The Deceivers (4 page)

I looked through the peephole in the door and got a surprise: My Thai restaurant deliveryman grinned at the peephole.

I'd become a regular customer at the restaurant down the street and was a good tipper despite my poverty. My favorite dish was a noodle and vegetable combo with chicken and spicy peanut sauce.

I hadn't buzzed him in, but he could have slipped in with someone coming or going or made a delivery to another apartment in the building. I unlocked the door and opened it, but left the chain attached and my foot against the door. He looked pretty harmless, but this was New York.

He had a brown paper bag in hand and a big smile.

“Hello, miss,” he said. His accent was thick.

“Hi, Sammy.” I couldn't pronounce his name so I called him something that sounded similar in English. I raised my eyebrows. “I didn't order anything.”

“No pad thai. Something better.” He held up the bag. “From Thailand. Art for sale.”

My mood immediately picked up.

“Come in.”

He knew I was in the art business because my name tag on the buzzer pad at the front door downstairs said “Art Inquiries.”

Sammy seemed a bit edgy and nervous; not the way he usually acted. That put me on my guard.

“What do you have?”

“For you, very nice.”

He took out of the bag a sandstone panel a couple inches thick and about the size of a car license plate.

My eyes lit up: a sandstone bas-relief with the venerable, aged look of a genuine antiquity.

Bas-relief figures were carved in the stone so the figures stood out from the background, as opposed to being etched in like an engraving. Creating raised figures wasn't easy. It required much more talent and time than simply etching figures, especially in hard materials like marble and sandstone.

The relief had three dancing goddesses called Apsarases, seductive women of Hindu mythology. Beautiful water and forest nymphs who played music and danced for the gods, they held a place in Asian myths similar to the Muses of Western mythology.

Far Eastern art wasn't my forte but I knew the dancers were a common motif in the artistic creations of temples in India and Southeast Asia.

Said to be able to change their shapes at will, the beauty of an Apsaras was beyond human description. Wives of the Gandharvas, court servants of Indra, the god of thunder and rain, the women danced to the music made by their husbands in the palaces of gods.

The instant question was whether I was looking at a bona fide artifact or a tourist reproduction.

I took the piece to examine the workmanship. Each female had struck a different dancing pose and had an elaborate headdress. Bare-breasted with jewelry on various parts of their body—necks, arms, ankles, even some fingers—all had scant clothing below their neckline. The fine detail was outstanding and no two dancers had the same clothes, jewelry, or expression.

Experts could usually tell just by looking at a piece whether it was genuine. They looked at the quality and workmanship, even its rarity. But a good copy sometimes was hard to tell from a real artifact and scientific tests were needed.

Some artifacts were made from materials that lent themselves to being duplicated later. Cast gold and bronze were easier to fake than hard stone materials like sandstone, limestone, and marble that required more skill.

The outer appearance was important. The patina, a covering that develops gradually on an object, over centuries for many antiquities, was often simulated to make it look old, and that was often where the forger failed.

The patina on this relief had the aged appearance consistent with the inferred age of a piece a thousand years old.

Another tip-off for forgery was the use of modern tools that left telltale marks.

I examined the relief closely with my magnifying glass, looking for anything on the sandstone that showed it was made with modern electric tools like sanders, grinders, or saws, but saw nothing that revealed it was a fake.

The only odd thing I saw under magnification was a tiny mark in the background. The mark was almost a half-moon with the flat line on top slightly concave.

Because the mark could have been an imprint of a tool the artist used, or created when something pressed against the piece since it had been made, it didn't help me in determining if the relief was authentic.

As a professional, I would never have authenticated a big ticket item like this without putting it through scientific tests. But you can't make it in the art business without having radar in your gut—and my instincts were screaming that I was looking at a thousand-year-old piece.

I knew infinitely less about Far Eastern artifacts than Mediterranean pieces, but Sammy's piece struck me as Khmer art. The Khmers flourished as a powerful empire about a thousand years ago in Cambodia and left behind temple complexes that became choked by jungle over the ages.

