‘Is this big business?’ Gilchrist said.
‘Medium size. Montague Pyke, one of the world’s biggest auction houses, has offices in South East Asia. It has been selling pieces of Khmer art as part of its annual auctions for years. It rarely provides the provenance. And where there is no provenance, more often than not there is theft.’
‘How many objects are we talking about?’
‘Around four hundred Khmer artefacts have been auctioned in New York in the last fifteen years. Pretty much all were sculpture – statues or reliefs. Only a fifth had provenance. Over half were from the twelfth century – the Angkorian or Angkor Thom period.’
‘And each one worth a fortune?’
Merivale shook his head. ‘Not a fortune, no. Just over half were big sandstone objects. They went for somewhere between eighteen and twenty-eight thousand dollars apiece. You’d think bronze pieces would be worth more but they’re usually smaller – average price is eight thousand dollars. But it adds up.’
Merivale took a longer drink of his beer.
‘You probably know Vietnam occupied Cambodia for about ten years from 1979 to 1989? When the Vietnamese withdrew it left a power vacuum which competing political factions, each with their own armies, tried to fill. The Khmer Rouge was still around, in the jungle near the Thai border. Arms dealing, drug trafficking, antiquities smuggling all skyrocketed, but the Khmer Rouge controlled the best routes to Bangkok – which is Smuggler Central in Asia.
‘In 1993, UN-sponsored elections allowed the securing of the Angkor Wat site but that still left the ones deeper in the jungle vulnerable. In 1998 the Khmer Rouge surrendered and you’d think that would be an end to the looting, but in 1999 sales of looted stuff increased by well over two hundred per cent.’
‘That doesn’t make sense,’ Heap said.
‘On the face of it, I agree,’ Merivale said. ‘But the removal of the Khmer Rouge opened up those smuggling routes to Bangkok to every other smuggler around. They didn’t have to worry any longer about getting their stuff ripped off by the Khmer Rouge or paying an extortionate tithe. In addition, the newly opened territory included some incredible temple complexes that the Khmer Rouge had been monopolizing.
‘Koh Ker, the tenth-century capital, is one of the most heavily looted sites because it’s so isolated. Poor roads and a harvest of landmines make for a solitary existence. And every apsara at the temple of Phnom Banan in the north-west has been decapitated so that the heads could be sold off.’
Heap looked at Gilchrist. ‘There were heads in some of those boxes.’
‘What’s an apsara?’ Gilchrist said.
‘A representation of a female deity.’ Merivale took another long pull on his beer, almost finishing it. Heap had scarcely got started on his. ‘So in 1999 the US agreed to ban the import of Khmer sculptures and architecture elements unless accompanied by an export permit. Montague Pyke’s sale of Cambodian artefacts dropped by eighty per cent. Guess they just couldn’t take stuff with no questions asked any more so the supply dried up.’
‘Where do you come in?’
‘All the US government intelligence bodies are concerned about this stuff. But the FBI Art Crime team has been busy since 2004. Back in 2008, hundreds of federal agents from different agencies conducted a massive raid on owners, curators, registrars and collection managers from sixteen museums and galleries in California and Illinois. Mostly this was about pre-Colombian art but there was some South East Asian art involved too.’
Heap finally took a proper swallow of his beer. ‘What was the result?’ he said, a foam moustache on his top lip.
Gilchrist, mother-like, wanted to brush it off for him but Merivale made a little gesture with his index finger and Heap wiped his own hand across his mouth.
‘Frankly, disappointing,’ Merivale said. ‘We seized loads of objects, interviewed a bunch of people. We indicted some but prosecuted only one person a couple of years later.’
‘Successfully?’
‘Oh, yeah. In 2010 Homeland Security went after him specifically. They called it Operation Antiquity. We’d had him in our sights for a long time. He’d been importing South East Asian items through brokers in Thailand and Cambodia for twenty-five years.’
‘Did he own up?’ Gilchrist said.
