Picking Bones from Ash (19 page)

Later, as we ate in our hotel room, I asked, “Who was that man?”

“Which man?”

“The Buddhist man.”

“Time for you to do your homework.”

“You
know
who I’m talking about.”

“Snowden-roshi is an old acquaintance. I doubt we’ll see him again.”

“He said he knew my mother.”

“Homework.
Now
.” François began to line up my books on the bed. Then, to soften his earlier severity, he said, “I’ll help you.” I was rather surprised to see just how quickly we could progress through the assignments together; a day’s worth of lesson material could easily be finished in an hour.

“I’m sorry,” he said when we were finished, “for that earlier bit of discomfort. But we are having a grand adventure together, and I don’t want anything unpleasant to spoil it.”

He hugged me, and I gave him one of my pieces of chocolate.

In the morning, I was sent on a mission.

“There is a piece of jade here, incorrectly marked as Ch’ing when it is Sung. Can you find it?” François asked.

I tried. I pored over every glass case, searching for the misidentified piece.

But I let him down. “I’ll give you a clue. You are looking for a cow. But hurry. Some Chinese are already onto its value.”

I looked for groups of Chinese gathered around a jade cow. You would think that this combination of elements would be rare, but the cow happens to be one of the most frequently carved figures across dynasties. Three men gazed at a glass case at Jade Phoenix of Ann Arbor and admired … a cow. A woman with horn-rimmed glasses and an ankle-length skirt of red crushed velvet sniffed at Suzi Wong of Long’s offerings, which included …
a cow. The bovines were everywhere, at St. Mark’s Kyber Pass, at Xia Xiu Ltd., at Cardeiro Connoisseurs. I went back to my father empty-handed.

He was disappointed. He left me alone in our stall for a few minutes, and when he returned, he held out his hands. “Cardeiro,” he said. In the palm of his hand, it was clear to me that this sleepy, serene cow could be nothing other than Sung. “You must learn to see things out of context, Rumi. Like me,” he said proudly. “Over time you too will learn to recognize what is right and what is wrong. Then you will be a true connoisseur.”

Charlie, though popular, was not considered to be the most impressive sculpture in the show. That honor went to a slab of marble: an entire tomb wall depicting men wearing kerchiefs and carrying flaming pots while grapevines twined around them.

My father and the other dealers gossiped endlessly about this piece.

“Is it real?”

“Must be from central Asia,” my father said, “with that weird blending of Eastern and Western iconography.”

“Ah! You must be right.”

“How did they get it?” everyone asked.

We had our answer late on the third day.

Despite my father’s insistence that Snowden-roshi would not be back, he did return with several men and women—all Buddhists—who had come to Asia Week hoping to see the face of Buddha.

“What are you doing here with these people? They don’t even care if they are dealing with Heian or Edo,” François whispered.

“What does it matter”—Snowden-roshi shook his head—“as long as a piece of art does what its creator intended and moves the viewer?”

“It’s dangerous,” François said, “to be moved by bad art. Think of Hitler. Corporate boardrooms.”

The air hissed with a collective “shh.” The police had arrived with five men in black suits and two Chinese officials. They made their way to the back of the room where the tomb sculpture was sitting. François dropped his papers and hurried toward Charlie. I had seen him behave this frantically and protectively only once, when an earthquake had struck the shop.

We were all quiet, trying to listen. The word
stolen
flew around our stalls, and we held it at bay, afraid it might be contagious. Two dealers were guided out in handcuffs.

“Careful. Don’t hurt it,” one of the dealers begged as the strange tomb wall was wheeled out on a flatbed by the police.

“Let that be a lesson to you,” François said to me later, “never to be too conspicuous.”

On the last day of the show, Snowden-roshi arrived with an older couple. The man had an aura of disinterested vagueness, but the woman had made every effort to ensure that she would spring to the foreground of any setting. She wasn’t very tall, but she was extremely thin and swayed back and forth, a cobra rising out of a basket, undulating, eyes alert. It was April, and she was wearing a bright-red coat that matched her scarlet wig. She removed the coat with her husband’s help and displayed her clavicle, ornamented with entwined amulets in ivory, coral, and a great deal of gold.

