Jimmy Fogg was known in the business for his connections with the murkier side of the antiques and curios world and he was precisely the person that Fitznorman needed in his search for the missing skull.
Fogg liked to present himself as a fine arts broker, though some spitefully called him second hand dealer at best whilst others treated him as a cheerful crook, and those he had crossed at some time did not hesitate to describe his as a cheap fence.
The Foggs owned two handsome antique shops, one in Camden Passage, and the other on the Fulham Road. It was a family business, his great grandfather, a Jew, had arrived in a hurry from Czarist Russia, fleeing the wrath of some very unhappy customers some time before the Revolution, setting up shop in East London.
Over the years the family dealt mostly in second hand furniture and run-of-the mill antiques, then in the late fifties they moved on, to more up-market antiques and art, and as the prosperity of the consumer society grew they catered to the pockets and tastes of the post-war nouveaux riches.
Jimmy had learnt the trade from his father, a character with a strange reputation, whom Fitznorman had never met and who for some reason was kept in the background. Jimmy was known in the business from London to Tokyo and from St Petersburg to Sydney, he would buy and sell almost anything that was remotely collected with art and arcane collections as long as there was a profit in it.
In spite of his somewhat doubtful reputation he knew his business. A collector could locate and buy the strangest things through Jimmy, then have them transported from one end of the world to the other in a couple of days, cutting through all kinds of red tape.
Fitznorman had confided to Jimmy the job of tracking down the lost skull, which had been illegally exported from Indonesia. The government wanted it back and in particular the Minister of Culture, who had accorded Aris his support and the permit for the exploration in Kalimantan, in exchange was a promise to track down the missing fossils, believed to be in the hands of a private collector, and if possible return them to Indonesia.
Fitznorman received a mail from Fogg with several attachments, photos of a brown skull. After carefully examining the photos, comparing them to those Tegu had given him in Jakarta, then he called Jimmy.
‘So Scott, no doubt you want to know where I am with your business?’
‘That’s right Jimmy, I see you’ve been able to locate something interesting?’
‘Yes we’re in luck, if we can move quickly. I’ve checked things out with one of my American contacts who knows a very private collector. Whether they’re ready to play ball with us or not, I don’t know, there’s a helluva lot of politics involved especially with the troubles out there in Jakarta at the moment. It would have been the best for your friend to do it through official channels, but unfortunately that’s out.’
From the photos the skull appeared to be one of Homo erectus, but Fitznorman was not entirely sure, and although he had compared it with the photos given to him in Jakarta, he was not sufficiently knowledgeable to come to any definite conclusion, especially since the photos could be misleading, or even photo-shopped.
All he knew was that Tegu Murtopo, the director of palaeoanthropology at Gadjah Mada University in Jakarta, had told him the cranium came from the Solo River area in East Java, and was estimated at anywhere between 100,000 to 1.5 million years ago. The photographs Tegu had given to Fitznorman clearly showed the sutures in the skull cap. The fact it had probably to a young adult male was purely academic.
Fogg went on to explain that it had been tracked down to a private collection of Asian curios belonging to a Los Angeles antique dealer. The question was, how had it arrived in Los Angeles?
Jimmy learnt it had been bought as part of a complete collection from the widow of a wealthy American businessman who had spent part of his life living and travelling in South East Asia, a keen collector of tribal art and curios.
The second question appeared not to be one of ownership, but how much?
The precise origin of the skull was unknown to the antique dealer, though he had shown it to a friend, an anthropologist at the American Museum of Natural History, who suggested it may have been part of the Peking Man fossils collection from Zhoukoudian in China, lost at the beginning of World War II during the Japanese invasion.
In fact, the lost skull had been found in a sand bank on Solo River, in the Sambungmachan District of East Java, and had been bought from a workman for a few dollars by a local small time fossil dealer, who then sold it to the American businessman in the antique market on Jalan Surabaya in Jakarta, who illegally brought it out of the country. It had been one of three fossil skulls found at the site and had been stolen before the University could involve the police.
What was scientifically interesting was the cranium resembled the Ngandong skulls. It had certain Homo erectus characteristics, a thick cranial bone and a pronounced browridge, but a high forehead and rounded braincase, which were more common with archaic Homo sapiens. However, the cranial capacity was low, around 1000cc compared to 1200cc in archaic Homo sapiens. Even more interesting the brain imprint showed evidence of Broca’s Cap, a sign of language capability. From the little evidence available Tegu had estimated it to be around 40 or 50,000 years old.
