A Cup of Light

by Nicole Mones

  Because these pots were the most perfect, the most truly priceless. They literally could not be improved upon. During the thousand years of imperial production in Jingdezhen, overseers had judged all the creations of the artists at the emperor’s kilns. Works deemed utterly perfect were sent to the capital for the Son of Heaven. Others, whether imperfect, overruns, or simply too experimental, were destroyed, some achingly beautiful but still destroyed, and always in the same ritual fashion—with a metal rod rammed down on them and the shards thrown in the pit.

  The artist had to go back, each time, and try again. Because if the next pot crossed the invisible line and was perfect, it would be borne as exquisite treasure to the Son of Heaven. And it would become immortal.

  By modern times, the emperor’s holdings had become, if not the largest, arguably the greatest art collection in selective terms the world had ever known. Continuously built for eleven centuries, it stayed in the Palace as dynasties came and went. Each new emperor inherited the art; many added to it. Despite losses, much remained intact. Jades, scroll paintings, bronzes, porcelains, calligraphy . . . more than a million masterpieces had accumulated by the dawn of the twentieth century. This treasure was not moved out of the Forbidden City until 1931, and then only when the Japanese occupation of Manchuria extended to within a few hundred kilometers of the capital.

  Could this group have come from the Palace holdings? She sat back and scanned the rows of crates. It was outrageous, unthinkable. She had to be rational. Yet one thing was sure: Wherever they came from, the pots were stunningly valuable. They were worth—she saw the numbers take dizzy shape in her head—more than one hundred million dollars. That was more than she could even imagine someone paying, so she pushed it aside and went on working.

  “You heard what I said,” she repeated to Dr. Zheng. “There are eight hundred of them. Roughly. More or less.”

  “That’s not possible,” he said for the third time.

  She could feel herself smiling. “Look, I’ve checked two of the crates. Twenty pots each. Twenty drop-dead pots. And there are forty crates total, same size.” She understood; it was too much to believe. In a world in which it was a major event to find two, first they had twenty. Now eight hundred. And so far, they were breathtaking. “How’s David?” she said, nudging her well-loved director off his closed loop of amazement.

  “Oh! He’s fine! David’s fine. He’s just where he’s supposed to be today. Lia, don’t worry. Hospitals in Japan are first-rate. He’s being showered with attention. Half the Tokyo office is there!” Dr. Zheng grumbled affectionately over this loss of productivity, proud of the network of relationships that held together the working world around him.

  “But of course I worry. The last time I saw him he was being wheeled into the O.R.”

  “He’s doing fine.”

  “I’ll call him when we get off.”

  “No,” Zheng said quickly. “David doesn’t need to know what you’ve just told me. It would serve nothing. It would gain us nothing. Think what it could cost. Eight hundred pots! No one can find out.”

  “I see what you mean. Then I’ll call him but I won’t tell him.”

  Zheng laughed, his characteristic little staccato bounce. “Impossible! You? You’re a terrible liar.”

  She laughed. “You’re right! That’s true.”

  “Don’t call him.”

  “Not at all?”

  “I’ll tell him you are asking after him.”

  “All right,” she said. She put her reluctance away because she trusted Zheng. He had taught her and guided her and he had never, ever tried to fix her. “So who will you send?”

  “I have to think. If anyone, it should be Phillip, don’t you think?”

  “Definitely. In fact he’s the only one.”

  “But I’m not sure it’s the best thing.”

  “I was afraid you’d say that again.”

  “For every additional person who finds out about this, a thousand points of danger arise.”

  “But I need someone with me.”

  “We’ll see. At least we should avoid the word getting out as long as possible. In any case, Phillip’s in England. I can get him back and ship him out again if we need to.”

  She calculated. “If I did it alone I could finish in ten days. Well, twelve. I’m still not sure that’s a good idea.” A job like this needed more than one pair of eyes. They both knew it.

  “I’ll call Phillip. I’ll at least see what it would take to have him close down what he’s doing and come back.”

  “I’ll work as fast as I can in the meantime.”

  “Good. My God! Eight hundred pieces!”

