The Looters Read online

  I had stepped into the pink marble and brass “Ladies’ Room” at Rutgers, the auction house, to check my outfit after the taxi ride over. I was about to make the biggest purchase of my career, a buy so big that it would be in the news tonight and tomorrow. And I wanted to look like success when the cameras started rolling.

  “Good luck, Maddy.” I saluted my image and headed back inside, many thoughts colliding in my mind. One was that for a single thirty-four-year-old woman living alone in New York I had a pretty good life.

  My most exciting personal possession wasn’t expensive clothes or jewelry but my black American Express card. No one back home would have recognized it as a status symbol, but in New York and L.A., where people were sophisticated, servers in restaurants and bartenders knew exactly what it was: a badge that identified you as Somebody.

  American Express gave out the cards by invitation only. I’d set out with a vengeance to get mine. I’d heard you had to charge a minimum of $150,000 a year to keep it, so I charged everything I could on it, even gas and groceries.

  Oh yes, I knew it was shallow and superficial and materialistic to get revved up about the color of a credit card, but we all have our ego into something, don’t we? That invitation from American Express represented my version of a ribbon for best cake at the fair.

  To get that card and everything it represented took a long, hard decade from the day I left a small town in Middle America. My parents had both been born and raised in the same town where I was brought up. My mother and father were what snobs on the East and West coast called Flyover People because the snobs flew over them hopping from coast to coast. Climbing high in the snooty, cutthroat world of museum art and antiquities, I worked and lived on Museum Mile, a haughty Upper East Side neighborhood in Manhattan surrounded by Old Money and dot-com tycoons. A not-too-shabby accomplishment for a girl who came from a small town in Ohio and who lacked the requisite pedigrees in family, money, and Ivy League education.

  Along the way a relationship up to the point of an engagement ring fell victim when I refused to move to D.C. after my investment banker fiancé accepted a promotion and transfer there. I cried at the time and sometimes I lie awake at night and think about him, imagining his warm body beside mine, but if I had to do it again, I would. He made a decision that put his career before me, and I put mine ahead of him.

  Acquiring a position as curator for one of the richest museums in the world had been achieved with a lot of hard work, none of it on my back. Plenty of women were willing to put out to advance their careers, but I wasn’t one of them. Sure, I’d cut a few corners—it was that kind of business. When a rare piece of art or collectible came on the market, it was war-to-the-knife, no-holds-barred, as collectors, dealers, and curators fought to possess it.

  My employer was J. Hiram Piedmont III, the scion of the family and chairman of the Piedmont Museum of Mesopotamian Art, a small but prestigious museum on Fifth Avenue near the Met with a very impressive antiquities collection.

  I personally didn’t have that much contact with Hiram himself, but I knew a lot about him: He usually got what he wanted no matter what the cost, socialized with the superelite, drove only the finest cars, owned a yacht on each coast, a private plane, mansions in world-class venues, had his own personal curator who furnished his homes with art and a personal tailor-valet who made his wardrobe. His kids went to a summer camp designed to help them cope in a world in which they were… well, different. In other words, he was superrich.

  Hiram the Third was also very generous about rewarding the museum’s curators as long as they brought in the results that gave him the publicity and prestige he desired. The job came with a generous expense account, along with a generous salary… and a revolving door for those who failed.

  Before I was hired by Eric Vanderhof, the museum’s director, who ran the daily operations of the museum, I had been an assistant curator for the Egyptian antiquities at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Met’s collection was world-class. But the work bored the hell out of me. Rubbing elbows with the great works of history never failed to thrill me, but the job itself was boring because I was just a tiny cog in a very big organization.

  I had had little control when it came to the conception and development of exhibitions. The Met kept artifacts in boring glass boxes and display cases in rooms lacking atmosphere and charm. I argued that people wanted an adventure when they visited the museum, to experience it as if “they were actually there.” It would leave a more lasting impression if the museum had an educational story about an exhibit that captured the adventure with authentic items and stories.

  I was on the verge of leaving my job at the Met for an offer to be the personal curator for a top Hollywood director, traveling around the world chasing pieces for a collection being built as an investment, when I found out from a friend of a friend about the opening at the Piedmont Museum. Hiram’s pockets were much deeper than the movie director’s, and it gave me a chance to build a world-renowned collection. Luckily for me I had made a good impression with Eric and I had an excellent résumé.

  With my generous salary I was able to leave my cramped apartment and rent a penthouse walking distance from the Piedmont. I gave my old car to charity and parked a new XK Jaguar in a garage. I also updated my wardrobe. I had some decent clothes, which I gave to charity, because I needed to dress with more class now. I started shopping at designer boutiques and higher-end stores. I considered my wardrobe an investment, so I didn’t feel guilty.

  My passion was handbags and shoes. I had at least a hundred pairs of shoes and dozens of handbags. I had my eye on a Yves Saint Laurent white crocodile bag but decided I couldn’t afford the $18,990 price. It seemed a little too extravagant to pay for one bag. Unless I got the big bonus I expected if everything went right today.

  One of my neighbors, a poor little rich girl, was studying for a master’s in luxury marketing, a growing field of expertise in a world as affluent as ours. She gave me advice on how to dress for success.

