Donovans 02 - Jade Island

She didn’t even nod. She simply went back to the jades. The sooner she was out of Farmer’s high-tech playpen and away from Han Seng, the happier she would be.
    As she bent over the first jade again, she wondered if pepper spray would put the guard out of commission before he could draw his gun and shoot. Somehow she doubted it.
    “Did you hear me?” Kyle breathed into Lianne’s ear.
    She nodded, then jerked slightly when she felt the faint, brushing warmth of his fingertips as he tucked in the strand of hair that insisted on coming free of her bone hair clip.
    “I’m going to have to get a better barrette,” Lianne said.
    “Not on my account.”
    “You’re distracting me.”
    “Should I apologize?”
    “Only if you’re sincere,” she retorted.
    He laughed.
    Lianne gathered her fragmenting thoughts and concentrated on the jades Seng was offering in trade to the Tangs. Although the light looked good, she had a more reliable index than visual memory. She reached over to her purse, took out several examples of jade whose color was known to her, and set them on the table to see what the lighting did to them.
    “Good,” Lianne murmured. “Full-spectrum daylight. The color you see now is what you’ll see at noon tomorrow somewhere else.”
    “You sure? This is pretty much a Mediterranean style of light. I can change the mix to pure Pacific Northwest.”
    Shaking her head, Lianne picked up the first jade, which rested on a card with the number 1 on it. The piece was a pendant half the size of her palm. The exterior of the pendant was a medium-green jade lattice of peach leaves and twigs. Inside the lattice was a peach that was a mottled white-green. The natural indentation of the peach had been exaggerated so that it was an accurate, if rather graceless, representation of a vulva.
    “You’re supposed to be thinking out loud,” Kyle said. “Remember?”
    Lianne nodded. She was also remembering that everything she said or did was being taped.
    “So what are you thinking?” Kyle asked.
    “I can see why Seng is editing this piece out of his collection.”
    “What’s wrong with it?”
    “It’s an example of how a collector’s particular passion can limit the quality of the pieces he collects.”
    Kyle looked at the pendant. “I’m listening.”
    “Han Seng has chosen to collect Chinese jade erotica from all dynasties. It’s a difficult choice. Even though erotica was an accepted and expected part of Chineselife—at least until Christianity and the People’s Republic—the vast majority of Chinese erotic art was in paintings.”
    “Visual aids, huh? Not much new there.”
    “Some things transcend cultural differences,” Lianne agreed dryly. “Unless an emperor or a prince or a very wealthy bureaucrat commissioned jade erotic objects, they simply weren’t made, or they were made by average craftsmen from average stone.”
    “Like the pendant you’re holding?”
    “Yes.”
    “So it’s not the subject matter that’s the problem?”
    “That’s your Puritan cultural background talking,” Lianne said, smiling slightly. “Puritanism was a very late comer to China’s cultural mix. The fact that Western museums display only Chinese household goods and landscape paintings says more about our society’s reluctance to address sexuality than China’s. China has a long and rich history of erotica.”
    “Most societies do.”
    “But China’s wasn’t kept in the closet. The frequency and duration of an emperor’s visits to his wives and concubines were as much a source of public concern and discussion as his imperial decrees. In fact, satyriasis was a condition much admired in a ruler.”
    Eyebrows raised, Kyle looked down the row of jade artifacts depicting variations on the theme of human sexuality.
    “Shocked?” she asked, watching him from the corner of her eye.
    He smiled slowly. “Just thinking about what would happen if a museum put these jades in the lobby. Bet attendance would go through the roof.”
    “So would the local politicians.”
    “Yeah. As you say, different cultures.” Kyle looked back at the pendant. “So the only problem with this is in the execution and the quality of the stone, not the subject matter?”
    Lianne nodded. “The Tang family has many exquisite variations of the peach leaves-and-fruit theme. The pieces are very sensual, suggesting the pleasure to be found within a woman’s body, as well as fertility with its promise of a man’s immortality