“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.
As the Kowloon banker had said, there had been seventeen wire transfers, and the envelope contained copies of them all. As she expected, fifteen wires had been sent to the Liechtenstein bank. The other two were more interesting. One, for US$100,000, had gone to a bank account in Dublin in the name of N. O’Toole, five years ago; the other, for $20,000, had been sent to a Jan Harald Sorensen in Skagen, Denmark, two weeks after the O’Toole wire.
It was just past nine o’clock in Hong Kong, late afternoon in both Dublin and Skagen. Ava found the Dublin bank’s phone number online and dialled the number. It took her two minutes to work through the prompts and get to a person.
“Hello, my name is Ava Lee. I work at the Kowloon Light Industrial Bank in Hong Kong. We’ve been asked to send a wire transfer to an account at your branch. Before transmitting it I wanted to confirm the account number and the holder’s name.”