  Since most of my salary went for rent, clothes, accessories, food, and paying off my student loans and credit card debts, I didn’t have much in my savings account. My theory was if you couldn’t take it with you, you might as well enjoy it now. And I did, because tomorrow looked like it was going to be even better.

  I had held the title of curator for over a year now. Besides caring for the objects belonging to the museum, performing research to identify the history of the objects in our collection, and creating and managing exhibits, I was also responsible for recommending acquisitions for the museum. Basically, my job was not only to oversee the museum’s collection but also to add to it. In four years the museum had gone through three curators because a centerpiece hadn’t been found yet.

  I was determined not to fail. The secret was to stay lean and hungry for pieces, keep a constant eye on the market, and fight hard and even dirty for pieces if that’s what the competition did. But that “revolving door” had been gnawing at me for the past several months. I had acquired some unique antiquities for the Piedmont, but I only recently found the pièce de résistance. I planned to bid on it at tonight’s auction.

  ***

  I smelled money in the air the minute I walked into the auction room.

  So many designer labels were present, Armani, Chanel, Ferragamo, Wang, Zegna, Hermès, Versace, Cavalli, Gucci, Lauren, Prada, Magli, to name a few, it looked like a fashion show at a high-end boutique. Tiffany’s, Winston’s, Bvlgari, Cartier, were on wrists, necks, and not a few ankles. With a little imagination, you could hear diamond-studded Rolexes tick-tick-ticking. A few “underdressed” people were sprinkled among the haute couture.

  The emotional and sometimes intense drama that took place in a tightly packed auction room full of elegantly dressed people, flashing their jewelry, ready to pay absurd prices to possess something that no one else had, was exhilarating. Texas hold’em poker players duel for hours over stakes of hundreds of thousands or even a million
. At a high-end art auction, people have bid a hundred million dollars at the flick of a paddle.

  An auction was a battlefield, a world-class chess match, and a group therapy session all at the same time. Friendships were forgotten, any weakness exploited. The highest bid was not always the winning bid… paying too much for a piece was worse than failing to be the high bidder.

  All of them were here tonight… Old Money, New Money, Other People’s Money… even Laundered Money. Everyone knew Mexican and Colombian drug lords were cleaning ill-gotten gains in the free-swinging art market.

  With art, it didn’t matter who you were: If you had money, you could play. And as in a game of Monopoly, the more money you had, the more you could buy. An amazing number of people played the art market much like others played the stock market. There are 8 million millionaires in this world, and a bunch of them buy art not just to hang up but also to hang on to as an investment. Often it wasn’t money at issue but ego. When ego was the motivation for the buy, I treaded lightly, because things could really get nasty. The most blood I’d ever seen on an auction room floor, metaphorically speaking, was bidding between a couple involved in a divorce. The family law judge had ordered them to auction off their art collection because they couldn’t agree on dividing the property. When the bidding between them got ridiculous over an antique chair, the husband suddenly rushed forward, grabbed the chair, broke it in half, and threw half at the wife.

  I always wondered what happened to their children and pets.

  Everyone has their own need for acquiring possessions. The rich want to increase their wealth; the passionate want to own beautiful things; the egotistical want to impress people; the greedy… well, they were just greedy.

  Money had the power to make dreams come true—but as Humphrey Bogart said in The Maltese Falcon about the statue that spawned murder among those who desired it, the piece of art itself was the stuff that dreams were made of.

  The stuff that dreams were made of… that’s how I felt about the works of antiquity, that golden era of the empires of Greece, Rome, Babylon, Persia, India, China, and many other regions before the Middle Ages. Marble statues, vases, carvings in stone… all of them excited me. When I touched a piece or held it in my hands, it wasn’t just an inanimate object to me but a magic talisman that caused my imagination to flow, to think about the artist or craftsman who had created it: A man or woman had taken shapeless marble or stone or clay and worked it into an image that caused oohs and aahs two or three millenniums later.

  Maybe I’m a little far-out, but I believe that when we create an object some essence of our human spirit passes from our hands to our creation.

  In college, while others went for jobs at McDonald’s and Starbucks, I applied at museums. The positions amounted to nothing more than standing around watching other visitors and answering their questions, but it brought me close to what I loved. To get experience by actually handling pieces, I volunteered to work for free with the curator staff at the Met who set up the displays. That pro bono time was my ticket to a job there after I graduated.

  ***

  As I went past the salesroom registration desk, the last bidder was picking up her paddle. Serious bidders had to register at the desk to receive their three-digit-numbered bidding paddles, but the process of clearing them to make deep-pocket bids had begun days earlier by verifying ability to pay. Some were here just for the fun of it and to watch other people spend millions of dollars.

  My paddle number was 120. I would follow the commands of Hiram when I bid on the piece I was there to buy. The purchase was anticipated to be a big one, the most ever paid for a Babylonian piece, and Hiram wanted to be in command of the amount he was willing to pay. I let him think he had control, but I had been working on him since the piece came on the market two weeks ago.

  I scanned the room. Several buyers who I knew would be bidding on tonight’s lots, the auction term used for pieces being sold, were in the room.

