The Looters (42 page)
Authors: Harold Robbins
She was still there, in the glove compartment. No doubt glaring at me with those shadowy empty eye sockets. Probably thinking of ways she could twist the steering wheel so my car went off the bridge.
The only way to keep out of her clutches was to dodge the bullet. That’s what I was doing. Now it was going to be up to the Iraqi people.
***
As soon as I made the drop—and got the promise from Abdullah’s daughter to swear that she had found the mask on her doorstep—I headed for my apartment. It might have been cleaned out by my creditors. I didn’t know, but I wanted to see that park view one more time.
Along the way I made a phone call.
The most important thing about Coby was that I never had to fake my orgasms with him. That meant a lot to me. And it was time to let him know that he shouldn’t quit his day job in expectation of getting millions.
“Coby, about that yacht you were going to buy with the finder’s fee…”
Chapter 67
Shifting from a buyer of antiquities to protecting the cultural treasures of the world came as a natural for me. So I set myself up in business.
My business card read: “Art Inquiries.”
I thought the word “inquiries” had much more class than “investigator,” which is really what I was. I liked that it sounded a bit British, too.
Anyway, the fact that the SEALs would have collected a $5 million finder’s fee for returning the Semiramis had left an indelible impression on me. Million-dollar art and antiquities were pretty common on the market. A 10 percent finder’s fee of $1 million was a lot of money for a girl who had fallen from grace from her park-view penthouse, Jag convertible, and black American Express card.
Hiram was suspicious that I had something to do with the loss of his prized possession but could never prove it. But his badmouthing me was enough to get me blackballed from the small, intimate world of being a museum curator.
I lost my job, but art was in my blood. Like a vampire, I had to stay around the trade to feed my bloodlust. And if I could track down and recover works of art and antiquities from thieves, preserving the cultural enrichment of the pieces, while making a living…. Why not?
I just had to stay alive while I rubbed shoulders with Mafia and mafiya, IRA thugs, Middle Eastern terrorists, and Colombian drug lords, all of whom trafficked in multimillion-dollar contraband pieces. Not that I didn’t have an inside track in the world of stealing and smuggling art: the SEALs.
There were no hard feelings between Coby and me. He thought it was clever that I had switched the real piece for the mock-up. His pals still wanted my hide, but after all the hell that came down over the mask, they’d decided that maybe there was something about the curse that they needed to duck.
Coby and his buddies were off searching for a Nazi submarine that went down with a load of diamonds off the coast of Africa back in WW II.
Gwyn did a disappearing act, no doubt with the help of her magician parents. The SEALs hadn’t heard from her since the day she drove Stocker over to kill us.
I launched my new business by simply buying business cards. I was back in a walk-up on the cusp of SoHo, Chinatown, and Little Italy, about a hundred blocks—and an economic eon—from where I had lived when I worked at the Piedmont Museum. I was brooding about how I would pay next month’s rent when I answered a knock on my door.
The Thai guy who delivered my take-out orders from a restaurant down the street stood there with a grin and a brown paper bag. He was real restaurant Thai, imported from the Old Country with a hard-to-understand accent. Sometimes I think he used pidgin English because he thought that’s how I expected him to talk.
“I didn’t order anything.”
“You art person. Something to show you.”
The name plate at the building entryway said I was in the “art business” to justify my existence in the world but hadn’t gone into details. Not that I wasn’t willing to pick up a bargain for resale if the right piece came along.
He put the paper bag on my coffee table and took out an object wrapped in a foreign newspaper, a slab of dark gray-green stone about the size of a car license plate.
I sucked in my breath and tried to maintain a poker face.
The carved images on the stone were
Apsarases
, angel dancers. The exotic dancers were beautiful water and forest nymphs who played music and danced for the gods.
“Found in grandmother’s attic.”
He spoke with a heavy Thai accent and mouthed the words as if he had memorized them from a low-budget movie.
“Uh-huh.”
I didn’t know if they had attics in Thailand, my image was thatched roofs and sandy beaches, but I had a pretty good idea where this Far Eastern art piece had come from: Angkor Wat, the magnificent temple ruins in the jungles of Cambodia. Archaeologists claim that the structures at Angkor are the most fabulous on earth, surpassing even those of Egypt.
Like so many other treasures of the Far East (and Near East), the magnificent ruins are prey for tomb robbers. And Bangkok was one of the routes that the antiquities traveled on their way to Japan and the West. Along with heroin.
I felt dizzy. Nothing short of greed and lust to possess this piece was gripping me. A museum in town that specialized in Oriental art would die for it. So would a horde of collectors.
