The Looters (15 page)

I tried to look sympathetic. “That’s all very true, and the same holds true for most of the countries in the Middle East. I’m sure you realize that the most significant factor about dealing with Middle Eastern antiquities is that at some point most of the provenances will originate in… a Middle Eastern country. Last time I heard, Americans were not loved anywhere in the region… and I’m sure none would put out a welcome mat for the FBI.”

“I understand it was the most violent civil war in modern history.”

He was referring to the civil war in Lebanon. I guess he was pretending that he didn’t hear me. Or maybe what I said just didn’t count.

He studied the report again before looking up. “It appears the family that allegedly owned the mask died out more than seventy years ago. That, of course, adds to the difficulty of checking out the provenance. Dead people can’t confirm it, can they?”

He was intimating that someone had deliberately chosen a family that wouldn’t have someone around to remember the past. Even I realized it wasn’t a difficult task. Death records could be checked for the selected time period in Beirut to see who died with no next of kin.

“Families die out,” I responded. “Even kings end up with no heirs. In the ownership history of the mask, it appears the last member was murdered. As you said, over seventy years ago.”

That was lame, but I wanted to make sure he understood that I wasn’t even born when the man was murdered.

“Interesting about the marketplace purchase, too. The transaction can’t be traced. And the nineteenth-century date gets us beyond most patrimony laws.”

“I see.” Yes, I saw very well. All of that had occurred to me, too. The inability to check out the statements in the provenance was something that made it attractive to me in the first place.

“The marketplace purchase, of course, is a favorite tool of tomb robbers and smugglers because it makes it impossible to track down exactly who actually possessed it. No receipts, no tax records, nothing to check out.”

“I’m sure many items were sold in marketplaces in third-world countries. To you it’s suspicious; to people who work in the trade it’s how business was done.”

“And then there’s the Panama ownership,” he said.

“Yes, it was purchased by a Panamanian company. That’s not unusual. Some companies like to use Panama as their, uh, national headquarters. Some sort of tax thing, I think.”

He nodded and pursed his lips, staring beyond me. “Panama is another place that makes it difficult for the police to do their job. It doesn’t take much to register a company in Panama today. Little information other than a rented mailbox is needed for an address.” He smiled a shark’s grin. “You can only imagine how little information was required to do business and how few records exist of companies formed there in the 1930s. My partner made a call to our FBI resident at the embassy in Panama City this morning. The resident howled with laughter when my partner asked him about tracing a 1930s Panamanian corporate registry.”

“Why is that?” I smothered a cough. A death rattle.

He kept nodding, his head rocking back and forth as if it were on a swivel. “The dead Lebanese from the marketplace sold it to the invisible Panamanians in the jungle. Making it very, very difficult to track.”

“Aah.” I tried to make it sound like he had given me an eye-opening revelation. Every word out of his mouth came across as an inference of my guilt. I wanted to run screaming from my office.

“And there’s the Swiss middleman.”

I cleared my throat. “The Swiss are significant players in the world art scene.”

Agent Nunes’s head rocked up and down again. “Correct… along with storing Nazi gold and laundering African blood diamonds, they’re noted for being middlemen for contraband art.”

“Excuse me, but it hasn’t been proven that the Semiramis is contraband.”

“It’s getting there. From a policeman’s standpoint, the problem with Switzerland as an entry point for an item into Europe is that it has very loose import laws and very restrictive ones protecting the privacy of business dealings.” He shook his head, proving it also swiveled sideways. “It seems like the provenance of your artifact hits all the hot spots for an investigator.”

My blood temperature and fears had gone up several notches. “If you come into this controversy with that attitude, we’re not going to get anywhere. You can’t look at the origins of ancient artifacts with tunnel vision. Some of the pieces have been floating around for thousands of years, from person to person, country to country, without leaving paper trails. Pieces changed hands during rape and pillage over the millennia, with none of the thieves signing contracts. We’re not dealing with cars that require a bill of sale and registration.”