Angkor Wat was the most prominent of the temple complexes. A magnificent edifice that ranks as a wonder of all time, many art critics consider it even more inspired than the monuments of ancient Egypt and Greece. But Angkor Wat had also been unmercifully looted over the centuries, with most of the stolen pieces making their way to Japan and the West through Thailand, along with most of the heroin that got pushed our way.

I could hardly breathe. My God … what I held in my hands was worth a small fortune.

“You like?”

“Yes. Uh, Sammy, where did you get this?”

He grinned. “Grandmother's attic.”

“Uh huh.” I smiled at him. I'm sure my lips were trembling as much as my knees. “You could make a lot more money if there were more of these.”

He grinned and nodded. “Plenty more.”

“I need to have the piece tested to help me authenticate it. You understand?”

He was already shaking his head
no
. “How much worth?”

“That's why I need to have it tested. Scientific tests are the only way we can see if it's real or a fake.”

“No fake. How much worth?”

“I agree that it doesn't look like a fake, but I need to be sure. I need to take it to be examined by experts.”

“Take pictures, tell me how much worth.”

“Okay.”

I grabbed my camera and started taking pictures. A piece couldn't be authenticated by a picture, but I was stalling for time. I didn't know if he brought it to me to buy or just to find out how much it was worth in order to sell it.

If it was real, museums would want it. So would a horde of collectors. Asian art was the rage among Americans and Japanese. A museum-quality piece like this had to be worth hundreds of thousands, maybe more, even with a suspect ownership history.

I tried to control my excitement. I was holding my salvation. A ticket back to the good life. I could probably buy it from Sammy for a fraction of its worth and resell it for enough money to restart my life. It meant not only getting an apartment bigger than a shoe box, but return of my credibility as an art—

His cell phone rang. It broke the spell. A sudden dose of reality washed over me as he answered the call.

Museums and collectors did not lay out megabucks for artifacts without knowing their previous ownership history. For at least the last hundred years most countries have had laws prohibiting the export of national cultural treasures. As a rule of thumb, most of the items acquired during the twentieth century were subject to claims from the countries of origin that the antiquities had been taken out of the country illegally.

Each year demands came from Italy, Greece, Iraq, Egypt, and other countries with archaeological sites rich in cultural treasures for return of illegally exported pieces. The demands were made on major museums. Many of them, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art—the Met—and the Getty, two world-class icons, had not only returned antiquities that could only be described as “priceless,” but were still under pressure to return many more.

Knowing the ownership history was crucial when buying a work of art or artifact. The art trade calls ownership history the piece's “provenance.” With antiquities, the word referred both to the place of origin—an archaeological site in Egypt, Greece, or wherever—and to the chain of ownership that established that the piece had left the country of origin legally and that the current seller had good title to it.

I was staring at an antiquity that probably had been looted in the Far East and smuggled into America. I didn't know how many years in prison that added up to, but just the thought of being in jail was enough for me.

After taking the pictures I had to sit down before my knees folded. I collapsed on a chair and stared at the artifact sitting on my lap as Sammy jabbered in high-pitched Thai with an ever increasing tempo.

Jesus, what was I thinking? The sandstone Apsaras piece wasn't a ticket to the good life but a free pass to jail. Obviously, it had been smuggled out of Cambodia and smuggled into the States … in a carton of rice noodles for all I knew.

What kind of ownership history could it have when it arrived in a brown paper bag that smelled of succulent Thai spices? I already had one long, hard, crushing fall from grace with the art world and the law because of a piece with a bad provenance.

Even more important, what I held in my hands was part of the cultural history of a small, poor nation, a treasure of its people that had been stolen, looted by thieves who often destroyed more than they hauled away … with the looted antiquities ending up in the collection of rich people who didn't give a damn about—

Sammy suddenly shouted. Almost a cry of pain. He took the cell phone away from his ear and stared at it wide-eyed as if it had suddenly come alive.

