Mandarin Yellow (Socrates Cheng mysteries)

by Steven M. Roth

  He continued. “This means that even though all Mandarin Yellows look alike to the untrained eye, they weren’t alike, especially underneath their beautiful yellow skins. That’s because the Mandarin Yellow’s outer beauty often masked hidden problems.”

  “Such as?” Jade said.

  “Such as internal hairline cracks that would not become known for a long while until significant, irreparable damage had occurred from within. That’s the irony and the curse of this wondrous writing instrument,” he said, nodding toward the box.

  “Okay, I get that,” Jade said, “but how did you avoid that problem with your pen?” she asked. She pointed to Socrates’ Mandarin Yellow sitting in its box between them. “Or, didn’t you?”

  “Truth is, I don’t know,” Socrates said. He reached out and lightly touched the box with one finger, then withdrew his hand.

  “When I bought this pen, I didn’t see any external cracks or dents or any signs that former cracks had been filled-in and repaired. On the surface, everything looked fine. But I really couldn’t know at the time I bought it about possible hidden defects,” he said. “In fact, I still don’t know. I’ll have to wait another dozen years or so to see if any show up.” He cleared his throat.

  “I bought this Mandarin Yellow on faith, hoping there were no concealed problems. That’s really all you can do if you want to own one. You never really know if there are flaws lurking beneath the beautiful yellow skin until it’s too late to do anything about them.” He paused, shrugged, and smiled warily.

  “That’s the way it is with the Mandarin Yellow,” he said. “Some things just have to be taken on faith, with a willingness to risk a mistake and the willingness to live with the consequences if you’re wrong.”

  WHEN SOCRATES AND Jade finished lunch, Socrates headed back to his store. He spent the next half hour finishing the chores he’d started earlier to prepare the store to temporarily go dark. Then, still having a little time to spare before his 4:30 meeting with Bing-fa, he booted up his computer and went online to see what had been posted on the Internet about the burglary at the gallery.

  Socrates assumed, based on what he’d read in art magazines over the years, that Interpol’s General Secretariat and the FBI’s Art Crime Team — perhaps even the London-based Art Loss Register — had posted news of the burglary on their web sites and had entered descriptions and photographs of the Mandarin Yellow and other stolen objects into their public online databases for anyone to view.

  Socrates pulled up the web sites, but didn’t find any references to the theft. That doesn’t make any sense, he thought. You’d think the Embassy or the gallery would want to have this information circulated as widely as possible. Why haven’t they reported it? he wondered, or, if it was reported, why hasn’t that information been posted online?

  AFTER HE FINISHED his futile search for online information about the burglary, Socrates still had time to kill before Bing-fa was due to arrive for their meeting. He shelved the last of the supplies, ordered others he would need when he reopened the store, locked his most valuable pens in the store safe, and dusted the framed historic documents hanging on three walls. Then he paid bills and wrote a check for next month’s rent just in case.

  When he finished these chores, Socrates checked his watch. It was 4:00.

  Socrates retrieved a bottle of Merlot from the stockroom and poured himself a generous glassful. He settled into a chair in the corner of the store, sipped his wine, and thought about Bing-fa. Specifically, he thought about the stories Jade had told him from time-to-time about her father’s early years as an immigrant to America

  ACCORDING TO JADE, Bing-fa, like many of the privileged eldest sons of upper-middle class Chinese families, had arrived in Washington from Shanghai in 1946 under a scholarship program established by Chiang Kai-shek to enable these favored eldest male children to study at American universities.

  In return for the payment of all their living and college expenses, these young men were expected to complete their studies and then return to China where they would pursue the traditional Confucian path to a civil service post and would provide China with a lifetime of needed skills and services. Chiang’s government also anticipated that these grateful young men would also offer Chiang Kai-shek their everlasting gratitude and personal loyalty.