‘This could be it, what now, can I send these photos to Jakarta?’
‘Yes, send them to Jakarta,’ replied Jimmy, ‘as for the rest I’m working on that right now.’
‘Working on what?’ Fitznorman wished he would be more precise.
‘Be patient, you remember the fellow in Zurich?’
‘Which fellow?’
‘You know the Russian.’
‘Okay, I remember, the Georgian.’
‘That’s him. He’s the collector, you know, in New York, but right now the skull is too hot and he’d like to get rid of it if the price is right.’
‘How much?’
‘I reckon after my first feelers, we could get the whole thing for about a million.’
‘A million! A million what?’
‘Dollars.’
‘You’re joking?’
‘A little bit outside of your budget. I see, well, if you’re friends are really serious I think we can make an effort, but I’m not sure.’
‘Listen Jimmy we’ve got to get together quickly so we can talk about this, in the meantime tell your pal he’s asking too much.’
‘When?’
‘Next week.’
‘No we’ve got to move sooner, this Russian will move if I don’t give him a sign right now.’
‘What do you suggest?’
‘Listen, I’m going down to Morocco...’
‘Morocco!’
‘A few days’ golf with Lombard, you know my Swiss friend, why don’t you join us, and it won’t be a waste of time.’
‘Lombard!’
‘He’ll be looking after the details if we get a deal.’
Fitznorman knew Lombard, a sharp wheeler dealer, who often helped Jimmy with the arrangements for his business transactions in Switzerland away from the prying eyes of British tax inspectors. Lombard was flying down to Morocco, where he was planning to play golf and meet his friends from the Ministry of Mines.
‘Okay, send me a mail with the details and book a room for me.’
Fitznorman knew that Aris would play along, but at a lower price, if the skull was genuine. His new logging concessions probably depended on making the minister happy and would in any case generate some fairly extravagant profits that could support the expenses of half million dollars or so. In his mind he felt confident that they should be able to put a deal together.
Seated in the first class section of the Royal Air Maroc flight, Fitznorman relaxed as he was fussed over by the cabin attendants serving champagne and hors d’oeuvres. The captain announced that the flight time was estimated to be about two and a half hours to Rabat. Fine weather was forecast for the arrival with ground temperatures a pleasant twenty five degrees centigrade.
The flight landed at Rabat Sale Airport at just after eight in the evening where a car from the Hyatt was waiting to pick him up.
The Hyatt was a welcome change from Borneo, situated about two kilometres from the centre of Rabat, a luxurious hotel offering a mixture of modern and traditional styles.
The walls of the vast lobby were decorated with carved arabesque style stucco, the floors spread with Arabian rugs, all of which was brilliantly lit by magnificent crystal chandeliers. To add to the ambiance the doorman and baggage porters wore red fez’s and traditional djellabas.
The majority of the hotel guests appeared to be European or American tourists, others looked as if they were from other African or Arab countries visiting the Cheriffian Kingdom on business, or perhaps an official visit to the court of Mohammed VI.
Fitznorman recognised Lombard, dressed in his usual laid-back English gentleman style, standing in the lobby lounge talking with Jimmy Fogg who had arrived by an earlier flight. After greetings, they agreed to meet in Lombard’s suite for drinks once Fitznorman had settled into his room.
‘Well here’s to our success,’ said Fitznorman lifting his whisky. ‘So Jimmy has told you all about the objects that we are negotiating for Mr Aris?’
Lombard nodded non-committally.
‘By the way Jimmy, before we go any further we’ll need the skull looked over by a qualified palaeontologist.’
‘Come off it old pal,’ said Jimmy with a broad gesture of his hands. ‘Do you think I go in for rubbish, you know me, I wouldn’t be here if I wasn’t sure of the goods.’
‘Okay, but in any case if we come to an agreement, at the moment of exchange, a bank transfer against goods, there will have to be an expert, there’s no other way. I can trust you Jimmy, but I don’t know who the other party is.’
‘It’s an old lady, I mean it, she’s the widow of the person who took it out of the country in the first place and all she wants to do is get rid of it…for a price.’
