Ghost Hero

by S. J. Rozan

  “What’s love got to do with it? Seriously, sure we like each other. She really would have called me to see that Jin Nong just because she knew I’d be interested, even though I can’t buy it. But if she had any chance at getting her paws on the Chaus, you’d better believe she’d have iced me faster than you can say ‘Frost Jack.’”

  “You didn’t just make that up.”

  “Not bad, right?”

  “He’s used it before,” Bill said.

  “So”—I led the descent into the subway—“having decided she could afford to be helpful, how helpful was she?”

  “Hard to say. She heard the buzz at an opening last week, but she can’t remember who from. Contemporary Chinese sculpture, at Red Sky Gallery in Chelsea. We can go over there later if you want, though I’ve seen the show and it’s awful.”

  “She didn’t hear it from Shayna? Right at her own front desk?”

  “Interestingly, no. Possibly interestingly also,” Jack said, swiping his MetroCard, “Red Sky is a couple of ambitious, currently penniless young guys on the top floor of the same building with Baxter/Haig.”

  The six train, obviously not wanting to make a liar out of me, swept in, scooped us up, and hauled us down to Astor Place. We picked our way along the student-clogged sidewalks over to Washington Square Park, where we manuevered past a steel band, a fire-eater, a mournful guitarist, and about a million dogs and their walkers to reach the nineteenth-century department store turned temple-of-learning where Dr. Yang was holed up.

  Jack took us up to the fourth floor and along a hallway lined with posters of Japanese anime characters and Hong Kong movie stills. Bulletin boards held tacked-up announcements for summer study programs in Taipei, Seoul, and Ulaanbaatar. I stopped at a theater bill featuring an angry Asian woman waving a big dripping knife, for a show called Alice in Slasherland.

  “I can’t help noticing there are no misty mountains.”

  “This isn’t the art department.” Jack knocked on a door. “It’s A/P/A Studies. Asian/Pacific/American,” he expanded, ostensibly for Bill’s benefit, though I’d have had to stop and think about it, myself. “Culture in context.”

  The door opened, revealing a large park-facing office with bookshelves and big windows. Behind the desk sat a tallish Asian man with brush-cut gray hair. In front of us, her hand on the doorknob, was a young, also tall, Asian woman. Her high-cheekboned face lit. “Jack! Daddy didn’t tell me you were coming.”

  “Hi, Anna. He didn’t tell me you’d be here, either.” Jack and Anna exchanged a quick kiss.

  “Hello, Jack,” said the man behind the desk, in a deep and Mandarin-inflected voice. He didn’t smile, just gave me and Bill a narrow-eyed glance; apparently we were another thing nobody had been told about.

  I looked around. Artwork hung on the walls, divided by bookcases like battling siblings better off separated. I found a canvas of subtle gray stripes soothing, and a calligraphic scroll seemed downright antiquated until I realized the flowing ink strokes formed, not Chinese characters, but character-shaped English words. That struck me as funny, but maybe I was missing some profound point. The neon-colored oil of a garish peony in a parched desert, on the other hand, would definitely take some getting used to.

  “Are you hot on the trail of something?” Anna asked Jack.

  I shifted my focus from art to people in time to see Dr. Yang flash a warning look behind Anna’s back. “Not really,” Jack said. “These are friends of mine. They’re interested in new Chinese art so I thought they’d better meet Dr. Yang.”

  Anna’s smile widened to include me and Bill. “Hi, I’m Anna Yang. The great man’s daughter.” We shook hands all around. “He is a great man, too,” she said. “He can be opinionated, though. But I guess that’s what people want, his opinions. Just don’t let him bully you.”

  Professor Yang frowned. “I don’t bully.”

  “Yes, Daddy.” As Anna Yang walked back to her father’s desk, I considered her. Her smile seemed genuine enough, but I got the feeling it wasn’t telling the whole story. Her eyes weren’t joining in. Anna kissed her father’s cheek and said to us, “Sorry I can’t stay to offer dissenting views in case you need them. Jack, I’ll see you sometime soon?”

  “You have anything new? I’ll come out and take a look.”

  “You mean, if I don’t, you won’t?”

