A year ago it would have been nothing for Sir Henri to broker a fifty-million-dollar deal for a two-thousand-year-old Greek vase. I’m sure the police were still trying to unravel all the shady complications that went along with those deals.
For certain, some of the world’s most prestigious museums were worried about what Sir Henri sold them. Demands by countries whose cultural treasures had been looted were common. The situation was the hottest issue in the world of antiquities. Great museums like the Met, the Getty, and others were being forced to return antiquities that they bought, sometimes decades ago … but that had left the country of origin illegally.
It all revolved around the concept of “provenance.” The provenance of a piece of art showed both its place of origin and its chain of title.
It didn’t matter if it was an Expressionist painting by the tortured Van Gogh, a sculpture by an unknown Greek artist who lived at the time of Homer, or a Roman dinner plate that was found buried in the volcanic ash at Pompeii, the history of ownership had to be traced back to show that it left its country of origin legally.
“Legally” generally meant either that it left the country before laws were passed that prohibited the export of antiquities or that it left the country with an export permit after such laws were passed. And that required tracing the ownership history of the item to make sure it hadn’t been smuggled out.
Henri had more Mediterranean pieces at his disposal than any other dealer. It didn’t come as any surprise to envious art dealers when it was revealed that many of those pieces were dug up at night from archeological sites and smuggled out and that the ownership history of the pieces, the provenances prepared by Henri, were frauds.
Oftentimes the artifact at issue was discovered by accident—excavated by a road crew along the Appian Way in Italy, unearthed by a building contractor during demolition in Greece, or dug up by workers with picks and shovels digging an irrigation ditch in Turkey.
These scenarios happened more frequently than people not involved in the trade realized. Naturally, the finders usually didn’t report what they had uncovered. Instead, the relic was surreptitiously sold to a local antiques dealer who passed it on to a bigger dealer who had a contact for smuggling it out of the country.
One big bonanza of looting occurred after the fall of Saddam’s regime in Iraq. As soon as law and order collapsed in the country, looters attacked the national museum and thousands of antiquities sites scattered around the country. Mesopotamia is called the cradle of Western civilization—and the theft of more than fourteen thousand artifacts from the museum alone is considered a world tragedy, not to mention the tens of thousands more items looted from sites around the country.
Lipton, of course, ended up with the cream of the looted artifacts. All he had to do to legitimize the stolen items was to have phony provenances made.
My fall from grace with the world of art occurred because I got inadvertently entangled with one of his multimillion-dollar deals where the documentation was false.
The international trade of antiquities is a vicious, cutthroat business of liars and thieves whereby museum curators with billion-dollar buying allowances compete with the world’s richest people for the rarest and most valuable objets d’art on earth.
I was part of it. I went into the deal with Lipton on the same basis as dozens of other deals with him and other art dealers—with my eyes wide-shut.
But I never bought a piece I expressly knew had been looted from an archeological site or stolen from a museum. The real horror of looting wasn’t that an item got displayed in a country where it didn’t belong. In terms of artifacts smuggled out of third world countries, the terrible consequence was that, more often than not, irreparable damage or even complete destruction was done by amateurs working at night with shovels and picks.
Fragile pieces of our history—the history of all of us who are tenants on Spaceship Earth—get destroyed so a third-world farmer can feed his family for a couple of months from the money he got for digging something up that had been buried for centuries—or even millenniums.
Lipton had fed that process and—damn it!—so had I and so had all the other curators and collectors buying with their eyes wide-shut. Our excuse was that if we didn’t do it, the artifacts would end up being looted anyway, so we might as well find them a decent home. But I learned the hard way that two wrongs don’t make a right.
The phone went off again in my hand. I had the vibration mode on and this time it felt like an electric shock. I flipped it open and bit my tongue from yelling at him again.
“Twenty thousand,” he whispered. “No catches. Entirely legit.”
Jesus. He really did sound like the devil.
“Henri … the last time you got me involved in a legitimate deal, I was almost murdered. And I lost my career and everything else. My only regret is that it appears you weren’t murdered.”
“That was the past, Maddy. Mistakes were made and we suffered for it.”
“We suffered? You mean I suffered, you son of a bitch. You’re still alive. You obviously haven’t suffered enough.”
“But things are different now, my dear. One thing’s for certain, you know that I have a talent for making money. Something we both need. I’ve gotten an incredible offer from a very rich man. And I need your help.”
“What help?”
“Locating a piece and buying it.”
“Why don’t you do it yourself?”
Dead silence. We both knew the answer to that one. No doubt Dubai was on the short list of places where he wouldn’t be arrested if he showed his face. Henri had been under investigation even before the fiery attack destroyed his gallery. Now he had to be number one on all police lists from London to Hong Kong.
“What exactly do I have to do for the money?”
I didn’t really expect an honest answer—every time art dealers moved their lips to speak, there was a good possibility you were getting a sanitized version of the truth or even an outright lie. But I needed enough to convince myself that it was all on the up-and-up …
“Take a plane ride. A long one, probably seven, eight thousand miles. Are you familiar with Dubai?”
