The Deceivers (9 page)

Rather than showing panic or anger, Taksin's instinctual reaction from his training as a monk was to remain calm and give a traditional Thai greeting—the
wai
, hands placed together and raised toward the face with the head lowered in a small bow.

He kept his face impassive.

“Why have you come to my house?” he asked the foreigner.

The man hit him.

As Phitsanu leaped forward to defend his friend, a Cambodian grabbed him by the hair, jerked his head back, and slid the cutting edge of a long knife across his throat.

8

New York

Another fine mess I'd gotten myself into.

Bolger's warnings stayed with me as I walked back to the subway station. It drove up my paranoia. I stopped and pretended to look at merchandise in a clothing store window to see if anyone was following me. In my mind, the candidates would be movie-style Asian martial arts experts—young, gravely intense, slender, kickboxing-karate-looking dudes in black clothes. Once again I saw nothing to fuel my fears.

My head was buzzing again with a million conflicting thoughts, most of which could get me into trouble, a circumstance I seemed to gravitate to with little encouragement from the rest of the world. Being broke just aggravated my own inherent propensity to get in over my head. Worse, nothing was simple. Messing with a gang of art thieves could prove deadly, a fact I knew from personal experience.

I mulled my next move while I sat in a crowded subway car and stared blankly at a printed public service warning about family preparedness for terrorist attacks.

I had two choices: call the police or go to the Thai restaurant where Sammy was employed.

If I called the police, I would be out of it, period. My chances of making any money would be nil and there was no guarantee they would be able to recover the Apsaras piece or anything else.

Worse, considering my previous experience with art theft and art cops, it would probably put me under suspicion because the cops would assume it was a falling out of thieves and I'd gone to the police for revenge. Or, as they say on the evening news, I'd be a “person of interest” in an art fraud. Not something my already tarnished reputation could absorb.

If I went to the restaurant and talked to Sammy and whoever else was involved, who knows what would happen, but like Bolger, I could think of some very dicey scenarios, none of them good for me.

For all I knew, the Apsaras piece was a very good reproduction. If so … well, that might not be the worst of all worlds. Far East art was hot and there was a limited supply. The piece didn't even have to be represented as authentic. There were plenty of rich collectors who would buy a good fake just to show it off to friends, boasting of course that they paid half a million for it instead of fifty thousand.

Before I called the police, I'd call the Cambodian embassy in Washington and find out if they paid “finder's fees” for recovery of their country's art.

When a valuable piece of art was stolen, the owner or insurance company often offered a payment for its recovery. That commonly translated into ten percent of the value of the piece. As bizarre as it sounded, it was not unusual for thieves to steal something worth millions just so an accomplice could negotiate a finder's fee for its return.

If I could prove to the Cambodians that I not only knew where the Apsarsas piece was, but that there was a whole hoard of them, I might work out a fee that got me out of desperate straits. And get the pieces back to where they belonged.

To get a finder's fee, I had to make sure it was an actual antiquity.

The first obvious step meant walking into a restaurant that was probably a den of smugglers; a place where the staff spoke a language I didn't understand; and who might stand in front of me smiling while they discussed in Thai different ways to murder me and slice me up for chicken-on-a-stick while I stood there looking stupid.

I didn't kid myself—on the one hand, returning it was going to be like how Indiana Jones operated, battling temple looters so the antiquities rightfully went to a museum. But as Bolger got across so adamantly, the violence in the real world of art smuggling wasn't done with movie magic.

I wasn't even sure the people in the restaurant were involved, but it seemed highly likely.

Going to the Thai restaurant was the scariest idea I could think of … but absolutely necessary.

I had to go to that restaurant. My feet were already taking me there.

*   *   *

THREE BLOCKS FROM
my apartment, the restaurant was a rice bowl and pad thai place—inexpensive food, reasonably healthy, and with good-sized portions. It was my kind of dining experience now that I was one step from a homeless shelter.

I thought hard about how I would approach Sammy when I got to the restaurant. Thought hard and came up with exactly nothing. The last time I saw Sammy he was panicking over something being said over the phone. For all I knew, he was now being served up to customers as Siamese spicy beef.

Still pondering what I would say by the time I made it to the restaurant, I said the hell with it and walked in.

The place was warm and smelled of succulent Thai spices. Busy, too. Most of the tables were occupied. A waiter tried to seat me and I said, “Takeout.”

I'd never been in a Thai or Chinese restaurant where the servers didn't speak pidgin English with a heavy accent. I'm sure the same was true across America. While I should be humbled by the fact that at least they spoke a foreign language, it made me wonder if they didn't cultivate the accent for effect, like American actors cultivate British accents. After all, who wanted to eat in an Asian restaurant where the waiters spoke perfect English?

I had this irrelevant thought as I stood by the cash register and pretended to look at a take-out menu. Sammy wasn't in sight.

I asked the young woman behind the counter, “Sammy, the deliveryman, is he around?”

“Sam—me?”

“You know, Sammy, delivers food.” What the hell was his Thai name?

She gave me a blank look.

“Delivery, the deliveryman. Takeout. Deliver to apartments. You know, Sammy.”

“No, no Sammy.” She shook her head and smiled.

Why did I think she was lying? A waiter came out of the kitchen, the door swinging shut behind him. We both looked in that direction. When I turned back, she avoided my eye and pretended to look at a receipt.

I went for the kitchen door—fast—with an exclamation from the hostess behind me. Pushing through the door I almost ran right into Sammy. He gave a startled yell and fled toward the back of the kitchen.

“Sammy! Wait!”

As I started after him, a short, squat man with a butcher knife suddenly stepped in front of me. He waved the big knife and shouted. I caught one word in English: “Out!”

