The Gilded Seal, page 39
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“Takeshi.”
She ran through her eve ning, starting with the discovery
of Besson’s body and culminating in her leading Takeshi and
his men to safety through the secret room into the adjacent
apartment block and from there out on to the street, well away
from the massed ranks of police, ambulances and slack-jawed
onlookers.
“So Milo didn’t kill Rafael?” Tom said, frowning as he
furiously retraced his steps and thoughts over the previous
few days to try and work out exactly when and how he’d got
that so wrong.
“You mean Takeshi got there first,” Archie growled. “Milo
would have offed him eventually to keep him quiet.”
“Where’s Takeshi now?”
“I told him that the originals of his paintings were at my
hotel,” she said. “I expect he’s on his way there to collect
them.”
“Sounds like he owes you.”
“I’m not exactly keeping score. I was just happy to get out
of that place alive.” She paused, then glanced around with a
frown, as if looking for something. “What about you? Wasn’t
there anything down there?”
“Something was down there. We just don’t know what it
means,” Tom said with a shrug. “Show her what we found,”
he added, nodding to Archie.
Archie carefully handed the mask to her and she turned it
over in her hands, puzzled.
“Why would someone hide this there? Even if it is of Na-
poleon, it can’t be what this has all been about?”
“I bloody well hope not,” Archie agreed.
“Do you think it’s rare?” she mused.
“It looks like the original, which makes it pretty much
unique,” said Tom. “Why?”
“Because the rarer it is, the easier it will be to track down,”
she pointed out.
“Track down how?” Tom pressed.
She pointed at an all-night café on the other side of the
road. A blinking neon sign in the window advertised twenty-
four- hour internet access. A few minutes later, they were hud-
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dled around a terminal with coffees on order, their backs
turned to the bored-looking student manning the till so he
couldn’t see their faces.
Death mask, Napoleon, she typed in. “Here we go.” She
selected the second result of the three quarters of a million
returned. “There are several different versions of Napoleon’s
death mask in circulation,” she read. “The original impres-
sion was taken by Dr. Francis Burton over forty hours after
the emperor’s death. ” She skipped ahead . “ Apparently Bur-
ton’s cast was stolen, but a copy later turned up in the hands
of Dr. Francesco Antommarchi.”
“Who?”
“Antommarchi.” She consulted the screen again. “Napo-
leon’s personal physician. It seems he received permission
from the French government to create bronze and plaster
copies of—”
“Antommarchi?” Archie interrupted.
“That’s right,” Jennifer checked.
“That’s the same bloke who owned the book,” Archie ex-
claimed.
“Are you sure?”
“Of course I’m bloody sure,” Archie insisted. “The auc-
tioneer said it was from the personal collection of Dr. Fran-
cesco Antom-wotsit. It was on the book plate too.”
“You’re right,” Tom breathed, his excitement building as
yet another piece of the puzzle slotted into place.
“According to this, Antommarchi and Napoleon
were
pretty much inseparable during the last two years of his life,”
Jennifer continued. “He was with him when he died. He even
helped carry out the autopsy.”
“In which case, it’s possible Napoleon confided in him
when he knew he was dying,” Tom suggested. “Perhaps even
told him about the Mona Lisa and the catacombs and the
map he’d had hidden in the Egyptian dinner service.”
“You mean the painting was down there once?” Archie
asked with a skeptical frown.
“How else did one of Antommarchi’s death masks get
down there?” Tom asked. “He must have swapped it for the
painting and then bricked the tunnel up behind him.”
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“Napoleon would’ve had to tell him exactly where to fi nd
it and given him a different key to the one we found,” Jenni-
fer pointed out. “Otherwise he would have had to destroy the
book and the porcelain obelisk to get to it.”
“Either way, it don’t help us much,” Archie sighed. “It
could be anywhere now.”
There was a long silence as this point sunk in.
“What happened to him in the end?” Tom asked eventu-
ally.
“The doctor? Not sure.”
She turned back to the computer and searched under An-
tommarchi’s full name, then scanned through the fi rst page
or so of results.
“It says here he emigrated to New Orleans in 1834 and
then moved to Cuba. Died four months later from yellow fe-
ver. He’s buried in the Santa Ifigenia Cemetery in Santiago
de Cuba.”
“That’s it?” Archie sniffed.
“Wait, this is interesting.” She held up a hand to silence
him as she read: “Most of Antommarchi’s possessions, in-
cluding paintings, furniture and a copy of Napoleon’s death
mask, passed into the care of the Governor of Santiago de
Cuba, who had let Antommarchi live in and work out of his
home. These same possessions were later bought from the
governor’s descendants by Julio Lobo Olavarria, a Cuban
millionaire, to add to his Napoleon collection which is now
housed in a museum in Havana.”
