The Deceivers by Harold Robbins Page B

talking about fakes. It certainly looks real, but so did the Apsarases.”
    â€œIt’s a fake,” Prince Ranar said. “Another excellent piece. Detective Anthony believes it’s by the same artist who did the Apsaras piece.”
    â€œThe only reason why it got exposed as a fake is because the buyer, a woman who runs a home goods company and has a weekly TV show on decorating, decided to show it off when she did a segment on her new apartment here in Manhattan. Someone from the Cambodian embassy spotted the piece. A quick check with the National Museum in Cambodia confirmed that the original was still there.”
    â€œDid the same people who smuggled in the Apsaras piece bring in this one?”
    Detective Anthony shook his head. “Actually, this one came through Hong Kong. It was owned by a Russian, one of those ex-KGB thug types who got rich in the nineties after the Soviet Union collapsed. Oil, I think. Great system. Pay off politicians and suddenly you’re an oil billionaire. He may have bought it legitimately, thinking it was authentic.”
    â€œHow did he get the piece?”
    â€œI don’t know and he’s not talking.”
    â€œCan’t the police—”
    â€œHe’s dead.”
    â€œOh … because of the Siva?”
    â€œWe don’t think so. He was gunned down in a nightclub in Hong Kong, apparently by other ex-KGB types to whom he wasn’t paying enough protection. His girlfriend, a model, is still in Hong Kong. She’s the one who put the piece on the market. We think she’s sitting on more, but she’s not talking, either. And there’s not much we can do about it. Hong Kong’s the gateway for much of the contraband art coming out of Asia.”
    Asian mafia. Ex-KGB billionaires. Murder. A Hong Kong model sitting on a hoard of fake art. Where did I fit into this? I asked the question and the detective answered.
    â€œWe’re never going to stop the smuggling of contraband art, looted or faked, until we get to the source. The police in Thailand, Cambodia, and the Hong Kong territory of China are not always helpful.”
    â€œWe are a poor country,” Prince Ranar said, “the poorest of the three mentioned. We have more land mines left over from wars than people to step on them. We’ve had revolutions that crippled us and even today there is an uneasy truce among political factions. Our police are overwhelmed with struggles against drug trafficking and prostitution that destroy the lives of young girls. The looting of our antiquities is the third arm of this trinity of evils. Unfortunately, these evils are rampant because Westerners feed the corruption with money. They buy drugs, sex, and stolen art.
    â€œOur cultural heritage is being vandalized, but we lack resources to deal with it. There are thousands of antiquity sites, many of them still covered by jungle, making it an impossible task to police with our limited resources. In our opinion, the best alternative is to increase the criminal sanctions against the wealthy Americans, Europeans, and Japanese who finance the crimes by paying enormous prices for unlawful goods.”
    The detective shook his head. “That isn’t practical. People have the right to buy art and rely on provenances.”
    I suddenly realized the role they wanted me to play. “You want me to act as an antiquities buyer.”
    â€œThat is what Detective Anthony had in mind,” Ranar said.
    â€œAn undercover thing,” I said. “Pretend to be in the market for stolen art.”
    â€œYou’ve got it,” Detective Anthony said.
    I thought about it. Probably dangerous because the criminals wouldn’t be happy when they found out I set them up. I wasn’t about to get myself killed for the love of art. But I could set up perimeters as to how far I was willing to go—like never meeting with the devils except in a safe place with a lot of police