  “If it’s what it looks like,” she said.

  “If it’s what it looks like,” he repeated, and they both smiled and hung up.

  She checked herself in the mirror. Now she was ready to go out and look for food, look for entertainment, or even just walk. For this she would turn her hearing aids up. She loved walking on the streets of China. She loved controlling the volume on her world, and this was one of the times she liked it up high. Walking through a Mandarin-speaking crowd, hearing the evanescent bubbles of their lives as she passed their pockets of conversation—their jokes, their gossip, their talk about what they were going to eat and whom they were going to see—this was always soothing to her. She liked to feel the ways in which other people were connected with one another. Here she could eavesdrop almost invisibly. She was tall, white, female; people never thought she was listening to them. She could walk with her hands in her pockets and be part of things.

  Glancing back at the mirror, she touched her cheek. Her face was too long, her eyes too sad. She had tried makeup, every imaginable way, but it never seemed to really make her look any different. She was getting older too. Lines were showing in the corners of her eyes. She was becoming faintly severe. Sad and severe, bad combination. She smoothed up her hair. Maybe she should stop wearing it in a braid. But it was truly most flattering to her head to have everything come to a point on top. Really, she said to herself, look. She tilted her face. You’re all right. You can’t complain.

  In Jingdezhen, the ah chan Bai walked the first of three sets of broad, shallow steps up to the Long Zu Temple. This was a temple to the local god. Towns and villages in China often worshiped gods of local repute. Sometimes these were heroic historical personages who had morphed into legend; sometimes they were spirits who were thought to control the region’s prosperity. The god of wind and fire who inhabited the Long Zu Temple was the latter sort, overseeing the art of porcelain in Jingdezhen and the fortunes of all men who had their hands in it. He was the god of the kilns.

  Bai’s European shoes made a satisfying patter up the worn-down stone steps. Large statues of temple dogs guarded each level. At the top, a stone walk divided a grassy terrace where a caretaker raked in a pleasingly ineffective rhythm.

  Walking into the temple, Bai’s mind flew back through the hush of spirituality to thoughts of his home. He saw the land his family had occupied since the reign of Jiaqing, given up under Communism, and then reclaimed again. The mountains were fragrant and dense with leaves. It was a place of brushworked beauty. But he was a modern man, a Chinese of the global era, and so he had gone to the city. There was nothing for him back in Hunan.

  He stepped into the cavernous main hall. It was dark. The ornate, timbered ceilings were lost above in the shadows.

  For hundreds of years this main hall had held the principal altar to the porcelain god. Now it was a museum, open to the public. He strolled past a dusty exhibit, with a fake altar and some token signage; the real altar, for those who still worshiped, was kept quietly in the back. At the end of a short hall he stepped around a sign forbidding passage in both English and Chinese.

  Others were forbidden. Not people like him. He entered the small room from the side and stood before the little shrine, eyes lowered before the bronze altar-figure. Electric candles with glowing red bulbs framed the statu
e, along with bowls of fruit in twin pyramids and incense smoke curling upward. He took three sticks and left a coin in their place.

  The first two he lit on the small oil lamp burning next to the incense, chanting under his breath for his two friends, Hu and Sun. He worried for them. The two men were leaving tonight, carrying their futures on their backs. They were transporting a pair of magnificent Yongzheng period famille-rose vases, each four and a half feet high. Neither had ever moved anything of unusual size. They’d been reluctant to bring in partners. Destiny, thought Bai. Safe passage. He rocked the two burning sticks between his hands and stuck them in the bowl of sand. There was so much smuggling in China. Most of it, though—most of the volume and the value—was goods smuggled into China. It was an unstoppable flood, everything from cars to cell phones to tankers full of oil pouring into the country. Billions of dollars’ worth of goods, staggering levels of lost revenues in Customs. Bai always hoped, in his prayers, that this incoming flood would continue to displace governmental attention from the activities of men like him.

  Now the third incense stick. This one was for him. He suspended it in the lamp flame until it caught. The glowing tip was his success, the sure burn his safety. If he made it through he could take Lili to Hong Kong. Just take her and go. His own glow started deep inside him, in the pit of his middle, and spread upward.