“This is Mrs. Mack,” Snowden-roshi said to my father. “And her husband.”

“Mr. and Mrs. Mack,” my father bowed. “François des Rochers.”

Mrs. Mack drifted between the cases. She asked many questions and even tried, at one point, to get my father to sell her a piece of jade marked with a red sticker, which meant that it had already been sold. Finally, she came to rest in front of Charlie.

“Look familiar?” Snowden-roshi asked.

At first, Charlie and Mrs. Mack did look very similar, with their unnaturally red coloring highlighted by bits of gold and black.

“How old is he?” she asked.

“Kamakura,” my father said. “You can tell just by looking. Stylistically, there is no other period he could be from.”

“He’s in
very
good condition.” She began to peruse our catalog.

“Obviously he was well cared for in the past.” My father smiled.

“Minor repairs?”
She quoted the text describing Charlie’s condition.

“The paint has dulled with age,” my father said smoothly. “And you can see he’s missing one of his weapons. But otherwise, he’s intact.”

Mrs. Mack knelt down to the floor and stretched out her palms toward Charlie’s feet. “Yes,” she said. “I can feel something from him.”

Behind her, my father rolled his eyes.

We arranged to ship all the unsold pieces from our collection back to California and, after much discussion, moved Charlie into our hotel room.
François instructed Sondra to call my school and tell them I was still sick. Then we turned our attention to Mrs. Mack.

“We’ll go to lunch. Where are you staying?” Mrs. Mack asked. “I’ll send my driver to get you.”

“The Plaza,” François smiled, “but Rumi and I have morning engagements. It’s best if we meet
you
.”

I hoped that this invitation to lunch would, at last, result in the chance to eat something other than food-by-the-pint. My hopes were only partly realized when François persuaded Mrs. Mack to eat in the cafeteria of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. “One should be inspired by great works when one is contemplating an acquisition,” he said.

We spent the afternoon wandering through the Met. In the Asia wing, vacant compared to the foot traffic that passed by the impressionist and modern paintings, we marveled over a display of embroidered
Nō
kimonos
. A Japanese businessman examined the contents of the cases with an expression of deep attention and a clenching jaw that belied his discontent.

“You see?” my father whispered to Mrs. Mack. “
There
is the kind of customer who, in perhaps ten years, will do everything he can to bring Japanese treasures back to his own country. China will follow. I have always maintained that the Chinese aren’t really communists. They are born merchants. And once their wealth begins to flower, they will want to reclaim their history.”

“I know all about merchants,” Mrs. Mack said. “You’ve heard of my father?”

“Airplanes, was it?”

“Steel, to be exact. Which they used on the airplanes. Classic story. He worked all the time and was hardly home.”

“But you must feel some pride seeing his name connected to this museum.”

“He donated money to avoid paying taxes, Mr. des Rochers. I would like a little more out of life. You understand, I’m trying to connect with
him
. With the Buddha.”

“Do you meditate?”

“Every day. But I find I need a focal point. The three Buddhas at home haven’t been sufficient. Snowden-roshi suggested I find something more unique to help me.”

While François, Mrs. Mack, Snowden-roshi, and the vague Mr. Mack circled the halls and floors of the museum, I took in the dizzying displays
of Egyptian tomb paintings and Greek statues. I wondered at the forces that had conspired to bring these varied treasures into one location.

“It is so sad to see these things here, instead of home in Athens where they belong,” Mrs. Mack sighed.

“Modern Greeks have little genetic connection to the Greeks of Pericles’ kingdom,” my father said.

“You think it is all right for wealthy nations to steal art?”

“I think art belongs with the people who will appreciate it the most at any given point in history.”

When we passed through the African section of the museum, François said, “It’ll be years before anyone notices that this stuff is missing from their country.”

I looked at the dark, angular heads of ebony statues and thought briefly of the hands that had made them, wondering if the artists were mourning the loss of their creations.

Unbeknownst to us, Mrs. Mack had asked her usual dealer to take a secret look at Charlie while he had been on display, and this dealer, no doubt concerned that my father was horning in on a favorite—not to mention wealthy—customer, had phoned Mrs. Mack to say he suspected Charlie was a fake.

