The Deceivers (3 page)

But broke and out of work were understatements. Crash and burn better described my situation. I had been the head curator for a small, very rich museum. I lost my big paying job, my park-view penthouse, and all the social-economic accoutrements of having “made it” when I innocently got swept into a crooked art purchase for the museum.

Being “not guilty” didn't count after I paid over fifty million dollars for a Babylonian piece that turned out to have been looted during the sack of the Baghdad museum when American forces entered the city. The dead bodies that started popping up in the wake of the purchase didn't help, either.

I made it once and I'd be back on top again. I'd have to work even harder than I did the first time, but I wasn't afraid of hard work. When opportunity arose, I'd grab it. My father used to say that a great lesson in life was never to be a standing target but to roll with the punches life threw. That's what I was doing now—rolling with the punches so I could get back on my feet.

“I can take it!” I told the rain. That was my expression of the power of positive thinking. I could make things happen, but I had to keep myself in a good place.

Despite my positive thoughts and the good luck crystal I'd bought in a Chinese herb shop, things were still pretty shitty. Broke and desperate were words I wanted to drop from my internal résumé.

The grocery store was four blocks from my apartment, but New York blocks could be as long as football fields—and they stretched out twice as long when it was cold, windy, or wet. Just what I needed when I'd been ecologically conscious, choosing paper over plastic. Not a good choice for walking in the rain—a paper bag became biodegradable real fast when it got soaking wet.

As I struggled against wind, rain, and the wrath of the gods I'd offended—I was so beaten down, it had to be from divine retribution—I tried to keep my groceries from slipping out of the disintegrating bag.

Besides thinking positive about getting back what I'd lost, I'd been thinking green lately, too, trying to do something for the planet. I guess the wake-up call for me were the stories of seals and polar bears starving and drowning because arctic ice was melting from global warming—while “global warming deniers” were racking in huge fees from polluters. So I'd bought nonfat organic milk in a glass bottle rather than plastic, but now its weight threatened to carry it through the bottom of the wet bag and break at my feet, taking with it my seven-grain bread, turkey bacon, and free-range eggs.

Strapped for money, I still bought high-end food for breakfast. I figured it balanced out the cheap fast food I had for dinner and the crackers and cheese I had for lunch. I hated cooking—for one. Cooking was only fun when I had a man and a bottle of wine to share it with.

When I fell from grace with the haughty world of New York art, none of my friends or associates threw me a lifeline, but I guess that said more about me than them. On gloom and doom rainy days I sat in my apartment and wondered how things would be now if I had just done things a little bit different … and told myself to learn from my mistakes because soon I would be right up there again.

I wore a lightweight, hooded raincoat rather than carry an umbrella. That left the paper bag exposed, so I hurried, passing street vendors who were frantically covering books, hot dogs, and hot—as in pirated—fashion jeans, CDs, and DVDs.

The mixture of races, clashes of cultures, and street people hawking everything from designer brand purses—knockoffs, of course—to peanuts and hot pretzels gave some New York neighborhoods an exotic third world ambiance. Close your eyes, listen to raised voices speaking a Babel of tongues and the angry honking of car horns, and you could imagine yourself in Beirut. Sadly, the sounds of emergency sirens and threats of terrorist bombs sometimes also gave the great city the feel of Beirut.

As usual, every taxi that went by had its roof emblem off, signaling that it was occupied or off-duty. In New York you could step off almost any curb and taxis fought for you … unless it was raining. Then the mysterious happened and taxis were more likely to run you down than stop—or they simply vanished from the streets.

Maybe it had something to do with quantum physics or that stuff called dark matter that astronomers now say we're all swimming in. Not that I had to worry about it. These days my means of transportation were my feet and the subway, a far cry from a few months ago when I paid more for parking my car each month than I do for rent on my current studio walk-up.

By the time I reached my building, I had the bottle of milk in one coat pocket, eggs in another, and everything else in the wet bag clutched to my chest.