  As I sat in one of the back rows, I figured there were at least two hundred people in a room that could easily accommodate twice that many.

  Rutgers was one of the premier auction houses in New York, perhaps the premier house. Christie’s and Sotheby’s had offerings in a wide range of genres and price ranges. Rutgers specialized in antiquities. The CEO liked to brag that if it wasn’t in existence before the barbarians raped Rome, it wouldn’t be auctioned off at Rutgers.

  Their business plan fit me perfectly.

  Hiram wanted to have the museum’s collection cover the whole Mediterranean art scene. That covered a lot of territory, including Greek, Roman, and Egyptian, the triumvirate of Western antiquities. Because the Piedmont Museum came into the acquisitions arena later in the game, though well-heeled, I convinced him to focus on pieces from the ancient Middle East—Babylonian, Chaldean, Assyrian, and the like. Those areas had more new pieces hitting the market than the triumvirate countries. Rutgers, a place that I had intimate connection with, was the auction house where many of these pieces were sold to the public.

  I didn’t realize until after I sat down that one of my knees was shaking slightly. A nervous habit of mine. But I had a lot to be nervous about as I thought about the purchase I was about to make tonight.

  Since the museum opened four years ago, a hunt had been on to find the perfect antiquity that would be the centerpiece of the Piedmont’s collection. Not only did it have to be unique, one of a kind, but it also had to be eye grabbing, a museum piece that would generate publicity from the media and covetous envy from the other museums and collectors.

  The relic I threw down the gauntlet on was a piece connected to an Assyrian queen who had made an indelible mark on the history of war and lust.

  Most people had probably never heard of Assyria or, if it sounded familiar, didn’t remember where it was located, though they’d heard of Babylon, its most famous city—the location of the Tower of Babel and one of the wonders of the ancient world, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. I wasn’t surprised about the ignorance of most people about geography—how many of us could have identified Iraq or Afghanistan on a world atlas before the War on Terrorism had begun?

  Going back several thousand years, Assyria was truly one of the greatest Middle Eastern empires. It rose to power around the same epoch that Egypt of the mighty pharaohs was declining. Much of the empire was located in Mesopotamia, the region we now call Iraq. Babylon itself was in its day the art and cultural center of Western civilization.

  The antiquity I was bidding on tonight was a golden death mask of history’s first great warrior-queen: Sammu-ramat. The Greeks called her Semiramis, and that was the name she went under in the worlds of art and literature.

  The story of this ninth century B.C. Assyrian beauty was a fascinating tale of war, lust, and romance. My research revealed that her relationship with her kingly husband was the basis for a central theme of romantic fiction popular right up to our present time, the roman d’aventure: tales of faithful lovers who are forced apart and are reunited only after numerous adventures.

  On the darker side of art was her notorious ability to incite more than the rape of empires: The mask carried a curse that passed to people who possessed it over the past three thousand years. What nonsense, I thought. But the legend of a curse made the value soar.

  Chapter 3

  As I waited impatiently for the bidding to start, people were still straggling into the room at the last minute, some with bidding paddles, some without.

  The auctioneer, Neal Nathan, had just arrived, making his way to the rostrum. He carried his precious black book with him. Neal would be checking prices in the book as the auction went on because it showed the “reserves,” the minimum prices the sellers had set. The prices were written in code so only the auctioneer would know the secret amounts. It also spelled out bids made by people who were not able to, or preferred not to, attend the auction.

  Two assistants sat next to the podium, ready to handle phone bids. On the back wa
ll was the currency conversion board for those bids placed with foreign currency.

  I knew that my lot would not be first on the block. Auctions were choreographed like Russian ballets, every moment rehearsed for weeks, sometimes months, in advance. While the order of offerings was customized for every sale, typically the star of the show was presented for bid about halfway through the event.

  The catalog for tonight’s auction listed 150 lots. A bidder’s valuable tool, the catalog listed each numbered lot for sale, the description and ownership information, and the anticipated bid value.

  I wore hands-free cell phone gear. A three-way conference call would take place between Hiram, who would make the final decision, Eric, who would offer his opinion, and myself, who would no doubt be blamed if anything went wrong. I would place my hand across my mouth to keep my lips from being read—it wouldn’t be the first time a bidder had a lip-reader at an auction to discover an opponent’s position.

  I didn’t know exactly how high Hiram would go, but I had a pretty good idea because I had been nudging him closer and closer to the figure I guessed it would take to get the piece. He wouldn’t tell me, and I didn’t expect him to. It was his money, even if he never personally earned a cent of it. I would have to wait and listen, picking up clues from nuances in his words and tone. Obviously, there was a point where he would not go a penny higher.

  So far, the most expensive piece for the museum had come in at $10 million. That wasn’t chump change, but it was a small fraction of what some works had gone for in the past. Somewhere beyond the initial authority he gave me was an amount above which he wouldn’t go. I doubted if he had the exact figure in mind himself. Even if he did, auctions were akin to horse races—in the heat of the moment, the horse can be whipped to go those extra lengths.

  Hiram would also be influenced by what I reported about the mood of the room as the bids were made.