“My dealer said we should test the hand,” she said.

François was horrified. “And
cripple
him?”

“I just want to be sure.” Mrs. Mack stiffened. “It is
my
money I would be spending.”

I could not tell if François’ display of inner struggle was real or fabricated, but he finally said, “If you wish, we can take a sample of wood from the Fudō’s base and perform a carbon 14 test. However, I want you to realize that we will, in effect, be defacing a statue that has already survived hundreds of years of natural disasters and wars.” He waited for these words to sink in and have an effect before he added, softly, “But I will be happy to pay for the cost of the test, if that would put your mind at ease.”

That evening, when we returned to the hotel, we found Snowden-roshi waiting for us. He helped two Australian girls, just arrived from the airport, with their bags, then turned to say hello.

“How did you find us?” François asked.

“The old-fashioned way. It’s not too hard to follow people in New York.”
He nodded toward a paper bag in my father’s hands. “Why don’t you let me take you out?”

“We’ve already purchased our dinner.”

“I all but guarantee you a sale, and you won’t eat with me?” Snowden-roshi took the bag from François’ hands and gave it to a homeless man sitting with his back against the hotel wall. Then we took a cab to a Japanese restaurant in the Village. A large Buddha, made of ice, sat underneath a red lamp, while red rose petals floated around him in a pool of water.

Snowden-roshi gently placed his hand on the wrist of our cocktail waitress. “Can you tell me who’s here tonight, honey?” he asked.

She blushed and whispered the names of a few actors and other people I did not recognize before drifting away to retrieve a bottle of
sake
.

“Buddha is making you a wealthy man,” François observed.

“Buddha didn’t believe in self-deprivation.”

“Making up for lost time?”

Snowden-roshi smiled. “Believe me, François, I know how to enjoy myself. That hasn’t changed.” He leaned forward. “But we both know that if all this disappeared tomorrow, I’d be the best equipped of all of us to deal with such a loss.”

There was a fat silence between them and I wanted to puncture it. “How come you knew my mother?” I asked.

The cocktail waitress returned, and we sat silently as she explained that our rare bottle of
sake
had been cured inside an ice cave north of Sapporo, and that the cups were cut from a bamboo forest just north of Kyoto.

“We generally don’t discuss Satomi,” François said, after the cocktail waitress had left. “Anyway, Rumi doesn’t remember anything.”

“Not at all?” Snowden-roshi looked at me.

Over the years, I had recalled vague impressions of someone I had earlier assumed to be my mother. A smell like baby ferns. A tanned wrist peeling an orange. Someone rolling down a hill beside me. But François had long ago insisted that these memories were not of my mother but culled from stories, poems he had read to me when I was younger.

“Your parents met through me. In Japan. At a social event.”

“Years ago,” François added.

“Your father was already in the business of identifying beautiful things.” Snowden-roshi’s eyes narrowed. “Even if those things belonged to other people.”

“If I remember correctly, I was also good at lending you a helping hand when you needed it.”

Snowden-roshi relaxed a little. “Yes. You did the best you could under the circumstances. I do know that.”

“And here you are now, torturing me with the company of this silly rich woman who has fastened onto Buddhism as an alternative therapy for her breast cancer.”

“She’s not a bad person.”

“I didn’t say she was bad. I said she was silly. First she’s not interested in money, then she won’t make a purchase till she knows its value. A true connoisseur would never behave this way.”

“She’s
rich
.” Snowden-roshi smiled.

“The Chinese say that wealth only lasts for four generations. After that, a family is like an overripe fruit. Too sweet. Good for nothing but birds and other scavengers.”

“That is what I love about New York,” Snowden-roshi sighed. “You can see that fruit forming before your eyes. The first generation in a family makes money. Learns to smoke cigars and play golf. Their children hope to hold on to their legacy. Then
their
children stumble upon irony and think themselves clever and superior. So
aware
. This goes on until you reach the decadent generation—like Mrs. Mack—the final flowering of a family’s genetic potential.”