“What commission would they take?”
“At auction, probably twenty percent; on a private brokered sale it would be around ten percent.”
She stared at the wall. “Are the paintings that well done?”
“They are superb.”
“Who did them?”
“That doesn’t matter, does it? It wasn’t Maurice O’Toole, of course. This chap may actually be better than Maurice. They’re hard to find, people with this kind of talent. I found this one just eight months ago.”
“I’m surprised, given your financial situation, that you haven’t sold them by now.”
A painful grimace crept onto his face. “I haven’t had them that long. I was getting ready to send the Picasso to market, but then you unfortunately dropped into my life.”
“So why go through Harrington’s? Why not broker your own private sale, pocket the money, and pay us off?”
“We need the aura of respectability and integrity, the cloak of academic professionalism that Harrington’s provides. And then there’s Sam himself. If Sam Rice puts his reputation behind a piece of art, not many people in my business would challenge him.”
Questions kept popping into her head but there was no structure to them. She needed time to think, to put things into some kind of rational context. “I need time,” she said.
“I’ll be here,” he said.
“I’ll call before I come back, but expect it to be sooner rather than later. We can’t let this thing linger.”
She had turned off her cellphone while she walked, not wanting any disruption of her thought process. She turned it on while she was riding the elevator back to her room; her heart sank when she saw that May Ling Wong had called three times, twice in the past hour. It was two a.m. in Wuhan. Uncle had called as well, Ava guessing because May Ling and maybe even Changxing were all over him. And finally Frederick Locke had phoned, his voicemail message sounding nervous and guilty.
Sam Rice, Ava thought instantly. Frederick Locke had talked to Rice, Rice had called Glen Hughes, and Hughes had thrown her some bullshit story about tracking her down through Hong Kong. That was why Hughes was so prepared. He and Rice had had time to concoct their scheme.
Locke was the only one she wanted to talk to, and she didn’t waste any time when he answered his phone.
“You told Sam Rice about me, about the three paintings, about the Fauvists, about the Hughes brothers — you told Sam Rice absolutely fucking everything,” she said.
He didn’t respond right away, and she found herself getting angrier. “We had a deal, you weasel. You promised me this would stay between me and you. Now you’ve compromised my position.”
“Ava, I couldn’t help it. When I checked to see who had authenticated the Modigliani, it was Sam. I nearly shit myself. He’s The Man here. He’s more than my boss — he is Harrington’s. I had to tell him what was going on. I thought he would get upset and tell me that our findings were crap, but he didn’t. He just sort of rolled his eyes and said no one’s perfect and that it was possible he’d made a mistake.”
“And then he called Glen Hughes.”
“If you say he did, then he did. I have to tell you, for me this redefines being between a rock and a hard place.”
She began to calm down. It wasn’t going to do her any good to get Locke more bent out of shape. “Frederick, I’m not going to do anything about this, okay? Let’s just take a deep breath and take a step back. I’ve met with Hughes and I’m still negotiating. There may be a way out of this that suits everyone, but in the meantime, keep your mouth shut. Don’t talk to Rice about it. And sure as hell don’t tell anyone else.”
“I’m not going in to the office tomorrow.”
“That’s a positive start.”
“The forgeries — what are you going to do?”
“Frederick, I told you in London that I would talk to you before I did anything. That’s still our agreement.”
“Ava, there’s no way I can talk to you about them, or what to do about them, without involving Sam Rice.”
“Can we please first get to a point where we have something concrete to discuss? I can’t have you running off half-cocked to Sam Rice with every morsel of information I give you,” Ava said, knowing that she had given Locke the last piece of information he would get from her until the case was completely resolved.
“Yes, I understand,” he said.
“Then sit tight and keep quiet. I’ll get back to you as soon as there’s something to report.”
“I’ll do the best I can.”
“Thank you,” she said, closing her phone.
She sat slumped over the desk in her room, feeling like a punching bag. Things seemed to be completely out of control. Locke was talking to Rice. Rice was talking to Hughes. The two of them were organizing a repayment plan that was full of risk, and it was illegal. May Ling Wong was making her crazy, and God knows what she was saying to Uncle. Being on the cruise ship with her mother and Bruce was starting to look like the good old days.
She needed to unwind. The walk hadn’t done it, and a run was just as unlikely to help. She called the hotel spa and asked how much they charged for a massage. For $625 she could get an hour-and-fifty-minute treatment that would have cost her maybe $30 in Bangkok, double that in Hong Kong. “When can you take me?”
“Now,” the woman said.
“I’m on my way.”
It began with a footbath and moved to a warm body scrub, with two Thai women working her from head to toe. When it was time for the massage, one asked, “How hard?”
“As hard as you can make it, unless I scream,” Ava said.
They almost did make her yelp, but somewhere between the work on her hamstrings and her bum muscles, Ava began to think more clearly.
When the women had her sit up so they could do a simultaneous head and foot massage, she had already made up her mind about what to do and was beginning to relax. “Tell me, do you do both heads?” she asked the woman working on hers.
“What do you mean?”
“When I was in China, in Yantai, I drove past a massage parlour every day. There was a big sign that said ‘head massage’ in English, Chinese, and Korean. But underneath the main sign were a whole bunch of other letters in Korean. When I asked my guide what it meant, he said the parlour claimed to specialize in massaging Korean ‘little heads,’” she said, pointing to her groin.
The women giggled and nodded. She gave each of them a hundred-dollar tip after the session.
Ava phoned Glen Hughes from her room. He answered just as it was going to voicemail. He was as suave as ever, but this time with a tinge of eagerness sneaking into his voice. “Ms. Lee, I was hoping you’d call back today.”
“There’s a restaurant called Asiate on the thirty-fifth floor of the Mandarin Oriental Hotel on Columbus Circle. Can you meet me there for dinner tonight at seven?” she asked.
“Gladly.”
Ava called downstairs, made the reservation, and turned on her computer. Hughes hadn’t been exaggerating about Sam Rice. The Harrington’s website, naturally enough, made him out to be the world’s greatest authority on twentieth-century painting. Other sites weren’t quite so effusive but were certainly respectful. Ava recognized the names of some of the museums and galleries that used him as a consultant. It seemed that Hughes was right — a Sam Rice authentication went a very long way.
She searched for his photo online. He had a round, moonlike face with a small, pert nose and close-set eyes. His lips were large, out of proportion to his other features. He was bald, with only a fringe of grey hair running around his head like a train track. He and the elegant Glen Hughes weren’t exactly a physical match.
Ava logged on to an art site to look at Gauguin and Picasso values. The numbers startled her. Gauguin paintings had fetched prices north of thirty million; Picassos had sold in the eighty- and ninety-million-dollar range. What a hell of a business, she thought.