  “Go all the way to Flushing to see work that’s ten minutes ago? Oh, okay. Soon.”

  Anna smiled and left, closing the door behind her.

  At a nodded invitation from Dr. Yang, Jack and I settled into the office’s two visitor chairs, leaving Bill to lean against the windowsill overlooking the park.

  “How’s she doing?” Jack asked Dr. Yang.

  “It’s a difficult situation,” Dr. Yang replied. I didn’t know what the question referred to, but I could tell that wasn’t an answer.

  Jack tried another: “Any word from Mike?”

  “Would we expect that?” With those words and a sharp shake of his head Dr. Yang closed out the subject of his daughter. “Jack, go down the hall to the faculty lounge and bring your friend a chair.”

  “It’s all right, sir,” Bill said. “I like the view.”

  Dr. Yang swiveled to Bill for a moment. “Very well.” He turned back to Jack. “Tell me how I can help you.”

  Jack paused before he answered. I hadn’t known him long, but I’d gotten the impression that, with the possible exception of flying bullets, nothing fazed him. This hesitation was something I hadn’t seen before.

  He plunged. “You probably guessed it’s about Chau Chun.”

  Dr. Yang’s face darkened. “Jack. I asked for discretion. Did—”

  “I know,” Jack said. “I’m sorry. But Lydia and Bill are also investigators. I didn’t go to them. They came to me.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I brought them here so you could meet them, and they could meet you. In a minute they’ll leave and you and I can talk privately. This morning a man I don’t know, a collector, hired Lydia and Bill to find the new Chaus.”

  I’d have given Bill a raised-eyebrow glance, asking if he’d known he and I were going to leave in a minute, but I was busy watching Dr. Yang for his reaction to this news.

  He wasn’t delighted, that’s for sure. His brow furrowed and his dark gaze fixed first on Jack, then on me, Bill, me again. He could give Bill’s eye-drill a run for its money. In case he was unsure which of us to address, I helped him out.

  “We went to Jack for background. We had no idea he’d been hired to do the same thing.”

  “And now you do.” Dr. Yang shot Jack an angry look, then asked me, “What does your client want with the paintings?”

  “Just to find them. He wants to beat out the other collectors.”

  “How does he know about them?”

  “Rumors, he says.”

  “He hasn’t seen them?”

  “No. How do you know about them, Dr. Yang?”

  “The same way. Rumors.” Dismissing the question, as well as, it seemed, my right to ask it, the professor stared at the gray-striped canvas on the wall. Maybe he needed to be soothed. “Who is he?”

  “My client? I’m sorry, I can’t tell you anything more than that he’s a collector. New in the field, he says.”

  Dr. Yang gave an impatient head shake. “Why does he want the paintings?”

  “Because they’re worth a lot.”

  “They’re worth nothing. They’re forgeries. He can stop wasting his money.”

  Hmm. Paying me was wasting my client’s money? “If you haven’t seen them—”

  “Chau Chun is dead!”

  “I know that’s what everyone says, but—”

  “He is dead!”

  “Isn’t it possible—”

  “No. It’s not.” The force of his glare almost knocked me off my seat. He pinned me with it another moment, then let out a long breath. “I was there.”

  Jack’s eyebrows rose. �
�You didn’t tell me that.”

  “Did you need to know it?” The professor swung the Jupiter-gravity stare to Jack. “That I held my friend’s hand as he died?”

  The room crackled. “I’m sorry,” Jack said. “But I think I did need to know. I thought you weren’t involved in the democracy movement.”

  “In the movement! No. I was a painter. I cared only for my art. My students. And my friends.” Dr. Yang turned to the sardonic canvas of the barren desert with the bright, impossible bloom. After a long moment, he spoke. “The students—Chau’s, and mine, everyone’s, from the universities of Beijing and from the countryside—had been occupying Tiananmen Square for days. With such hopes, such sense of power and possibility! Chau was with them from the first, teaching his classes on the paving stones, believing with them that things could change.” Yang’s face darkened. “I thought he was a fool.”

  None of us spoke, waiting.