‘Hang on a minute, I thought it was a Russian?’
‘That’s right he’s handling things on her behalf.’
‘Sounds a bit dodgy.’
‘Look don’t worry about that, it’s the skull you want isn’t it?’
Fitznorman nodded a little uncertain.
‘What about the price?’
‘I put the pressure on and they’re willing to deal at six hundred,’ Fitznorman replied, then adding, ‘thousand.’
Jimmy ignored him
‘So the price is six hundred thousand dollars then, Scott tells me we can get a guaranty from Aris’s bank, his own bank!’ said Lombard.
‘Bank Surabaya Mas.... Hong Kong?’
Fogg nodded.
‘It’s not exactly a first class international bank!’ said Lombard.
‘But Aris’s group is a first class risk.’
‘With the present political chaos I wouldn’t agree one hundred percent with that statement...but don’t worry I think Aris is a good risk.’
‘Excellent,’ said Fitznorman.
‘Not so quick!’ said Lombard. ‘I must inform you that my fee will be another fifteen percent.’
‘That’s quite a bit,’ said Fitznorman, ‘Let’s say it’s not a big problem.’
‘Good, it’s agreed.’
Fitznorman nodded.
‘Don’t forget it’s all in American dollars,’ chipped in Jimmy, ‘don’t let Mr Aris get any ideas about paying us in Indonesian Rupiah.’
Fitznorman gave a weak laugh.
‘So, what’s our program then,’ said Jimmy.
‘This evening dinner and tomorrow golf.’
It was simpler than Fitznorman would have though, short and sweet, nothing had been lost for the moment and he left Rabat feeling pleased with himself. The arrangement with Fogg and Lombard looked positive. It only remained for Aris to approve the arrangement, in principal a formality.
Boats and ethnology, a funny mix, but that was Alfonso Ribeiro, he was a specialist in both. Boats came first and the forestry paid the bills. The boats were expensive, much more expensive than any mistress.
He had been born into a wealthy family in Buenos Aires, where he lived until the family moved to the United when he was sixteen years old. Ribeiro studied ethnology, not with the view to it being a profession, but because it was fashionable amongst students. He added tropical forest ecology because in South America the two went together, governments killed Indians and dispossessed them of their natural home. Ribeiro like many other young people of his generation had taken up the banner in defence of Brazil’s Indian peoples.
After graduation at UCLA he moved to Europe to pursue his education and in doing so became fluent in French and German. He cultivated his style, though he retained a very slight South American accent, which gave him a certain charm.
A little older and more realistic Alfonso Ribeiro commenced his career with a Boston based consulting firm, advising them on forestry and conservation in the Amazon Basin. After almost five years he was appointed as a permanent adviser, based in Rio de Janeiro, when the Brazilian market promised growth and profits.
He built a solid reputation advising government policy makers concerned by the effect the treatment of the Indians had on the country’s international image. Ribeiro then moved on joining a multinational group as an internal consultant for a vast reforestation project in Amazonia.
In spite of promoting the business of his employers in Amazonia, he never ceased to be concerned by the destruction of the Indian habitat, an endless conflict between the needs of his country’s burgeoning population and its original peoples. But in truth Ribeiro was not made to spend his life as a missionary, struggling to survive, defending the Indian way of life, living in some lost village deep in the heart of the Amazonian forest.
The frugal life in Amazonia, far from the comforts and distractions of civilisation finally took its toll and Ribeiro having inherited a substantial sum of money decided that a change was in order. The conflict of interest had become too much and declaring his disgust with his government’s policies he simply chose the easy route out. He packed his bags and headed for San Diego in California where he had dreamt of spending his days as a kind of latter day Hemingway, boating and writing about the Indians.
It did not turn out quite as he had expected, as an adventurous South American he could not resist the infinite number of business temptations of Southern California. He became involved in a boat building company in which he invested heavily. They built boats for the very rich in the US and overseas.
His enthusiasm and ambition overtook his sense of business. Through a combination of poor judgement and bad luck he lost his shirt to a Lebanese partner, who embroiled him in a sordid affair delivering boats to rich Saudis in Marbella. Alfonso’s problem was that he was too trusting with the result his partner disappeared with several million dollars and an expensive yacht, last seen heading for Suez in Eastern Mediterranean.
