The Looters (9 page)

Dane and I stared at her for a few seconds, not believing what had just come out of her mouth. I found my voice first. “Sinbad?”

“He was in
Arabian Nights
. I liked that movie, too. Tell us some more about the lust and disgust your statue has caused.”

I didn’t correct her by reminding her it was a mask. She was getting into it now.

Apparently I had underestimated Cassie’s repertoire of film and literature. She was well versed, at least in the Disney-type movies.

“The Hope Diamond,” she said.

I didn’t follow her train of thought. “The Hope Diamond?”

“You know, the one with the mummy’s curse.”

Dane said, “I think Cassie is referring to the gem’s curse.”

I cleared my throat. “Actually, Cassie, I think the mummy’s curse was King Tut’s revenge….”

It went on like this for fifteen minutes. Luckily it was a short interview. I don’t think I would’ve survived any longer.

Chapter 11

A week later I stepped out of a limo in front of the museum. My heart was fluttering. I lived only a few blocks away, but rather than walk or take a proletarian taxi, I ordered up a limo as if it were Academy Award time.

This is going to be my night.

A reception would introduce Queen Semiramis to an even larger art world audience, some of the world’s crème de la crème of the antiquities trade, along with some politicians and billionaires, but most important to the news media.

No doubt Hiram thought it was going to be his night, too, but his contribution to Semiramis and the museum itself was in the form of writing checks. Having a billion-dollar checking account was very convenient, but it didn’t make him a hero. As far as I was concerned, I was the star of the show.

The world of priceless art was a playground for billionaires, a rarified atmosphere even more privileged and snooty—and cutthroat—than that of owning a Kentucky Derby champion or a sports team. Or having a movie star or supermodel wife.

The Piedmont Museum was Hiram’s “trophy,” his ego trip—an accomplishment he could buy with his inherited money, as opposed to working for a living. But I had to give Hiram credit. He was ruthless about acquiring pieces for the museum. He wasn’t alone. J. Paul Getty treated acquisitions of art with the same Art of War mentality with which he ran the oil companies that made him the richest man in the world during his lifetime.

But unlike J. Paul Getty, Hiram never personally earned a dime from his sweat, although I didn’t give old man Getty too much slack, either—most of America’s successful billionaires who hadn’t made their fortunes with computer and Internet technology had had wealthy parents who gave them a multimillion-dollar head start. Getty’s father had been an oil millionaire a hundred years ago, a time when a million dollars stretched a long ways.

The Piedmont family made its first fortune in wine. Hiram I, the founder of the family fortune, brought his family to New York in the 1890s from the Asti winegrowing region of Piedmont in northern Italy. A cousin who had a small business importing wines had already preceded Hiram I. He took over the cousin’s business and built it into a major importer.

Around the turn of the century the company started distributing Asti Spumante, a sparkling wine that became a popular alcoholic beverage.

During World War I, while Getty was getting rich from the hunger for oil to drive the war effort, Hiram heard a lot of talk about a growing temperance moment that advocated a “prohibition” on selling alcoholic beverages. He looked around and decided that the manufacturing plants for war vehicles were going to turn into an enormous boom for cars for ordinary people. Deciding nobody was going to outlaw cars, he sold his wine-importing business and invested his money in the stock of a new, risky business called General Motors. It wouldn’t be long before the car company was the largest manufacturing company in the world.

The next in line, Hiram II, added AT&T and IBM to the family’s stock portfolio.

By the time the family fortune came to the current Hiram, he was already far too rich to acquire more money. He also inherited one of the grand houses on the Upper East Side that his grandfather Hiram I had built for his wife, Sophia.

The huge mansion was built for her at a time when the Upper East Side along Central Park was known as Millionaire’s Row instead of Museum Mile.

Sophia was a fanatic about roses. She developed several varieties of hybrid tea roses—including the prizewinning Piedmont and Asti varieties. Unfortunately, she carried her love for roses not only into the garden but also to her home.

