The wild beast of Wuhan al-3

by Ian Hamilton

  “Nothing official,” the reporter said. “You say you know the people at the gallery?”

  “Yes, two of them. Edwin Hughes and his assistant, Lisa.”

  The reporter checked her clipboard. “We came up with those names ourselves, but they haven’t been confirmed.” She moved off, following the cameraman, who had found a position that gave him a clear shot of the doorway.

  It’s strangely quiet, Ava thought. The uniformed police were standing like sentries, staring back at the onlookers, while the plainclothes officers whispered back and forth and occasionally walked in and out of the building. When they moved, Ava saw a gurney, flanked by two ambulance attendants and a policeman, rolling out of the gallery. There was a white body bag on it. The crowd gasped, and Ava heard several women moan. The man next to her said, “God love us.”

  They pushed the gurney to the last ambulance in the row, and another gurney began its progress from the gallery, with an identical white zippered body bag. Ava stared at the bags, almost willing herself to see through them. The bodies are small, she thought. Female probably.

  A third gurney came through the door. A pair of brown leather wingtips lay beside the body bag.

  Ava gagged. The man next to her said, “Go easy, there.”

  She breathed deeply through her nose. Then she started to move away, back towards the bakery door where only a few days before she had lain in wait for Edwin Hughes.

  It took ten minutes to clear space for the ambulances. As they drove away, the crowd began to disperse. Ava walked towards the crime scene, her eye on the television reporter, who was in deep discussion with one of the plainclothes police officers. She watched them talk, the reporter making notes and then calling over the cameraman to film her report, the hughes gallery sign prominent in the background as she spoke into the camera.

  The reporter did three takes before she was satisfied. The cameraman went off to get more exterior shots and the reporter walked to her car, which had been parked behind the ambulances. Ava caught up to her as she skirted the barrier.

  “Did you get the names?” Ava asked.

  It took the woman a second to recognize her, and then she looked around to see if anyone else was listening. “The two you mentioned, plus a third, a woman named Bonnie Knox. They think she was a customer.”

  “How did they die?”

  “I’m not sure I should say anything more.”

  “Please, this is important to me,” Ava said.

  The reporter lowered her voice. “They think it was some kind of gangland thing. The three of them were shot in the back of the head, and were probably on their knees when it was done.”

  “But why the women, the customer?”

  “Innocent bystanders, they think — a robbery gone bad. Hughes must have tried to resist and the women got caught up in the mess,” she said. “It’ll be all over the news in the next hour or two and the police will make some kind of statement before the afternoon is out. Until then, keep this between us, eh?”

  Ava nodded and began walking slowly back to the hotel. She met Sam Rice and Frederick Locke on the way. “I couldn’t find a bloody parking spot,” Rice said, breathless. “I’ve been circling for ages.”

  “You didn’t miss anything,” Ava said quietly.

  “What happened?” Locke asked.

  “You can hear about it on the news in an hour or two, I’m told.”

  “Is Edwin all right?” Rice said.

  She looked away. “No, he’s not, and there’s nothing we can do to help. Now I need to be alone for a while, and you should go back to the office.”

  “Ava — ”

  “No, Sam, I can’t talk to you or anyone else right now. I’ll call you later and we can continue the discussion we were having this morning. Although I suspect it might be irrelevant now.”

  She half walked and half ran to the hotel. “Do you have a room available?” she asked the front-desk clerk.

  “Of course, Ms. Lee, and welcome back to the Fletcher Hotel.”

  (32)

  Ava lay in the dark with the drapes tightly drawn, the digital clock by the bed unplugged. Her mind was jumping from one scenario to another; her feelings oscillated from confusion to rage to grief in an instant. Underlying it all was the sickening realization that she had been betrayed.

  She didn’t know how long she had been in bed before she finally found the energy to get up. She opened the drapes to a sunny day, the Gardens lit up like — what, a Fauvist painting?

