The wild beast of Wuhan al-3

by Ian Hamilton

  “Can I have the names?”

  “Please, Ms. Lee,” he said, the easygoing banter of their initial phone calls gone.

  “Ava.”

  “Ava, if your suspicions are correct, then my firm has several problems. One of them is financial, another calls into question our reputation, and the third — in reference to the two paintings we didn’t sell — has tremendous ethical implications.”

  “By ethical do you mean should we tell the people who bought forgeries that they bought forgeries?”

  “Something like that, although not quite so simply stated.”

  “I have some ethical issues myself,” she said.

  “How so?”

  “I have a client who was swindled out of seventy-three million dollars. My primary obligation is to retrieve that money.”

  “I’m sure that if your assertions are true you’ll have everything you need to pursue legal action against the people who did this.”

  “Glen Hughes, and maybe Edwin Hughes.”

  “You seem convinced.”

  “My problem is that my client won’t want to take legal action against either Hughes, not until all other options have been exhausted. Even then he may choose — for reasons of his own — to maintain his privacy.”

  “That seems strange to me.”

  “You attitude would seem strange to him. He’s Chinese, as you know, and there’s a cultural divide that isn’t easily explained. There’s also a gap between the way business is conducted in China and the way it’s conducted here. My client would just as soon shake your hand as sign a contract. The difference to him is negligible in terms of his expectation of being delivered what you promise. And if you fail to deliver, then he expects you to compensate him — without bringing lawyers into it.”

  “I’m not sure I completely understand.”

  “And I’m not sure how much more I can say.”

  Locke began to pluck at his beard. “I give you the information you want — and then what?”

  “I sit down with Hughes and persuade him to make restitution.”

  “But your client has no connection to these three paintings.”

  “The Hughes brothers — either of them, both of them — don’t care about being sued by some Chinese businessman with cultural pretensions, particularly when their tracks were so cleverly covered. As you and Brian Torrence know, they or one of them officially sold the Fauvist paintings to a dealer in Hong Kong named Kwong, or to his business, Great Wall Antiques and Fine Art. Kwong is dead. The business is closed, the records destroyed.”

  “And what about these three paintings?”

  “The Hughes brothers may not be so willing to be sued by the owners of these three paintings, or by Harrington’s. It’s one thing to mock a man from Wuhan but it’s another to screw around with — well, with whom? Who bought the paintings? Tell me, and then I’ll tell you how much leverage I think we have and I’ll tell you how I’ll proceed.”

  “You haven’t proved the paintings are forgeries,” he said.

  “Fair enough,” she said, opening her Shanghai Tang computer bag.

  She passed him one file. “That’s the Manet. There’s a photo of it, titled and double-dated. There’s an invoice made out to the Hughes Art Gallery with Manet on it. The painting was shipped by DHL; there’s a copy of the delivery slip made out to the Hughes Gallery address. Finally, there’s a copy of a cancelled cheque made out to Maurice O’Toole and signed by both Edwin and Glen Hughes. You’ll see on the memo line that the invoice number is referenced.”

  He went through the documentation with great care. Then he looked up at her, shook his head, and went through it again.

  “What O’Toole did was very clever,” he said, looking out the window. “There were three known versions, variations of The Execution of the Emperor Maximilian, all dated around the same time, before this fourth one came on the market. We heard rumblings about it but it never came to auction. A Manet enthusiast in Scotland purchased it from an unknown source, who now appears to have been the Hughes brothers.”

  “He did due diligence?”

  “Buying from the Hughes brothers would have been considered due diligence enough, although if he went to other authorities, they could have been fooled.”

  “Who bought it?”

  “The Earl of Moncrieff.”

  “He sounds impressive.”

  Locke looked down at her bag. “Can I see the other two files?”

  She took the Manet file back and passed him the one for the Modigliani self-portrait. He took as much time going through that paperwork. Ava admired his thoroughness.

  “Again, clever. There are many self-portraits, and this one seems plausible. It was sold into a private collection in London. The owner is Harold Holmes.”

  “The media tycoon?”

  “That’s him.”

  “Now here’s your part in this,” Ava said, sliding the Lipchitz portrait file towards him.

  “In 1916 Modigliani did a portrait of Jacques and Berthe Lipchitz. O’Toole painted Jacques alone. There’s no reason to think that Modigliani might not have done the same,” Locke said.

  “But it was sold at auction, through your firm. Surely the provenance was examined inside and out.”

  “According to our records, it was.”

  “Who looked at it?”

  “Not me, if that’s what you’re insinuating. I was too junior to look at something like this.”

  “Then who?”

  He looked uncomfortable. “I think, for now, that has to be remain internal to Harrington’s.”

  “Then who was the buyer?”

  “Jonathan Reiner.”

  “I’ve heard of him too.”

  “Not surprising. He’s one of the five wealthiest men in the U.K.”

  Ava had written the names in her notebook as Locke reluctantly gave them to her. “Moncrieff — tell me about him.”

  “Considers himself to be a true patron of the arts, and he has the money to indulge his interest. He lends many of his paintings to Scottish museums and galleries, and he sponsors young Scottish artists.”