Surrounding the outside of the mansion were rose gardens and fountains and statues with rose motifs. At enormous expense, Sofia had “old-world craftsmen” in Europe create a large Gothic “rose window,” a round stained-glass window with rose floral designs.

The general consensus was that the rose window, which was in the front of the house and considered the focal point, would have looked much better in a cathedral.

Naturally, the house was called the Rose House… although people in the neighboring mansions called it a gaudy eyesore.

The word was that Hiram III wasn’t displeased when the place burned down ten years ago. What he constructed in its stead was not a home but a museum.

The Piedmont Museum was designed to look like a box—or, more accurately, a series of square boxes. From the outside it was all straight lines. Hiram’s theory was that if you made it in the shape of a box, you wouldn’t be restricted in how you filled the interiors. He was right. He wanted a “theme museum,” and the boxed shape permitted him to design the interior without posing any restrictions from the exterior.

The neighbors were unanimous in their opinion again that the new house was worse than the old—at least the old one had Sophia’s exuberant bad taste going for it.

In discussing acquisitions for the museum with Hiram, I soon found out that his taste in art was not much better than his grandmother’s taste in decorating. His most serious interest in the art he acquired was in having his picture taken next to the pieces. His wife’s attitude was exactly the same.

When I first came to work at the Piedmont it had been a traditional museum—visitors walked by enclosed glass cases and roped-off exhibits. In other words, it was very boring. Pieces were rarely displayed as anything but individual works.

My own feeling was that works of art could be best appreciated if they were presented with a story.

When I first proposed the concept to Eric, he instantly disliked it.

“This is a museum,” he said. “Each and every piece has its own unique history, sometimes a thousand years apart from the piece next to it. We can’t tell a story by combining a Babylonian chariot wheel, a Persian helmet a millennium younger, and a Roman spear from hundreds of years after that.”

I disagreed. “Every one of those civilizations battled each other. You could have an exciting story about war and conquest.”

Hiram had been intrigued with the idea.

Considering all the Mesopotamian art that we had, it was easy for me to come up with a theme.

“Babylon,” I told them, “and specifically, Nebuchadnezzar’s Babylon. He was the greatest king in the world during his time, and Babylon was the most fabulous city. Everybody has heard of the Tower of Babel and the Babylonian Captivity of the Jews. Both are themes taught in Sunday school. And of one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World: the Hanging Gardens of Babylon.”

I was right, of course. With so much colorful history and architecture, a Babylonian theme was perfect for the museum.

“We can make a visit to the museum an experience,” I told Hiram and Eric. “People wouldn’t walk by lifeless objects on stands and in display cases but pieces that combine with scenery to tell them a story. Periodically we can change the theme, reusing some of the pieces and adding those we have in storage.”

“What sort of themes?” Hiram asked.

“Universal ones—love, war, and money, the three building blocks of civilization. The public is more interested in how Cleopatra seduced Caesar and Mark Antony and ended up taking the bite of a snake than they are in how many countries the Romans conquered.”

I called it “world building,” taking a concept from science fiction writers who create futuristic and alien worlds from scratch with their imaginations.

The world I set out to build was Babylon when it was the Queen of the World… well, that was what I told Hiram and Eric, but knowing that sex was more important than culture, what I really set out to re-create was the Whore of Babylon.

As the entrance to the exhibit gallery, I chose the Ishtar Gate, the most famous entry of the city.

“Ishtar was the Babylonian Venus, the Goddess of Love,” I pointed out, showing them pictures of the enormous re-created gate that the Iraqis had built at the modern entrance to the ancient ruins. I didn’t add that she was also a shady lady, the protectress of prostitutes and alehouses.

The gate, blue with gold and white trim, resembled the entrance to a medieval castle. As with the original design, metallic images of dragons and young bulls were embedded in the walls.

Once you came through the gate, the Hanging Gardens, ziggurat terraces with sloping sides covered with carpets of magnificent flowers and vines, flowed down on both sides of the aisle. We called the pathway Processional Way, naming it after the ancient thoroughfare.

