The Looters (27 page)

“Sure, like the Semiramis and the dozens of other artifacts you have at the Piedmont.”

“Those were bought legitimately. Not stolen from the people of the Middle East.”

He scoffed. “Where were those millions of people when their country was being destroyed by war, looting, and neglect?”

I raised my eyebrows. “Helpless? Hungry?”

“Exactly, but that’s not an excuse. You know that probably fifteen thousand artifacts were looted from the Iraqi museum.”

I nodded. “While the literary heritage of the nation burned in the national library.”

“My recollection was that Saddam’s boys trashed the library to hide evidence against him and them. Apparently modern history of his atrocities was stored there, too. But let’s get back to the fifteen thousand museum artifacts. Let’s assume that some dudes did rip off—”

“You’re one of the dudes.”

“—a few items, even some very valuable ones. That left about fourteen thousand, nine hundred for the local mob to steal and/or destroy.”

We were still only halfway to the fishing vessel. My paranoia was growing. What was he going to do once we got there? He and his modern-day pirates could murder me and feed me to the sharks. No body, no proof of a crime.

“Is this going to be one of those no corpus delicti things?” I asked.

Chapter 42

“A what?”

“Are you going to murder me and dump my body in the sea so I’ll never be found? If you’re not, would you please mind telling me what’s going on?”

He took another swig of beer. “Okay. Here’s the bottom line. As you can see from my cap, I was once a Navy SEAL. So were my partners, all except Gwyn, but she was also Navy and is half-fish. You’re going to meet them shortly.” He waved the beer bottle at the fishing boat. “There were five of us SEALs, all part of the same unit. I told you what a SEAL is.”

“Some kind of frogman. Only you fight everywhere.” I wondered if Gwyn was his girlfriend.

“Yeah, that’s about it. To wear the trident, the insignia of a SEAL, means you’ve survived the toughest military training in the world.”

“I guess they train you to kill in more ways than any other soldiers. That should make you very proud.”

“Yeah, it does, especially when some wiseass civilian who I’ve protected from foreign enemies wants to get sarcastic.”

“What foreign enemies have you and your pals protected me from?”

“That big bad wolf Saddam. We were in Desert Storm and Desert Sabre, the first Gulf War.” He grinned. “We got into a little trouble during that one.”

“Uh-huh. A little trouble as in…?”

“You have to understand. It’s hard to be part of the sea, to have salt water in your blood, and not have a fascination for sunken treasure. It goes with the territory. When we were in the Persian Gulf, we heard stories about ships that had gone down over the centuries carrying treasure. The Gulf was once famous for its pearls. Gwyn, who was a Navy communications officer, did some research and found the record of a shipment of pearls that were being sent from a potentate in Baghdad to an Indian raja as a wedding gift. We located the wreck and recovered the pearls.”

I shrugged and shook my head. “That doesn’t sound too bad. I thought you were going to tell me you stole Saddam’s gold or something.”

“We didn’t think it was so bad, but the Navy got its nose bent out of shape because we used Navy time and equipment to locate the wreck and recover the pearls.”

“Oh, I see. You did it illegally. While other people were fighting a war, you were out diving for treasure with assets that the military needed.” I thought using the word “assets” gave a nice touch to my sarcasm. I’d heard talking-head generals on TV use the word.

“Something like that, though it wasn’t much of a war. The brass were more annoyed because we wouldn’t turn over the pearls.”

“So you got a court-martial.”

“No, that would have given the SEALs a black eye. We parted company with the Navy with general discharges. There was too much pirate and adventure in us, anyway. The regimentation in the military is a killer, especially with a war that turned out to be all show but no go.

“But because of the salt water in our blood, we had to keep our feet wet. We learned a lot about deep-sea diving and recovery while in the Navy, tech stuff that civilians would only learn at a world-class oceanography institute like Cousteau or Woods Hole. It would have been a shame to let all that knowledge go to waste. And we also borrowed some equipment before we left.”

I nodded at the fishing boat we were slowly approaching. “And you used the stolen equipment to find sunken treasure. Illegally.”

