The Looters Page 4

  The men had probed with an iron rod a mound near a section of wall at the ruins and felt something solid underneath. Digging down with pick and shovel, they uncovered a mask embedded in an ancient stone altar. Scratching the mask and seeing gold, they broke the surrounding altar to free the mask.

  “Tomb robbers,” his father had called them. “In minutes, they destroyed an ancient altar and crushed underfoot vases and clay figurines that have survived wars and the wrath of the elements for three millenniums. All because of their stupidity.”

  His father understood their motive.

  The five were not professional tomb robbers but simple men who hungered for a better life. They and their families had little more than the clothes on their backs and a few possessions in their mud huts. Their only income came from picking dates from the trees near the river and herding communal goats and camels. The amount of money they would divide between them from a Baghdad antiques dealer buying the mask was small, no more than a month’s wages for a city worker. But to these men who had so little of material value, a few coins in their pockets were a fortune.

  When Hussein took the mask from them and turned it over to the authorities, he made blood enemies of the men.

  “They are destroying our history,” Hussein told his son after he had notified the National Museum of Antiquities of Baghdad of the find. “Our poverty does not entitle us to become thieves and destroy our history. The Iraqi people have a proud history going back thousands of years. We have been the crossroads of the great religions and cultures of half of the world.”

  He shook his finger at Abdullah. “An antiquity is not a treasure to be stolen and sold. It is a piece of our history that belongs to all the people of Iraq. Foreigners have already stolen much of our history. We must salvage what remains for our people.”

  An excited museum curator who came to collect the mask explained it to him.

  “Your people have found the death mask of Sammu-ramat, the great warrior-queen of Assyria.”

  “What is a death mask?” Abdullah asked.

  “A cast made of a person’s face after death. The find is especially important because Sammu-ramat is believed to have built Babylon as her capital.”

  “And the Gardens,” Abdullah’s father added.

  “Yes. She had the Hanging Gardens of Babylon created as a wedding present for her son’s new wife. The Gardens are one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.”

  Abdullah’s father knew some legends about the queen. “Sammu-ramat brought bad luck to everyone but herself.”

  The curator nodded in agreement. “She was the mistress of a general. When the king saw her great beauty, he fell in love with her and had the general killed. Forced to commit suicide, it’s said. But this woman had a lust for men besides her husband. When the king found out she was bedding her guards, she killed him and took over the throne. After she became queen, she took a different man to bed every night, having each killed the next day so another could take his place that night.”

  ***

  At the river, Abdullah tried to ignore the men’s shouting and concentrate on watering the camels. A very thirsty camel could hold up to a hundred quarts of water, but sometimes they had to be coaxed to drink. As he walked between the animals, stroking and scolding them, a wind suddenly arose and he tensed.

  Two winds were the bane of Iraq: the Shamal from the north and the poisonous Simoon wind that shrieked out of the southern deserts. The Shamal was predictable, a hot, dry wind coming from the north during the summer months. The Simoon struck without warning. “Like a scorpion,” his father said. Hot and oppressive, it seared across the deserts and plains, sometimes appearing as a whirlwind of dust.

  The dreaded Simoon was the wind that rose now as Abdullah worked with the camels. The beasts brayed and nervously stamped their hooves as the hot blaze suddenly struck.

  An ill omen, Abdullah thought. The Simoom was the scourge of the desert people, from Saudi Arabia’s Empty Quarter to Syria’s Plain of Akkar. It could blind cities, turn sand as hot as lava, and bury caravans.

  Abdullah swung around when he heard his name uttered out loud. The shout wasn’t a call to him but an accusation yelled at his father.

  He had warned his son that others would be disgruntled because he had arranged for Abdullah to work at the museum in Baghdad, a reward for turning over the mask. But it wasn’t a monetary reward: Abdullah would share a small room with other boys at the museum and earn his keep by sweeping and cleaning.

  The job, however, came with an unspoken opportunity. “You are a smart boy. You’ll learn many things at the museum. Someday others will sweep the floors for you,” his father expressed to him.

  The real crux of the dispute was the other men’s suspicions that Abdullah’s father had not only arranged a better life for his son but had also been secretly rewarded with gold by the museum. Abdullah knew the only reward his father had asked for was a radio that could be used to call al-Hillah, the nearest large town, in case of emergency. The radio would benefit the whole village, not just Abdullah’s father.

  He suddenly turned his back on the men to return to his camels at the river.

  Abdullah shouted when he saw a man draw the knife from beneath his robe. As his father spun around, the man sprang at him. A second man drew a blade, then another, all of them hacking and chopping at Abdullah’s father.

  “Father!” Abdullah screamed, running toward the melee. His father was barely able to stand up. He gasped and began to fall.

  Abdullah ran into him, grabbing him around the waist, but the older man was too heavy for him. His father slipped to the ground, leaving a trail of blood down the front of Abdullah’s shirt.

  Abdullah tearfully shrieked at the five village men whom he had known since his birth.

  “Murderers! Thieves!”

  Chapter 5

  Baghdad, 2003

  “Murderers! Thieves!” Abdullah ibn Hussein muttered as he staggered down a street on his way to the Iraqi museum.