At the far end was the Tower of Babel, the “Gate of God.”

According to the Bible, the Babylonians wanted to build a tower that reached the heavens. But God disrupted the work by so confusing the languages of the workers that they could no longer understand one another.

Along the path, I placed exhibits—a fierce Assyrian in a Babylonian war chariot, statues, vases, a ninth century A.D. reproduction of the Code of Hammurabi, perhaps the oldest promulgation of laws in human history, and other artifacts of the era. Each museum piece was placed in a scene that recounted the story of Babylon.

The only thing missing was a centerpiece.

Then I found it.

When the auction hammer fell on my bid for the Mask of Semiramis, I had my showpiece—and my place in museum lore.

Both Hiram and Eric basked in the publicity light that the Babylonian theme generated… and ignored the fact that I was the one who came up with the idea of making the Piedmont a theme museum.

I arrived inside the museum just as the public announcement came on to remind people that the museum was closing in ten minutes. Although we had hired a professional event planner to supervise the event, I double-checked everything, on the theory that if anything could go wrong, it would.

The museum was closing earlier than normal because of the private reception at six o’clock. The professional caterers needed three hours to set everything up and I figured an extra hour on top of that in case of an unexpected surprise. I instructed the planner to furnish the food tables with platters of fancy hors d’oeuvre, as well as expensive wine and champagne. Nothing but the best. Two chocolate waterfalls, one milk and one dark, made from premier chocolate, surrounded by mounds of fruit and cookies for dipping, made up the dessert table. Who didn’t love chocolate?

The extra guards I had hired to make a show of security for Semiramis were already on duty.

As I walked through the museum, I noticed a man suddenly reach out to touch a marble nude statue on display. The security sensor immediately sounded. One of the guards quickly approached him and guided him out. Although we had signs posted throughout the museum that prohibited touching, for some reason people always had an urge to touch the nude statue. The same went for religious art. I never understood why.

Chapter 12

Abdullah waited anxiously on the sidewalk outside the Piedmont Museum for the Iraqi UN delegation to arrive, including its ambassador. He planned to accompany the delegation when they entered the museum.

“The diplomats are invited to a blasphemy and a sacrilege,” Abdullah had told his daughter when he left the house. “They will stand by the looted treasures of our country and smile as their pictures are taken. But will one of them raise their voice and say that Iraqi culture belongs in Iraq? Will even one of them ask how Americans would feel if the Statue of Liberty was dismantled and shipped to Baghdad?”

His long-suffering daughter refused to answer. But as he was going down the stairs, she had told him, “Don’t call me if you are arrested. I will tell them I don’t know you.”

She was right, of course. What he was doing was foolish, even stupid, and even he realized it. He was going to storm the museum and expose the fraud. To attempt that in Iraq when Saddam was in power, or even today, would get him shot. Here in America, he would be arrested and released after appearing before a judge, with a promise to come back to court on another day.

Not so bad
, he thought. The only real leverage they had over him was the threat of deportation.

He had come to the United States because his life was in danger in his own country, and he was grateful that he was here. His complaints were not against the Americans in general but against the rich and powerful people who used their status to steal the cultural treasures of his nation.

He had stopped trying to defend his actions with his daughter. He was doing something foolish. “What if you are deported back to Iraq for your actions?” she asked many times. That would be a death sentence. For a moment he wavered, ready to abandon his mission, but then he thought of his father, who had died for the mask, and it encouraged him.

A fine mist had now turned into a light drizzle. Abdullah was eager to get inside where it was dry and warm, even though he stood under an awning to avoid the rain. He cursed himself for not bringing his umbrella.

When the six-party delegation finally arrived in a stretch limo, he quickly fell in behind them and entered the museum with them.

Chapter 13

Hiram’s store-bought wife, Angela, was again serving as official hostess tonight. A position I should have held. Antiquities and museums bored her… except when the cameras were on her.