  She turned on the television and flipped channels, looking for news of the shootings, but there was nothing. Leaving the TV on, Ava went into the bathroom. She stripped and climbed into the shower, the water as hot as she could bear. For ten minutes she let it pelt her, more punishing than cleansing. Feeling no less lost, she wrapped herself in the hotel’s terrycloth bathrobe, a towel around her head, and went back into the bedroom.

  She crawled back into bed. Even in the robe she felt cold, and she pulled the duvet up to her chin. She was listening to a quiz show when she heard the host’s voice interrupted by a reporter’s and the words “multiple shootings.” Ava sat up.

  The presenter sat at a desk with three photos displayed behind him. She recognized Edwin Hughes and Lisa. The third picture was of Bonnie Knox, a woman in her early thirties, the mother of two young children. The news report cut to the scene outside the art gallery. The reporter she had talked to was conducting an interview with one of the plainclothes officers. He was subdued, confirming only that three people had been shot dead. There were no suspects and no apparent motive, although they were treating it as a robbery. The reporter pushed the officer to confirm that the three victims had been killed execution-style. “We have no firm motive and we can’t speculate,” the policeman repeated.

  Ava turned off the television. It was time to call Hong Kong.

  She punched in Uncle’s number. Her call went directly to voicemail. She checked the time. It was midnight in Hong Kong. She left him a message: “This is Ava. Please call me back.”

  She hung up the phone and sat quietly. One more call, she thought.

  May Ling Wong answered the phone with a tentative “ Wei?”

  “This is Ava. I’m in London.”

  The phone went deathly silent.

  “Why did you do it?” Ava asked quietly. She could hear May Ling breathing. “Why?” she demanded.

  “I am so sorry,” May Ling said softly. “But it was necessary.”

  “Necessary? You killed the wrong man. Edwin had nothing to do with the Fauvists. He helped us.”

  “He led you to Glen Hughes. We thought it wisest to eliminate the connection.”

  “And the women — what about the two women?”

  “The women weren’t part of this,” May Ling said carefully. “I was distressed when I heard about them. But you know how these things are; you send someone to do a job and something unexpected always happens. The men involved thought it best that there be no witnesses. It’s sad, but it couldn’t be helped.”

  “One of them was just a customer. She had two young children. You’ve made orphans out of them.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Sorry? You should never have gone near Edwin Hughes. I had him neutralized. He was never going to divulge what he knew.”

  “We discussed this — ”

  “Who is we?” Ava interrupted.

  There was a pause, and Ava felt her spirits sink even lower. “Changxing and me,” May said.

  Ava wasn’t sure she believed that. “And the two of you decided that Edwin Hughes had to die?”

  “It was necessary.”

  “How about Glen Hughes? Are your people tracking him? When does he die?”

  “Not yet.”

  “But he will?”

  “Maybe not,” May said slowly.

  You bitch, Ava thought. You sneaky bitch. “You made me a promise,” she said, and then regretted the words.

  “And I made it in good faith. But my h
usband found out about our arrangement. He has had no peace — you saw him in Wuhan. This will help ease his pain.”

  “You should never have done what you did.”

  “I will talk to my husband about the other man. Maybe there’s a way — ”

  “No,” Ava said.

  “But if we get our money back he may — ”

  “No!” Ava yelled.

  The line went silent. Then Ava heard a sigh. She’s calculating, Ava thought. She wants to ask me about the money but she doesn’t want to do it directly. She doesn’t want to push me even further off course.

  “Have you spoken to Uncle?” May Ling said.

  It was the first time Uncle had been mentioned, and it caught Ava off guard. “No, I haven’t.”

  “He wasn’t pleased with us. He wasn’t as angry as you are, but he wasn’t pleased.”

  “When did he know?”

  “Hours ago.”

  “How did he find out?”

  “Changxing called him.”

  And Uncle didn’t phone me, Ava thought.

  “He wasn’t pleased,” May insisted.

  “I have to go now,” Ava said.

