The Wild Beasts of Wuhan (8 page)

“I’m hardly mysterious.”

“But you are here to talk about the paintings?”

“Exactly.”

“Quite a problem.”

“So it seems.”

The waiter interrupted them. “I’ve ordered sparkling water, unless you want something stronger,” Torrence said.

“That’s perfect.”

“I recommend the antipasto, and they make a damn fine Caesar. And the brick-oven pizza isn’t half bad.”

“Then why don’t you order for both of us,” she said.

After the waiter had taken their order, Torrence turned back to Ava and said, “The first thing you have to tell me, Ava, is what do you know about this apparent mess we’ve unearthed?”

“Virtually nothing.”

“So you aren’t you in the art business?”

“No, I’m an accountant.”

“I don’t mean to sound rude, but why would the Wongs hire an accountant to help out with this problem? Do you have extra qualifications in the art field?”

“None whatsoever. I barely know anything at all about art.”

He chewed on a breadstick. “I don’t understand.”

“The Wongs have been defrauded of many millions of dollars. My company specializes in finding out who did it and where the money is. We then do what we can to recover as much money as possible. It doesn’t make any difference to us if we’re dealing with computer parts, shrimp, textiles, or paintings.”

“But if you know nothing about the art world, how do you even know where to begin?”

“That’s why I’m here. You’re my beginning.”

“Ah, silly me.”

“Do you have plans for this afternoon?” she asked.

“If I did, I imagine they’ve just changed.”

“I like perceptive men,” she said.

Their food came all at once and the conversation dwindled. Ava waited until the pizza was almost gone before taking out her notebook. “Can we stay here to talk?”

“I don’t see why not. But if we do, I expect you to buy me something stronger than sparkling water.”

“Whatever you want.”

“They have a brilliant Chianti.”

“Order away.”

She passed on the wine, which didn’t seem to bother Torrence. He downed one glass quickly and was halfway through a second by the time the table was cleared.

“I need to understand how it’s possible for the Wongs to end up with all of those fakes. Wong isn’t a stupid man. He isn’t an art expert but he does seem to know a lot about the Fauvists. And then there’s that man Kwong. They seem to think he may have had nothing to do with it, that he was as much a dupe as they were. So explain to me, how does something like this happen?”

“Something like this, as you say, happens all the time. Art galleries and museums throughout the world are filled with forgeries and fakes of all kinds — pictures, sculptures, antiquities — but not many people want to talk about it. No one wants to look stupid. No one wants to devalue their collection.”

“Let’s stick to the paintings. Wong Changxing wanted to sell the Monet, so let’s concentrate specifically on that piece. When he bought it, why wouldn’t he have known it was a copy? Surely there has to be a record of it somewhere.”

“It wasn’t a copy,” Torrence said.

“What do you mean?”

“It was an original painting.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Someone painted water lilies in the style of Monet. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that unless you try to pass it off as a Monet. Until it’s signed
Monet
the painting is actually paying homage to the original artist; after it’s signed, it’s a fake and a criminal offence.”

“In the style of?”

“Yes, like most of the rest of the Wongs’ pictures.”

“But when you say ‘in the style of,’ how many water lilies paintings are there?”

“That’s where it gets a bit tricky. Many of these artists fell in love with a subject and painted and repainted it from different perspectives, different angles, in different light conditions. The artist Derain, for example, whom your Mr. Wong adores, painted the Tower Bridge and the other major London bridges ad nauseam. Monet did hundreds of variations on water lilies. So, what your clever forger does is find a subject that an artist has done several versions of and then adds one more. So it isn’t a copy, it’s just another interpretation of a familiar subject. Which he does well, mind you. A good forger gets into the head of the original artist. The colours, the kind of paint, the technique, the brushstrokes, the canvas — they are almost as one. And the Wongs, I have to say, have some absolutely top-class fakes.”

“So no actual copies?”

“No. It wouldn’t do to sell someone a painting that is already hanging in an art gallery. I mean, even the dullest of us would be able to figure out that a con was on.”