It was a hard experience. He fell back on forestry, setting himself up as an independent consultant, specialised in tropical forest policy. Forced to put as much space as possible between himself and California, he set up his business in Montreal, where many of the large forest based industry companies and international consulting firms had their headquarters.
He was now wiser, and though perhaps a little over-weight, he cut a fine figure, a smart dresser, often wearing a blazer and British style regimental tie. He had the kind of qualities that inspired the confidence of his clients, a good listener with endless patience, and above all an incomparable knowledge of tropical forest systems and ecology.
Canada was not know for its tropical forests and his customers, whose business had spread into South East Asia, engaged him as a specialist for their projects, lobbying governments, where the forests of Malaysia and Indonesia were being exploited by the pulp and paper industry.
He was well introduced in Jakarta with contacts at the Ministry of Forests in Jakarta, close to the Minister Wihartjo and his Director General Rudini, whom he advised on long term planning of pulpwood plantations and conservation questions. Wihartjo had recommended him to Aris on the setting up of timber estates and plantations needed for the supply of raw materials to his mills.
Fitznorman met Ribeiro as a guest at one of the regular business dinners when Aris entertained his friends mixing business with pleasure. They became friends with a common interest in ethnology, comparing their experiences in the forests of South East Asia and Amazonia, regions which were remarkably similar in a number of ways, climates, forest peoples, rivers, jungles and the threat of loggers and monoculture.
Beyond that their business worlds were very different, but little by little they got around to mixing art and boats. Ribeiro took pleasure in introducing Fitznorman to island hopping, sailing to little known and sometimes uninhabited islands, and those much more known such as Krakatoa.
Together with Pierre Rossard, they flew to Bali to meet Alfonso who was up to his promise, a boat trip to the Island of Komodo. Fitznorman also wanted to explore Flores, 370 miles east of Bali, beyond Komodo, where he could visit the caves in which ancient stone tools had been found and possibly other islands that lay to the east, a potential source of antiques and ethnic art. Scott figured a little time away from Jakarta would not hurt as the riots and disorder seemed to have taken hold of the city.
Ribeiro following Aris’s recommendations, chartering a sixteen metre sailing boat from Jim Collins, an Australian who had opted for a wanderer’s life drifting from port to port like an old seadog with short charters for well heeled tourists.
It was Saturday morning in the half light when they sailed out amongst the Bugis’s sailing ships in Sape Harbour. They headed down the long narrow bay and were soon in the open sea. Ribeiro sailed east around the point pushed by a stiff breeze cutting through the low waves, the coast a grey-blue haze to the south.
At that rate Ribeiro told them they would be on Komodo before midday, a sailing time of about four or five hours. The Komodo National Park consisted of several islands, the largest of which was Komodo, lying between the islands of Sumbawa and Flores in the Lesser Sunda Islands, 200 nautical miles to the east of Bali.
With Jim Collins at the helm they relaxed, watching the coast line slip by, there was little else to do for the next few hours.
Their conversation wandered as Ribeiro described to Fitznorman his business in East Kalimantan on a project that was to transform the secondary forest areas into pulpwood plantations.
‘So little by little the forest is being cut down to make for agricultural land and the tribes’ people will become town dwellers.’
‘I’m afraid so Scott and there’s very little we can about it, the population is growing at an alarming rate and they need land and food.’
‘The population of Java, not Borneo!’
‘It doesn’t matter where, for their government it’s all Indonesia.’
Ribeiro described the secondary forest that sprung up replacing the natural forest after the valuable timber had been felled by the logging companies. Previously the loggers were only interested by what were called dominants, the giants of the forest, which form the pillars around which nature built the forest.
Now they even wanted to clear cut the secondary forest as part of a programme to settle immigrants from densely populated Java, transforming the secondary forest into agricultural land and plantations of oil palms, rubber trees and pulpwood.
‘So this means that little by little Borneo will be deforested?’
‘That’s right, the same as in Brazil and the Philippines.’
‘Do agree with that?’ questioned Fitznorman.
‘Whether I agree or not makes little difference.’
‘Why?’
‘I’ll tell you a story,’ he said, ‘that of the Jari River project in Amazonia, a story of how men destroy nature without the slightest thought to future generations.’
