Chapter 90
When Yang Ye returned to the grocery store, it was about to get dark.
Zhou Yiheng and Xiao Xiao had been anxiously waiting for her in the grocery store for the entire day. When they heard her pressing the password at the door, they immediately walked out of the living room and waited for her at the door together.
As soon as Yang Ye walked into the door, Xiao Xiao stepped forward. She pulled Yang Ye's arm and looked him up and down carefully.
"Are you okay?" Xiao Xiao looked at her worriedly.
Yang Ye smiled, but there was still a hint of fatigue between his brows. "It's okay, I'll just go get a report."
"You scared me to death." Xiao Xiao patted her chest, finally letting out the breath that had been holding her back all afternoon. "I just heard what you said, asking me to wait, and then telling me to come back and talk. I thought something was wrong with you."
Yang Ye smiled, and she patted Xiao Xiao's hand soothingly, "I just saw a strange person at Jinshizhai, and I don't want them to find out, so I told you this."
Zhou Yiheng took a cup of freshly poured hot water from the kitchen, handed it to Yang Ye and said, "Drink a cup of water and rest for a while before we talk."
Yang Ye took the glass of water, feeling the warm walls. She sat down on the office chair Xiao Xiao had just moved and took a few sips of the hot water. She couldn't figure out why, but the image of the man in the windbreaker became clearer and clearer in her mind. The familiar figure of the man, with those fierce and calculating eyes, always struck Yang Ye as strange, but she couldn't put her finger on what it was.
She clenched the cup tightly with both hands.
"Boss?" Xiaoxiao noticed her distraction and called out softly.
Yang Ye placed the water cup on the table next to her. She took a deep breath and tried to piece together the things she had seen in Jinshizhai in order. Xiao Xiao and Zhou Yiheng stood across from her, looking at her with concerned expressions.
Yang Ye looked up. Her calm eyes seemed to have a sense of direction, though not much. Slowly, she recounted to them everything that had happened today, from the completely false appraisal report in her hand, to the swapped pastel dish she had retrieved, to the van she had seen at the door, and finally, the strange man who had puzzled her.
"It's now certain that the so-called appraisal is a cover," Yang Ye concluded with certainty. "They don't care about the true value of the items at all. They only care about making money by exploiting the information gap. And I suspect their method of shipping them out may be more direct than I previously thought."
"Why?" Zhou Yiheng asked.
"I just saw them loading four boxes into the van," Yang Ye said. "If we assume each box can hold a maximum of four items, they've taken away sixteen items this time. Jinshizhai has only been open for three months, how could they have collected so many?"
"Do you think they might mix the fake ones with the real ones?" Xiao Xiao frowned.
"Yeah." Yang Ye crossed his legs and leaned forward.
The cell phone in her pocket suddenly vibrated. Yang Ye took it out and saw the display on the screen. She pressed the answer button and turned on the hands-free function.
"How's the situation over there?" Yang Ye asked straight to the point.
"The situation isn't good," Li Cheng's heavy voice came from the other end of the phone. "There are indeed a group of people in the market right now who claim to appraise artworks and then sell them at high prices. Their tactics are all the same: they either produce fake reports, or try to devalue genuine works by saying they're fake. Or they try to devalue the authentic works."
He paused briefly, then said with regret, "I have a friend whose elderly family member was sick and needed money, so he sold a famille rose porcelain vase, but it only sold for less than 50,000 yuan. But when I looked at the photos he sent me, although I'm not a professional in this field, 50,000 yuan is far too low an estimate for a porcelain vase from the early Qing Dynasty."
"Is he also in Jinshizhai?" Xiao Xiao asked
"No, it's from a company called Shengshi Appraisal," Li Cheng said, "but the report he showed me is similar to the documents you sent me before."
Yang Ye and Xiao Xiao looked at each other and saw shock and helplessness in each other's eyes.
Zhou Yiheng folded his arms, his tone heavy, "It seems their preparations are more complicated than we imagined. But I still don't understand. If their original goal was to ship the real thing abroad and then trade it overseas, wouldn't it be better to send one piece at a time? Why would they have to go through so many?"
"No, shipping one item out alone will actually attract more attention." Xiao Xiao shook her head. She spoke slowly, as if she was organizing her next thoughts. "Only by mixing it with a bunch of other things can it pass as something else."
"I have a bunch of stuff and I want to ship it abroad. I don't need to use names like antiques or curios. After all, if I want to ship it out under these two names, I still need relevant approval documents. But what if I use the names of handicrafts or decorative items?"
Zhou Yiheng nodded thoughtfully, but then he raised a new question, "If that's really what you said, then why did he go to so much trouble to have someone do the appraisal?"
"Okay, I got it." Yang Ye hung up the phone
The grocery store also fell into a brief silence.
Zhou Yiheng was the first to break the silence. "I've always thought, if they're doing all this to disrupt the market and then secretly ship the goods abroad for trade, they could definitely use simpler methods. The current Jinshizhai, first, makes counterfeits to replace the real ones. Second, it lowers the value of the real ones and buys them at a low price. Third, it accepts counterfeits, even though it's to cheat people out of money. But with these three things, I really can't imagine what kind of person could do it."
