The wild beast of Wuhan al-3

by Ian Hamilton

  She had the bellman put the boxes on the floor in the sitting area and dropped her carry-on in the bedroom. When he left, she took off her still-damp clothing and hung it in the bathroom to dry. Then she opened the Double Happiness computer bag and took out her notebook. She wanted to review her notes, try to create some kind of timeline, before attacking the files.

  Her phone rang and May Ling Wong’s number appeared on the screen. Ava looked at her watch. It was past midnight in Wuhan.

  I can’t avoid her forever, she thought. “Ava Lee.”

  “May Ling.”

  “It’s late for you.”

  “I couldn’t sleep. I called Uncle and he said he hadn’t heard from you. It’s been some days now and I’m curious as to how you’re doing.”

  “I don’t have much to report.”

  “But you’re still looking — that must mean something.”

  “It means I’m still looking.”

  “I’m going to assume that’s positive.”

  “It isn’t anything right now,” Ava said.

  “Where are you? Physically, I mean?”

  “Ireland.”

  “Why?”

  “Auntie, please let me do my job. I promise you, the moment I have something to report, I’ll call.”

  The line went quiet. “Ava, I asked you not to call me Auntie,” she finally said.

  “I’m sorry, May. I forgot.”

  “Uncle said you were difficult to reach and reluctant to talk about the job at hand. I thought he was exaggerating.”

  “He wasn’t.”

  “I thought after our chat in Wuhan that we had built a trust.”

  “May, this has nothing to do with trust, or friendship, or anything other than the fact that I refuse to speculate on how well things are going and when it will end. It’s better for you and better for me that way. You don’t have unrealistic expectations, and I’m not burdened.”

  “Ava, if — and I repeat and emphasize the if — if you do find something I want you to promise you’ll let me be the first to know. I don’t want to hear it from Uncle.”

  “I can do that,” Ava said.

  “Then I’ll hear from you.”

  “You will.”

  Ava hung up and dialled Uncle’s number. If May Ling had been talking to Uncle, Ava assumed he was still up.

  “ Wei.”

  “It’s Ava. May Ling just called me.”

  “She phoned here four times today. I finally spoke to her tonight. She said she wanted to talk to me about our agreement. I think she was just testing, seeing if we were encouraged enough to ask for one.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I told her it was too soon to discuss it.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Is it too soon?”

  “Yes. I don’t have enough to go on.”

  “I thought London was going to be helpful.”

  “Not yet. I handled it badly and now I need to find another reason to go back.”

  “What is your plan?”

  “I’m working on one. By tomorrow I might know.”

  “Call me then, one way or another. This is taking up a lot of time, and I sense you are getting frustrated. Sometimes we just have to walk away.”

  As Ava hung up she felt a pain in her stomach. She had gone all day without eating, and now she was ravenous. She reached for the room service menu and ordered potato and haddock soup and a steak sandwich made from aged Hereford.

  She opened her notebook on the coffee table in the sitting area and reached for the first box, the one with the most recent records. She worked steadily for an hour, stopping only to answer the door when room service called. She opened every file folder and looked at every scrap of paper, taking nothing for granted. Helen Byrne wasn’t wrong: Maurice O’Toole had been a hoarder. He kept not only bills and receipts related to his paintings but receipts for every household expense, bank statements, and copies of the cheques he had received. He would have made a good bookkeeper, Ava thought. What surprised her was how few sales he had made. In addition to the Derain he faked during that period, he had sold only ten of his own paintings, and they netted him less than the one Derain.

  The second, third, and fourth boxes were more of the same. It had taken her close to four hours to go through the paperwork, and all she had when she was done was the same information Helga Sorensen had given her, though more detailed, and she had the photos of the paintings. But it was still only Glen Hughes’ signature on the letters requesting works “in the style of,” and there was no hint of any impropriety.

