Ghost Hero Read Online Free PDF

weren’t partners, just PI’s who called each other in from time to time. But not really, I suddenly realized. From the start we’d discussed, argued, poked holes in each other’s theories and plans. We operated from a two-person consensus, not a hierarchy.
    “If it were your case,” I asked, “would you have told him that stuff?”
    Bill grinned. “Probably not.”
    On the next corner I took out my phone and called Baxter/Haig, the gallery where our lead worked. I spoke to an ennui-filled young woman, then clicked off and told Bill, “On the late shift today. In at noon.”
    Bill checked his watch. “Okay, then, I have an idea.” He told me about it, I liked it, and we both headed off to fulfill our parts. I went to the Met’s Asian art galleries to inspect classical ink paintings, for an idea of what these new Chaus, real or fake, might look like.
    Bill went home to shave.

4
    The half hour I spent drifting through the museum’s quiet rooms mostly just reminded me how ignorant I was. I read exhibit labels and bought a book that talked about brushstroke angle and ink saturation. It also discussed the concept of veiled commentary, just enough to confuse me. I looked at the paintings with it in mind, but I had trouble following how plum blossoms that were borderless gray wash instead of opaque white with black outlines expressed the sympathy of Buddhist monks for exiled officials.
    What did intrigue me, though, were the poems. Because this was familiar stuff.
    Chinese classical paintings often have poems on them, either the poem that inspired the painting, or one inspired by it. Sometimes the poem’s by the painter, sometimes by someone else. I knew that, but I’d never spent much time with the poems. Now I tried reading them as political commentary, too. The ones in the exhibit were mostly short couplets—“Crickets and ants are on the Great Road,” that sort of thing. After a few, it hit me: All the old men of my childhood talked like this. Even today, if I drop in at Grandfather Gao’s herb shop, we’ll sit over tea and he’ll come out with something like, “A swirling feather cannot come to rest until the wind dies down,” or “Beating the grass for game may stir the sleeping snake.” Half the time I have no idea what he’s talking about, but the other half, it turns out he’s saying something I really need to listen to.
    I leaned in to study the poems. The crickets and ants, those must be the riffraff you encounter everywhere, even on the Great Road. The wild goose whose call, unanswered, echoes outside the poet’s hut is his yearning for his hometown, far away. The poems made me feel considerably less dim than the paintings did. I was reading one about centipedes and spiders that ended, “Pity the ones caught in the world’s web/Those with poison are not lenient with each other,” when a voice in my ear whispered, “Don’t turn around. There’s a ghost behind you.”
    “No, it’s only you,” I said to Bill, whose reflection I’d seen in the glass as he was sneaking up on me. “It’s just that, spiffed up like that, you look so unreal.”
    “You’re adorably ephemeral, too. Shall we go?”
    A bus, a subway, and a little walking—together faster than a midday cab—put us in the heart of the Chelsea gallery district. This part of lower midtown, way over west, is where the art dealers fled after SoHo went all upmarket.
    Baxter/Haig occupied prime real estate, the ground floor of a renovated warehouse on West Twenty-fifth. We pulled open glass doors and strolled into a high-ceilinged space hung with huge, vivid canvases. The paintings all offered clichéd—or, I suppose, iconic, depending on your point of view—images of China. Tiered pagodas, terraced rice fields, moon-gated gardens, the slithering Great Wall. Busy folks swarmed everywhere, numerous as insects. Another icon/cliché: the vast industrious Chinese masses. Only when I looked closely I saw these weren’t people. They