“That’s an interesting word. It doesn’t always mean the same thing wherever you go. You can say something in New York that gets you a laugh, whereas in North Korea they shoot you. The Spanish consider what we’re doing illegal. We don’t.”

“You decide what laws you’ll obey.”

“We decide what laws are reasonable. Do you know anything about the laws of the sea concerning salvaging sunken treasure?”

I shook my head. “Not really.”

“For the eight or ten or how many thousands of years we’ve had ships on the sea, the law has been real simple—finder’s keepers. If you can find it and recover it off the bottom of the ocean, it’s yours. Then some political genius decided that if the wreck was in the three-mile, or twelve-mile, or whatever limit they said their nation’s boundaries extended out to sea, they still had jurisdiction over it. Ever hear of Spanish ships called
Juno
and
La Galga?
”

I pleaded ignorance again.

“They both went down off the coast of Virginia, one in 1750, the other in 1802. We’re talking about wood galleons that have been on the bottom of the sea for two hundred to two hundred and fifty years. When salvagers located them, the Spanish government sued in a U.S. court, claiming the ships still belonged to them.”

“Who won?”

“The Spanish. The scenario even gets crazier. About one hundred and fifty years ago, a paddle wheel steamer went down in deep water a couple hundred miles out to sea. It was carrying an enormous amount of gold from the California gold rush. It took about twenty years of clever thought, planning, raising millions of dollars, and raw courage to find the wreck in water eight thousand feet deep. When they brought up the gold, thirty-nine insurance companies were waiting to put claims on it.”

He shook his head. “The bottom line is that there are too many governments making too many rules. All individual initiative is suppressed. We once had people who trekked pathless jungles, climbed the highest mountains; now most people are couch potatoes who watch TV reality shows about people lost on deserted islands—beachcombers who are followed around by a camera crew, of course. Look at the guys who sailed around the world in a balloon for the first time. Instead of cheering them, there were threats from some countries that they would be shot down if they flew over.”

“You are a common thief of uncommon things. Just another tomb raider.”

“So what’s an archaeologist but a tomb raider? You think King Tut’s mummy likes it any better because the guy who violated his tomb had a college degree? What’s a museum curator but just one more link in the chain of antiquities that have been ripped out of tombs with and without government permission? And this crap about not touching any ship that has gone down anywhere anytime in history. Hell, most of the countries that sent out those ships a thousand or two thousand years ago aren’t even in existence anymore. And the ones that are just let the stuff sit there rotting until someone with guts brings it up.”

I said, “There are billions of people in this world. If we don’t have rules, we’ll have to live by the laws of the jungle. That’s fine… if you happen to be a muscle-bound ex—surfing bum.”

“Ouch! Anyway, I’m not objecting to rules; it’s the chains I don’t like.”

“So looting the Iraqi museum was an expression of your individual right to do what you wanted regardless of the law.”

“We didn’t
loot
the museum. We went there and saved and preserved priceless artifacts.”

My jaw dropped. “What? You broke into a museum in a foreign country, armed and dressed as American soldiers, took antiquities to sell… and you don’t consider that looting?”

“Yeah, and how about the sex you used to pass around to get deals on antiquities? You don’t consider that whoring and pimping?”

“I’m not proud of what I did, but at least it didn’t get people killed. What did Lipton have to do with all this?”

“Your pal Lipton, and I emphasize the fact he was
your pal
, came to us with a museum deal. But he didn’t come to us and say, ‘Hey, fellas, let’s go and rob a museum.’ He was one of the group of Anglo-American art experts who went to the White House and Whitehall to plead for protection of the Baghdad museum and library when the U.S. and its allies were gearing up for war. He saw that the politicians and generals were more interested in oil and military engagements where they could test their latest high-tech weapons than they were in antiquities.

“So he came to us with a plan to remove the most valuable pieces so they wouldn’t be looted or damaged by a mob. Which is what happened to ninety-nine percent of the missing fifteen thousand artifacts.”