  She pored over the invoices, deposit slips, and bank statements, hoping she could find something that might link Edwin to the forgeries or expose a bank account other than those she knew about in Liechtenstein and Kowloon. There was nothing. Maurice O’Toole was paid exclusively from the Liechtenstein account, most often by a cheque signed by Glen Hughes. There was no mention in the files of the $100,000 Nancy O’Toole had received from the Kowloon account. Ava made a note to ask Helen if Nancy had been as professional about record-keeping as her husband.

  It was eleven o’clock and she thought about going to bed, but her head was too full of O’Toole’s files. Ava looked outside at the River Liffey, lit by streetlamps filtering through a fine mist. The heavy rain had abated but it still looked chilly outside. It had been like this since she had arrived in Europe, and her mood was beginning to take on the character of the weather. Every time she thought she had found a ray of sun, a dark cloud had smothered it. She sighed and reached for her Adidas jacket. She needed a walk.

  (22)

  Ava woke at eight and immediately checked her email. Maria and Mimi had both written again.

  Ava, you can’t be so casual about Maria’s mother, Mimi wrote. This is an enormous event for Maria. She needs support, and she needs it from no one else but you. If you aren’t prepared to meet the woman, then I think you need to let Maria know and you need to tell her why. And I have to say that if she means what I think she means to you, you do need to do this.

  Ava closed the message and sighed, thinking over what Mimi had written. Then she clicked on an email from Maria. I hope everything is going well. I didn’t hear back from you yesterday. Did you receive my email about my mother visiting?

  Ava wrote, I’m getting caught up and just read your message. If you are happy about your mother visiting, then I’m happy for you. Will I get to meet her? Miss you. Ava.

  Ava was startled when she returned to her inbox and saw an email from Michael Lee. She hesitated before finally opening it. When you have the time, call me, or better still could you arrange to come to Hong Kong? There are some things I need to discuss with you. It was signed, Warmest regards, Michael.

  Now what the hell is this about? she thought, and then remembered the remark her father had made in his message about wanting to talk to her about Michael. She wrote to her father, Why do you need to talk to me about Michael? And then for good measure, she added, And how did you ever get Mummy and Bruce to play nice? And why are you staying an extra week in Toronto?

  She closed the computer and looked over at the boxes on the floor. She knew she was going to spend the day going through more of them, so she didn’t need to dress up, but she was rankled by Helen’s remark about not looking professional. She put on her black Brooks Brothers shirt and cotton slacks, fixed her hair with the ivory chignon pin, and even put on a little makeup.

  She went downstairs to have breakfast in the hotel’s restaurant. From where she sat she had a view of the lobby, and at around ten o’clock a view of Helen Byrne pushing a baggage trolley through the front doors.

  Ava went to meet her. “You’re early,” she said to Helen’s back.

  Helen spun around, her hair wet, water dripping down her face. “I have some shopping to do, so I thought I’d take advantage of coming into town. But there’s all this goddamn rain.”

  “I’m glad to see you, and actually I have your money.”

 
They rode the elevator together, Helen rubbing at her hair with the sleeve of her denim shirt. When they walked into the room, Helen left Ava with the boxes and headed directly to the bathroom. She came out with a towel wrapped around her head. “Eight more boxes,” she said. “The taxi didn’t want to take them, so I had to pay extra.”

  Ava handed her the bundle of cash that she had withdrawn from an ATM the night before. Helen counted the bills, her lips moving as she did so.

  “I meant to ask you,” Ava said. “Around the time that Maurice died, maybe shortly thereafter, Nancy received a lump-sum payment of one hundred thousand U.S. dollars. It was sent to her from a bank in Kowloon, Hong Kong. Did she mention anything to you about this?”

  “Not that I can remember.”

  “It was a large amount. From what I can see in those files, Maurice didn’t have any money. When you said he left her comfortable, I assumed they had money in the bank.”

  “They lived hand-to-mouth most of the time.”

  “But you said he left her comfortable.”

  “I figured it was insurance.”

  “And she never said?”

  “No.”

