The Gilded Seal

‘What’s going on?’ she demanded, grabbing the arm of a passing officer and flashing her badge. He glanced at it suspiciously, checking her face against the photo.

‘Homicide. Some hot-shot attorney.’ He shrugged disinterestedly, 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 towards 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 material. Brushing his straw-coloured hair across his balding scalp, he smiled warmly as he approached, the colour 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 she was closer, she noticed that he had a mustard stain on the right leg of his faded chinos and a button 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 flashgun exploded 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 his head at the building behind him, a tape recorder materialising under her nose.

‘No comment,’ Jennifer insisted as she pushed past him, her annoyance with herself at not having immediately recognised his name only slightly tempered by her curiosity at what he was doing here.

‘Was Hammon under federal investigation?’ Lewis skipped backwards to keep up with her.

‘No comment,’ Jennifer repeated, shielding her face from the camera’s cyclopic gaze as she marched purposefully towards 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 backwards, 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 chattering 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 sing-song tone.

‘Can I quote you on that?’

FOURTEEN

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 delayed 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 Barrio Santa Cruz, trying to forget what he had felt upon seeing the place where Rafael had died, and focus instead on what he had learned there.

On reflection, of all the things that Gillez had told him, two stood out. The first was that Rafael had been seen going to confession at the Basilica de la Macarena which, given Rafael’s attitude towards religion in general and the Catholic faith in particular, seemed about as likely as the Pope being spotted in a strip bar.

The second was that although Gillez had mentioned Rafael’s apartment being searched, he’d said nothing about his studio. It was just possible, therefore, that the police didn’t know about it. This was hardly surprising given that, as far as Tom could remember, the property was registered in the name of Ignacio Sánchez Mejías, a once-famous Sevillian bullfighter and longstanding resident of the Cementerio de San Fernando.

The crumbling street of tattered warehouses and tumble-down workshops was deserted, but Tom stuck to the shadows all the same. When he was satisfied that he was alone, he crossed over, side-stepping a decomposing car raised on bricks. The wreck had been set alight at some point and the seats were melted back to their frames, scraps of fabric and foam clinging stubbornly to their blackened skeletons like skin.

There were no lights on inside Rafael’s two-storey building, and as he drew closer Tom could see that the padlock securing its heavily graffitied roller-shutter to the ground was still intact. Above him, a small fern that had somehow taken root under the flaking plaster swayed lazily in the sticky heat.

Checking around him one last time, he sprang the lock, raised the shutter high enough to slip under it and then rolled it back behind him. The noise reverberated along the length of the windowless room that stretched in front of him like a deep coffin. Grabbing a chair, he leaned it against the shutter and then balanced the padlock he’d removed from the door on its seat. It was an old trick, but an effective one.

Locating the torch in its usual hiding place, Tom crept along the narrow corridor formed by the assortment of unwanted furniture, old tyres and children’s toys that had been piled up on either side of the room, dolls’ eyes glinting accusingly every so often out of the darkness. A few of the nicer pieces had been covered in protective sheets; as Tom walked past, they lifted slowly as if reaching out to touch him, before settling back with an inaudible sigh.

Compared to the ground floor, the upstairs room was light and airy, with large windows front and back and a high, glazed roof. There was a full moon, its anaemic glow chased away every few seconds by the red-blooded pulse of a large neon advertising sign high on the wall of a neighbouring building.

Despite the shifting light, Tom could see that the room was every bit as chaotic as he remembered. The concrete floor, for example, was almost lost under a layer of dried paint, thin veins of random colours that crackled underfoot like dry twigs on a forest floor. Discarded sketches and half-finished canvases were gathered in the corners as if blown there by the wind, empty paint tubes and worn brushes emerging from the gaps between them like the masts of a ship half-buried in sand.

And yet not everything was the same. A chair had been flipped over on to its front, its legs extended helplessly into the air, its innards spilling through the deep gash that had been cut in its seat. Two easels were lying prostate on the ground. All the cupboards and drawers had been yanked open and their contents scooped out on to the floor beneath. Tom’s face set into a grim frown. Whoever had turned over Rafael’s apartment had clearly been here too.

Kneeling down, he plucked a small photo frame from where it was sheltering under a crumpled newspaper. Although the glass had been shattered, he recognised Rafael’s grinning face through the sparkling web of tiny fractures. He had his arm around Tom on one side and Eva on the other, and the three of them were sitting on the edge of a fountain in the Alcázar. The mixture of anger and disbelief that he had felt on seeing the crime-scene photographs welled up in him again. Why?