  “Wait — ”

  Ava shut the phone, threw it on the bed, and then sat by the window, watching the people below strolling, laughing, talking on cellphones, going about their normal business. That’s all she had been doing — going about her normal business. That was the job. Find the bad guy, get the money. And do it all with a minimum of fuss. And always, always, always keeping the client out of the process. She should have known from the start that the Wongs weren’t going to be passive. They were too rich, too powerful, too used to getting their own way. She’d been naive to think that she could work with May Ling alone when she and Changxing were like one person. Ava guessed that he had known about every conversation she had with May from the outset. And then the two of them had somehow co-opted Uncle, persuading him to pass on information that he normally kept between Ava and himself.

  What’s done is done, she told herself. No more wallowing. Think about now. Ava looked at her reflection in the window and thought about May that first night in Wuhan, sitting on the bed, crying over her husband’s pain. “Fuck you, Auntie May,” she said to her reflection.

  (33)

  She phoned Sam Rice first. “Ava, I’m glad you called. I was beginning to worry about you.”

  “I’m okay, considering. You did hear the news reports about Edwin and the two women?”

  “Of course. How tragic, how unbelievably tragic.”

  Ava detected no sign of strain in his voice. “They were shot,” she said.

  “I know. I called a friend of a friend who works at New Scotland Yard and he filled me in on the details. It was a robbery, evidently. Several paintings were missing from the walls.”

  “Have you spoken to Glen?”

  “Yes, twice. The first time when I came back from the gallery, and the second when I finished my chat with the chap at Scotland Yard. He’s devastated, obviously.”

  “I was going to call him.”

  “I would wait if I were you. He’s trying to reach Edwin’s family right now and plans to be in England tomorrow. Assuming we have the other thing well in hand, he can concentrate on rebuilding that relationship.”

  “You intend to go ahead with the sale of the Picasso and the Gauguin?”

  “Why, of course.”

  “On the same schedule?”

  “Why not?”

  Ava looked out the window, trying to figure out what to say next. How could they not see the connection between the deaths and the paintings? She had expected alarm, panic, fear. Ignorance is sometimes a good thing, she thought. “Can you move even faster?”

  “We had an understanding — ”

  “I know. The thing is, this Edwin Hughes affair has upset me more than I can say. I’d like to put this job behind me.”

  “Anything is possible, at a cost,” he said slowly. “I have specific buyers in mind for both paintings, but I was going to dangle them in front of a few other people and try to start a bidding war. If I go directly to the most likely purchasers and if I want them to respond quickly, I’ll lose some of that edge. Our final sale price will be lower. How much, I don’t know, but definitely lower.”

  “I’m prepared to live with that.”

  “But are we?” Rice said.

  “I’m sorry, I don’t understand.”

  “You want to net about seventy million dollars. I’ve calculated that after commissions and expenses, I can return that to you and still have about ten million for Glen and me. If I follow your directions now, we might gross only eighty or ninety million. Let’s say it’s eighty. Now, if you take your seventy, that leaves me with virtually nothing after commissions. As I see it, I’m the one creating the value and I’m the one taking the risk. Without me, there is no sale.”

  “As a brokered sale, Harrington’s gets ten percent?”

  “Yes, and that’s not negotiable.”

  She calculated. “Are you sure you can get eighty million if you flip the paintings as quickly as possible?”

  “Yes, I can get eighty.”

  “Okay, Harrington’s gets ten percent and I’ll guarantee you and Glen five million each, regardless of the final selling price. I’ll still want the money to go to Liechtenstein until I give instructions for where my portion is to be sent.”

  “And your clients will be okay with that?”

  Ava thought about May Ling and Changxing high up in their castle in Wuhan, ready to unleash another killer. “My clients are my concern. I’ll handle them,” she said.

  “When you say ‘sell them quickly,’ what kind of time frame do you have in mind?”

  “Twenty-four hours.”

  “Good God.”

