The Deceivers Read Online Free PDF Page A

and sandstone.
    The relief had three dancing goddesses called Apsarases, seductive women of Hindu mythology. Beautiful water and forest nymphs who played music and danced for the gods, they held a place in Asian myths similar to the Muses of Western mythology.
    Far Eastern art wasn’t my forte but I knew the dancers were a common motif in the artistic creations of temples in India and Southeast Asia.
    Said to be able to change their shapes at will, the beauty of an Apsaras was beyond human description. Wives of the Gandharvas, court servants of Indra, the god of thunder and rain, the women danced to the music made by their husbands in the palaces of gods.
    The instant question was whether I was looking at a bona fide artifact or a tourist reproduction.
    I took the piece to examine the workmanship. Each female had struck a different dancing pose and had an elaborate headdress. Bare-breasted with jewelry on various parts of their body—necks, arms, ankles, even some fingers—all had scant clothing below their neckline. The fine detail was outstanding and no two dancers had the same clothes, jewelry, or expression.
    Experts could usually tell just by looking at a piece whether it was genuine. They looked at the quality and workmanship, even its rarity. But a good copy sometimes was hard to tell from a real artifact and scientific tests were needed.
    Some artifacts were made from materials that lent themselves to being duplicated later. Cast gold and bronze were easier to fake than hard stone materials like sandstone, limestone, and marble that required more skill.
    The outer appearance was important. The patina, a covering that develops gradually on an object, over centuries for many antiquities, was often simulated to make it look old, and that was often where the forger failed.
    The patina on this relief had the aged appearance consistent with the inferred age of a piece a thousand years old.
    Another tip-off for forgery was the use of modern tools that left telltale marks.
    I examined the relief closely with my magnifying glass, looking for anything on the sandstone that showed it was made with modern electric tools like sanders, grinders, or saws, but saw nothing that revealed it was a fake.
    The only odd thing I saw under magnification was a tiny mark in the background. The mark was almost a half-moon with the flat line on top slightly concave.
    Because the mark could have been an imprint of a tool the artist used, or created when something pressed against the piece since it had been made, it didn’t help me in determining if the relief was authentic.
    As a professional, I would never have authenticated a big ticket item like this without putting it through scientific tests. But you can’t make it in the art business without having radar in your gut—and my instincts were screaming that I was looking at a thousand-year-old piece.
    I knew infinitely less about Far Eastern artifacts than Mediterranean pieces, but Sammy’s piece struck me as Khmer art. The Khmers flourished as a powerful empire about a thousand years ago in Cambodia and left behind temple complexes that became choked by jungle over the ages.
    Angkor Wat was the most prominent of the temple complexes. A magnificent edifice that ranks as a wonder of all time, many art critics consider it even more inspired than the monuments of ancient Egypt and Greece. But Angkor Wat had also been unmercifully looted over the centuries, with most of the stolen pieces making their way to Japan and the West through Thailand, along with most of the heroin that got pushed our way.
    I could hardly breathe. My God … what I held in my hands was worth a small fortune.
    â€œYou like?”
    â€œYes. Uh, Sammy, where did you get this?”
    He grinned. “Grandmother’s attic.”
    â€œUh huh.” I smiled at him. I’m sure my lips were trembling as much as my knees. “You could make a lot more money if there were more of