The art market will always be a mystery market, and it is very difficult to buy and sell a work in this world.

Any work of art has a problem of origin, that is, the work you are going to sell must ensure that it is not stolen black goods, otherwise not only will you have to file a lawsuit, but the gallery that helped you sell will also have legal responsibility, which has a lot of difficulties for Gao Hongsheng to figure out Guò's plan to sell famous paintings for money.

But there are still many ways to circumvent this problem, and he has adopted the simplest and most legendary, and arguably the most old-fashioned, one-fool boy who buys a few paintings at a flea market in Paris, and then finds other works behind them, so as to give the best explanation of the origin of his goods, otherwise a question of provenance will push him to the front of the law.

After a week of meticulous pre-preparations, he dragged a large suitcase alone to the door of a gallery on the Left Bank of France, a gallery that was not at all conspicuous in appearance and had been booked by phone three days before, without which he could not knock on the door of the shop Pù, a shop specializing in the appraisal and acquisition of works of art, which was by appointment only, and he came to appraise five works, including one by Monet.

Gently knocking on the ancient door knocker, a middle-aged white man with blond hair opened a crack in the door of the store, blocked the gap and asked expressionlessly in French, "Is there something wrong?" ”

"I'm sorry, I don't know French, can you understand English?" Gao Hongsheng can only say that he knows that he is speaking French, so he doesn't want to think about anything, so he has to ask apologetically with a smile.

"I'm sorry, I can understand English, is there anything you can do?" The middle-aged man replied in English with a blank face.

"Yes sir, I came to appraise a few works, and I made an appointment three days in advance. My name is Gao, Chinese. Gao Hongsheng replied cautiously.

"You are China Gao, hello, we have been waiting for you, please come with me." When the middle-aged man heard Gao Hongsheng say this, he immediately opened the door with a smile on his face, and turned sideways to let Gao Hongsheng in

When Gao Hongsheng dragged the big suitcase into the door, the middle-aged man closed the store door with his backhand, glanced at Gao Hongsheng's big box and said, "Do you need my help?"

Gao Hongsheng adapted to the slightly dim light in the room, stood at the door and looked at the whole store, this is an empty store that can be described as an angry rat tired cat, no furnishings, no decoration, there is not even a nail on the empty wall, let alone think about anything like a shelf, only an old wide counter lies in the middle of this long shop, and there are a few high-backed chairs behind the counter. In the middle chair sat an old man with brown hair in a suit from the sixties and seventies, who was curiously looking at Gao Hongsheng with a disappointed face with eyes that seemed to have passed through time and space.

"No, it's not heavy, thank you." Gao Hongsheng turned his head and replied.

"Please come with me and let's see if your stuff is genuine, and hopefully you're one of the lucky ones." The middle-aged man joked heartily.

Gao Hongsheng followed the middle-aged man to the front of the counter, and was about to open the suitcase, but was stopped by the middle-aged man, and he said: "The appraisal fee of 5,000 euros, 1,000 euros per piece, we can issue an appraisal certificate." ”

"Hmmm! Know. Do I need to pay now? ”

"No, now please show the work you need to identify, I hope we all have good luck."

Gao Hongsheng put the suitcase on the wide counter, took out a white glove from the pocket of his jacket and brought it on, carefully opened the zipper and took out the five oil paintings inlaid in the frame one by one, and carefully placed them on the counter with the help of middle-aged people, and in the center was a straw pile by Monet.

After placing the painting, Gao Hongsheng took a small step back to make way for the place, and the old man had already stood up from his chair when he took out the first work, walked around the side of the counter, and stood behind Gao Hongsheng, carefully observing.

"Cornell, please turn on the lights and bring me my magnifying glass, thank you." The old man stared at the pile of straw in the middle of the counter, and ordered loudly without raising his head.

The appraisal work went very smoothly, and no one in that world was bored with copying Monet's works, and all five works were really not in the real works.

But what happened next made him very depressed, mainly because their purchase price was really low.

"Mr. Gao, I don't know what you want to do with these paintings of yours, if you are not in a hurry to make a move, we can sell the price of the works through a series of hype, of course, the account is six of us and four of us, if you are in a hurry, we can only give you a reference price, these five works are a total of three million US dollars, which can be purchased by us."

"20 million dollars, these paintings are yours, I still have more than a dozen works in my hand, if the price is satisfactory, I will give them to you."

The underground black art market is like this, it is impossible to want too high, those works auctioned in the auction house are all from innocent backgrounds, and the price of goods from unknown sources like Gao Hongsheng cannot be increased at all, so he had to call a price that he is still satisfied with.

"Five million dollars."

"Eighteen million dollars."

"Six million dollars"

"Seventeen million dollars."

“…………”

After some bargaining, Gao Hongsheng's Swiss account had an additional $11.5 million, of which $500,000 was a deposit paid by the store owner of more than a dozen of his other works, and a week later, another $20 million was added to Gao Hongsheng's bank account, so that he finally entered the ranks of billionaires, of course, a billionaire in RMB, but he was an invisible billionaire, a rich man who could not see the light.

In order to launder these black money, Gao Hongsheng had to wander to Brazil, the kingdom of football, where he anonymously set up seven trading companies, and then used these trading companies to carry out a large amount of import trade with his cousin's company, and imported a large number of cotton, hardware, condoms, medicines and other goods needed by future generations to Brazil at a price several times more than the market price, and then hid all those goods in his artifact space. Gradually launder your black money into clean money and store it in the account of Zài's cousin's company.

In this way, it took him nearly two months to launder the black money that he could not see the light into a clean RMB, otherwise the black money that could not see the light could only lie in an anonymous bank account, and could only be watched and not spent forever.