  “Is it possible?”

  He paused and then said slowly, “It is, but we’re now most definitely in the eighty-million range.”

  “I told you, I can live with that.”

  “Then I’ll make my calls. I have one client on standby in Japan and the other is in Germany. I’ll press them to close. If I can get them to do it, I’ll let you know. I won’t call you directly, though. You’ll receive an email and probably a voicemail from my wife. Her name is Roxanne. And Ava, I think we should make it a matter of practice in future to conduct all this business between her and you.”

  “Then I’ll look to hear from Roxanne.”

  “That still leaves the other three paintings, especially the Modigliani that Locke is fretting about.”

  “That paper you wanted me to sign this morning — show it to Locke and send it over to my hotel, will you? I’ll sign it and have it sent directly back. That should mollify Frederick. Tell him that as well as protecting Harrington’s, we decided under the circumstances to keep Edwin’s reputation intact. That’s one more piece of security for Locke.”

  “I thought the very same thing. I think Locke will be completely onside with this.”

  “Locke is your problem now,” Ava said. “I just want to finish this job. I’m ready to go home.”

  (34)

  Ava hung up from speaking with Sam Rice feeling that she had reassumed some measure of control. Now I need to talk to Uncle, she thought.

  She tried his line and it again went directly to voicemail. She had a long list of phone numbers of people associated with him, and the first and most obvious choice was Sonny.

  “ Wei,” Sonny answered on the second ring, the sound of traffic audible in the background.

  “It’s Ava. I need to talk to Uncle. Do you know where he is?”

  “He’s inside.”

  “I don’t have a magic phone, Sonny. What do you mean by inside?”

  “Massage.”

  “This late?”

  “He’s been sick. He slept most of the day and is better now. He thought that a guasha treatment would help.”

  Ava had experienced a guasha treatment once: a hot porcelain spoon was dipped in hot oi
l and used to scrape the back until it was almost raw. It was supposed to leach out impurities. All it did was leave her back red and sore for a week. “When will he be done?”

  “Maybe ten minutes.”

  “Have him call me as soon as he’s out.”

  “Okay.”

  “Sonny, this is very important.”

  “I’ll tell him.”

  She turned on her computer and logged on to a site that listed all the U.K. newspapers. The Hughes Gallery killings were front-page news: a robbery gone wrong; three bodies found in the back office, hands tied, a bullet in the back of each head. The office had been ransacked and two paintings were missing. There were no known suspects, although several people in the area saw a tall blond man leaving the gallery around the time of the shootings.

  Her cellphone rang.

  “Why didn’t you phone me to tell me about the shootings?” she said before he could speak.

  “I was ill,” Uncle said. “Not thinking very clearly, and I knew we would have an intense conversation.”

  “Uncle, what happened?”

  “What we feared when we first met the Wongs in Wuhan. Wong Changxing wanted revenge more than he wanted his money back. The wife, though, really wants the money. That’s why Glen Hughes is still alive.”

  “But they killed the wrong man.”

  “No, that was deliberate.”

  “Why?”

  “Despite your information, Changxing believed that Edwin and Glen had to be in it together. They were brothers, after all, brothers in the same business, brothers who had worked together before. And even if they weren’t in it together, he thought killing Edwin would send a very clear message to Glen that he was next. They want their money, of course, and they won’t do anything until they have it. In the meantime, I’m sure Wong likes thinking about the terror he has brought to Glen Hughes.”

  “They told you all this?”

  “Wong called me so he could gloat. He was very pleased with himself, and he thought that I would be pleased too. Remember, I am from Wuhan. I know how they think, I know how they act,” Uncle said. “In Hubei province, killing or seriously injuring a person who owes you money is considered to be stupid. If they are dead, how can they pay? So you always pick someone close to them as a way of delivering a message that cannot be ignored. That is the way it was when I was a young man. That is the way it still is with some people. He thought I would appreciate the fact that some of the old ways survive.”