Tom turned to Archie with a questioning smile.
‘Yeah well, I can’t think of everything, can I?’ Archie sniffed grudgingly.
Taking the watch from her, Tom again eased the door open and then held the back of the watch as close as he could to the small surface-mounted white box he had noticed previously. Then, exchanging a quick, hopeful look with both Archie and Allegra, he pushed the door fully open. For a few moments they stood there, each halfexpecting to hear warning tones from the alarm’s control panel. But the sound never came.
They were in.
SIXTY-EIGHT
Restaurant Perle du Lac, Geneva 20th March – 12.30 p.m.
‘You found it!’
Faulks leant on his umbrella to stand up as the maitre d’ escorted Verity along the terrace to the table. She was wearing a black dress and a denim jacket and clutching a red Birkin to match her shoes. Half her face was masked by a pair of dark Chanel sunglasses, a thick knot of semiprecious stones swaying around her neck.
‘Earl, darling,’ she gushed. They air-kissed noisily. ‘Sorry I’m late. Spanish air traffic control was on strike again.
‘Allow me.’ He stepped forward and pushed her chair in for her, then handed her a napkin with a flourish. The maitre d’, looking put out at having been so publicly supplanted, retreated in stony silence.
‘What are we celebrating?’ She clapped her hands excitedly as the waiter stepped forward and poured them both a glass of the Pol Roger Cuvee Sir Winston Churchill that Faulks had specially pre-ordered.
‘I always drink champagne for lunch.’ He shrugged casually. ‘Don’t you?’
‘Oh, Earl, you’re such a tease.’ She took a sip. ‘You know this is my favourite. And as for the view -’ she gestured beyond the terrace towards the lake, its jewelled surface glittering in the sun – ‘you must have sold your soul to get such a perfect day.’
‘You’re half right.’ He winked.
She turned back to him with a suspicious smile, pushing her sunglasses up and shielding her eyes from the sun with a hand.
‘Are you trying to soften me up?’
‘As if I’d dare!’ He grinned. The waiter materialised expectantly at their table. ‘I recommend the pigeon breast.’
Their order taken, the waiter backed away. There was a lull, the delicate chime of Verity’s long painted nails striking her glass echoing the clink of cutlery from the neighbouring tables, until she fixed him with a casual look.
‘Do you have it?’
There. The question he’d been waiting for. Faulks was impressed. It had taken her a full three minutes longer to ask this than he’d thought it would. She’d obviously come here determined to play it cool.
‘I have it,’ he confirmed. ‘It arrived yesterday. I unpacked it myself.’
‘Is it…?’ Her voiced tailed off, as if she didn’t trust herself to put what she felt into words, her carefully planned strategy of feigned indifference falling at the first hurdle, it seemed.
‘It’s everything you dreamt it would be,’ he promised her.
‘And you have a buyer?’ she asked, her voice now betraying a hint of concern. ‘Because after the kouros, the trustees have asked for a review of our acquisitions policy. They’re even talking about establishing some sort of unofficial blacklist. It’s madness. The lunatics are taking over the asylum.’
‘I have a buyer,’ he reassured her. ‘And provided you value the mask at the agreed figure, he will happily donate it to the Getty as we discussed.’
‘Of course, of course,’ she said, seeming relieved.
‘What about Director Bury?’ It was Faulks’s turn to sound concerned. ‘Have you spoken to him?’
‘That man is a disgrace,’ Verity snorted. ‘How he ever came to…’ She broke off, and took a deep breath, trying to compose herself. ‘Well, maybe I shouldn’t complain. Better a riding school pony on a lead rope than an unbroken Arab who won’t take the bit.’
She drained her glass, the waiter swooping in to refill it before Faulks had time to even reach for the bottle.
‘So he said yes?’
‘If it’s in the condition you say it is and I confirm that it’s by Phidias, he’ll submit the acquisition papers to the trustees himself. Bury may be incompetent, but he’s not stupid. He realises that this could make his own reputation as much as mine. And he knows that if we don’t take it, someone else will.’
‘My buyer has promised me the money by the end of the week if you green-light it. It could be in California by the end of the month.’
‘I just wish we hadn’t arranged all these meetings today,’ she sighed. ‘Four o’clock seems like a long way away.’
‘Then I’ve got some good news for you,’ Faulks smiled. ‘I bumped into Julian Simmons from the Gallerie Orientale on the way in and he wants to cancel. We should be able to head over there by around three.’
‘Two and a half hours.’ She checked her watch with a smile. ‘I suppose that’s not too long to wait after two and a half thousand years.’
SIXTY-NINE
Free Port Compound, Geneva 20th March – 12.32 p.m.
‘What a shithole,’ Archie moaned.
Tom had to agree. Withered carpet, wilting curtains, weathered windows, a stern row of steelfronted cupboards lining the right-hand wall. There was something irredeemably depressing about the room’s utilitarian ugliness that even the unusual table at the centre of the room – a circular slab of glass supported by a massive Corinthian capital – couldn’t alleviate. Sighing, he opened one of the cupboards and then stepped back, openmouthed.
‘Look at this.’
The shelves were overflowing with antiquities. Overwhelmed by them. Vases, statues, bronzes, frescoes, mosaics, glassware, faience animals, jewellery…packed so tightly that in places the objects seemed to be climbing over each other like horses trying to escape a stable fire. The strange thing was that, while there was nothing here of the casual brutality with which Contarelli had treated the objects in his care, Tom couldn’t help but wonder if the sheer number and variety of what had been hoarded here, and what it said about the likely scale and sophistication of the Delian League’s operation, wasn’t actually far more horrific.
‘This one’s the same,’ Allegra said, her voice brimming with anger.
‘Here too,’ Archie called, opening the one next to her.
There was a gentle knock at the door. Using D’Arcy’s watch again, Tom let Dominique in.
‘You escaped?’ Archie grinned.
‘No thanks to you,’ she huffed angrily. ‘I don’t know what you said to him to convince him to rent us some space, but he’s been giving me some very strange looks. Luckily he had to go and do his rounds or I’d still be…’ She broke off, having just caught sight of the open cupboards. ‘I guess we’re in the right place.’
‘You’re just in time,’ Tom said. ‘We were about to have a look next door.’
They stepped through into the adjacent room, the lights flickering on to reveal another Aladdin’s cave of antiquities, although here stored with rather less care – a wooden Egyptian sarcophagus sawn into pieces, straw- packed chests with Sotheby’s and Christie’s labels still tied to them with string, vases covered in dirt, cylinder seals from Iraq wrapped in newspaper, bronze statues from India propped up against the wall, Peruvian ceramics…In the middle of the room, raised off the floor, a quarter-ton Guatemalan jaguar’s head glowered at them through the
