Read The Deceivers for Free Online Page B

would wait and hold the door open when you met them coming or going, but like any good New Yorker, I didn’t know my neighbors well enough to pick them out of a police lineup.
    Sighing, I forced myself away from the window, hoping my melancholy would fade. Think positive .
    I got into a comfy position on the sofa and stared vacantly at the rain slashing against the window. The heat in the room made me drowsy. Usually I could control the steam radiator heat but the handle was broken … again. I jotted down a note to myself to tell the landlord to fix it—again.
    I’d been sitting for an hour, trying to figure out what way I should turn, when the phone rang. I didn’t recognize the number, but it wasn’t Mrs. Garcia’s number so I answered it.
    â€œMaddy, it’s Bolger.”
    I couldn’t have heard a better name or voice to help with my predicament. Bolger was a top-notch art expert who opened a one-man, one-room bookstore that sold new and used art books after he retired from the Met. He occasionally hired himself out as an art authenticator, examining pieces to separate the fakes from the bona fides, but the field was mostly dominated by laboratories with high-tech equipment.
    We’d worked together at the Met when I was a young intern learning the world of museums and he was an old pro in the unit that performed tests to determine the authenticity of pieces that the museum wanted to acquire.
    Bolger had an encyclopedic knowledge of antiquities, but after leaving the museum, the march of technology had relegated him to the status of an anachronism—a person who belonged in another time.
    â€œI’m obsolete,” he told me years ago. “I weigh two hundred pounds and a computer chip that weighs a thousandth of that can store infinitely more knowledge.”
    When I was still head curator at the Piedmont, I sent him artifacts to authenticate. I had more faith in his instincts than a laboratory full of high-tech machines.
    â€œI have a referral for you,” he said. “More accurately, I gave your name and phone number along with a high recommendation to a very rich and serious collector. Hopefully he will be calling.”
    â€œGreat. I need the business. I’m glad you called. We haven’t talked in ages.”
    He was on the list of people I’d sent business cards to after I’d decided to launch my business. So far he was the only one who had called me.
    â€œHow you doing?” he asked.
    â€œWell, as you know, I started my own business and things are a little … ah…”
    â€œSlow?”
    â€œUh huh.”
    â€œTough?
    â€œUh huh.”
    â€œI know, I’ve been there. Something will happen soon. Send me a batch of your business cards and I’ll give them out to everyone from book buyers to the mail carrier. Your luck will turn around.”
    Bolger knew about the Semiramis scandal, but he was too much of a gentleman to say anything, which was fine with me—I was tired of explaining myself and proclaiming my innocence.
    â€œMaybe it has. Something really weird happened that I need your opinion on. Are you busy right now?”
    â€œI haven’t sold a book in two days, but that’s okay, I like my books and hate to part with them. What’s up?”
    â€œI just saw a piece of art and it’s blown my mind. You won’t believe it when I tell you.”
    â€œYou said weird. Is this going to be one of those scenarios in which someone puts out five bucks at a yard sale for a painting that’s been in grandma’s attic for fifty years … and it turns out to be a Matisse?”
    â€œYou’re a mind reader. But do grandmas have attics in Thailand?”
    â€œOnly bamboo ones that monkeys swing in.”
    â€œSomebody showed me a sandstone Apsaras relief a little while ago that looks real.”
    â€œIt might be. There are looted pieces around. The creators of Angkor’s