The Deceivers Read Online Free PDF

these.”
    He grinned and nodded. “Plenty more.”
    â€œI need to have the piece tested to help me authenticate it. You understand?”
    He was already shaking his head no . “How much worth?”
    â€œThat’s why I need to have it tested. Scientific tests are the only way we can see if it’s real or a fake.”
    â€œNo fake. How much worth?”
    â€œI agree that it doesn’t look like a fake, but I need to be sure. I need to take it to be examined by experts.”
    â€œTake pictures, tell me how much worth.”
    â€œOkay.”
    I grabbed my camera and started taking pictures. A piece couldn’t be authenticated by a picture, but I was stalling for time. I didn’t know if he brought it to me to buy or just to find out how much it was worth in order to sell it.
    If it was real, museums would want it. So would a horde of collectors. Asian art was the rage among Americans and Japanese. A museum-quality piece like this had to be worth hundreds of thousands, maybe more, even with a suspect ownership history.
    I tried to control my excitement. I was holding my salvation. A ticket back to the good life. I could probably buy it from Sammy for a fraction of its worth and resell it for enough money to restart my life. It meant not only getting an apartment bigger than a shoe box, but return of my credibility as an art—
    His cell phone rang. It broke the spell. A sudden dose of reality washed over me as he answered the call.
    Museums and collectors did not lay out megabucks for artifacts without knowing their previous ownership history. For at least the last hundred years most countries have had laws prohibiting the export of national cultural treasures. As a rule of thumb, most of the items acquired during the twentieth century were subject to claims from the countries of origin that the antiquities had been taken out of the country illegally.
    Each year demands came from Italy, Greece, Iraq, Egypt, and other countries with archaeological sites rich in cultural treasures for return of illegally exported pieces. The demands were made on major museums. Many of them, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art—the Met—and the Getty, two world-class icons, had not only returned antiquities that could only be described as “priceless,” but were still under pressure to return many more.
    Knowing the ownership history was crucial when buying a work of art or artifact. The art trade calls ownership history the piece’s “provenance.” With antiquities, the word referred both to the place of origin—an archaeological site in Egypt, Greece, or wherever—and to the chain of ownership that established that the piece had left the country of origin legally and that the current seller had good title to it.
    I was staring at an antiquity that probably had been looted in the Far East and smuggled into America. I didn’t know how many years in prison that added up to, but just the thought of being in jail was enough for me.
    After taking the pictures I had to sit down before my knees folded. I collapsed on a chair and stared at the artifact sitting on my lap as Sammy jabbered in high-pitched Thai with an ever increasing tempo.
    Jesus, what was I thinking? The sandstone Apsaras piece wasn’t a ticket to the good life but a free pass to jail. Obviously, it had been smuggled out of Cambodia and smuggled into the States … in a carton of rice noodles for all I knew.
    What kind of ownership history could it have when it arrived in a brown paper bag that smelled of succulent Thai spices? I already had one long, hard, crushing fall from grace with the art world and the law because of a piece with a bad provenance.
    Even more important, what I held in my hands was part of the cultural history of a small, poor nation, a treasure of its people that had been stolen, looted by thieves who often destroyed more than they hauled away … with the looted