The Gilded Seal (48 page)

“I just got here myself,” she replied as she stepped around

to the rear passenger door, handed Archie the crate left for

Tom by Besson, then climbed into the front seat.

“You been fighting?” Archie exclaimed, almost sounding

impressed. Her clothes were covered in oil and dirt and her

face and throat looked bruised.

“Have you?” She nodded at Archie’s ripped suit and black-

ened shirt and Tom’s filthy jeans and coat.

“We’ve just spent three hours crawling through all sorts of

shit. You were meant to be taking it easy at Henri’s,” he re-

minded her.

“Where do you think this happened?” She indicated her

battered face.

“But . . .”

“Henri’s dead.”

“Milo?” Tom guessed through clenched teeth, immedi-

ately wishing he’d insisted Besson come with them rather

than remain alone. Her answer, though, surprised him.

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t w i n i n g

“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-

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

3 6 3

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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t w i n i n g

“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

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

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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

3 6 7

“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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t w i n i n g

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.