Merivale nodded. ‘He spilled on the entire operation. Turned out his Thai and Cambodian brokers used private diggers to loot ancient sites. For twenty-five years this guy had been falsifying documents to get stuff into the US. We reckon that because of him Thailand lost a third of what remained of its ancient Ban Chiang culture.’
Gilchrist couldn’t get excited about all these lumps of stone.
Merivale, though, that was something else. ‘But that was just one end of it.’
Gilchrist focused on the subject, not the man. ‘What was the other end?’
‘The artefacts came in on container ships with a load of cheap tourist “handicrafts”. They declared the whole shipment low value. They sold the artefacts to some private buyer for a much higher sum. The buyer then donated the artefacts to a museum, claiming for them an even higher value. That higher amount would then be written off his tax bill as a charitable donation.’
‘Clever.’
‘Very. One intercepted shipment had a second-century Dong Son bronze container and a seventh-century Khmer sandstone head – let’s not even get into whether the head had originally been attached to something. Altogether these were worth some $35,000. Coming into the country they were declared at Customs as having a value of $250.’
‘We’re still talking pretty low value items here.’
‘Well, the value to the country they have come from is much higher – plus the money is cumulative.’
‘So I’m gathering,’ Gilchrist said. ‘These countries leave these things rotting in the jungle though, don’t they?’
Merivale shrugged. ‘Not my business. I just want to be sure US museums are finally looking properly at their acquisition policies.’
‘Doesn’t that just mean the crooked dealers will turn to private collectors without scruples to make their sales?’ Heap said. ‘If it looks good they won’t ask too many questions.’
‘They already do but we’re on their trail too. We’ve wised up to the tricks of their trade. It’s tough, though. Looted stuff is often auctioned on the Internet. It can change hands pretty quickly. But anyone buying cultural or historical stolen property is breaking both US and international laws.’ Merivale prodded the table-top. ‘And we will track them down.’
Heap gestured vaguely around. ‘Which is how you ended up here?’
Merivale looked into his empty glass. ‘I was on a stopover in London en route to a conference in Budapest and I saw the Looted Artefacts database had been alerted to some stuff discovered here.’ He smiled. ‘I read in one of your newspapers that the Director of the Pavilion has been arrested for body-snatching or whatever the hell he’s been doing. I’m not interested in that, but if he’s in the looted artefacts business …’
Heap’s phone buzzed. He excused himself and walked out to the foyer.
‘How can we help?’ Gilchrist said to Merivale.
‘First off, let me see the objects in question. I’m then going to have to requisition them for further examination. I hope you don’t see a problem with that. Second, I don’t suppose you’d consider having dinner with me tonight?’
Gilchrist flushed, caught off guard.
Merivale put his hands up. ‘I don’t know anybody in town and I figured we could exchange some notes about the case over a good meal.’
Gilchrist nodded slowly, looking at Jon Hamm. ‘OK. Sure. Is Heap invited too?’
Merivale gave her the full wattage smile. ‘Preferably not.’
They arranged to meet in an hour in Carluccio’s across the road from the hotel. She left him in the bar and joined Heap in the foyer. He was still on the phone. She stepped out into the sunshine and waited for him.
When he came out, he
said: ‘That was legal, ma’am. Rafferty isn’t the only one up to this bizarre stuff. There’s this woman they were going to charge with necrophilia in Sweden. Thirty-seven years old. She admits she’s a bit odd. In her flat police found six skulls, a spine and a large number of other bones along with body bags and morgue pictures. There were photos of the woman performing sex acts on a skeleton. There were two CDs entitled “My necrophilia” and “My first experience”. They couldn’t make a charge of necrophilia stick since it was a skeleton, not a cadaver, so she was charged with violating the peace of the dead.’
Gilchrist shook her head.
‘She admits she’s a bit odd,’ Gilchrist repeated slowly.