  Forty-five years had passed since he had uttered that accusation at five men along the Euphrates River near Babylon. Now another life-and-death crisis had erupted over antiquities.

  Life is a circle, he thought, at least the parts of it we don’t want to meet again. Confronting the pillagers of history had brought him full circle from the day his father had died in his arms.

  Abdullah’s dream as a child was to visit the great museum in Baghdad and see the cultural treasures his father talked about so often. The museum had been closed to the public for several years, so Abdullah was thrilled when his father told him that he would be working there. But his trip to the museum had been on the heels of tragedy. He had left the village of his birth soon after his father had been killed and had never returned.

  As Abdullah’s father had predicted, sweeping floors at the museum would change Abdullah’s life. He had stayed with the museum and worked his way up to become a curator for the museum. The large facility had a number of curators. His special task was to supervise the public displays and arrange exhibits of Babylonian art.

  The museum actually started out as one room in a government building in Baghdad on the east bank of the Tigris River in 1923. Eventually it moved to a bigger building in the same district at the foot of the al-Shuhada Bridge and became the National Museum of Antiquities.

  The museum’s first director, Gertrude Bell, the famous British adventurer, explorer, and archaeologist, remained in charge until her death in 1926.

  Bell had left Britain on the Orient Express in the 1890s for a life devoted to the Middle East. She traveled throughout Iraq, Arabia, and Persia learning Farsi, Arabic, and local dialects. She worked for the British intelligence in Cairo during the First World War before becoming director of antiquities in Baghdad after the war and the creation of the nation.

  In addition to approving applications for archaeologists to dig at sites, she visited them on their sites and was especially credited for keeping the finds
in Iraq instead of leaving the country.

  The museum now had twenty public galleries, arranged chronologically from the prehistoric through the Sumerian, Babylonian, Assyrian, and Islamic periods, displaying clay tablets, cylinder seals, ivories, jewelry, and statues. The most impressive gallery contained the Assyrian antiquities. Gigantic carvings covered its walls and giant human-headed winged bulls stood on pedestals. The museum’s most prized possession was the Sacred Vase of Warka. Over five thousand years old, it was the oldest known carved stone ritual vessel.

  Objects spanning more than ten thousand years of civilization were on display in the museum, but the displayed pieces represented only about 3 percent of its holdings, making it the world’s greatest holder of cultural treasures. In total, the museum housed almost two hundred thousand artifacts.

  Abdullah had learned to read and write and was knowledgeable about the antiquities of the museum, but unlike the other curators, he had limited formal education. Most of the curators had advanced degrees in archaeology, art, and other similar areas of study. He made up for a lack of formal education with hard work, enthusiasm, and dedication.

  Abdullah’s devotion propelled him now out of a sickbed to the museum.

  The world of antiquities had not changed greatly since the day his father was murdered for protecting a museum piece. At thousands of sites all over the nation, people—some poor and desperate, some just avaricious—still stole and sold pieces of the nation’s history. But now was a time of special concern: For the second time in just over a decade, foreign armies were pounding Baghdad.

  In 1991, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait and grabbed its oil, bringing the wrath of Western allies on him and the nation. After twelve contentious years of containment and defiance, the foreigners had returned, only this time the American, British, and other forces had crushed Saddam’s armies, pushing all the way to Baghdad.

  News of allied forces entering the city and fighting near the museum had gotten Abdullah out of his sickbed.

  That Saddam, his brutal sons, and the hated Ba’th political party should be driven from power was right and just. “Allah Akbar!” God is Great! But the museum was too important to become a casualty of the war between Saddam and the West.

  A decision was made to lock up the museum and send the employees home for their protection. The museum director advised the staff that the museum would not be harmed in the coming battle, that under the international conventions of war museums could not be targeted.

  When the lockup occurred, Abdullah was suffering from a recurring problem with malaria attacks and had been bedridden for three days. Suffering fever and chills, he forced himself out of bed and onto the street when he got news from a friend that a unit of Saddam’s elite Republican Guard was using the museum as a defensive position and that American troops were approaching. That made the treasure-house of culture a battlefield.

  As Abdullah came around the corner to a side entrance of the museum he uttered an exclamation of grief and distress: “Ya ellahe!”

  Both Iraqi and American military vehicles were parked near the side door. Two Iraqi Republican Guard soldiers were standing by the trucks smoking cigarettes.

  They’re fighting inside! was the first thought that ran through Abdullah’s mind.

  He didn’t know what to do. If he barged in, one side or the other would shoot him. He needed to find the Americans inside and tell them they must leave the museum and wait for the Iraqis to surrender. Everyone knew Saddam had fled the city and resistance was useless.

  Abdullah’s command of English was good because over the years he had assisted British, Canadian, American, and Australian archaeologists who had come to the museum to study the antiquities of Mesopotamia. He would reason with the soldiers, make both sides understand that what would be destroyed was not the weapons of war but the irreplaceable heritage of an entire nation.