There was a thud downstairs. Steel on concrete. The padlock falling off the chair he’d left leaning against the shutter. Someone had come in behind him.

He placed the frame back on the ground and crept over to the top of the stairs, positioning himself out of sight to the left of the doorway. From below he heard the sound of careful footsteps and then the tell-tale creak of the staircase. The third step, he remembered from when he had made his own way up.

He readied himself, ready to send whoever was coming up sprawling across the room, when the faint scent of perfume reached him. A perfume he recognised.

‘Tom?’ An uncertain voice filtered through the open doorway.

‘Eva?’ Tom edged forward, his shadow further obscuring the already dark stairwell. A figure advanced towards him.

‘Still using that old chair routine?’ A flash of white teeth amid the gloom.

‘Still wearing Chanel?’ Tom smiled as he stepped back and let Eva into the room.

‘If that’s a line, it’s a bad one,’ she sniffed, brushing past and then wheeling to face him. In the intermittent neon glow she looked even more striking than he remembered: dark oval eyes glinting impetuously, an almost indecently suggestive mouth, shimmering black hair held off her face by an elasticated white band and tumbling down on to olive-skinned shoulders that might have been modelled on a Canova nude.

‘I heard you’d gone straight.’ She sounded sceptical.

‘I’d heard the same about you,’ he said softly, trying to keep his eyes on her face rather than tracing a line from her slender ankles to her skirt’s embroidered hem and the suggestive curve of her legs. Now, as when he’d first met her, she radiated sex. It wasn’t deliberate, it was just the way she was. The animal dart of her pink tongue against her lips, the generous heave of her breasts under her black silk blouse, the erect nipples brushing the material, the open thrust of her hips. Sex seasoned with a hint of unpredictability and a dash of temper for good measure.

A pause.

‘It’s good to see you again, Eva.’

He meant it.

‘What are you doing here?’ she demanded.

Her tone didn’t surprise him. Their break-up had been messy. She’d been hurt. No reason she should be anything other than cold with him now. In fact, it made things simpler.

‘Same as you. Looking for answers.’

‘He’s dead.’ Her voice was hollow. ‘What more of an answer do you want?’ She paused, her eyes boring into his. ‘Go home, Tom. You’re not needed here. You’re not wanted here.’

‘He left a message before he died.’

‘I know.’ She gave a sad nod. ‘They showed me the photos.’

‘Then you saw who it was addressed to?’

‘You two and your little codes and secrets.’ Her bottom lip, pink and full, jutted out indignantly, nostrils quivering.

‘It was never like that,’ he insisted.

‘Yes it was. Rafael only ever invited me in when it suited him. And even now that he’s dead, nothing’s changed.’ Tom remembered now that she’d always insisted on calling her stepfather by his first name.

‘What was he mixed up in?’ Tom pressed.

‘I don’t know. Things were never simple between us.’ She fixed him with an accusing stare. ‘You walking out on me didn’t help. It forced him to pick sides.’

‘Is this about Rafael, or us?’

Eva flew forward and slapped Tom across the cheek, the sharp crack of the blow echoing around the room.

A pause.

‘Feel better?’ Tom asked slowly, rubbing his face.

‘Go home, Tom,’ she said wearily.

‘He came to see me in London.’

‘What?’ This, finally, seemed to have registered.

‘Three or four weeks ago. I don’t know what he’d got himself involved in, Eva, but I think he was in trouble and that he wanted my help. He stole part of a Napoleonic dinner service. An obelisk. What was he up to?’

She looked down, the toe of her black patent leather shoe poking absent-mindedly through the debris strewn across the floor.

‘He lied to us, Tom.’ She glanced up, looking unsure of herself for the first time. ‘He lied to us all. I could tell from his voice. He’d signed up for another job.’

‘For Milo.’ Tom nodded, thinking back to the unfinished letter M scrawled in blood across the base of the well. ‘Have you checked the drawers yet?’

‘What do you mean?’

He pulled one of the drawers out, emptied what remained inside it on to the floor, and then released a small catch underneath. The bottom of the drawer folded back, revealing a hidden compartment about an inch deep. It was empty.

‘He used to hide things he was working on in these,’ Tom began, before realising from the expression on Eva’s face that this was yet another secret Rafael had not chosen to share with her. Maybe she had a point after all.

‘Open them,’ she muttered hoarsely.

There were six drawers, but like the first, they were empty. All except the final one. This opened to reveal a painting. A painting that a small part of Tom had almost been expecting to find. There could be no doubt now that the two cases were connected.

