The Gilded Seal, page 15
searched every ship and train leaving the country. The news-
papers hyped it endlessly. Rewards were offered. People were
arrested and released. If you ever wondered why the Mona
Lisa is the world’s most famous painting, it’s got nothing to do
with her enigmatic smile. It’s because she was stolen.”
“Where did they find it in the end?”
“Peruggia had it all along,” Archie said with an apprecia-
tive smile. “All Valfierno wanted was the story in the papers
long enough for him to shift his six forgeries. Once the news
broke, Peruggia never heard from him again. A few years
later, he tried to sell the painting to a dealer in Florence. The
dealer tipped off the Uffizi. When the police nabbed him,
they found that he’d been stashing it in a specially built trunk
with a false bottom.”
“So, based on that, all we need to do is hide in the Louvre
overnight, take it off the wall and walk out.” Dumas grinned.
“What are we waiting for?”
“What do you mean, ‘we?’ ” Tom frowned. “You’ve done
t h e g i l d e d s e a l
1 2 7
your bit, J-P. You got us in to see Troussard. Archie and I will
take it from here.”
“Non, you’re not freezing me out now, Felix.” Dumas’s
eyes fl ashed defi antly. “I was quite happily drunk in that bar
until you dragged me out. Now that I’m sober, you’re stuck
with me until the end.”
“You’re a government agent, J-P,” Tom insisted. “Archie
and I know what we’re getting into. This isn’t your thing.”
“What is my thing now, Felix? I’ve got no job. No wife . . .”
“Archie, you tell him,” Tom pleaded.
“We’ll need the extra muscle,” said Archie with a shrug.
“He’s a spy,” Tom reminded him. “You hate spies.”
“Ex-spy,” said Archie. “Same as you. Besides, I’ve always
thought J-P would make a good villain, if he put his mind
to it.”
“Merci.” Dumas winked. “Anyway, if by some miracle
you actually do manage to steal the Mona Lisa, someone
needs to make sure you two don’t accidentally decide to hold
on to it.”
“You see, he’s a natural crook,” Archie said solemnly. “He
doesn’t trust anyone.”
C H A P T E R T W E N T Y- F I V E
AVENUE DE L’OBSERVATOIRE, 14TH ARRONDISSEMENT,
PARIS
21st April— 9:02 a.m.
The elevator was enclosed in a black wire cage that rose
like a scorched tree up the central core of the winding
stone staircase. Hauling open the concertina- style gate, Jen-
nifer stepped inside, allowing it to spring shut behind her. The
date on the brass control panel, almost polished away over the
years, indicated that it had been installed in 1947. It seemed
older.
She pressed five and, after a few moments’ refl ection, the
cabin lurched skywards with an ominous clunking and shriek-
ing noise. The floors crept past like rock strata, and she had
the sudden sensation of being hauled up the side of a cliff in a
wicker basket.
Henri Besson, the forgery expert Cole had hooked her up
with, was standing waiting for her on the landing. At least
she assumed it was him, the elevator rising to reveal fi rst bare
feet, then brightly patterned knee-length shorts and fi nally a
loosely buttoned Hawaiian shirt sprouting silvery chest hair.
He held out his hand, his greeting immediately dispelling her
doubts.
t h e g i l d e d s e a l
1 2 9
“Mademoi selle Browne? Enchanté. Henri Besson à votre
ser vice.”
He had the tan to match his clothes, his dark blue eyes
twinkling out from an unshaven and surprisingly youthful
face, given he was fifty or so years old. Only his curly hair,
graying at the sides and thinning on top, gave some indica-
tion of his true age.
“Good morning.” She smiled. “Thank you for doing this at
such short notice.”
“The larger the client, the less warning they give you.”
He gave a disconcertingly lopsided smile and it took her a
few moments to realize that the entire left side of his face was
paralyzed. One cheek was slack and heavy, the other fi rm and
dimpled; one eye drooping, while the other twinkled. She
guessed that he’d had some sort of a stroke.
“Come in, please. The others are already here.”
Hudson and Cole had both insisted that somebody from
their respective Paris operations should be on hand to wit-
ness the initial examination in person. Partly this was to en-
sure that the tests were conducted to their mutual satisfaction,
but she suspected there was also an element of cold-war style
politics to it as well. Neither superpower was willing to con-
cede the slightest potential advantage to the other.
Ushering her into a small office dominated by a fl oor-to-
ceiling gilded mirror, Besson introduced her to Miles King
and Caroline Vernin, representatives from Sotheby’s and
Christie’s respectively. Both were young and sharply dressed
and had the same hungry look she had seen in realtors when
first trying to rent an apartment in Manhattan.