  He went to the other side of the building and used his key to enter through a door restricted to employee use only. Making his way down a deserted corridor, he was relieved not to hear gunfire.

  Maybe the fighting was over, he thought.

  He came into the front exhibition room and stared in astonishment. American and Iraqi uniformed soldiers were not fighting but were busy at work, concentrating on what they were doing—boxing museum antiquities!

  He wasn’t a fool. He realized instantly that they weren’t preserving the pieces—they were robbing the museum.

  Stunned and speechless, he watched soldiers who were supposed to be fighting and killing each other stealing the most important cultural relics of the nation. Statues too large or heavy to move easily were having their most valuable part—the heads—cut off.

  He gasped at the sight of a soldier using an electric saw to cut the head from a white marble statue of Poseidon recovered from the Hatra site. Another Hatra relic, a marble money box, was being bubble-wrapped. An ivory plaque of a lion killing a Nubian, an Assyrian piece from Nimrud, and the copper head of the Goddess of Victory were being carried out the door.

  He staggered into the room, his mouth agape, his mind swirling.

  “Stop! In the name of God. Stop!”

  The men in the room suddenly noticed him.

  “Abdullah! You fool! What are you doing here?”

  The man who had spoken was one of Abdullah’s superiors. Everyone knew the man was a member of Saddam’s Ba’th Party and would be discharged as soon as a new government was formed. But he had been Abdullah’s friend for over twenty years. Now he was helping the foreigners and Iraqi soldiers loot the museum.

  An American soldier wearing a cap with the word “SEAL” on it stepped in front of Abdullah and drew his pistol.

  “Please,” Abdullah’s superior pleaded, “he’s just a sick old man.”

  Abdullah’s head exploded with pain as someone struck him from behind with the butt of a rifle.

  Chapter 6

  Jamaica Plains, New York City, the present

  Abdullah’s daughter, Asima, held her head in her hands to try to suppress a growing headache. She was tired of listening to her father rant. For the last hour he had been directing his diatribe at the TV set in her fifth-floor walk-up flat located in a low-rent district in Queens, one of the five boroughs of New York City.

  She had been in the United States for twenty years now, having emigrated with her late husband. When her father suffered a serious head injury during the U.S. occupation of Iraq, she had him brought to the States, first on a hardship medical visa and then seeking asylum on the grounds that he would be prosecuted for political crimes if he returned to Iraq. The new administration had accused him of dereliction of duty in his failure to preserve and protect the property of the Iraqi museum from looters.

  The looters were identified as a mob of Iraqis who had entered the museum after law and order had broken down in the city.

  Asima was a dispatcher for a taxi company whose owner had come from Iraq. After spending many hours teaching Abdullah the street system of the city, she had arranged a taxi-driving job for him. Because of headaches from his injury and bouts of malaria, her father frequently missed work. But that was the easy part for her to deal with. His great passion… no, his great obsession was the identification and recovery of antiquities stolen from the museum.

  “Thieves! Murderers!” he ranted at the television.

  Thousands of antiquities were missing from the museum. After a passage of years, he was certain that many of them were slowly coming out of the woodwork and making their way into the public eye in museums and galleries.

  Her father spent every spare moment casing museum and art shows for the items. When he found antiquities that he believed belonged to the collection, he sent a fax to the Iraqi consulate. Nearly ten thousand pieces were expressly missing, but that was from the museum itself. How many thousands more were dug out of the ground by tomb robbers and sold to be smuggled out of the country was impossible to estimate.

  “It’s the Mask of Sammu-
ramat,” he told her.

  The news story on television that set him off an hour earlier was about the $55 million auction sale for a Mask of Semiramis.

  “They call it Semiramis,” she said. She had heard his ravings a hundred times about antiquities, especially the one that he felt a personal connection with.

  He was so excited he bounced on the edge of the worn, stuffed couch. “That’s the Greek name, but she is Sammu-ramat to our people. It is the mask that was stolen from the museum.”

  “How can you prove it?”

  That was her immediate response each time he told her he had found a piece taken in the looting of the museum. Officially, the Iraqi government claimed that the museum was looted by a mob. Abdullah’s contention that it had been an organized conspiracy involving Iraqi and American troops had been the reason his daughter and sympathetic friends in Baghdad had helped him get out of the country. The claim had not found favor in Baghdad at a time when the government desperately needed American help.

  “Only one Mask of Sammu-ramat was in the museum,” he said, turning to face Asima. “A mask that is no stranger to me. Your grandfather died for it.”

  She closed her eyes and sighed. Life was hard. She had two small children to support, a husband who had died too soon, and a father who reminded her of the famous Spanish knight-errant who had jousted with windmills.

  Abdullah constantly made the rounds of galleries and museums and had made many claims of looted Iraqi antiquities being held by public and private collections. All the accusations had been ignored.

  This time he was accusing a private museum of buying stolen property. She had heard the name Piedmont and recognized it as the name of one of the rich families of the world.

  Asima and her father were simple people who were barely able to maintain basic subsistence. Much of what they earned went to the attorney who was handling her father’s claim of political asylum. She worried that he would set powerful forces into motion that would harm them.