The Looters

by Harold Robbins

  Nunes walked along, pursing his lips before he answered. “It’s more complicated than that. This wasn’t a squabble over what was in the boathouse. The stuff had been abandoned. Hell, it barely survived the attack. Obviously, the shooter didn’t even want the items. Killing was more important to him than the antiquities. Nothing was taken from the gallery in London, either.”

  “What’s the motive?”

  “The two incidents are hits, pure and simple. He was after people. The antiquities were just a coincidence when the shooting started. At this point, we know who some of the targeted people were. Other than the Dupre woman and whoever was present for the fireworks here, they’re dead. But we still don’t know who’s pulling the trigger, why, or who’s next.”

  “That leaves a couple universal motives: greed and/or revenge.”

  Captain Ramirez asked a question, which Clyde translated. “He wants to know if you’re certain that this crime and the one in London are connected.”

  “Absolutely. You not only have the same weapon and modus operandi with a connection to antiquities, but the clincher is the woman.”

  Earlier when the Spanish officer mentioned that a taxi driver had dropped off an English or American woman in the area hours before the attack, Nunes asked the police to check all nearby hotels. Not only had an American woman and man stayed at a local hotel, but their rental car, picked up in Calais, France, and their luggage were still at the hotel also. The man couldn’t be identified, but the car had been rented under the name of Madison Dupre.

  “The fact that Dupre never returned to her hotel again to get her things raises several possibilities. She may have been kidnapped by the shooter, be on the run from him, or, worst-case scenario, she’s dead and we just haven’t found the body yet.”

  “What about the possibility of her being in bed with the shooter?” Clyde asked.

  “Possible, but unlikely. We know she went into Lipton’s gallery before the shooter did and left barely escaping an inferno. I don’t think she would have voluntarily put herself into that much risk. It’s more likely that the shooter has the typical motive—money or revenge. Dupre got in the way, maybe as a former accomplice. She scrambled out of London without going back to her hotel. I suspect she dodged the bullet and did the same here.”

  When Nunes told him about the woman’s cryptic voice-mail message, Clyde said, “Doesn’t sound like a real call for help to me. If she was completely innocent, she could’ve gone to the local police.”

  “She avoided the Spanish police, just like she did in London. And New York.”

  “So what is it with this woman? Sounds like she went from mild-mannered art curator to being involved in international murder in short order.”

  “I don’t know. It just keeps getting more and more complicated.”

  Nunes stuck his head in the boathouse to get a look at the antiquities being examined by museum personnel and stepped back again shaking his head. “It started with a Babylonian queen who had a reputation for stirring up murder. Sounds like Dupre is following the same path.”

  Chapter 47

  New York

  Something big that had changed since I had returned to Manhattan was my mode of transportation.

  The subway had always been the most convenient way to get around the island and across to the other boroughs but not the snootiest. I had walked on clouds when I acquired the privilege of calling for a driver in a Town Car whenever I needed to get around the city. When I got bumped up from a Town Car and rode around in one of those big black Cadillac SUVs… well, as the Mafia said, I was a made woman.

  Kiss that luxury good-bye.

  Now I sat in a subway car rubbing shoulders with the great unwashed masses at five o’clock commute time. Although subways are damn convenient, commute time was hot (any time of year), crowded (any time of year), and stinky (any time of year).

  Taxis were still an option, but the subway was faster and more anonymous, not to mention cheaper.

  My New York Yankee hat, sunglasses, sloppy pullover, blue jeans, and running shoes put me in disguise mode.

  Coby and I had been back in the city for three days now after flying into Boston’s Logan Airport, then taking Amtrak’s high-speed Acela express train to Penn Station. We set up camp in an eighty-foot tri-level luxury yacht called the Luv Mate, which belonged to Coby’s old Navy pal who had left the service and made millions with a Web site that specialized in hooking up military people with other military people.

