The Gilded Seal (37 page)

the painting was a forgery,” Tom continued, stepping closer.

“Only they couldn’t admit it. Too many red faces on too many

important people.”

There was a long pause. Levy leaned forward and stubbed

out her cigarette on the ashtray on top of the baby grand pi-

ano. Petals from a drooping vase of lilies lay sprinkled across

the mirrored surface like autumn leaves on a pond.

“I always said someone would find out eventually.” Her

voice was clear and small, her eyes moist.

“How long has the Louvre known?” Jennifer asked.

2 7 4 j a m e s

t w i n i n g

“Since 1913. Since it was recovered after the Valfi erno

theft.”

She quickly scanned the room and Tom suspected she was

desperately searching out the bottle of gin he’d seen next to the

bed. She’d struck him as highly strung the first time they’d met.

Perhaps her nerves were even more brittle than he’d guessed.

“At first it was assumed that the thieves had substituted

one of Chaudron’s forgeries for the real
Joconde
,” she con-

tinued. “But then they realized that it was the same painting

we’d always had. It had just never really been analyzed prop-

erly before. That’s when they guessed that the original must

have been replaced.”

“When?” Jennifer prompted her again.

“Sometime between the Revolution and the Restoration.”

She shrugged, the words now tumbling from her bloodless

lips. It was strange, but Tom sensed that she was fi nding a

strange release in talking to them, as if a burden was being

lifted from her shoulders. “It was a chaotic time. Things were

moved around. Rec ords were destroyed.”

“What about you, when did you find out?” he asked.

“A year after being made Curator of Paintings. Once they

were sure that they could count on me not to talk.” She

looked up with a pained smile at the recollection.

“Who else knows apart from you?”

“A handful of people. Louvre employees.”

“No one in government?” Jennifer asked in surprise.

“No.” She gave a hollow laugh. “If you want to keep a se-

cret, you don’t tell a politician.”

“But you had arranged to send the painting for forensic

testing.” Tom frowned. “Wouldn’t the secret have come out

then anyway?”

“We’ve always resisted pressure to subject it to a proper

analysis. But when we noticed the warping, the Ministry of

Culture forced our hand. We had to play along.”

“Even though that would have revealed the truth?”

“You don’t understand, do you?” She gave a rueful, almost

mocking laugh. “It was never going to make it upstairs. That

was the whole point.”

“The point of what?” Jennifer said sharply.

t h e g i l d e d s e a l

2 7 5

Levy shook her head vehemently, turning to face the open

window again.

“I’ve said too much already.”

“Please,” Jennifer insisted. “We need to know.”

“What for?” Levy looked out over the rooftops with a dis-

tant, glazed look. “If you keep it, they’ll think you stole it.

But if you hand it back, the Louvre will just claim that you

switched it for a forgery. It’s too late for you. It’s too late for

all of us.”

“Not if we can prove what’s really going on,” Jennifer in-

sisted.

“It’s like a terrible curse . . .” Levy spoke in an almost

dreamlike voice, her words directed at no one in particular,

“A burden handed down through the generations, the lie

growing as each year goes by, as each new person is drawn

into the circle of deceit.”

She stepped out on to the balcony, her black hair sashaying

across her cheeks, the sunglasses on her head glinting like an

extra set of eyes.

“Now I’m the last one. It will all fall on me. They’ll say

it’s my fault. The whole world will be looking. Accusing.

Blaming.”

She turned to face them, her back to the railings, and slowly

slipped the sunglasses down on to her face.

“Well, I won’t let them,” she said defiantly. “I won’t give

them that pleasure.”

She leaned back against the railing and, before they had

time to register what was happening, tipped herself over the

edge.

There was an awful moment of paralyzed silence. Then a

scream and the screech of skidding tires from the street be-

low. Tom and Jennifer rushed to the balcony and peered

down in horror. Levy had landed on her back, her left leg

twisted under her so that her foot almost reached her shoul-

der like a doll thrown to the ground. Blood was pooling

beside her shattered head. The first few passersby reached

her and instinctively looked up.

Tom, his face pale, yanked Jennifer away from the edge.

She was trembling, her breathing ragged.

2 7 6 j a m e s

t w i n i n g

“Are you okay?”

“Why did she have to . . . ?” she eventually mumbled.

“She didn’t.”

“We drove her to it. We could have stopped her.” She

glanced resentfully at the balcony, as if it was also partly to

blame for not having grabbed at Levy’s ankles as she had

gone over.

“It wasn’t our fault,” Tom insisted, although he had the

sudden, sickening realization that she might have a point.

Levy had clearly been on the edge. Had they pushed her too

hard? He could feel an indigestible cocktail of shock, disgust

and guilt settling in his stomach.

C H A P T E R S I X T Y- T W O

SAINT- OUEN, PARIS

23rd April— 3:10 p.m.

It must have been ten years since Archie had been up to the

flea market. Not much had changed. The day-traders still

lined the route from the Metro like fly-paper, each hoping

that a few of the jostling passers- by would stick to them as

they spilled off the trains and fl itted past.

Initially the stalls mostly contained designer rip-offs,

carved African statues and cheap tourist trinkets, but it wasn’t

long before they gave way to more quirky traders, their wares

carefully arranged on stained blankets or heavily patched

plastic sheeting. Roller skates, an old Snoopy, a radio miss-

ing its volume knob, miscellaneous keys, odd crockery, a

dog-eared book. If ever there was a place that proved that

everything had a value, then this was it. The trick was fi nd-

ing who it was of value to, of course, and how much it was

worth to them.

Archie walked through the gates of the main market itself

and headed toward the center, gambling not only on his

memory being reliable but that Ludo wouldn’t have moved.

All in all, it was a relatively safe bet. Ludo was a man of

habit. Fish on a Friday. Two sugars in his coffee. Sports pages

before the news.