‘I think I’ve heard of Jari,’ Fitznorman said vaguely. ‘It wasn’t Ludwig was it?’
‘No, it wasn’t really Ludwig who started it all, sure it had been his baby, but above all Jari was fully backed by General Golbery.’
‘Golbery?’
‘A general who controlled the Extraordinary Ministry for Regional Agencies in Brazil. Later he became the Chief of State security. It was unusual because he had some very strange ideas about geopolitics.’
‘What do you mean by strange?’ asked Fitznorman.
‘Well, he controlled and influenced Brazil’s development of its natural resources for several decades. He was a man who stuck to his policies...even when it should have been obvious that he was on the wrong track.
‘How exactly was he involved with Jari?’
‘Jari was what I suppose you could call a joint-venture between government and capitalism. One of the most well known, because it involved Daniel K.Ludwig.
‘I see,’ Fitznorman nodded, though he’d never heard of him.
‘It was initially seen as a frontier project, you know the kind that the media likes to talk about, that is before the ecologist movement even existed,’ he chuckled.
‘When did it start?’
‘On the Jari River! You know where that is?’ he said glancing at Fitznorman. ‘South from the Tuma-Humac Mountains that separate French Guiana from Brazil, the plantations were started there in 1967.’
Fitznorman was none the wiser, and furrowed his brow as if trying to visualise the geography northern Brazil. Alfonso had talked about it many times, but geographically it remained vague.
‘Who was Ludwig anyway?’ asked Fitznorman.
‘An American billionaire, enormously rich, he made his fortune in shipping.’
‘Yeah, I seem to remember that, but what was he doing in the Amazon anyway?’
‘I’m not really sure, but you know his idea to make plantations in Brazil wasn’t the first.’
‘Oh.’
‘The first, at least in modern times, was none other than Henry Ford. He tried to set-up rubber plantations, at a place he called Fordlandia, where he bought two and a half million acres, much further into the interior than Jari.’
‘Fordlandia! That goes back quite a way?’
‘Yes. It wasn’t such a big project as Ludwig’s, about seven thousand acres of rubber trees were planted, they should have been ready for tapping in 1936, but one disaster followed another. In the end, after spending over ten million dollars, Ford sold out to the Brazilian government, for a twentieth of that sum in 1945. I guess he wanted to control the source of rubber for his car tyres.
‘Anyway it was a fiasco, just as Ludwig’s was to end up forty years later. The only difference was that Ludwig’s project was on a very much bigger scale and surprisingly, looking back, most of mistakes were the same!’
Ribeiro pointed ahead, their route lay between Pulau Banta and Pulau Kelap and soon they saw Komodo rising in the distance before them.
Fitznorman looked at Ribeiro, he had stopped talking, the swell had increased and the boat was rising and falling more than earlier.
‘The weather is changing?’
‘No, it’s just the swell.’
‘So what happened with Ludwig?’
‘Well Ludwig bought three million acres in northern Para, on the north side of the Amazon, about 200 kilometres from the island of Marajo. He planned plantations of a fast growing Indian tree known as Gemilina arborea. They’d calculated that there would be a shortage of wood fibre for the paper pulp industry.’
‘Was he wrong?’ said Fitznorman smiling.
‘You know he was! There’s no shortage, now, or in the near future, but then Brazil imported all of its paper pulp from the USA, illogical when you think of the vast forests resources in Amazonia, wasn’t it?’
‘What about Borneo?’
‘You don’t need to cut down all the forest, that’s what I keep telling them. A couple of hundred thousand hectares can supply all the wood you want. They don’t need to need to push the Dayaks into slum towns and run down villages where’s there’s no work. Anyway it wasn’t only pulp wood plantations that Ludwig planned, he also envisaged vast rice paddies, the biggest in the world, mining and livestock operations and workers townships, as well as 2,500 miles of roads and about fifty miles of railroad track.’
‘Sounds a bit like Aris’ project,’ said Fitznorman frowning.
‘That’s exactly why I’m here in Indonesia. Not only Aris, but the Ministry of Forests want to avoid the kind of mistakes made over the last few years in the forestry industry here. They want to set up eco-tourism, providing a living for the local peoples and developing nature reserves, like the Komodo National Park. Not making the same mistakes Ludwig and Ford made. There everything that could go wrong we