The wild beast of Wuhan al-3

by Ian Hamilton

  “Not to worry, your timing is actually quite good. Come with me.”

  Ava followed Chan to the boardroom, where three files were laid out side by side on the table. “Those are his annual financial statements and tax returns,” Chan said, pointing to the stack. “I separated the paintings transactions into these three files to make it easier for you.”

  “Three files. Three transactions?”

  “No, five. Two each in two years and one in another year.”

  “There were twenty transactions.”

  “I have records for five, that’s all.”

  “Let’s look at them,” Ava said, knowing there was no point in arguing.

  She sat next to Chan, who opened the first file. “Kwong paid $1.5 million for this painting from a gallery in Paris. Actually, he didn’t technically pay. He negotiated a price, invoiced the Wongs, took their payment, deducted a commission of five percent, and then forwarded the balance of the money to the seller. The seller then sent the painting to Kwong. He used the same procedure for all five of the paintings I have records for.”

  “That was trusting of the Wongs,” Ava said.

  “Kwong wasn’t a fool,” Chan said. “Why would he risk making an enemy of one of the most powerful men in China?”

  Ava leafed through the paperwork. Chan had grouped it in chronological order, making it easy to follow. The procedure she had described for the first painting had been repeated four more times. Each had a different seller. “So he was acting as a broker, a middle man. He never had actual possession of any of these paintings.”

  “That’s the case.”

  Ava worked through the files again, noting the dates, the artists, the paintings. Then she opened her notebook and compared them against her list. Chan’s files documented three of the five paintings Torrence judged to be genuine; the other two were on his questionable list. She guessed those two were going to pass muster.

  “I have a problem,” Ava said to Chan. “Our records show that the Wongs bought twenty paintings from Great Wall, not five.”

  “This is all I have.”

  “Could you leave me alone with these other files for a little while?” Ava asked, pointing to the stack.

  “Certainly. I’m borrowing an office two doors down. Come and get me when you’re done.”

  Grace Chan was a good accountant. Ava found it easy to go through a year of business at Great Wall. The income statements and balance sheets were clear and concise, the backup was referenced. It wasn’t much of a business, not in ceramics anyway. The first year she examined had sales of less than HK$2 million — about US$300,000 — and after a myriad of expenses the company was US$20,000 in the red. It was only with the commission on the Wong sale that the company had made any profit.

  The next year was more of the same, except this time Grace Chan had recorded four commission payments. Four? Ava thought. Two paintings were sold to the Wongs that year, not four. Where did the other two commissions come from?

  She left the boardroom, the file under her arm, and found Grace Chan. “These two commissions,” she said, pointing to the entries. “Were they invoiced?”

  “Yes. I only pulled out the copies of invoices and paperwork relating to the five paintings, but yes, those entries were invoiced. The paperwork is in the back storeroom.”

  “Could you get them for me, please?” Ava asked. “And Grace, how many other large commissions were there over that period — commissions not directly related to Kwong and Wong?”

  “Quite a few. They were making him wealthy. He could have retired in style if not for the cancer.”

  “What were the commissions for?”

  “I was never sure. The invoices just say, ‘For consulting services rendered.’ When I asked him what that meant, he said he was doing provenance work on Chinese ceramics for a European company.”

  “And you believed him?”

  “Ava, as long as the paperwork and the money matched, and as long as he was properly declaring his income and paying his taxes, it wasn’t up to me to question him.”

  “I think we should look at all the files and put dates and amounts to these commissions.”

  “I’ll get the files.”

  It took them more than two hours to go through each file and find the appropriate copies of invoices. Ava recorded everything in her notebook. When they were done, she compared dates and amounts. There were exactly fifteen invoices, each issued shortly after the Wongs had bought a painting from Great Wall. But the commission invoices weren’t made out to the Wongs; they were made out to a numbered company with a Liechtenstein address. The invoice amount was exactly three percent of the Wongs’ purchase price.

  “Is it possible for me to make a private phone call?” Ava asked Grace.

  “Certainly. I’ll be in my office if you need me.”

  Ava tried May Ling’s office line first and got voicemail. She didn’t leave a message. She tried May Ling’s cellphone, which she answered on the first ring. “Ava, I was hoping you would call.”

  “I’m in a meeting but I need you to answer a couple of simple questions for me. First, the paintings you bought, how did you pay for them?”

  “By cheque or by wire transfer, a bit of both.”

  “You paid against an invoice, correct?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Always?”

  “No invoice, no payment.”

  “I need you to do something for me. Get one of your financial people to go back through the twenty transactions. Dig out the invoices and then tell me who, when, and how you paid. It’s probably best to email everything to me. I’d like copies of the invoices and any wire transfers, and copies of the returned cheques — back and front.”

  “What have you found?”

  Ava heard the eagerness in her voice and knew she was going to have to be cautious about how often and in how much detail she spoke to May Ling. “Nothing yet. I’m just trying to be thorough about recreating the transactions.”

  “I’ll have someone do it right away.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Please call me later.”

  “If I have something to report.”

