Ian Hamilton - The wild beast of Wuhan

“On 65th Street near Lexington Avenue, on the Upper East Side,” he said.

She repeated this to Gail.

“There’s a Mandarin Oriental Hotel at Columbus Circle and 60th Street,” Gail said. “It’s on the southwest corner of Central Park. You can have a room with a park view if you don’t mind paying a thousand dollars a night.”

“Book the flight and the room,” Ava said.

“I’m finished with the list,” Hughes said, as she hung up the phone.

She read the document quickly. The only name she recognized was Sam Rice, only because Hughes had mentioned him specifically.

“And here is the information on my brother.”

“Only one address. Is that his house or his office?”

“Both, evidently. He told me he has his office on the ground floor and the living quarters are upstairs.”

“A townhouse?”

“That’s what he told me.”

“Is he living alone?”

“Yes, wife number three vacated several months ago.”

Ava thought Hughes looked curiously relaxed. This is the man, she thought, whom Edwin Hughes said he detested. “So, you say you spoke to your brother and he’s going to be co-operative?”

“I did, and he said he would be.”

“He took your call so easily?”

“I used Lisa’s mobile. He probably thought it was some old girlfriend trying to reach him.”

“Was it strained, your conversation?”

“What does that matter?” Hughes asked. “You got what you wanted.”

“How hard did you have to push?”

He laughed and then slowly shook his head. “My brother has a remarkably fine-tuned instinct for survival. He can identify danger from miles away, and I only had to start talking about you and Maurice O’Toole before he had the situation sussed out. He thought the half-million was cheap. He said he’d pay it. He may posture a bit, protest, negotiate, whine, threaten — he has a whole range of theatrics he can call on — but in the end he said he’ll pay. His only concern, actually, was about my ability to pay my share. I almost thought he was going to offer to fund that too.”

“Did you go into the letters I’ve drafted for the Earl and the others?”

“I didn’t have to. Glen understood the implications of this going public far quicker than I did.”

“So he’s expecting me?”

“Of course. I told him I thought you’d be there in a day or two, and that you’d contact him directly.”

This has gone well, Ava thought. Maybe too well.

Edwin Hughes fussed with the papers on his desk. Ava tried to think of anything she might have missed. When she was satisfied she had covered everything, she stood up, put his notes in her bag, and said, “Thanks for this.”

He walked out from behind the desk. “I’ll walk with you to the door.”

She hadn’t been physically close to him before, and now that she was, she could smell a distinct body odour. Hughes hadn’t showered or used deodorant that morning, or else he had been sweating up a storm. On his breath she also picked up the unmistakeable scent of whisky. Fear and booze were a bad combination.

He was walking beside her when he reached out to touch her elbow. Ava recoiled. He realized at once that he had overstepped his boundaries, pulled his hand back, and jammed it into his jacket pocket. “Ms. Lee, I have something I’d like to ask you,” he said.

“I can’t promise I’ll answer.”

“My brother, Glen — you are going to hurt him, aren’t you?”

She wasn’t quite sure what he meant and looked at him sideways. Hughes’ face betrayed nothing. “Does he care about his money?” she asked.

“Passionately.”

“Then I am going to hurt him.”

She called Glen Hughes from the Delta business-class lounge at Heathrow, although she wasn’t expecting to reach him. So when she heard “This is Glen Hughes,” she was taken aback, and stumbled before saying, “This is Ava Lee.”

“I didn’t expect to hear from you quite so soon,” he said.

There wasn’t a hint of tension in his voice. If anything, he seemed disinterested, bored. Maybe that’s the impression he’s trying to give me, Ava thought. His accent was more refined than Edwin’s, the pace of his words slower, languid.

Ava was sitting at the bar, a glass of wine and a small plate of smoked salmon finger sandwiches in front of her. “I didn’t see any point in wasting time,” she said.

“Indeed not.”

“I’m at Heathrow. I’m scheduled to get into New York tonight around nine o’clock. Is it possible we could meet tonight?”

“There’s absolutely no chance of that. I have a function at the Whitney.”

“I don’t mind working late.”

“Ms. Lee, I’m quite sure you have my address.”

“I do.”

“Well, in that case, I’ll see you here tomorrow morning any time after eleven,” he said and hung up. Ava shook her head. It wasn’t often that she was so deftly dismissed.

She heard the call to board, quickly downed the last of her wine, and gathered her bags to head for the plane.

The business-class cabin was almost full. Ava settled into her seat and waved at the flight attendant, who was already getting impatient with demanding passengers. “I don’t want anything to eat,” she told her. “After we take off, just bring me two glasses of your best white wine.”

As soon as they were in the air, Ava put on her earphones and settled back to watch Martin Scorsese’s The Departed, a remake of one of the best Hong Kong films ever made, Infernal Affairs. Ava wasn’t sure that Scorsese would be able to capture the complexity of the original, and was disappointed to see that he hadn’t. The American version added an unconvincing love triangle and ended in the most predictable way: the bad guy got shot. In the Chinese version, the bad guy, played by Andy Lau, had been left to deal with inner demons that eventually drove him to madness. Maybe, Ava thought, the difference between the gweilo and the Chinese approach to the same story can be found in the film’s titles. The name of the original Cantonese version, translated literally, was “non-stop path,” a reference to Avici, the lowest level of hell in Buddhism. That’s where the Lau character ended up, in a never-ending cycle of torment.

Ava turned off the entertainment system and pulled out her notebook. She had made only rough calculations of what Glen Hughes had actually pocketed; now she wanted to fix a final number. It turned out to be $73,450,000. She wondered how much of it he would be good for. He would start off with denial, of course, as they all did. Then that would give way to accepting minimal responsibility, before finally capitulating. That’s when the negotiations would really start.

Ava wasn’t in the instalment payment business. She and Uncle would take one shot at getting everything they could for the client, collect their commission, and then move on. She had been lucky on her last few jobs: the culprits had been identified early on and the money was still recoverable. The Hughes scam went back ten years, and from everything Edwin had said, Glen Hughes had burned through a lot of the funds in that time.

JFK was a zoo when they landed. Ava waited in line at Customs for more than an hour, her patience wearing thin. But the taxi line was mercifully short and the traffic to Manhattan light; at close to eleven o’clock Ava arrived at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel. She hadn’t slept much on the plane, which was unusual for her, and with the time difference it felt like four a.m. She was hungry, but her need to sleep overwhelmed her need for food, and by eleven thirty she was showered and tucked into bed.

She slept a dreamless sleep and woke at nine. It was the longest uninterrupted rest she’d had in weeks. She immediately went to the window and opened the drapes. Central Park gleamed at her, bursting into green under a warm spring sun.