Ghost Hero

Начало книги

Reed Farrel Coleman, Nancy Ennis, Ed Lin, Jonathan Santlofer, Lisa Scottoline, Keith Snyder, Joseph Wallace

Steven Blier, Hillary Brown, Belmont Freeman, Max Rudin, James Russell, Amy Schatz

Betsy Harding, Royal Huber, Tom Savage

The Museum of Chinese in America

And a wish for good fortune to

Liu Xiaobo and Ai Weiwei

1

In a relentlessly chic and tranquil tea shop on the Lower East Side, I sat sipping gunpowder green and trying to figure out what my new client was up to. That the client, Jeff Dunbar, sat across the table laying out the case he was hiring me for, helped not at all.

“It’s about art,” he’d begun, stirring sugar into his straight-ahead American coffee after the pleased-to-meet-yous were over.

“Art?” I’d tried to sound intrigued, as opposed to baffled, by this revelation. Dunbar had called the day before, saying he needed an investigator and had seen my Web site. I’d expected, when we met on this chilly, bright spring morning, to hear a problem that was personal—cheating fiancée, two-timing wife—or professional—industrial espionage, embezzling employees. Straying spouses and shady secretaries are my daily bread and the Web site says so. It doesn’t mention art, a specialty outside any of my areas of expertise. If this case was about art, I had to wonder, why call me?

Читать дальше →