‘Is that a da Vinci?’ Eva exclaimed.

‘It’s the Madonna of the Yarnwinder,’ Tom confirmed grimly as he carefully lifted it from the drawer. ‘But it’s not the original. That was stolen a few days ago by Milo. This must be one of your father’s forgeries. I expect that’s what his killers were looking for when they turned this place and his apartment upside down.’

‘You mean all this was for a stupid painting?’ Her voice broke as she gestured, the sweep of her arm taking in the ransacked room but also, Tom knew, the invisible trail of blood that led to the courtyard on the other side of the city. She pinched the bridge of her nose, trying to keep her emotions in check. He said nothing, giving her time to regain her composure. As she lowered her arm, Tom caught a glimpse of the silver bracelet he’d given her many summers ago, before she hurriedly tugged her sleeve back down to cover it. Perhaps she hadn’t totally banished those times from her mind after all.

‘They didn’t take everything,’ he said gently. ‘They left you this –’

He handed her the photo he had found on the floor. This time there was no holding back her tears.

FIFTEEN

South Street, New York

19th April – 3.26 p.m.

As soon as she was certain that the doors had closed behind her, Jennifer let out an angry cry and struck her fist against the side of the elevator. The noise echoed up the shaft above her like thunder presaging a heavy storm. How could she have been so stupid? Lewis had just been fishing and she’d grabbed the bait at the first time of asking. She’d even knocked the guy over. On camera. What would Green say? Assaulting civilians was not exactly how the Bureau liked to handle its PR. If it wasn’t so bad, it would almost have been funny.

Less funny was how Lewis had known she would be there. Had someone leaked her schedule? Unlikely, given she had only arranged to see Hammon after leaving Razi earlier that morning.

Maybe it was just an unfortunate coincidence. After all, years swimming through the lurid waters of popular scandal had given Lewis and his kind a nose for a story somewhat akin to a shark’s for a wounded seal. He would have smelt the blood in the water from the other side of the city.

The doors whirred open. A camera flash exploded, momentarily burning an image on to the back of her retina. A corpse sprawled on the floor in front of the reception desk. Two bullet wounds in her back suggesting she’d been gunned down as she tried to run away. A dark shadow of blood beneath her, matting her long blonde hair with dark streaks.

‘Who the fuck let you up here?’ A man stepped into her field of vision. He had a mottled complexion, a deep scar across the bridge of his nose and a lazy right eye.

‘Special Agent Jennifer Browne, FBI.’

The man glanced at her ID and then looked up again, his chin jutting out defiantly. Judging from his greying brown hair, she guessed he was maybe forty, forty-five years old. Behind him, she saw two people from the coroner’s office flip the girl over before lifting her into a body bag and zipping it shut.

‘You’re kidding, right? The bodies are still warm and already you’re trying to crowd us out?’

‘I had an appointment with Mr Hammon.’ She nodded at the large nameplate on the wall behind the reception desk. ‘I only just found out about the shooting.’

‘Hey, Sutton,’ the man called out without looking round. ‘You got anything in the book today with a Julia Browne?’

The body bag was lifted on to a stretcher and wheeled into the open lift behind her.

‘Jennifer,’ she corrected him sharply.

‘Whatever.’ He shrugged.

A woman standing on the other side of the desk leaned over the terminal, her finger leaving a greasy mark as she slid it across the surface of the on-screen diary.

‘Sure,’ she called out. ‘Three thirty. Special Agent Jennifer Browne.’ She looked up and gave Jennifer a fleeting nod that she took as sisterly encouragement not to let herself be pushed around. There was no danger of that.

Grudgingly, the man reached out to shake her hand.

‘Jim Mitchell, Homicide. I’m afraid Hammon’s going to miss your three thirty.’

‘No kidding?’

‘You a client?’

‘I was hoping to talk to him about a case I’m investigating.’

‘Yeah, well, talking’s the one thing he won’t be doing again,’ Mitchell said with a smirk.

‘What do you mean?’

‘See for yourself.’

He threw open the large mahogany double doors behind him and waved her through. Hammon’s office was located in the corner of the building, its two glass walls framing the graceful sweep of the Brooklyn Bridge as it unfurled against the East River. At that moment a chopper took off from the nearby heliport, its red-tipped rotors carving a steep circle in the thin air.

Beyond the view and the extravagance of a large fish tank set into the facing wall, however, the room was a triumph of minimalist design. The only furniture consisted of two Barcelona chairs neatly arranged around a square glass table and a massive cherrywood desk that was empty apart from a folded copy of the Wall Street Journal and an open laptop. A fax machine and a printer sat on a low table that hugged the desk’s right leg.