“The paintings arrived safely?” she asked, noting the tee-
tering piles of auction catalogues on the far side of the room
and the assortment of ash-filled wine glasses balancing on
top of them.
“We delivered ours yesterday afternoon,” Vernin confi rmed.
“I made sure that the paintings that
were on Agent
Browne’s flight were shipped straight from the airport as
soon as they’d cleared Customs,” King immediately fi red
back.
1 3 0 j a m e s
t w i n i n g
“Everything is ready,” Besson reassured her. “Now, tell
me, have you ever taken part in something like this before?”
“Is it anything like an autopsy?” she asked with a smile.
“Because I’ve done plenty of them.”
“Précisement!” Besson clapped his hands. “An artistic au-
topsy. Only no one has died.”
The memory of Hammon’s gaping eye sockets and the
bloody gash of his open mouth fl ashed into her head and for
a moment she thought of correcting him. Someone had died,
and it hadn’t needed an autopsy to explain the cause of
death.
“Venez. I’ll talk you through it.”
He opened a set of double doors and led them from the of-
fice into a large room, the damage caused by his stroke fur-
ther betrayed by his shuffling limp and the unnatural splay of
his left foot.
It was dark, sunlight peeking in around the edges of the
metal shutters. Even so, Jennifer could make out the elabo-
rate nineteenth-century plaster cornicing that suggested this
had once been the main sitting room. Not that there was any
furniture now. Instead, the room was almost entirely taken
up by a large chamber constructed from heavy-duty plastic
sheeting, leaving only a narrow path around its perimeter. It
reminded Jennifer of the forensic tents erected around a
crime scene, except here the plastic was clear, not white. A
pale inner glow was projecting various dark shapes against
the translucent material as if it were a screen.
“It’s a clean room,” Besson explained, sensing the ques-
tion she was asking herself. “It allows me to maintain the air
purity, temperature and humidity at the right level.”
He pulled on a white lab coat that reached just below his
shorts and then pushed his feet into a pair of bright yellow
boots of the type Jennifer had seen in abattoirs and mortuar-
ies before. It certainly explained why he was barefoot. He
handed each of them a similar coat and a set of elasticated
overshoes.
“Please don’t touch anything,” he warned, as he pulled on
a set of surgical gloves and then looped a pair of square-
framed reading glasses around his neck.
t h e g i l d e d s e a l
1 3 1
As soon as they were all dressed, he located a split in the
chamber wall and held it open for them. They stepped into a
small anteroom and then pushed through a heavy curtain of
overlapping clear plastic strips into the chamber itself, the
temperature dropping noticeably. Motion-
sensitive lights
blinked on overhead, their ultraviolet fi lters radiating a faint
blue wash.
The center of the chamber, Jennifer could now see, was
dominated by a large circular table. All four paintings had
been removed from their frames and mounted in steel cradles
that allowed them to be moved and rotated without having to
touch the canvas.
Seeing them side by side for the first time, she had to admit
that, of the two artists, she preferred the Chagall. There was
passionate energy there, an almost childish abandon of color
and movement that she instinctively connected with, com-
pared to the Gauguin’s rather self-conscious sense of control.
On one side of the table a fearsome array of mechanical
arms, bristling with cameras, lights and other unidentifi ed
appendages, hung down menacingly over the canvases, as if
the paintings were patients sitting nervously in a dentist’s
chair. Meanwhile the edges of the chamber were lined with
various unidentified pieces of electronic and analytical
equipment that gave off a low hum as LED lights of different
colors fl ashed wildly.
“Authentication typically requires two types of analysis—”
Besson put his glasses on as he turned to face Jennifer, the
explanation clearly aimed at her—“forensic and Morellian.”
“Morellian?”
“In simple terms: Does it look right? Is it consistent with
the preferred themes, style, composition and technique of a
partic ular artist? To be honest, that’s often enough. You just
look at it, and you know.”
“I think we’ll need the full set of tests on this one,” Vernin
cautioned him. “If I have to go back to my clients with bad
news, they’re going to want to see everything.”
“Mine too,” King added quickly.
“Then I’ll have to take samples.”
“Only swabs,” insisted Vernin.
1 3 2 j a m e s
t w i n i n g
“That rules out AAS and ICPS,” he warned her.
“But you can still do X-ray, infrared, UV and TXRF,” she
pointed out. “That should be enough.”
“TXRF?” Jennifer frowned.
“Total reflection X-ray fluorescence spectrometry,” King
explained. “Just don’t ask me what it means.”
“It means you take swabs from the painting’s surface and
then examine the trace elements under X-ray,” Vernin said
impatiently.
