Someday the woman would be arguing with the devil about her place in hell.
I hadn’t been paid yet for the work I’d done for her and I had a Bastard with a capital B of a landlord who was hoping to take my overdue rent out in trade—and not the art kind.
I have discovered a quirky thing about life—when you’re really down and don’t need to be kicked again, you put out a scent that tells unhappy, neurotic jerks that you’re available and vulnerable. When I was up, I would have blown past these kinds of people without noticing they were alive. Now I had to tiptoe around them and hope they didn’t know I was alive.
I quickly showered and dressed. I had selected my clothes the night before, a habit that my mother instilled in me when I was a little girl. It saved a few minutes in the morning, especially helpful if you were running late.
I grabbed a cup of coffee and a blueberry muffin at the local deli on my way to the subway station. The coffee was steaming hot the way I liked it, and the muffin was surprisingly good, but I was still in a grumpy mood. When I got to the subway, I missed the train by thirty seconds, which added to my irritableness.
During the night I’d only gotten a few hours of deep sleep before a couple in an apartment below me decided to wake up everybody in the building with their loud arguing. Every once in a while someone yelled for them to shut up and/or die soon and even more vulgar suggestions, but it didn’t do any good, not until the police finally arrived.
I usually woke up in the wee hours anyway—and not just because New York is a city that never sleeps, the middle of the night being the haunt of trash collectors, sirens, construction crews, delivery trucks, traffic, and anything else that makes noise.
I lay awake and miserable because I couldn’t shut down the video in my head that replayed all of my sins and mistakes. It was like being forced to watch an excruciatingly bad movie, over and over, while tied to a chair with my eyelids taped open.
In the good old days—less than a year ago—I had slept peacefully when I lived on the Upper East Side. Not only were things a lot quieter there than in my present breadbox-sized studio apartment on the cusp of Chinatown, Little Italy, and SoHo in lower Manhattan, but my nerves were not on fire. Those champagne days were gone, much too quickly. How does that line from an old poem go? They are not long, the days of wine and roses …
As I waited for the train, I swore an oath to stop feeling sorry for myself and agonizing about the past. I had to get rid of the negative and emphasize the positive—but not this morning. Not until after I got paid by the rich Bitch with a heart of stone and dreadful taste in art.
I got off the subway at Fifty-ninth Street and started walking toward Sixty-fourth, an area of the city noted for its wealthy inhabitants in the old days and where not a few rich people still resided. I knew it was a cliché but as I walked I kept thinking about how the rich were so very different from everyone else. They had different problems than the rest of us, and money, the root of all the current evils plaguing me, wasn’t one of them.
The Upper East Side ran north and south from about Fifty-ninth Street to Ninety-sixth Street and east and west from Fifth Avenue to the East River. My place had been in the upper Eighties, a penthouse with a park view not far from where I used to work at the Piedmont Museum on the stretch of Fifth Avenue known as Museum Mile. The area included a dozen or so museums, some world-class, with the Metropolitan topping the list.
When I made big money, I planned to find my way uptown again, maybe this time to the Upper West Side near the park. It was younger and hipper than the old money side and had come into its own with lots of cafés and shops. It wasn’t cheap, either. Nothing was cheap about Manhattan, not even the walk-up studio I had now, a zillion blocks from the haughty uptown districts.
One of the things I missed about living close to Central Park was the beautiful architecture of the residential buildings. The tree-lined streets were also calm and peaceful. It was one of the quietest and cleanest areas in the city. Who wouldn’t want to live here? You only needed about three or four million to buy even a small town house on a side street. Sure, no problem. Even renting one of these places could set you back more money a month than the average person earned in a year.
The most palatial mansions and apartment houses were found along Fifth Avenue and Park Avenue stretching from the mid-Sixties to the Nineties. Some had been mansions of nineteenth-century barons of railroads and industry and were now subdivided into apartments and condos. The really exclusive buildings had multifloor units with a dozen rooms. One of these was where my former employer, Hiram Piedmont, lived. He occupied the top two floors.
Hiram never worked a day in his life and had everything money could buy—including his own museum in an era when possession of a “priceless” piece of art was viewed as a trophy akin to owning a baseball team or a Kentucky Derby winner.
When things got tough, his money sheltered him. He taught me a lesson about rich people that F. Scott Fitzgerald noted a long time ago—the rich can be careless with other people’s lives.
Hiram had wanted a world-class museum and I gave it to him. My expertise in antiquities centered on the region in and around the Mediterranean—mostly Greek, Roman, Egyptian, and Mesopotamian.
I focused Hiram’s museum on the Babylonian era and found him pieces that were displayed in movielike sets that brought out the magnificence not only of the ancient artifacts but brought home to the viewer the cultural context. For instance, rather than having a sword displayed under glass in a case or mounted on the wall, I had the sword put in the hand of a character from the same historical era … and with the character in battle.
I did make a little mistake—okay, about fifty-five million dollars’ worth of mistake, when I bought a looted antiquity at auction. I could have kept my mouth shut and kept my job, but in the end, I had to do the right thing. And I’d do the same thing again if I had to do it all over. But I had a lot of help getting up to my tush in alligators, including a push and a shove from Hiram, to whom that kind of money was chump change.
