The Curse Read Free Page A

was a looted piece. There were some clues, but I had pressure from Hiram to buy the piece regardless of my doubts. Naturally, when things got nasty, I was the one thrown to the wolves.
    Hiram was rich enough not to take the blame for anything. And it gave him a nice tax write-off as my career and comfortable life was thrown out the window of a very high building.
    As a result I lost my job, my penthouse, my sports car, along with a covetous Manhattan parking space that cost more than the rent on my current studio on the cusp.
    I even lost the black American Express card that had been my own measurement of having “made it.”
    The only things I kept were the debts that remained after the car and furniture were sold for less than what I owed on them.
    During the first few months of scraping bottom I sold off my jewelry and expensive clothes for a fraction of what I paid for them because I needed the money for food and shelter.
    I didn’t go to upscale restaurants or shop at high-end stores and boutiques anymore. Now I bought clothes from sale racks in my neighborhood, and I ate cheap deli food or takeout from my favorite Thai and Italian restaurants, stretching out the pad thai noodles and spaghetti Bolognese for a couple of days.
    I also lost something I didn’t realize I had had—a desire to possess material things.
    I no longer missed the penthouse and the expensive sports car. I wouldn’t replace them if I won the lottery. But the great clothes and good restaurants were another thing. I did miss that.
    All in all, I was really more at peace with life and myself. I just wished I had a few less debts from the old days and a little more money for the lean cycles I constantly went through.
    Having my reputation back would help, too. Being involved in one of the great antiquities scandals and frauds in history naturally got me blackballed as a curator in the art world. Nobody wanted to be associated with me, even though I had been an innocent player in the whole thing.
    Well, basically innocent. The art business operates with many shades of grays rather than blacks and whites. It was inevitable that pieces with shaky provenances sometimes found their way onto the auction block and you had to look the other way to make sure no one else grabbed the item before you did.
    The “provenance” of an item in my business basically refers to its chain of ownership. It’s like buying a house—you have to check to make sure the party you’re buying from is the legal owner.
    However, houses have ownership histories that are easy to examine, while it can be difficult and even impossible to trace the owner of art pieces thousands of years old that might have passed through many hands over the millenniums or had been dug out the ground yesterday.
    Artifacts by the tens of thousands have made their way from antiquity sites in Europe, Africa, the Middle East, India, the Far East, and the Americas, be it legitimately, by conquest, or by just plain looting.
    It wasn’t that long ago that colonial empires were emptying archaeological sites around the world. Some regions have had one conqueror after another loot their historical treasures. Looting occurs all around the planet even today—there are thieves in Cambodia using electric saws to cut out pieces of irreplaceable Khmer art, peasants in Iraq looting Babylonian sites in order to feed their families, even construction workers in Italy who occasionally find rare artifacts when digging and sell them on the black market.
    All in all, it wasn’t that big a deal for me to have accidentally purchased at auction a piece that turned out to be looted—except for the fact that I paid more than fifty million for it and had to violate a few laws of man and nature to get it back to where it belonged.
    Unfortunately, the international art trade was literally a cottage industry with all the major players knowing—and spying—on each other. It