If you want to find a forger, don't go looking for the forger.
He hides. He changes his name. He moves house every three months.
Go and find the man who sells to him.
The man who sells doesn't hide. The man who sells has to open a shop, hang a board, and pray for customers.
"The false ruby on that pin is fired glass," I told Pei Yan, pulling on my shoes. "To fire a red like that — no cloudiness, no grit, even all the way through — there aren't four kilns in this capital that can do it."
"You know all four?"
"I know all four. I also know which one cheats with lead." I lifted my chin. "You come. You don't speak."
At the first kiln I asked to buy a batch of red stones, rice-grain size, for the eyes of a statue, complained about the price, haggled, and left.
At the second I criticized the color, accused the master of cutting it with lead, and got thrown out.
At the third I sat and drank two cups of tea, talked about my father, sighed about how slow business was, and then said wistfully: "I want the old color. There used to be someone who worked for the Tan family workshop — such a beautiful red..."
The old kiln master was pouring. His hand stopped.
"The Tan place." He set the pot down. "Burned. Three years back."
"Burned?"
"Burned to the ground. Eleventh month, twentieth year of Jinghe." He clicked his tongue. "Big wind that night. Nobody could do a thing."
I picked up my cup and drank.
Eleventh month, twentieth year of Jinghe.
The same month my father lost his eyes.
I put the cup down, beamed at him, praised the tea, asked a few harmless questions, and towed Pei Yan out of the door.
Three steps down the street I realized my hands had gone cold.
The Tan family workshop had stood outside the city, seven miles beyond the south gate.
What's there now is a patch of black ground gone over with weeds, a few brick walls still standing half-height like broken teeth. Half a mile off there's a ruined earth-god shrine with the roof fallen in on one side.
We were still a hundred paces from the shrine when we heard it.
Knock.
Knock.
Knock.
I turned around.
Pei Yan had stopped in the middle of the road.
He wasn't moving. His face hadn't changed. But he stood there rigid, arms hanging, like a man who has just heard his own name called in the dark.
I walked back, reached out, and took hold of his wrist.
I didn't say anything.
I just held on.
After a long moment I felt him let out a breath.
Then he walked on.
There was an old man in the shrine mending a pot.
Seventy or so, bent-backed, hair completely white, in a robe patched over its patches. In front of him were a few holed pots belonging to people from the hamlet, a small anvil, a hammer.
He fitted a patch over the hole, raised the hammer, and struck.
Knock.
The thumb of his right hand was gone.
An old cut, long healed, neat. Not an accident. Nobody loses a thumb to an accident and gets a face that clean.
That was done on purpose, by himself.
A stone-setter without a right thumb is finished. The thumb is what holds the stone.
I took out the phoenix pin and laid it on the dirt in front of him.
The hammering stopped.
The old man looked at the pin for a long time.
Then he set the hammer down, slowly, the way you set a thing down for the last time.
"I've been waiting three years," he said.
Old Tan denied nothing.
I'd expected to have to press him, frighten him, work him around. My father taught me thirty ways to get the truth out of a lying customer.
I didn't use one of them.
He talked the way a man empties a sack of stones he has carried far too long.
"Three thousand sets. Fourth month that year. Delivery before the ninth." He said. "They supplied the iron. I only cast, riveted, lacquered."
"You knew it was thin," I said.
"Of course I knew." He said. "Fifty years in the trade. I pick up a piece of iron and I know how many men it kills."
He raised his head. His eyes were clouded, but not blind — only the film an old man's eyes get when the tears have been gone a long time.
"I did ask. I asked the officer who brought the iron: is this really going to the frontier? He said no — reserve stock, it sits in a warehouse, nobody ever puts it on."
"You believed him?"
"No," Old Tan said. "I didn't believe him. I made it anyway."
He looked down at his ruined hand.
"Girl. You price things for a living. Tell me — a man who knows he's casting death, and casts it anyway, because three thousand sets pays enough to feed forty people in that workshop for two years — what's that man worth?"
I had no answer.
"Who placed the order?" Pei Yan asked. It was the first thing he'd said since walking in.
"I don't know."
"Old Tan—"
"I truly don't." He shook his head. "An officer came. That officer died the next year. Then someone else came with the money. The one with the money didn't know who he was paying for either — he only counted it out."
I saw Pei Yan's hand close.
Three years. He had sold his entire house. And at the end of it the road ran to an old man mending pots in a broken shrine.
"But I remember one thing," Old Tan said.
My head came up.
"That same month they sent a second order. A small one." He pointed at the pin on the ground. "That."
"A hairpin."
"Yes. A hairpin, a jade bangle, a wooden box. They brought me the real ones and told me to make them identical, and when I'd finished they took both back." He frowned, as though he still found it strange. "Fifty years in the trade, I'd never had an order like it. People hire me to make a copy so they can sell the original. These people kept both."
"They took the real ones back?" I asked.
"They did. All three. Said they were putting them back where they came from."
I glanced at Pei Yan.
Three real things of his mother's, carried out.
Three false ones left behind in a courtyard locked for three years, with the dust laid back down evenly.
So they hadn't swapped them to steal.
They had swapped them to keep — to hold the real things somewhere else, and let this house go on believing nothing had moved.
Something was in those three objects. And they did not want Pei Yan's hands on it.
Pei Yan reached into his robe, took out the coarse cloth bag, opened it, and set the armor plate on the dirt beside the pin.
Old Tan looked at it.
Then his face went grey.
"I paid three coppers for it," Pei Yan said. "A scrap-iron stall outside the east gate. I didn't know it was real. I don't know what's real. I never have."
He sat down, on the filthy ground, level with the old man mending pots.
"I only knocked on it once," he said. "And it made the sound I listened to all night on the wall at Wangsha."
Three years he had gone out to buy the truth with his eyes, and bought nothing but forgeries.
The one true thing he ever bought, he bought with his ears. Three coppers.
Old Tan began to shake.
Not with fear. It was the shake of an old man when something inside him gives way.
He put out a hand toward the plate, and drew it back.
Pei Yan reached over, took the holed pot beside him, set it on the anvil, and held it steady for him.
Nobody said a word.
The old man picked up his hammer and struck once.
Knock.
Then he wept.
It wasn't until I stood to leave that Old Tan looked properly at my face.
He looked for a long time. Long enough to raise the hair on my neck.
"Girl," he said. "Are you... a Su?"
I stopped.
"Su Ping's daughter. The One Word House, Yonghe Street."
I couldn't get a word out.
Old Tan got to his feet.
Then he did something that made me step back — he went down on his knees and put his forehead to the dirt in front of me, three times, hard enough to hear.
"Old Tan—"
"Your father—" His voice broke open. "Is your father still living?"
"He is." My own voice sounded like someone else's. "My father is blind."
The old man folded down onto the ground.
"I'm sorry," he said. "The eighth month that year, I was desperate. I took that plate of armor and pawned it."
"Of the whole street, I picked the one shop that never lies."
