The Deceivers

by Harold Robbins

  “I have a feeling it’s the real thing. When I held it in my hands, I felt the touch of the ancient artist who created it.”

  That got a humph! instead of a grunt from Bolger. “You could make a fortune opening a psychic art evaluation service. But back to reality: The first instinct is always to identify Khmer pieces only with the Angkor temple complex, especially Angkor Wat. That’s where the empire was centered and the distinctive Khmer style was perfected, but there are hundreds of lesser temple sites scattered in the jungles of Cambodia, some of them still undiscovered.”

  He looked up at me. “Hundreds of temples, thousands of pieces, over a century of looting, no cataloging of the artifacts, all a recipe for disaster for the wondrous complex. You know better than me what a terrible tragedy the looting of the Iraqi museum was. It’s been compared to the loss of the great library of Alexandria that held much of the knowledge of antiquity during the time of Julius Caesar and Cleopatra. But you don’t hear that sense of loss when people talk about thousands of pieces of Khmer art being stolen by tomb robbers each year.”

  He shook his head in disgust. “Do you know that Angkor Wat was left off a modern list of the so-called wonders of the world? The list was voted on by millions of people who have no idea of where the hell Cambodia is, never heard of Khmer art, and are ignorant of the wonders of Angkor.

  “It’s that extensive? The looting?”

  “You have to assume that any piece of Khmer art without a clear record of legal ownership for the last century has been looted. And since the West has only had a high interest in Khmer art for the past few decades, that means most of the stuff on the market, in collections, and displayed at museums don’t have valid provenances. In fact, a lot of Khmer stuff is sold specifically without provenances of any kind.”

  Even before talking to Bolger I had already pretty well concluded that the Apsaras piece was looted, but that wasn’t the end of the story for me. I was too desperate to let it go without getting to the bottom of it.

  “What’s even worse,” he said, “is that for every piece they take out, the temple robbers destroy many more. To get this little section of Apsarases, the looters would have broken off a much larger piece, destroying much of it and just salvaging a small part. They do the same thing with statues. They usually won’t take a whole statue because it’s too hard to conceal crossing border checkpoints. Instead they cut off the head because it’s the most valuable part and leave the body.”

  To maliciously damage a piece of art that had survived centuries or even millenniums was a real sin. I told him I wished now that I’d gotten deeper into the art of the Far East.

  “You’re not alone. Our art is focused on the great Mediterranean civilizations because they’re linked to our heritage. There’s a diminishing number of pieces on the market because it’s been collected for so long. Now collectors have woken up to the Far East and the fact that Khmer art is among the most splendid on the planet. And that means trouble for the sites in Cambodia, especially the Angkor site. One of the highest achievements of man’s artistic talents is being destroyed to satisfy the greed of collectors.”

  I gave a big sigh. “Thanks, Bolger, just what I needed when everything has gone to hell in my life. Now I can agonize over the loss of irreplaceable cultural treasures. Please tell me what you think about its authenticity before I cut my wrists.”

  He pointed at the pictures. “How do you expect me to tell you anything from pictures?”

  “Because you’re a genius.”

  “Now you’ve pressed the right button, girl.”

  “Just give me your gut reaction.”

  He went back to examining the pictures.

  I knew his gut reaction was usually as good as most scientific tests. The cost of tests ran into the thousands and often Bolger could study an object with the naked eye and be right most of the time. A lot of people who worked with art could do the same, including me, but since he had worked for decades authenticating pieces at one of the major museums of the world, his frame of reference was infinitely greater than most of us.

  He studied the pictures closely for several more minutes before he said anything. “It looks right … I can see why you think it could be real but are cautious. Faking has become such a fine art nowadays. Even if I had it in front of me, I’d need to study it.”

  “What’s your gut saying?”