‘We’ve got three fatalities. Hammon, the receptionist and a security guard in the lobby.’

‘When?’

‘An hour ago, maybe two. Eyewitnesses put two men at the scene, with two more waiting in a car outside. Initial reports suggest they were Oriental – Japanese or Korean, maybe. You know…’ he shrugged helplessly and for a moment Jennifer thought he was actually going to tell her that they all looked the same to him. This guy was a real sweetheart.

‘Were all the victims shot?’

‘Point-blank range. Probably a .45. Only Hammon didn’t get off quite so easy as the other two.’ Mitchell nodded grimly towards the desk and the large black chair with its back turned towards them.

Jennifer stepped around the edge of the desk and realised, as she caught sight of a wrist secured to the chair’s metal arm with a plastic tag, that Hammon was still there.

‘He’s next, as soon as they’ve loaded the other two up,’ Mitchell explained as she shot him a questioning glance.

Moving closer, she could see that the lawyer’s balding head was slumped forward and to one side; his chin and monogrammed shirt were soaked in blood. One of his expensive leather shoes seemed to have half come off as he had struggled, although the black handle of the Tanto knife that was protruding from his chest, his Ferragamo tie draped around it like a scarf, suggested it had been a short and uneven contest.

Most shocking though were his eyes, or rather the gaping, livid sockets where his eyes had been until someone had prised them out, leaving red tears frozen on to his face like wax.

‘There’s no sign of them here,’ Mitchell volunteered. ‘We figure they took them with them.’

Jennifer looked up, her face impassive. The longer she did this job, the less instances of random sadism such as this seemed to shock her.

‘Some sort of trophy?’

‘Maybe.’

She leaned forward with a frown, having caught sight of something soft and pink that seemed to have been skewered on to the tip of the knife before it was plunged into Hammon’s chest.

‘What’s that?’

‘His tongue,’ said Mitchell, watching her closely.

‘His tongue…’ It was more of a statement than a question and Mitchell seemed disappointed by her muted reaction. ‘So it’s got to be some sort of a revenge killing, right? A punishment for something he’d said or seen. Or both.’

‘You tell me.’ Mitchell shrugged. ‘I’m normally pulling hookers out of dumpsters and junkies out of the East River. What was your angle?’

‘Hammon got into a fight with someone who’s involved in my case. I wanted to find out why.’

‘The guy’s an attorney. What more of a reason do you need?’ Mitchell laughed.

Jennifer smiled as she moved round to the other side of the desk, slowly warming to Mitchell’s black humour.

‘You got any paper?’ she asked suddenly.

‘What?’ Mitchell frowned.

‘Paper?’

Mitchell continued to stare at her blankly.

‘For the fax,’ she explained, pointing at the light blinking on the fax machine. ‘Looks like something’s caught in the memory.’

With a nod of understanding, Mitchell opened the printer tray, removed a few sheets of paper, and placed them into the fax. Moments later, the machine began to whir and hum, sucking a fresh sheet inside and then spitting it out on to the floor.

Mitchell picked the sheet up, studied it for a few seconds, then handed it to Jennifer. ‘Go figure.’

Three items were listed on the page: First an alphanumeric code – VIS1095. Then a sum of money – $100,000,000. And beneath them, a letter in a circle.

The letter M.

SIXTEEN

Las Candelarias, Seville

19th April – 9.33 p.m.

Eva seemed reluctant to leave the workshop. Tom understood why.

Unable to sleep the night of his own father’s funeral a few years before, he had wandered through Geneva’s wintry streets, vainly looking for answers to questions that he couldn’t yet quite bring himself to ask. As dawn broke, he had found himself standing outside the front door to his father’s old apartment, drawn there as if by some ancient magic. Sitting on the foot of his father’s bed, seeing his cufflinks glittering on the marble-topped chest and his ties peeking out from behind the wardrobe door like snowdrops nosing their way above ground in early spring, it was almost as if he had still been alive.

Now he sensed that Eva was doing the same, absorbing the memories of her father that swirled stubbornly around this room like paint fumes. The half-empty wine glass with a ghostly lip-print on its rim. The pocket-knife, its bone handle smoothed by use. The discarded sunglasses, one arm bent back on itself where he had sat on them. Part of Tom wanted to hold her, to tell her that it would all be all right. But he knew it wouldn’t, not for a long time, and that this was something she was going to have to come to terms with on her own.