“Jan is upstairs; I’ll get him. You can sit there and wait,” she said, motioning to the living room.
More paintings hung there, most of them of the Tjorn harbour and all of which featured a bald man and a woman with bright red nipples. When Jan Sorensen walked into the room, she knew who the bald man was, and she imagined that Helga must have remarkable nipples.
He was only about five foot six and he was fat and soft, not a man used to manual labour or physical exertion of any kind. His eyes were as blue as Helga’s, his skin as fair, and the same lines were etched beside his eyes. They could have been twins if she were taller.
“There was a dealer here from Copenhagen about six months ago. He tried to steal my paintings for next to nothing. Are you with him?” he said aggressively.
Ava stood and offered her hand. “My name is Ava Lee, and I have nothing to do with a dealer in Copenhagen.”
“Then who do you work for?”
So much for easing into this, she thought. “I work for a Chinese collector.”
Sorensen looked baffled. “Chinese? I’ve never sold to any Chinese.”
“They were purchased indirectly.”
He looked at his wife. “I told you that agent was screwing us over.”
“Can I sit?” Ava asked.
“Please,” Helga said. “Can I get you anything? I just baked some muffins, and we have coffee and tea.”
“Coffee would be fine.”
“We only have instant.”
“Perfect,” Ava said.
She sat on one of the chairs and Sorensen sat on the couch facing her. He looked as if he wanted to ask her something, and she prepared herself. But he held back until his wife came back, with one cup of coffee. That’s interesting, Ava thought.
“What paintings did your client buy?” he asked as the cup was placed on the table in front of Ava.
“Some Skagen beach scenes,” she said.
“How much did he pay?”
“It varied.”
“How much?”
Ava couldn’t see how to avoid giving him a number. “On average, about five thousand,” she said.
“Kroner?”
“U.S. dollars.”
“That fucker!” he yelled, leaping to his feet.
Helga tugged at his arm, and for a second Ava was reminded of May Ling Wong trying to calm her husband. There was a strange kind of symmetry.
“He has never paid me more than five thousand kroner — that’s about a thousand dollars!” he said to his wife.
“I know, Jan, I know. Now sit down; you don’t want to scare this young woman.”
He collapsed onto the couch.
Ava looked at the paintings on the wall. How was she going to get from them to Fauvist art? Her decision to walk up the hill had been taken too lightly, she now thought. She normally liked to prepare for meetings, imagining different scenarios and how they would play out. This was all too ad hoc. And now she was stuck.
“Can I speak frankly?” she said, talking to Helga more than her husband.
“Of course,” the woman said.
“I’m going to buy some of Mr. Sorensen’s paintings — the ones hanging here on the wall, if you’ll sell them to me — but they aren’t the real reason I came to see you.”
They both looked at her, faces blank.
“What I really want to know is if Mr. Sorensen has ever dabbled in Fauvist art?”
She had seen photos of cattle getting hit between the eyes with a stun gun. Their reaction wasn’t any different.
Jan slumped back on the couch, his anger replaced by something else. Resignation? Fear? His wife gathered herself more quickly, a determined look settling across her face. “We don’t know what you’re talking about,” Helga said.
“I didn’t come here to cause any harm to you, your husband, or your family,” Ava said quickly. “I’m not the police and I don’t work for any legal authority. I’m just trying to help a client solve a riddle.”
“We don’t know what you’re talking about,” she repeated.
“About five years ago, someone sent a money transfer to your husband for twenty thousand dollars. I believe that money was payment for producing paintings in the style of various Fauvist artists, which were sold as genuine works for considerable amounts of money. Now, I don’t know if the money you received was a down payment or if there were additional payments, but I do know for certain that the payment was made. I have the bank records.”
Helga glanced at her husband. Ava knew the look: her mother had used it often enough with her. It said, I told you so.
“How many paintings did you do?” Ava asked.
Sorensen turned and stared at his wife. She was looking into the dining room. Ava could almost see her calculating how much Ava might actually know. Jan Sorensen wasn’t going to say anything, Ava knew. He was waiting for his wife to assume control.
“Mrs. Sorensen, the people I represent are very wealthy. They believe they’ve been cheated and they’ve hired me to find out what happened and to remedy it. They have no interest in pursuing you or your husband. In fact, they’re prepared to pay you if you’ll assist them in getting to the bottom of this. And not only will they pay you, I guarantee that your husband’s name will never be connected to this affair.”
“How much money are you talking about?” Jan said.
His wife shushed him as Ava leapt in. “Twenty thousand.”
“Kroner?”
“Dollars.”
Jan Sorensen started to speak but his wife shushed him again, and this time accompanied it with an elbow into his side. She stared at Ava, searching for a lie.
“We will pay you, and your husband has nothing to fear,” Ava repeated.
Helga Sorensen plucked at the folds of her dress.
She’s calculating, Ava thought. “Money in the bank and absolutely nothing to fear,” she said.
The woman looked at her husband. Ava knew he had been ready to say yes the moment she said twenty thousand. “My husband and I will need to discuss this,” Helga said deliberately. “That is not an admission of anything, you understand. We just need to discuss this.”
“Do you want me to step outside?”
“No, it will take longer than that. Where are you staying? In Torshavn?”
“No, here, at the fisherman’s hotel.”
“Come by in the morning. The children leave for school at eight twenty. Anytime after that.”
“I’ll be here,” Ava said.
Helga Sorensen walked Ava to the door, opened it, and eased her onto the street without saying another word.
The rain was coming down hard now, and Ava was soaked when she got back to the hotel. Nina was still at the desk. “How did it go?” she asked.
“Better than I expected,” Ava said. “It was worth getting wet. Now I just want to jump into a hot shower.”
“I would do it quickly if I were you. The Russians will finish drinking soon and make a dash for the other bathroom and use up the hot water.”
“I’ll beat them to it, then,” Ava said, heading for her room.
She stripped, showered quickly, towelled herself dry, and climbed into bed in panties and a T-shirt. It had been a long day and now she was exhausted. She thought about calling Uncle and decided it was premature. She had met no-nonsense women like Helga before. She was confident she would be able to cut a deal with the Sorensens, but she wanted to have a dollar amount established and she wanted to have a name before phoning Hong Kong.
She was dozing, barely asleep, when she heard noises in the corridor. She thought about putting tissue in her ears when she heard Nina’s voice. At the same time her door handle turned back and forth. Someone was trying to get into her room.
She walked to the door, and as she did, the handle jerked more violently. She heard men’s voices in what sounded like Russian. She stepped back. Then Nina screamed, a mixture of fear and anger. Ava opened the door, took one step into the corridor, and walked almost directly into Nina.