He appeared singularly unimpressed with my outburst. “The question about the Semiramis isn’t whether the provenance goes back to Genghis Khan’s rape of Baghdad a thousand years ago but whether the mask was stolen from the Iraqi National Museum a few years ago.”

“Baghdad wasn’t taken by Genghis Khan; his grandson Hülegü sacked the city.” I smiled sweetly. “Before the U.S. Army did.”

Nunes leaned forward, locking eyes with me again. My heart thumped. I was innocent but was glad that I wasn’t on a lie detector machine at that moment, because my panic would have sent the ink needle screeching up and down the graph paper.

“I’m not here to play games with you, Ms. Dupre. The provenance smells. You have a serious problem with it.”

“I relied upon—”

“Getting a piece of paper from a thief doesn’t let a buyer off the hook if the buyer knew the item was hot. You’ve gotten most of your acquisitions from the same auction house. The seller in every case was a London art dealer, who got them from a dealer in Switzerland. An interesting pattern, don’t you think? I got that with just a quick Internet search. What do you think the chances are that we’ll come up with more interesting information when we start examining the underlying documents and pieces?”

“The dealer and auction house had the items we wanted. The sellers provided documentation. End of story.”

“Why did they have such a supply of antiquities? Artifacts were looted from the Baghdad museum. After a couple years, the market has a sudden influx of artifacts from the region. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to make a connection. We both know that there’s a worldwide network of smugglers, dealers, and buyers for contraband antiquities. It’s a dirty business that attracts not only collectors but major museums.”

That did it. I jumped to my feet. “How dare you come in here and insinuate that our museum has been involved in illegal purchases.” I went to the door and jerked it open. “If you want to see the Semiramis or anything else in the museum, contact Eric Vanderhof, the director.”

“I’ll do that. Thanks for your time.”

I shut the door behind him and leaned against it, my head swirling.
My God… how could this be happening?

I phoned Neal again. No answer on his cell phone. I tried his office.

“I’m sorry, Ms. Dupre,” his assistant told me. “I’m not sure where Neal is right at the moment.”

Yeah, like the Secret Service doesn’t know where the president is at any given moment. Eric wasn’t back from his meeting with Piedmont, either.

The people who got me into this mess were keeping their heads down while I was the target in a shooting gallery.

On top of being involved in a sensational purchase of a Middle Eastern antiquity at a time when such transactions were under the microscopes of agencies around the world, I had the bad luck of drawing a hard-ass FBI agent. And unfortunately he knew something about art.

I touched the pocket where I had the examiner’s report.

Too nervous to sit at my desk, I grabbed my purse and coat. It was time I confronted my accuser.

Chapter 20

I took a taxi to the address on Abdullah’s handout. To make sure he was home, I called the number on his handout and hung up when I heard his voice. He lived in Jamaica Plains, a neighborhood on western Long Island in the borough of Queens, the largest of the five boroughs of New York City. Queens was mostly residential, with some manufacturing in Long Island City and shipping facilities along the East River. The JFK and LaGuardia airports were in Queens.

The clapboard five-story apartment building in a depressed neighborhood looked like a fire waiting to happen. Next door was a Middle Eastern grocery store. The pungent aroma of spices filled the air outside the doorway. Two women with black head scarves—a symbol of female servitude for a billion Muslims—stood chatting at the bottom of the short flight of stairs to the apartment building’s entrance. They stopped and stared at me. Probably the only businesswomen they saw were child welfare workers.

I found the man’s last name written in pencil on the registry for the fifth floor. The door to the building was already ajar. The rusted lock looked as if it had been busted for some time.

I stepped inside a worn and dirty entryway and faced four flights of stairs, not relishing the thought of walking up. I didn’t expect to see an elevator and got my expects. The old building was a building inspector’s wet dream.

At the bottom of the stairway a little girl was playing with a homemade doll. When I said hello to her, she smiled shyly and stared up with large almond eyes.

I heard Middle Eastern music as I made my way up the stairs. I hated the sound of it. It grated on my nerves worse than rap. A loud television was blaring a soap opera through the walls. The farther I climbed, the more I smelled stagnant odors of lamb and butter in the corridors.

