The Gilded Seal (31 page)
The picture switched to footage of the inside of the tunnel.
Shattered glass and blood on the road, emerald blankets over
bodies, a disco- beat of blue lights reflecting off the tunnel
roof, the scorched wreckage of the Brinks armored van, the
twisted shell of a burned-out civilian car caught up in the
explosion. Interestingly though, Tom noted, no mention of
the
Mona Lisa
. Not yet, at least. That would come when
they’d worked out their story. Covered whatever expensively
clothed backsides needed protecting.
“Tom?”
Besson called him over from the doorway, his face trou-
bled, a white lab coat worn over his Hawaiian shirt and
shorts.
“Where have you been?” Tom jumped down from the
worktop.
“Can we talk?” Besson’s right eye twitched nervously.
“What’s up?” Tom frowned. It wasn’t like Besson to pass
up on a drink.
“It’s better if I show you,” he insisted in a low voice.
“Sure,” Tom nodded.
He followed him upstairs into the front room. The
Mona
Lisa
was in a large Perspex box and Tom crouched down to
peer at it, half anxious, half disbelieving, like a new father
gazing at a premature baby in an incubator. She was really
there, safe and well, her smile serene now and at peace.
On the other side of the room, Besson had assembled a
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small makeshift lab complete with a portable X-ray machine
and electronic testing devices.
“You said you only wanted to take a quick look at it,” Tom
reminded him, surprised by the amount of equipment crowded
into the small room. “Not run a full set of tests.”
“This is a once-in- a-lifetime opportunity,” Besson insisted.
“You’ll thank me later.”
“Not if you damage it, I won’t.”
“It wouldn’t matter if I did.” Besson shook his head, an
apprehensive look in his eyes. “It’s not the real painting.”
“What do you mean, it’s not real?” Tom laughed. “They
took it straight down from the Salle des Etats to the armored
van.”
“Oh no, it’s the
Mona Lisa
,” Besson reassured him. “At
least, the
Mona Lisa
as we have come to know it. See here—”
he put his glasses on and indicated some close- up photos of
the lower half of the portrait, his finger circling a small area
where the surface of the paint was very faintly different from
the rest. “This is where it was restored following the acid attack
in 1956. And this here is from when a Bolivian student threw
a rock at it later that same year.”
“Then what are you saying?” The amusement in Tom’s
voice had been replaced by a growing sense of concern. If
Besson was kidding around, he wasn’t getting the joke.
“Look at these . . .” Besson’s initial apprehensiveness
seemed now to have given way to a nervous energy as he
shuffled over to an upturned box on which he’d arranged
more photos. “I took some X-rays.”
Tom studied the images that Besson thrust eagerly into his
hands, the
Mona Lisa
’s rich, sensuous colors reduced to clin-
ical, monochromatic shades of gray and black, her eyes cold
and dead. He looked up, puzzled. If there was something
there, he certainly couldn’t see it.
“Is this meant to be telling me something?”
“Nothing!” Besson exclaimed triumphantly. “It’s telling
you nothing. That’s exactly my point. There’s nothing there,
apart from the painting itself.”
“Well, what else would there be?”
“Da Vinci was very experimental in his approach. He
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would sketch out initial designs, move things around, add in
a detail one day only to take it away the next. X-rays of his
work show evidence of this underpainting. But this painting
has none.”
“What does that prove?” Tom challenged him. “Maybe he
didn’t need any for the
Mona Lisa
.”
“Then it would be the only work he ever painted where he
didn’t,” Besson scoffed. “Besides, that’s not the only prob-
lem. There’s the pigments too.”
“The pigments?” Tom’s head was spinning.
“I ran some TXRF tests . . .” Besson was barely able to
contain himself now, the words tumbling out of his mouth. “I
found trace elements of Prus sian Blue.”
“And that’s bad?”
“Very bad.” Besson nodded emphatically. “Prus sian Blue
wasn’t invented until 1725.”
“But that’s two hundred years after da Vinci died.”
“Exactly.” Besson’s face and tone neatly reflected both his
excitement at what he had discovered and his fear at its im-
plications.
“So what are you saying? That it’s a fake?”
“It depends what you mean by fake. This is the same
painting that has hung in the Louvre for at least the last two
hundred years. This is the
Mona Lisa
that we have all come
to know and admire . . .” he paused. “But it wasn’t painted by
Leonardo da Vinci.”
This way for the sorrowful city,
This way for eternal suffering,
This way to join the lost . . .
Abandon all hope, you who enter
Dante,
The Divine Comedy
(Inferno III.i)
C H A P T E R F I F T Y- O N E
HOTEL CLICHY, 17TH ARRONDISSEMENT, PARIS
23rd April— 7:32 a.m.
Leigh Lewis wedged the phone against his shoulder and
dialed room service. He let it ring, one minute, then two,
gingerly exercising his bruised jaw, before stabbing the hook
switch angrily and dialing reception.
He had only been out of the States once before. Well,
twice if you included Niagara Falls for his honeymoon, which
he didn’t. Canada didn’t count.
He remembered it well. It had been London in the fall of
1977. A two-week holiday with his girlfriend of the time who
was crazy about the Sex Pistols and, by extension, anything
else British. When the Pistols split up after a fi nal perfor-
mance at the San Francisco Winterland Ballroom in 1978,
she had told him tearfully that rock and roll had died that
night. Personally, he’d been happy to see them go. The rela-
tionship had fizzled out soon after Sid murdered Nancy that
fateful night in the Hotel Chelsea.
