The Looters (11 page)

He slowed down his pace, realizing he was lost. He wasn’t familiar with the area and wasn’t sure which street would take him back to the underground station that he had exited earlier on his way to the museum.

There were no taxis on the street; there never were when it rained, a phenomenon he heard others complain about but that he never understood. Where did the taxis all disappear to?

The street he walked on was dark and quiet. A car had just turned on the same street and was moving slowly, almost as if it was looking for something or someone.

Adrenaline kicked in. There were bad people everywhere, even in nice neighborhoods. Maybe the people in the car were going to rob him and beat him. Maybe kill him.

He suddenly heard the car speed up. Abdullah started to run. It was a gut impulse. He almost knocked down a person as he rounded the corner.

The car was almost beside him. He tried not to look at it, keeping his feet in motion and his focus in front of him, planning his next move.

A familiar voice shouted out from the passenger side window, “Father! Stop! We’ve been trying to find you!”

Chapter 16

As soon as the last guests left, I rushed to review the provenance for the mask. Neal had already split earlier, which was fine with me, after I told him I was too bummed out to have sex with him. I’m sure he found somebody else to satisfy him. From looks I saw pass between him and Angela before, I wouldn’t be surprised if they had something going.

I took another look at the man’s handout as I made my way to the museum’s executive suite. Just as he had told me, it stated he was a former curator for the Iraqi museum. The title had different meanings in different places, from someone in charge of the collections, as I was at the Piedmont, down to someone who swept the floors.

Studying the fuzzy, grainy picture again, I didn’t see anything that clearly identified the location of the mask when it was photographed. It sat on a workbench, for sure. But I didn’t see anything that identified where the bench was.

The fact the picture didn’t clearly infer that the location was the Iraqi museum was critical. Worse than artifacts that were freshly dug up by tomb robbers—pieces with actual dirt on them—were ones stolen from other museums and collectors. Those weren’t dirty metaphorically; they had stripes on them—
prison stripes
—because they usually could be identified and traced back to the rightful owner.

Everyone in the art world was familiar with the looting of Iraqi antiquities following the American invasion in 2003. Many thousands of museum pieces had been stolen. No one knew the exact amount, although I’ve seen a figure of 15,000 or more mentioned. In addition, when the police restraints came off and the country turned to chaos as sectarian violence erupted and law and order broke down, thousands of antiquity sites had been invaded by tomb robbers who often inadvertently destroyed as much as they stole.

At the same time the museum was being looted, priceless and irreplaceable books and manuscripts were being destroyed at the Iraqi National Library as flames devoured thousands of rare pieces.

The devastation of knowledge and the cultural heritage of both the museum and the library had been compared to the burning of the great Library of Alexandria that came about as a result of the intrigues of Caesar and Cleopatra. By today’s standards, it would be like the destruction of both the Louvre and the Vatican Library.

As would be expected, the availability of Middle Eastern artifacts shot up after the debacle.

Certainly I bought some pieces; in fact, the best pieces in the Piedmont collection were acquired by me during the past year, but I always made sure to check the Art Loss Register first. Not that that act alone would fly about missing Iraqi museum pieces. Like everyone else in the business, because of the nature of the losses and the inadequacy of the record keeping at the museum I was well aware that not all of the losses were actually listed in the Register.

But I wouldn’t have bought a piece that I definitely knew was contraband. I wasn’t that stupid.
Not fifty-five million dollars stupid.

I knew the provenance of the mask by heart, but I wanted the comfort level again of seeing the written history that spelled out that the private ownership of the Semiramis went back over a hundred years, into the late nineteenth century. A critical time period, because most of the national laws prohibiting the exporting of antiquities from their countries of origin dated from the twentieth century. Anything in private ownership before 1900 was generally open game.

All vital documents concerning the collection were kept in the “Panic Room” in the executive office area. Officially, it was called the Document Storage Room. I gave it the nickname after seeing the Jodie Foster movie because it reminded me of the sealed, fireproof, vaultlike room she holed up in during a robbery.

“Good evening, Ms. Dupre.” The greeting came from hidden speakers as I walked through an exhibit area.

“Hi, Carlos,” I replied, waving my hand in the air.

My presence, picked up by hidden cameras, had been displayed on a monitor in the security center—which was also hidden.

“Hidden” was the key word for museum security. Prominent security measures didn’t seem to discourage people from stealing. Now everything from cameras to laser beams and radio transmission tags on individual items was being concealed.

I retrieved the file folder from the Panic Room and took it back to my assistant’s desk to review and copy it. Besides a copy for Hiram, Eric, and the lawyers, I wanted my own copy of it… more security blanket mentality.

The provenance report, made by a Swiss art appraiser named Viktor Milan, was the top document in the file.

The provenance said that the Semiramis had been acquired by a man named Rashid Kalb in 1883 in a marketplace in Beirut, Lebanon. No paperwork accompanied the sale, which was typical of both the time and the place. In those days Lebanon was a region under the rule of the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire. Istanbul, Turkey, was the capital. The empire collapsed after World War I.

No one would expect a receipt from a “marketplace” purchase, either. But again, that wasn’t unusual for the time or place. Credible oral histories could support a chain of ownership.

