The Looters (2 page)

I had asked for a second-floor room, as I always did after reading that it was a safer bet than a ground-floor motel room for a woman traveling alone. After I double-locked the door and wedged a chair under the door handle, I checked the big front sliding glass window. Unlatched, of course. I locked it.

The bedspread smelled as if it hadn’t had sex washed off in a while, so I took it off and put my long coat on top of the bedsheets to lie on it. The sheets were the one thing in the room that got periodically washed, but I still didn’t plan to use them; the room was rented by the hour, but that didn’t mean the maids changed the bedsheets by the hour.

For a long time I half-sat, half-lay on the bed and stared up at brown water stains on the cottage cheese ceiling, thinking how capricious life was. One minute everything in your life is fine, and the next minute you’re roadkill. Life just wasn’t fair sometimes. Bad things are supposed to happen to bad people, not good people. And I was not a bad person. At least, not
that
bad.

I closed my eyes but couldn’t fall asleep—I had company. The sounds of their real and faked lust came through the common wall: the excited grunts of a john and the false cries of a whore. Naturally, the walls were paper thin.

The sound effects got more intense and their bed rocked against the wall with a frantic rhythm:
Grunt-bang-moan… grunt-bang-moan
. The woman’s moans sounded as sincere as a sermon in a whorehouse.

Please, God, make them climax.
I resisted the impulse to pound on the wall and yell to the woman,
Goddammit, fake your orgasm and get it over with
.

My body was shaking, but it wasn’t due to the vibration from the trucks that rumbled by or my neighbors’ frenetic fury. I had really screwed up my life… or, more accurately, someone else had screwed it up for me. I had just been a willing victim.

Flickering flashes from the tacky neon motel sign in the parking lot passed through the dirty window and dusty sheers to give life to the mask on the dresser across the room.

As I stared at the mask I sensed it was staring back. The golden death mask of a Babylon queen from three thousand years ago, it was a valuable museum piece—over $50 million valuable.

After the greatest warrior-queen of antiquity died, the mask was prepared by taking a mold of her face. Over the centuries, it had gained repute as a harbinger of misfortune to the possessor. Strangely, that drove up its value.

People attached value to evil: The Hope Diamond rests in the Smithsonian not only for its size but also because of the bad luck—and death—it brought to its possessors. Hell, Hollywood made a cottage industry out of avenging mummies after archaeologist Howard Carter broke into King Tut’s tomb in the 1920s and eleven people connected with the project had died of unnatural causes within a period of five years.

The vibrant mask staring at me from the dresser also carried a legacy of murder and lust across the millenniums. I had grown to hate it.

I wasn’t sure how long I gazed at the cursed mask before I finally closed my eyes. But my sleep was interrupted by a nightmare.

I dreamed I was asleep on an iron cot in the corner of a large room that had cold, bare gray concrete walls. My cell phone started to ring, and I fumbled around on the cot trying to find the little phone in the layers of brown Army blankets. A man suddenly appeared beside me in the darkness. I didn’t recognize him.

He bent down and said in a whisper, “You shouldn’t be in here alone.”

The irritating cell phone kept ringing. Why couldn’t I find it?

Finally, my brain registered that my cell phone was actually ringing in the room. I sat up. Coming out of a deep sleep with a sense of dread, I looked around for the stranger, but I was alone. The dream seemed so real.

I got up and checked the door and the window.

My cell phone started ringing again. I followed the sound to my handbag on the table. As I fumbled with the handbag, the phone fell on the floor and bounced under the bed. I got down on my hand and knees in the dark to retrieve it. By the time I got the phone in hand and flipped it open, the ringing had stopped and the faceplate registered 1 Missed Call.

I hesitated to check my voice mail, wondering if this was a trick to trace my location. Curiosity got the better of me. I went ahead and accessed it. The message was simple. A man’s voice said, “Maddy, it’s me. I’ll catch you later.”

I recognized the voice. It raised the short hairs on my soul.

I hit the repeat key to listen to it again—and again.

I couldn’t understand how he had called me.

He was dead.

