by Ian Hamilton
“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 Sørensen’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 Sørensen 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.”
“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, and 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.