When things got really tough, his faithful employee—me—was thrown to the wolves, along with all my status symbols: not just my penthouse and sports car, but an actual parking space that cost more per month than I pay now for my studio apartment. The wolves also devoured my exclusive, by-invitation-only black American Express Card, which had been my own measurement that I had “made it.”
Gone were the days of going to expensive restaurants and shopping at high-end stores and boutiques on Fifth Avenue. I eventually sold most of my jewelry and expensive clothes for food and shelter. Most of my clothes now came from the sale racks at clothing stores in my neighborhood, and splurging on dinner meant takeout from the local deli and my favorite Thai and Chinese restaurants.
Since I no longer got a steady paycheck, I became more frugal about how I spent my money. I was self-employed now as an art appraiser and investigator and I got paid when clients paid me, which wasn’t always in a timely manner. The wealthy were often worse in paying than the not-so-wealthy, but they were also the ones who bought high-ticket art and antiquities.
Passing a small art gallery, I quickly popped inside to drop off my business card and a pamphlet with my qualifications—minus the fact I had once been innocently involved in one of the great antiquities frauds in history.
Unfortunately, the international art trade was literally a cottage industry with all the major players knowing—and spying on—each other. It wasn’t easy to keep a low profile when you had once been a player.
In the past, I went to auctions at Christie’s and Sotheby’s in New York and London. Bought vases and statues, jewelry and swords, and anything else old and rare and desirable, even a mummy once, spending millions with a flick of my numbered auction house paddle.
Now I wore out my shoes and pride cold-calling galleries and antiques shops whose entire collections often didn’t amount to the tens of millions I once—
Shit! I had to stop
my whining and crying over spilled milk and whatever else I was drowning in and keep telling myself to think positive, radiate good vibes, feel grateful for having good health … but all that went to hell when I got hounded by credit collectors.
I have actually made friends with one of the collectors, a “Mrs. Garcia”—which I found out is not her real name. When the message I scribbled on the Saks bills I received, “Deceased—Return to Sender,” didn’t fool anyone, Mrs. Garcia began a relentless phone call campaign.
Now we exchange pleasantries when she calls to remind me that I haven’t gone through on my last promise to send money (a promise made not only with my fingers crossed, but contingent upon getting a fee I never got). When she calls, we talk about how hard things are for working people, how her son is doing poorly in school and can’t stay out of trouble, and I tell her war stories about dealing with rich people and how it’s harder to pry money from them than to extract teeth from snapping alligators …
As I left the gallery, my cell phone rang. I looked at the number and groaned. It was Mrs. Bitch, the collector from hell.
Please don’t change your mind again.
I answered the phone in a professionally pleasant voice. “Hi, Mrs. Winthrop. I’m on my way to your place.”
“Don’t bother,” she said.
“I’m just a few blocks away—”
“Don’t waste your time.”
“It’s no problem.”
“Yes, it is. I’ve decided not to buy the vase.”
Damn! I looked up to the sky for divine guidance. “It was perfect for your living room.”
“Well, I’ve thought about it, and I don’t think it’s the right piece.”
Please God! I need a break!
“It’s an authentic fifth-century Roman piece and well worth the price,” I said. Irritation crept into my voice and I tried to control it. “It will look terrific in your—”
“No, I want something else, something older—”
“It’s fifteen hundred years old.”
“The fact is my astrologer told me that Italian art isn’t right for me.”
“Your astrolo—” I choked.
“She said to go Greek.”
I kept myself from screaming but not from shaking. I took deep breaths to control my breathing. I was somewhere between panic and murderous rage.
I needed the money.
“What about … Greek…?” We’d been through Greek, Roman, Egyptian, and Babylonian before, over and over …
“That’s all she told me. ‘The stars say to go Greek,’ she said.”
Deep breath. “Well, I’m sure the right piece is out there and we’ll find it.”
Even I heard the desperation in my voice. I didn’t care what the hell she wanted as long as I got paid. At this point I didn’t care if she furnished her living room in early Andy Warhol. It had been several weeks now and she still hadn’t paid me. And I hated, hated, hated asking for money. I had earned it, but she made me feel so small about asking for it.
“Mrs. Winthrop, I, uh, sent you a bill for my services and I haven’t received payment—”
“My accountant handles those things. Besides, my understanding is that there’s no charge unless I buy something. I have to run.”
She hung up before I could say anything else.
I took the phone away from my ear and screamed “Bitch!” at it.
I could understand why some people got murdered. If I had been in the same room with her and had a gun, I’d be getting free board and room for the rest of my life in a state prison.
She wasn’t worth killing … but it would have felt so damn good to at least see the fear on her face as I—
Think positive.
I took a few deep breaths but I still couldn’t shake the image of her on hands and knees begging me to accept the hard-earned money she owed me.
My father once told me that even though most rich people never actually earned the money they possessed, they had become experts at not spending what they married or inherited.