Chapter 2

A Month Earlier

I looked at myself in a full-length mirror and smiled. Dressed in my $3,000 black Versace dress and $580 Domenico Vacca suede-and-crystal dress sandals that I had purchased especially for the occasion, I looked damn good. I had even splurged and bought a drop-down diamond pendant from Tiffany to match the tiny diamond earrings I already owned.

I had stepped into the pink marble and brass “Ladies’ Room” at Rutgers, the auction house, to check my outfit after the taxi ride over. I was about to make the biggest purchase of my career, a buy so big that it would be in the news tonight and tomorrow. And I wanted to look like success when the cameras started rolling.

“Good luck, Maddy.” I saluted my image and headed back inside, many thoughts colliding in my mind. One was that for a single thirty-four-year-old woman living alone in New York I had a pretty good life.

My most exciting personal possession wasn’t expensive clothes or jewelry but my black American Express card. No one back home would have recognized it as a status symbol, but in New York and L.A., where people were sophisticated, servers in restaurants and bartenders knew exactly what it was: a badge that identified you as
Somebody
.

American Express gave out the cards by invitation only. I’d set out with a vengeance to get mine. I’d heard you had to charge a minimum of $150,000 a year to keep it, so I charged everything I could on it, even gas and groceries.

Oh yes, I knew it was shallow and superficial and materialistic to get revved up about the color of a credit card, but we all have our ego into something, don’t we? That invitation from American Express represented my version of a ribbon for best cake at the fair.

To get that card and everything it represented took a long, hard decade from the day I left a small town in Middle America. My parents had both been born and raised in the same town where I was brought up. My mother and father were what snobs on the East and West coast called Flyover People because the snobs flew over them hopping from coast to coast. Climbing high in the snooty, cutthroat world of museum art and antiquities, I worked and lived on Museum Mile, a haughty Upper East Side neighborhood in Manhattan surrounded by Old Money and dot-com tycoons. A not-too-shabby accomplishment for a girl who came from a small town in Ohio and who lacked the requisite pedigrees in family, money, and Ivy League education.

Along the way a relationship up to the point of an engagement ring fell victim when I refused to move to D.C. after my investment banker fiancé accepted a promotion and transfer there. I cried at the time and sometimes I lie awake at night and think about him, imagining his warm body beside mine, but if I had to do it again, I would. He made a decision that put his career before me, and I put mine ahead of him.

Acquiring a position as curator for one of the richest museums in the world had been achieved with a lot of hard work, none of it on my back. Plenty of women were willing to put out to advance their careers, but I wasn’t one of them. Sure, I’d cut a few corners—it was that kind of business. When a rare piece of art or collectible came on the market, it was war-to-the-knife, no-holds-barred, as collectors, dealers, and curators fought to possess it.

My employer was J. Hiram Piedmont III, the scion of the family and chairman of the Piedmont Museum of Mesopotamian Art, a small but prestigious museum on Fifth Avenue near the Met with a very impressive antiquities collection.

I personally didn’t have that much contact with Hiram himself, but I knew a lot about him: He usually got what he wanted no matter what the cost, socialized with the superelite, drove only the finest cars, owned a yacht on each coast, a private plane, mansions in world-class venues, had his own personal curator who furnished his homes with art and a personal tailor-valet who made his wardrobe. His kids went to a summer camp designed to help them cope in a world in which they were… well, different. In other words, he was superrich.

Hiram the Third was also very generous about rewarding the museum’s curators as long as they brought in the results that gave him the publicity and prestige he desired. The job came with a generous expense account, along with a generous salary… and a revolving door for those who failed.

Before I was hired by Eric Vanderhof, the museum’s director, who ran the daily operations of the museum, I had been an assistant curator for the Egyptian antiquities at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Met’s collection was world-class. But the work bored the hell out of me. Rubbing elbows with the great works of history never failed to thrill me, but the job itself was boring because I was just a tiny cog in a very big organization.

I had had little control when it came to the conception and development of exhibitions. The Met kept artifacts in boring glass boxes and display cases in rooms lacking atmosphere and charm. I argued that people wanted an adventure when they visited the museum, to experience it as if “they were actually there.” It would leave a more lasting impression if the museum had an educational story about an exhibit that captured the adventure with authentic items and stories.