  This seemingly simple concept collapsed under the weight of China’s wartime and post-World War II hyper-inflation, a calamitous condition widely believed in China to have been brought about by Chiang’s voracious looting of the state’s treasury and by his unfettered printing of currency to feed his insatiable appetite for wealth.

  By the late 1940s, China’s crippled economy and bankrupt state treasury had destroyed China’s middle class and rendered Chiang’s government unable to sustain the thousands of overseas scholarships it had sponsored.

  In 1947, Chiang yielded to economic reality and pulled the plug on the scholarships. As a result, approximately four thousand Chinese students in the United States suddenly found themselves abandoned by their government and cut off from all financial support from home. Most of these students returned to China to face uncertain lives of unimagined poverty, hardship and political upheaval.

  Nineteen year old Bing-fa did not escape this nightmare.

  With his scholarship lost, Bing-fa dropped out of George Washington University, but did not return to Shanghai. Instead, he wrote to his father seeking instructions telling him what to do.

  The return letter arrived four months later, but the reply came from Bing-fa’s mother, not his father.

  Honorable son, Li Bing-fa:

  Do not return home. There is nothing here for you to return to. No work at all. You cannot help yourself or our family by returning to Shanghai. All our property is lost to government bandits and banks, swallowed by high prices, increasing taxes, and unpayable debts.

  Your loving, venerable father, overwhelmed by his loss of face, has shamed himself by eating the fruit of the hemlock plant in the flowering season.

  Three weeks ago, several soldiers from Generalissimo Chiang’s army came in the late night to our temporary dwelling and took both your younger brothers with them to fight the Communists. Your brothers are forever lost to us. We will never see them again.

  Your beloved youngest sister and your cherished middle sister also are lost to us. They now work as Sing-Song girls at the Garden of the Perfumed Flowers on Foochow Road.

  I cannot bear the disgrace that has visited itself upon our family. I will join your father with our ancestors before you receive this letter.

  With his family destroyed by Chiang’s economic policies and greed, and with no property or family left to return to in Shanghai, Bing-fa remained in Washington. For the next three years he worked as a dishwasher at a restaurant in Chinatown. He later became a waiter at the same restaurant, then a cashier. Six years later, he left the restaurant and became a messenger for a local Chinatown Triad known as The Lotus Leaf Brotherhood. Eventually, Bing-fa became a salaried officer in the Triad. His life immediately began to improve.

  In 1967, Bing-fa left The Lotus Leaf Brotherhood and organized his own Triad, the Jiao tu san ku — the Cunning Rabbit With Three Warrens Society. This Triad associated itself with a similar organization in Shanghai run by Big Eared Tu, who also headed Shanghai’s notorious criminal enterprise known worldwide as the Green Gang.

  The Cunning Rabbit With Three Warrens Society operated as a secret charitable and fraternal organization. Within two years of its founding, the Triad ruled Washington’s Chinatown community. Bing-fa ruled the Triad.

  Its members received many benefits. In return for a small weekly dues payment, the Triad’s members received many services such as traditional medical care, life and burial insurance, legal advice, day care services, and personal, business and real property protection. The Triad also provided translation services, low-cost prostitution services, daily card games, cricket fighting matches, and other popular forms of gambling such as thirte
en-card fan tan, tien gow, and the popular thirty-two dominoes game of chance, pai gow. In hard financial times, the Triad paid the costs of educating members’ children, found or created jobs for the unemployed, and otherwise subsidized members’ families who were in financial crises.

  As the years passed, Bing-fa continued to prosper. By 2001, he openly owned a popular Chinatown restaurant (called the Golden Dragon), a successful hand laundry, a grocery store, a walk-in medical clinic, an herbal pharmacy, a furniture emporium, and a fully occupied luxury rental apartment building on H Street, known as the White Plum Blossoms Apartments, where Bing-fa, his second wife, and Bing-fa’s sons lived.

  Bing-fa also silently controlled, in a secret pact with the Green Gang, three Washington, DC gambling parlors, two local Chinatown banks, a Chinatown-based savings & loan association, a mahjong hall, four massage parlors/places of prostitution, a neighborhood barber shop, a small-loan finance company (located in the central business district of Washington, not in Chinatown) and two pawn shops located in the Dupont Circle area.

