Free The Wild Beasts of Wuhan by Ian Hamilton Page A

on Mr. Andersen, I discover he doesn’t exist or he gave the gallery the wrong address. And finally we have Mr. Andersen selling it through an agent to Mr. Kwong. I can’t locate the agent.
    “Aside from the consistency in discrepancies — and consistency is what I look for, mind you; anyone can make a bookkeeping error, but when they pile up, the notion of error disappears — I did a search to see if the painting had ever been exhibited anywhere. It hadn’t. Now, we’re talking about a Monet, not your brother Harry’s watercolour that you might hang on the living room wall, and there’s nothing more that art collectors love than showing off their collection. There isn’t a museum or art gallery in the world that can stay fresh without loans from private collections. So unless Herr Bauer and Mr. Andersen were complete recluses, the odds are that the picture would have surfaced somewhere, sometime — Is this helpful?”
    “Tremendously,” Ava said. “Tell me, though, wouldn’t it be quicker and easier just to send the painting to a lab for an analysis?”
    “That is the last thing to rely on,” Torrence said. His face was getting flushed, the Chianti taking its toll. “Your good forger knows his paints and, more important, knows his artists’ paints. Paint can be aged, and canvases too. It isn’t difficult.”
    “This is really quite interesting,” Ava said.
    “These are clever men.”
    “That leads me to Mr. Kwong. I know very little about him other than that he was a dealer whom the Wongs trusted.”
    “He was a ceramics dealer, and not half bad at it. He wasn’t big time but he knew his stuff and had a decent enough clientele, nearly all Chinese, of course.”
    “So how did he get into paintings?”
    “The Wongs asked him.”
    “He knew how much about the area?”
    “From what I can gather, hardly anything. The Wongs seem to have been his only clients for paintings.”
    “So how could he locate and buy all those works?”
    “Now that is the question, isn’t it?” Torrence said, emptying the bottle into his wineglass. “How did he indeed?”
    “Have you given it any thought?”
    “A bit, and it seems to me he probably just tapped into associates here who referred him to some people in Europe or the U.S. It isn’t that big a world, our art world. All he had to do was contact some of the major dealers and galleries, tell them he had a client who was interested in buying Fauvist works, and ask them to let him know if something came on the market. There’s always someone interested in selling.”
    “How would he finance those purchases?”
    “He didn’t, I would imagine. He probably had some kind of commission arrangement.”
    “But he did the invoicing.”
    “He wasn’t dumb. The last thing he would want to do is let his client know who he was buying from, and vice versa. You can be sure, though, that no painting arrived in Wuhan until it had been paid for.”
    “How did the real paintings get mixed in?”
    “Kwong was obviously buying from a number of people, some of whom just happened to be honest. There’s no way he was dealing with just one group or gallery.”
    “Could he have somehow orchestrated the fakes himself?”
    “I don’t think so.”
    “Why not?”
    “There’s the matter of the real paintings, and the questionable ones — I haven’t ruled them out as real too. If he was reasonably certain he could cheat the Wongs without their figuring it out, why would he bother to send them a genuine Matisse and Dufy? It doesn’t make sense to me. No, I think your man Kwong got in over his head. He was only too happy to be a scout for the Wongs and to take a commission from the other end. I’m sure he looked at the provenances supplied with the paintings, but that’s about all he did. I’d also bet that he was doing business with some supposedly reputable companies, and that he was prepared to take their assurance at face value.”
    “Like which companies?”
    “The