Mrs. Winthrop was obviously of that caliber. Having old money, not having worked for a living, not having earned the accoutrements of the grand scale in which she lived, or all of the above, she had no empathy for mere peons like me who earned their living getting their hands dirty with real work.
If she’d ever had a “day job,” she would understand what it meant to do the work and not get paid.
Maybe it was a fantasy, but I honestly believed that people who had little of the world’s material goods were usually more generous and honest about money than people who had a lot—especially if it wasn’t earned.
A building contractor friend out in L.A. told me that every time he finished a job in Beverly Hills and wanted the last payment from the homeowner, “complaints” about the workmanship suddenly surfaced and the amount of the final payment due diminished as the size of the complaints grew …
I wasn’t going to let her get away with it. Even though she had plenty of money, I didn’t. I needed to get paid for my time and effort. I had a cat to feed, myself to feed, and bill collectors who had to eat, too.
I was just about to call her back and tell her the next call would be to my lawyer—a bluff, of course, since I couldn’t afford a lawyer—when the phone rang in my hand.
The phone display said it was a restricted call. Bill collector, was the first thing that came to mind. I had them all on small monthly payments—most of which I never made. Had another popped up? Better yet—it could be a call from an art collector wanting to hire me.
I let it ring a couple times before I answered. I didn’t want to sound too available if it was an art collector.
“Maddy.”
“Yes…” The voice was familiar but I couldn’t place it.
A burst of static and then I heard, “Maddy, this is Henri Lipton.”
I took the phone away from my ear and just stared at it.
The caller on the other end was a voice from the grave.
“My God—Henri, you’re dead.”
2
Henri Lipton. The world’s biggest antiquities dealer—and BASTARD in all caps. Also the world’s biggest art crook. Past tense. He was killed in an explosion in his London art gallery. I know. I was almost killed in the explosion myself.
His body was never found, but it wasn’t the kind of fire and blast someone would survive. I did, though only by the hair of my chinny-chin-chin.
“Maddy? Are you there?”
“Henri? Is it really you? You’re alive?”
“Unless there’s phone service from hell, it’s me in the flesh.”
“What about Albert and that woman who—?”
“They didn’t make it. I’ll explain it all later when I see you.”
“You’re in New York?”
“No, I’m in Dubai. I want you to come here and talk to a client of mine about a piece he wants to acquire.”
“Come to Dubai?”
“Yes.”
Dubai. I knew it was a city somewhere in the Middle East, but at the moment my mind was too blown to place exactly where it was. Shocked down to my socks, my father would say.
If Lipton wasn’t dead, he was certainly wanted at the minimum by the FBI, Interpol, and Britain’s Art and Antiquities squad for his involvement in stolen antiquities.
The blast at his building occurred when a disgruntled coconspirator went on a rampage. I was an innocent participant in the entire messy, violent affair that left bodies on two continents. Well … if not completely innocent, I certainly hadn’t done anything criminal. At least not intentionally. No matter what I did, I didn’t deserve to lose everything because I did the right thing at the end.
Basically, Henri Lipton was responsible for the crash and burn of my career. He was the one that set everything into motion.
Now this dead man who ruined my life calls me up and thinks I’ll meet him at some godforsaken place halfway around the world? Talk about being born under cros
sed stars. Mrs. Winthrop’s astrologer would have a coronary if she did my horoscope.
“Are you still there, Maddy?”
“What are you talking about? Why would I go all the way to Dubai? Why shouldn’t I just get a gun and shoot you?”
“Money. Twenty thousand—cash—up-front. All expenses prepaid. If you don’t take the job, you can be back home in twenty-four hours. If you take the job, the twenty thousand is just part of the down payment.”
Rage swelled in my chest but my instant rejection of his offer, based upon my common sense and fear of being involved in anything the bastard was selling, got stuck in my throat like a big piece of meat.
Twenty thousand dollars.
Not the kind of money I’d sell my soul for … a year ago. Today it was salvation. Paying down bills to keep the creditors at bay awhile longer. Some decent clothes. Maybe even a little bigger apartment …
“Twenty thousand, Maddy,” the devil whispered in my ear. “For a plane ride. Cash.”
My soul was on the auction block. Going … going …
“No!”
I snapped the cell phone shut and caught myself from throwing it on the sidewalk—I couldn’t afford a replacement.
Unbelievable. Bizarre. A call from Henri Lipton. A call from the grave. Dead Henri Lipton offering me money. Twenty thousand dollars for a plane ride.
I walked—stalked—down the street, talking to myself like I was street-crazy. It was insane. An offer too good to be true. From a dead man—who should be ashes to ashes after he was caught in a raging fire. Who should be burning in hell after the fire in London.
Comparing Henri to the devil involved more than just his actions. He had always reminded me of a well-fed Satan. Sixtyish, with fine silver hair, goatee, and mustache, he had been an art dealer headquartered in London and was officially Sir Henri Lipton. Before his well-publicized “death,” he handled the world’s biggest-ticket sales of classical Greco-Roman, Egyptian, and Mesopotamian antiquities.
The Shroud Page 2