Justice Denied (22 page)

Not to be tolerated. She swept up the baby and clumped one flight down the stairs to Stuart Franciosa's loft. There she found the proprietor, a small, elegant bearded sculptor, and his mate, still smaller and more elegant, a Creole from Louisiana named Larry Bou-dreau, at ease in their dressing gowns, sipping coffee and watching
All My Children
on a small color television.

Marlene breezed in, deposited Lucy on Larry Boudreau's lap, and went to the kitchen, where she poured herself a cup of coffee. Stuart's loft, unlike her own, consisted of a formal two-bedroom apartment, constructed of dry wall, and a large studio equipped with workbenches and a disreputable orangish sofa, on which the roommates now reclined.

“No work today?” asked Stuart.

“Day-care conked out on me. And I had a million things to do. I'm heading into a ferocious depression.”

“And so you dropped down here, where fun ever reigns supreme, in hopes of a cheerful word?”

“Not for nothing are we called gay, Stuart,” said Boudreau, holding Lucy's hands and goggling at her as she tried to walk up his belly. He was a nurse. He had delivered Lucy Karp in an adjoining bedroom, Marlene having been caught short by an emergency involving a pair of Mafia gunmen. Larry doted on Lucy; this was not surprising, given his current position as chief nurse in the children's ward at Columbia-Presby: she was cute, affectionate, and not dying from fulminating meningococcemia.

“What about you, Larry?” Marlene asked. “Vacation?”

“Not at all, mah dear child. Ahm night-shiftin' it this week. Stuart heah will be rambling through wicked SoHo, breakin' hearts while Ah attend the sick.”

Franciosa rolled his eyes. “We're having a spat. It's too tawdry and boring. He's being the martyr, and I'm the heel.”

Boudreau sniffed and leveled a hooded and disdainful look at his lover over Lucy's bouncing dark head.

“Meanwhile,” said Stuart brightly, “I have two passes to a tony reception, uptown. Shrimp and champagne. Are we interested?”

Larry said, “Ah'd love to, deah, but Ah have to wash mah hay-uh,” in a tone that could have etched bronze.

“God, I haven't been uptown in months,” sighed Marlene.

“Why don't you take Marlene, Stuart?” said Boudreau silkily. “She'd love it. Ah'll watch ouah little darlin' heah. Mind, y'all have to be back by two-thirty …”

Franciosa hesitated, neatly trapped. Marlene would insure that he behaved himself, while Larry would get to sulk nobly at home. “Want to?” he asked, after a moment's pause.

“Since you ask …” she said. “Just twist my arm a little harder.”

Forty-five minutes later, Marlene sat in a cab with Stuart Franciosa, wearing a yellow 1950s sundress bought at a thrift shop, thong sandals, and a Panama hat with the brim turned up. She was working hard, fighting guilt, trying to bring her mood up to match her sprightly appearance. Around 14th Street, guilt retreated snarling into its cave, and Marlene turned her attention to the prospect of a delightful afternoon consuming elegant viands in the company of lovely people, none of whom spent much time examining mutilated women.

“So, what's with this gallery? Are you in it?”

Franciosa, who had been doing some sulking of his own, shone a weak smile at her. “No, Sokoloff handles nothing but the old: antiquities, plus Byzantine and other Eastern stuff. They're one of the main houses in the City for that.”

“So why did you get an invite?”

“They've used me to make copies. Lost-wax jobs, in precious metals. Scythian bracelets, Egyptian rings, that sort of stuff. Little statuettes. It's a nice little business for them, and I get some good contacts out of it.”

“Wow, treasures of the mysterious East. It sounds deliciously romantic and decadent.”

“You got it, sister,” said Stuart, brightening.

They arrived. Sokoloff's occupied a corner at Madison in the fifties. Inside were three spacious rooms, painted white, with track lights on the ceiling and oriental carpets on the floor. The treasures were arranged in glass cases on the walls and on pillars. Glomming the artifacts and loading up on canapés, shrimp, and Moët were perhaps fifty people, the men prosperous-looking, the women dressed in the sort of clothes one needs an appointment to buy. Marlene was introduced to the proprietor, Stephan Sokoloff, a portly old rake who lingered a tad too long over the continental kiss he placed on Marlene's hand. Stuart ushered her away before she could object.