  “So all in all, the Hughes brothers have messed with some big boys.”

  “Couldn’t have been much bigger, unless they were selling to the Queen and the National Gallery.”

  She held out her hand for the Lipchitz file.

  “Can I keep this for a day or two?” Locke asked.

  “Afraid not.”

  “I’ll make some copies, then.”

  “Not yet,” Ava said.

  “I thought we had an understanding.”

  “Frederick, I trust you enough to have come here with these files, but until I resolve my differences with the Hughes brothers I prefer to keep these documents under my control. Things happen, you know. One of your assistants sees something, questions are asked or little comments are made, and then your boss is asking what’s going on and you don’t want to lie to him. And so on and so on. So for both our sakes, I’ll hang on to them for now.”

  “You said we’d agree together how to proceed,” he insisted, his face reddening.

  “And we will, once I’m finished with the Hughes brothers.”

  “What if they refuse to co-operate with you? What if they won’t give you what you want?”

  “Then I’ll be back here with my tail between my legs, files in hand, and we’ll chat. Either way, successful or not, the files are coming back here.”

  “I’m not going to convince you otherwise, am I.”

  “No.”

  “So now what?”

  “Do you have addresses for the three buyers?”

  “Yes, they’re in here.”

  “Can I have them, please?”

  He hesitated.

  “Frederick, I can find them easily enough. All I want you to do is save me some time.”

  He took a slip of paper out of each of his files and passed them to her.

  “Now I need to use a computer, a printer, an
d a photocopier.”

  (24)

  It took her close to two hours to prepare the packages for Edwin and Glen Hughes. Locke hung about nearby, acutely interested but too polite to pry. Ava bundled the files together and put a big rubber band around them before jamming them into her bag. It was past eight o’clock and she was hungry. She thought for a second about asking Locke to join her for dinner, then immediately threw the idea aside.

  She called the Fletcher and enquired about a room. They were only too happy to welcome her back, she was told. She felt as if she had hardly left.

  “I’m staying at the Fletcher Hotel in Kensington,” she told Locke.

  “Do you want a ride? My car is nearby.”

  “The tube will do fine. I’ve bothered you enough today.”

  “ Bothered is hardly the word I would use,” he said. “Emotionally ravaged is more like it.”

  “I’m sorry. I know this must have been upsetting.”

  “The consequences are just beginning to sink in. It’s one thing to discuss forgeries in the abstract. It’s quite another to have them staring you in the face when you know all the participants and are imagining how everyone is going to react. I’m not going to sleep well, I can tell you that.”

  “If it’s of any comfort, this should be over soon,” Ava said.

  “How soon?” he asked.

  “Hopefully I’ll see Edwin Hughes tomorrow, and if that goes as planned I’ll be onto Glen Hughes right after.”

  “Can you call me?”

  “When it’s completely finished, not before.”

  “And you’ll bring the files here?”

  “I promise,” Ava said. “And you won’t discuss this with anyone, not even your shadow, until then?”

  “I promise.”

  Ava extended her hand. Locke took it and shook it vigorously. His eyes bored into hers, looking for doubt. She stared back and then smiled. She trusted this one.

  “I’ll walk you down,” Locke said.

  When they reached the street, he hesitated at the door. Ava looked around and saw a sign for the underground. “There’s my transportation,” she said, and walked towards the tube station before he could speak.

  She took the train to Kensington High Street. It was past eight o’clock when she got there, and when she walked up the steps, she saw that for once it wasn’t raining. She went to Marks amp; Spencer and bought a tuna sandwich — confirming first that the tuna was albacore, not skipjack or yellowfin — and a bottle of white burgundy.

  An hour later she was sitting in T-shirt and panties at her computer, the half-empty bottle of wine next to her, reading about the Earl of Moncrieff. She had already googled Holmes and Reiner, and the Earl was just as formidable. She could only imagine how horrific it would be to have all three gunning for you. She hoped the Hughes brothers had as much imagination as she did.

  She opened her email. Maria was elated at Ava’s reaction to the possibility of her mother’s visit. Ava blinked, surprised that her girlfriend had read so much into what she had thought was guarded support. She sat back in her chair. Maybe Mimi is right, she thought. Maybe it’s time to make a commitment.

  Her father had also written to her. The first part of his message made her smile. A detente had been reached between Bruce and Jennie Lee because he had bribed his wife. He had given her a choice: maintain the hostility and he would catch the first plane back to Hong Kong as soon as they landed in Toronto, or make things work and he would spend an extra week in Richmond Hill.

  His response to her question about why he needed to talk to her about Michael wasn’t so clear. Michael has some financial problems that he’s trying to work through. I’m not sure it’s going well. I’ll talk to him when I get back to Toronto tomorrow. I don’t want to say anything more than that until I know all the details.

  She checked the time. It was still the middle of the night in Hong Kong. Normally she didn’t email Uncle, but she didn’t want to wait up to call him. So she wrote, Call Wong May Ling. Finalize a financial arrangement. I think I’ve finally found some information about who did this, information that we can use to get some of the Wongs’ money back. I’ll call you in the morning, my time.