  In 2004, Washington’s Mayor Anthony Williams and the Greater Washington Area Board of Trade designated Bing-fa as Washington’s Man-of-the-Year to honor him for his many years of community service and perceived rectitude.

  SOCRATES REALIZED AS he recalled Jade’s stories, Bing-fa was a well-connected, somewhat unsavory, and very powerful man. He definitely was not a man to be taken lightly.

  As Socrates dwelled on this last thought, his attention was caught by the ringing of the entrance door’s overhead bell. Bing-fa had arrived for their meeting.

  THE MEETING WITH Bing-fa went well. Socrates described the information he would need to begin his investigation, and Bing-fa promised to deliver it to him the next afternoon.

  The next day, within minutes before Socrates closed his store for what he expected to be the last time for several weeks, the Twins barged in as if they were being chased. They brought a package for Socrates from their father.

  “So,” Bing-luc said, as he strutted up to Socrates, “you are the low faan causing the troubles between Elder Sister and our father.”

  There was no levity nor any goodwill intimated by Bing-luc’s statement. Neither he nor his Twin brother smiled as Bing-luc said this.

  “You should be more respectful of tradition and the obligations of familial piety owed by a daughter to her father and brothers,” Bing-luc said.

  Bing-luc’s statement surprised Socrates, not because of its overt hostility and implicit menace, but because the Twins had even bothered to say it at all. Socrates hadn’t expected the Twins to depart from their reputed lassitude when it came to Li family matters.

  Socrates didn’t reply. Instead, he reached out to Bing-luc’s hand, snatched away the folder Bing-fa had sent over, and quickly skimmed its contents to make sure, at the very least, that the inventory and photographs of stolen items he’d asked for were there.

  When he finished looking through the materials, Socrates said, “Tell your father I’ll call him when I’m ready to meet again.” He turned away and walked back behind the glass display case.

  Bing-luc stared at him with an expression Socrates could only interpret as the mental equivalent of rage.

  “You have been warned, low faan,” he said to Socrates. Then he and his brother turned away and left the store.

  AFTER THE TWINS left, Socrates cleared off an accumulation of Pen World magazines he kept on a small library table for customers to read, and made a work space for himself. He pulled up a chair, took the materials Bing-fa had sent over, and sorted through them.

  He created three piles, stacking index cards and pages according to their general subject matter: people involved with the exhibit; written descriptions of the stolen items; and, photographs of the stolen objects. He later would look for some unifying thread or other relationship among the items described in the piles.

  He next looked through the information on the 3" x 5" index cards. Each card named one person, and stated that person’s role with respect to the exhibit. The card also gave the person’s title, if any, the work address, and the person’s work telephone number. Only a few cards also showed e-mail addresses or Twitter, Facebook or other social media contact information.

  From Bing-fa’s card Socrates learned that Bing-fa had originally conceived of the idea for the exhibit and then had convinced the People’s Republic government to approve it, to ship the objects from Mao’s secret archives to its Embassy in Washington, and to underwrite all costs. This, Socrates realized, explained Bing-fa’s belief that the burglary and postponement of the exhibit’s opening had caused him to lose face in the Chinese community.

  Socrates learned from another card that Iris Hua, the gallery’s director, had supervised Bing-fa’s sons in performing heavy lifting for the exhibit, tasks such as transporting the objects to be exhibited from the Embassy to the gallery, hanging the wall art, and setting up glass-enclosed exhibit cases and pedestals for the porcelain ware and sculpture. Iris Hua had also assisted the Embassy’s cultural attaché in selecting the photographs for the exhibit’s full-color catalog and in writing the catalog’s descriptions for the objects to be exhibited.

  Other people, whose names or job descriptions Socrates didn’t recognize, also were described on the index cards. Some were temporary gallery employees and some were student volunteers and interns brought in to work on various aspects of the exhibit.