My landlord came down the front steps to the street as I hurried up. He gave me a smirk that said things could be better for me if I was “nicer” to him. I gave him a small, polite smile. He didn't bother turning back to open the building door for me.
Bastard
.

I had already bounced a rent check with him and I'd only had the place for three months. Not a clever move.

Vaguely southern Mediterranean in looks, he had the bald head, thick neck, and petroleum-barrel torso of a professional wrestler on one of those TV shows where men brutalized each other in a ring while the crowd roared for more blood. He didn't need to pump up on steroids because he was naturally a big, hairy ape.

He looked at me as if I were a piece of meat to pound with his dick.

That image came as I scrambled to cover the bounced check, hocking a wristwatch for $900 that had cost me $11,000.

Now I was desperately short of things to hock. Which created another perverse thought: How many weeks—days?—of apartment occupancy could I “buy” if I gave him a blow job?

Jesus—what a repulsive thought, but it popped into my head as I climbed the interior stairs to my apartment. It wasn't the sort of thing that a man would think about. And I'd gulp down Drano before I did anything like that—at least I hoped I would.

But whichever way I went, bleeding wrists or lying down with a swine, I wouldn't be the first woman who did something repulsive in desperation. Or the first man, for that matter, though it was easier for a man in one respect: A bed at the homeless shelter for him doesn't come with a fear of getting raped.

Think positive
 …

I put away the groceries and stood by my window, staring down at the street below, not really seeing anything, just watching the hypnotic rain glide down, trying not to think about the mistakes I'd made and the wrong turns I'd taken.

Another line from that Carpenters's song played in my head:
Feelin' like I don't belong
 …

I didn't belong to anyone; no husband, lover, significant other. No family, not even a job where I could relate to others for eight hours a day. Twists and turns and bumps, losing control and going into a spin around dangerous curves, that's what my life seemed to have become the last few months. Just about everything had changed.

I wasn't just broke, I was lonely and broke. I hadn't had a date for so long, the battery had run down in my vibrator. I sighed just thinking about the money I used to spend, the things I used to have, the lovers I once enjoyed …

Just keep thinking positive and roll with the punches.

My cell phone rang. I started to hit receive and stopped because I didn't recognize the calling number. Better that it went into voice mail. I had a new address and new phone number, but I was still getting hassled by bill collectors. The CIA could learn things from these people. I had to dodge one coming into my building yesterday. The woman had called me a “deadbeat” loud enough to be heard in the Bronx. I rushed into the building, embarrassed. There were some things I could confront and control with as much courage as a 125-pound woman could muster … but knowing I owed debts that I couldn't pay wasn't one of them.

I had scribbled “Deceased—Return to Sender” on collection notice envelopes now for weeks, but it hadn't fooled anyone.

I checked voice mail and my suspicion was right. A Mrs. Garcia wanted me to give her a call so she could arrange a special repayment plan for my Saks bill. She made it sound like I was getting in on the ground floor of a golden opportunity. The woman should be selling penny stocks.

I already knew from experience that the tenor of the calls got nastier as time went on.

Those TV ads where the bankruptcy lawyer with the shiny polyester suit and toothy crocodile smile says he can get the hounds off your back were beginning to look better every day.

Being a deadbeat hadn't been my plan and wasn't the way I thought of myself. Things had just gone to hell for me in the proverbial handbasket. Real fast. Like slipping down the side of a glacier into a smoking volcano.

I'd come to the big city out of college full of dreams and drive and had spent a decade working myself up from a fifth-floor studio walk-up to a penthouse in the Museum Mile area on the haughty Upper East Side.

Now I was back in a small apartment. Smaller than my last bedroom. Gone were my designer-furnished penthouse with a view of Central Park, my $85,000 Jaguar, and my walk-in closets full of designer labels. Hell, I lived in a walk-in closet.

