If Samimi had respected Taghinia at all, he would have been impressed by his boss’s cunning-offering a generous bonus wrapped around a threat. Instead it made him all the more nervous about watching his own back.
“Didn’t show them the papers? Why is that?” demanded Taghinia from the opposite end of the table as he put the Cuban up to his mouth and inhaled again.
“I have some questions about their authenticity,” Reza explained. “And I don’t want to turn anything over to the museum’s attorneys that might prove embarrassing and hurt our case.”
Taghinia picked a piece of tobacco off his thick lips, blinked his lizard-brown eyes and started tapping his foot on the carpet. “Questions?” Tap, tap. “Questions at this point are not a good thing, Mr. Reza.” Tap, tap. “Our government is losing patience.”
“Regardless, it’s not in your best interest to have me proceed rashly.”
Taghinia glared at Samimi as if this was somehow the underling’s fault. The only real civility and cooperation between Iran and America was in the cultural arena, and if this issue dragged on and became an international incident it wouldn’t help either country’s already strained diplomatic efforts.
“Were you aware of this?” he asked.
“I don’t care if Samimi knew about it or not. I want to know what’s wrong with the documents.” Nassir’s voice drew everyone’s attention back to the squawk box in the middle of the highly polished ebony table.
“I don’t believe they’re authentic,” Reza said.
“What?” Taghinia’s face flushed with an emotion that read as outrage but that Samimi suspected was guilt.
“That’s impossible,” said Nassir. “Reza, do you understand? That’s impossible.”
Samimi had never heard the minister of culture so upset. Nassir had studied art history at Oxford and had published two books on Islamic art that had each been translated into more than twenty languages. Nassir had once said that he believed every piece in Iran’s museum was a member of his family and it was up to him to safeguard them all.
“The partage agreement that details the fate of the objects found at the Susa excavations is dated 1885,” Reza said.
“Yes?” Nassir asked.
“The paper it’s written on was manufactured in 1910,” Reza explained.
“Impossible.”
“I’m afraid not. I’ve had two experts test it.”
“But there are corroborating records,” the minister argued.
“None that mention this piece by name or description, Mr. Nassir. For the past eighteen months, we’ve been operating on the assumption that these papers were authentic. We’ve built our whole case on them. This is a serious setback.”
At the heart of Iran’s request was an eight-foot-tall chryselephantine statue of the Greek god Hypnos, the god of sleep, which neither Samimi nor anyone else on the phone call had ever seen. According to art historians, some of the best chryselephantine sculpture came from the city of Delphi, which had been looted by the Phokians in the mid-fourth century BCE. The Phokians had sold some of the treasures to raise money and pay troops; others they melted to make coins. It was believed that a Persian satrap or king in Susa had bought Hypnos when the Phokians reached the east and that, at some point after that, the statue had been buried. It might have been hidden during an attack to save it from more looters because of the amount of gold, ivory and precious stones that decorated it, or stolen again and hidden by the thief. No one knew, but the result was that it had survived practically intact until the 1880s.
“What about the treaty?” Nassir asked.
Samimi had also given Reza a copy of a treaty dated April 12, 1885, that granted France the exclusive right to excavate the area of Shush, which was on the ancient site of Susa. “That’s authentic, but since we have no proof of when Hypnos was found, only when it was shipped out of the country, it’s useless.”
“It was discovered prior to April. The American collector bought looted art,” Taghinia insisted. He turned and looked at Samimi, then blew out more of the toxic smoke.
Samimi knew he couldn’t logically be blamed for this latest snafu. Nassir had sent the documents in question to America via the diplomatic pouch. But Taghinia was going to need someone to blame and the case had been Samimi’s responsibility for the past year and a half. He knew more about the history of the hypnotist than anyone here but Reza.
When the American collector who’d bought the sculpture died in 1888 he left it, along with the rest of his vast collection, to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. At that time New York’s fledgling museum, which had recently moved from Fourteenth Street up to Eighty-First Street and Fifth Avenue, had already outgrown its new space, and its director, General Luigi Palma di Cesnola, was using all available funds for expansions. When he saw how much conservation Hypnos needed he put the sculpture in storage in the cavernous tunnel under Central Park until he had the money to tend to it. In 1908 a young curator mislabeled it and for almost an entire century after that, it remained lost. Then, in the winter of 2007, another curator, searching for a Roman bronze, discovered the mislabeled crate. A few months later, the Met announced its find. Hypnos, they said, would be getting the conservation it needed before being installed in a special exhibition space linking the Greek and Roman wings with the new Islamic wing when it opened in 2011.
Five months later, Vartan Reza formally made a request on behalf of the Iranian government that Hypnos be returned, claiming it had been illegally smuggled out of the country by a French archaeologist.
Once the international press reported the story, the Greek government filed a similar claim, requesting that the sculpture be returned to them since, even though the piece had been found in the Middle East, it was clearly of Greek origin and a national treasure.
It was no surprise that the single surviving piece of chryselephantine sculpture in the world was a prize to fight over, but the Met refused to even get into the ring.
In a New York Times op-ed, the museum director wrote about the cultural heritage issue at the heart of the battle:
There is no case here. Frederick L. Lennox, who bequeathed the sculpture to us, did not engage in buying contraband. Partage was a common and legitimate system in the nineteenth century, and this treasure was part of that fair exchange-expertise traded for a percentage of what was found. It wasn’t illegal activity then and can’t be looked at as illegal activity now.
Hypnos has been at the Met for over one hundred and twenty years. This is his home, and with us he is safe in a way that he might not be in his homeland. We’ll continue to protect him and prepare him to be shown unless and until we have irrefutable proof that he’s here illegally.
All over the world, museums engaged in similar battles were watching what happened in New York. When accused of harboring looted treasures, most of them took it upon themselves to do the research necessary to prove the legality of their ownership. Not the Met. The director insisted the burden of that proof was on the claimant. The Metropolitan, he said, was under no obligation to prove the opposite. The last will and testament of Frederick L. Lennox had been verified when it was executed over a hundred years before.
Reza had countered by getting a subpoena requiring the museum to turn over Lennox’s bequest and any other pertinent paperwork. When that request was refused, Reza filed with the Manhattan district attorney, asking to be allowed to review the Met’s documents and study the detailed history of the object’s journey to the museum in order to prove it was there illegally. The district attorney was quoted as saying, “A museum must recognize its obligation to return looted objects of art to their country of origin. That’s in the public interest.” But, stopping short of penalizing the Metropolitan, he added, “It is, though, incumbent on Iran to first present some proof that the sculpture was removed illegally.”