The Gilded Seal (11 page)
“Fake, forgery, fraud. Bring them up in the wrong context
and you’ll find yourself on very dangerous ground.” His tone
was growing increasingly strident, almost angry.
“I wasn’t suggesting . . .”
“People’s reputations are on the line. Reputations that have
taken years to establish. An accusation is made and pfff—”
he snapped his fingers “—it’s all gone. But what if you get it
wrong? By the time you realize your mistake, lifelong rela-
tionships have been destroyed, trust shattered. Forgery is the
pedophilia of the art world. Once the suspicion is raised,
you’re presumed guilty even when proven innocent. It’s a
shadow that never leaves you, poisoning everything you touch.
So you need to be either very brave, or very sure that you’re
right, before you cry forgery in this city.”
“Even so,” she said with a frown, “given the sums in-
volved, I would have thought that forged works appear on a
fairly regular—”
“I’ve already told you,” he snapped, his hand hovering
over the door handle, his cheeks fl ushed, “none of us do this
for the money. It’s . . .”
“For the art, I know.” She completed the sentence for him
unsmilingly. It wasn’t the first time today she’d heard that
familiar and infuriating refrain.
ALAMEDA, SEVILLE
19th April— 5:25 p.m.
Gillez led Tom round to the other side of the well. There,
hastily daubed against its weather- stained stone base,
were three letters, or at least what appeared to be letters,
arranged in a triangle. At the top an F, to the left a Q, to the
right an almost indistinct N.
“Any ideas?” Gillez asked hopefully, wiping the sweat off
his forehead with his sleeve.
Tom shrugged.
“Not really,” he lied.
The triangle was Rafael’s symbol, an oblique reference to
the mountainous region of Northern Italy his family came
from and from which his name derived—Quintavalle liter-
ally meant the fifth valley. The top letter was who the mes-
sage was addressed to. F for Felix. The Q was who it was
from. Quintavalle. As for the N, Tom was certain that it
wasn’t an N at all but an M that Rafael had been unable to
complete before his attackers pounced. An M for Milo, to tell
Tom that that was who was about to kill him.
“Did you find a small gambling chip anywhere? Mother-
of- pearl, inlaid with an ebony letter?”
“What?” The confused expression on Gillez’s face told
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Tom they hadn’t. Not that surprising, on refl ection. Murder
was probably not something Milo would want to advertise.
“Show me the photos.” Tom demanded icily.
“I thought you didn’t want to . . .”
“Well now I do,” Tom insisted, his earlier reluctance for-
gotten.
With a shrug, Gillez pulled a handful of black-and-white
photos out of the file and handed them over. Tom leafed
through them slowly, his face impassive, trying to divorce
the pictures of the carcass that had been strung across the
open doorway from the living, feeling person he had once
known. It was an impossible task and Tom knew that from
now on both images were condemned to an unhappy mar-
riage in his mind, each intimately bound up with the other.
He looked back to the inscription written in his friend’s
blood. He had not given much thought to the events up at
Drumlanrig Castle since he had learned about Rafael’s fate.
In fact, he had called Dorling on his way to the airport to
excuse himself, temporarily at least, from the investigation.
Now, however, the image of the black cat nailed to the wall
and its parallels with Rafael’s agonizing death came sharply
back into focus. Milo was clearly involved in both cases and
wanted him to know it. The question was why.
He looked up sharply, the noise of approaching sirens in-
terrupting his thoughts and prompting an instant, almost
instinctive reaction.
“Are they for me?”
“Of course not,” Gillez laughed. “I wouldn’t do that. Espe-
cially not to you.”
Tom stared at Gillez for moment and then cuffed him
across the face. The man’s head snapped back as if it was on
a spring. A small cut opened up on his right cheekbone.
“Yes, you would,” Tom said stonily. If there was one thing
he had learned to rely on, it was Gillez’s pathological dishon-
esty.
Gillez glared at him angrily, his hand clutching his face.
“Don’t you trust anyone anymore?”
“Cut the bullshit, Marco. How long have I got?”
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Marco’s shoulders slumped into a sullen sulk.
“It’s not my fault. They still want you for that Prado job. I
had to give them
something
in exchange for the fi le.”
“Don’t try and pretend you did me some sort of a favor,”
Tom snarled. “This was all about you. It always is. What did
they catch you at this time? Bribing a judge, sleeping with the
mayor’s wife? Something that made it worth selling me out
for, in any case. How long have I got?”
“One, maybe two minutes,” Gillez admitted, still massag-
ing his cheek. “They’re locking down the whole area. They
don’t want you slipping away again.”
“Then I’d better make this look convincing.”
Tom stepped forward and punched him in the face, break-
ing the sharp ridge of his nose with a satisfyingly loud crack.
Gillez screamed and clutched his face, the file dropping from
his hand, blood seeping between his fingers and dripping on
to his pastel jacket and cream shoes.
“You don’t want them thinking you let me get away, do
you?” Tom shouted as he scooped the file off the fl oor. The
anger and frustration of the last twenty-four hours had found
a strange release in the sharp stab of pain across his knuckles
and Gillez’s animal yelp. He went to hit him again, but then
drew back as the sound of approaching feet and muffl ed
shouts of “
Policía!”
reached him. Spinning around, he darted
through one of the open doorways and up the stairs just as
someone began pounding on the heavy gate. He was glad
he’d taken the time to lock it behind them.
He continued up the crumbling staircase until he arrived
at a flimsy metal door. Kicking it open, he emerged on to the
flat roof. The city stretched out around him, slumbering in
the dusty heat, the surrounding rooftops of burned terracotta
forming stepping stones across which, if he was quick, he
could make his way to safety.
