“It’s me. Open the door.”
“What?”
“Open up.”
I closed my eyes. It couldn’t be. This couldn’t be happening to me.
The knocking on the door became more insistent. I refused to believe it. It wasn’t possible.
“Open the door, Maddy. I don’t want to have to kick it down. Neither one of us can afford to have the cops called.”
“How did you find me?”
“GPS device in the heel of your shoe.”
“You sonofabitch.”
“Just protecting our investment. We figured you’d never let us offer the mask back for a finder’s fee.”
“Of course not. It has to go back to Baghdad. I knew you were lying.”
“You see? It’s been a misunderstanding all the way along the line again. Now open the door before I kick it open.”
I didn’t fool myself with wishful thinking that the pervert at the front desk would help me if my door got kicked in. Or call the police. Not that I wanted the police called. But it would be nice if I wasn’t constantly at the mercy of every predator that came along.
I opened the door and faced his big grin. “You really are a bastard.”
“For sure. But let’s not dwell on the past. I have a couple of associates waiting that are eager to come in and break your neck. We need to get this over with before they decide they’d rather strangle you and hang than peacefully walk away with a five-million-dollar finder’s fee.”
“You and your buddies are the scum of the earth.”
He clutched his chest. “God… that… hurt. Now give me the mask.”
He stepped into the room, making me give way.
“Bastard.” It was the only word that kept coming to my tongue.
“Can we get beyond the personalities?”
The mask was on the dresser. I swear, the bitch was leering at us.
“Ah, the queen herself.”
I shot for the dresser and Coby caught me. “You don’t want my pals coming up. They blame you for Gwyn, too.”
“What did I have to do with Gwyn?”
“Everything went to hell after you entered the picture. Even Stocker got crazier than he was before.”
“Blame her.” I pointed at the mask. “Not me.”
He took the mask off the dresser. I reached for it and he put it behind his back.
“Maddy, give it up; it’s not going to happen. You can’t believe we robbed the museum in Baghdad while armies clashed and robbed a museum in New York while security cameras rolled just to let you give it back?”
“You don’t understand what you’re doing. You haven’t grasped it yet. There’s a curse on the mask.”
“There’s five million dollars on the mask.”
“You’ll never see the money and even if you did, you’ll never live to spend it. The curse is real. Walk out of here with that mask and it’ll get you.”
He kissed me. Long and hard. The press of his lips against mine made me want more.
“I’ll be back. With plenty of money for us.”
“I don’t want your blood money.”
“I’m going to take you back to Europe. We’ll buy a yacht and sail the Mediterranean and—”
“Rob antiquities from shipwrecks?”
He patted my tush.
“Helluva idea. We’ll do that, too.”
I started to call him a bastard again as he left, but instead I leaned against the door frame and watched him go. Hopeless. He would never be, well… normal. He had gone to the dark side of art and would never come back. But my heart was still with him. And I knew that in his own mind he wasn’t taking something from me. He was, as he put it, preserving an antiquity, and making a handsome profit to boot.
“Damn you,” I whispered.
I gathered up my stuff. I left behind my shoes that alerted a satellite somewhere in space where I was and walked out barefoot. I was tired of leaving a trail.
Pulling out of the parking lot, I followed roads that led back to the turnpike. For the first time since I raised the paddle to place a $55 million bid, I felt at peace. My conscience had been bothering me for so long. It was finally going to be put at ease.
So much had happened since the day a taxi driver named Abdullah walked into the museum and accused me and everyone else of being less holier than thou. And he was right. He was the towel head, the camel jockey, and we were materially superior for having the cars, homes, and other economic miracle of Western society. But we were the thieves of his culture.
True, I didn’t know the mask was part of the looting of his country’s national museum. And most of the harm to the museum and other antiquity sites came from the Iraqis themselves. If I had known the mask was stolen, I would never have urged Piedmont to buy it. But I was also careful to look the other way.
What I didn’t do expressly I did by not looking askance at something that was too good to be true. I sinned by omission.
But that was over, now.
What was that about life being a circle? All your bad deeds come back to bite you? That’s why I had to return that bitch queen back to Iraq. She was truly the Whore of Babylon. And she wasn’t going to let me live in peace until she was back in her own country, playing hell with those poor people.
I didn’t know how that would affect Iraq, but right now I had my own skin to save from her dark curses.
Once I was over the bridge and five minutes from my destination, I made a call. It was late, but it was never too late for good news.
“I have something for you,” I told Abdullah’s daughter. “I need you to come down to the street in front of your apartment.”
What I had for her was the death mask of Semiramis.
We had entered the museum with two fake masks. Gwyn had one to make the exchange. I had one in an inside pouch of my robe, intending to use it later to make a switch for the real one.
Gwyn slipped me her fake and I gave it to Angela.
I left the museum with two masks: the real one and the fake that was inside the robe pouch.
I carried the robe into the motel room with me and put the fake mask on the dresser after I realized I still had it.
Coby took the fake mask.
Semiramis herself, or at least the real impression of her face after death, was in the glove compartment of the rental car. I had left it there when I went into the motel. Hoping I’d left bad luck behind.
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 w
as 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
The Looters Page 33