The Medici Conspiracy (35 page)

This narrative, of course, totally contradicts the account originally
given by the Metropolitan Museum of Art at the time of the krater's acquisition.

On the following day, Hecht flew to Malaga in Spain for a holiday at Lew Hoad's tennis camp, and a couple of weeks later von Bothmer got in touch to say that the museum's trustees had approved the purchase of the vase.

Note his recollection of the exact date the money was paid and the specific exchange rates, down to two decimal places, that seem to be engraved on his memory.

At this point, Hecht's memoir mentions the
New York Times Magazine
article on the krater and the subsequent investigation by Nicholas Gage, referred to in the Prologue of this book. Finally, Hecht discusses the fact that Sir John Pope-Hennessy, then director of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and later director of the British Museum, expressed reservations that the krater was a fake. Hecht reports that this was also the view of Robin Symes and his partner Christo Michaelides. The criticism evidently got to him, for a whole page of the memoir is taken up with the plaudits the krater received from other experts.

Until this point, the account has been seamless. The Euphronios story is the culmination of a section of the memoir, fourteen pages long, beginning in 1967, and devoted almost exclusively to Hecht's dealings with Medici. The
New York Times
involvement in the story doesn't occur until page ten of this section and then occupies only a few paragraphs. After this, Hecht then returned to a fuller account of the
New York Times
and London
Observer
investigation of the provenance of the krater. This starts on a fresh page, in slightly different pen. (Hecht used several pens, and several inks, for the memoir, including a fountain pen.)

In a fourteen-and-a-half-page section, he recalled Nicholas Gage's investigation, and the way the Carabinieri pursued him, the prosecution in Italy, his eventual acquittal, and an attempt in 1977 by the Italian authorities
to have the New York police put him before a grand jury. He was eventually acquitted there, too, but during his cross-examination before the grand jury, he was characterized as being little more than a “street peddler.” This got to him, and, to the jury's great amusement, he tells us, he read off an impressive list of institutions to which he had sold material. These institutions included the British Museum, the Louvre, the Glyptothek in Munich, the Glyptotek in Copenhagen, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and museums in Toledo, Cleveland, at Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the Campbell Soup Museum in New Jersey. With the grand jury's dismissal of the charges against him, Hecht noted that the “harassment ended.”

His memoir then switches to more historical material. Thirty or so pages later, however, he returns once again to the Euphronios affair. This time there are crucial differences in his account. This section is dedicated solely to the affair and is physically separate, not part of a seamless narrative exploring other deals and other times. Moreover, the paper is not lined but is either plain or graph paper, and the manner of writing is somewhat different. Notably, there are far more abbreviations. It begins in this way, for instance, describing the situation when Tom Hoving first saw the krater in Zurich:

As before they went to the Rotisserie de la Muette for lunch and discussed price, where, on this occasion, he says that Hoving told him about the coin auction (in the earlier account, and in Hoving's own account, it was the other way around and Hecht had mentioned the coins to Hoving). “Hoving wanted to pay some in the fall and some in the coming year.” Then this:
t reduce the price in order t mk early payment poss.” This was changed to read: “I said that I would ask t owner t reduce the price in order t mak early payment poss.”

He goes on: “July & Aug wer spent finding a solution agreeable both t mus and
the owner.” Later, after flying the krater in its box on the
TWA flight, “I was mt at Kennedy by an armed museum guard, Mr.—and Mr. X, the museum's customs brkr.” As before, when he reached the museum his wife and two daughters were there, B. L., as he called his wife, dressed in a dirndl skirt and his daughters in colorful jeans. “My wife now saw the crat, for t 1
^st
tim & exclaimed, ‘I could almost cry, it's lk a Rembrandt!'” Afterwards Hecht and his family crossed Fifth Avenue, to the Stanhope Hotel, and had a drink at the pavement café there.

He then proceeds to repeat the details of the Sarrafian story, which explained the origins of the krater as having been acquired in London in the 1920s and Sarrafian's decision to sell before moving abroad. In this account, Sarrafian finally contacted Hecht in early 1971 to say that his agent would be in touch in Zurich in August that year.

“The teleph rang at about 7 A. M. & a voice w/ a typ. ME Fr. accent sd: ‘Iz thees Mr.
Edge-te.'” The man came, Hecht showed his passport to prove who he was, then they both went to Fritz Bürki's to give him the vase to restore. Hecht took the agent to the station and himself caught the evening flight to Rome “and stayed up late c B. L. telling her the Sarpedon story.” He stayed in Rome for a wedding, then again went off to Lew Hoad's tennis camp in Spain, while his wife and daughters went to America. While his wife was in America, he asked her “t cal DvB & mention that he should prepar for a bombshl.”

The rest of the account is almost word for word what Hecht maintained in 1972, though at the time none of the above was made public.

One of the most arresting features in this part of the memoir is the severe abbreviation of the words. Are they incriminating? Does the truncated nature of so many words suggest perhaps that Hecht had written them before, that he was slightly bored with them so he couldn't be bothered to write them out in full and was now coming up with an amended version? And do the crossings-out signify slips of the pen that in fact reveal the real truth, as when he uses “I” or “me,” then changes it to “the owner”? Why, in this latest account, can he not remember the name of
Mr. Keating, the museum's broker at Kennedy Airport, yet he can remember what his wife said, on seeing the krater, that it made her want to weep and reminded her of a Rembrandt? Is it likely that if she really did make such a stagey remark, he would have overlooked it in the other account? Isn't his account of Sarrafian's agent's arrival in Zurich—referring to him as “
Edge-te” equally stagey? In this version, Hecht told his wife to alert von Bothmer to a bombshell. How does this square with the other account, that he sent von Bothmer a letter, and with Hoving's account, that Hecht's wife called
him
? Isn't the level of incidental detail in this second account much less than in the “Medici version”? There is no mention of a wounded dog, no talk of tennis with von Bothmer's beautiful stepdaughter, no exchange with von Bothmer's son about Herakles' half brother? Most important of all, if Sarrafian's agent didn't bring the vase to Zurich from Lebanon until August 1971, as Hecht says here, how can Dietrich von Bothmer have seen it at Bürki's, as he said he did, in
July
1971?

The very fact that there
are
two accounts is of course curious. The eighty-eight pages of the memoir contain no other example where Hecht describes events twice and gives different versions. Then there is the fact that there are several parallels in the first “Medici version” that fit with Hoving's account and not with the other one. These include Hecht invoking the sale of the museum's coins to pay for the vase, Rousseau's second trip to Zurich, the fact that the first photographs of the vase showed it with a “spider's web” of cracks, the comparison in price to the painting by Monet, and Hecht's worry about “the dollar situation.” Ferri later found out, in his interrogation of Robin Symes, that the London dealer confirmed he had bought a bronze eagle from Hecht, for $75,000, in the early 1970s.