I might even be able to squeeze a curator’s job out of it.
Okay, grandmother’s attic might not be the best provenance, but it could be true… couldn’t it? And even if it wasn’t, with a little doctoring we’d soon find out that the piece came to America two hundred years ago on a clipper ship… and the captain conveniently drowned a few years later, making it impossible to doubt “his” word that he had—
Oh, hell, I couldn’t do it, even if Oriental art was the rage among Americans and Japanese and I was sorely in need of a break.
The piece in front of me had to be worth half a million, maybe more, even with a suspect provenance. And what kind of “finder’s fee” could I get from the Cambodian government if I called Special Agent Nunes and he turned it over to them? A thank-you note on embassy stationery? Cambodia was another one of those third-world countries with problems up the yin-yang.
I sighed.
“You like?”
“Hmmm. Very nice.”
As much as I needed the money, I just couldn’t let the cultural treasures of a small, poor country in Asia be sold by tomb robbers on the black market of stolen antiquities.
I smiled at him. “You could make a lot more money if there were more of these.”
He grinned and nodded. “Many more.”
As soon as I found where the “many more” were being held, I’d call Nunes.
I wondered what he’d say when he heard from me again. Last time I saw him, he had me in the federal corrections center, hammering me with questions about the theft of the Semiramis from the Piedmont. Which I had replied to by following Neal’s advice of deny, deny, deny.
Later, after I turned in the Thai mafia, or whoever the tomb robbers were, and recovered cultural treasures of a small, poor country, I could worry about paying my rent and whether I would be murdered for my efforts.
Harold Robbins, Unguarded
On the inspiration for
Never Love a Stranger
:
“[The book begins with] a poem from
To the Unborn
by Stella Benson. There were a lot of disappointments especially during the Depression—fuck it—in everyone’s life there are disappointments and lost hope…. No one escapes. That’s why you got to be grateful every day that you get to the next.”
On writing
The Betsy
and receiving gifts:
“When I wrote
The Betsy
, I spent a lot of time in Detroit with the Ford family. The old man running the place had supplied me with Fords, a Mustang, that station wagon we still have…. After he read the book and I was flying home from New York the day after it was published, he made a phone call to the office on Sunset and asked for all the cars to be returned. I guess he didn’t like the book.”
On the most boring things in the world:
“Home cooking, home fucking, and Dallas, Texas!”
On the inspiration for
Stiletto
:
“I began to develop an idea for a novel about the Mafia. In the back of my head I had already thought of an extraordinary character…. To the outside world he drove dangerous, high-speed automobiles and owned a foreign car dealership on Park Avenue…. The world also knew that he was one of the most romantic playboys in New York society… What the world did not know about him was that he was a deadly assassin who belonged to the Mafia.”
On the message of
79 Park Avenue
:
“Street names change with the times, but there’s been prostitution since the world began. That was what
79 Park Avenue
was about, and prostitution will always be there. I don’t know what cavemen called it; maybe they drew pictures. That’s called pornography now. People make their own choices every day about what they are willing to do. We don’t have the right to judge them or label them. At least walk in their shoes before you do.
79 Park Avenue
did one thing for the public; it made people think about these girls being real, not just hustlers. The book was about walking in their shoes and understanding. Maybe it was a book about forgiveness. I never know; the reader is the only one who can decide.”
Paul Gitlin (Harold’s agent) on
The Carpetbaggers
after first reading the manuscript:
“Jesus Christ, you can’t talk about incest like this. The publishers will never accept it. This author, Robbins, he’s got a book that reads great, but it’s a ball breaker for publishing.”
From the judge who lifted the Philadelphia ban on
Never Love a Stranger
, on Harold’s books:
“I would rather my daughter learn about sex from the pages of a Harold Robbins novel than behind a barn door.”
On writing essentials:
“Power, sex, deceit, and wealth: the four ingredients to a successful story.”
On the drive to write:
“I don’t want to write and put it in a closet because I’m not writing for myself. I’m writing to be heard. I’m writing because I’ve got something to say to people about the world I live in, the world I see, and I want them to know about it.”
Harold Robbins titles from RosettaBooks
79 Park Avenue
Dreams Die First
Never Leave Me
Spellbinder
Stiletto
The Betsy
The Raiders
The Adventurers
Goodbye, Janette
Descent from Xanadu
Never Love A Stranger
Memories of Another Day
The Dream Merchants
Where Love Has Gone
The Lonely Lady
The Inheritors
The Looters
The Pirate
