“Kate, Pippa, I’ve missed you so much. Poor little things—are you jet-lagged?” Colette cooed as she bent down and cuddled her emaciated dogs.
“Did she really name her dogs…” Rachel began to whisper in Carlton’s ear.
“Yes, she did. Colette adores the royals—at her parents’ house in Ningbo, she has a pair of Tibetan mastiffs named Wills and Harry,” Carlton explained.
“How were my darlings? Did everything go okay?” Colette asked Roxanne with a worried expression.
“Roxanne just flew Kate and Pippa on Colette’s plane to see a famous dog psychic in California,” Carlton informed Rachel and Nick.
“They were very good. You know, at first I had my doubts about that pet psychic in Ojai, but wait till you read her report. Pippa is still traumatized by the time she almost got blown out of the Bentley convertible. That’s why she tries to burrow under the backseat and poo-poos every time she rides in it. I told the woman nothing—how did she know you had that kind of car? I am a total believer in pet psychics now,” Roxanne reported earnestly.
Colette petted her dog with tears in her eyes. “I am so sorry, Pippa. I’ll make it up to you. Roxanne, please take a picture of us and post on WeChat: ‘Reunited with my girls.’ ” Colette posed expertly for the picture and stood up, smoothing away the wrinkles on her skirt. She then said to Roxanne in a blood-chilling tone, “I never want to see that Bentley again.”
The group approached the final pavilion, the largest building of all and the only one that did not have any exterior windows. “Roxanne—code!” Colette ordered, and her headset-wearing assistant dutifully punched in an eight-digit code that unlocked the door. “Welcome to my family’s private museum,” Colette said.
They stepped into a gallery the size of a basketball arena, and the first thing that caught Rachel’s eye was a large silkscreen canvas of Chairman Mao. “Is that a Warhol?” she asked.
“Yes. Do you like my Mao? My father gave that to me for my sixteenth birthday.”
“What a cool birthday present,” Rachel remarked.
“Yes, it was the favorite out of all my presents that year. I wish I had a time machine so I could go back and Andy could do my portrait.” Colette sighed. Nick stood in front of the painting, staring with amusement at the Communist leader’s receding hairline, alternately wondering what the dictator or the artist might have made of a girl like Colette Bing.
Nick and Rachel began heading toward the right, but Colette said, “Oh, you can skip that gallery over there, that’s just filled with boring junk my father had to have when he first started collecting—Picassos, Gauguins, that sort of thing. Come see what I’ve been buying lately.” They were steered into a gallery where the walls were a veritable checklist of the artists du jour from all the international art fairs—a mouthwatering Vik Muniz chocolate syrup painting, Bridget Riley’s migraine-inducing canvas of overlapping tiny squares, a heroin-fueled scrawl by Jean-Michel Basquiat, and, of course, an immense Mona Kuhn image of two preposterously photogenic Nordic youths posing nude on a dewy doorstep.
Rounding the corner, they came into an even larger gallery that contained only one enormous piece of art—twenty-four scrolls that were hung together to form a vast, intricate landscape.
Nick was taken aback. “Hey, isn’t that The Palace of Eighteen Perfections? I thought Kitty—”
At that moment, Roxanne gasped in alarm and put her hand over her earpiece. “Are you sure?” she said into her headset, before grabbing Colette’s arm. “Your parents just checked in at the guardhouse.”
Colette looked panic-stricken for a split second. “Already? They’re much too early! Nothing’s ready!” Turning to Rachel and Nick, she said, “I’m sorry to end the tour now, but my parents have arrived.”
The group rushed back toward the grand salon, as Colette barked out orders to Roxanne. “Alert all staff! Where’s that damn Wolseley? Tell Ping Gao to start cooking the parchment chicken now! And tell Baptiste to decant the whiskey! And why aren’t the bamboo groves around the central pool lit?”
“They are on a timer. They don’t come on until seven o’clock along with the lights,” Roxanne responded.
“Turn everything on now! And turn off this silly whimpering man—you know my father only likes listening to Chinese folk songs! And get Kate and Pippa into their cages—you know how allergic my mother is!”
Hearing their names, the dogs started yapping excitedly.
“Kill the Bon Iver and put on the Peng Liyuan!”*3 Roxanne rasped into her headset as she ran toward