Various members of the Kalb family owned it until the last member died out in 1934. It was sold shortly before the death of Rana Kalb, the last surviving member of the family—who apparently was murdered for reasons that were not revealed—to a Panamanian company, which held it for fifty-five years. They sold it three years ago to Milan. He in turn sold it a few months ago to Henri Lipton, the London art dealer who had arranged the auction in New York.

Although I had never met Viktor Milan, I recalled seeing his name on the provenances of other pieces I’d bought from Lipton. Lipton I knew reasonably well, having met with him several times in New York and at his London gallery.

The fact that a priceless artifact had turned up in a Lebanese marketplace over 120 years ago was not unusual. Even today, antiquities were sold in third-world countries for a tiny fraction of their value. In the nineteenth century, the laws protecting antiquities in the region probably didn’t exist—and if they were on the books were easily avoided, as they were today.

A solid history of personal ownership going back an eon would have been nice, but that was the exception, not the rule, with antiquities. Records of sales get lost or destroyed or never were prepared. In this case, the most important document was the bill of sale from Rana Kalb to the Panamanian company in 1934. Two versions were present: one written in Arabic scrawl, the other typed in English. The document included a sworn narration of the original marketplace purchase of the piece decades before.

It wasn’t the most perfect provenance I had seen, but this was how art pieces were frequently sold back then—and even now. Little formality was involved in the transfer of pieces worth millions. Sometimes there was no formality at all, other than a thorough inspection of the piece by an expert—and often that was not even done.

I sighed with relief. The provenance was “acceptable,” which was what I said in my memo to Eric and Hiram at the time.

After reading my memo, I quickly skimmed through some correspondence from Neal at the auction house and appraisals by two experts I had hired to give me an opinion on the piece’s value and authenticity.

I came across a report prepared by Charles Bensky, a professional document examiner, an expert whom I had retained to scrutinize the paperwork supporting the provenance. His job was to determine whether the documents were genuine. I recalled speaking to him over the phone when he had given me the all clear on the paperwork supporting the provenance, but I didn’t remember seeing his report before.

I started to skim over the report and stopped dead when I got to the Summary of Conclusion in the middle of the first page:

I stared at the statement, but my brain refused to further process the information. I read it again—and again, staring at the words, trying to make them say something other than what I saw in black-and-white.

Stripped of its verbosity, it said the bill of sale was a phony.

The provenance was invalid.

Chapter 17

I jumped out of the chair and backed away from the report as if it were a snake.

“It can’t be,” I said out loud. Not possible. No way in hell could the provenance be a fraud.

Grabbing the report, I reread the statement:
suspicious… prepared later than the 1934 date
.

How could he say that? My heart banged against the wall of my chest. I couldn’t get enough air.

“
This can’t be true
.”

I had hired Bensky to examine the documents supporting the provenance. Basically, that came down to the bills of sale from the last surviving member of the Lebanese family to the Panamanian corporation, the sale from the Panamanian corporation to Viktor Milan, and the sale from Milan to the London dealer. There were also birth and death certificates of the members of the Lebanese family to prove their existence.

I didn’t order a document examination on every purchase, not even high-end ones. In buying art and antiquities, you rely more on
who
you are doing business with, since documents might be forged. In this case I ordered it because the Semiramis was such a huge investment and none of the people in the Lebanese and Panamanian connections were still alive. Even though I was dealing with Henri Lipton, an icon in the world of art whom I had dealt with many times in the past, the Semiramis was too big a purchase not to double-check the provenance documents.

The report in the file was dated two days
after
I spoke to Bensky. How it got past me and into the file was baffling.

Almost anyone from Eric and Hiram down to the clerical staff, even security guards, had access to the Panic Room. It wasn’t even locked, because it was intended to protect against fire, not thieves—only records were kept in it. And there was no security surveillance anywhere in the executive suite.

I forced myself to continue reading the full report. In my frazzled state, I had to read it twice.

Bensky stated the problem was with the font and spacing of individual letters of the alphabet:

Bensky claimed that a manual typewriter being used in Panama with the same font just fifteen months later was “highly improbable, though possible.”

More suspicious was the second problem with the font:

He gave an explanation about the two types of spacing:

Prior to the 1960s, each letter, number, and punctuation mark in a typewriter occupied a “typing bar.” When a key was pressed, the typing bar for that letter flew forward, struck the inked ribbon, and made an impression on the paper. Most office typewriters had about forty typing bars to accommodate upper-/lowercase letters, numbers, and punctuation marks.

To keep the bars from jamming,
the bars had to be all the same width
. Even though the letter
I
occupied less space on paper than the letter
M
, the widths of the bars were the same. So on paper an
I
had more space around it than an
M
.

This was called
monospacing
.

A more advanced form of spacing is
proportional spacing
, in which the space between letters is proportioned so that the letter
I
does not have more space before and after it than the letter
M
.

Proportional spacing came into home and office typewriters in the early 1960s with IBM’s introduction of the typing ball in Selectric typewriters: A single golf ball—size typing head replaced the dozens of typing bars.

Bensky’s report said that the introduction of computers also enhanced the profession of forgery because computers were so versatile. They could be used to create an “ancient document” with almost any type of font or other characteristic. But they could also lead to mistakes by the forger: