The Deceivers (7 page)

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.

Taksin thought of himself as an artist, not a thief … though some might say that he was both an artist and a thief. He didn't take money with sleight of hand like a pickpocket or with a gun like a robber, but by creating reproductions of great works of antiquity. Because of his incredible skills, more often than not the works were sold as bona fide antiquities.

He didn't consider his works fakes, nor thought of them as fraud when they were sold as antiquities. He created what he had the ability to craft and if others believed the pieces were something besides the works of Taksin of Bangkok … well, people could believe what they wanted. Besides, Taksin never got involved in selling his creations to collectors. He sold to dealers who in turn marked his pieces up a thousand percent and resold them.

About thirty years old, he had been raised by Buddhist monks but left the order in his teens. He wasn't certain of his exact age because he had been a foundling left on the steps of a temple. The monks gave him the name of a famed, eighteenth-century general king because he was found on the great man's birthday.

His talent for carving and sculpturing was recognized early. At first he made small wood objects that he “gave away” for no more than an extra bowl of rice because he wasn't permitted to sell the pieces. From wood he graduated to carving soapstone for inexpensive tourist souvenirs. His early life was spent in a temple near the Cambodian border and he was drawn to Khmer art.

When he was in his late teens, antique dealers noticed that Taksin's inexpensive soapstone reproductions of Buddhist religious objects often looked as good as the authentic pieces he was copying. Dealers began having him make custom pieces from sandstone that they then passed off to buyers as authentic antiquities.

He gave up his bright saffron robe and begging bowl for a more earthly existence reproducing works of art and experiencing a more worldly existence than his life in the temple.

The progression from making souvenirs to making works of art was evolutionary and inevitable because Taksin was simply a genius. A Renaissance master for his own time and place, he possessed the eye, touch, and patience of Khmer masters dead a millennium.

He began a work by buying a piece of sandstone. To make it appear authentically Khmer, rather than freshly quarried stone, he bought temple rubble—chunks of building material from Angkor and other Cambodian sites.

Taksin didn't know that sandstone had a “fingerprint” in that it could be tested for its mineral and chemical content to establish whether the stone actually came from the claimed antiquity site.

He chose the temple rubble because in his own mind the stone from religious sites was imbued with a spirit that made his finished piece of art even more desirable. The debris was inexpensive and easy to obtain.

Taksin worked his pieces with just a mallet and a variety of iron chisels. Dealers who wanted him to produce pieces quicker urged him to use some modern tools to speed up the process. Modern steel chisels had a different cutting edge than the iron ones used by Khmer craftsmen a thousand years ago; much sharper, they would have made his work easier and faster, but he insisted upon using iron ones, refusing to use steel even in the early shaping of the piece.

Electric tools would have speeded up the work even more; it was common to use electric tools in the production of faked artifacts, with the telltale marks covered up by sanding and chiseling later. But Taksin made his pieces slowly and laboriously because he believed that was the only way he could really walk in the shoes of ancient craftsmen.

Once he had the stone sculptured into the final shape, the last step was to re-create a realistic surface coating, the patina. This, again, was a step where fakes were frequently exposed. The surface coating that gave an authentic Khmer antiquity its aged appearance came from sun and rain, jungle foliage, dirt, river water, or whatever other environmental forces the piece had been subjected to since it had been created a thousand years before.

It was easy to “age” the piece by creating a coating that made it look old. Every Thai artist had their own technique for aging, but just burying it in a muddy pig's pen for a few months could give the piece an aged look. Bronze pieces especially “aged” well, adding centuries over a short period of time.

To pass more than cursory scrutiny—simply having an aged look wasn't good enough—the piece had to look exactly like artifacts from the site where it was supposed to have been obtained. More important, if it was to be sold at a high price, scientific tests would usually be done, so the corroded coating of the piece had to have a chemical fingerprint like those found at Cambodian antiquity sites.

In creating the patina, Taksin again had acted intuitively rather than from knowledge of scientific tests. He chose only rubble that had not been fully buried, thus didn't have an impact from leaves, tree roots, and organic matters contained in soil that would have made it easier for tests to determine exactly where the piece was supposed to have come from—and thus easier to expose as a fraud by comparing it to authentic pieces.