“There is one problem, Einstein. Tomasian could go down for it, despite everything.”
“No way. Because we are going to find and convict the actual killers.”
“You’re that confident?”
“Of course.” He grinned at her. “I have you, don’t I? You’re always accusing me of not having confidence in you or your ideas. You were the one who first sniffed out it wasn’t Tomasian, you got that stuff from the U.N. guy, and you’re going to find who did do it. I’m a cripple. You have to grab the banner from my failing hands.”
She stared at him, her face flashing a series of emotions. “You’re such a rat. Only you would’ve turned us working together into a macho game with Roland.”
Karp laughed and looked skyward. “Dear God, what do they want?”
Eventually she laughed, too. “Okay, wiseass, what’s our next move?”
“Follow the art. What deal went down between Kerbussyan and Ersoy? And find out about the art frauds. It’s got to be that. Somebody killed him because he was about to blow a scam. That, or because of some pricey trinket that got misplaced or ripped off.”
Marlene followed the art. She gathered up the notes she had made at the U.N. and the other materials from the case and went to visit V.T. Newbury. His cubicle was on the eighth floor in Fraud, another typical assistant district attorney’s tiny veal-fattening pen, although V.T. had made some improvements. He had his own furniture: a Sheraton-style desk, a Tiffany desk lamp in mauve and cream glass, a worn but genuine oriental on the floor, a signed (real) Matisse print, and a fake (but pretty) Utrillo street scene on the wall.
“V.T.,” she said, sliding into the cane rocker he kept in his office for visitors, “let’s talk about art. Tell me things.”
V.T. looked up from a catalogue raisonné he was studying.
“Post-modernism is dead, assuming there ever was such a thing.”
“Not like that. About what you and Rodriguez are doing. The fakes.”
“Oh, that. That’s going nowhere. As I recall Ramon telling you at Sokoloff’s, art fraud is a hard thing to demonstrate. The victims are embarrassed, so they take their lumps without complaining. If they do complain, the dealer smiles and buys the stuff back, and the next day it’s crated and on a plane to Taiwan or Brazil. They just sell it again. You can’t touch the dealer; he just does a Bogart.”
“Pardon?”
“Like Bogart in Casablanca. When Claude Rains asks him why he came to Casablanca, he says, ‘I came for the waters. For my health.’ And then Rains says, ‘But there are no waters in Casablanca. Casablanca is in the desert.’ And Bogart says, ‘I was misinformed.’ The dealer has his provenance and his opinion from some art school guru he keeps on retainer. So he’s cool. The only way to nail them is if you have solid evidence that they knew the art was fake, like if they actually commissioned some SoHo hack to whip out a Cezanne. Then it is prima facie scheme to defraud, a Class E. Or if we have evidence that the art was actually stolen, and the dealer knew about it. Even then it’s dicey. This is not a guy with fifty hot TVs in the back room. Except if they actually arranged the theft, which is incredibly rare, they’d usually plead down to Criminal Possession Five, misdemeanor level.”
“So what’s the point? Of what Rodriguez and you are doing?” Marlene asked.
“The point is the rings. Art fraud nowadays isn’t a solo operation. You don’t have many guys like Van Meegheren faking Vermeers on his own anymore. It’s an international operation involving groups of dozens of people for each major scam. It’s Big Con. So Rodriguez works very tight with Interpol and the people who do the same kind of work he does in the major art centers. The idea is to understand the con and roll up the whole ring at once-craftsmen, dealers, middlemen, and all, close down the workshops and grab the money. That’s the most important thing.”
“This is where you come in,” Marlene observed.
V.T. was an expert, perhaps the reigning expert in New York at that time, on how people disposed of ill-gotten gains. He smiled and made a deprecating gesture. “That, and my magisterial knowledge of the quattrocento. But I’m drawing a blank on this one. Ramon is much vexed.”
“How come?”
“We don’t know the seller, for one thing. Sokoloff regards it as a trade secret, and we can’t demonstrate knowing fraud on his part, so we can’t pressure him to give it up. The only thing he’ll say is that the stuff comes from Turkey. That’s the other problem. The Turkish authorities are being less than fully cooperative.”
“Because they don’t care about antiquities? Like Rodriguez said?”
V.T. pursed his lips and cocked his head: an expression of polite disagreement. “Hmm. As to that. I think there are various factions involved. I think that probably some Turks don’t care, or would like to forget the previous inhabitants of Anatolia, just as Ramon says. I think others, when they bother to think about it at all, resent the looting of their country. After all, the stuff is there; it belongs to them now, whoever made it. I’m not a Sioux, but if a bunch of Turks arrived and started to loot Indian artifacts, I might get upset. And then there are the people who just see a buck to be made. Tourism et cetera.”
“But you do think it’s at least plausible that this guy Ersoy was buying stolen artifacts back for Turkey.”
“Plausible. Yes, at least plausible.”
Marlene did not particularly want to hear this. She wanted Ersoy to be scamming in some way, but she knew she wanted it, and so she was careful not to let jell in her mind a dependence on that view of things.
“V.T., I think you should check on some stuff for me and Butch. It’s a long story. Have you got a minute?”
“Yes, it’s a life of leisure here at Fraud. Shoot.”
Marlene gave him a brief history of the investigation into the killing of Mehmet Ersoy, including what she and Harry Bello had learned at the Turkish mission. Shortly after she began, V.T. got out a pad and started to take notes.
“This is really fascinating, Marlene,” he said when she had finished. “Especially this business about the brother in Turkey. The archaeologist. A family business maybe. You said there were some letters from the brother. Could I take a look at those in translation?”
“Sure, I’ll get them for you. You think it’s something?”
“Yeah, it has the right odor. What you need in these scams, for authenticity, is a credible story that you have access to good stuff, either a theft from a museum or a discovery. Alfredo Kappa, for example.”
“Who was …?”
“This was three, four years back. Kappa let it be known on the Rome market that he had discovered an Etruscan grave site and was keeping it hidden from the art authorities. He moved a hundred and eighty works in a single week, all fakes, of course. Knowing that they might get something that nobody else has is irresistible to a certain class of collectors. The illegality just adds some spice. In this case, though, we have a quasi-legit dealer moving the stuff openly-some of it, anyway.”
“There could be more?”
“I’d count on it. The open market just heats up the bidding. You go to the guy who lost out on the Lydian brooch and hint that there’s another available off the books.”
“Which is a fake.”
“Doubtless.”
“So Rodriguez was right? Sokoloff’s stuff is phony?”
V.T. made his lip-pursing gesture again. “I’m not so sure. The Roslin painting is real enough. What I smell is something really large. A coup. You move some genuine stuff, museum quality. You make a big deal about how important the pieces are, scholars write articles, the Times does a spread. You focus attention, get the serious money interested, spread the story, line up the customers, sell your fakes, and you’re gone.”
Marlene thought about this for a moment, chewing her lip. “Okay, let’s go ahead on Butch’s supposition. Ersoy was dealing with Kerbussyan. Kerbussyan buys art … uh-oh.”