The Looters by Harold Robbins Read Free Book Online

soldiers, make both sides understand that what would be destroyed was not the weapons of war but the irreplaceable heritage of an entire nation.
    He went to the other side of the building and used his key to enter through a door restricted to employee use only. Making his way down a deserted corridor, he was relieved not to hear gunfire.
    Maybe the fighting was over, he thought.
    He came into the front exhibition room and stared in astonishment. American and Iraqi uniformed soldiers were not fighting but were busy at work, concentrating on what they were doing—boxing museum antiquities!
    He wasn’t a fool. He realized instantly that they weren’t preserving the pieces—they were robbing the museum.
    Stunned and speechless, he watched soldiers who were supposed to be fighting and killing each other stealing the most important cultural relics of the nation. Statues too large or heavy to move easily were having their most valuable part—the heads—cut off.
    He gasped at the sight of a soldier using an electric saw to cut the head from a white marble statue of Poseidon recovered from the Hatra site. Another Hatra relic, a marble money box, was being bubble-wrapped. An ivory plaque of a lion killing a Nubian, an Assyrian piece from Nimrud, and the copper head of the Goddess of Victory were being carried out the door.
    He staggered into the room, his mouth agape, his mind swirling.
    “Stop! In the name of God. Stop!”
    The men in the room suddenly noticed him.
    “Abdullah! You fool! What are you doing here?”
    The man who had spoken was one of Abdullah’s superiors. Everyone knew the man was a member of Saddam’s Ba’th Party and would be discharged as soon as a new government was formed. But he had been Abdullah’s friend for over twenty years. Now he was helping the foreigners and Iraqi soldiers loot the museum.
    An American soldier wearing a cap with the word “SEAL” on it stepped in front of Abdullah and drew his pistol.
    “Please,” Abdullah’s superior pleaded, “he’s just a sick old man.”
    Abdullah’s head exploded with pain as someone struck him from behind with the butt of a rifle.

Chapter 6
    Jamaica Plains, New York City, the present
    Abdullah’s daughter, Asima, held her head in her hands to try to suppress a growing headache. She was tired of listening to her father rant. For the last hour he had been directing his diatribe at the TV set in her fifth-floor walk-up flat located in a low-rent district in Queens, one of the five boroughs of New York City.
    She had been in the United States for twenty years now, having emigrated with her late husband. When her father suffered a serious head injury during the U.S. occupation of Iraq, she had him brought to the States, first on a hardship medical visa and then seeking asylum on the grounds that he would be prosecuted for political crimes if he returned to Iraq. The new administration had accused him of dereliction of duty in his failure to preserve and protect the property of the Iraqi museum from looters.
    The looters were identified as a mob of Iraqis who had entered the museum after law and order had broken down in the city.
    Asima was a dispatcher for a taxi company whose owner had come from Iraq. After spending many hours teaching Abdullah the street system of the city, she had arranged a taxi-driving job for him. Because of headaches from his injury and bouts of malaria, her father frequently missed work. But that was the easy part for her to deal with. His great passion… no, his great obsession was the identification and recovery of antiquities stolen from the museum.
    “Thieves! Murderers!” he ranted at the television.
    Thousands of antiquities were missing from the museum. After a passage of years, he was certain that many of them were slowly coming out of the woodwork and making their way into the public eye in museums and galleries.
    Her father spent every spare moment casing museum and art shows for the items. When he found