  I spent most of the day making my way around the city picking up art publications and gallery and auction house catalogs. Since Stocker needed to sell antiquities to pay off his mob creditors, I was sure he’d seek private sales, with an art dealer brokering the deals. The word had to be circulated someway. I hoped one of the catalogs or art magazines I picked up would have a clue. I made sure to check out Rutgers in case Neal was involved. I came up with zero from their catalogs.

  When I got back to the yacht Coby was in a soft chair with his bare feet propped up on a railing, a cold beer in hand, tortilla chips and a bowl of guacamole at his side.

  “Don’t we look comfortable,” I said, annoyed that he was laid-back and relaxed when my mind and body were hyperventilating.

  “My mind is working every waking and sleeping moment to analyze the mission.”

  I wanted to slap him across his smug mouth. He was one of those people who seemed to get away with everything I never got away with in life. I knew better than to try to reform him. Some men—and women—can’t be housebroken. He simply wasn’t pliable. But he was hard where a woman wanted a man to be hard.

  I just shook my head and sat down and started going through the thick stack of materials I had gathered. His crunching slowly got on my nerves.

  “Would you mind closing your mouth when you chew?”

  “Already found it,” he said, crunching some more chips as he spoke.

  I looked up. “Excuse me?”

  “You wanted a lead on Stocker selling something. I found it.”

  I pressed my lips together and looked at him, stupefied. I had just spent five hours hopping in and out of subway cars, up and down steep stairs, in and out of subway stations, pounding concrete sidewalks and dodging taxis as I ran across streets to pick up a shopping bag full of written material while he sat here filling his gut with Corona and chips.

  “You know, you really are a bastard.”

  “What did I do?”

  He crunched more chips and I kept myself from grabbing one of his beer bottles and giving him a good old-fashioned attitude adjustment across the side of his head.

  “Well, are you going to tell me?”

  “It’s over there.” He gestured at a laptop computer on the seat to my right, which had a stack of printed pages on it. The computer had a Luv Mate decal on it.

  “I got on the Internet and typed in the key words for ancient Middle Eastern art, ‘Mesopotamian,’ ‘Babylonian,’ ‘Akkadian,’ that sort of thing.”

  “And you came up with something?” I grabbed the papers off the laptop.

  “A lot came up, but the stuff in your hands is the most intriguing.”

  The first piece of paper was a gossip column article. It said that Paula Golding, who had a messy divorce going with Carter Golding, had filed a restraining order to keep him from disposing of or hiding valuable pieces of his art collection, including a Babylonian piece acquired within the last week for $3 million.

  Coby shook his head. “There’s just no privacy left in this world. It cost me all of seven dollars to access the court records and print out the wife’s restraining-order request. Look at the page I have folded over.”

  The art piece was described as the marble head of Marduk, chief god of the Babylonian pantheon.

  “There was a head of Marduk in the looted items, wasn’t there?” I asked him. If anyone knew the answer to that question, he did.

  He nodded. “Yeah, we took one. Which tells me that Stocker found out where L
ipton kept the goods before he killed him. That’s why Lipton became expendable. And why all the rest of us are. Course, there’s the chance this may be a piece we didn’t take. Any more of these around?”

  “None that I know of, and for sure not one that has appeared openly on the market. He paid three million for it. That’s suspicious in and of itself.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s worth two or three times that. I would have paid seven or eight million had it gone on the auction block. And there would have been plenty of competition bidding against me.” I was so excited, I got up and paced. “No, you’re right; this has to be one of the looted items. It’s too important a piece not to have created a buzz if it had been offered for sale publicly. Someone didn’t want the world to know it was being offered, so it was sold privately—at a fire-sale price. And Golding is the perfect candidate for it. He’s not too scrupulous and he has enough money so he won’t miss a meal if the deal turned sour and a legitimate owner showed up and claimed the piece.”

  “You sound like you know this guy.”

