Meet Me in Venice Read Free Page B

man.”
    And she was, Preshy thought, smiling, probably right.
    Nevertheless, thinking of what Daria had said, she decided that tonight she would put on the little black dress and the heels, and the thin little rope of diamonds Aunt Grizelda had given her for her sixteenth birthday—(so different from her grandmother’s fantastical lost necklace)—as well as the canary diamond ring, a gift for her twenty-first. (“Since no man has given you a diamond ring yet, suppose I’d better,” Aunt G had said when she presented it to her, and since Grizelda felt size counted, it was a whopper.) Preshy always felt elegant when she wore it and Daria said it made her look like a rich girl and added a little class to her act.
    Preshy heaved a sigh. She would go to that art gallery opening after all, then she would have a late after-hours dinner with Sylvie at Verlaine. It was just another Saturday night in Paris.

THREE
    SHANGHAI
    L ILY lived in the historic part of Shanghai known as the French
    Concession, in an old Colonial-style house that thanks to her efforts had survived the destructive development boom of the past few years.
    In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the area had been home to French diplomats, businessmen and entrepreneurs, as well as hard-partying socialites, but after the Revolution it had fallen on hard times. Now, though, it was being brought back to life with a mix of the old small traditional businesses and open-fronted shops set alongside smart restaurants and bars, with chic boutiques scattered amongst its alleys and broad tree-lined avenues.
    Tucked back on a
longtang,
a narrow lane with a nightclub on one side and a noodle shop on the other, Lily’s house was a gemfrom the past, set in its private courtyard with a red-tiled roof, tall green-painted shutters and a large verandah.
    The house had been owned by the Song family for generations and was the only possession Lily’s father had not been able to gamble away. It had been the single anchor in their chaotic lives, and the only thing Lily had felt no one could ever take from her. Her father had gambled himself into financial oblivion playing baccarat and
pai gow
in Macao and other gambling capitals of the world, leaving his wife to scramble for an existence. But Lily was made of different stuff. When she was very young, she had decided she would succeed, at any cost.
    Her mother, who was the Hennessys’ first daughter, had disobeyed them and run off to Shanghai with the gambler and playboy Henry Song. They never spoke to her again. While Lily’s father played the tables, her mother attempted to make a living selling cheap copies of antiques. Somehow the family scraped by. When she was sixteen her father died and Lily left school and took over the business. Her mother died five years later. Lily was alone in the world with no one to rely on but herself.
    She ran her antiques business from the house and did most of her “buying” cheaply from small villages and towns, searching out old family pieces from simple country people who had no idea of their true value. She did not consider this stealing, merely good business. More recently, though, when the Yangtze, the Great Yellow River, had been gouged out to create a dam, gangs of robbers had discovered the tombs hidden near the old villages and were secretly and illegally dismantling them, stealing the treasures of the ancestors.
    Superstitious, this had made Lily nervous, but she soon shrugged it off and found herself a lucrative new source of income, buying from the gangs, or “suppliers” as she preferred to call them, then selling on to private customers like the Swiss businessman, acting on behalf of a rich collector. As a front for her illegal activities she kept up her regular business of manufacturing replicas of antiquities: the traditional Buddha’s, and Mao souvenirs and the famous terra-cotta warriors of Xi’an, that she sold to tourist shops, as well as abroad.
    She