by Ian Hamilton
Kwong’s business was called Great Wall Antiques and Fine Art. He had been the sole owner and the business had been shuttered when he died. His brother had inherited everything. He had sold off the inventory, shredded the records, and made Great Wall history. That doesn’t mean there aren’t records somewhere, she thought. The Hong Kong Department of Inland Revenue would certainly have tax returns.
The flight was uneventful, and Uncle and Ava breezed through Hong Kong Immigration. She called the Mandarin Oriental Hotel as they were walking out of the arrivals hall to meet Sonny, booking a room for three nights. As she did she saw Uncle glancing sideways at her.
“I have been thinking you need to be careful with this woman,” he said.
“A couple of days, that’s all. If I don’t find anything, then that’s it.”
“She will have expectations.”
“I made no promises.”
“You know how selective some people’s memories are. I do not want you to be the subject of recriminations.”
“I’ll be careful what I say.”
“I would be happier if her husband knew,” he said.
“Let me try it my way for a few days. That’s all — a few days.”
She knew Uncle wasn’t arguing with her and that he wasn’t about to tell her to change her decision. He just needed to let her know that he was concerned.
“ Momentai,” he said.
They saw Sonny leaning against the Mercedes, talking to a couple of policemen. He rushed to Uncle as soon as he saw him, grabbing the carry-on. The policemen lowered their heads in Uncle’s direction.
“I’m staying at the Mandarin Oriental in Central,” she said to Sonny as the car pulled away from the curb. “But drop me off at the Star Ferry terminal in Kowloon. I’ll take the boat over to Central. That way you won’t have to fight the Harbour Tunnel traffic.”
“Hot pot tonight?” Uncle asked.
Ava hesitated. “I may work late. The sooner I start on this case, the sooner I’ll get it behind us.”
“That is sensible,” Uncle said.
“I’ll keep in touch,” she said, kissing him on the forehead as Sonny eased the car up to the terminal entrance.
At just past one o’clock she boarded the ferry. It was a gorgeous day. Spring was the only season she had ever enjoyed in Hong Kong. The summers were oppressively hot and the fall was too often cold and rainy. The winters were perpetually damp, with temperatures low enough to make the chill seep into the bones. She was able to get a seat near the front but she moved back from the rail to avoid the odours wafting off the water. As the ferry churned its way across Victoria Harbour towards the Hong Kong shoreline, Ava watched the sun flicker off the skyscrapers, the light shimmering on black, silver, and gold glass. What a marvel it is, she thought for the second time in two days. People raved about the view of the harbour from Victoria Peak, but for Ava there was no better way to see it than from the ferry on a beautiful day.
When the boat docked, she walked across Connaught Road to the Mandarin Oriental Hotel. Entering through its front doors was like coming home for her. She was a frequent guest, and within five minutes she was checked in and had been escorted by one of the front desk associates to her room.
Ava quickly unpacked. She put her laptop on the desk, turned it on, and then opened her Moleskine notebook, where she had copied the notes May Ling had given her. She found the phone number for Brian Torrence and dialled it.
“Torrence,” he answered.
He can’t be senior, she thought, if he’s answering his own phone. “Hello, my name is Ava Lee. May Ling Wong gave me your number.”
“I spoke with her this morning.”
“Good. So you’re free to talk to me?”
“Whenever you want.”
“How about right now? I’m staying at the Mandarin Oriental. Your office is no more than a five-minute walk.”
“Have you had lunch?”
“No.”
“Me neither. There’s an Italian restaurant on the ground floor of my building. Why don’t you meet me there in about ten minutes? Ask for me, or just look for me. I’m tall, skinny, blond hair, and I’m wearing a navy-blue suit today.”
“Mr. Torrence, did May Ling tell you why I want to talk to you?”
“There’s only one thing it could be about,” he said. “Truthfully, I found it a puzzling request.”
“Why is that?”
“I’ve never heard of you, and in my field there aren’t that many strangers.”
“Well, I guess we’ll have to remedy that.”
(8)
Ava walked into the Italian restaurant and quickly found Brian Torrence. Even seated he seemed taller than the waiter who was attending to him, and his bushy mop of blond hair was hard to miss.
“Mr. Torrence,” she said.
He looked up and smiled. He’s young, probably in his mid-thirties, she thought.
“Call me Brian,” he said, without getting up.
“And I’m Ava.”
“Your accent — I can’t place it. Certainly not Hong Kong English.”
“I’m Canadian.”
“The Wongs reach out to a young Canadian woman? The mystery deepens.”
“I’m hardly mysterious.”
“But you are here to talk about the paintings?”
“Exactly.”
“Quite a problem.”
“So it seems.”
The waiter interrupted them. “I’ve ordered sparkling water, unless you want something stronger,” Torrence said.
“That’s perfect.”
“I recommend the antipasto, and they make a damn fine Caesar. And the brick-oven pizza isn’t half bad.”
“Then why don’t you order for both of us,” she said.