I rubbed my head with my hands. “I… you must think I’m very stupid or very naïve. Do you think me or anyone else will believe that you robbed the museum to save the antiquities for the world? Do I look like I just fell off a lettuce truck?”

“Turnips. People fall off of turnip trucks. I’m not telling you our motivation was to save the antiquities for Iraq. I told you we didn’t simply set out to rob the museum. Taking abandoned treasure off the ocean floor is our thing. We consider it open season because it really belongs to no one. And we’re not into robbing museums. Lipton told us that if we didn’t get the antiquities out, they would be taken by mobs and Iraqi criminal elements. Hell, Saddam’s government was one big criminal element.”

“Did he also tell you that this humanitarian deed would bring you tens of millions of dollars when the artifacts were sold?”

“We were too low on the food chain for those tens of millions.” He grinned. “But we were in the single-digit category. The deal was money up front for expenses and ten percent of what the artifacts brought when they were sold.”

“So there was never an intent by Lipton or you and your gang of forty thieves to preserve the antiquities for the Iraqi people. Right from the beginning they were to be sold to rich collectors and museums.”

“You’re beginning to sound more like a prosecuting attorney than an accomplice.”

“A what?”

“Keep your pants on and listen up. Let’s go back to motivation. I keep telling you, I never said the idea was to preserve the pieces for the Iraqi people. For every guy like the Iraqi curator who got murdered trying to protect his country’s cultural heritage there were a dozen Saddam cronies who were waiting for law and order to break down to grab treasure. We saved the antiquities for the world—”

“I have a hard time buying your high moral position—”

“I didn’t say I had a high moral position. You keep making me a merciless devil and saying I’m trying to act like I’m a saint. What we did we did for money… but we didn’t do it to harm the antiquities. Lipton was a big-time art dealer; I imagine he cut a few corners—and probably wasn’t the only one in the business who did….” He gave me a penetrating stare.

“Why don’t you just call me a pimp and whore again? A good offense is always a good defense, isn’t it?”

“Look, Maddy, I’m no angel and neither was Lipton. I like to think that most of what I do is for adventure, but maybe I do have a little larceny in my heart, a little Blackbeard the Pirate. But I don’t destroy antiquities. Not even when I use an old coin on a watch.”

He waved his wrist at me.

“Lipton was the same way. Regardless of his profit motives or the corners he cut to get pieces, he was a lover of art. He really wanted to save the antiquities from looters. And if he made a buck doing it, that was all the better. So he hired us to grab some of the best pieces before the doors got knocked down and the mob burst in. We would have taken the whole museum if we’d had transportation for it. As it was, we took forty good items. The Semiramis was the cream of the lot. It wasn’t even on public display out of fear Saddam or one of his cronies would grab it.”

“You took the best and left the rest for looters. What happened to Abdullah?”

“Like I told you, he was a real romantic in a cold-ass world, too idealistic.” He grinned again. “He wasn’t willing to compromise his ideals like you and me, eh?”

Bastard.
“What did you mean when you said you saved his life?”

“We were in the museum, protecting the antiquities of Mesopotamia from common looters. Arrangements had been made with an Iraqi general, one of Saddam’s elite guard, to give us access. A money arrangement, of course. He even provided an honor guard—included in the price, but I think they were also there to grab what they could as soon as we drove away.

“Abdullah came barging in when we were loading stuff. Suddenly came in from nowhere, shouting like a maniac that we were thieves.”

“Which you were.”

“I hit him over the head and knocked him out to keep him from taking a bullet from someone else.”

“You should be very proud of yourself.”

He leaned forward, staring at me. “Did you hear what I said? He came stumbling in when we were loading up, raising a stink. He was about to get wasted when I hit him. Hey—I saved the guy’s life.”

“He was about to get wasted, as you put it, because he walked into a criminal scheme you helped create.”

“And what would’ve happened to him if he had walked in a few minutes later when the mob was looting the place? You never seem to get the big picture.”

“Oh, I get it. You saved him in Baghdad. And killed him in New York.”

L
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