  Socrates planned to conduct face-to-face interviews with the principal players named on the index cards, specifically, the gallery’s director, the assistant director, and any other gallery employees. His goal would be to gather as much general information as possible in each interview to determine who stood to gain and who stood to lose the most by the postponement or cancellation of the exhibit. That information might provide him with the motive for the burglary which, in turn, might point the way to the identification of the criminals and to the recovery of the Mandarin Yellow and other stolen artifacts.

  Socrates opened a yellow legal pad to a blank page, and made a list of the tasks he thought he’d have to perform in addition to the interviews at the gallery: study the inventory of stolen items to identify a common theme among the objects taken; visit the scene of the crime; study the exhibit catalog looking for one or more themes among the objects not taken by the burglars; and, review the police file to obtain the benefit of the lab reports and the crime scene reports. He thought a moment, then added to his list, ‘talk to Embassy personnel’.

  Another thought occurred to him. Before he conducted the interviews at the gallery, he would visit the gallery without identifying himself, in the guise of an art lover, to acquire the feel of the crime scene. Then, after he’d had a chance to review the police file and was more knowledgeable about the case, he would go back to the gallery, but this time he would identify himself as an investigator working for Bing-fa. He would then ask the hard questions.

  SOCRATES CHECKED HIS watch. He and Jade had agreed to meet for dinner that evening. Socrates had just enough time to hurry home, shower and change into fresh clothes, then get over to Jade’s condo to meet her when she arrived home from the university. They planned to talk during dinner about Socrates’ planned approach to the investigation. Socrates hoped Jade might give him some helpful insights from her father’s perspective.

  Ninety minutes later, Socrates stood in Jade’s living room sipping from a glass of Baijiu - a white liquor distilled from sorghum, popular in China — while Jade showered and dressed for dinner. He looked around the living room, the dining room and the connecting foyer from his vantage point in the living room over by the dry sink.

  Nothing about the tasteful decor of Jade’s condo surprised him. Not the traditional feng shui interior north to south flow, not the high quality of the Chinese art and ceramics Jade displayed, and not the clusters of photographs she had placed on several walls and on one table in a very un-Chinese-like manner of decorating. In many ways, Socrates realized, Jade’s sty
le of furnishing and appointing her condo was merely an upscale extension of the way she had set up her dorm room at Penn State.

  The condo’s furnishings consisted of several examples of country furniture that had been constructed in various North China provinces from the late 1800s through the mid-1930s. There were tables of differing sizes and shapes, yoke-back and horseshoe-back chairs, and five decorated wooden Revolution Chests scattered among the three rooms. Jade also had distributed brush pots, ink sticks, ink stones and other traditional scholars’ studio objects throughout the rooms, subtly mingling these objects among the vernacular furniture.

  Socrates checked his watch. He was hungry, and Jade, as usual, was running late. He walked over to the foyer to look at Jade’s display of black and white photographs.

  Jade had covered one wall with images of her family members taken during various stages of their lives. There were images of Bing-fa as an adolescent in China, and others of him as a young man in America. Socrates particularly liked Bing-fa’s wedding photograph, taken of him and Jade’s deceased mother in Washington’s Chinatown sometime in the early 1950s. When Socrates first saw this photo in Jade’s dorm room, he thought he was looking at a picture of Jade, she so resembled her deceased mother at approximately the same age.

  Jade’s display also included photographs of Jade and her brothers at various ages. Socrates couldn’t help smiling as he traced Jade’s development, as depicted in nine images, from a prepubescent girl into her teenage years and then into young womanhood.

  There also were several photographs of Eldest Brother. He appeared sullen in all of them, even as a child. No big surprise there, Socrates thought.

  Socrates moved over to the photographs of Bing-enlai — Youngest Brother — Jade’s special sibling for whom she had acted as surrogate mother after their natural mother died. He appeared friendly, but befuddled, in his few photographs.