Authors: James Twining
CLERKENWELL, LONDON
19 July—2:05
P.M.
H
e’d had the shop’s frontage painted a treacly black, although the windows themselves were still obscured from the street by the thin coat of whitewash. Against this background the shop’s name, freshly painted in large gold letters in a semicircle across both large panes, seemed to stand out even more prominently. Tom read it proudly:
KIRK DUVAL
. His mother would have liked that. And then under it in a straight line and smaller letters:
FINE ART
&
ANTIQUES
.
He checked both ways and then crossed the street, stopping halfway as he searched for a gap in the traffic, eventually reaching the shop door. It opened noiselessly under his touch to reveal a jumble of hastily deposited boxes and half-opened packing crates, their contents poking resolutely through straw and Styrofoam. In one, an elegant Regency clock. In another, a marble bust of Caesar or Alexander, he hadn’t checked yet. Across the room, an Edwardian rosewood card table had been completely unpacked and a large Han Dynasty vase filled with dried flowers stood in the middle of the dark green felt. It was going to take weeks to sort it all out.
Still, that didn’t bother Tom. Not now. For the first time in as long as he could remember he had time on his side. He had thought about stopping before, of course, or at least toyed with the idea. After all, he hadn’t needed the money for years. But he’d never been able to stay away for more than a few weeks. Like gamblers ushered back to their favorite seats at the blackjack table after a brief absence, he had been sucked back in every time.
This time was different, though. Things had changed. He’d changed. The New York job had proved that to him.
And yet one name lurked beneath the thin veneer of normality that Tom had tried to build for himself over the past few days. Cassius. He wasn’t sure if Archie had been lying or not, using Cassius’s name perhaps to try and force Tom’s hand to follow through on the job. If so he was taking a big risk. But if it really was Cassius that had commissioned the theft, then Archie was rolling the dice without even properly understanding the rules or how Cassius played the game. Or even perhaps what was at stake.
But Archie wasn’t his responsibility. That’s what Tom kept reminding himself. Not now, not ever. If he had gotten himself into this mess then it was up to him to get himself out of it. Tom wasn’t being heartless. Those were just the rules.
He continued through the shop, the wooden floor freshly cleared of the debris that had coated it, until he reached the two doors at the rear of the room. Opening the one to his left, Tom stepped through onto the narrow platform that ran along the back wall of the large warehouse.
On the left-hand side, a metal staircase spiraled tightly down to the dusty warehouse floor some twenty feet below. A steel shutter in the opposite wall opened onto the street that ran down the hill and around the back of the building. There was a faint buzzing from the neon tubes that lined the warehouse ceiling and their primitive light made the flaking and stained white walls come out in a sickly sweat.
“How are you getting on?” Tom called out as he came down the stairs, the cast-iron staircase vibrating violently with each step where it had worked itself loose over the years. The girl looked up at the sound of his voice, brushing her blond hair aside.
“There’s still a lot to do.” She took her glasses off and rubbed her blue eyes. “How does it look?” Her English was immaculate, although spoken with the slight tightness of a Swiss-French accent.
“Great. You were right, the gold does look better than the silver would have.”
She blushed and put her glasses back on. Still only twenty-two, Dominique had worked for Tom’s father in Geneva for the last four years. After the memorial service, she’d volunteered to help him move all his father’s stock back to London and get the business up and running there. She’d done a great job. He was hoping she would agree to stay on.
“Is everything here?” Tom nodded toward the piles of crates and boxes that were stacked across the warehouse floor.
“I think so, yes. I just need to check those last few boxes off against my list.”
“These?” asked Tom, walking over toward the three crates she had pointed at.
“Uh-huh. Read off the numbers on the side, will you?”
“Sure.” He went to the first one and, bending his head slightly, read the numbers back to her.
“One-three-one-two-seven-two.”
She turned back to the laptop she was sitting in front of.
“Okay.”
Tom moved to the next crate.
“One-three-one-one—”
He was interrupted by a clipped, nasal voice that sank heavily from the platform above.
“My, my, we have been busy, Kirk. You must have knocked off Buckingham Palace to get your hands on this little lot.”
“Detective Constable Clarke,” Tom said flatly without bothering to look up. “Our first customer.”
Clarke robotically lit another cigarette from the one already in his mouth before flicking the sputtering butt over the railing and wedging the new cigarette between his teeth. It landed harmlessly at Tom’s feet.
“It’s Detective
Sergeant
Clarke now, Kirk,” he said as he took a drag on his cigarette and made his way down the stairs to the warehouse floor, the staircase strangely silent under his lazy step. “While you’ve been away, there’s been a few changes around here.”
“Detective sergeant? They really must be desperate.”