After the waiter had taken their order, Torrence turned back to Ava and said, “The first thing you have to tell me, Ava, is what do you know about this apparent mess we’ve unearthed?”
“Virtually nothing.”
“So you aren’t you in the art business?”
“No, I’m an accountant.”
“I don’t mean to sound rude, but why would the Wongs hire an accountant to help out with this problem? Do you have extra qualifications in the art field?”
“None whatsoever. I barely know anything at all about art.”
He chewed on a breadstick. “I don’t understand.”
“The Wongs have been defrauded of many millions of dollars. My company specializes in finding out who did it and where the money is. We then do what we can to recover as much money as possible. It doesn’t make any difference to us if we’re dealing with computer parts, shrimp, textiles, or paintings.”
“But if you know nothing about the art world, how do you even know where to begin?”
“That’s why I’m here. You’re my beginning.”
“Ah, silly me.”
“Do you have plans for this afternoon?” she asked.
“If I did, I imagine they’ve just changed.”
“I like perceptive men,” she said.
Their food came all at once and the conversation dwindled. Ava waited until the pizza was almost gone before taking out her notebook. “Can we stay here to talk?”
“I don’t see why not. But if we do, I expect you to buy me something stronger than sparkling water.”
“Whatever you want.”
“They have a brilliant Chianti.”
“Order away.”
She passed on the wine, which didn’t seem to bother Torrence. He downed one glass quickly and was halfway through a second by the time the table was cleared.
“I need to understand how it’s possible for the Wongs to end up with all of those fakes. Wong isn’t a stupid man. He isn’t an art expert but he does seem to know a lot about the Fauvists. And then there’s that man Kwong. They seem to think he may have had nothing to do with it, that he was as much a dupe as they were. So explain to me, how does something like this happen?”
�
��Something like this, as you say, happens all the time. Art galleries and museums throughout the world are filled with forgeries and fakes of all kinds — pictures, sculptures, antiquities — but not many people want to talk about it. No one wants to look stupid. No one wants to devalue their collection.”
“Let’s stick to the paintings. Wong Changxing wanted to sell the Monet, so let’s concentrate specifically on that piece. When he bought it, why wouldn’t he have known it was a copy? Surely there has to be a record of it somewhere.”
“It wasn’t a copy,” Torrence said.
“What do you mean?”
“It was an original painting.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Someone painted water lilies in the style of Monet. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that unless you try to pass it off as a Monet. Until it’s signed Monet the painting is actually paying homage to the original artist; after it’s signed, it’s a fake and a criminal offence.”
“In the style of?”
“Yes, like most of the rest of the Wongs’ pictures.”
“But when you say ‘in the style of,’ how many water lilies paintings are there?”
“That’s where it gets a bit tricky. Many of these artists fell in love with a subject and painted and repainted it from different perspectives, different angles, in different light conditions. The artist Derain, for example, whom your Mr. Wong adores, painted the Tower Bridge and the other major London bridges ad nauseam. Monet did hundreds of variations on water lilies. So, what your clever forger does is find a subject that an artist has done several versions of and then adds one more. So it isn’t a copy, it’s just another interpretation of a familiar subject. Which he does well, mind you. A good forger gets into the head of the original artist. The colours, the kind of paint, the technique, the brushstrokes, the canvas — they are almost as one. And the Wongs, I have to say, have some absolutely top-class fakes.”
“So no actual copies?”
“No. It wouldn’t do to sell someone a painting that is already hanging in an art gallery. I mean, even the dullest of us would be able to figure out that a con was on.”
“Okay, but if the Wong pieces are so good, how did you determine they’re fakes?”
“This should quicken your accountant’s heart: due diligence. Or, as we prefer to say, provenance.”
“I understand that from a financial viewpoint.”
“It’s much the same when you’re talking about a painting. There’s its creation, duly noted by the artist; the assignment or sale to a gallery, an agent, or a patron, duly noted as a commercial transaction; then usually another sale or two — all of them recorded. And most times when there is a sale, you can expect to find authentication by a curator, an insurance appraisal, a condition report. They even look at the back of the painting to make sure the stretchers and nails are of the period. So no painting travels the world alone. They’re all accompanied by bits of paper that attest to what they are and where they’ve been. It may not have always been like that, but I can tell you that in the past few hundred years it has been absolutely the norm.”
“And Wong’s paintings — what about their paperwork?”
“It was there. It was just bogus.”
“How?”
“Your good forger is an intelligent person. He understands that the provenance means almost as much, if not more, than the painting, so he spends considerable time and effort creating facsimiles. Bills of sale, shipping documents, condition reports, authentication documents, letters between dealer and customer — he does them all.”
“And what process do you go through to discredit it?”
“I should make it sound more difficult than it is, but in this computer day and age — and given that we’re dealing with paintings that are hardly a hundred years old — it wasn’t all that hard. I started with a catalogue of the artist’s known works, a complete list, with pictures. As I said, there are hundreds of water lilies, but none that matched the one Mr. Wong owned. Now, it is possible — unlikely, but possible — that one slipped through the cracks. Maybe Monsieur Monet gave one to a chum as a gift and neglected to make a note of it; it does happen. So I burrowed into the paperwork.
