounded by expensive shops and hushed sounds. “Well, guys,” I said, “what now?”
Mark said, “I want to drop in on L. L. Lee.”
“His shop will be open on Sunday?”
Mark nodded. “In the afternoon. If he’s not there, I’ll go up to his place. I always wanted to see it anyway.”
“His place is famous?”
“He lives along Harlech Road, on the Peak. They say he has some of his most valuable antiquities up there, in the house and the gardens. A lot of the houses on the Peak have gates, but Lee’s gates have two Ming lions just inside them, to keep the riffraff out.” Mark grinned. “No cop’s ever gotten past the lions.”
I was about to ask him if Bill and I could come along, when a cell phone rang.
Bill’s hand went to his jacket pocket, Mark’s to his belt, mine to my bag. When all the phones were out and opened, Mark won.
“Wai!” Then a brief silence, during which Bill and I put our phones away. In his American-accented Cantonese, Mark asked a few questions, listened to the response, and in a voice of resignation told them he’d be right there. He folded his phone up and said, “Damn.”
“What is it?” I asked.
“I’m not on duty,” he said, “but I’m on call. We rotate as backup in case the guys on duty are out taking care of something when something else comes in. Usually it doesn’t, but it just did. A floater in the harbor.” He shook his head ruefully. “Some poor fisherman gets drunk and falls out of his sampan, call Quan. The 14K and the Wo Shing Wo hold a shoot-out on Queen’s Road, make sure Quan’s got some fisherman who fell out of his sampan to keep him busy.”
“Does this mean there’s about to be a shoot-out on Queen’s Road?”
“No. But it means I’ve got to go deal with this. I’ll call you as soon as I can.”
So Mark Quan left us in the middle of the lobby of the Furama Hotel, heading back out along the same bridge Bill and I had come in from. I watched him walk away, with his loose, easy stride; then I turned to Bill.
“Tang dynasty horses,” I said, “are beautiful clay sculptures. I saw some at the Met once, in a show from the museum in Taiwan. Did you go to that show?”
“Yes.”
“Then you know what I mean. And don’t you feel a need to see those horses again?”
He looked at me. “I do,” he said. “And soon.”
“Well, if you really feel that way, I understand there’s a dealer up on Hollywood Road who handles them.”
“I think I’ve heard about him. L. L. Lee?”
“That’s who I had in mind.”
“Good,” Bill said. “Let’s go.”
nine
I unfolded my map of the Hong Kong Island side and perused it. “If we go that way,” I said, pointing out the hotel window, “and walk along that road, we’ll get to the escalater.” I headed to the staircase down to the ground floor.
“We’ll get to what escalator?” Bill asked, following along.
“The one that runs up the hill.”
“Oh, that escalator.”
I glanced over at him. “You’re clueless, aren’t you?”
“Only a little.”
“You should have read the guidebooks to find out all the stuff that happened here in the last twenty years. They have an outdoor escalator that runs up the whole side of the mountain. To solve the traffic problem, all those people living up there and working downtown. It runs downhill in the morning and uphill in the afternoon and at night.”
Bill raised his eyebrows in acknowledgement of my superior erudition. Taking a breath, I plowed out from the air-conditioned hotel into the damp hot day and led the way superiorly along the avenue, wading through the ocean of young Filipina women. By the time we’d gone a few blocks, their numbers had thinned, reduced to small groups here and there in the shade, tide pools and rivulets the sea had left behind.
I turned us left off the avenue up a shortcut alley too narrow for the sun to penetrate, though I didn’t notice it being any cooler in the shade. Bill stopped and bought us plastic cups of fresh-squeezed watermelon juice from a storefront juiceman, and from the shadows of doorways children and adults watched us drink it. We glugged it down and turned right at the end of the alley, walked another block, and there was the escalator.
Superior knowledge notwithstanding, the first sight of the thing was breathtaking. It had an aluminum canopy for a roof, but it had no sides, and mostly it wasn’t really an escalator, it was a ser
ies of moving walkways like at the airport, except inclined. And it went on up the hill for a mile, carried at second-story height above the streets on steel columns, very close to the buildings on one side, with staircases down from it every couple of blocks so you could get on or get off.
“Very clever,” Bill said, “these Chinese.”