“Okay, but if the Wong pieces are so good, how did you determine they’re fakes?”

“This should quicken your accountant’s heart: due diligence. Or, as we prefer to say, provenance.”

“I understand that from a financial viewpoint.”

“It’s much the same when you’re talking about a painting. There’s its creation, duly noted by the artist; the assignment or sale to a gallery, an agent, or a patron, duly noted as a commercial transaction; then usually another sale or two — all of them recorded. And most times when there is a sale, you can expect to find authentication by a curator, an insurance appraisal, a condition report. They even look at the back of the painting to make sure the stretchers and nails are of the period. So no painting travels the world alone. They’re all accompanied by bits of paper that attest to what they are and where they’ve been. It may not have always been like that, but I can tell you that in the past few hundred years it has been absolutely the norm.”

“And Wong’s paintings — what about their paperwork?”

“It was there. It was just bogus.”

“How?”

“Your good forger is an intelligent person. He understands that the provenance means almost as much, if not more, than the painting, so he spends considerable time and effort creating facsimiles. Bills of sale, shipping documents, condition reports, authentication documents, letters between dealer and customer — he does them all.”

“And what process do you go through to discredit it?”

“I should make it sound more difficult than it is, but in this computer day and age — and given that we’re dealing with paintings that are hardly a hundred years old — it wasn’t all that hard. I started with a catalogue of the artist’s known works, a complete list, with pictures. As I said, there are hundreds of water lilies, but none that matched the one Mr. Wong owned. Now, it is possible — unlikely, but possible — that one slipped through the cracks. Maybe Monsieur Monet gave one to a chum as a gift and neglected to make a note of it; it does happen. So I burrowed into the paperwork.

“It said that this particular painting was consigned to a gallery in Zurich. There is no record of Monet’s ever working with any Zurich gallery. No matter; the painting was supposedly sent to Switzerland. When I checked into the Swiss gallery, it turned out that it had existed but went out of business thirty years ago. Convenient, no? The gallery sells the painting two months later to a Herr Bauer, a Zurich resident. There’s an address on the bill of sale, and it turned out to be the address of a bakery. Well, maybe Herr Bauer was a baker. So I kept ploughing on. Just before the Second World War, Herr Bauer sells the painting back to the gallery where he bought it originally. The gallery sells it again, this time to a Norwegian named Andersen, who takes it off to Oslo. Again the bill of sale is informative, but when I check on Mr. Andersen, I discover he doesn’t exist or he gave the gallery the wrong address. And finally we have Mr. Andersen selling it through an agent to Mr. Kwong. I can’t locate the agent.

“Aside from the consistency in discrepancies — and consistency is what I look for, mind you; anyone can make a bookkeeping error, but when they pile up, the notion of error disappears — I did a search to see if the painting had ever been exhibited anywhere. It hadn’t. Now, we’re talking about a Monet, not your brother Harry’s watercolour that you might hang on the living room wall, and there’s nothing more that art collectors love than showing off their collection. There isn’t a museum or art gallery in the world that can stay fresh without loans from private collections. So unless Herr Bauer and Mr. Andersen were complete recluses, the odds are that the picture would have surfaced somewhere, sometime — Is this helpful?”

“Tremendously,” Ava said. “Tell me, though, wouldn’t it be quicker and easier just to send the painting to a lab for an analysis?”

“That is the last thing to rely on,” Torrence said. His face was getting flushed, the Chianti taking its toll. “Your good forger knows his paints and, more important, knows his artists’ paints. Paint can be aged, and canvases too. It isn’t difficult.”

“This is really quite interesting,” Ava said.

“These are clever men.”

“That leads me to Mr. Kwong. I know very little about him other than that he was a dealer whom the Wongs trusted.”

“He was a ceramics dealer, and not half bad at it. He wasn’t big time but he knew his stuff and had a decent enough clientele, nearly all Chinese, of course.”

“So how did he get into paintings?”

“The Wongs asked him.”

“He knew how much about the area?”

“From what I can gather, hardly anything. The Wongs seem to have been his only clients for paintings.”

