(12)
The wires hadn’t arrived by seven thirty, and Ava was scheduled to join Uncle at eight at the Shanghai restaurant on the Kowloon side. Reluctantly she left her hotel and walked to the Star Ferry. This time she sat in the stern so she could look back at the magnificent skyline, which expanded as she moved farther away from shore.
Uncle was, as usual, already at the restaurant when she arrived. She hadn’t even sat down before he asked, “The banker called you?”
“Yes, and he was helpful.”
“Good. My friends want to know.”
Ava could only imagine what the banker had been told.
“What did you find out?”
“Nothing of any substance, but there may be some leads I can pursue.”
“So it is not over?”
“Not yet. Close, but not yet.”
He looked at the menu. “What kind of Shanghai food does your mother like?”
“Do they have drunken chicken?”
“Yes, and the stewed sea cucumber.”
“Steamed buns?”
“Of course.”
“Add a soup and that should be enough.”
“They have a Shanghai soup with pork, baby bok choy, and bamboo shoots.”
“Perfect.”
They talked idly while they ate. Ava’s last case had involved bringing two of Uncle’s men, Carlo and Andy, from Hong Kong to Las Vegas. Ava said some nice things about their contribution and asked what they were up to.
“Carlo has a bookmaking sideline, and Andy and his wife own a noodle shop near the Kowloon train station,” he said. “They were sorry they did not get to see more of Las Vegas. Carlo said you were a very tough boss. He meant that as a compliment, of course.”
They left the restaurant at nine. Sonny was waiting outside for Uncle, the Mercedes running. She hadn’t seen him there when she arrived. “I am going for a massage,” Uncle said. “Call me tomorrow and let me know if you are staying.”
Ava rode the ferry back to Central, the view of the skyline now almost overpowering. She had tried to explain it to an American friend one time and all she could compare it to was Times Square — ten times over.
When she arrived at the Mandarin, she asked the concierge if any packages had arrived for her. She was told that an envelope had been taken to her room a half-hour earlier.
Ava opened the door to her room and saw the envelope on the floor. She picked it up and went over to the desk, then opened it and smiled.
As the Kowloon banker had said, there had been seventeen wire transfers, and the envelope contained copies of them all. As she expected, fifteen wires had been sent to the Liechtenstein bank. The other two were more interesting. One, for US$100,000, had gone to a bank account in Dublin in the name of N. O’Toole, five years ago; the other, for $20,000, had been sent to a Jan Harald Sorensen in Skagen, Denmark, two weeks after the O’Toole wire.
It was just past nine o’clock in Hong Kong, late afternoon in both Dublin and Skagen. Ava found the Dublin bank’s phone number online and dialled the number. It took her two minutes to work through the prompts and get to a person.
“Hello, my name is Ava Lee. I work at the Kowloon Light Industrial Bank in Hong Kong. We’ve been asked to send a wire transfer to an account at your branch. Before transmitting it I wanted to confirm the account number and the holder’s name.”
“Yes, go on,” a woman replied.
“The account is in the name of N. O’Toole, and the number is 032-6567-4411.”
There was a pause. “You said you were going to send a wire?” the woman asked.
“That was the plan.”
“You should change it. That account was closed three years ago.”
“That’s strange. Mr. O’Toole gave us the number himself.”
A longer pause. “There was no Mr. O’Toole on this account, just a Mrs. O’Toole.”
“Are you absolutely sure about that?”
“Let me double-check,” the woman said. “Yes, it was Mrs. O’Toole. It’s quite clear.”
“And the N was the first letter of what name?”
“It doesn’t say, and I’m actually surprised that you wouldn’t know at your end. I mean, you’re the one sending the wire.”
“We Chinese aren’t all that good with Western names,” Ava said quickly. “Do you have any information on file that might help me contact Mrs. O’Toole?”
“No.”
Ava started to phrase another question when the line went dead. Maybe the Danes will be more co- operative, she thought, and dialled the number of the bank in Skagen.
She got a live person at the Skagen bank on the second ring. She repeated her story about preparing to send a wire transfer and passed along the account number and the name Jan Harald Sorensen.
“Yes, we can confirm it,” a woman said.
“Would you also have contact information for Mr. Sorensen?” Ava asked. “We normally like to put an address on the wire.”
“No, we can’t give out that type of information.”
“It would — ”
“No, we don’t do it under any circumstances,” the woman said and hung up.
Bankers in Europe aren’t very accommodating, Ava thought. But then, they aren’t connected to Uncle and his network of friends.
She went online and spent the next fifteen minutes trying to find a Jan Harald Sorensen in Skagen, a town with a population of fewer than ten thousand people. She found a number of Sorensens, but no Jan, Harald, J.H., or even J.
She pushed her chair back from the desk and walked over to the window. She had the name of a Liechtenstein bank that wouldn’t talk to her and the names of two people she couldn’t locate. She knew that the bank had some kind of connection to Mrs. O’Toole and Mr. Sorensen, whoever they were. She also knew that it had been directly responsible for setting up the second Great Wall company account at the Kowloon bank, and the money from the forged art sales had flowed to them. Given that the company existed for the sole purpose of selling forged art to the Wongs, it made sense to her that this somehow linked O’Toole and Sorensen to the scam. But how? Ava thought. Were they agents who set up a deal or two? Were they artists? Were they the painters who created the fakes?
Ava caught herself. She went back to the desk and leafed through the wire transfer copies. What it came down to, she finally decided, was that she had to assume that O’Toole and Sorensen were directly linked to the forgeries and were — a big leap in logic, she knew — probably the painters who had been used. It’s the only connection I have to pursue, she thought, as she started to call London.
“Frederick Locke.”
“This is Ava Lee.”
“Ms. Lee, I didn’t expect to hear from you so soon.”
“Something’s come up,” Ava said. “Do you know an Irish painter from Dublin named O’Toole?”
“Maurice O’Toole?”
“All I have is an initial, N, and I’ve been told the person is female.”
“I don’t know any female artists named O’Toole.”
