The Wild Beasts of Wuhan (20 page)

“Tomorrow.”

“Then the files stay here until then.”

“Please, Ms. Byrne, don’t make me waste my evening. Let me take at least a couple of boxes tonight. The balance can stay here until you get your money.”

Ava’s cellphone rang. She listened, said “Thanks,” and then turned to Helen. “The Morrison Hotel on Ormond Quay. Do you know where that is?”

“Centre of Dublin.”

“That’s where I’ll be. Come by tomorrow anytime after eleven with the rest of the boxes and I’ll have your money for you.”

( 21 )

Ava’s suite at the Morrison gave her a jolt of déjà vu. It had the same bold, bright minimalist look as the Fletcher Hotel — black-and-white furnishings with bright red cushions and duvet cover. But instead of looking down on Kensington Gardens, the view was of the River Liffey flowing slowly by.

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 Sørensen 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 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.