“I need to talk to—”

“Out! Out!”

He waved the butcher knife and I backed up, walking quickly through the restaurant and out the front door, smiling and pretending that I hadn't just been threatened by a cook with a large knife.

Once outside, I picked up my pace and hurried down the street. There was more than one way to skin a dog or cat or whatever that saying was that my father used to say when I was a kid. An alley ran in back of the restaurant and I headed for it, going down the street and around the corner to enter it.

The back door to the restaurant was a hundred feet from the corner. As I hurried past the Dumpsters posted behind the businesses and approached the back of the restaurant, I saw smoke coming from the other side of its Dumpster.

A cigarette came flying into the alley. Sammy followed it, yawning and stretching. Obviously a man with little on his mind except the next noodle order.

He saw me and gaped.

“Sammy! I need to talk to you!”

He froze in place and gawked. Something akin to panic spread across his face.

“Sammy, I need to see that piece. Don't worry, I'll help you. It might be extremely—”

I suddenly realized that he wasn't looking at me. He was staring at something behind me. I swung around.

Holy shit.

A man dressed in black, Thai I guessed, with a white shirt and a black tie, walked toward us.

I stared at the gun in his hand, fascinated and petrified at the same time.

I could hear Sammy's footsteps retreating behind me but I was too stunned to turn and look or even start running myself.

The man made eye contact with me and raised the gun to fire.

I stood still, rooted. My feet wouldn't move. I just stared openmouthed at the man. It wasn't registering. A man was coming at me with a gun in his hand and was about to shoot me.

He looked beyond me and pointed the gun. I unfroze enough to see that he was pointing it at Sammy who was running like hell up the alley. I screamed and dropped to my knees as a big black SUV came around the corner and into the alley with screeching tires.

The man with the gun swung around to face the SUV. He seemed to be unsure of what to do as the SUV came at him and another one entered from the other end of the alley.

He made up his mind and put his hands up in the air, still holding the gun until men and women in body armor leaped out of the SUV with one of them shouting for him to drop his weapon.

NYPD was printed on their vests.

9

“I was in the wrong place at the wrong time,” I said.

The man sitting across from me wasn't buying it. He was a police detective, with the dour, cynical view of life that big-city cops get.

“You're in deep shit.”

It was the second time he had characterized my situation that way.

I was in an interrogation room in a police station on Centre Street. In police custody. Not of my own volition but under suspicion of a large number of vague charges. The fact that saving me from being murdered had blown a police surveillance particularly incensed him.

This wasn't the first time I'd been told by an art theft cop that I was in deep trouble. I should have taken being arrested again as just rolling with another punch, but beneath my brave smile my heart hammered and my knees shook. Emotionally I was torn between breaking out in sobs … and flying across the table to strangle my tormentor.

“I have so many charges to file against you, it's going to look like an indictment of the whole Soprano mob.”

Michelangelo was the name of my interrogator. He was actually Detective Michael Anthony, but the news media called him Michelangelo because he was a painter and his real name was vaguely similar to the great artist.

He was in charge of Art Theft Detail in the Special Investigations Division of the NYPD.

I'd never seen any of his art, but had read an article about him in the paper last year. A gallery owner who had seen his work told me that the detective's painting skills were in the range of the couple hundred-dollar landscapes displayed for sale on the walls of the corner coffeehouse rather than the stuff of millionaire's mansions. But that was nothing to sniff at—my own artistic skills were in the paint-by-number range.

I sighed. And tried to keep a happy face even though I wanted to throttle the sarcastic bastard. “I haven't done anything … illegal.”

That was my line of defense—I hadn't done anything. I still didn't even know if the Apsaras piece Sammy showed me was real or fake, but regardless of what it was, I hadn't done anything with it. I was just trying to track it down and see if I could make some money from it. Or as I told the detective, so I could make sure it got back to its original owner if it had been stolen.

He hadn't seemed captured by the notion that I was innocent, so I kept coming up with theories in the hopes that one would connect.

“I was just in the wrong place at the—”

“You keep saying that but you have a history of dealing in contraband art.”

“That's a lie! There were never any charges filed against me.”

He pretended to read off a list like an indictment from God. “Trafficking in looted Iraqi artifacts—”

“A mistake. I bought into a fraudulent provenance.” I spread my hands on the table between us. “Look, Detective, I've been through this before with cops—”

“The FBI.”

“As tough and suspicious as you—and that's not intended as a compliment,” I smiled sweetly and said very slowly, “I haven't done an … nee … thing. Nothing.”

“You were in an alley trying to make a deal with a Thai smuggler when we saved your ass.”

That was a matter of interpretation. Mine was that the man with the gun in the alley was going to kill Sammy, not me. But I wasn't really sure.

“Why don't you help yourself out by telling the truth. Come clean and there are things I can do for you with the D.A. and judge.”

“Here's the truth—
again
.” At least a decent proximity thereof, I could have added. I had to stick to enough of the truth to be credible and not be caught in a lie, because I knew from past experience that even breathing around contraband art could be incriminating. “Sammy the deliveryman brought a sandstone relief of Apsarases to my apartment. He knew I was in the art business. I had no idea—”

“How did he know you were in the art business?”

“It's on the name plate outside my apartment building entrance,” I said sweetly. “And we'd joked about it.”

“So he just shows up at your place without an invite with a priceless—”

“I didn't know it was real, I thought it was just a decent-looking
fake
. I was hoping he'd have a warehouse full of the
fakes
because there's a market for good
fakes
.” Fakes, fakes, fakes. That was the key. There was no law against fakes unless you represented them as the real thing. And I hadn't represented anything to anybody.

I found that the more I lied, the more I could do it with a straight face. I should have been a lawyer. Or a politician.