“It’s that rich place in the Middle East. They tried to buy New York Harbor or something.”
“I see you still reserve your brilliant mind solely for the world of antiquities, but yes, it’s that rich place in the Persian Gulf. You get twenty thousand cash, up-front, and all expenses paid. You fly to Dubai, spend an hour with me talking to the client. If you don’t want the job, you use your prepaid return ticket home. If you agree to help me find the piece, we’ll settle upon further terms with the client, with money up-front.”
It sounded too good to be true … and considering that I was talking to a man who was presumed murdered after a crooked art deal went south, it probably was exactly what my instincts were telling me—a deal with the devil. But so much money, when I had so little …
“Who’s the client?”
“You know I can’t tell you that. Sadly, there’s no honor among art dealers.”
If that wasn’t the truth. Secrecy was an art form itself in the cutthroat art trade where there weren’t enough good pieces and wealthy buyers to feed the army of dealers trying to get a cut. The world of espionage could learn a thing or two about secrecy and deception from art dealers.
“Some rich Arab sheik?” I asked. That had to be a good guess since Dubai was some kind of Arab place. But there were other possibilities.
Art collecting was the sport of kings. World-class pieces went for tens of millions, some for more than a hundred million, with the commissions and fees in the millions. A lot of money was flowing out of the oil-rich Middle East looking to buy “priceless” pieces that doubled in price every few years. Not to mention that Colombia’s cocaine kings had discovered art was a surefire way to launder drug money.
“You’ll find out in Dubai.”
Dubai seemed to be in the news a lot lately. I
n fact I had seen a special on TV recently about it. A piece of desert being turned into a fairy-tale city from The Arabian Nights.
“You shouldn’t pass up a trip to Dubai, anyway,” he said. “It’s the place now. A fabulous metropolis rising like the mythical phoenix from the desert sand. The new playground of the rich and famous.”
Sounded like something he read in a travel guide.
“You get your money up-front. Today. Even if you don’t take the job, you can spend a few days in one of the most fascinating cities on the planet … all expenses paid.”
“What’s the catch?”
It was a rhetorical question to myself because there was always a catch when easy money was offered. Not to mention that it was a stupid question to ask a man wanted on two continents for fraud and deceit and even more serious crimes.
“As always in our business, the catch is a big fish we need to reel in. We have a collector on the hook. We just need to set the hook.”
“Why did you call me? You must know I wish you were dead—really dead.”
“Because you’re good at what you do. Very, very good. You know Mediterranean antiquities better than anyone else. Except myself, of course.”
“That’s only because you’ve also seen the crooked side of antiquities, Henri.”
“My dear, these personality attacks won’t pay our bills. I have a collector rich enough to buy a small country. It’s just a matter of getting him what he wants.”
“What exactly does this man want?”
“I can’t tell you that until you agree to take the job. You know how the system works. There’s only one artifact like it on earth and our man wants it at any price. Fortunately, he has the money to satisfy his lust.”
“You have to tell me something. I can’t go halfway around the world blindly.”
“Let’s just say it’s a couple thousand years old and was buried with Christ.”
Jesus. Literally. Now that was a showstopper.
“Great,” I said. “I know exactly where to find it. The Vatican. It’s in one of its secret archives.”
“My dear, the beauty of this commission is that we get paid whether we are able to acquire the piece or not. Up-front,” he said, repeating those magic words.
I hoped he couldn’t hear the beat of my heart and the sound of my nerves jangling. The call from the grave was an offer of salvation. But damn-damn-damn, I knew there was a catch. Catch-22, the Catcher in the Rye, whatever it was, it wasn’t that easy.
I knew I should tell the bastard to go to hell, that I should call the FBI or whoever and tell them that they could find Henri Lipton the international art crook in a place called Dubai.
But I was so broke …
“I need some time to think about it.”
“No time. I’ll call you back in an hour for your answer.”
I hung up without saying goodbye. He didn’t deserve the courtesy. I continued walking for a while along the side streets before I made my way toward Third Street.
3
Don’t get caught watching the woman, Shamil cautioned himself as he followed Madison Dupre.
That’s what he had been told before being sent to New York on the assignment. Don’t get caught following the woman. Don’t get caught carrying out the orders.
He kept his distance, back a hundred feet, following her as she walked toward Third Street. He was careful not to stare at her back or even directly look at her. Instead, he simply looked vaguely ahead, not focusing on anything or anyone, just moseying along behind as if he were out getting some air.
Manhattan was an easy place to follow someone without being detected. Business streets were often crowded with people and “people” came in a wide variety of sizes, shapes, skin colors, and national origins. Neither a zombie nor a circus clown could get too many stares walking down a busy street. People had seen everything.
Shamil wasn’t his real name, but a name he used in the organization to which he belonged.
