proached it.
“They’re with me,” Franzy explained to the two unsmiling
men who came out to greet them. They were each patted
down and then waved through with a grunt, the tunnel an-
gling down into the hill.
“Keep your voices down,” Franzy told them as the passage
leveled out and they approached a thick black curtain. “The
film’s still on.”
“Film? What film?” Archie frowned.
Franzy swept the curtain aside with a fl ourish. They
stepped cautiously through and found themselves in a cav-
ernous amphitheater lit by a flickering image being projected
on to a painted stone wall. Tom recognized the movie—
The
Bicycle Thieves
.
Facing the screen were several shallow terraces carved
into the rock, crowded with people, some gazing rapturously
at the screen, some kissing, some passed out. A few mis-
matched sofas and armchairs were arranged in the space be-
tween the terraced seating and the screen, people smoking
and drinking as if they were slumped in front of their TV at
home. A small group was gathered around a candle on the far
side of the chamber, the sallow light revealing their haunted,
hungry faces as they prepared to shoot up, a dark liquid bub-
bling in the spoon they held suspended over the dancing
flame. Witches around a cauldron.
3 3 8 j a m e s
t w i n i n g
“We excavated this place,” Franzy informed them proudly.
“We run a cinema club every few nights.”
“Where do you get the power?” Tom shook his head in
amazement. It was hard to believe that this shadow world
revolved unnoticed beneath the feet of the one above. Franzy
laughed, and Tom wondered whether bringing outsiders here
allowed him, briefly at least, to see this place almost as if for
the first time, to overcome the anesthesia of familiarity.
“We siphon it off the grid,” he giggled. “Just like we use
water from the fountains above to flush the toilets. Come on.
Blanco’s this way.”
He led them past the terraced seating. A few people glanced
at them disinterestedly before turning back to the fi lm, their
partner, or whatever it was they were trying to inject or ingest
at the time. Stepping into a narrow passage, he lifted another
heavy black curtain.
This time they found themselves in a much smaller cham-
ber filled with mismatched tables and chairs that Tom as-
sumed had been snatched from outside various restaurants
and cafés. To their left, two tables housed a rudimentary bar
and a makeshift cooking area. The sound of laughter and
clinking crockery from the twenty or so people fi nishing din-
ner washed over them.
“We have six or seven similar restaurants all over Paris,”
Franzy boasted.
“Who else knows about this?” asked Archie, clearly as
surprised as Tom.
“Not many. It’s been illegal to come down here since the
fi fties. The
catafl ics
, the cops who patrol the catacombs, fi ne
you if they catch you. But since Blanco joined, they tend to
leave us alone. He used to be one of them.”
He steered them over to a table at the back of the room. A
man was sitting there, picking over the remains of a meal, a
joint in one hand. He wore a red headscarf tied into a knot in
the nape of his neck and colored beads tied into his straggly
beard. Both his ears were pierced all the way along their
edge and each lower lobe had a plastic insert embedded into
it, designed to stretch a hole in the skin. His neck was tat-
tooed with a star, although it wasn’t clear if it was meant to
t h e g i l d e d s e a l
3 3 9
be a pentacle or a Star of David. A narrow steel bar, tipped
with sharp points, pierced the soft skin between his eyes
where his nose met his forehead. What struck Tom most of
all, however, was not Blanco’s tribal body decoration but that
under his holed tracksuit he had the lean, sharp-edged phy-
sique of an endurance runner. Whatever he did to amuse
himself down in the Stygian darkness of these tunnels, it
clearly kept him fi t.
“Blanco . . .” Franzy seemed suddenly nervous. “These are
the people I told you about. The ones Ketter vouched for.”
“Sit,” the man instructed them in a raspy voice, pale eyes
glowering under dark eyebrows. “Not you, Franzy. You can
piss off.” Franzy grimaced and scuttled off to the bar where
he ordered a drink and eyed them sullenly from a distance.
“Franzy pretends to be one of us,” Blanco growled. Tom
wondered if his strange, almost American accent, was a de-
liberate affectation or more likely the result of watching too
much imported TV. “But he hasn’t made the leap yet. He still
lives up top; only comes down here when he feels like it. I
don’t like agnostics. Either you believe or you don’t . . .” He
paused to pick something out of his yellowing teeth. “Which
are you?”
“We’re just passing through. Ketter said you could help.”
“I could. I still haven’t decided if I will,” he said unsmil-
ingly.
“We’ll pay,” Tom ventured.
“What do you think your money buys you down here?” He
gave a dismissive shrug. “If I help you, it’ll be because I
choose to.” He removed his headscarf and pulled his bleached
hair back into a ponytail that he fixed into place with an elas-
tic band.
“We’re looking for something,” Tom explained. “A place
down here called the
Autel des Obelisques
.”
“Never heard of it.”
“We have a map.”
Tom cleared the plates out of the way and smoothed the
map out. The sight of the faded cloth seemed to trigger a
flicker of interest in Blanco. He put his joint down and leaned
forward.
3 4 0 j a m e s
t w i n i n g
“How old is this?”
“About two hundred years.”
He gave a low whistle, his tongue stud clinking against his
teeth.
“Most of these passageways are still intact . . .” He traced
a path along some of the lines on it. “This is where we are
now—” he indicated a spot on the map. “But there are other
places on here I’ve never even heard about.”
“When
we’ve finished, you can keep it,” Tom offered,
guessing from his interest that this might sway him. “All we
need is for you to take us here and back.” He pointed at the
spot circled in red. “Do you know it?”
“I know where it is,” Blanco nodded, “But it doesn’t exist.
The tunnel ends here—” He indicated a point some way
short of the circle. “I’ll take you if you want, but it’s a long
walk for not very much.”
