Ian Hamilton - The wild beast of Wuhan

“Mr. Torrence, did May Ling tell you why I want to talk to you?”

“There’s only one thing it could be about,” he said. “Truthfully, I found it a puzzling request.”

“Why is that?”

“I’ve never heard of you, and in my field there aren’t that many strangers.”

“Well, I guess we’ll have to remedy that.”

Ava walked into the Italian restaurant and quickly found Brian Torrence. Even seated he seemed taller than the waiter who was attending to him, and his bushy mop of blond hair was hard to miss.

“Mr. Torrence,” she said.

He looked up and smiled. He’s young, probably in his mid-thirties, she thought.

“Call me Brian,” he said, without getting up.

“And I’m Ava.”

“Your accent — I can’t place it. Certainly not Hong Kong English.”

“I’m Canadian.”

“The Wongs reach out to a young Canadian woman? The mystery deepens.”

“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.