Those Who Feel Nothing (23 page)

Byng looked at her. OK, she obviously did sound impatient.

‘As I said, he's a world expert on Khmer art,' Byng continued. ‘He has written the definitive book on it. But he's under investigation in the US at the moment. A federal seizure lawsuit has been issued there on behalf of Cambodia for the return of two statues illegally removed from the country in 1975.'

‘Are either one of these statues the Ganesh you talked about?' Gilchrist said to Rutherford.

‘The big brass one?' Byng said to her friend.

Rutherford nodded.

‘No. These are something else.'

‘What does Windsor say?'

‘He denies the accusations, of course. But he's got form. He's been implicated in the sale of looted artefacts to the New York, Chicago and Philadelphia museums.'

‘Quite an entrepreneur,' Gilchrist said.

‘Quite so,' Byng said. ‘In the main one, the federal lawyers say Mr Windsor – who is identified in court papers only as “the Collector” – bought a twelfth-century sandstone statue of a Khmer warrior sometime in the early seventies knowing that it had been looted from Koh Ker during the Cambodian civil war.'

‘They're only bringing this up now?' Heap said.

‘Well, it was only in 2007 that at Koh Ker a pedestal and a pair of feet, without the rest of the statue, were uncovered. A couple of years later a French widow approached Montague Pyke about selling this sandstone statue of a Khmer warrior her husband had owned since 1975.'

‘Somebody saw that the statue and the feet on the pedestal matched when Montague Pyke posted a photo of it in its catalogue?' Heap said.

Byng nodded.

‘Exactly. The Frenchman had bought it at auction in Paris. The court papers say Windsor assisted with export licences that concealed what the statue actually was when it was shipped to Paris for that 1975 auction. The papers also say that Windsor had bought it from a Thai dealer in Bangkok in the early seventies who ran an organized gang of looters.

‘So the sale was suspended. But the auction house is fighting the United States government's effort to seize the statue, arguing there is no evidence that the statue was looted or is even the property of the Cambodian government.'

‘And Windsor?'

‘He's annoyed because he says he is being smeared. He's not a defendant in the case. The court papers don't provide the evidence to support the US's depiction of him. He says he has never owned the statue although he wanted to. He simply recommended to the London auction house that they bought it from the Thai dealer.'

‘What does the auction house say?' Gilchrist said.

‘That Cambodia can't lay claim to a statue that was abandoned in the jungle fifty generations ago.'

‘What do you think about that argument?' Heap said.

Byng crossed her legs and Heap flushed, bless him.

‘The US government's view is that the statue is still Cambodian property because the state has never transferred it to anyone else. It's stolen property.'

'And your view?' Heap said.

‘Officially we all work to a 1970 UNESCO convention preventing the illegal transfer of cultural property – but it is no longer fit for purpose.'

Byng clasped her hands on her knee. Heap was riveted. Gilchrist smiled to herself. This woman did have great legs. When she'd crossed them earlier it had almost been a
Basic Instinct
moment. Almost. And, dammit, the woman was bright. Gilchrist was trying hard not to hate her.

‘The looting is one thing but all a government has to do is issue export licences and it can flog off its entire cultural heritage quite legally. If in Syria Assad had decided to empty the museums to buy more chemical weapons to attack his own people, he could have done so quite legally.'

Heap frowned. ‘What's the deal when iconoclasts take over a country? I remember the Taleban blowing up those Buddhist statues at Bamiyan when they took over Afghanistan.'

Gilchrist nodded warily as she had no idea what he was talking about.

‘You know those statues dated back to the second and fifth centuries?' Byng said. ‘And in the Balkans in the civil war, ancient monuments of special cultural significance were targeted by all sides: churches, mosques – even bridges. The Sarajevo National Library was burned to the ground.'

‘Nothing new there,' Heap observed. ‘We had our own dissolution of the monasteries in Henry VIII's time and Oliver Cromwell was pretty iconoclastic during our own Civil War.'