2 7 8 j a m e s

t w i n i n g

He recognized the shop immediately, the window bulging

with an eclectic assortment of items—a set of red velvet cin-

ema seats, a scale model of a sailing boat, a wastepaper bin

made from an elephant’s foot, a bird cage shaped like a hot-

air balloon, a crucifix wrestled from a deconsecrated grave,

oversized spectacles that had once hung over an opticians.

Archie pushed the door open, a bell tinkling overhead.

Ludo looked out from behind a case containing a stuffed

vulture, his face breaking into an immediate, gap-toothed

smile. He was even fatter now than Archie remembered him,

his stained red tie cascading down his front and riding up

and over his stomach like water flowing down a cliff, his

short legs forced apart by the girth of his thighs, his choco-

late eyes peering out from the heavy cowling of his brows

and fl eshy cheeks.

“Archie,
quelle surprise
!” To Archie’s barely concealed

discomfort, Ludo hugged him, his soft gut pressing against

him, before leaning across the void and kissing him on both

cheeks. “Good to see you again.”

“You too, mate.” Archie shrugged off the embrace as po-

litely as he could, silently vowing to lay off the biscuits when

he got home. “No change here, I see.”

“That’s what I like about this business. I sell the past.

There’s no need to change.”

“You still selling information too?”

“For the right price, I’ll sell anything.” Ludo grinned, un-

consciously wetting his lips with his tongue. “Why, what are

you looking for?”

“Not what, who,” Archie corrected him. “I need to fi nd

someone. I need to find someone now.”

C H A P T E R S I X T Y- T H R E E

AVENUE DE L’OBSERVATOIRE, 14TH ARRONDISSEMENT,

PARIS

23rd April— 4:01 p.m.

Did she date the Louvre’s
Mona Lisa
before she . . . ?”

Besson left the sentence unfinished as he turned away

from the stove where he was boiling a pan of water. Tom and

Jennifer were sitting on opposite sides of the kitchen’s small,

semi- circular table.

“She said that it had probably been replaced sometime

between the Revolution and the Restoration. So that’s

what . . . ?” Tom gave a questioning shrug. “About 1789 to

1814, right?”

“That’s consistent with what I thought too,” said Besson.

“Does it matter?” Jennifer seemed distracted. Having

emptied a packet of matches on to the table, she was now

dropping them one at a time back into the box.

Tom wondered if she was still reliving Levy’s fi nal

moments—her ashen face, the pale cigarette in her trembling

fingers, her fragile voice, the way she had carefully slipped

her sunglasses on before jumping, as if she had known that

her eyes would otherwise betray the violent end she had in

mind for herself.

He, for one, was forcing himself not to dwell on that fi nal,

2 8 0 j a m e s

t w i n i n g

arresting image. He wasn’t being unfeeling, just pragmatic.

They couldn’t help Levy now, but they could still help them-

selves.

“It matters if we’re going to find the original,” he reminded

her.

“Get real!” she snorted impatiently.

“I’m serious. You heard what she said. Even if we give the

painting back, the Louvre will accuse us of returning a fake.

We haven’t got any choice.”

“You think pinning all our hopes on finding a painting

that’s been missing for two hundred years is a choice?” She

gave a hollow laugh.

“No one’s ever known it’s been missing before. No one’s

ever really looked for it before,” Tom insisted. “Maybe if we

go back through the painting’s history. See who’s owned it,

where it’s been, then we . . .”

“
Plutôt facile
,” Besson broke in. “
La Joconde
is one of the

least-traveled paintings in history.”

“What do you mean?”

“Da Vinci never actually delivered it. They say he liked it

too much. He took it everywhere with him until he sold it to

François I, just before he died. The painting was installed at

Fontainebleau and then transferred first to Versailles and

then to the Louvre during the Revolution. It’s hardly ever

moved from there since.”

“But it has moved?” Jennifer asked.

“A few times,” he conceded. “Apart from the Valfi erno

robbery, there was a brief evacuation during the Franco-

Prussian war and tours to the U.S. in the 1960s and Japan and

Rus sia in the 1970s. And of course Napoleon borrowed it for

a few years, but as he was only living next door in the Tuile-

ries, I’m not sure that counts.”

“Napoleon?” Tom looked up sharply. “Napoleon borrowed

it?”

“
Oui
. They say he hung it over his bed.”

“Shit!” Tom clasped his hands behind his head and

squeezed his eyes shut. “I’ve been such an idiot.”

“What?” Jennifer frowned.

t h e g i l d e d s e a l

2 8 1

“Henri, you remember I told you Rafael left me a mes-

sage . . .”

“A message?” Besson looked at him blankly.

“He wrote something just before they killed him. Three

letters in a triangle.” He grabbed a pen and a piece of paper

and drew them out. “An F for me—Felix. Then Q for Quin-

tavalle. And an N, which I assumed was an unfi nished M—

you know, thinking he must have been interrupted before

being able to complete the final downstroke. An M for Milo,

to tell me that that was who had killed him. But what if it re-

ally
was
an N? An N for Napoleon.”

“You mean that Milo didn’t kill him?” Besson, looking

confused, scratched the side of his face.

“Maybe. Or maybe he was trying to tell me something he

felt was more important. Something to do with the
Mona Lisa

and Napoleon. Where’s the porcelain obelisk I left here?”

“In the office. It’s been modeling for me.”

Tom ran next door only to reappear a few moments later

holding a large object wrapped in a white cloth.

“What’s that?” Jennifer asked.

“Rafael came to see me in London before he died. He left

me this,” Tom explained as he unwrapped the obelisk and

placed it on the table between them. “It’s a piece of the Sèvres

Egyptian dinner service. It was made for Napoleon.”

She carefully picked it up.