“Stuart!” she said in a stage whisper, “I'm dressed like a hick. I thought it was going to be arty, people with blue spikes and vicious leather.”

Franciosa laughed. He was himself wearing all black under an Italian silk double-breasted jacket in the palest possible tangerine, worn open. “It doesn't matter what you wear when you're the most beautiful woman in the room, dear. As you are. You saw how Sokoloff drooled over you.”

He started and placed his hand on his breast. “Speaking of which—be still my heart! Who is that dish?”

Marlene followed his gaze. It had been a rhetorical question, and she was astounded that she was actually able to answer it. “It's V.T. Newbury. What the hell is he doing here?” The man in question was a smallish ash blonde with the perfect Anglo-Saxon features of a portrait by Copley.

“You know him?”

“Yes, and you can stop that panting, you slut.”

“He's
not
straight.”

“Like a T-square. Want to meet him anyway?”

“Maybe later,” said the artist morosely, at which point he was shanghaied by a person in a feathered hat.

Marlene ambled over to Newbury, who was in rapt conversation with a squat, swarthy man dressed in a cheap and ill-fitting three-piece polyester suit. V.T. was his usual exquisite Paul Stuart self. They made an odd pair.

V.T.'s eyes widened in surprise when he saw Marlene, but she forestalled whatever remark he was about to make.

“Not a word, V.T. I'm not here, you never saw me. Gosh, that's a lovely thing. What's he smiling about?”

They were standing in front of a glass case containing a small statue of a boy done in some hard, bright stone. The tag said “Kouros, 14.5 cm, alabaster, Miletus, ca. 600 B.C.”

The swarthy man said, “It's what they call the archaic smile. It's a symbol of personality.” This delivered in a thick New York accent.
Poisonality.

Marlene gave him another look. A blunt, square face, pockmarked, and a black crew cut. Intelligent eyes, but they had a hard, cynical light in them that Marlene recognized all too well.

“Not something most cops would pick up,” she said. The man laughed, and V.T. made the introductions. The swarthy man was in fact Detective Lieutenant Ramon Rodriguez, and he was in charge of the small unit of the New York Police Department that investigates art frauds and thefts.

“So, V.T., you're working?” she asked. V.T. was a light of the D.A.'s fraud bureau.

“Yes, I suppose I am. And isn't it pleasant? That's why I love fraud. You get to mix with an altogether tonier class of people than in Homicide.”

“Yeah, and the food's better too,” said Rodriguez, snagging a caviar-heaped cracker from a passing tray.

“So what's the scam?” said Marlene, doing the same. “Is it a fake?”

Rodriguez looked at the little kouros again. “Well, it's kinda hard to say. With stone like this, you don't have the chemical tests you have for your organics, like wood and cloth, or pigment tests and X rays for old paintings. All you have is, you can do crystallographic analysis to see where the original stone came from and if it has weathered the way it ought to if it's ancient. Other than that, it's all stylistic. And provenance, of course.”

“Which means?” asked Marlene, all at once fascinated, and not because the subject was inherently gripping. Something tugged at her mind.

“Well, stylistic is Sokoloff got some guy from Yale and some guy from the Met to say it's a realie,” said Rodriguez. “Provenance means you got documentary proof of a chain of ownership; that, or the thing's been under observation in some church since the year one. But you can forge or fake provenance. Or explain not having any—hey, you just dug the sucker out of some tel in Iraq. Example: in 1960 a Brit named Mellaert discovered a trove of stuff at Haçilar in Turkey—pottery mostly, very old. Turns out the ‘peasant' who led Mellaert to the find was a forger named Cetimkya, who ran the pots off himself. Of course, once you have a ‘find' it's open season; who's to know the stuff's not something ripped off out of the dig before it was catalogued? Pre-Columbian stuff is the worst for that. Robbing graves is a major industry down there, and collectors don't ask questions. And they get ripped like crazy.

“The hard part is making them complain; nobody likes to be a mark, especially rich connoisseurs.”
Connowsewers.

“So why are you here at this particular gallery? Routine?”

Rodriguez smiled, showing large, yellowish teeth. “I like the food. No, actually, I'm following up on an Interpol bulletin. Somebody popped a warehouse in Istanbul that was being used to keep stuff from the Topkapi collection. Nobody knows what the hell was in there, but a bunch of collectors in Milan, Paris, and London have been stung by phony antiquities and Byzantine stuff, supposedly the loot from Istanbul. It would be natural for whoever's doing it to move their operation to New York too. So, watch and wait.

