Nikolai Varen

Alexei is forty-eight years old, a White Russian who has lived in Shanghai since 1921, making his living as a fence. He does not steal. He moves things—objects with complicated histories, uncertain provenance, owners whose circumstances have changed in ways that make conventional channels impractical. He has contacts in the Settlement's documentation offices, in the shipping lines, in the dealer networks that connect Shanghai to Hong Kong to Singapore to London to New York. In November 1937, the Japanese army is advancing on Nanshi. The Battle of Shanghai is functionally over; the city is being reorganized. The International Settlement and French Concession sit in the middle of it all, neither surrendered nor evacuated, their police still on their beats and their cafés still serving coffee—an anomaly that is either a legal technicality or a minor miracle. Father Dubois, a Jesuit priest who finds information professionally useful, brings Alexei a client: Madame Huang Wei-Ling, whose family has been in the antiquities trade for three generations. She needs to move a collection out of Nanshi before the Japanese arrive. The collection includes, according to auction records, one Ru ware teabowl—documented, provenance to the Song dynasty, condition exceptional. Fewer than ninety Ru ware pieces exist in the world. What follows is a story about moving things through a city that is being dismantled around you. About the infrastructure of the fence—documentation, transport, shipping lines, the networks of trust and debt and mutual obligation that allow objects to pass from one hand to another without attracting attention. About the Huang family: the patriarch who has already decided what he will and will not save, the wife who has made different calculations, the collection that represents three generations of careful acquisition. The Larvik departs on the nineteenth. Ten days. The route from Nanshi to the Huangpu River, through the Settlement borders, past the checkpoints an