  “I’ve bumped into him a number of times at gallery showings. He’s well-known in the art world. Very rich and very secretive about his collection. Most collectors like to beat their chest about what they own, but Golding isn’t that type. He’s a hoarder. He owns to possess and doesn’t want to share his darlings with anyone. And he has a reputation about not being too particular about the provenances of what he buys. That works well if your transactions are kept confidential.”

  “He’d buy a stolen piece?”

  I thought about the question. “If you mean would he buy a piece that was known to have been stolen, I’d say no. He wouldn’t buy it because it would come with prison stripes on it, but there are many levels of scrutiny. He’s definitely not the type to look too hard at the provenance if he really wants something. I once passed on a piece from Petra in Jordan and—”

  I suddenly stopped as I realized how Golding would have gotten connected to the Marduk piece: Neal. I had suspicion before. Now I was sure.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “I just got a revelation. I told you Stocker couldn’t do it alone. He’d have to run newspaper ads and probably have the police on him.”

  “You said he needed an art pro.”

  “Neal.”

  “Your auctioneer pal?”

  “He’s the chief auctioneer for Rutgers. A few months ago, he offered me the Petra piece, a second century B.C. vase. The piece had significant damage and the provenance was really suspect. While I was considering it, an American archaeologist, a university professor studying the Petra site, was arrested for smuggling another piece out of Jordan. He’d put a removable ceramic coating around the vase to make it look like a cheap tourist item. A sharp-eyed customs inspector at JFK got suspicious when the professor looked tense while the inspector asked how much he paid for it. The piece Neal offered me came from the same dig as the vase. I wouldn’t touch it. Neal later bragged to me that he’d sold it to Golding despite the suspect provenance.”

  I didn’t add that Neal’s boast was made in bed during one of those nights he was bragging about his deals and I was faking an orgasm.

  “So you think he sold Golding the Marduk? Were you fucking your pal Neal?”

  How rude. I ignored him. I was no longer surprised that Neal got involved with Stocker—Neal obviously had been connected with Lipton, and assisting Stocker may have been just a matter of survival. Though, knowing Neal, he’d figure out a way of making a profit even off a crazed killer.

  “Would that much money get Stocker out of his debt to these mob people?” I asked.

  “I doubt it. From what Lipton said, he’d have to sell most of the collection. You didn’t answer my second question.”

  “Get back on the Internet and run a search on Neal’s name. Because of his connection to a major auction house, you’ll have a million hits, so narrow it down to the past week. I’m going to check the antique catalogs and ads.”

  An hour later, neither of us had anything. And I still hadn’t answered his question.

  “I have one more idea,” I said.

  I called the telephone number listed in the court papers for Paula Golding’s attorney. I got past the attorney’s assistant by telling her that I had information for the attorney about Mr. Golding’s art collection. After I waited on hold for an intolerable time, a woman got on the line. I identified myself as an art dealer but refused to give my name. After verbally fencing for a moment, I got down to the bottom line.

  “I know Golding and I don’t like him. He once promised to buy a piece if I could get it for him. When I got it, he didn’t go through with the deal. I may have information about another recent deal, but I need to know who sold him the Marduk head.”

  She gave me the name of the dealer and I told her I’d call her back—and I hung up. I stared at Coby, the wheels turning in my head.

  “Gilgamesh,” I said. “Gilgamesh Gallery.”

  “You know the outfit?”

  “It doesn’t exist. Look, the New York art world is a small cottage industry with a finite number of rich and superrich players. Everyone knows everyone else. If there was a Gilgamesh Gallery doing multimillion-dollar deals, I’d know about it.”

  The name struck a chord with me. “Gilgamesh is the hero in a heroic poem about a Mesopotamian warrior-king. It was written back around 2000 B.C. It’s the Mesopotamian version of Homer’s Greek epics.” I stared at Coby, pursing my lips. “Neal has a fascination with the Gilgamesh tales. He even owns a piece of clay tablet with some lines of the poem on it. It’s his most expensive personal piece.”