  Bai perched the stick in the sand by the others and brought his offering out, unwrapped it from its layers of cloth. It was a pot, of course, a Wanli blue-and-white stem cup. It was not real. It was fang gu, a copy. This one, of course, was primitive, crude, quite inexpensive. Such a piece was perfectly adequate when dealing with spirits. Spirits were vain, easily fooled, known to be satisfied with even remote facsimiles.

  He stared at the rising ropes of fragrance, the glass eyes of the god. Maybe he was going to taste success. If he did, he’d get a new name. That was how it was among the ah chans. A man got his midlife name when he made his big win. Now they just called him Bai, or sometimes Long Neck Bai on account of the birdlike way his head sat on his shoulders. No more of that. Just Emperor. Emperor Bai. Call me Huangdi. Elated, filled with the sweep of blessing, sure all he desired was coming his way, he bowed low to the god and left.

  Jack Yuan took the call on the deck of his cliffside house in Cannon Beach, Oregon. The wet wind ruffled the plastic tied over a stack of logs and shivered the salt-air-stunted pines that grew up along the sides. The deck was cantilevered out over five hundred sheer feet of rain-wet rock. “This is Jack,” he said into the phone.

  He walked to the rail, listening. It was Dr. Zheng. He leaned over the roiling Pacific. Gleaming piles of black rock materialized, rose, then sank and vanished in the pulse of waves and foam.

  “I have some news,” said the age-darkened voice from New York.

  “I’m listening.” Jack curled his hand to shield the phone from the roar of the sea. Jack had never met Zheng in person, though he thought he knew him, knew him well, by his voice, by its range of shadings and its manifold moods. Jack had bought through him for several years now. He liked Dr. Zheng. He felt he could rely on the gentleman’s discretion.

  Discretion was important to Jack. He bought secretly. He wanted everything anonymous. He had an uneasy relationship with the advent of major money in his life, and he didn’t like people knowing what he had.

  In any case it was easy, collecting anonymously. He used proxies. He planted people at the auctions, speaking urgently in multiple languages into their cell phones, knowing that as the bidding went into the stratosphere the art people would be studying them, guessing, trying to connect them to buyers, dealers, and agents they knew. Meanwhile he would place the winning bid through the one person he knew no one would have been watching—the obvious person off on the side, speaking English. It was so easy to predict where people would look and what they would think. He felt a familiar dash of pity. Human society was so much less mysterious than he had once thought, than he’d hoped. It was sad.

  He hadn’t always been interested in Chinese antiquities; he’d bought other objets first. But there came a point when he had stared into the mirror at himself every day for too long, at his glossy black flat-combed hair, his cashmere golf shirts, his overengineered athletic shoes. He was neither white nor truly Chinese. Then he bought a few porcelains through Dr. Zheng. They were ancient and exquisite. They made him feel more himself, even though he was a lifelong baseball-cap wearer from Alhambra, California. “Has Miss Frank seen the porcelains?”

  “Yes. She’s seen them.”

  “And they’re good?”

  “Oh yes,” Dr. Zheng said in a voice oddly tickled with laughter. “More than that. Wonderful! But that’s not the thing.”

  And the thing is? Jack thought, waiting.

  “There are more than you think.”

  “What?” A wave crashed down below and poured spray up against the rock face. Jack was straining into the phone. “How many more?”

  “Eight hundred.”

  “What!”

  “Eight hundred,” Dr. Zheng said again, slowly.

  I did hear that, Jack told himself wonderingly, staring out at the strip of red molten sun spread under the lowering clouds, fading its last into the ocean. “How is this possible?”

  “I don’t know,” Dr. Zheng said.

  “Where did they come from?”

  “I don’t know that either. Not yet.”

  “Eight hundred,” Jack repeated slowly. He had been knocked back for a second. Now his mind cracked open to the sudden and fundamental upshift of possibility. Everything notched forward.

  Eight hundred fine porcelains. It would be unthinkably expensive. His wife, Anna, would never permit it.