“It said that this particular painting was consigned to a gallery in Zurich. There is no record of Monet’s ever working with any Zurich gallery. No matter; the painting was supposedly sent to Switzerland. When I checked into the Swiss gallery, it turned out that it had existed but went out of business thirty years ago. Convenient, no? The gallery sells the painting two months later to a Herr Bauer, a Zurich resident. There’s an address on the bill of sale, and it turned out to be the address of a bakery. Well, maybe Herr Bauer was a baker. So I kept ploughing on. Just before the Second World War, Herr Bauer sells the painting back to the gallery where he bought it originally. The gallery sells it again, this time to a Norwegian named Andersen, who takes it off to Oslo. Again the bill of sale is informative, but when I check on Mr. Andersen, I discover he doesn’t exist or he gave the gallery the wrong address. And finally we have Mr. Andersen selling it through an agent to Mr. Kwong. I can’t locate the agent.
“Aside from the consistency in discrepancies — and consistency is what I look for, mind you; anyone can make a bookkeeping error, but when they pile up, the notion of error disappears — I did a search to see if the painting had ever been exhibited anywhere. It hadn’t. Now, we’re talking about a Monet, not your brother Harry’s watercolour that you might hang on the living room wall, and there’s nothing more that art collectors love than showing off their collection. There isn’t a museum or art gallery in the world that can stay fresh without loans from private collections. So unless Herr Bauer and Mr. Andersen were complete recluses, the odds are that the picture would have surfaced somewhere, sometime — Is this helpful?”
“Tremendously,” Ava said. “Tell me, though, wouldn’t it be quicker and easier just to send the painting to a lab for an analysis?”
“That is the last thing to rely on,” Torrence said. His face was getting flushed, the Chianti taking its toll. “Your good forger knows his paints and, more important, knows his artists’ paints. Paint can be aged, and canvases too. It isn’t difficult.”
“This is really quite interesting,” Ava said.
“These are clever men.”
“That leads me to Mr. Kwong. I know very little about him other than that he was a dealer whom the Wongs trusted.”
“He was a ceramics dealer, and not half bad at it. He wasn’t big time but he knew his stuff and had a decent enough clientele, nearly all Chinese, of course.”
“So how did he get into paintings?”
“The Wongs asked him.”
“He knew how much about the area?”
“From what I can gather, hardly anything. The Wongs seem to have been his only clients for paintings.”
“So how could he locate and buy all those works?”
“Now that is the question, isn’t it?” Torrence said, emptying the bottle into his wineglass. “How did he indeed?”
“Have you given it any thought?”
“A bit, and it seems to me he probably just tapped into associates here who referred him to some people in Europe or the U.S. It isn’t that big a world, our art world. All he had to do was contact some of the major dealers and galleries, tell them he had a client who was interested in buying Fauvist works, and ask them to let him know if something came on the market. There’s always someone interested in selling.”
“How would he finance those purchases?”
“He didn’t, I would imagine. He probably had some kind of commission arrangement.”
“But he did the invoicing.”
“He wasn’t dumb. The last thing he would want to do is let his client know who he was buying from, and vice versa. You can be sure, though, that no painting arrived in Wuhan until it had been paid for.”
“How did the real paintings get mixed in?”
“Kwong was obvi
ously buying from a number of people, some of whom just happened to be honest. There’s no way he was dealing with just one group or gallery.”
“Could he have somehow orchestrated the fakes himself?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Why not?”
“There’s the matter of the real paintings, and the questionable ones — I haven’t ruled them out as real too. If he was reasonably certain he could cheat the Wongs without their figuring it out, why would he bother to send them a genuine Matisse and Dufy? It doesn’t make sense to me. No, I think your man Kwong got in over his head. He was only too happy to be a scout for the Wongs and to take a commission from the other end. I’m sure he looked at the provenances supplied with the paintings, but that’s about all he did. I’d also bet that he was doing business with some supposedly reputable companies, and that he was prepared to take their assurance at face value.”
“Like which companies?”
“The real paintings were bought from three separate galleries, two in France and one in New York. First-rate firms. The questionable ones are more of a mixed bag. I recognize some of the names attached to them, but not all.”
“The fakes?”
“Nearly all of them bought from individual collectors, sometimes through agents and some through galleries. The paperwork was always complete and always bogus.”
“How would he have been able to contact all those people, or they him?”
Torrence threw his head back and then shook it as if it needed to be cleared. “My guess — actually, my opinion — is that none of it was random. There’s no way that all those fakes could have found their way to Wuhan without some orchestration. I think you’ll find that Kwong was working with an agent. So rather than hunting down Fauvist works himself, Kwong entrusted that job to the agent. You find that agent and you’ll be on your way to finding your perpetrator.”
“You make it sound simple.”
“It isn’t. There’s nothing in the paperwork I saw that hints at one person. All the bills of sale are from a myriad of individuals and galleries and addressed to Kwong.”