Justice Denied (27 page)

She saw Sokoloff the next day in the office above his gallery. She went alone. Harry was off on bureau business, talking to people who might know whether some guy in Washington Heights had been raping his nine-year-old stepdaughter. She had told him about Djelal, and he had said he would look into it. She was at least mildly guilty about using Harry to investigate something outside her official (and his official) purview, essentially as a favor to her husband. The other women in the office were getting miffed about it too, although they were careful not to show it.

Harry wouldn't work directly for them in any case; they had to go through Marlene to get him to do anything. Since they were all ambitious women with substantial egos and a certain quickness to take offense at the slights that came daily from what was still virtually an all-boy environment, this did not add to the joy of working in the Rape Bureau. They called Harry, behind his back, “the Dobe”—Marlene's Doberman pinscher.

So she sat uneasily on Sokoloff's nearly real Louis Quinze settee, making small talk with its charming owner, in his charming, exquisitely decorated office, feeling vaguely blue. She had not yet told him why she had come, but he had assumed that she was working the fraud thing with Rodriguez and she had not contradicted this.

“You sell a lot to Sarkis Kerbussyan, don't you?” she asked.

“Yes, I've placed a number of very fine pieces with Sarkis over the years.”

Placed. Like abandoned children in foster homes, but with infinitely more concern.

“Armenian artworks, right?”

“By and large. Sarkis has one of the largest private collections of Armenian art, both ancient and medieval. Why do you ask?”

Marlene ignored this question. “Would you say he's a connoisseur? That he knows what he's doing?”

Sokoloff nodded and smiled. “Oh, yes. He has a good eye. There is still a little of the rug merchant in him.”

“Is it likely that he would be taken in by fakes, if they were offered?”

The temperature of Sokoloff's smile dropped a few degrees. “Fakes. Well, dear lady, we can all be taken in by clever fakes. Not everything can be analyzed in the laboratory. If we took the time to do so for every item, the art business would collapse. We all have to rely on taste and provenance and the integrity of a reputable dealer. So I can't really tell you if any fakes have been unloaded on Mr. Kerbussyan. Certainly he never got one from me. Knowingly, that is.”

Marlene looked at him, waiting. After a brief silence he took a deep breath through his fleshy nose and continued.

“On the other hand, the specialist collector is perhaps more susceptible to that sort of thing than the general collector, odd as it may seem.”

“Why is that?”

“Because the specialist is interested in the specialty, not necessarily in the aesthetic or technical qualities of the art itself. Despite his greater familiarity with his narrow field, his desire for possession may overcome his prudence. For example, back in the mid-sixties there was an enormous surge in the market for Judaica. Perhaps it was the Six-Day War, who knows—a stimulus for Jewish patriotism. In any case, many wealthy American and European Jews were willing to pay anything for old synagogue silver, the
rimanim,
the little bells and decorations hung from the Torahs, North African Hanukkah lamps, silver menorahs, and such things. Enamel betrothal rings with Hebrew inscriptions.

“And, of course, the market responded. There was a cottage industry digging out old tea caddies and carving them with Hebrew to make
ethrog,
the little boxes to place matzoh in, and converting Victorian silver chalices into medieval kiddush cups. Probably half the forgers in Italy were studying Hebrew.

“What's interesting is that there were very few complaints about all this. Only the historians were affronted. The customers were delighted, mostly. And you have to wonder who got hurt. Some fakes are fine art in themselves. Vlaminck painted a fake Cezanne, which Cezanne thought was a very nice painting. Picasso owned a fake Miro. Funny, heh?” He laughed, to show what funny was.

“So, the point is,” he concluded, “Sarkis and some others like him want Armenian, they'll get Armenian. Real or fake.”

“I see. Do you think that a Turkish diplomat named Mehmet Ersoy might have sold things to Kerbussyan? Real or fake.”

The art dealer raised an eyebrow. His smile was now purely formal, a faint upward tug of his thickish lips. He said, “Miss, ah, Ciampi, is it? Perhaps it would save time for both of us if you simply told me what you are here for.”

“You recognize the name?”

He nodded. “The man who was shot. At the United Nations?”