‘Ma’am. Meanwhile, in Austria, a forty-seven-year-old man is being charged with disturbing the peace of the dead after police found fifty-six human skulls and fifty-five other bones at his home. He’d done a Rafferty except he’d taken them all from the same graveyard. The only reason he was caught was because he tried to sell three skulls and two thighbones at a flea market.’
‘Is that charge on our statute books?’ Gilchrist said.
‘Legal are checking,’ Heap said.
Gilchrist nodded. ‘Let’s get rid of this as quickly as we can. It’s sick but it’s a side issue in relation to our regular policing.’
‘Ma’am.’
‘I’m going to pop back to my flat,’ Gilchrist said. She knew she was flushing. ‘Agent Merivale wants to continue briefing me this evening.’
‘He wants to continue briefing you?’ Heap repeated.
‘That’s right.’
Heap looked at his feet for a moment then muttered: ‘Overpaid, oversexed and over here.’
‘What’s that?’ Gilchrist said sharply.
‘Nothing, ma’am.’ Now Heap was blushing, but with an impish smile on his face. ‘Nothing at all.’
NINE
A bell above the door jangled as Bob Watts entered the antique shop. A woman behind a desk at the far end of the shop looked up and smiled at him. Her hair was drawn back tightly to accentuate the perfect oval of her face. Incense drifted around her from burners at either edge of the desk.
Watts smiled back and looked around him. Buddha heads and torsos carved from stone or cast in brass. Big pieces of French colonial furniture: chests, cupboards and bedheads made from teak or some other hardwood. He’d seen similar modern versions in the Lombok shop, imported from Thailand.
The woman let him browse but when he approached her desk she looked up and gave him the same neutral smile, one eyebrow slightly raised.
‘How old are these pieces?’ Watts said.
‘Their ages vary,’ she said, with the hint of an accent. ‘Did you have a particular piece in mind?’
Watts pointed behind her. ‘That Buddha there, for instance. It looks really old.’
The woman glanced behind her. ‘It’s not. Late nineteenth century. Burmese.’ She gestured back into the shop. ‘That one down there is much older. The brass one? Sixteenth century from Thailand.’
Watts nodded. He pointed at the furniture.
‘Suppose you can’t get stuff like this any more, given it’s made from hardwood.’
‘They farm teak so you can still get it, but modern furniture doesn’t have that patina of age.’
‘Age can be imitated though, can’t it?’ Watts said.
‘Faked, you mean?’ the woman said. ‘Of course. There are unscrupulous people in this business as in any other.’
‘I’m trying to place your accent. I’m guessing French.’
‘You guess correctly.’
‘Have you been in Brighton long?’
She gave him an appraising look. ‘Why would you want to know?’
Watts recognized that he was hopeless with women. He grinned, feeling foolish. ‘Sorry. I wasn’t prying. It’s just that if I lived in France I can’t imagine I would want to move to England.’
‘I have never lived in France,’ she said, a small smile playing on her lips.
‘Ah,’ he said. ‘That makes two of us. You’re French-Canadian?’
She gave him that appraising look again. ‘I was born and raised in Indochine.’
‘Vietnam?’
She nodded. ‘My parents were plantation owners too stubborn to leave during the Vietnam War.’
‘They lost everything?’
‘Let us say their circumstances became rather straitened.’
‘Straitened.’
She smiled. ‘Indeed. And not long before Saigon fell they decided it would be politic to take what money they had left and move to Cambodia.’
‘Probably wise.’
‘It was wise until Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge took over the country four years later.’
‘They lost what little they had retained?’ Watts said.
‘The French embassy arranged transport out of the country for all non-Cambodians just before Phnom Penh fell to the Khmer Rouge. They took what they could carry, including me.’
‘Where did you go?’
‘Laos.’
Watts frowned as he thought for a moment. ‘A safe choice – at least, I can’t think of anything horrible happening there.’
She smiled, a broader smile than before. ‘You’re right.’
‘So that’s where you were brought up.’
‘Well, we moved back to Cambodia a decade later, in the late eighties, once the Vietnamese had gone – you know they invaded in 1979 and toppled Pol Pot?’