“I'll say one thing for whoever's doing this. They know what they're doing—the craftsmanship's outa-sight. C'mere, I'll show you something.”

The three of them trooped over to a case by the wall. On black velvet a small painting glowed golden.

“Christ Judged by Pilate,”
said Rodriguez. “Byzantine, ninth century. Okay, the wood's right, it's an old panel. The paint's egg tempera, the blues are crushed lapis, the red's cochineal—not modern pigments. The gold in the frame is really beaten, not milled. Milling wasn't used until the tenth. But …”

He paused significantly. “Stylistic analysis. The soldier holding Christ. His helmet, his armor, even his stance and the expression on his face is right off a cross reliquary and icon of the Passion now in the treasure of the Primatial Basilica of Hungary—early thirteenth.”

“But why couldn't the Hungarian piece be copied off this one?” Marlene asked.

“It don't work that way. Stylistically, that figure's too late to have been done by a Byzantine in the ninth. Here's something else, even more interesting.”

They moved to the next case.

“Five-pointed Armenian tiara decorated with star and two eagles, gold and gems, circa 90 B.C. Same thing: the workmanship is terrific. Lost wax casting, no drawn wire. There's one just like it in the Armenian state museum at Erevan. I mean, just like it. I'm not saying it's a fake; it could be an ancient duplicate or a slightly later copy. But …” He waggled his hand. “In any case, it convinced Kerbussyan enough to buy it.”

“Kerbussyan!”

“Yeah. Why, do you know him?”

“I heard the name. How do you know he bought it?”

“Little red dot there on the card. Has to be old Kerbussyan. Nothing that good from Armenia comes through the New York market without him scarfing it up. He's probably the major collector of Armenian art in the world. Look, here's something else he bought.”

The next case held a small panel painting. The card gave
Burial of St. Gregory
as its title, and there was a tiny red stick-on dot there too.

“It looks a little like Giotto,” said Marlene.

Rodriguez raised an eyebrow. “Very good. It's a contemporary of his, Tóros Roslin. ‘School of,' more likely. Worked in southeastern Turkey—what they called Cilicia or Lesser Armenia. Funny, it's not quite an antiquity—out of Sokoloff's usual line.”

They studied the painting in silence for a few moments. A haloed saint was being placed in a tomb, with the usual attending mourners and angels waiting to conduct his soul to glory.

“Why is his face like that?”

“Oh, that's the famous mask,” said Rodriguez. “St. Gregory the Illuminator was the founder of Armenian Christianity back in the fourth century or thereabouts. It's, um, a complicated story, but the upshot was the king and queen were real broken up when he died, so they had a death mask made of his face, and after a while they used it as a cast for a solid gold mask adorned with jewels. According to one version of the legend, Gregory's actual eyes were incorporated into the mask, miraculously preserved from corruption. It had the usual holy powers. Heal the sick, make the blind see. Gregory's right hand, by the way, is wrapped in a silver gauntlet reliquary in the treasury of the Catholicos of Cilicia in Beirut.”

“What happened to it? The mask, I mean.”

“No one knows … if it ever existed, which I doubt. Art history's full of legendary treasures like that. I'll tell you one thing, though. If it ever comes through New York, Kerbussyan'll buy it.” He looked at his watch. “Shit, I'm due downtown in court in half an hour. Nice to meet you, Marlene. Coming, V.T.?”

“Just a sec, Lieutenant, one question,” Marlene said. “Did you ever hear of a guy named Mehmet Ersoy?”

Rodriguez frowned and chewed his lip. “Name sort of rings a bell. Turkish name. What about him?”

“Well, I just thought that since his business was buying back stolen Turkish antiquities, you might have run across him.”

“Stolen Turkish antiquities? Who told you that?”

“I heard it from their guy at the U.N., in confidence, that the Turks have a program to locate and return to Turkey ancient stuff that is taken out of the country illegally and is being sold abroad. Had some serious money behind it too.”

Rodriguez shrugged. “Well, hey, it's possible, but I never heard anything about it. I mean, from the Turks' perspective, it don't make a hell of a lot of sense.”