Byng was taking more time to deal with Heap, Gilchrist noticed. Big Brain had that effect.

‘True,' Byng said, leaning towards him. ‘But you kind of hope everyone but ignorant fundamentalists of whatever religion have learned about the importance of cultural heritage by now. And certainly some countries are getting more gung-ho about getting stuff back.'

‘You mean Greece and the Elgin Marbles?' Heap said.

‘I was thinking of Egypt. The latest government is suing English and Belgian museums for the return of tomb carvings. It says that if the museums don't return the artefacts archaeologists from these museums won't be allowed to dig in Egypt. Not that it'll be safe to dig there any time soon in any case. They've been asking for the Rosetta Stone back from the British Museum since 2004 but that's not going to happen.'

‘But if something ancient is in a country then I guess it belongs to that country,' Heap said. ‘I suppose if the government wants to destroy it, it can.'

‘There is an argument that it belongs to the world and they just happen to be living on the land where it was found,' Rutherford interjected. ‘If you're suggesting these people are descendants of the people who built these things that is a bit of a stretch. Seems to me there is no such thing as owner-occupiers. Just occupiers.'

‘What happens if there is a civil war going on as in Syria?' Gilchrist said.

‘There is a Hague convention to protect property during armed conflict but it's pretty ineffectual,' Byng said. ‘Both sides in any civil war loot treasures to buy weapons. And there are opportunistic thefts from criminal gangs. Remember when all of Iraq's museums got sacked during that war?'

Rutherford leaned forward. ‘In the antiquities world cultural preservation and national ownership often collide,' she said. ‘If the French and other western collectors had not preserved this art, what would be the understanding of Khmer culture today?'

‘Is Windsor a collector as well as a dealer?' Gilchrist said, trying to get the conversation back on track.

‘Most dealers are both,' Byng said. ‘Windsor is getting on, so he's probably spent half a century putting together his own collection. He has donated works to Phnom Penh's National Museum and prestige museums in America. The irony about the National Museum donations is that for all we know it had all been looted from there in the first place during the Khmer Rouge period.'

‘Nobody gives something for nothing,' Heap said. Then flushed.

‘In the case of Windsor you might be right,' Byng said. ‘He has been investigated before for involvement in dodgy dealings. And when I checked with UNESCO's Phnom Penh field office they were very sceptical. They reckon his definitive book is a kind of guide to all the art looted from the country. The book has beautiful photographs of beautiful works that are all privately owned in secret places. In the book the owners are anonymous and Windsor refuses to tell Cambodia who they are or where the objects are.'

‘He doesn't want his pals to risk losing their art to the country it was stolen from,' Heap said.

Byng nodded. ‘He says the items are being better looked after than they would be back in Cambodia. And maybe he has a point. Who will pay for the conservation, the repatriation? Where will they be displayed? He's said he's going to donate much of his own collection to Cambodia – but not until he's dead.'

Gilchrist had heard enough. Plus she was fed up with feeling totally out of her depth. She got up from the sofa. ‘We need to see this man,' she said. ‘Do you know where he is in Brighton?'

‘He backs a shop here and I think he has a house here but I'm not sure – he also lives in New York and Bangkok. He's a very wealthy man. In addition he spends a lot of time on a beautiful old steam-powered yacht – it was a rum-runner during Prohibition.'

‘Sounds like ascertaining his current whereabouts might prove difficult,' Gilchrist said.

‘I know the shop is in the Lanes,' Byng said. ‘Although it's not under his name.'

Gilchrist turned to Heap.

‘We also need a word with Rafferty.'

‘Ma'am.'

Byng got up from her cross-legged position on the sofa with such elegance Gilchrist wanted to spit in her face.

‘If I can be of any further help,' she said, holding out her hand.

‘You've already been more than helpful,' Gilchrist said, resisting the urge to crush her hand in her own fierce grip. She hoped she sounded genuine. She glanced at Heap. Obviously not.