  “How much of it was left when she died?”

  “About half.”

  “Did Nancy leave any records? Bank statements, that kind of thing?”

  “No, she wasn’t much for clutter.”

  “Okay, I guess that’s that,” Ava said. “Just one thing more: I’ve prepared a bill of sale I’d like you to sign.”

  Helen looked dubious. “Ms. Byrne, I don’t want ownership of these records ever to come into question. I typed this up last night. All it says is that you have sold me these twelve boxes of Maurice O’Toole memorabilia.”

  “Memorabilia. That’s a fancy word.”

  “Can you think of a better one?”

  “Maurice’s shit.”

  “You can add that in brackets if you want.”

  Helen looked at Ava, her eyes roaming up and down the length of her body. “You’re a sharp little thing, aren’t you.”

  “Not always,” Ava said.

  “Whatever. Give me a pen,” she said.

  She signed the document and Ava saw her to the door. She then turned to the boxes, which were still sitting on the trolley. She unloaded them, rolled the trolley into the hallway, and got ready to spend the day with Maurice O’Toole.

  The first two boxes were no different than those she had dug through the night before. Still she opened every file and looked at every piece of paper, setting aside the Fauvist art references. When she finished, she checked her notebook. Between Sorensen’s and O’Toole’s records and Torrence’s assessments, she had now accounted for every apparent forgery, which according to her numbers the Wongs had paid $73 million for. There had been twenty paintings on those Wuhan walls. Five were genuine. She now had a paper trail that led directly to O’Toole and Sorensen and the fifteen that weren’t. And not one of those documents had brought her any closer to Glen Hughes.

  The next box was depressingly barren: no Fauvists and no evidence of anything other than Maurice O’Toole’s inability to sell his own artwork for more than a few hundred euros. She shoved it aside and started in on the next box.

  The name Manet leapt out at her from one of the tabs. She plucked the file and sat on the pure white couch. She felt a shiver of anticipation as she opened it, and then a full-blown smile spread across her face.

  The photo of the painting showed a man facing a firing squad. Underneath O’Toole had written: The Execution of the Emperor Maximilian, dated 1867, completed June 1997. She leafed through the accompanying paperwork, looking for the letter requesting the piece. She couldn’t find one but there was an invoice made out from Maurice O’Toole to the Hughes Art Gallery, Church Street, London, and a copy of a DHL shipping slip dated June 17, with the gallery’s address. The invoice had one word on it: Manet.

  Ava went back to the box and extracted the bank statements file. She found the month the shipment had been made and looked for a deposit. There wasn’t any. She turned to the next month and there it was: ten thousand pounds sterling, converted into euros. The deposit slip was attached. O’Toole had written Hughes Gallery on it. He had also copied the cheque and stapled it to the slip. The cheque had two signatures on it, Edwin Hughes and Glen Hughes, and in the bottom left-hand corner someone had written the O’Toole invoice number.

  She put everything together in one file and returned to the boxes.

  In the next box she found the name Modigliani. The painting was titled Self-Portrait, 1919. The paper trail was identical to that of the Manet, right down to the copy of a cheque with two signatures.

  In next box she found another Modigliani, Portrait of Jacques Lipchitz, 1916. O’Toole hadn’t kept the shipping slip, but everything else was there.

  She checked the tabs in the final two boxes and found nothing of any interest. It didn’t matter — she had what she needed.

  Ava sat on the couch holding the three file folders on her lap like Christmas gifts. Somewhere, somehow, these paintings had been sold to people who weren’t named Wong and didn’t live in Wuhan.

  She went online to look for the paintings. A quick search for the Manet and the Modigliani self-portrait drew blanks. But the Lipchitz portrait had sold at auction for seven million pounds two months after O’Toole shipped it to London. The consignee wasn’t named, and neither was the purchaser. The auction house was Harrington’s.

  She reached for her phone to call Frederick Locke.

