The Deceivers (6 page)

He wasn't a small-talk person. I knew nothing about his personal life other than the part about art. And he could be crotchety at times. I once asked him why he never married and got an irritated “Too damn busy” as a response. “None of your business” probably was what he meant.

His tenure at the Met had ended abruptly and he went into retirement a couple years after I left the museum. Rumors in the art trade had swirled after he left, ranging from being fired for telling off a supervisor to taking something home that belonged to the museum. I never really believed that he stole from the museum, but if he did, he wouldn't be the first art lover who couldn't control an irresistible impulse and pocketed something he loved.

Art addiction can affect people like drug compulsion. Art lovers have cut priceless paintings out of museum frames, used razor knives to cut old maps out of books, pocketed small antiquities on display in museums and galleries, and committed a thousand other crimes against the thing they loved the most.

I'd stopped at a drugstore on the way to Bolger's and had my digital pictures printed in an enlarged format. I couldn't afford a printer right now and probably couldn't figure out how to connect it up if I had one.

Bolger was talking to a customer when I entered the bookstore. I waved hello and walked over to a stack of books on the floor and starting flipping through the pages until the person left. Morty, his cat, was usually wandering about talking to everyone but I hadn't seen him yet. Bolger named the handsome cat after Mortimer Brewster, the character played by debonair Cary Grant in the 1940s classic comedy
Arsenic and Old Lace
.

“Finally got a customer?” I asked after the woman left.

“The woman's after my body, not my books. She pretends to have an interest in art but she doesn't know farts from Warhol.”

“From the looks of the dust and cobwebs in this place, she only needs to know the difference between a mop and a broom.”

“Dust and clutter adds to the artsy-fartsy ambiance I deliberately cultivate to prove that I'm an intellectual.”

“Where's Morty?”

“Asleep in his bed.”

“A perfect day for it.” The rain had let up but it was still damp and wet outside.

“Yeah, he has the life of Riley. Let's go in the back and I'll put on the teapot and you can tell me what's going on.”

He put a “Shut” sign on the door.

He walked with a cane for support because his arthritic hip had gotten worse over the years. I think the pain was one of the main reasons for his grouchiness.

His kitchen was a pleasant surprise.

“Neat and tidy,” he said, grinning. “Not at all what you expected after seeing heaps of books in the other room. I only keep the store a mess so people can't find what they're looking for and take away my precious books.

“So business is not so good, huh?” he asked as he got the teapot going.

“Worse than yours—no one even wants my body, unless you count my pig of a landlord who looks like he'd lust after anything that walked on two—or four—legs.”

I laid the pictures out on the table.

He grunted as he picked up his magnifying glass. “I could tell a helluva lot more if I had the actual piece instead of a picture. Can I see it?”

“I'm working on that.” I told him about Sammy bringing it to my place. “I had it in my hands for maybe one minute.”

His eyes grew wide. “You opened your door and a Thai deliveryman was standing there with a piece of Khmer art in a paper bag? You're damn right about it being weird—it's the strangest art story I've heard.”

“He showed up unexpected, got a phone call, and flew out of my place in real fright. Which makes me wonder who called him and what was said, though I have some guesses that the caller described some unpleasant things that would happen to Sammy if he didn't return the piece.”

“Doesn't sound like it's something you'd want to get involved in. I suggest we shred the pictures and you go on with your life without looking over your shoulder.”

“I'm trying to see this as an opportunity rather than a threat. I can think of lots of reasons why a restaurant delivery guy would be walking around with—”

We ended the sentence with a laugh.

“Okay, it's probably hot, so let's just do this as an academic question. Do you think it's the real McCoy?”

He grunted again. “Your pictures are pretty good. The piece certainly has the look of the real thing. But there are damn good fakes on the market today, though Khmer sandstone works don't top the lists. Sculpturing hard stone is too hard and takes incredible talent. Casting bronze and baking pottery is much easier to deal with if you're going to make a fake. With some antique Chinese porcelain pieces going for tens of millions of dollars, the rewards can be pretty incredible.”

“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.”