He was Chechen and had arrived in New York only three days before. He started his surveillance that morning when the woman came out of her apartment building hurrying down the steps, following her to the subway station, only to get there too late to catch her train.
Being late for the subway had been a problem for him, too. For a moment, they were the only two people on the platform. She had turned to him and thrown up her hands in a gesture of frustration that he pretended he didn’t see as he made his way to the opposite end of the waiting area.
It wouldn’t do to have her see him. Not yet. If she had spotted him in the station and then on the street when he was following her, she would be suspicious.
Shamil had never been sent on an assignment in which the target was a woman. His superior told him that he had been selected for the assignment because he blended so well in crowds. Nondescript and average were apt descriptions of his appearance. Not too tall, not too fat or skinny, not too much of anything. He had a face that didn’t draw stares.
As he walked, he pulled out his cell phone and hit a speed dial number. The phone was answered on the seventh ring with a curt greeting.
“Yes?”
“I’m behind her. She received two calls in the last couple of minutes. It looked like both calls caused her stress.”
“You know your instructions?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Make sure to follow them.”
“Haven’t I always?” Even as he asked the question, he knew the answer wasn’t true.
“See that you do.”
The call was terminated. He stared at the phone for a moment. Like the calls the woman had received, his call had also caused him stress. Not because of the assignment—it wasn’t the first time he had been sent to do something that ordinary people would find shocking. It was an unspoken quality in his superior’s voice that worried him. An abruptness that lacked the comradeship that they had always operated under.
He didn’t know if he had picked up on a change of attitude toward him or if it was simply uneasiness at being on a dangerous mission in a foreign country and so far from home. His other assignments had all taken place in his own land and in Russia proper. And none had involved an American woman as the target.
Like other Chechens, he didn’t consider Chechnya to be a part of the Russian Federation. A small country with a population of less than a million, smaller than major U.S. metro areas’ Chechnya was kept chained to the larger country by force of arms, not brotherhood. Oil deposits and Russian fears that if they let Chechnya become independent other national groups would demand independence, kept a long, bloody, and bitter war going.
The country had long resisted its Russian masters. During World War II, Stalin accused the Chechens of plotting with the Germans and had deported literally the entire population to Siberia. They were not allowed to return for a dozen years.
Not all of the bloodshed in the Chechen conflict had been confined to the brutal ravages of war in the tiny country itself. The Chechens carried the fight to many regions of Russia with acts the Russians called terrorism and the Chechens called patriotic resistance.
Besides a bitter war for freedom, Chechnya had contributed another violent aspect to the Russian Federation—the most ruthless organized crime elements on the planet, putting to shame the Eurasian mafias and the Far Eastern triads and yakuza.
Shamil knew the assignment in New York was a test of his loyalty. His comrades were suspicious because his last mission had ended in the death of his partner. He would be dead if they realized how badly he had botched the assignment. A woman too inviting, coupled with him having too much to drink, doing too much bragging, had led to a leak about the assignment. Russian security forces had been waiting. His partner died in a hail of bullets and Shamil was almost captured.
A woman halfway around the world had caused his disgrace. Now another woman, the one he was following, would redeem his honor with her life.
He actually had no idea what threat this wo
man posed to the Chechen movement. Had he been sent to kill a political type—a president or other leader—he would easily have grasped the significance. Even a mass killing, such as ones that terrorist organizations have carried out, including the Chechens on a number of occasions, would be easily understood as a “statement in blood” to remind the world that his people were suffering under the iron heel of a tyrannical oppressor.
When Shamil had asked why the woman was being targeted, he had been bluntly told that his only duty was to follow the orders given to him.
Not to know the entire assignment wasn’t unusual. If a member of the group was captured, it would be a disaster if they knew everything about the mission. But, he wondered, who was this American woman? And what had she done to draw the head of the organization on to her from thousands of miles away?
The woman is attractive, he thought. A little older than his twenty-eight, he estimated her age as mid-thirties. Smartly dressed, she appeared to be a sharp businesswoman.
None of that made it any harder for him. He always performed his assignments well. Except for that time. And the fear of his failure being discovered was why he was so paranoid. If the organization knew, he would be treated no better than the woman he was following.
The woman disappeared into a deli and he stepped off the curb and hailed a taxi. It was time for the next stage of the operation.
“Sex shop,” he told the driver.
The driver, a Sikh wearing a red turban, turned in his seat and stared at him.
“A place where they sell things to pleasure sex,” the man said.
4
“A couple thousand years old and buried with Christ.”
Lipton’s description roiled in my head. What a great salesman. He had given me just enough information to pique my interest—and nothing that would help me if I wanted to steal his client or get the piece for another collector.
He was a master at manipulating people. Unfortunately, he was also a world-class liar and con artist.
I jumped on a subway back to Chinatown. I needed a zen butter ice-cream cone from the Chinatown Ice Cream Factory and a good Chinese foot rub while I contemplated Lipton’s offer. The ice cream and foot massage always churned my brain cells when I needed to make important decisions.
The Shroud Page 3