From the courtyard below came the sound of the gate splin-
tering. Gillez’s plaintive cry echoed up the stairwell. Tom’s
Spanish wasn’t fluent, but he knew enough to understand
what he was blubbing.
“Don’t shoot, don’t shoot! It’s me, Sergeant Gillez. He’s
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upstairs. Someone get me a doctor. The bastard’s broken my
nose. I tried to stop him, but he had a gun. Shoot him. Oh,
my nose. Somebody shoot him, for God’s sake!”
Despite everything, Tom smiled. Cops like Gillez gave
most criminals a good name.
SOUTH STREET, NEW YORK
19th April— 3:17 p.m.
The sound of sirens echoing down Broadway’s steel can-
yon reached Jennifer several blocks before she turned
on to South Street and saw the reflection of the blue strobe
lights in the glass walls looming around her. New York was
one of the few cities where sound traveled faster than light.
As she drew closer, she could see that a small crowd had
gathered at the foot of one of the buildings, straining to see
what was going on from behind a hastily erected set of weath-
ered blue police barriers. As she watched, the crowd parted
reluctantly to let two paramedic teams through, before snap-
ping shut hungrily behind them.
“Stop here,” she instructed her driver, who tacked obedi-
ently right and eased to a halt about fifty yards from the
building’s entrance.
Jennifer stepped out. A local news channel was already
broadcasting from across the street, presumably tipped off by
one of the cops that they kept on the payroll for just this sort
of eventuality. And given the manpower that the NYPD was
already lavishing on the scene, the networks wouldn’t be far
behind.
“What’s going on?” she demanded, grabbing the arm of a
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passing officer and flashing her badge. He glanced at it suspi-
ciously, checking her face against the photo.
“Homicide. Some hot- shot attorney.” He shrugged disin-
terestedly, giving Jennifer the impression that either this was
a fairly routine occurrence in this part of Manhattan, or that
a small part of him felt that one less attorney in the world
was probably no bad thing.
“He got a name?”
“Yeah, Hammon. At least that’s what it sounded like. Half
the time you can’t hear a goddamned thing on this piece of
shit—” He smacked his radio resentfully. “Now, if you don’t
mind . . . ?”
Jennifer waved him on and took a deep breath. Hammon
dead. Coincidence? Possibly. Probably. Until she knew more,
it was pointless to speculate.
“Special Agent Browne?”
A questioning, almost incredulous voice broke into her
thoughts. As she turned, a man in his mid-fifties broke away
from the crowd at the base of the building and walked toward
her, his rolling gait suggesting some sort of longstanding hip
injury. Every part of him appeared to be sagging, his clothes
hanging listlessly from his sharp, bony frame, the excess
skin under his eyes and chin draped like folds of loose mate-
rial. Brushing his straw-colored hair across his balding scalp,
he smiled warmly as he approached, the color of his teeth
betraying that he was a smoker, and a heavy one at that.
Jennifer frowned, unable to place the man’s chalky face
and pallid green eyes, her mind feverishly trawling back
through distant high school memories and her freshman year
at Columbia. Now that she was closer, she noticed that he had
a mustard stain on the right leg of his faded chinos and a but-
ton missing from the front of his blue linen jacket.
“Leigh Lewis—
American Voice
.” He held out a moist
palm, which Jennifer shook warily, still uncertain who he
was. “Here, Tony, get a shot.”
Before Jennifer knew what was happening, a fl ashgun ex-
ploded in her face. The fog lifted. Lewis. The journalist
Green had warned her about.
“So, what’s the deal here? You know the vic?” Lewis jerked
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7 5
his head at the building behind him, a tape recorder material-
izing under her nose.
“No comment,” Jennifer insisted as she pushed past him,
her annoyance with herself at not having immediately recog-
nized his name only slightly tempered by her curiosity at
what he was doing here.
“Was Hammon under federal investigation?” Lewis skipped
backward to keep up with her.
“No comment,” Jennifer repeated, shielding her face from
the camera’s cyclopic gaze as she marched purposefully to-
ward the building’s entrance.
“Or had you two hooked up? The word is you like to
party.”
“Get out of my way,” Jennifer said through gritted teeth.
She was only a few feet from the security cordon now and
she gripped her ID anxiously in anticipation of escaping
Lewis before she lost her temper.
“The only catch, of course, is that everyone who screws
you winds up dead.” Lewis was standing directly in front of
her now, blocking her way and moving his head in line with
hers every time she tried to look past him. “In fact, maybe I
should call you the black widow, Agent Browne.”
“Fuck you.” Jennifer pushed Lewis roughly in the chest.
He stumbled backward, tripping over his photographer and
sending him sprawling.
She caught the shocked yet triumphant expression on
Lewis’s face as she stalked past them, the camera still chat-
tering noisily as the photographer continued to shoot. She
flashed her badge at the bemused officer controlling access
into the building and stalked inside, her eyes brimming with
tears of silent anger. From behind her she could hear Lewis’s
voice ringing out in an annoyingly singsong tone.
“Can I quote you on that?”
LAS CANDELARIAS, SEVILLE
19th April— 9:23 p.m.
Tom had waited for the protective cloak of darkness to
fall before venturing over to this side of town. Although
Gillez and his colleagues
were reassuringly incompetent,
there was certainly no point in tempting fate by walking
around in broad daylight. The trail left by Rafael’s killer was
cold enough already, without Tom being arrested and de-
layed by yet another round of pointless questioning.
He had therefore spent the intervening hours holed up in
the tenebrous anonymity of a small basement bar in the Bar-