  “It sounds like Stocker and your pal Neal that you’ve been fucking are made for each other. Neal has all the connections in the world of Middle Eastern art and Stocker’s sitting on the biggest stash of Middle Eastern art to hit the market since Genghis Khan looted Babylon.”

  He wanted a reaction from me about Neal and I passed on it again. “You seem to be having senior moments at an early age. I told you he didn’t take Babylon.”

  “You did?”

  Maybe it was Nunes I told. Anyway, a string of thoughts went off in my head like a string of firecrackers. “Jesus, he’s been behind everything.”

  “Genghis Khan?”

  “Neal, you moron. He’s been more than just a way for Lipton to auction the mask. I think he’s in it up to his neck. He’s the one who steered me into the Mesopotamian pieces coming onto the market, not to mention the mask itself. I told him I was going to Bensky’s. Bensky’s house gets burned down and he goes missing. I told him Abdullah was getting proof that the mask had been stolen. The poor man is murdered. I told him I was going to London. Ditto for Lipton.”

  The more I thought about it, the angrier I got. My God—he’s turned that homicidal bastard Stocker on to me, too. I had lain in bed with Neal and shared my body with him… and he turns a homicidal killer on to me. What a prick! Stocker had timed his attack in London to get me, too. And in Malaga. Worse, Neal cost me my job and framed me with the police.

  How could I be so stupid!

  At least I had no emotional ties with him. Sex with him had just been pure business fucking. I felt that it was on a higher plane because there had been no passion in it.

  “I’m glad I faked my orgasms with him, that bastard,” I blurted out.

  “So you did fuck him.”

  “Well, you wanted to know. There’s your answer. That make you horny? Are you the kind of guy who likes to watch a woman fuck another man? I could—”

  I got out of the way of a flying jalapeño pepper. He grabbed me and pulled me to him. I tried to struggle out of his arms, but I couldn’t. He had one of my hands pinned behind my back.

  “Ouch, you’re hurting me.”

  “You know what I like; you’re a cock teaser.” He kissed me hard on the lips.

  I felt the throbbing bulge getting hard against me. I got aroused as he kissed me. He slowly released
his hold on me.

  I pressed my body closer. “You’re making me horny now.”

  “Good. That’s the way I want it.”

  We retreated to the bedroom below and fucked our brains out like there was no tomorrow. When our sexual needs were satiated, we came back to the matter at hand even though we were still lying naked on top of the bed.

  “Is Neal rich?”

  “He’s well-off, but if you exclude people who actually earn a living from the definition of rich, no, he’s not. He earns a salary at Rutgers, a good one, but he’s still just an employee. He’s always bitching about how much he brings in and how little of it he sees himself. He makes up for it by putting buyers and sellers together in private deals. There was always talk about some of the stuff Neal peddled on the side, but the talk was never very loud, because it’s an industry in which few of us have clean hands.”

  He grinned. “Most of the hands in my business are dirty, too.”

  “We’re not outright thieves.”

  “As my grandmother would say, that’s the pot calling the kettle black.”

  His grandmother was probably Ma Barker.

  “I have a plan,” he said.

  “What’s your plan?”

  “We kill Stocker and Neal and get back the museum pieces.”

  “Hmmm.” I nodded. “Not bad, but I have a better one. We catch Stocker and Neal red-handed and turn them over to the FBI along with the artifacts so I can go back to my life and start rebuilding my career.”

  “Good idea. We’ll go with your plan. Okay, now that we’ve solved that problem, I have another plan.”

  He grabbed me and pulled me on top of him.

  “You’re a horny bastard.”

  “You’re a horny bitch.”

  “You’re lucky I really like you.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t have to fake my orgasms.”

  I really did like Coby. But I also didn’t totally trust him. I had a feeling that his acquiescence to my plan was about as real as my moans of ecstasy with Neal.