“Give me!” He grabbed the piece from me.

“Wait!”

He fled with the piece, out my door with me right behind grabbing at his shirt.

“Wait—I'll give you money!”

He knocked my hand away and flew down the stairs. I stood at the landing and watched him disappear.

With my salvation.

Or maybe he saved me from myself.

5

As I watched the street below from my window, Sammy shot out of the building and ran down the street as if all the hounds of hell were snapping at his heels. Maybe they were. A noodle deliveryman with an incredibly valuable piece of ancient artwork—obviously there were some tangled webs about the piece. For all I knew, the restaurant was a den of art thieves. Right off it sounded like a great front for smuggling art in from the Far East.

The first scenario that jumped at me was no honor among thieves—he was supposed to deliver it somewhere and decided to sell it himself. And the person on the phone had given him a preview of what was going to happen to him if he didn't return the item real fast.

Whatever the caller said had put a fire under him. And I didn't think it was the Thai restaurant cook chewing him out for being late for a delivery. Sammy was really scared.

Alarm bells were going off in my head, the kind that ring between my ears when I'm doing something stupid that I know is stupid. I should pick up the phone and call the police.

My phone rang and I nearly jumped out of my skin.

I stared down at the number. It was that Mrs. Garcia who wanted me to pony up the Saks's bill.

I ignored the call and paced. This wasn't the first time Sammy had brought artwork to me. A month ago he had shown me two small bronze statues. Because they were cast rather than carved, bronze objects were especially easy to reproduce with an appearance of being ancient. As many as 90 percent of bronzes for sale are fakes or copies.

I noticed the poor workmanship immediately, though to a tourist in a souvenir shop they would have looked authentic enough.

He hadn't seemed surprised when I told him they were fakes. He just wrinkled his brown eyes and smiled at me.

Now I realized he had been testing my skills as an appraiser because he had something more significant he planned to show me.

To get his hands on a piece as valuable as the Apsarases, Sammy had to be connected to very big-time art smugglers. Or art thieves. For all I knew, the piece had been stolen from a collector, gallery, or museum here in the States, but that premise immediately sounded unrealistic to me. The contraband art trade was so widespread in poor Asian countries it would be infinitely easier to obtain antiquities there and smuggle them in rather than steal a piece here and have the theft publicized not only in the news media but posted on Internet art loss sites.

Sammy said there were more pieces. Considering the value of the Apsaras relief he showed me, if there were more pieces, the inventory would be worth millions.

I wondered if he really knew what a valuable item he had. I suspected he didn't. The value of stolen works escalated from very little to very much as the piece made its way up the art theft food chain. And Sammy would definitely be a bottom feeder in that chain.

Even if he didn't know the value, he wasn't stupid. He had to know it wasn't a tourist souvenir but a genuine work of art.

For sure, there was money to be made, one way or another … hopefully honestly. I didn't want to spend my life running from creditors or stick my nose into something that left me running from criminals.

I couldn't let this thing drop. I was pulled too many ways by too many emotions, from feelings of a mother hen in protecting the piece from people like Sammy who didn't respect its priceless cultural value, to figuring out a way to make money on it … without going to jail.

My thinking wasn't straight, but neither was my life. I had to admit that my fall from economic grace had caused me to do some serious thinking about who I was, where I came from, and where I was going. Like people who only pray when there's hell to pay, I had thoughts about a simpler life … a little house with a white picket fence, rug rats crawling around while I prepared a Sunday pot roast for that man in my life …

A few months ago I would have howled with laughter from the image. But like a scary medical diagnosis, the free fall that left me financially crippled and my reputation roadkill had put the fear of the Lord in me. They say there are no atheists in the foxhole and right now I was crouching down in a battlefield with the slings and arrows of creditors flying at me. So I watched my cussing, my drinking, and my impure thoughts. At least, I tried.