  “Then the rumors: tanks, troops, the army on the way. People laughed. Send the army against a peaceful protest? That was the old way. This is the New China. But people coming in from the countryside reported it breathlessly. Tanks, massing nearby, undeniable. The crowd became uneasy. Then the loudspeakers, the warnings: Clear the Square! Public order will be maintained! The mood changed again. Anger and defiance. The students were doing what the law allowed. They would stay!” He shook his head. “People went to the Square, people of influence, to beg them to leave. I went, also, to Chau, to our students. What you’ve done is noble and courageous, I said, but you’ve lost. Go home, wait for another chance. They wouldn’t go. This is the chance! I stayed, trying to persuade. Finally, the tanks came.” Another long pause. “The soldiers were weeping. When the order came, some fired into the air, over the students’ heads.”

  In the silence, Dr. Yang stared at the painting, but we could all tell he wasn’t seeing it. Finally he spoke again, in changed, cold tones. “There, Jack. Is that what you needed? Tell me, does that help you?”

  In a quiet voice, but a firmer one than I could have found, Jack said, “I’m sorry. I appreciate how hard that must have been. But it does help and I wish you’d told me sooner. For one thing, if you were with Chau when he died, it makes it a lot less likely that he’s alive and painting these paintings.”

  “Less likely? It was never possible!” Dr. Yang pressed his palms on his desk as though he had to keep it from lifting off. “Is that the hypothesis you’ve been working on since I hired you? That Chau’s not dead and the paintings are real? That’s a problem, Jack.”

  “Maybe. There’s another problem, too. Someone shot at me.”

  “Someone—what?”

  “Shot a bullet through my office window. About two hours ago.”

  It took Dr. Yang a moment to catch up. “I—was anyone hurt?”

  “No.”

  “Who was it?”

  “I have no idea. Or what the point was, either.”

  “Did you call the police?”

  “Of course. Bullets in my ceiling?” Jack added, “I didn’t mention you.”

  Dr. Yang’s lips compressed into a thin line. He nodded curtly and said to me and Bill, “Will you excuse us?”

  If I’d conjured up a semireasonable excuse to stay I might have tried it, but it wasn’t hard to see that nothing would work. Bill pushed away from the windowsill and I stood from my chair. “Of course,” I said. To Jack: “We’ll be outside.”

  Jack gave a distracted nod. He and Dr. Yang sat staring at each other as we left.

  * * *

  I shut the door behind us, then said to Bill, “Can I listen at the keyhole?” He didn’t dignify that with an answer. We sat on a bench and watched students walk by. “What did you think?” I asked.

  “Tough customer.”

  “I had professors like him in college. I did well in their courses because I was scared not to. But from your I-Spy perch by the window, I mean.”

  Bill came up with this trick and we do it routinely at interviews now, especially the first time we meet someone: We try to sit far enough apart that the person can’t see both of us at once. Then one talks, the other watches. We can’t always pull it off, but it’s particularly convenient when the interviewee doesn’t have enough chairs.

  “He’s way more angry than I’d have expected,” Bill said.

  “Jack said he’s an angry kind of guy.”

  “Still. Now we know he’s Jack’s client. So what? It may be irritating but it’s not a disaster. He’s overreacting.”

  “Maybe.” In my mind I heard Dr. Yang’s dark voice as he told his story. “What he told us; it makes his reason for hiring Jack more convincing, doesn’t it?”

  “You mean, protecting Chau’s rep?”

  “Protecting Chau, I get the feeling. The way he couldn’t, back then. Maybe he’s so furious out of helplessness. This situation is getting out of control. The way that one did, and look what happened.”

  Bill nodded. “Possible.”

  “And speaking of protecting people, here’s another question: What about his daughter? Anna? You saw how he stopped Jack from telling her what was up. Why wouldn’t he want her to know?”

  “She seems to have her own problems. Whatever Jack meant when he asked how she was doing and if anyone had heard from Mike. Sounds like her boyfriend ditched her. Maybe Yang doesn’t want to complicate her life right now.”

  I thought about Dr. Yang as an overprotective dad. High walls and lattice-screened windows came to mind, but Anna’s affectionate teasing didn’t strike me as coming from either the cowed and timid or resentful and rebellious young woman that that approach would have been likely to produce. She’d probably been wrapping him around her finger her whole life. “Well, maybe,” I suggested, “he really is only protecting his investment while he pretends to care about his dead friend, and he feels guilty enough about it that he’d just as soon his daughter doesn’t know.”