  “The same as yours—it pings as genuine. Even the broken edges appear to be what you’d expect from a piece looted from a temple. But unless you have the actual piece and can put it through the paces, you can be easily fooled, especially by a photograph. Excuse the pun, but the art of faking has turned into a real art with modern techniques.”

  I pursed my lips and nodded. “I read that there are sculptors in Greece, the Middle East, and the Far East who are able to create ancient-looking art that’s difficult to distinguish from the real stuff. Even governments are getting into the picture. The museum in Cambodia’s capital has a workshop that’s turning out realistic-looking fakes for the tourist market.”

  “We both know that it’s usually easy to spot a fake,” Bolger said, “but once in a while a piece shows up that is so good, it’s really hard to tell whether it was created for Julius Caesar or for someone last week.”

  “If it’s a fake, wouldn’t scientific tests show that the sandstone doesn’t match Angkor antiquities?”

  He shook his head. “Forgers get blocks of sandstone from the actual quarries used to build Khmer temples. They paint it with chemical solutions and bury it in Cambodian soil for months. It’s very convincing. As you know, you can’t scientifically age-date a stonework, anyway. Radiocarbon dating only applies to materials like wood which was once living.”

  The kettle whistled on the stove signaling that the water was ready.

  “Why don’t you fix us some tea while I grab a couple of my books.”

  He talked as we leafed through books.

  “Since you’ve expressed an ignorance about Khmer art, we’ll start with the name. Cambodia is the name of the country, but the people are mostly of an ethnic heritage called Khmer. A thousand years ago, when Europe was coming out of the Dark Ages, the Khmer Empire had its center at Angkor in what is now central Cambodia. Its kings created the world’s largest religious compound, probably as tributes to themselves as living gods, much like the Egyptian pharaohs did.

  “Their religion was an adaptation of Buddhism from India and in that region a Buddhist temple is called a wat. The most famous temple complex is Angkor Wat built in the early twelfth century under King Suryavarman II.”

  “So Cambodians are Khmers, Angkor is where they expressed their art in the grandest way, and a wat is a temple.”

  I knew generally most of what he related but would never have gotten the king’s name right.

  “That’s the big picture. Angkor Wat is also famous for having the longest bas-relief panels in the world. Most of the sandstone carvings were once painted and gilded. They depict historical episodes in the life of King Suryavarman, scenes from Hindu epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, the exploits of the Hindu gods Siva and Vishnu with celestial nymphs known as Apsarases, and scenes from the daily life of the Khmer people at the time the complex was built.”

  That was a mouthful. Like I said, his knowledge was encyclopedic.

  He tapped a picture. “Tell me more about the workmanship on the piece you saw.”

  “I wish I had a camera that did micro close-ups because the detail was striking. The faces were really well defined and the dancers wore intricate jewelry. I didn’t find any major cracks or repairs in the stone. The surface coloring was in splotches of red, brown, and orange hues.”

  He nodded. “Khmer pieces from Cambodia frequently have this mottled, variegated surface coloring. The colors actually leach from both the inside of the sandstone and minerals from the area where it was removed. But like I said, the stone is easy for a forger to get.”

  As I talked, he quickly
flipped through a book.

  “Ah, here it is. Look at this. A piece from an Angkor Wat temple wall.”

  The image was of three Apsarases. The women portrayed in the book resembled the bas-relief that Sammy had shown me, but I immediately saw tiny differences, which was to be expected: Artists who did the carvings gave their own interpretations of Apsarases, but kept faithful to the mythology that they were exotic dancing girls.

  “Similar, but not the same.”

  I slowly leafed through the book as he went back to examining my pictures with his magnifying glass. Pictures of the dancers had only slight differences in pose and jewelry from Sammy’s piece and the others in the book, but I could spot subtle differences that indicated different artists had created them.

  “Obviously all the Apsaras pieces bear similarities,” I said, “but I don’t see a match close enough to suggest that Sammy’s piece was a copy.”