Gone was my black American Express Card, too. You got one by invitation only. I'd heard that the card was usually offered only to people charging $150,000 or more a year. To me, the card was my diploma from the School of Hard Knocks that said I had made it. I felt worse about losing it than my sports car.

Materialistic? Sure. And not “green” of me. It was only a piece of plastic and plastic was the nonbiodegradable bane of the world, the stuff that would still be around choking the environment ten thousand years from now, indestructible “artifacts” revealing our artificial souls to archaeologists who have computer chips for hearts and brains.

I was really in a confused mental state, vacillating between wanting to save the world for baby seals to wishing I still had a credit card that permitted a person to buy a ridiculously priced sealskin purse …

Christ, sometimes it felt like my thoughts were ricocheting in my head, one minute desperate to do anything to be back on top, the next worrying about the health of the planet. I was still suffering aftershocks from the collapse of my career. It didn't just come to an end—a Category Five hurricane roared through my life.

Still, I couldn't walk away from antiquities. These fragile remnants from past civilizations, often the only remembrances of millions of people who had lived and loved and created great works of beauty, were a part of me, in my blood even before college. When I was a little girl I had a stack of books next to my bed on the history of art from my father's personal collection. I leafed through those books, staring at the gold, marble, bronze, and jade works created by people dead a millennium.

Working with antiquities wasn't something I could walk away from, but I needed to reinvent myself because no one would hire me.

I went freelance, opening up my own business:
Madison Dupre, Art Inquiries
. That and my cell phone number were all my business cards said.

Art Inquiries
. I liked the sound of it. It had a snooty British ring to it that gave my business a bit of class.

I deliberately made the name vague because I wanted to be open for any kind of work—tracking down art for buyers, appraising it, investigating ownership history, authenticating pieces, negotiating prices. My phone number had to go on, but I didn't dare put my address on the cards for fear a prospective client would know where I lived. People with money wanted to deal with people who had money … at least enough of it to infer that they were successful.

If a meeting was necessary, I planned to go to the client's place or meet for lunch. Just in case I absolutely needed a mailing address, I rented a mail-drop box in the Financial District. The address left the impression I had an office in a prestigious building, but that facade hadn't been necessary yet because I had no clients.

I mailed business cards to everyone I could think of—people who knew me and I hoped trusted me, people I'd met through the museums, major collectors, and galleries I'd dealt with over the years. I even wore out shoe leather going from gallery to gallery to drop off my card.

The commission from just one of the art buys and sales I used to handle on a regular basis would keep me on my feet as I got my new career rolling. But so far my phone hadn't rung yet. At least not from someone who wanted to
give
me money.

Plenty of wealthy art collectors could have used my help buying or selling art, but none were calling. The only “collectors” calling were the ones who dealt in past due bills.

After a month, I became worried. Two months and I was scared. Now I was just plain desperate. I couldn't hold out much longer. Soon I'd have to go to plan B—which I didn't have at the moment.

Where was my twenty-twenty hindsight a year ago? Putting nothing in a savings account was mind-blowing. My theory had been that after you paid for the essentials, anything left over was free money. You earn it, you spend it. Simple as that. But I hadn't planned on a thermonuclear meltdown of my life.

I lay back on my couch, telling myself to keep thinking positive. It wasn't long before my eyes closed and I fantasized about being on a beach with crystal-clear blue water and bright sunny skies. I was naked and walking toward a tanned, gorgeous-looking man … he was naked, too. We lay on the sand, our bodies coming together with the warm wet surf teasing my bare skin …

Then trouble knocked.

 

 

If a thing's worth having, it's worth cheating for.

—W. C. FIELDS TO MAE WEST

4

I jerked awake to a persistent knocking at my door.

I wasn't expecting anyone and I knew the neighbors on my floor had not gotten home from work because I hadn't heard feet on the stairs and slamming doors. That left undesirable candidates—a bill collector or my horny landlord.