  Ava hung up and then used the boardroom phone to call reception. She asked to be connected to Grace Chan. “How was Mr. Kwong paid these commissions, the ones for the supposed ceramic provenance consultations?” she asked.

  “By cheque.”

  “Do you have the bank deposit slips, the cheques?”

  “Not the original cheques; they stayed with Mr. Kwong. I have copies.”

  “They will do just fine.”

  Ten minutes later she had copies of the fifteen cheques the numbered company had sent to Kwong for commissions. The company’s bank was the Liechtenstein Private Estate Bank. Ava knew what her chances were of getting any information from the bank: zero. She wrote down the address anyway and double-checked the numbered company. If it wasn’t registered in Liechtenstein she might be able to find out something about it.

  “You’ve been really helpful,” Ava said to Grace, passing her a sealed envelope with HK$2,000 in it. Grace looked at it but didn’t open it. The lady has some class, Ava thought. “If this works out well, I’ll see if I can find an additional bonus for you.”

  “To be honest, the money doesn’t mean that much to me,” Grace said, not raising her eyes from the envelope.

  “Pardon?”

  “I’m more interested in knowing whether Mr. Kwong was involved in something improper and if I’ve been a party to it. I’ve found all this quite unusual, and upsetting.”

  “I don’t know what he was actually involved in, but whatever it was it won’t be any reflection on how well you did your job. I found your work completely professional and beyond reproach. You have nothing to fear.”

  Grace looked at Ava. “And I guess Mr. Kwong has nothing to fear now either.”

  (11)

  Ava went online as soon as she returned to the Mandarin. There was nothing yet from
Wuhan. Still, she pushed aside any idea of returning that day to Toronto. There was something odd enough about Great Wall’s accounts to compel her to stay at least until she had figured it out. Wherever it led, she would have fulfilled her commitment to May Ling and could head home knowing she had done all she could.

  The thought of home brought her father to mind. How was he surviving the cruise from hell? It was late in the evening wherever at sea he was, but she knew he was a night owl. She punched his number into her cellphone. It rang once and went immediately to voicemail. “It’s Ava. I’m in Hong Kong. The job in Wuhan may not turn into anything worth pursuing, and if it doesn’t I’ll be back in Toronto before you. Give my love to everyone, and tell Mummy I said she’s to behave.”

  She hung up and went back to the computer. An email from May Ling with attachments was now in her inbox. When she clicked on it, the email simply said, Here is everything you requested. There were twenty invoices, all from Great Wall Antiques and Fine Art. Five had no payment instructions other than a net ten-day term request; cheques were mailed to the Kau U Fong Road address. The other fifteen specifically requested that the cheques be sent to Great Wall Antiques and Fine Art, care of the Kowloon Light Industrial Bank. An address was provided for the bank, along with Great Wall’s account number.

  She checked her notes. The five cheques sent directly to the street address of Great Wall were for paintings Brian Torrence deemed genuine or possibly genuine. The fifteen cheques sent to the account at the Kowloon bank were for those Torrence was sure were forgeries. What was stranger was that the five cheques had been deposited into an account at the Hong Kong Shanghai Bank, which was where Kwong banked, according to Grace Chan’s audit records.

  Was Kwong running two accounts? And if he was, why? Grace Chan had made it clear that she wouldn’t have tolerated it if he’d been trying to avoid taxes.

  Ava phoned Uncle. “Do we know anyone at the Kowloon Light Industrial Bank?”

  “Friends own most of the Kowloon Light Industrial Bank.”

  “Then I need you to talk to them.”

  “What do you want to know?”

  “Great Wall Antiques and Fine Art. Who controlled the account? I need copies of all the activity going through the account over the past ten years.”

  “I will see what I can do.”

  “Thank you, Uncle.”

  “You have that tone in your voice, the one you get when you have found something.”

  “I’m easily excited,” she said.

  “I will pretend I believe you,” he said. “What are you doing for dinner?”

  “No plans.”

  “There is a new Shanghai restaurant near the Peninsula that they say has the best stewed sea cucumber in Hong Kong.”

  “My mother would be happy.”

  “ Momentai.”

  Ava was lying on the bed, closing her eyes for a few moments, when her cellphone rang. “Ava Lee.”

  “Ms. Lee, I’m Henry Chew from Kowloon Light Industrial Bank.” Uncle’s guanxi never failed to impress her.

  “Thank you for calling.”

  “My pleasure,” he said. Ava could hear the nervousness in his voice. “I have an assistant trying to locate the documentation you want. We’ll send it to the hotel by courier when we have it. In the meantime, I’ve taken a look at the account. What do you want to know?”

  “It was in the name of Great Wall Antiques and Fine Art?”

  “Actually no, it was a DBA account. The account holder was a numbered company doing business as Great Wall.”

  “Where was the company registered?”

  “Liechtenstein.”

  Shit, she thought. “A bit unusual, isn’t it, for a company registered there to open a Hong Kong bank account?”

  “There was less scrutiny then, fewer concerns about money laundering and that kind of thing. As long as the company was a legal entity and as long as it was obeying Hong Kong law, opening a bank account wasn’t that difficult.”