“The way you say that, Mr. Sokoloff, suggests to me that you knew Ersoy's name even before he was shot,” Marlene said, and then, to forestall the response she saw building in the man's face, “No, you asked why I was here. Okay, I'm going to tell you, frankly. I'm not interested in art fraud per se. What I'm interested in is who killed Mehmet Ersoy and why.”

“But I thought—”

“Yes, we have a suspect, but we have reason to believe that whether or not he actually did it, the reason had nothing to do with political terrorism. The reason Mehmet Ersoy was killed involved the sale, or theft, or forgery, of objects of art. Which is why I want you to tell me everything you know about Ersoy, about his dealings in the art world, and about his relationship with Sarkis Kerbussyan.”

She was looking directly at Sokoloff as she spoke, and she imagined that she could see the calculations going on behind his dark eyes. She added, “I should also tell you that I have no reason to believe that you have been personally involved in any of this, and you are not at this point the subject of any investigation. However, you
are
obliged to give me any information that you have; failure to do so is called hindering prosecution, and is itself a felony.”

The words sounded absurdly formal in Marlene's own ears, but she could see that Sokoloff took them seriously. V.T. had been right; the art dealer did not want to he mixed up in anything to do with a murder. He chewed on his lower lip, and dropped his eyes, and sighed—a picture of surrender that Marlene hoped was not a complete dramatization.

“Well. You're a forceful young woman, Miss Ciampi. Of course, I will help you in any way that I can. You will forgive my not being forthcoming at first. There is, ah … a certain confidentiality associated with my business, which I would not have liked to breach without good cause. In any case … I did know Mehmet Ersoy, from, say, two years ago. Naturally we met. He was cultural attaché at the mission, I am an antiquities dealer, much of my business is with goods originating in Asia Minor, so of course we had much to discuss.

“Then—I forgot how it came up—he asked if I would be interested in handling some items, some antiquities, on the New York market. His brother is an archaeologist and a museum director in Turkey. I had no problem with that. His paper was in good order. He said these pieces were being de-accessioned from Turkish museums, and he was credentialed as agent.

“The pieces arrived, beginning last November. I remember a small figurine of Tiamat from Pergamum, in ivory, some Ionian red-figure work, some jewelry. A beautiful tetradrachm of Tigranes the Great. Small but very high quality. I had no trouble selling them. Kerbussyan, of course, snatched up the tetradrachm.” Marlene looked blank. “An ancient Armenian coin,” he explained.

“We do some more business. The pieces get better and better. This is all private sales, by the way. He doesn't want an auction or a gallery show, even though I tell him he can do much better than he can selling privately. About six months ago, he stops selling to me. I think I half expected it.”

“Why is that?”

Sokoloff shrugged and, with a watery smile, replied. “I've seen it before. A seller comes to town. Puts a few pieces with you. You do okay by him. Everyone's happy. Then, bang, you find he's all of a sudden the competition. He knows who your best customers are. They've bought his things. He approaches them—let's do a deal, minus Sokoloff's commission—who needs him?”

“What do you do when that happens?” Marlene asked. “Or, did you do anything in this case?”

“What can I do? They're both free agents. But, of course, dealing with someone on the side like that exposes the customer to certain risks, which he doesn't have when he buys from me.”

“Like fraud?”

“Like fraud. Even so, I was surprised when Kerbussyan started dealing directly with Ersoy. Sarkis, I told you already, is a maniac for Armenian pieces. I hear things, on the street, in the Armenian community. You didn't know? Yeah, I'm an Armenian, too; half—my mother, God rest her. She got out of Zeitun just before the big attack in 1915. Her parents sent her east. She kept moving, one step ahead of the Kemalists, and ended up in what became Soviet Armenia during the civil war. She met my father there, and they got to Odessa, where I was born, and then out in 1925. What a life! So, yes, I've known Sarkis for years. And I'm hurt; it's not like him to take bread out of my mouth for no reason. So I invite him. We meet. At the Russian Tea Room, in fact. I ask him what's going on, he's buying direct from the Turks. It's like a joke. I know how he feels about the Turks, right? He apologizes. Then he tells me a story.” Sokoloff paused and shook his head sadly. “A crazy story. He says, ‘Stephan, Ersoy has got the mask. The
Suurp Timag.
'”

“I'm sorry, the what … ?”