“I think they’d have twigged if they had the Mona Lisa up
on the wall,” Archie laughed.
“Not if there was something else painted over it,” Jennifer
insisted with a firm shake of her head.
“What do you mean?”
“Remember how Rafael had stuck one stamp over another
on the letter he left for Tom?” she reminded them. “We didn’t
understand it at the time, but what if he was trying to tell us
that the Mona Lisa had been hidden in the same way? Under
another painting. Under one of Antommarchi’s paintings. It
could still be there now.”
There was a long pause, filled by the sound of two Japanese
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girls giggling as they uploaded pictures of themselves on to
their blog. Archie gave a deep sigh, then shook his head.
“Well, I’m not going to bloody Cuba,” he sniffed.
“Jen and I will go,” Tom agreed. “I want you to stay here
and keep an eye on J-P. If Milo gets desperate, he may try
and make a move on him to flush me out.”
“No one’s going to Cuba,” Jennifer pointed out. “Not un-
less we swim there. Ferrat will be watching the airports.”
“Didn’t you tell me Razi was in Havana?” Tom asked
slowly.
“Yeah.” She nodded. “We think they owed him for some
scam he helped pull a few years back.”
“Well, your new friend Takeshi owes you too. And I think
he’d be pretty interested in finding out where Razi’s hiding
out,” Tom said with a smile. “Maybe even interested enough
to lend us his jet.”
C H A P T E R E I G H T Y- T H R E E
HÔPITAL PITIÉ SALPÊTRIÈRE, 13TH ARRONDISSEMENT,
PARIS
24th April— 8:02 a.m.
He couldn’t prove it, but Dumas was pretty certain the
nursing staff had been ordered to ration his morphine.
Either that, or they’d deliberately left the bullets in to spite
him. How else to explain why the hot blade of pain embed-
ded in his leg was being twisted and pushed faster and deeper
with every passing hour. He certainly didn’t buy the tired
line that the doctor kept trotting out about how this meant he
was getting better.
The lock turned on the door. Dumas looked up from his
bed accusingly, ready to tackle the doctor on this point once
again, before screwing his face into an angry scowl when he
saw who had walked in.
“What the hell do you want?”
“Is it so wrong to want to visit an old friend?” Troussard
shrugged, pulling a chair up to the bed.
“How did you get in here?”
“Those guards are there to stop you leaving, not me com-
ing in,” Troussard reminded him.
“Does Ferrat know you’re here?”
t h e g i l d e d s e a l
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“Ferrat asked me to come. He thought maybe we could
talk.”
“I’ve got nothing to say to you.” Dumas turned away.
“You’ve got nothing to say to anyone,” Troussard laughed.
“That’s the problem. I’ve told them it’s a waste of time. That
you’re a drunk. That you probably can’t remember which
muscles to squeeze to piss or shit, let alone anything else. But
they asked me to try all the same.” He placed a hand on Du-
mas’s arm and squeezed it encouragingly.
“If you touch me again, I’ll show you I remember exactly
which muscles control what,” Dumas said through gritted
teeth. Troussard snatched his hand away.
“Frankly I don’t care if you talk or not,” he sniffed. “The
way I see it, the less you cooperate with us, the longer you’ll
go away for.”
“What do you mean, ‘cooperate with us?’ ” Dumas laughed.
“Ferrat’s not that stupid. He’s not fool enough to let a clown
like you get anywhere near his case.”
“Well then, you’re the fool,” Troussard retorted. “Ferrat is
circulating daily reports on his progress to a select number of
se nior Louvre officials, and I’m one of them.”
“Oh, well done,” Dumas applauded sarcastically. “Thirty
years of brown-nosing and you’re on a mailing list. I hope it’s
everything you dreamed it would be.”
“The President himself receives the same report,” Trous-
sard said haughtily.
“Is that right? Then what’s the latest from ground zero?
What stunning breakthrough have you made today?”
“As if I’d tell you!” he snorted.
“More like you don’t know.” Dumas gave a mocking laugh.
“You haven’t changed. All flirt and no follow through.”
“How’s this for size, then?” Troussard shot back angrily.
“One of Milo’s gang is a woman.”
“You really expect me to swallow that?” Dumas shook his
head in disbelief.
“The FBI have confirmed her DNA sample,” Troussard
shot back triumphantly. “Eva Quintavalle. It confi rms an
eyewitness report that a woman executed one of the police
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officers in the tunnel. She was last seen six months ago in
Tokyo visiting Asahi Takeshi, a Japanese businessman with
strong links to the Yakuza. We think she may have been lin-
ing him up as a buyer . . .” He paused and then stood up,
nodding slowly. “Oh, I see what you’re doing. Very clever.
