A Cup of Light by Nicole Mones

she knew she had a high-wattage grin. She could always crack the ice with a smile. No, she wasn’t so like him.
    Forget him, she thought.
    Just then the driver turned away from the lake and into the gate of the villa. Her heart lifted at the thought of today’s pots, just ahead, waiting. She didn’t need to think about her father. He could stay in his memory room. He didn’t have to come out.
    In Hong Kong Stanley Pao sat back on a leather couch and talked to Gao Yideng on the phone. “And for what percentage? Mmm, I don’t know. Five more tenths of a point. Yes.” Stanley smiled faintly. He was in his seventies, a sleekly plump, patrician man who wore his white hair pomaded straight back, just long enough to disappear neatly under his collar. He liked to sit with one hand on his rounded stomach. He spoke in slow, measured tones and never dropped his refinement of manner. He lived alone here in this magnificent old apartment in Happy Valley, which looked over the racecourse. He had always lived alone, except for his prized Pekingese dogs. He had never married. He was the sort of man after whose personal life people did not ask and whose partners, whoever they were, did not appear with him in public.
    Not that he didn’t let some of his vices show. One of them was horse racing. Not only could he see the track from his windows, he could see the giant screen over the track for simultaneous video close-ups. At dawn he watched the horses exercise as he took his tea. But mostly, he followed horse racing on his computer, which was always kept running on a side table in his porcelain room. A keyboard always lay beside him on the couch. Results from races around the world appeared regularly, and in between, charts of thoroughbred bloodlines and streaming reams of racing data ran endlessly down the screen. Offtrack betting, in some form or another, was available in most cities of the world. Horses raced every day. Stanley played right here, placing bets, paying out or collecting through the keyboard on the sofa beside him. It was one of the games he loved in life. Though business was fun too. He listened to Mr. Gao. Ah, now the commission sounded right. Now he was getting close to feeling satisfied. “I think this will be possible,” he said. Nothing jolted Stanley off his phlegmatic calm. “Of course,” he said, “the porcelain must be fully inside Hong Kong.”
    Both men, several thousand miles apart, smiled into their phones. This was the beauty of Hong Kong’s law, as they knew.
    â€œSo I transfer it to the American representatives. They’ll contract their own packing and crating?” Stanley knew the details of a job like this well. He had been a private porcelain dealer for many years, receiving selected clients in this room. He only served those lucky enough or powerful enough to be invited here to his home, where his beloved prizewinning dogs ran free in the outer rooms; where here, in his climatically controlled inner chamber with the racetrack view, millions of dollars’ worth of rare porcelain was on casual display, cluttered, grouped on tables and floor and shelves and every available space. Fine pots from the Ming and Qing and the Tang and the Song. Piles of art books with relevant cross-references to museum collections around the world. Yet there were many fake pots in the room too. There were fakes even an amateur could spot, and also fakes that would fool anyone—even him, the
éminence,
if he didn’t know better. The interplay between doubt and faith, between the eye believing and the eye distrusting—this was the real surge for Stanley Pao. This was what kept his soul afloat.
    He listened carefully to Gao Yideng, but at the same time he also made a decision about betting on a race at Saratoga. One hundred U.S. dollars on number three in the fifth. An amusement, an intriguing moment he would set up for himself, later when the results of