“So how could he locate and buy all those works?”

“Now that is the question, isn’t it?” Torrence said, emptying the bottle into his wineglass. “How did he indeed?”

“Have you given it any thought?”

“A bit, and it seems to me he probably just tapped into associates here who referred him to some people in Europe or the U.S. It isn’t that big a world, our art world. All he had to do was contact some of the major dealers and galleries, tell them he had a client who was interested in buying Fauvist works, and ask them to let him know if something came on the market. There’s always someone interested in selling.”

“How would he finance those purchases?”

“He didn’t, I would imagine. He probably had some kind of commission arrangement.”

“But he did the invoicing.”

“He wasn’t dumb. The last thing he would want to do is let his client know who he was buying from, and vice versa. You can be sure, though, that no painting arrived in Wuhan until it had been paid for.”

“How did the real paintings get mixed in?”

“Kwong was obviously buying from a number of people, some of whom just happened to be honest. There’s no way he was dealing with just one group or gallery.”

“Could he have somehow orchestrated the fakes himself?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Why not?”

“There’s the matter of the real paintings, and the questionable ones — I haven’t ruled them out as real too. If he was reasonably certain he could cheat the Wongs without their figuring it out, why would he bother to send them a genuine Matisse and Dufy? It doesn’t make sense to me. No, I think your man Kwong got in over his head. He was only too happy to be a scout for the Wongs and to take a commission from the other end. I’m sure he looked at the provenances supplied with the paintings, but that’s about all he did. I’d also bet that he was doing business with some supposedly reputable companies, and that he was prepared to take their assurance at face value.”

“Like which companies?”

“The real paintings were bought from three separate galleries, two in France and one in New York. First-rate firms. The questionable ones are more of a mixed bag. I recognize some of the names attached to them, but not all.”

“The fakes?”

“Nearly all of them bought from individual collectors, sometimes through agents and some through galleries. The paperwork was always complete and always bogus.”

“How would he have been able to contact all those people, or they him?”

Torrence threw his head back and then shook it as if it needed to be cleared. “My guess — actually, my opinion — is that none of it was random. There’s no way that all those fakes could have found their way to Wuhan without some orchestration. I think you’ll find that Kwong was working with an agent. So rather than hunting down Fauvist works himself, Kwong entrusted that job to the agent. You find that agent and you’ll be on your way to finding your perpetrator.”

“You make it sound simple.”

“It isn’t. There’s nothing in the paperwork I saw that hints at one person. All the bills of sale are from a myriad of individuals and galleries and addressed to Kwong.”

“You do know that all the records from his business have been destroyed?”

“Yes. It doesn’t leave you much to go on, does it.”

“I have a few ideas,” she said.

“Like what?”

She shook her head. “They’re not important,” she said. “Let me go back to the fakes for a minute. If someone was going to organize this kind of fraud, they would need a painter, or painters, yes?”

“They would indeed, unless they scoured the world looking for fakes that already existed. But given the consistency in the quality of work I saw, though, I would think most of them could have been done by one person.”

“One, or more?”

“Given the time frame over which it took place, it could have been one. It would have been more secure that way. And they were all Fauvist works, and these forgers do tend to specialize.”

“So this agent, he just contacts an artist and says, ‘Paint me a Monet’?”

“Something like that.”

“And in this case you think an agent commissioned an entire range of Fauvist paintings from a forger or forgers and then passed them along to Kwong with dummy paperwork?”

“I think that’s probably the case.”

“What would the artist get paid?”

“I have no idea. It might depend on whether or not he had to sign it. Remember what I told you earlier: if the painting isn’t signed, it isn’t a forgery. So I imagine there would be a premium attached for a signature.”

“These forgers, how easy are they to locate?”

“Well, they don’t have a union or anything, but within the art world there are certainly some who are known. Elmyr de Hory was one — he did Monets, by the way. Then there was John Myatt, who did versions of Matisse and Dufy. David Stein did Picasso and Chagall. And then there was Hans van Meegeren, who managed to do more than a passable imitation of Vermeer.”