You catch up with the black Mercedes and follow it to the Terror Museum, the dreaded former home of the Hungarian secret police. Harry Nesbo gets out and enters the museum.

You abandon the taxi a street away. You take out a handful of notes to leave for the driver but someone else is going to steal this car and go through it before he ever gets it back. You stuff the notes back in your pocket.

The Terror Museum. You're too young to remember its original purpose but you're aware of its vile history as headquarters of both fascist and communist secret police.

It's a massive building on a corner at Andrassy Ut. On the outside walls are passport photographs of all those who died at the hands of occupiers of these buildings over many decades.

You do not allow yourself to get emotionally engaged, although you know how helpless each one would have been at the hands of the blunted and the sadistic. You have lived in times where you have seen such men and women all over the world. The scum of the earth. The despicable ones. The ones who feel nothing. Your aim has always been to redress that balance. You laugh harshly. How can one man do that or imagine that he can?

You go in and buy a ticket. You know your quarry is in here somewhere. Your instructions from Paradise are vague. Monitor him.

Nesbo is buying a bottle of water in the café to the left of the ticket office. You want to leave your new hat on as disguise but it is warm in here.

As you start to take it off your quarry suddenly appears in front of you. He has doubled back to collect an audio-visual guide from the bookshop and is now wearing headphones. He is fiddling with the headphones, you are fiddling with the hat. You get away with it, you think.

There is an inner courtyard beneath an internal well that rises four floors to a glass roof. People used to be hung in this courtyard. Now there is a pool and, on a large plinth in the centre of it, the hulking form of a rusty tank. In 1956 this tank rolled down the street outside to crush the uprising against the Soviet scum. You hear people say how surprisingly big it is. You have seen tanks before.

You look up. There are balconied walkways on three sides of the well on each floor. On the fourth a single wall ascends from ground floor to top floor. This wall is covered from top to bottom with blow-ups of secret police file photographs of those unfortunate enough to have been imprisoned, tortured and killed here.

There are thousands of them. It is overwhelming but you cannot allow yourself to be overwhelmed. You have a job to do.

Each blown-up photo, face front, eyes staring, has a number stamped across it. You see your quarry on the ground floor looking across at the photographs, checking them against the book in his package.

The history of this building is laid out in an exhibition that begins on the second floor and moves down the building, ending in the basement.

After your quarry has examined the photos on the wall for a little time you see him enter the lift. You stand before the closed doors and watch the indicator. The lift stops at two. You go up the stairs, two steps at a time. The heating in this museum is powerful. Now you are hot. It gives you the excuse to take your coat off.

One of your strengths is that you are forgettable. Your features are nondescript, your physique average, your demeanour modest. Except to the practised eye, taking your coat off is as good as adopting a disguise.

You find Nesbo cutting through a gallery in darkness into a long, high room with filing cabinets on every wall from floor to ceiling. The drawers of the cabinets are shallow, as if there is one per person. There are moveable ladders to access the higher drawers. You stand near the entrance, showing undue interest in a desk with absolutely nothing interesting about it.

Nesbo has opened a file drawer. You expect alarms to go off. Silence, although maybe lights are flashing somewhere. He closes the drawer, turns and leaves the room. Not quickly, not slowly. The book is no longer in his hand.

You glance around quickly but, you hope, casually. A group of young people are ushered in and cluster around the cabinet. A guide begins to talk to them.

Your brief is vague enough to give you a dilemma. Do you follow the man or the book? You are calculating how far Nesbo will have got, either by the stairs or the lift if this group are there one minute, two minutes, three minutes. You figure you have about thirty seconds before you lose him.

The man or the book?

There is movement to your left. A woman has entered the room from the wrong direction. Your height, swathed in a long coat, her head and shoulders wrapped in a shawl. Appropriate for the cold outside; suffocating, you would have thought, for the heat in here but it means her face is concealed.

She is looking towards the tour group.

Your decision is made. You loiter around other desks in the centre of the room. After what seems an age but is really only a couple of minutes the tour group moves on.