A muscle in Clarke’s neck began to twitch. He was quite a tall man, although his rounded shoulders made him seem shorter. He was also distressingly thin, his gray skin drawn tightly across his sharp cheekbones, his mouth pulled into a permanently grudging grimace, his hair fine and brushed forward to disguise how far it had receded. His wrist bones, especially, jutted out under translucent skin and seemed so delicate that they might snap if you shook his hand too firmly. The only color came from the broken blood vessels that danced across his sunken cheeks.
“I heard you were back, Kirk. That you’d crawled out from whatever hole you’ve been hiding in for the last couple of months.” His watery eyes flashed as he spoke. “So I thought I’d come and pay you a visit. A social call. Just in case you thought I’d forgotten about you.”
“Well, if it’s any consolation, I’d certainly forgotten about you.”
Clarke clamped his mouth shut and Tom could see from the color rising to his face that he was focusing all his energies on not losing his temper. Eventually he turned away from Tom and indicated the room around him with his head.
“So, all this shit’s yours, then?”
Tom stole an anxious look at Dominique, but she was staring at the computer screen as if nothing was going on behind her.
“Not that’s it’s any of your business, but yes.”
“You mean it is now,” said Clarke, laughing coldly. “But God knows which poor sod you nicked it off.” He kicked the crate nearest to him, his clumpy, thick-soled shoes at odds with his delicate frame and making his feet seem huge. “What about this one. What’s in here?”
“You’re wasting your time, Clarke,” said Tom, his own mounting frustration giving his voice a slight edge now. “I’ve moved my father’s business from Switzerland and I’m reopening it here. I have import papers in triplicate from both the Swiss and British authorities for everything.”
Clarke turned back to face him and smirked.
“Tell me, was it the drink, or the shame over having you for a son that finally did him in?”
Tom’s body stiffened, the muscles in his jaw bulging as he clenched his teeth together. He could see Clarke savoring the moment, his eyes narrowed into fascinated slivers of gray.
“I think it’s time you left,” said Tom, taking a step forward.
“Are you threatening me?”
“No, I’m asking you to leave. Now.”
“I’ll go when I’m ready.” Clarke thrust his chin out in defiance and folded his arms across his chest, the material of his gray suit, shiny on the elbows, acquiring a new set of creases.
“Dominique,” Tom called out while keeping his eyes firmly fixed on Clarke’s. “Could you please get me the Metropolitan Police on the line and ask to speak to Commissioner Jarvis. Tell him that Detective
Sergeant
Clarke is harassing me again. Tell him that he has illegally entered my premises without a warrant. Tell him he’s refusing to leave.” She nodded but didn’t move.
Clarke stepped forward until he was so close that Tom could smell the smoke on his breath.
“You’ll slip up, Kirk. Everyone does eventually, even you. And I’ll be there when it happens.”
Flicking his cigarette to one side, sparks scattering in its wake, Clarke marched back up the stairs and through the door.
Dominique fixed Tom with a questioning stare. He cleared his throat nervously. Although he had known that he would have to have this conversation at some stage, he had planned to do it on his own terms, when he was good and ready. Certainly not like this.
“I’m sorry you had to sit through that,” he began. “It’s not what it looks like.”
“Sure it is.” She gave him a half smile and then looked away.
“What do you mean?” His eyes narrowed.
Silence.
“Your father used to talk a lot, you know, when he drank,” she said eventually. “He said some things about you. I got the picture. Your policeman friend just filled in a few gaps.”
Tom sat down on the crate nearest her and rubbed the back of his head.
“Well, if you knew that, what are you doing here?”
“You really think I expected you to be the only honest person in the art business? Everyone’s got some sort of angle. Yours is better than others I’ve seen.”
“That’s it?”
“Partly.” She smiled and tilted her head to one side. “You know, I put a lot of time into this business with your father. By the time he died, things were going really well. When we first met, you said you were serious about trying to keep it going. I guess I wanted to believe you.”
“I am serious about making it work. More now than when we first spoke about it.” He looked at her earnestly.
“So what about…?”
“That’s over. This is all I’ve got now. That’s why I need to make it work.”
“Okay.” She nodded slowly.
“Okay?” He raised his eyebrows.
“Okay.” She put her glasses back on and turned back to the computer.
THE SMITHSONIAN, WASHINGTON, D.C
.
19 July—9:06
A.M.
“A
nd unofficially?”
Baxter leapt up from his desk and gripped the back of his chair.
“Unofficially, ten coins survived.” He breathed excitedly, his upper lip beginning to bead. “It turned out they were stolen from the mint by George McCann, the former chief cashier there, before the melting. He denied the accusations, of course. But it was him.”
“And the coins?”
“A couple started surfacing at numismatic auctions in 1944. A journalist alerted the mint, who brought in the secret service. It took them ten years, but eventually they tracked them all down and destroyed them. All apart from one.”
“They couldn’t find it?”
