Tell Me No Lies by Elizabeth Lowell Read Free Book Online

slightly away from her body as she bent to study the bronze. The men in the room were treated to a view of smoothly swelling breasts that were barely concealed by dark blue silk.
    "Daughter of a missionary," murmured Catlin in Mandarin. "By the spirits of my ancestors, if the daughter of my minister had looked like that, I would have gone to church seven days a week and twice on Sundays.''
    Yi smiled. "The mother was pleasing" he said, also in Mandarin.
    "Is the daughter a broken pot?" Catlin asked, his delivery as staccato as Yi's.
    Yi shook his head as his soft voice filled the room with the clipped, sliding tones of Mandarin, "After the mother, there is no other woman. Her hair was a golden river. Her voice dreamed in shades of silver. To be near her was to know the serenity of the lotus blooming beneath the summer moon."
    Catlin's eyes narrowed as he looked at the Chinese who stood and stared through a two-way mirror into the hidden past. Living in Asia had taught Catlin that Chinese men were not noted for their tender view of women, despite a persistent strain of eros and romance in Chinese poetry. Yet in Yi's voice there was both remembered desire and something else, something deeper and more enduring. If translated into ideographs, Yi's description would have been ambiguous, capable of referring to both the spirit and the flesh. But then, the hallmark of the written Chinese language was that most ideographs had more than one meaning. China's multileveled, evocative, imprecise ideographs were a joy to poets and a curse to scientists.
    The sound of Lindsay's words drew Catlin's attention back to the present and the woman who stood on the other side of the mirror.
    "Number one is a rather ordinary ich'i of the ting type. Or ding, if you follow the recent spelling and pronunciation guide approved by the People's Republic."
    "Whoa," said O'Donnel. "Run that by me again, in English."
    "Taking notes?" asked Lindsay, smiling.
    "Nope. You're being immortalized on tape. Didn't Mr. Stone tell you?"
    Lindsay shook her head, making light run like threads of molten gold through her hair. "The first bronze is a ritual vessel, a three-legged caldron used for serving meat and cereals. Late Shang period."
    "Genuine?"
    "Yes. There's no particular artistry in it, however. It's simply a bronze vessel made for the grave of a man of middling importance who died three thousand years ago. Excellent pat-ma, if you care."
    O'Donnel shrugged. "Not me. My boss might. I don't know."
    "Most collectors care more about patina than about the intrinsic artistry of the vessel itself," explained Lindsay. She smiled slightly as she bent over another bronze, remembering collectors she had known. They were a diverse and unpredictable breed, as even the most casual visitor to any museum could see.
    Lindsay used both hands as she turned the second bronze toward the light. Though the piece was less than a foot high, the craftsmen hadn't stinted on the bronze. "And if the collector is Chinese," she continued, turning another aspect of the bronze toward the light, "he will probably care more for the quality of the inscriptions than anything else about the piece."
    With an expression of distaste, Lindsay returned the bronze to the table. ' This is a kuang, a vessel for wine or water. It aspires to be Shang. It isn't. It's probably a Sung forgery. The Chinese have been faking early Shang bronzes for at least seven hundred years."
    "Really? Why?" asked the agent, looking at the bronze and finding nothing worth counterfeiting. To his taste it was squat, overwrought and ugly.
    "Fashion." Lindsay's smile turned down at the corners. "And survival. In Sung times there was a very powerful magistrate who would excuse all manner of antisocial behavior in exchange for ancient bronzes that carried inscriptions. Wise crooks cast their apologies in advance. With appropriate inscriptions, of course."
    O'Donnel's smile was wide and understanding, if not wholly approving. "But how