  “You’ll have first right, of course.” Dr. Zheng’s voice jumped straight into his brain. “But you need only take what you like. We have many other buyers.” There was a smile in his voice. “Believe me, we do.”

  “Let me think about it,” Jack said. He’d been knocked off balance. He didn’t want to rush. Still, he saw a possibility as he stared out at the churning gray Pacific. He saw a lens dial in, and everything grew clearer, brighter, higher in the air. Gulls flapped and cried. Exaltation surged. He knew this feeling. When he’d been a young man, single, he’d had it every time he fell in love. He was married, he didn’t fall in love anymore, and now this feeling came to him through acquisition. Like this, he thought, fine porcelain: He’d be with friends. They’d have tea. Some of mankind’s most radiant works would be passed from hand to hand. “What would you say is the total worth?” he asked Dr. Zheng.

  “Oh. Quite impossible.”

  “Ballpark.”

  “Really. Lia just got there. She’s alone. It will take days just for her to open all the boxes—”

  “Roughly,” Jack said, patient.

  “You mean if they’re all authentic. Because there’s that too.”

  “Yes.” Jack waited, enjoying it. He could almost feel the old gentleman readying his pencil. He stood on an edge in his life. And this particular precipice, on this deck a tenth of a mile above the waves, would never come again.

  Zheng coughed. It was as if he couldn’t bring himself to say it.

  “Yes?” Jack said.

  “Well over a hundred million dollars. Over a hundred fifty million. I really can’t be more specific.”

  Jack took this in. “How long will it take her to do an inventory?”

  “Some time. Some days.”

  “Let me think, then.”

  “Please,” said Dr. Zheng, “be at your ease. We’ll send you selected photos, piece descriptions. These will give you an idea.”

  “Great,” said Jack.

  He was going to talk to Anna. Already he was thinking strategy. Art made money. It could be an asset to a portfolio. Still. He knew his Wharton MBA wife would not take kindly to so much money being put into delicate, breakable objects. After they hung up, Jack stood a long time staring at the surf boiling in the last
gray wash of light.

  “It’s amazing,” Dr. Zheng said to her. “I have the feeling he’s considering taking all of it.”

  “That would be nice.”

  “And quiet.”

  They could feel each other smiling. “Is he a big collector?”

  “New. Young. He’s been working up to this. He buys silently. Chinese-American, software money.”

  “And our seller?”

  “I checked. Never bought or sold at auction,” Zheng said.

  This sounded right to Lia, though it made this deal even stranger. She was used to seeing the major collectors from the Mainland at the big auctions now in Hong Kong, London, and New York. They were stepping into the vacuum sucked out by the decline of other countries.

  But she’d never seen Gao among them. He’d never been to the previews, the cocktail parties. He was never one of the ones they would mention when a delicious new piece turned up for sale. “Fung would pay half a million for this.” And: “What about Toller? Oh no, he’s getting a divorce.” And: “Pity Martinson died! He would have loved this.”

  “Is everything real so far?” Dr. Zheng asked her.

  “So far,” she said. “I’m pretty sure—no, I’m quite sure. What I’ve seen so far is real.” She made her voice firm to rule out the fear.

  Fakes slipped through all the time, and art insiders knew it. She had heard museum people say, late at night after the restaurant had emptied out and the glasses were in disarray upon the tables, that if only ninety percent of their holdings were authentic they’d be happy. That meant a lot of fakes—oh, but they were excellent fakes, fakes that had dazzled everyone. And then they would always fall into the same unanswerable argument: What exactly made a fake a fake, when everyone who saw it was sure it was real? What lay deeper in it to recognize?

  The fakes in Chinese art, of course, were different. In Western art, fakes intended to deceive. In China, quite often, they aimed to pay tribute. Reproductions had long been a serious, respected artistic practice. Great works were born from this. They were copies, yes, but made by real artists, out of love. Some changed hands, were lied about, and turned into forgeries—this was inevitable. And some of these in turn were so good that they fooled everybody: buyers, auction houses, experts, people like Lia. This was the thing she most feared.