“Oh, they knew where it was. Only problem was that they couldn’t get to it. You see, it had been bought by King Farouk of Egypt for his coin collection and the U.S. Treasury, not realizing what it was, had issued him with an export license. There was no way he was going to hand it back just because they’d screwed up their paperwork.”
“Even though he knew it was stolen?”
“As far as he was concerned, that probably just added to its value. In any case, after the Egyptian revolution in 1952 he was out of the equation. The new government seized the collection and auctioned it off, including what had by then become known as the ‘Farouk coin.’”
“So somebody else bought it.”
“No.” Baxter’s eyes flashed, mirroring the excitement in his voice as he seemed to relive the events he was describing. “The coin just disappeared.”
“Disappeared?” Jennifer found herself edging forward on her seat, excited by Baxter’s fevered account.
“Vanished.” Baxter bunched his fingers into a point and then blew onto them, stretching his hand out flat as he did so. “For over forty years. Until 1996, when Treasury agents posing as collectors seized the coin from an English dealer in New York and arrested him.” Baxter’s eyes glistened. “Only he then sued the Treasury, claiming that he’d bought the coin legitimately from another dealer. It went to court and eventually the Treasury agreed to auction the coin and split the proceeds with him.”
“How do you know all this?” Jennifer asked, puzzled at the level of detail that Baxter seemed to have at his fingertips. “This is just one coin; you must have hundreds of thousands here.” Baxter threw up his hands.
“Because this isn’t just any old coin, Jennifer. This is the holy grail of coins. It has been stolen from the Philadelphia Mint, owned by a king, vanished and then reappeared in dramatic circumstances. This is the forbidden fruit, the apple from the Garden of Eden. It is totally unique.”
“So how much are we talking?”
“Twenty dollars for the certificate to make it official U.S. coinage.” Baxter paused dramatically. “And just under eight million for the coin itself.”
Jennifer’s eyes widened. Eight million dollars for a coin? It was a crazy, reckless amount of money. It didn’t make any sense. Except that perhaps it did. It was certainly enough to kill for and, in Ranieri’s case, maybe even to die for.
“You know, the National Numismatic Collection automatically receives examples of all American coins. We actually have two 1933 Double Eagles on display over in the Money and Medals Hall. They and the Farouk coin are the only 1933 Double Eagles in existence, although as museum exhibits they are clearly not available for private ownership as the Farouk coin is. We can go and take a look if you like,” Baxter suggested eagerly.
“Sure.” Jennifer nodded. “That way we could at least compare them to this one.”
Baxter slipped out from behind his desk and over to the door, which he held open for her.
“After you.”
“Thank you, Miles.”
It was only a short walk to the hall, which revealed itself to be a long, narrow gallery, flanked on each side by wall-mounted rectangular display cases, their contents glittering under the lights. Baxter headed to one of the cabinets in the middle of the room and stopped next to it. Two coins were set apart from the others and lay side by side, in a specially constructed, chemically inert plastic container, each displaying a different face against the green felt.
“They’re beautiful, aren’t they?” Baxter’s hushed voice rippled through the empty room. Jennifer bent forward until she started to fog the glass, the ghostly fingerprints of earlier visitors materializing with each breath and then immediately vanishing.
“The actual design was commissioned by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1907 from the sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens. You can see his initials there, just below the date. He wanted to try and capture something of the majesty and elegance of the coins of the ancient world. I think he succeeded, don’t you?”
She sensed Baxter lowering his face and staring at her as she gazed at the coins, moving his head closer to hers, almost whispering in her ear.
“As you can see, one side features a large eagle in flight, while the obverse depicts Lady Liberty, a torch in her right hand and an olive branch in the left, symbolizing peace and enlightenment. She’s beautiful, isn’t she?”
She felt Baxter’s hand brush against her neck and instinctively drew away with an annoyed shrug of her shoulders. She immediately wished she hadn’t. The hurt look on Baxter’s face showed his realization that this, rather than their earlier flirtatious exchange, perhaps better reflected her true feelings for him. When he spoke next, his voice was tinged with anger.
“Why don’t you just tell me what this is
really
all about, Agent Browne?”
“This is about whether my coin is a fake, Mr. Baxter.” Jennifer made no attempt to be friendly now. It was too late for that. “Or whether it’s the real thing.”
“Well, it’s impossible to say without running some tests. It’s clearly the same design and looks real enough, but we would need to analyze the coin…compare it to our originals. It could take days, weeks even….” He tailed off.
“I understand.” Jennifer nodded. “Thank you for your time, Mr. Baxter. It has been very useful. The lab will be in touch about those tests.” She turned to leave but Baxter reached out and grabbed her shoulder, his fingers scrabbling against the black material.
“Jennifer, wait.” His voice was strained, pleading. “You can’t just go like that. Where did you get that coin? I have to know.”
She smiled.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Baxter, but that information is classified. A small matter of national security. I’m sure you understand.”