V.T. grinned. “Ah, yes. It just struck me too.”
Marlene rocked forward and rapped her knuckles on the desk. “Crap! Ersoy sells Kerbussyan fakes, and he finds out and aces him. Christ, it wouldn’t take much to get him to shoot a Turk. Damn! It could be we’ve gone around in a big circle for nothing.”
“You mean it might actually be Tomasian. Kerbussyan tries to recover Armenian national treasures, gets cheated by the hated Turk, and sends the Secret Army out for revenge. Yes, there’s that, but in that case you’d also want to bring in the old man too. Okay, put that aside for a minute, and look at the other alternative. Let’s say thieves fell out. Who would Ersoy be connected with on this scam?”
Marlene paged through her notes. “Ahmet Djelal. Ersoy spent a lot of time with him. And he was in charge of security at the mission. And he’s got Ersoy’s desk calendar.”
“It’s worth checking.”
“Yeah. Okay, I’ll send Harry around. What else?”
“Well, from my end, I’ll start pulling the wires on the brother, and you get me those letters. We’ll see if his bank account is consistent with the salary of a humble archaeologist.”
Marlene sighed. She was oppressed by the idea that the Armenians were in fact involved with the murder. “I guess I should go tackle Kerbussyan. I don’t see how it’s going to do any good. I mean, why the hell should he talk to me? Butch’s been at him already, so have the police, and we haven’t got anything new to wave in his face.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t see Kerbussyan yet,” said V.T., a sly tone creeping in.
“Oh?”
“No. I think you should talk to Sokoloff first.”
“Why? We have nothing on him either.”
“Yes, but he doesn’t know that. Cast some broad hints. The last thing he wants is to be involved in a murder investigation, the old smoothie. If he’s not actually the middle man between Ersoy and Kerbussyan on any art dealings they may have had, I guarantee you he knows who sold what to whom. And if it was real.”
She saw Sokoloff the next day in the office above his gallery. She went alone. Harry was off on bureau business, talking to people who might know whether some guy in Washington Heights had been raping his nine-year-old stepdaughter. She had told him about Djelal, and he had said he would look into it. She was at least mildly guilty about using Harry to investigate something outside her official (and his official) purview, essentially as a favor to her husband. The other women in the office were getting miffed about it too, although they were careful not to show it.
Harry wouldn’t work directly for them in any case; they had to go through Marlene to get him to do anything. Since they were all ambitious women with substantial egos and a certain quickness to take offense at the slights that came daily from what was still virtually an all-boy environment, this did not add to the joy of working in the Rape Bureau. They called Harry, behind his back, “the Dobe”-Marlene’s Doberman pinscher.
So she sat uneasily on Sokoloff’s nearly real Louis Quinze settee, making small talk with its charming owner, in his charming, exquisitely decorated office, feeling vaguely blue. She had not yet told him why she had come, but he had assumed that she was working the fraud thing with Rodriguez and she had not contradicted this.
“You sell a lot to Sarkis Kerbussyan, don’t you?” she asked.
“Yes, I’ve placed a number of very fine pieces with Sarkis over the years.”
Placed. Like abandoned children in foster homes, but with infinitely more concern.
“Armenian artworks, right?”
“By and large. Sarkis has one of the largest private collections of Armenian art, both ancient and medieval. Why do you ask?”
Marlene ignored this question. “Would you say he’s a connoisseur? That he knows what he’s doing?”
Sokoloff nodded and smiled. “Oh, yes. He has a good eye. There is still a little of the rug merchant in him.”
“Is it likely that he would be taken in by fakes, if they were offered?”
The temperature of Sokoloff’s smile dropped a few degrees. “Fakes. Well, dear lady, we can all be taken in by clever fakes. Not everything can be analyzed in the laboratory. If we took the time to do so for every item, the art business would collapse. We all have to rely on taste and provenance and the integrity of a reputable dealer. So I can’t really tell you if any fakes have been unloaded on Mr. Kerbussyan. Certainly he never got one from me. Knowingly, that is.”
Marlene looked at him, waiting. After a brief silence he took a deep breath through his fleshy nose and continued.
“On the other hand, the specialist collector is perhaps more susceptible to that sort of thing than the general collector, odd as it may seem.”
“Why is that?”
“Because the specialist is interested in the specialty, not necessarily in the aesthetic or technical qualities of the art itself. Despite his greater familiarity with his narrow field, his desire for possession may overcome his prudence. For example, back in the mid-sixties there was an enormous surge in the market for Judaica. Perhaps it was the Six-Day War, who knows-a stimulus for Jewish patriotism. In any case, many wealthy American and European Jews were willing to pay anything for old synagogue silver, the rimanim, the little bells and decorations hung from the Torahs, North African Hanukkah lamps, silver menorahs, and such things. Enamel betrothal rings with Hebrew inscriptions.
“And, of course, the market responded. There was a cottage industry digging out old tea caddies and carving them with Hebrew to make ethrog, the little boxes to place matzoh in, and converting Victorian silver chalices into medieval kiddush cups. Probably half the forgers in Italy were studying Hebrew.
“What’s interesting is that there were very few complaints about all this. Only the historians were affronted. The customers were delighted, mostly. And you have to wonder who got hurt. Some fakes are fine art in themselves. Vlaminck painted a fake Cezanne, which Cezanne thought was a very nice painting. Picasso owned a fake Miro. Funny, heh?” He laughed, to show what funny was.
“So, the point is,” he concluded, “Sarkis and some others like him want Armenian, they’ll get Armenian. Real or fake.”
“I see. Do you think that a Turkish diplomat named Mehmet Ersoy might have sold things to Kerbussyan? Real or fake.”
The art dealer raised an eyebrow. His smile was now purely formal, a faint upward tug of his thickish lips. He said, “Miss, ah, Ciampi, is it? Perhaps it would save time for both of us if you simply told me what you are here for.”
“You recognize the name?”
He nodded. “The man who was shot. At the United Nations?”
“The way you say that, Mr. Sokoloff, suggests to me that you knew Ersoy’s name even before he was shot,” Marlene said, and then, to forestall the response she saw building in the man’s face, “No, you asked why I was here. Okay, I’m going to tell you, frankly. I’m not interested in art fraud per se. What I’m interested in is who killed Mehmet Ersoy and why.”
“But I thought-”
“Yes, we have a suspect, but we have reason to believe that whether or not he actually did it, the reason had nothing to do with political terrorism. The reason Mehmet Ersoy was killed involved the sale, or theft, or forgery, of objects of art. Which is why I want you to tell me everything you know about Ersoy, about his dealings in the art world, and about his relationship with Sarkis Kerbussyan.”
She was looking directly at Sokoloff as she spoke, and she imagined that she could see the calculations going on behind his dark eyes. She added, “I should also tell you that I have no reason to believe that you have been personally involved in any of this, and you are not at this point the subject of any investigation. However, you are obliged to give me any information that you have; failure to do so is called hindering prosecution, and is itself a felony.”
The words sounded absurdly formal in Marlene’s own ears, but she could see that Sokoloff took them seriously. V.T. had been right; the art dealer did not want to he mixed up in anything to do with a murder. He chewed on his lower lip, and dropped his eyes, and sighed-a picture of surrender that Marlene hoped was not a complete dramatization.