The Deceivers (5 page)

Besides desperation, the fall from grace had brought one definite change in me: I now knew I wanted life beyond my career, not just the material accoutrements from having an income that rated a black credit card, but I had to find the right man or there would be no one to cut the lawn and take out the garbage.

I wasn't really that cynical about love. I talked facetiously about sex because I'd never found the right person to share my life with. And I was running scared that I might never experience that deep, passionate, soul-satisfying eternal love that books and movies say we need. I avoided permanent entanglements because I wanted to make sure I had all my “wants” satisfied so I wouldn't end up like my parents with an “I wish I had” attitude that followed them to the grave.

My dad, a community college art teacher, had wanted to be an archaeologist exploring ancient sites around the world. My mother had dreamed of being a dancer but became a homemaker and librarian.

What they accomplished should have been enough for anyone, but for inexplicable reasons probably relating back to their own upbringings, it wasn't. They wanted more and expressed vague feelings of discontent to me about the directions their lives had taken.

I believed that my parents were great successes. But both of them had conveyed to me a melancholy desire about what might have been instead of them being satisfied with their accomplishments. I always wondered if their discontentment was connected to their relationship with each other rather than their careers; whether something was missing between them.

They had died in a car accident about the time I was getting out of college and I missed them dearly.

I picked up from my parents a free-floating dissatisfaction with where and what I was, a feeling that there was always one more step to take, one more hurtle to leap. I knew I should be satisfied with myself … bookstores were filled with psychobabble books to guide people who thought like me. But it was a lot easier to figure out what made you tick than to change the behavior.

Now what? My parents weren't here to help me, I was divorced ten years ago, and the few friends I had acted like I'd give them a computer virus if they answered my phone calls or e-mails.

What did a woman do when she was too educated and too experienced to get an ordinary job? Who was going to hire me to work a cash register at Wal-Mart when my last job paid twenty times more? And I worried about an employer doing a background check. Was there a database of people like me who were arrested but never charged? Not that they'd need it—I was as infamous in the New York art trade as Kenneth Lay was to members of the financial community.

It used to be a matter of pride to me that I was so single-minded about art. Now I was paying for it. I kept asking myself what I would do if I couldn't get something going in the art world and my answer was to shake my head and pray that lightning struck.

There was an expression to describe people who were inescapably drawn to a disaster: fatal flaw. And I had it.

Everything I owned was in this one room. A wooden table with two chairs served as both my desk and kitchen table. I found them at a flea market for thirty dollars. By adding two coats of paint and new foam cushions to the chairs, they were good as new.

Even though my apartment was tiny, the high ceiling and two windows made it appear less claustrophobic. Painting the walls a bright white helped, too. I had a large walk-in closet; one thing I liked about the place. All the other studios either had a tiny closet or none at all.

Besides my table/desk and two chairs and the love seat sofa I sat on, I had a double-size bed with a backboard I made myself from a piece of wood covered with fabric, one wicker nightstand, an old trunk suitcase for a coffee table, and some bookshelves that I put on the wall myself. The open kitchen was tiny, just enough room to stand in, but I wasn't much of a cook anyway. Besides, fast food often cost less than home cooking, especially for someone like me who didn't have the condiments.

As a student, I had lived in a fifth-floor studio walkup in Chelsea and now gravitated back into lower Manhattan because the area had a certain energy to it and was affordable. Only this time I found a place on the cusp of Soho, Little Italy, and Chinatown. I was back to living with “working people,” back to being part of the anonymous masses that limos and ecology-raping SUVs splashed water on as they pulled up to curbs on wet days.

The street life here was much richer and more diverse than the sterile Upper East Side along the park. Worker tenements shouldered ten-million-dollar “lofts”; the sign at a postage-stamp-size parking lot on Mulberry Street in Little Italy read “Mafia Only”; and if you looked like a tourist, you couldn't move ten feet in Chinatown without someone edging close and whispering, “Handbags?” Of course, the bags were knockoffs of high-end designer labels.

The building I lived in needed a paint job on the outside and the inside lobby needed a serious makeover, but the rent was cheap. No elevator again, so my legs got a workout taking the stairs up to the third floor.

The tenants were ordinary decent people, just trying to make a living and raising their families. They went to their jobs five days a week, whether they liked it or not, had little left over after paying bills, enjoyed their two days a week off, and went back to work again. On weekends when the sun was out they took their kids to a park. Same routine week after week until they retired or died.

These people worked for essentials—food, shelter, clothes—as I did when I was struggling through college and launching a career. When I was on top, I could have lived on a fraction of what I made. Instead, I had worked to enjoy a life of luxury: hiring an interior decorator to do my penthouse, sleeping on the finest silk sheets, dining in restaurants without menu prices, driving a car that turned heads.

I wish I could say that life beside simple people who worked hard for a living was the best thing that ever happened to me; that like Jimmy Stewart in
It's a Wonderful Life
, a near-death experience had brought new meaning to the simple joys of life … but dragging myself up long flights of stairs to a cubbyhole apartment with the smells of spicy jerk chicken and Spanish language TV soap operas blaring through doors was no match for a snooty Upper East Side penthouse in a building where the doorman parked my Jag and the reception area had handwoven Persian rugs tossed on plush carpeting.

Sure, my poor-but-honest working-class neighbors were a lot friendlier; they smiled more and unlike that shit of a landlord would wait and hold the door open when you met them coming or going, but like any good New Yorker, I didn't know my neighbors well enough to pick them out of a police lineup.

Sighing, I forced myself away from the window, hoping my melancholy would fade.
Think positive
.

I got into a comfy position on the sofa and stared vacantly at the rain slashing against the window. The heat in the room made me drowsy. Usually I could control the steam radiator heat but the handle was broken … again. I jotted down a note to myself to tell the landlord to fix it—again.