“AAS and ICPS tests involve scraping off actual paint
chips and then burning them to analyze their resins,” Besson
said as he busied himself around the main computer. “Most
people won’t allow them. But it’s always worth asking.”
One of the robotic arms sprang into life, lowering itself
over the first Gauguin canvas and then tracking across its
surface. Jennifer watched silently as, with metronomic sweeps
of the cursor, the scanned image of the painting began to
take shape on the computer screen. When it was fi nished, the
table rotated automatically until the other Gauguin was in
position. Then it too was scanned in.
As soon as both paintings had been captured, Besson
called up the images on another set of screens, leaving the
computer to scan in the two Chagalls behind him. Adjusting
the magnification until it was possible to see the individual
brush strokes, Besson tracked across the surface of the fi rst
painting, switching at various points to the equivalent section
of the other painting to compare them.
“Any joy?” King asked hopefully after fifteen or so min-
utes.
Besson, ignoring the question, crossed to the table and
tilted the two paintings upright. He stood for a few minutes in
front of each one, his left arm across his stomach, the other
supporting his chin as he contemplated them. Finally, with a
nod, he went to the right-hand Gauguin and placed his hand
on the top of the canvas.
“This one.”
“What?”
“It’s not right.”
“In what way?” queried Jennifer.
t h e g i l d e d s e a l
1 3 3
“It’s good. Excellent. But the confidence of the brush
strokes, the layering of the paint and the colors are far more
consistent in the other painting with Gauguin’s style at that
time. This one is a bit . . . soulless.”
King stepped forward and glanced at the painting’s identi-
fication label before giving Vernin a triumphant grin.
“One of yours. Unlucky.”
Jennifer nodded to herself. Hudson had been right, after
all. Razi’s painting was the genuine one.
“I’ll want those tests,” Vernin instructed Besson in a stern
tone, “And a second opinion.”
“Of course,” he nodded. “I suggest the Wildenstein Insti-
tute. Sylvie Ducroq is the Gauguin expert there.”
“What about the Chagall?” Jennifer reminded him.
Besson set about repeating the exercise he had run through
previously. This time, however, it only took half as long.
“No question that this is the original,” he announced, indi-
cating the painting to his right. “The other one hasn’t got the
right aging. The colors are too fresh, too new. It’s not as good
an attempt as the Gauguin. I expect it was done in China.
They still teach traditional oil techniques out there.”
“Fifty euro says that one’s yours too,” King challenged
Vernin with a smile.
“You’re such a child,” she sighed as she stepped forward to
examine the label before looking around with an anguished
look.
“Just not your day, is it?” King crowed.
Jennifer wasn’t listening. She was trying to understand the
significance of both forgeries ending up in the hands of
Christie’s Japanese client.
“The full forensic tests will take one or two days,” Besson
observed, pulling his gloves off with a loud thwack. “I’ll
email them through as soon as they’re done. I suggest you
hold off talking to your clients until then.”
“Agreed,” said King cheerfully, barely able to contain
himself. This was clearly the art world equivalent of the
Battle of Chattanooga. “Thanks for your help on this one,
Henri.” He shook his hand enthusiastically.
“We’ll see ourselves out,” Vernin said curtly, casting off
1 3 4 j a m e s
t w i n i n g
her protective white coat and striding toward the opening in
the chamber’s plastic folds.
“I’ll arrange for the paintings to be returned as soon as
I’ve finished,” he called after them, before turning back to
Jennifer. “Presumably you would like the ones you brought
over to be sent to your hotel, Made moi selle Browne?”
“The George V,” she confirmed. “Thank you.”
She shook Besson’s hand and then turned to follow King
and Vernin back to the offi ce.
“Mademoi selle Browne. Un moment, s’il vous plaît,” Bes-
son called her back, removing his glasses. “I didn’t want to
mention it in front of the others,” he said in a low voice, “but
there’s something else you should know about these paint-
ings, the Gauguin in partic ular.”
“Go on.”
“These aren’t just forgeries. They are perfect copies.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that whoever painted them must have had direct
access to the originals. The Gauguin is certainly the better
executed of the two, but they both combine small details that
the painter would only have been aware of if they had the
original in front of them. Maybe he or she has been a little
too clever?”
Jennifer gave a pained sigh. Far from simplifying the case
by allowing her to focus on the two forgeries and their history,
she now had no choice but to include the originals in her in-
vestigation as well. She was right back where she’d started.
“Not the answer you were looking for?”
“That would have been too easy.” She smiled ruefully.
He escorted her to the front door but as she stepped out on
to the landing, she paused, suddenly remembering that she
had one more question for him. Pulling a slip of paper from