But I’m not falling for it.”
“Falling for what?” Dumas said innocently. “You’re not
going, are you? We were just getting started.”
“You think you’re so goddammed clever, don’t you?”
Troussard said through clenched teeth. “So much smarter
than everyone else. Well, in case you hadn’t noticed, I’m not
the one under arrest.”
“Believe me, I’d rather be in prison than have to listen to
you harp on much longer.”
“Is that what your wife said when she left you?”
Dumas was up in a fl ash, the pain in his leg forgotten, his
forearm pinning Troussard to the wall by his throat.
“Don’t you talk about her, you bastard. Don’t you even
think her name.”
“Guard!” Troussard croaked, his eyes fl icking despair-
ingly toward the door. “Guard!”
Moments later, Dumas was being prized away by one uni-
formed officer while another was helping Troussard stagger
back to his feet.
“Okay, okay,” Dumas shook the guard off and got back
into bed. “Just get him out of here.”
The guards ushered Troussard toward the door. For a mo-
ment he looked as if he was gearing up for some parting re-
mark, but a biting look from Dumas sent him scurrying from
the room clutching his throat.
Dumas waited until he was sure they’d locked the door
behind them before taking out the phone he’d managed to
slip out of Troussard’s jacket pocket. He dialed first one num-
ber and then, when that wasn’t answered, a second.
“Archie, it’s Jean-Pierre.”
“J-P! You okay mate? Whose phone are you calling on?”
“Never mind that. Where’s Felix?” he asked in an urgent
tone.
“On his way to Cuba with Jennifer.”
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“The FBI agent?” Dumas frowned, confused. The last
he’d heard, they were setting her up, not working with her.
“A lot’s happened since you’ve been gone.” Archie sounded
weary.
“You can tell me everything later,” Dumas said impa-
tiently. “You need to get a message to Felix. You need to
warn him about Eva.”
“What about Eva?”
“She’s working with Milo.”
A pause.
“What have they got you on in there?”
“I’m serious,” Dumas insisted. “I just had Troussard in
here, showing off. He told me that the FBI had identifi ed her
from a DNA sample left in the tunnel. She wasn’t there as a
hostage. She was fighting alongside Milo.”
“He didn’t take his phone in case they managed to track
it.” There was a slightly despairing edge to Archie’s voice.
“Then you need to get out there.”
“How? I’m on Interpol’s watchlist as one of Tom’s known
associates. I won’t get past Duty Free.”
“They managed it.”
“They borrowed a plane off some Japanese mobster who
owed Jennifer a favor. Asahi . . .”
“Takeshi,” Dumas completed the sentence for him, his
face set into a grim frown.
“You know him?”
“Archie, they think Takeshi is one of the buyers. Eva was
seen with him a few months ago.”
“They’re walking into a trap,” Archie breathed.
“If you can’t go, you’ll have to find someone else who
can,” Dumas said slowly. “And they’ll need a plan.”
C H A P T E R E I G H T Y- F O U R
MALECÓN, HAVANA, CUBA
24th April— 10:12 p.m.
The girls were turning out along the Malecón, their lip-
stick glowing invitingly in the lights of the passing cars.
Their skirts hitched, they patrolled narrow strips of pave-
ment like lionesses pacing around a small cage, their pimps
resting at a discreet distance against the sea wall, smoking or
playing cards or both. Across the harbor’s dark waters a buoy
blinked red, its pulsing light seeming to serve more as an in-
vitation than a warning to the passing ships.
Jennifer and Tom walked on silently, refusing the occa-
sional offers of cigars smuggled out of the Partagas factory
and the constant whistles of the bicycle taxis encouraging
them to jump on. After ten hours on a plane catching up on
the previous few days’ sleep, both of them seemed to be en-
joying the playful tug of the wind through their hair and the
sharp tang of the sea.
“Do you really think it’s in the museum?” Jennifer asked
eventually as an antique scooter loaded with groceries
chugged past.
“According to the catalog, they own four or fi ve paintings
that used to belong to Antommarchi,” Tom reminded her.
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“But until we get in there tomorrow morning, we won’t know
for sure.”
“And if it’s not?”
“Then we keep looking. There’s no reason to think he would
have destroyed it. Besides, what else can we do if we’re going
to prove our side of the story and try and get Eva back?”
A neon- blue ’57 Chevrolet Bel-Air purred past, its tail fi ns
gleaming under the orange streetlights like the afterburn on
a pair of booster rockets. The incongruous sight made Jen-
nifer smile, bringing home the strange series of events that
had led her here. A few days ago she’d been investigating a
small-scale art forgery ring in New York. Now here she was
