She opened her email. Maria was elated at Ava’s reaction to the possibility of her mother’s visit. Ava blinked, surprised that her girlfriend had read so much into what she had thought was guarded support. She sat back in her chair. Maybe Mimi is right, she thought. Maybe it’s time to make a commitment.
Her father had also written to her. The first part of his message made her smile. A detente had been reached between Bruce and Jennie Lee because he had bribed his wife. He had given her a choice: maintain the hostility and he would catch the first plane back to Hong Kong as soon as they landed in Toronto, or make things work and he would spend an extra week in Richmond Hill.
His response to her question about why he needed to talk to her about Michael wasn’t so clear. Michael has some financial problems that he’s trying to work through. I’m not sure it’s going well. I’ll talk to him when I get back to Toronto tomorrow. I don’t want to say anything more than that until I know all the details.
She checked the time. It was still the middle of the night in Hong Kong. Normally she didn’t email Uncle, but she didn’t want to wait up to call him. So she wrote, Call Wong May Ling. Finalize a financial arrangement. I think I’ve finally found some information about who did this, information that we can use to get some of the Wongs’ money back. I’ll call you in the morning, my time.
Ava climbed onto the bed with the files she intended to take to Edwin Hughes in the morning. She went through each of them in detail, making sure that the spelling and grammar were accurate in the letters she had prepared. It seemed trivial, but she wanted nothing to detract from the professionalism she intended to impart. This time she was going to be prepared. This time Edwin Hughes wasn’t going to shuffle her out the door.
She turned on the television and found herself watching an old episode of Prime Suspect. She had seen all of the shows when they came out, and then had bought the DVDs. She made Mimi watch them with her, though she was too embarrassed to admit that she identified with Helen Mirren’s character. It wasn’t Jane Tennison’s persistence, smarts, indifference to chauvinism, or toughness that appealed to Ava’s sense of herself; it was the fact that no matter how many people were around, Tennison was essentially alone — and she was okay with being alone.
Ava fell asleep on top of the bed, the television still on. She woke at four, cold and needing to pee. She turned off the TV, went to the bathroom, and then crawled under the duvet.
When she opened the bedroom drapes the next morning at seven, she blinked in surprise. The sun was shining, and the people outside were wearing dresses and short sleeves. She quickly made a Starbucks VIA instant coffee, downed it, brushed her teeth and hair, put on her running gear, and headed downstairs.
The weather was glorious, the smell of flowers wafting across the High Street from Kensington Gardens. She did three full laps through the Gardens and Hyde Park, the longest run she’d had in months. As she jogged back to the hotel, her thoughts turned to Edwin Hughes. She remembered him sitting behind his desk, his brown leather wingtips resting on the Sorensen paperwork as if it was so much garbage. She remembered him calling for the girl in the red dress — Lisa was her name — to tell her the meeting with Ms. Lee was over, and would she kindly escort her from the premises.
By the time Ava got back to the hotel, she was wired. She put on the blue-and-white pinstriped Brooks Brothers shirt, her black linen slacks, and her alligator heels. She pulled her hair back as tightly as she could, fastening it in place with the ivory chignon pin. She completed the look with a light touch of red lipstick, some mascara, and her Annick Goutal perfume. She slipped on her Cartier Tank Francaise watch and her gold crucifix, stood back, and looked at herself in the mirror. Dressed for battle again, but this time with more purpose.
It was nine thirty, four thirty in the afternoon in Hong Kong. She phoned Uncle.
“I was waiting,” he said.
“I’m sorry. I was getting organized for my meeting.”
“Your email pleased me.”
“I think we have a pathway to some kind of resolution.”
“How much can you get back?”
“I don’t know yet, but they have money, these people.”
“Who are they?”
“Two brothers: their names are Edwin and Glen Hughes. One of them may have had nothing to do with this at all; I’m just not one hundred percent sure yet. I’ll know in a while.”
Ava heard his dog yapping in the background and then the voice of his housekeeper, Lourdes, telling it to be quiet. He was still at his apartment. “I have been back and forth on the phone with May Ling all day.”
“And?”
“We have an agreement,” he said.
She thought his tone sounded strange — flat, tentative. Not many things excited Uncle, but money usually did. And this could be a lot of money.
“Was she pleased with the developments?” she asked.
“More than pleased, I would say. She wanted to call you, of course, and I told her you were completely out of reach,” Uncle said. “Pleased or not, though, she still negotiated very hard.”
“What did we end up with?”
“Twenty percent.”
It was a substantial discount from their usual fee of thirty percent, but given the amount of money involved, it was still a healthy commission. “Good… Why doesn’t that seem to please you?”
“As I said, we talked all morning. She is a smart woman, May Ling. Once she knew we had a chance to recover the money, she knew we would not walk away so easily. As much as she wants to appease her husband, the businesswoman — the Wuhan woman in her — could not keep from haggling.”
“I understand,” Ava said.
“That is when Wong Changxing got involved.”
Ava froze. “How?” she said.
“He was evidently listening to my negotiations with May. When she kept pushing for fifteen percent, he interrupted and told her that twenty percent was fine.”
“She told me she’d keep him away from this,” Ava said.
“It was probably unrealistic of us to believe her,” Uncle said. “They are close, those two. They spend every minute of most days together. She would have found it hard not to share, especially when she knows how much it means to him.”
“This is a problem for me, Uncle,” Ava said slowly.
“When we were in Wuhan, I agreed with you. Now I do not. After my talk with May I called Changxing directly. He apologized for stepping into the middle of the negotiations. He said he overheard May talking to me earlier in the day, and he persuaded her to tell him what was going on. He seemed calm, not like he was when we were in Wuhan. He wants his money back, he said, nothing more than that. He said he was so emotional in Wuhan because we were the first people they had told about the treachery. He got carried away.”
“And you believe him?”
“I do,” Uncle said.
Ava had never told Uncle she didn’t trust his judgement. She wasn’t sure she ever could. “If you are certain,” she said.
“I am.”
(25)
By the time she reached Church Street, the Wongs were gone from her mind. Let Uncle handle them, she thought.
She got to the gallery at quarter to ten, so she walked across the street and stood in the entrance to a bakery, which gave her a clear view of the gallery’s front door. At five to ten Lisa arrived, the short red dress replaced by a twin in black. She is a magnificent-looking woman, Ava thought.
She waited for Edwin Hughes. At quarter past she thought about calling the gallery to see if he was there already, and then thought better of it. Be patient, she thought.
At ten thirty Hughes drove past in an old-model Jaguar. He found a parking spot on her side of the street, about twenty metres past the bakery. She watched him get out of the car, cross the street, and walk into the gallery. He was wearing a navy-blue suit with broad white pinstripes. It takes a confident man to wear a suit like that, Ava thought as she watched Hughes walk with long, easy strides, his back straight, his six-foot frame giving off an aura of dominance.