I was on the verge of leaving my job at the Met for an offer to be the personal curator for a top Hollywood director, traveling around the world chasing pieces for a collection being built as an investment, when I found out from a friend of a friend about the opening at the Piedmont Museum. Hiram’s pockets were much deeper than the movie director’s, and it gave me a chance to build a world-renowned collection. Luckily for me I had made a good impression with Eric and I had an excellent résumé.

With my generous salary I was able to leave my cramped apartment and rent a penthouse walking distance from the Piedmont. I gave my old car to charity and parked a new XK Jaguar in a garage. I also updated my wardrobe. I had some decent clothes, which I gave to charity, because I needed to dress with more class now. I started shopping at designer boutiques and higher-end stores. I considered my wardrobe an investment, so I didn’t feel guilty.

My passion was handbags and shoes. I had at least a hundred pairs of shoes and dozens of handbags. I had my eye on a Yves Saint Laurent white crocodile bag but decided I couldn’t afford the $18,990 price. It seemed a little too extravagant to pay for one bag. Unless I got the big bonus I expected if everything went right today.

One of my neighbors, a poor little rich girl, was studying for a master’s in luxury marketing, a growing field of expertise in a world as affluent as ours. She gave me advice on how to dress for success.

Since most of my salary went for rent, clothes, accessories, food, and paying off my student loans and credit card debts, I didn’t have much in my savings account. My theory was if you couldn’t take it with you, you might as well enjoy it now. And I did, because tomorrow looked like it was going to be even better.

I had held the title of curator for over a year now. Besides caring for the objects belonging to the museum, performing research to identify the history of the objects in our collection, and creating and managing exhibits, I was also responsible for recommending acquisitions for the museum. Basically, my job was not only to oversee the museum’s collection but also to add to it. In four years the museum had gone through three curators because a centerpiece hadn’t been found yet.

I was determined not to fail. The secret was to stay lean and hungry for pieces, keep a constant eye on the market, and fight hard and even dirty for pieces if that’s what the competition did. But that “revolving door” had been gnawing at me for the past several months. I had acquired some unique antiquities for the Piedmont, but I only recently found the pièce de résistance. I planned to bid on it at tonight’s auction.

***

I smelled money in the air the minute I walked into the auction room.

So many designer labels were present, Armani, Chanel, Ferragamo, Wang, Zegna, Hermès, Versace, Cavalli, Gucci, Lauren, Prada, Magli, to name a few, it looked like a fashion show at a high-end boutique. Tiffany’s, Winston’s, Bvlgari, Cartier, were on wrists, necks, and not a few ankles. With a little imagination, you could hear diamond-studded Rolexes
tick-tick-ticking
. A few “underdressed” people were sprinkled among the haute couture.

The emotional and sometimes intense drama that took place in a tightly packed auction room full of elegantly dressed people, flashing their jewelry, ready to pay absurd prices to possess something that no one else had, was exhilarating. Texas hold’em poker players duel for hours over stakes of hundreds of thousands or even a million. At a high-end art auction, people have bid a hundred million dollars at the flick of a paddle.

An auction was a battlefield, a world-class chess match, and a group therapy session all at the same time. Friendships were forgotten, any weakness exploited. The highest bid was not always the winning bid… paying too much for a piece was worse than failing to be the high bidder.

All of them were here tonight… Old Money, New Money, Other People’s Money… even Laundered Money. Everyone knew Mexican and Colombian drug lords were cleaning ill-gotten gains in the free-swinging art market.

With art, it didn’t matter who you were: If you had money, you could play. And as in a game of Monopoly, the more money you had, the more you could buy. An amazing number of people played the art market much like others played the stock market. There are 8 million millionaires in this world, and a bunch of them buy art not just to hang up but also to hang on to as an investment. Often it wasn’t money at issue but ego. When ego was the motivation for the buy, I treaded lightly, because things could really get nasty. The most blood I’d ever seen on an auction room floor, metaphorically speaking, was bidding between a couple involved in a divorce. The family law judge had ordered them to auction off their art collection because they couldn’t agree on dividing the property. When the bidding between them got ridiculous over an antique chair, the husband suddenly rushed forward, grabbed the chair, broke it in half, and threw half at the wife.