Watts was relieved he’d finally arrived at where he wanted to be. He gestured round the shop. ‘Is that how this all got started – importing stuff from Cambodia?’
‘In fact not. This business is nothing to do with my family. It is run by Englishmen. But the objects are from all over Indochine.’
Watts reached out and picked up a card from a pile on the edge of the table. He read the front and turned it over. ‘An office in Siem Reap,’ he read aloud. ‘That’s Angkor Wat, isn’t it?’
She nodded, frowning slightly.
‘Do you have things from there?’
Her frown deepened. ‘Of course not,’ she said. ‘Angkor Wat is a protected site. Nothing can be taken from there.’
‘I know that, but I assumed things were taken in the past before it became protected. Presumably those objects turn up from time to time quite legitimately?’
She was appraising him again. ‘Do you know how many Cambodian artefacts are in the British Museum?’
Watts had bad memories of a woman from the British Museum he’d been involved with so he was thrown for a moment. Recovering, he said: ‘I’ve a feeling you know the answer to that.’
‘Three. Three objects out of however many thousands of artefacts the museum possesses. The Vietnamese collection is scarcely bigger. They have a few pieces from Burma and Thailand but that part of their Asian collection is really poor.’
‘What conclusion do you draw from that?’
She laughed. ‘The conclusion I draw,’ she said, lingering on the phrase to let him know it was the formality of the question that had amused her, ‘is that nobody originally recognized the value of objects that seemed to be mimicking Chinese originals – and that now nobody is allowed to export any artefacts from these countries.’
‘But that confirms my original point. If nobody valued them the colonists would have chipped nice bits of the temple decorations off and brought them back with them over the past couple of hundred years just as souvenirs.’
She nodded. ‘Undoubtedly. And over the past thirty years a number of pieces from the Angkorian period have come on the market.’ She gave a little shrug of her shoulders and looked him in the eye. ‘Not through this shop, however.’
He nodded, thinking: with your denial you’ve put a notion in my head that wasn’t there before.
‘So – the owner or owners.’ Watts looked at the card again. ‘Is anyone around?’
It isn’t Will Rogers.
‘You haven’t changed much,’ Frank Howe says
when you turn to face him. ‘Still skinny as piss.’
‘Nor you,’ you say evenly, though in truth you’re surprised at how bloated he’s become: heavy jowls and big belly, all his muscle turned to fat. He still has a moustache, though smaller now, carefully trimmed. Grey.
‘Good to see you, Jimmy,’ he says.
You half expect him to offer his hand but both arms remain loosely hanging by his sides. He is showing no weapon but that doesn’t mean he isn’t armed. And his eyes haven’t lost their watchfulness.
‘You were expecting me to come and find you?’ you say.
Howe turns to the fridge and bends to open it and take out the vodka. He gestures to you with the bottle. You nod and he pours two big shots, almost emptying the bottle. He stretches his arm out to offer you your glass.
You take it and he tilts his glass at you. You both drink.
‘One day, of course, I knew you’d come,’ he says. ‘I haven’t exactly been hiding.’
‘But then I did think you were dead.’
‘We’ve all been in plain sight. Maybe you just needed better spectacles.’
‘I thought you were dead so I wasn’t looking.’
Howe shrugs. Although he’s overweight there was something almost balletic about the way he’d taken the vodka from the fridge. Economy of movement and effort. When you decide to move, he’s not going to be easy.
‘I need to know where the others are,’ you say.
‘How do you know they’re still alive?’
‘Because those kind of bastards never die, however much they deserve their comeuppance.’
‘So are they going to get their comeuppance? Am I?’
You don’t reply. Keep the bastard hanging.
‘We didn’t do so much to you.’
You keep your voice level. ‘You took my wife. You killed my wife. You lied to me about that and everything else.’
Howe shrugged. ‘How were we supposed to know she was your wife? You said bugger all about that.’
Those Who Feel Nothing Page 14