He hadn’t enjoyed the trip. Sure Big Ben and Buckingham
Palace had been swell. He’d ridden in a bright red double-
decker bus, had his photo taken with a real “Bobby” and seen
the punks loitering along the King’s Road. But it had rained
non- stop, their B&B had been small and dirty, and the food—
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t w i n i n g
and this was what he couldn’t forgive or forget—had been
shit.
Not that Paris was shaping up much better. Browne had
given him the run- around yesterday, and so far all he had to
show for his trouble was a bruised face, a couple of blurred
photos and a hangover.
As for his hotel, it was in the middle of the red-light dis-
trict. His tiny airless room had one window which gave on to
a dingy alleyway that the local prostitutes used for sex and
tramps for pissing in. Needless to say, there was no air-con,
forcing him into an impossible choice between the stench
and intermittent groaning from the street below or sweating
through the unseasonably warm nights. The paper was pick-
ing up the tab, of course, but that was hardly the point. It was
no excuse for the hot water running out by eight in the morn-
ing or food not being served after nine at night. It was cer-
tainly no excuse for his phone calls going un- answered when
all he wanted was a goddammed cup of coffee.
He slammed the phone down and pulled on a pair of jeans
and a Georgetown sweatshirt—his cousin’s son had left it at
his place a few summers ago. Grabbing his key, he marched
out into the hall as fast as his bad hip would let him, and
made his way down the staircase, the carpet rough and cov-
ered in invisible bits of dirt under his bare feet.
“What the hell kind of operation are you clowns running
here?” he raged as he rounded the corner that led to the small
ground- floor reception area. “I’ve been trying . . .” He tailed
off. There was no one there. Nor was there anyone in the
small, chaotic office that lay beyond the reception desk. The
switchboard was flashing on about six lines. Where the hell
was everyone?
Frowning, he retraced his steps to the foot of the staircase
and paused. A door at the end of the passage ahead of him
was ajar, the flicker of a television and the faint hum of voices
seeping from within.
He nudged the door open and found himself in what he
guessed, from the battered lockers and overfl owing ashtrays,
was the staff room. A small TV set had been fixed high on
the far wall and gazing up at it, open-mouthed, were the re-
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ceptionist, bellboy, chef and kitchen porter. They had also,
judging from the way they were dressed, been joined by a
couple of the girls who worked the neighboring strip of side-
walk.
His curiosity stifling his indignation, Lewis stepped into
the room. On the screen above him he could make out a re-
porter standing in front of the Louvre’s glass pyramid.
“What’s happened?” he asked no one in partic ular, the few
words of Spanish that he relied on to get his shirts laundered
of little use now.
The receptionist looked up at him with mild surprise and
then shrugged helplessly, his English clearly not up to the task
either.
“
La Joconde
— the
Mona Lisa
,” one of the hookers ex-
plained in a thick accent without looking round, “she’s been
stolen.” The girl standing next to her nodded mournfully and
Lewis thought he could see a tear running down her cheek.
“Stolen? When?”
“Yesterday afternoon. But the police only announced it a
few hours ago.”
“Who do they think took it?”
“Him—” The girl pointed with a thin, ring-encrusted
fi nger.
Lewis snatched his eyes back to the screen, and fl inched at
the grainy image staring back at him.
“Him?” he choked. “Are you sure?”
“
Oui
,” said the girl, a hint of anger in her voice.
Lewis didn’t wait to hear any more. Sprinting back out
into the corridor, he took the stairs two at a time, the pain
from his hip all but forgotten. Pausing breathlessly outside
his room to unlock the door, his key skated nervously across
the surface of the lock before fi nally sliding home. He fl ung
the door open and leaped over to the bed, kneeling next to it.
Brushing the discarded whiskey miniatures and soiled tis-
sues to one side, he feverishly spread out the pile of black-
and-white photographs on the floor with both hands so that
he could see them all.
“There—” He snatched one up triumphantly. “I knew it!”
This was pure gold; the break-through story he’d always
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dreamed of. The
New York Times
. The
Washington Post
.
He’d have his pick of them all. He switched his phone on and
dialed without even listening to his waiting messages.
“Editorial,” a voice chirped.
“Marcie, it’s Leigh. You’re still there. Good.”
“Leigh, where the fuck have you been?” the voice barked.
“We’ve been leaving messages all over for you. The biggest
story since Jesus breaks and the only guy we have in Paris
goes fucking AWOL . . .” A pause. “Are you sober?”
“Relax, Marcie, I’m already on it,” Lewis reassured her.
“In fact, I’m all over it.”
“Why, what have you got?” She didn’t sound convinced.
“Oh, nothing much,” Lewis said nonchalantly, holding the
photo up with a smile. “Just a shot of the prime suspect kiss-
ing Special Agent Jennifer Browne the night before the heist.
Let’s see the Bureau try and shake this one off.”
“Leigh,” she breathed, “I think I love you.”
C H A P T E R F I F T Y- T W O
RUE DE CHARENTON, 12TH ARRONDISSEMENT, PARIS
23rd April— 8:42 a.m.