  He finally set down the magnifying glass and pictures. “I need to see the piece. Even at that, it’s so good, tests would have to be run on it. You realize it’s extremely valuable even if it’s a fake.”

  I nodded. “Far Eastern art is hot on the market.”

  “Especially Khmer art now that the Chinese have not only cracked down on contraband art, handing out death penalties for infractions, but Chinese billionaires are buying up the stuff in foreign hands and taking it back home. The antiquities black market is worth billions of dollars. You even have poor countries tolerating the illegal export of art objects because corrupt government officials are on the take.

  “Even countries in Western Europe like Italy and Greece which have the money to protect their cultural heritages are plagued by tomb raiders. The professional tomb robbers like those they call tombaroli in Italy are murdering their own cultural history, but at least the Italian government fights the thieves. That’s not always the case in the poor countries of Southeast Asia, Latin America, and the Near East. There’s wholesale looting.”

  Mortimer suddenly jumped on my lap and rubbed his body against me. “Hello, Morty.” As I petted him he purred and kneaded his claws into my thigh. A little painful to take, but cats think we love it.

  “Tell me more about Angkor Wat art,” I said. “How many of these Apsarases are there?”

  “Twenty-six, each representing a distinct aspect of the performing arts, similar to how the ancient Greeks thought of their Muses. A couple thousand images of them are carved in sandstone at Angkor Wat. That’s why they’re so identified with the site.”

  “Have you been to Angkor?”

  “A couple times. Long ago. The damage to the site is obvious and a lot of it happened during our lifetimes, especially during the seventies and eighties. You’ve heard of the Khmer Rouge?”

  “Some kind of political thing?”

  He nodded his head. “Some kind of political insanity. Khmer Rouge means Red Khmers, as in communist red. They took over the country back in the mid-seventies and banned all institutions—stores, banks, hospitals, schools, religion, even families. They set up an unworkable agrarian utopian society instead.

  “Everyone was forced to work twelve to fourteen hours a day, every day. Children were separated from their parents to work in mobile groups or serve as soldiers. People were fed a watery bowl of soup with a few grains of rice thrown in. A horrible time in history,” he said, shaking his head. “Babies, children, adults, the elderly were killed en masse.”

  I grimaced.

  “The Killing Fields is what they came to call it,” he said.

  I’d heard the expression. “Wasn’t that a Vietnam War thing?”

  “The years following it. The Killing Fields were sites in Cambodia where large numbers of people were killed and buried by the Khmer Rouge. A good movie was made about it.”

  “How many people actually died?”

  “One out of every three or four people in a pretty small country, to the tune of maybe a couple million. The commies killed people if they didn’t like them, if they didn’t work hard enough, if they were educated, if they came from different ethnic groups, if they showed any sympathy when their family members were taken away to be killed—”

  “Jesus, who didn’t they kill?”

  “They weren’t discriminatory, for sure. Everyone had to pledge total allegiance to the government. It was a campaign based on instilling constant fear and keeping their victims off balance. It was a bloody, brutal reign of terror.”

  I smiled at him. “Is there a moral in this horror story for me?”

  “Absolutely. You start flirting with contraband Khmer art, you’ll find yourself running with tigers and sharks that make the Mafia look like schoolboys.”

  “Sammy’s Thai, not Cambodian.”

  “Same difference, right next door. The Thais run the criminal syndicates in Indochina because they have more international contacts than any of the other groups.”

  He leaned forward, locking eyes, staring at me, hard. “Walk away from this, Maddy. It means nothing but trouble for you. Things are a little tough, but I still get authentication work. I’ll start subbing the assignments out to you.”

  “Thanks. Let me think about it.”

  I needed to change the subject and talk more about Khmer art instead of the sick bastards who killed people—and the dangers to me. Bolger didn’t understand how desperate I was.

  Morty stopped kneading and got himself in a comfortable position on my lap.

  “Getting back to Khmer art, what do you look for in differentiating between an authentic piece and a forgery?” I asked.