I'd been sitting for an hour, trying to figure out what way I should turn, when the phone rang. I didn't recognize the number, but it wasn't Mrs. Garcia's number so I answered it.

“Maddy, it's Bolger.”

I couldn't have heard a better name or voice to help with my predicament. Bolger was a top-notch art expert who opened a one-man, one-room bookstore that sold new and used art books after he retired from the Met. He occasionally hired himself out as an art authenticator, examining pieces to separate the fakes from the bona fides, but the field was mostly dominated by laboratories with high-tech equipment.

We'd worked together at the Met when I was a young intern learning the world of museums and he was an old pro in the unit that performed tests to determine the authenticity of pieces that the museum wanted to acquire.

Bolger had an encyclopedic knowledge of antiquities, but after leaving the museum, the march of technology had relegated him to the status of an anachronism—a person who belonged in another time.

“I'm obsolete,” he told me years ago. “I weigh two hundred pounds and a computer chip that weighs a thousandth of that can store infinitely more knowledge.”

When I was still head curator at the Piedmont, I sent him artifacts to authenticate. I had more faith in his instincts than a laboratory full of high-tech machines.

“I have a referral for you,” he said. “More accurately, I gave your name and phone number along with a high recommendation to a very rich and serious collector. Hopefully he will be calling.”

“Great. I need the business. I'm glad you called. We haven't talked in ages.”

He was on the list of people I'd sent business cards to after I'd decided to launch my business. So far he was the only one who had called me.

“How you doing?” he asked.

“Well, as you know, I started my own business and things are a little … ah…”

“Slow?”

“Uh huh.”

“Tough?

“Uh huh.”

“I know, I've been there. Something will happen soon. Send me a batch of your business cards and I'll give them out to everyone from book buyers to the mail carrier. Your luck will turn around.”

Bolger knew about the Semiramis scandal, but he was too much of a gentleman to say anything, which was fine with me—I was tired of explaining myself and proclaiming my innocence.

“Maybe it has. Something really weird happened that I need your opinion on. Are you busy right now?”

“I haven't sold a book in two days, but that's okay, I like my books and hate to part with them. What's up?”

“I just saw a piece of art and it's blown my mind. You won't believe it when I tell you.”

“You said weird. Is this going to be one of those scenarios in which someone puts out five bucks at a yard sale for a painting that's been in grandma's attic for fifty years … and it turns out to be a Matisse?”

“You're a mind reader. But do grandmas have attics in Thailand?”

“Only bamboo ones that monkeys swing in.”

“Somebody showed me a sandstone Apsaras relief a little while ago that looks real.”

“It might be. There are looted pieces around. The creators of Angkor's Khmer art used an enormous amount of sandstone in its wonders and the dancers are a common subject. So right off my first inclination, sight unseen, is that it's a Khmer piece.”

“My thought, too. I have a picture of it.”

“I haven't heard anything about an Apsaras panel on the contraband lists, but I'll check. Com'on over, you've got me intrigued.”

“I'm on my way.”

6

Bolger's place was on the west side of Chelsea a couple blocks from the Hudson River. Back in the days when I was struggling to get a career going, my place in Chelsea wasn't far from where Bolger was located now.

The rain had stopped by the time I stepped out of the subway station three blocks from his place, close enough to hoof it the rest of the way. Not a glamorous neighborhood, some of the apartments and stores looked a little seedy, but the streets were clean.

I got an odd feeling that someone was following me and I turned to look over my shoulder. I was being followed all right, by dozens of people, none of whom appeared to know I existed. As in any big metro area, few people smiled or even made eye contact at passersby. Too many people, too many nuts.

Bolger's small bookstore was on the bottom of a two-story brick building that he owned. The apartment living room was the actual store. The only furnishings in it were a dog-eared recliner that needed recovering and a TV that was perpetually on. I never saw him look at the TV and I suspect it was more “companionship” than entertainment.

The two-bedroom apartment upstairs was rented out to a middle-aged couple with no children, like most of his previous tenants. He didn't dislike kids; what he didn't like was the pitter-patter of running feet above him when he was engrossed in one of his art books or examining a work of art.

Unlike me who had focused on the works of the great Mediterranean civilizations, he had a wide range of knowledge. The Met was an eclectic museum that housed pieces from most of the great antiquity sites of the world. Working there for over thirty years, he developed a profound mental database of the key elements to look for on a particular piece—and it didn't matter whether it was a Greek sculpture, a Mayan pictograph, or a clay pot from the Gobi Desert, he had seen it sometime in his career.

I didn't know if he still was doing authentications for fees. People like me who knew him from the old days could call him up to pick his brain.

A very small sign outside on the wrought-iron railing said “Bolger's.” Nothing about being a bookstore. Probably wasn't permitted to have a business in the building, but it wasn't much of a business, anyway. The fact that he hadn't sold a book for days wasn't news—he hated to sell his beloved books and was more likely to encourage customers to browse the book or even borrow it rather than part with it.

I'd never seen the rest of his apartment but if the bookstore was any indication, it was probably overcrowded and disorganized. In the store part, books overflowed boxes, were stacked in leaning, wobbly-looking piles, and crammed into shelves. The place looked ready to collapse with a good sneeze.

How he kept track of what-was-where I didn't know; yet if you asked him for a particular book he knew exactly where it was located.

Besides books, he had antiquity pieces in nooks and crannies and on high shelves around the room. The pieces were an eclectic lot, some real though not priceless, some extremely good fakes, including several he obtained after he exposed them as reproductions to a disappointed owner.

Bolger was in his early seventies and a bachelor. His first name was Charles, but I never heard him called anything but Bolger even back at the Met.