  “Maybe so.”

  “What did you think of the art in his office?” I asked, but my phone rang, so Bill didn’t get a chance to answer. I flipped it open. “Hi, Linus.”

  “Hey, Cuz. So, Bill’s all hooked up. Vladimir Oblomov, shady Russian, Chinese art honcho. You want to hear?”

  “Of course.” I did; but also, he clearly couldn’t wait to tell me.

  “First I went to the Wikipedia pages for two hot Chinese artists. Wow, you know how weird that stuff is? Anyway, I made Oblomov a buyer on one and a seller on the other. Bill might want to check out their stuff, you know, so in case his squeeze wants to talk about them.” He gave me the artists’ names. “Then I made a Web site for Vassily Imports. They sell food from Russia and, like, Eastern Europe and the Stans. Caviar, black bread, pickles, cheese—whatever, I looked up what one of the real sites sells and made it like that. Oblomov is on the board of directors, and he’s also VP for International Corporate Communications. No one ever knows what that means so I figured it was cool. And the Web site, I made it so it sort of takes you in circles if you try to go too deep. So if you were really trying to find who the boss man is, you couldn’t. That’s the shady part, you dig? Then I grabbed a shot of Bill from when we went to the park that time and Photoshopped it into some gallery opening in Hong Kong I found online, then put the whole thing on Flickr and tagged him along with the other VIPs. I got him listed on Yahoo.com and WhitePages, but no address, no phone. You think she’ll pay to do the search? I might be able to get something in there, but only maybe.”

  “No, I don’t think she will. By the time she Googles him it’ll be after he’s called her. She won’t be trying to find how to contact him, just to make sure he’s not some kind of phony.”

  “Good luck with that.” I could hear Linus’s grin. “So, anyhow, the next thing, Trella opened a blog on JournalScape, backdated like six months: She’s an art student, yadda yadda yadda and OMG she met this Oblomov dude, older but God is he loaded. They kicked it for a while but it cooled.”

  “Good, Linus.”

&n
bsp; “And I started a Facebook fan page for the Russian mob and made him one of the fans.”

  “What?”

  “Kidding! Joke! Winking emoticon!”

  “Oh.” I breathed out. “Thanks, Linus. This all sounds terrific. Send me a bill.”

  “Nah. Family’s free. Just tell me if it works?”

  I promised to do that, and clicked off.

  “You’re in business,” I told Bill. “When Shayna Googles Vladimir Oblomov, she’ll get more than if she Googled the real you.”

  “As it should be.” He checked his watch. “This is probably a good time to call her. She gets off in half an hour.”

  “Well, then, absolutely. She has to have time to check out Linus’s hard work.”

  Bill did call Shayna, who, from where I was sitting, seemed delighted to hear from him. The first thing he said was, “Eet’s Vladimir Oblomov,” as if he had no idea she didn’t know his last name. Things went all murmuring from there, which was a little revolting, so I got up and checked out the posters and flyers on the walls. This might not have been the Art Department, but apparently a lot of events coming up around Asian Art Week considered themselves of interest to A/P/A Studies students. Auctions, lectures, panels, gallery shows, led off by a glittering benefit gala I couldn’t imagine college students attending except as cater waiters. Capping the week was “Beijing/NYC,” which my client had mentioned: an offering of the government of the People’s Republic to the art lovers of New York. Paintings, sculpture, photography and installations, all so new their paint, or ink, or gluey emulsion, wouldn’t be dry. I was considering the civilized nature of cultural exchange when Dr. Yang’s door opened and closed, leaving Jack standing in the corridor.

  “Aramis,” I said. “How’d it go?”

  “Wow.”

  “You look a little dazed.”

  Jack shook his head slowly. “All I could think while he was reaming me out was, thank God he wasn’t on my thesis committee.”

  Bill, spotting Jack, whispered some ridiculous sweet nothing into his phone and thumbed it off. I asked Jack, “Why is he so upset? It’s not your fault we went to you. Did you explain your reasoning, why you told us about him?”