“The Holy Mask of St. Gregory the Illuminator,” said Sokoloff, a tone of awe creeping into his normally dry voice. Marlene remembered the conversation she'd had with Rodriguez and Roslin's painting of the interment of the saint.

“Which is what, exactly?” she asked.

“It's a myth,” said Sokoloff. “A dream.”

“But Kerbussyan believed it?”

“Yes, I'm afraid he did. He was obsessed with it, as both a collector and an Armenian nationalist. When it was offered to him, he suspended all disbelief. It's strange. Otherwise he's such a clever man. I suppose we all have a weak spot …”

“But he must have seen some evidence.”

“He said a photo. In color. I tried to tell him it was a plot, a forgery racket. But he went right ahead.”

“He actually bought it?”

Sokoloff's forehead wrinkled, as if under the press of an unpleasant memory. “I don't know what he did. When he saw I was scoffing, he closed up. He can do that. A very proud man sometimes. We haven't discussed the matter since then.”

Marlene nodded and asked, “Mr. Sokoloff, in your opinion, if Kerbussyan thought that Ersoy had defrauded him over something as important as this mask, could he have arranged to have Ersoy murdered?”

A tight smile. “I suppose everyone is capable of murder under the right circumstances.”

“Is that a yes?”

An inclination of the head, with tightly pressed lips.

“And would he have used Aram Tomasian to do it?”

Sokoloff's face broke into a smile. “My dear young lady, if you had a perfectly good hammer and you had to bang a nail in, would you bang it in with a Meissen vase instead? Believe me, if Sarkis wanted to kill someone, he has people to do it who could eat little Aram for breakfast. And you wouldn't have caught them either.”

When Marlene returned to her office, there was a note on her desk saying that the district attorney wanted to see her immediately. Marlene said, “Shit!” in a high-pitched voice that provoked a burst of laughter in her office, grabbed a yellow pad, and headed for the elevator. As she rode up, she tried to think of any high-profile, newsworthy rape cases that might have engaged the interest of the DA. She drew a blank. No politician's or big shots daughters, no nice white girl raped by black beasts, no nice black girl raped by gangs of Nazis, no day-care scandals. Not this week.

Thus, she was curious and mildly apprehensive when she walked into the D.A.'s outer office and announced herself to the receptionist. This glittering person informed her that Mr. Bloom had been called away and that she should speak to Mr. Wharton instead.

Marlene's heart sank. Whatever it was would have nothing to do with her or with her bureau—not really. She felt a brief surge of resentment against her husband, which she quickly stifled. It wasn't fair, but it was a fact that anyone closely associated with Karp in the office came in for a share of harassment from Wharton, and it was now her turn.

Wharton was sitting behind his desk when she entered. Late afternoon sunlight from his two big windows glinted off his round glasses. He looked at her with his kewpie-doll's face drawn into its characteristic expression of mild distaste. He didn't ask her to sit, but she sat anyway, and steeled her jaw.

There was no point in small talk. Wharton said, “Henry Pinnett tells me you've been harassing the United Nations.”

“Who's he?”

“The mayor's liaison with the U.N. He called Mr. Bloom this morning, and Mr. Bloom hit the roof.”

“I haven't been harassing anyone.”

“According to my information, you made a visit to the Turkish delegation to the U.N. last week, during which you misrepresented yourself and rifled through confidential files.”

“I was conducting a legitimate interview as part of a murder investigation. There was no misrepresentation. The information I collected was freely given.”

“A murder investigation?” said Wharton. “What the hell were you doing investigating a murder?”

His tone said he didn't really want an answer, so Marlene remained silent and worked on controlling her wise mouth, a technique she had brought to perfection during the eight years she had spent under the absolute domination of Sister Marie Augustine, compared to whom Conrad Wharton was the merest twit.

After an appropriate wait to inspire terror, Wharton said, “It has to stop. You are not to contact any U.N. official for any purpose without clearance from the D.A.'s office. Is that perfectly clear?”