“How long?” Archie sounded concerned.
“Near the Luxembourg Gardens.”
“We could drive,” Archie suggested hopefully.
Blanco fixed him with a hard stare.
“I’ve not been on top in five years. I’m not about to start
now.”
C H A P T E R S E V E N T Y- S E V E N
AVENUE DE L’OBSERVATOIRE, 14TH ARRONDISSEMENT,
PARIS
23rd April— 11:54 p.m.
She couldn’t move—her hands were tied behind her back,
her ankles lashed to the chair legs. Worryingly though,
although blindfolded, she wasn’t gagged. Not a good sign. It
meant they didn’t care if she screamed for help. It meant they
knew that no one would hear, that no one would come to help.
She was on her own.
She heard a voice, but didn’t recognize the language. Ko-
rean? Japanese? Thai? Something like that. Was this Milo’s
crowd? Had he somehow figured out that Henri was helping
them? The blindfold was ripped from her head.
“You’re awake. Good.”
Blinking, she saw two Asian-looking men standing on ei-
ther side of a snowing TV screen. The man on the left—
short, stocky and dressed in a black suit—was totally bald.
He had no eyelashes or eyebrows either, which, taken to-
gether with his white surgical mask, gave him a strange, al-
most alien appearance that seemed at once permanently
surprised and disconcertingly expressionless. His skin had
a pale, luminescent quality too, almost as if it had been
smoothed on like wax. The man to the right was dressed
3 4 2 j a m e s
t w i n i n g
more conventionally and stood a good few inches taller, with
a square head and jagged scar across the bridge of his nose.
He was holding a butterfly knife that he was fl icking open
and shut in a rhythmic blur of blackened steel.
Although Jennifer recognized a slight theatricality in the
scene, she had to admit that it was working—she was scared.
“Who are you?” she mumbled, her throat dry and sore.
“What do you want?”
“Watch,” the man with the knife said, nodding at someone
behind her.
The TV flickered and then burst into color, the screen
filled with a close-up of Besson’s terrified face. Two sets of
hands, both missing their little fingers, appeared from the
sides, one clutching a wooden spoon, the other grasping a tin
of paint. Red enamel paint. She looked away, horrifi ed, but
immediately felt someone grab a fistful of hair and force her
head back around. She screwed her eyes shut, the fl eeting
glimpse of Besson’s bulging eyes and blue lips making her
stomach turn over.
“Watch,” the voice came again. “Watch, or we’ll cut your
eyes out too.”
She looked up. Besson was convulsing now, but she fo-
cused on a point on the horizon beyond the screen so that all
she could see was a strangely beautiful kaleidoscope of shift-
ing shapes and colors. And she tried to block out Besson’s
choked gurgling by focusing her mind instead on decipher-
ing what the man had just said—“We’ll cut your eyes out
too
.” Did that mean these were the people who had killed and
mutilated Hammon?
The video ended. The screen began to snow again, fi lling
the room with a strange yellow light as if a storm was about
to break. The man on the left stepped forward and spoke
through his mask, the material riding up on his nose.
“Fifteen years ago I bought two paintings . . .” Each word
appeared to have been carefully measured and then delivered
with precision. “A Chagall and a Gauguin.”
“You’re Asahi Takeshi?” she guessed, suddenly relating
his baldness to the story she had heard about him having
survived radiation poisoning by a Triad gang.
t h e g i l d e d s e a l
3 4 3
“One was painted by Rafael Quintavalle, the other by
Henri Besson,” he continued without answering. “I’m sure
you can guess who sold them to me?”
“Hammon.” She nodded. No wonder Besson had been able
to identify the forgeries so quickly the other day, she thought
to herself. He’d painted one and his old friend Rafael the
other.
“When I tried to sell them, I was told they were forgeries.
That I had been stolen from. Humiliated. So one by one I
found those responsible and made them pay. Now only Razi
is left. The coward won’t long outlive the others. I don’t for-
get and I don’t forgive.”
They’d been wrong, she realized now. Milo had had noth-
ing to do with Hammon or Quintavalle’s deaths. This was
revenge. Brutal revenge for a scam committed fi fteen years
ago and then forgotten by everyone. Forgotten by everyone
except the person they’d ripped off.
“Killing me won’t help.”
“None of this helps. I do it because it pleases me. Because
I can.”
He nodded at the man next to him, who locked his knife
into the open position and stepped toward her.
“Wait,” she called, her eyes fixed fearfully on the ap-
proaching blade. “I can help.”
“How?” he sneered.
“Your paintings—the real ones. They’re in a safe in my
hotel. I can give you access to them.”
The man holding the knife paused, waiting for some in-
struction from Takeshi who appeared to be considering her
offer.
“Go on.”
“You’ll have the certificates and the originals. The auction
houses will have no choice but to sell them as planned. How
could they refuse? No one will ever know about the forgeries
you bought.” She felt no guilt about this. Hammon was dead
and Razi had fled the country. Neither would miss the paint-
ings and, given the circumstances, she wasn’t sure she had
much choice.
Takeshi nodded, but before he could speak, another of his
3 4 4 j a m e s
t w i n i n g
men gave a panicked shout. A steady blue pulse could be
seen through the kitchen window rising from the street be-
low like steam. The police had arrived. Somehow they had
found this place too. And even though she couldn’t see his
face under his mask, from the steely look in Takeshi’s eyes
and the way his men were already checking their weapons
and ammunition, she guessed that not only were they hope-
lessly outnumbered, but that they had no intention of going
quietly. Not unless she showed them how.
“There’s something else I can help you with,” she offered
quickly. “A way out.”