"Maybe they are screening." Yang Ye stood up and thought for a while. "Through a lot of identification, they can filter out the truly valuable things."
"Are they looking for something specific, like a masterpiece by a master, or something from a particular year?" Xiao Xiao suddenly asked. "I'm wondering, since they're arranging the transaction abroad, wouldn't foreign buyers have requirements for their items? It's not like others will just accept whatever they have, right?"
Yang Ye did not answer, but the man in the black windbreaker appeared in her mind again. The indescribable sense of familiarity made her feel uneasy.
After a moment, she turned to face Zhou Yiheng and Xiao Xiao, "What if we assume that their goals were never the same?"
"Just as Zhou Yiheng just said, they're using three methods simultaneously," Yang Ye said. "On the one hand, they're buying authentic items at low prices, then mixing them with handicrafts and shipping them out. On the other hand, they're producing all sorts of fake reports on a large scale, disrupting the current market and attracting more people to their appraisers."
Yang Ye paused, "As for why I chose this place, it's probably because I'm familiar with it."
Zhou Yiheng took over the conversation and added, "Another possibility is that they need to gather a certain amount of goods to pack the handicrafts and ship them abroad, and the quantity must be correct."
"No matter what they want, the things cannot be shipped out in such an unclear way." Yang Ye looked at the two of them and said firmly, "Absolutely not."
It was around six o'clock, almost seven. The police station in the evening was no longer as lively and noisy as it was during the day. There were only a few scattered police officers in the duty room at the door. Yang Ye greeted them and walked upstairs. The sound of her footsteps on the stairs was particularly obvious in this quiet environment.
Walking upstairs to the office, she knocked twice on the door.
The door was ajar, and the voice of someone talking on the phone came from inside. The hoarse voice was full of obvious fatigue.
"This is the third case this month. These are all elderly people being scammed. Let's file a case according to the procedures."
Xu Jingzhe hung up the phone, looked up and saw that it was her, surprise flashed across his face, "How come you have time to come to my place today?"
As he spoke, he stood up and walked to the water dispenser to get some water for Yang Ye.
Suddenly, as if he had thought of something, he stopped taking the water and his tone became a little nervous, "Did something happen to Xiao Xiao?"
"Xiao Xiao is fine," Yang Ye said. She took the water cup and leaned back on the chair opposite Xu Jingzhe. "I have something to ask you for help."
She took the document out of her bag and placed it on Xu Jingzhe's desk.
Xu Jingzhe sat back in his chair and, puzzled, opened the folder. Inside was the appraisal report from Jinshizhai regarding her small pastel dish. He flipped through a few pages, and the confusion on his face gradually faded, replaced by a sense of helplessness and distress.
"You're going to tell me about Jinshizhai again." Xu Jingzhe put down the document and rubbed his temples with his fingertips. "I know you suspect they have problems, and I believe your intuition is very accurate. However, we have to rely on evidence to handle cases. Your suspicions and conjectures are completely useless to us."
"The evidence is right here," Yang Ye pointed at the report he had just put down and said seriously, "They also swapped my things."
Xu Jingzhe's expression immediately turned serious. He sat up straight and asked, "Switched? How can you be sure?"
Yang Ye pulled out her phone, found her photo album, and compared the two photos. She had suspected that Jinshizhai might be playing tricks with the items, but she hadn't expected her guess to be right.
There were two photos, one taken before she sent it for appraisal. There was a clear, light scratch on the edge of the plate, a different color than the plate itself. The other photo was taken secretly after she received the item from Jinshizhai. The plate was still the same, but the scratch had disappeared.
"I know this scratch very well. I scratched it on purpose before I sent it to them. The one they returned to me is not the original one at all," Yang Ye pointed at the phone screen.
Xu Jingzhe frowned. He looked back and forth at the two photos, carefully examining them several times. He tapped his fingers on the table a few times and sighed. "We can accept the suspicion that the items were swapped. If confirmed, it would be a theft. But you told me before about smuggling. We don't have enough evidence right now. We can't file a case and can't move forward."
He leaned forward and patiently spoke to Yang Ye, "Poor appraisal skills and the issuance of a false report are at most a matter of industry irregularities or commercial fraud, which falls under the jurisdiction of market supervision. Their shipping boxes are professional and they have a dedicated storage warehouse, but this doesn't prove they are smuggling. What you've told me now doesn't even meet the most basic standards for filing a case."
"If it's commercial fraud, why make such a big fuss?"
"I still say that there's nothing wrong with your speculation and suspicion, but what we need is evidence that can be recognized by the law," Xu Jingzhe said. "Handling a case is like building a house; you have to have solid evidence."
Yang Ye thought for a moment, then looked up at Xu Jingzhe and said, "What if I could receive direct evidence?"
"What do you want to do?" Xu Jingzhe asked.
"If they swapped my belongings and the value of the items reached the threshold for filing a case, would you be able to send the police?"
"Yes," Xu Jingzhe nodded after a pause, then added, "But the value of something must be recognized, you can't just talk about it verbally."
"Okay, I understand." Yang Ye stood up and had a rough idea in his mind.
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