  “Who was the signing authority?”

  “A Georges Brun.”

  “Just one?”

  “It appears that way.”

  “What information do you have on him?”

  “He has the same address as the numbered company, a phone number that I would guess is in Liechtenstein. The copies of his photo ID all have a Liechtenstein address.”

  “Can you give me the phone number now and send copies of the photo ID with the other information?”

  “Sure,” he said, and recited the phone number.

  “The account is closed now?” Ava prodded.

  “Dormant. It still has a minimum balance.”

  “When was the last transaction?”

  “More than two years ago.”

  “How active an account was it?”

  “Not very, although a lot of money certainly went through it.”

  “Put a number to not very.”

  “After the initial opening deposit, there were fifteen more. As for withdrawals, there were fifteen large wire transfers and two smaller ones.”

  “You’re sending me copies of all those transactions?”

  “We’re searching for them as we speak.”

  “Who did the small wires go to?”

  “I won’t know where any of them went until we see the wires.”

  “I want to thank you for this,” Ava said. “You’ve been helpful.”

  “Not a problem, except — can I assume you’ll try to contact Georges Brun and maybe the overseas bank?”

  “You can.”

  “You can’t mention that we gave you this information.”

  “I won’t. And look, send the information to me as soon as you have it. Don’t wait until tomorrow.”

  “Will do.”

  She stared at the Liechtenstein phone number. Everything she knew about Liechtenstein told her that the number was probably the bank’s and that Brun was probably a bank employee. Assuming that was true, she tried to come up with a plausible excuse for calling that would get Georges Brun or whoever else was at the other end of the line to speak to her. She came up dry.

  Frustrated with herself, she went online and began to research Liechtenstein banking and company registration regulations. Maybe I’m overthinking this, Ava thought. Maybe the country’s reputation as a haven for offshore accounts has been overstated.

  Half an hour later she gave up. Incorporating a company in Liechtenstein was as easy as buying milk at a corner store in Canada. There were officially more than seventy thousand registered holding companies in a country with a population of thirty-five thousand. And there were more than two hundred private banks to service those companies. Their reputation for secrecy was second to none, although they frowned on money laundering and were prepared to work with foreign government authorities if any fraudulent activity was suspected. Ava had no government credentials she could wave at them, and there was no hint of money laundering.

  She then began considering the idea that the phone number was an actual company’s, not the bank’s. If it was, there would be a real name attached to the number she had. What the hell, she thought, it’s worth a try.

  She dialled the number and a woman answered in a language that sounded like German. “I’m sorry, I only speak English,” Ava said.

  “Liechtenstein Private Estate Bank,” the woman said.

  So much for that plan, Ava thought. “Georges Brun, please.”

  “Who shall I say is calling?”

  “Never mind,” Ava said, and hung up.

  She had no one else related to this case to talk to, or rather no one who would talk to her. Either way it made no difference. All she had left were the wire transfers, and she had no reason to believe they would contain information she didn’t already have.

  (12)

  The wires hadn’t arrived by seven thirty, and Ava was scheduled to join Uncle at eight at the Shanghai restaurant on the Kowloon side. Reluctantly she left her hotel and walked to the Star Ferry. This
time she sat in the stern so she could look back at the magnificent skyline, which expanded as she moved farther away from shore.

  Uncle was, as usual, already at the restaurant when she arrived. She hadn’t even sat down before he asked, “The banker called you?”

  “Yes, and he was helpful.”

  “Good. My friends want to know.”

  Ava could only imagine what the banker had been told.

  “What did you find out?”

  “Nothing of any substance, but there may be some leads I can pursue.”

  “So it is not over?”

  “Not yet. Close, but not yet.”

  He looked at the menu. “What kind of Shanghai food does your mother like?”

  “Do they have drunken chicken?”

  “Yes, and the stewed sea cucumber.”

  “Steamed buns?”

  “Of course.”

  “Add a soup and that should be enough.”

  “They have a Shanghai soup with pork, baby bok choy, and bamboo shoots.”

  “Perfect.”

  They talked idly while they ate. Ava’s last case had involved bringing two of Uncle’s men, Carlo and Andy, from Hong Kong to Las Vegas. Ava said some nice things about their contribution and asked what they were up to.

  “Carlo has a bookmaking sideline, and Andy and his wife own a noodle shop near the Kowloon train station,” he said. “They were sorry they did not get to see more of Las Vegas. Carlo said you were a very tough boss. He meant that as a compliment, of course.”

  They left the restaurant at nine. Sonny was waiting outside for Uncle, the Mercedes running. She hadn’t seen him there when she arrived. “I am going for a massage,” Uncle said. “Call me tomorrow and let me know if you are staying.”

  Ava rode the ferry back to Central, the view of the skyline now almost overpowering. She had tried to explain it to an American friend one time and all she could compare it to was Times Square — ten times over.

  When she arrived at the Mandarin, she asked the concierge if any packages had arrived for her. She was told that an envelope had been taken to her room a half-hour earlier.

  Ava opened the door to her room and saw the envelope on the floor. She picked it up and went over to the desk, then opened it and smiled.