We climbed the stairs and joined everyone else, part of the slow-moving stream of people floating past the windows of upstairs dentists’ offices, dingy small factories, used bookstores, apartments. I could have leaned over and grabbed a teapot from a kitchen windowsill, or a potted plant from a balcony. Some of the places we drifted by had rice-papered their windows, and one or two offices in newer buildings used clouded glass; but mostly, the goings-on within the walls at ten, fifteen, twenty feet above the sidewalk were as open to our view as the things that happened at street-level would be anywhere else.
I stared as we rode by, trying to take in the lives of all these people: the dentist picking up his drill while from the chair the patient watched his every move; the frowning lathe operator oiling a recalcitrant gear; the student turning pages in her textbook. Little old ladies made tea, middle-aged men read the newspaper, children crawled on the floor in tiny kitchens and bedrooms, all on top of each other, and me and Bill and thousands of other moving people practically in their laps. Because of the traffic below and the escalator machinery and the Sunday jackhammer shift filling the air, you couldn’t hear anything from inside these places, but you could see. I wondered if some of the moving people peered into some of the same apartments and businesses day after day, if it became like a soap opera you watched for half a minute in the morning and again in the evening, and you had to figure out what had happened in between for yourself.
“We can’t go in together,” I said to Bill as we came to the end of the last walkway we needed, about halfway up. We stepped from it to the platform at the top of the stairs.
“To Lee’s?” he asked.
“In case Franklin’s told him about us. About Grandfather Gao’s emissaries. Two individual Americans out shopping, no problem. But as a pair we’re a little unmistakable.”
“Granted. So how do you want it?”
“Me first Give me a few minutes, then come on in.”
“What are we looking for?”
“I have no idea.”
“Oh,” he said. “Well, I’m good at that.”
We headed down to the sidewalk.
Hollywood Road ran perpendicular to the escalator, a curving, one-way, hilly street lined on both sides with shops famous for antiquities, carpets, old furniture, and quality reproductions. In most of central Hong Kong, the shop signs were in both English and Chinese. It was like that here on Hollywood Road, and because this merchandise was high-end, the English words were the big and flashy ones.
Getting from one side of Hollywood Road to the other, I realized, was going to be a major challenge, given the speed and density of the traffic, even on Sunday. We had to do it, though, because the address of L. L. Lee Oriental Antiques put it a few hundred yards west of us, on the other side of the street.
“I needed that,” I said to Bill as I leapt onto the opposite curb, ignoring the blasting of horns and the curses of drivers. I straightened my shirt and smoothed my hair. Bill had arrived a few seconds before me, having taken advantage of a lumbering truck to stride across the street while I was staring into the window of a carpet store.
“Needed what?”
“That adrenaline rush. Fights jet lag, you know.”
“I’ll remember that.”
“No, you won’t.”
“I would if I weren’t jet-lagged. Okay, you have ten minutes.”
I wiped the sweat from my forehead and headed down the street to L. L. Lee Oriental Antiques. When I reached the storefront I stood for a moment, just to look.
L. L. Lee’s shop was narrower than some of the others I’d passed. Like them it had a glass door and a glass show window; but here the painted screen just inside the door and the two large red lacquered armoires standing in the show window blocked the shop’s interior from the street. The only way to find out what made up L. L. Lee’s world was to step inside it.
So I did.
The heavy glass door, as it shut behind me, totally silenced the horns and the tires and the jackhammers, refused entrance to the dust and the glaring sun and the hot sticky air: a miracle of modern building technology, transparent to the eye, opaque to the ear. I’d have to ask Bill later, I thought, how they did that.
I stepped around the screen with its peonies and pines, and I stopped. The shop was unnaturally quiet, not only for Hong Kong, but for any place I’d been, anywhere with cars outside and radios in the next room and people talking on the sidewalk. In old China, homes faced inward, solid walls to the street and your neighbors, windows and doors and columned walkways opening onto your own shady courtyard. The rooms in those houses might have been like this: cool and quiet and rich, perfumed with the mingled smells of sandalwood and camphorwood, incense and leather. In those houses the generations lived together, and the ghosts of the dead never left.