Abdullah’s apartment was closest to the stairway.

I knocked on the door.

He must have been eating, because when he opened the door he was still chewing on something. He had on jogger’s pants and a sleeveless white undershirt. Surprised to see me, he immediately stuck his head out to see who else was with me.

“I’m alone,” I said. “My driver is waiting downstairs.” I actually hadn’t thought of having the taxi driver wait, but I felt better making Abdullah think I wasn’t entirely alone.

“Come in. Sit down.”

“Thanks. I apologize for not calling, but I was in the neighborhood and decided to drop by.” That rang false even to my ear.

He was calmer than the last time I saw him outside the museum.

“Mr. ibn Hussein, I’m Madison Dupre, the curator—”

“I know you who are.”

“Has anybody else come to see you?”

“The police have been here.”

Nunes, I imagined.

“You say the Semiramis was stolen. How can you prove that?”

My career was on the line and possibly even my freedom. I wanted to see his proof that the museum piece was stolen.

He looked to the window and sighed, suddenly appearing tired and weary.

“My daughter will be here soon. She was the one who made arrangements for me to come to America. My health is not too good. I lost my job as curator for the Iraqi museum. They wouldn’t listen to me when I told them that Iraqi traitors worked with the foreigners to take away our treasures.”

“You said you saw them.”

“I was there. I tried to stop them, but one of the foreigners hit me on my head, an American. I came to America to avoid being killed for saying that Americans looted the museum. Strange, I know. But it wasn’t America that looted the museum, just some of its soldiers. Unfortunately, that’s the way solders are everywhere. Saddam’s Republican Guard helped them take the best pieces and then came back themselves to loot thousands more of our nation’s treasures.”

“Are you sure they were Americans?”

“I speak English very well. I know the difference between the way the British and Americans sound. Besides, their uniforms and caps were American military. I saw the word.” He tapped an imaginary cap on his head. “I stood as close to them as I am to you.”

He stood silent for a moment and stared into the past. “My father also tried to preserve our heritage. The Semiramis was found by men in our village when I was a boy. My father stopped them from selling it on the black market. They murdered him for protecting it.”

“I’m sorry.”

“The museum had over one hundred and fifty thousand items in its collection. Only a fraction of those were displayed for public view and had been cataloged. It takes time and patience for such a task, and for years we did not have the resources to do that. We were slowly making progress. We had to lock away our precious antiquities to prevent further thefts.”

“And the Semiramis?”

He gave me a sly look. “The Semiramis and some of the other best pieces were only cataloged here,” he said, tapping his head.

“Why?”

“Because Iraq has seen one dictator after another during most of my lifetime. When the dictator or his family wasn’t stealing from the people, his underlings were. If they knew how valuable some of the artifacts at the museum were, they would have taken them for their palaces. Or sent them to be sold in Europe and the money put in their Swiss bank accounts.”

“Mr. ibn Hussein, I’ve seen paperwork that says the Semiramis was in private hands in Lebanon over a hundred years ago, not in the Baghdad museum.”

“Let me show you something.”

He took a picture out of a dresser drawer and handed it to me. The photo was a faded Polaroid of the mask that was reproduced on his handout. The background was no clearer in the original.

“This doesn’t show—”

“I have proof. The mask has the imprint of a cylinder seal on the bottom of it.”

A cylinder seal was a sign of ownership used in ancient Babylon, often made of hard clay or, more commonly, stone. Many were about the size of a short cigar. Property owners often used these seals to leave an impression on their possessions. The process involved using wet clay on the item and the seal rolled over it. The carving on the seal was intaglio, so that it left an impression that could be read or viewed. Many were elaborate. Some had names; others had motifs of various designs representing people and animals, a hieroglyphic-type scene that could tell a story about its owner.

I knew from news accounts that a U.S. soldier serving in Iraq had purchased cylinder seals from a street vendor selling trinkets. When the soldier returned to the States, he discovered they were valuable antiquities and turned them over to the FBI.