  “Sandstone is a good substance for creating frauds because it’s not subject to most tests that determine authenticity. While none of the tests tell us how old the piece is, we can examine the corrosive coating on the stone to see if the chemical, biological, and mineralogical composition of patina conforms to the conditions where it was supposed to have been for centuries. A forged antiquity has to appear properly aged, so the forger has to make it look a thousand years old in a matter of weeks or months. That’s where many stone forgers trip up—the artists can’t get that thin coating on the piece exactly right. At least in terms of coloring, we can see your piece has the right look.”

  “Was there anything you saw in the pictures that suggested it wasn’t created with ancient tools?”

  “The artist could have used iron tools not much different than the ones used for eons.”

  I knew there were no obvious signs of modern tools but I was still picking his brain. “So basically, if it turns out the sandstone itself is from a quarry where it should have originated from, and the workmanship is on par with the craftsmen of the Khmer Empire, then the patina is what we should concentrate on.”

  “But even that’s not a sure bet. Weathering causes an erosion layer at the surface that can vary from less than a millimeter up to several centimeters deep. Sometimes the environment deletes layers rather than adds them. It gets even more complicated because tomb looters sometimes clean pieces, wiping away a couple thousand years of aging, because they’re under the erroneous impression that a piece is more valuable clean than in its natural state.”

  He was seeing me out when I noticed several small art pieces on a high shelf—a bronze of the monkey general Hanuman who rescued Rama’s wife, a sandstone Buddha sitting on a wide-back chair made of a coiled cobra with fanning head, and a sandstone linga, a phallic symbol of fertility often identified with the god Siva.

  “The linga’s Indian,” he said, “but the monkey general and the Buddha on the naga, the cobra, are Khmer, based on Hindu mythology. Reproductions, but I wish they were real. A foolish collector paid ten thousand for the monkey king in Hong Kong. It took me about thirty seconds to tell him it was a fake. The patina came off on my fingers when I wet it and rubbed it. He left in disgust and didn’t pay me. I guess he thought leaving an expensive fraud was payment enough.”

  “I just remembered something. There was some kind of marking on the back of the Apsaras relief
.”

  “What kind of marking?”

  “I’m not positive, but it looked a little like a half-moon.”

  Bolger stared at me.

  “Have you seen the mark before?” I asked.

  “No, of course not. It could be anything. Are you going to take my advice and walk away from this thing?”

  “I don’t know what I’m going to do. I’m thinking about going to that café where Sammy works.”

  He shook his head. “You didn’t listen to anything I said about how ruthless these people are. There’s no guarantee your friend Sammy even still has the piece. Hell, Maddy, there’s no guarantee Sammy is still breathing. They call double-crossers like Sammy ‘fish food’ in the Far East. That’s what they become after they’re chopped up and the pieces are tossed into the sea.”

  “I know, I know. To be honest, I feel like I’m spinning in circles. I can’t stand the idea of Sammy and a gang of antiquity thugs smashing works of the ages. And I’m wondering if there isn’t something in it for me.” I smiled. “Maybe the gods were telling me something when they sent Sammy to my door.”

  “And maybe they were testing your naïveté. Wasn’t your experience with Iraqi looters enough for you? Look what it cost you. This time it may be your life.”

  “That’s not fair. I lost my job because I wouldn’t stand by and let a cultural treasure be lost to the Iraqi people.”

  “It’s your life. Just watch yourself.”

  “I’ll be careful.”

  Famous last words.

  7

  Bangkok, Thailand, a week earlier

  Taksin moved through the Thieves Market in the darkness with ease after having done it hundreds of times. The stalls were closed but when the marketplace awoke in the morning, it would be buzzing with customers, many of them tourists looking for a bargain. The marketplace got its name from the practice of thieves unloading their ill-gotten gains there. That was all supposed to be in the past because the thievery practiced today in the market was mostly just separating tourists from their money.