I slept exactly one hour.
By the fourth watch I was up, lighting a candle, knocking on the study door.
Pei Yan opened it at once. He hadn't slept either. I doubt he had slept a whole night through in three years.
"I want to see all forty-one," I said.
"Now?"
"Now." I raised the candle. "You told me all forty-one are yours. But you never sold the pin. So how many of the forty-one aren't yours?"
He stood still a moment.
Then he reached for his outer robe.
"Come."
We started in the main hall.
I went first with the candle. He came behind, hands clasped, saying nothing.
The bronze censer on the table. I lifted it, turned it once, tapped it with a nail. "False. That green came out of vinegar and salt, six months in the jar."
"Yes," he said. "The real one I sold in the third month last year. Two hundred and sixty taels."
"Traded for what?"
He was quiet a moment.
"A name," he said. "The name of the officer who kept the armory that year. A man told me that for two hundred and sixty taels he'd give me the name. I paid. I went to find him. He'd died the year before — old age, in his bed, with his children and grandchildren all around him."
I looked up at him.
"You spent two hundred and sixty taels to learn that a man was dead."
"Yes."
He said it as evenly as if he were reading out a ledger line.
I didn't say anything else. I moved on to the next vase.
We went through that whole house before the night was out.
The ninth piece was a painting, Autumn Mountains, hanging in the west hall. I looked at the ink, the paper, the seal. "False. But a decent job."
"The real one traded for a stack of paper," he said.
"What paper?"
"Supply disbursement records. Four sheets. Stamped."
I spun around. "Four stamped sheets of disbursement? If those were real—"
"They were false," he said.
I stood there.
"I didn't know." His voice stayed level, but I saw his hands close behind his back. "I took those four sheets, I read them, and I found a name on them. Xia Yuan, warehouse officer at Binzhou. I was so pleased I didn't sleep for three nights. I went to Binzhou to find him."
"And?"
"He was a good man. He had nothing to do with any of it. He fed me dinner. He asked after my father."
He stopped.
"Three days after I left Binzhou, Xia Yuan died. Fell down a well."
The candle wavered in my hand.
"Those four false sheets weren't made to fool me," he said. "They were made to send me looking. Wherever I go, they learn how far I've got. Whoever's house I walk into, that man dies."
"I'm a hunting dog with a ruined nose. They point, I bark. And someone dies."
He looked at the forgery on the wall.
"The real one sold for eight hundred taels. Tell me, then — what did eight hundred taels buy?"
I stood with the candle in my hand and could not answer.
Because I knew the answer.
He'd bought one sheet of false paper. And one real man's life.
The twenty-second piece was the inkstone.
No — the inkstone was gone. In its place sat another one, black stone, well carved, characters cut into the underside.
I looked at it a long time.
"The grinding well," I said at last. "An inkstone granted by an emperor, ground on by three generations of your family — the well would be dished. Dished to the right, because men grind with the right hand. This one is flat as a plate."
"Yes."
"When did you sell it?"
"Seventh month last year."
"Traded for what?"
Pei Yan said nothing.
I turned and lifted the candle.
"Pei Yan. Traded for what?"
"A seat," he said quietly. "I paid twelve hundred taels to sit and eat one meal with a court official. Half an hour."
"What did he say?"
"He said the fish was good."
I laughed.
Then I stopped laughing.
Because I saw his face.
"Which official?"
"Jiang Jingzhi." He said it flatly. "Grand Secretary now. Minister of War three years ago. My father's report came back from Wangsha through his hands."
I nearly dropped the candle.
"Then what are you still doing here? He—"
"I spent half a year on him," Pei Yan said. "I had people count every object in his house. There isn't one thing in it worth a hundred taels. He eats vegetables. He wears cotton. His son is a registrar in a poor county, walks to work, applied last year for a transfer to the capital, and his father refused it."
"Forty-two thousand taels skimmed off that armor contract. Not one copper of it went into his house."
He shrugged.
"I counted three times. Then I crossed him off."
I sat down.
There's a saying in my trade; my father taught it to me when I was ten. A greedy customer is easy. It's the one who wants nothing that's hard.
A greedy man, you know what he wants, so you can name a price.
A man who wants nothing — you're blind.
I always thought that saying was about buyers.
By the middle of the night I understood what we were actually doing.
I'd thought I was taking inventory.
These forty-one forgeries were not a smokescreen.
They were forty-one headstones.
Every false object stood in the exact place of a real one that had left this house. And every real one that left bought back a fragment — a dead man's name, a dinner, a compliment about the fish, a sheet of false paper, a body at the bottom of a well.
He had sold his whole house to buy the truth.
And they had sold him nothing but forgeries.
He couldn't see it. So he kept paying. For three years.
I am a merchant. I grew up in a pawnshop; I have watched people sell their mother's things, their children's things, until it stopped touching me.
I have never in my life seen anyone taken like that.
Everywhere I found a fake, he could name it at once: sold in which month, for how much, traded for what.
No thinking. No ledger to check.
Thirty-eight pieces, recited like scripture.
He could not identify a single forgery in that house. But he remembered every real object that had ever left it, down to the day and the figure.
Near dawn I understood.
That isn't memory.
That's a man in mourning.
The last three were in a courtyard at the northwest corner.
Pei Yan stopped outside the gate.
"This was my mother's," he said. "She died when I was nine."
He handed me the keys.
"I don't go in."
"How long has it been locked?"
"Three years."
I took the keys and pushed the door.
A film of dust lay over everything, thin, and perfectly even. There was a wooden box on the dressing table. A jade bangle on a stand. The phoenix pin had lived in the box until the wedding day, when it was fetched out and put in my hair.
I looked at the bangle first.
Then the box.
Then I sat down hard on a dusty stool, still holding the candle, my heart beating slow and heavy.
All three were forgeries.
I went out. Pei Yan was still on the step, his back to the door.
"Three pieces," I said. "Pin, bangle, box. All false."
"I never sold anything of my mother's," he said. "Not one thing."
"I know."
I sat down on the step. A little apart from him.
I didn't ask. I didn't comfort him either.
Back at the shop he had sat beside me exactly like this and let me be. I'd thought he simply hadn't known what to say.
Now I understood that letting someone be is a thing you have to learn.
The sky began to lighten. The dust in the courtyard rose into the first shaft of it, drifting, slow, like snow falling upward.
"Pei Yan."
"Yes."
"Whoever came in and swapped these three," I said, "wasn't after money. That bangle would fetch three hundred taels; faking it cost him a hundred at the least. He clears two hundred. He got into this estate, into a courtyard locked for three years, and walked out with two hundred taels?"
He turned to look at me.
"He wasn't taking things," I said. "He was looking for something. Looking for it in those three pieces. And when he'd finished looking, he left copies behind so you'd never know anyone had been."
I raised my eyes to the dusty room.
The dust was thick. Perfectly even.
"You locked this door three years ago," I said. "Someone got in before I did."
"And he put the dust back tidily afterward."
