The Looters by Harold Robbins

fluttering. I lived only a few blocks away, but rather than walk or take a proletarian taxi, I ordered up a limo as if it were Academy Award time.
    This is going to be my night.
    A reception would introduce Queen Semiramis to an even larger art world audience, some of the world’s crème de la crème of the antiquities trade, along with some politicians and billionaires, but most important to the news media.
    No doubt Hiram thought it was going to be his night, too, but his contribution to Semiramis and the museum itself was in the form of writing checks. Having a billion-dollar checking account was very convenient, but it didn’t make him a hero. As far as I was concerned, I was the star of the show.
    The world of priceless art was a playground for billionaires, a rarified atmosphere even more privileged and snooty—and cutthroat—than that of owning a Kentucky Derby champion or a sports team. Or having a movie star or supermodel wife.
    The Piedmont Museum was Hiram’s “trophy,” his ego trip—an accomplishment he could buy with his inherited money, as opposed to working for a living. But I had to give Hiram credit. He was ruthless about acquiring pieces for the museum. He wasn’t alone. J. Paul Getty treated acquisitions of art with the same Art of War mentality with which he ran the oil companies that made him the richest man in the world during his lifetime.
    But unlike J. Paul Getty, Hiram never personally earned a dime from his sweat, although I didn’t give old man Getty too much slack, either—most of America’s successful billionaires who hadn’t made their fortunes with computer and Internet technology had had wealthy parents who gave them a multimillion-dollar head start. Getty’s father had been an oil millionaire a hundred years ago, a time when a million dollars stretched a long ways.
    The Piedmont family made its first fortune in wine. Hiram I, the founder of the family fortune, brought his family to New York in the 1890s from the Asti winegrowing region of Piedmont in northern Italy. A cousin who had a small business importing wines had already preceded Hiram I. He took over the cousin’s business and built it into a major importer.
    Around the turn of the century the company started distributing Asti Spumante, a sparkling wine that became a popular alcoholic beverage.
    During World War I, while Getty was getting rich from the hunger for oil to drive the war effort, Hiram heard a lot of talk about a growing temperance moment that advocated a “prohibition” on selling alcoholic beverages. He looked around and decided that the manufacturing plants for war vehicles were going to turn into an enormous boom for cars for ordinary people. Deciding nobody was going to outlaw cars, he sold his wine-importing business and invested his money in the stock of a new, risky business called General Motors. It wouldn’t be long before the car company was the largest manufacturing company in the world.
    The next in line, Hiram II, added AT&T and IBM to the family’s stock portfolio.
    By the time the family fortune came to the current Hiram, he was already far too rich to acquire more money. He also inherited one of the grand houses on the Upper East Side that his grandfather Hiram I had built for his wife, Sophia.
    The huge mansion was built for her at a time when the Upper East Side along Central Park was known as Millionaire’s Row instead of Museum Mile.
    Sophia was a fanatic about roses. She developed several varieties of hybrid tea roses—including the prizewinning Piedmont and Asti varieties. Unfortunately, she carried her love for roses not only into the garden but also to her home.
    Surrounding the outside of the mansion were rose gardens and fountains and statues with rose motifs. At enormous expense, Sofia had “old-world craftsmen” in Europe create a large Gothic “rose window,” a round stained-glass window with rose floral designs.
    The general consensus was that the rose window, which