  Ava climbed onto the bed with the files she intended to take to Edwin Hughes in the morning. She went through each of them in detail, making sure that the spelling and grammar were accurate in the letters she had prepared. It seemed trivial, but she wanted nothing to detract from the professionalism she intended to impart. This time she was going to be prepared. This time Edwin Hughes wasn’t going to shuffle her out the door.

  She turned on the television and found herself watching an old episode of Prime Suspect. She had seen all of the shows when they came out, and then had bought the DVDs. She made Mimi watch them with her, though she was too embarrassed to admit that she identified with Helen Mirren’s character. It wasn’t Jane Tennison’s persistence, smarts, indifference to chauvinism, or toughness that appealed to Ava’s sense of herself; it was the fact that no matter how many people were around, Tennison was essentially alone — and she was okay with being alone.

  Ava fell asleep on top of the bed, the television still on. She woke at four, cold and needing to pee. She turned off the TV, went to the bathroom, and then crawled under the duvet.

  When she opened the bedroom drapes the next morning at seven, she blinked in surprise. The sun was shining, and the people outside were wearing dresses and short sleeves. She quickly made a Starbucks VIA instant coffee, downed it, brushed her teeth and hair, put on her running gear, and headed downstairs.

  The weather was glorious, the smell of flowers wafting across the High Street from Kensington Gardens. She did three full laps through the Gardens and Hyde Park, the longest run she’d had in months. As she jogged back to the hotel, her thoughts turned to Edwin Hughes. She remembered him sitting behind his desk, his brown leather wingtips resting on the Sorensen paperwork as if it was so much garbage. She remembered him calling for the girl in the red dress — Lisa was her name — to tell her the meeting with Ms. Lee was over, and would she kindly escort her from the premises.

  By the time Ava got back to the hotel, she was wired. She put on the blue-and-white pinstriped Brooks Brothers shirt, her black linen slacks, and her alligator heels. She pulled her hair back as tightly as she could, fastening it in place with the ivory chignon pin. She completed the look with a light touch of red lipstick, some mascara, and her Annick Goutal perfume. She slipped on her Cartier Tank Francaise watch and her gold crucifix, stood back, and looked at herself in the mirror. Dressed for battle again, but this time with more purpose.

  It was nine thirty, four thirty in the afternoon in Hong Kong. She phoned Uncle.

  “I was waiting,” he said.

  “I’m sorry. I was getting organized for my meeting.”

  “Your email pleased me.”

  “I think we have a pathway to some kind of resolution.”

  “How much can you get back?”

  “I don’t know yet, but they have money, these people.”

  “Who are they?”

  “Two brothers: their names are Edwin and Glen Hughes. One of them may have had nothing to do with this at all; I’m just not one hundred percent sure yet. I’ll know in a while.”

  Ava heard his dog yapping in the background and then the voice of his housekeeper, Lourdes, telling it to be quiet. He was still at his apartment. “I have been back and forth on the phone with May Ling all day.”

  “And?”

  “We have an agreement,” he said.

  She thought his tone sounded strange — flat, tentative. Not many things excited Uncle, but money usually did. And this could be a lot of money.

  “Was she pleased with the developments?” she asked.

  “More than pleased, I would say. She wanted to call you, of course, and I told her you were completely out of reach,” Uncle said. “Pleased or not, though, she still negotiated very hard.”

  “What did we end
up with?”

  “Twenty percent.”

  It was a substantial discount from their usual fee of thirty percent, but given the amount of money involved, it was still a healthy commission. “Good… Why doesn’t that seem to please you?”

  “As I said, we talked all morning. She is a smart woman, May Ling. Once she knew we had a chance to recover the money, she knew we would not walk away so easily. As much as she wants to appease her husband, the businesswoman — the Wuhan woman in her — could not keep from haggling.”

  “I understand,” Ava said.

  “That is when Wong Changxing got involved.”

  Ava froze. “How?” she said.

  “He was evidently listening to my negotiations with May. When she kept pushing for fifteen percent, he interrupted and told her that twenty percent was fine.”

  “She told me she’d keep him away from this,” Ava said.

  “It was probably unrealistic of us to believe her,” Uncle said. “They are close, those two. They spend every minute of most days together. She would have found it hard not to share, especially when she knows how much it means to him.”

  “This is a problem for me, Uncle,” Ava said slowly.

  “When we were in Wuhan, I agreed with you. Now I do not. After my talk with May I called Changxing directly. He apologized for stepping into the middle of the negotiations. He said he overheard May talking to me earlier in the day, and he persuaded her to tell him what was going on. He seemed calm, not like he was when we were in Wuhan. He wants his money back, he said, nothing more than that. He said he was so emotional in Wuhan because we were the first people they had told about the treachery. He got carried away.”

  “And you believe him?”

  “I do,” Uncle said.

  Ava had never told Uncle she didn’t trust his judgement. She wasn’t sure she ever could. “If you are certain,” she said.

  “I am.”

  (25)

  By the time she reached Church Street, the Wongs were gone from her mind. Let Uncle handle them, she thought.