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.”