I started forward, trying to shake the feeling of being uninvited, an intruder in someone’s courtyard home. I looked around me, at the past. Red bridal cabinets painted with idyllic scenes of arched bridges and willow trees stood next to teakwood trunks, below shelves crowned with scrollwork. Square chairs lacquered red like the cabinets sat patiently under elaborately carved tables, waiting for someone to come and contemplate the clay and bronze sculptures resting on every surface. Painted scrolls of misty mountains, spotted with the red chops of owners through the centuries announcing to later generations each one’s approval of the work, hung on a dark red wall. On a shelf I spotted my Tang dynasty horses, four of them, little fat ponies with simple saddles, their heads turned slightly left as though they’d just noticed you and hoped you wanted to go for a ride.
In pools of lamplight and in the shadows between them, each piece of dark wood furniture, each clay or bronze figure that crowded the narrow shop seemed to be dwelling still in the age that produced it.
Gazing at this and that, wondering about the ages of paper and bronze and clay, the lives they had led, I had worked my way deep into the shop. I was inspecting a bronze temple bell, cool and heavy to the touch, when my eye caught a movement in the shadows. I turned. High on the back wall, near a latticework cabinet lined with ginger jars and cricket cages, smudges of smoke floated from incense sticks at a small altar. Beneath was a low opening surrounded by a deep and heavily carved wood frame, probably originally a temple entrance, of an age I could only imagine. In the opening’s dimness I could just make out a slender shape, a man, unmoving, draped in loose cloth. It might have been an ancient monk, come to learn who was approaching the temple precincts. Motionless, he regarded me as I stood in this room, all of bright hot noisy Hong Kong beyond the door behind me, the shadowy, unfamiliar past enveloping me from walls, shelves, floor and tables, crowding me close.
Unexpectedly, I shivered; it must be that Hong Kong too-cold air-conditioning, though it didn’t seem every cold in here.
The figure in the doorway didn’t move. Neither did I. The scent of the incense drifting around me was sweet and familiar: It was the type Grandfather Gao used, in his orderly, quiet shop on the other side of the world. A memory of a time many years ago in that shop came to me, an image seen as through a vanishing of smoke: myself, lifting the lid of a porcelain jar as big as I was, standing on tiptoe to see its contents. My mother, embarrassed, scolding, uselessly ordering me to be still. And Grandfather Gao calmly reassuring my exasperated mother that my endless activity and inability to sit still were not a worry: “A person moving fast enough will come to be everywhere at once. Finally, being everywhere, she will find no need to move at all.” As a child I’d known that wasn’t true and I’d giggled at how silly this dignified old man could be. Now, looking at this indistinct, unmoving figure in a dim Hong Kong sh
op, I wondered whether, as usual, Grandfather Gao had meant much more than he’d said.
For once motionless myself, I returned the gaze of the cloth-draped form. A few more silent moments passed; then he took a step through the doorway. My heart skipped. He moved forward, stopping in front of me in a circle of yellow lamplight. He revealed himself to be a thin elderly man, his gray hair cut very short, his monk’s robes resolving into a dark silk tunic and pants of the old style. Really, Lydia, I thought, ordering my heart back to normal. An ancient monk. Please.
The old man didn’t smile and his eyes didn’t leave me as he said formally, “Welcome to my shop.” He spoke in Cantonese. I smiled with more ease than I felt and answered him.
“Thank you,” I said. “Are you Mr. Lee?”
He folded one hand over the other and held them out to me, bowing in the Chinese manner.
“I’m afraid my Cantonese is poor,” I went on, trying to put a lot of New York into my words. “Do you speak English?”
That, of course, was for Bill’s benefit, for when he got here.
“If you prefer,” Mr. Lee answered, unruffled, in clear, precise English. Gazing directly at me, he asked, “Is there something in particular which you wished to see?”
I had the disconcerting feeling that that was not the question to which he wanted an answer. Determined to act as though this were a normal shopping expedition, I smiled again and said, “I’m in Hong Kong visiting my brother, and I wanted to get him a gift.” I spoke apologetically. “I know he likes antiques, but I don’t know anything about them. All these different things.” Mr. Lee’s face was impassive. I turned to a shelf. “But these horses, for example. How could anyone not love them? They’re so charming. And those figures—tell me about them.” I pointed to two flat-fronted little bronze men at a bronze table, tiny wine cups and game pieces on the gameboard between them.