  (23)

  It was late afternoon when Ava’s flight landed at Heathrow, which planted her in the midst of rush hour traffic. What should have been a half-hour drive to the Harrington’s offices in Westminster turned into an hour-and-a-half commute. The only consolation she took was that it would give Frederick Locke more time to do his research.

  The phone conversation she’d had with Locke from her Dublin hotel room that morning had not gone entirely well, and she blamed herself for that. Her two-month layoff had taken a toll. She wasn’t as sharp as she normally was, first with Edwin Hughes and now with Locke.

  Locke’s initial reaction to her discovery of the Manet and the two Modigliani paintings had taken her aback. His attention immediately, solely, and obsessively focused on the Modigliani Lipchitz portrait that Harrington’s had sold. She had heard panic in his voice, and when he said he would have to call in his boss to join their discussion, she knew she had gone off track.

  “You can’t do that,” she said.

  “I have no choice. If we sold — ”

  “Frederick, stop. Listen to me. There is no hard proof of anything. I have suspicions, nothing more than that. Let’s not alarm anyone until we’re certain of the facts, and until you and I have had a chance to talk and decide how best to handle this. There are more people involved in this than Harrington’s. My client, for one. Now, I’m going to be in London sometime late this afternoon. I’ll bring what I have with me for you to review. Until then, this is strictly between me and you.”

  When he didn’t answer, she pushed, “If you won’t promise that you’ll handle it this way, I’ll do it on my own. That will take Harrington’s out of the loop. I think you’ll agree that it would better serve your purposes to be very much part of the decision-making process. I mean, you don’t want to pick up the Daily Telegraph two weeks from now and read about how your firm sold a forgery, do you? What would that say about your competence in performing due diligence?”

  “You make a point,” he said, sounding uncertain.

  “What does that mean?”

  “I promise.”

  “You promise what, exactly?”

  “This will remain between you and me.”

  “Until we — and I stress the we — decide how to handle it. Agreed?”

  “Agreed.”

  “Okay, so write down these names and dates,” she said, and dictated the titles of the Manet and Modigliani paintings and the earliest date they could
have appeared on the market. “I want to know who bought them, for how much, and where those paintings are now.”

  “I’ll do what I can.”

  “I’m sure you will. I’ll call you when I land.”

  She had phoned again as soon as she stepped into the taxi at Heathrow. “I’m in London.”

  “I’m still trying to locate the third painting,” Locke said.

  “My driver says we’re going to be sitting in traffic for a while.”

  “I’m not going anywhere, believe me.”

  “See you when I get there.”

  Harrington’s was on New Bond Street, almost directly across from Sotheby’s auction house. A security guard looked suspiciously at her carry-on. But when she gave him her name, he handed her a badge and pointed to a bank of elevators. “Fifth floor. Mr. Locke is expecting you.”

  When she exited the elevator, a man with a name tag that read locke was standing in front of her. She had half-expected to see another Brian Torrence — tall, gangly, a bit dishevelled; instead she found herself staring up at a mountain of a man. He was easily six foot four, broad without being fat, and had short brown hair and a bushy beard. “Ava Lee, I presume,” he said.

  “That’s me. And you are Frederick Locke.”

  He nodded. “I’ve reserved one of our small boardrooms. Shall we go?”

  It was past six o’clock. She followed him past rows of empty offices furnished with pedestrian metal desks and chairs. The boardroom housed a round wooden table with matching chairs. Ava looked out the window, which faced Sotheby’s. “Keeping the competition close?” she said.

  Locke didn’t answer. Instead he sat down, three file folders in front of him. “This is rather serious,” he began.

  “That’s why I’m here.”

  He tapped the top file. “I’ve managed to locate the three paintings you identified. The Modigliani self-portrait was sold to a private collector for six and a half million pounds.”

  “Do you have a name?”

  “In a minute,” he said, raising his hand. “The Manet was sold to another private collector for five million pounds, and the Lipchitz portrait, as you found out, was sold through our house for seven million pounds.”