New York is a pivotal location in the cameo’s modern history, but not a place where the novel settles the object’s provenance: it is the city associated with the World Trade Center collapse, the reported discovery of the jewel in the rubble, and the puzzling circulation of counterfeit copies afterward. These competing reports make New York both a point of apparent recovery and the source of renewed uncertainty about where the authentic stone went.

New York and the reported recovery

The family’s account links the cameo to the aftermath of the World Trade Center collapse. In a letter to Charles de Castelmont, Mathieu D’Anjou argues that Élie D’Anjou, born in the United States in 1842 and adopted by a French-Canadian couple, was a Castelmont descendant. As supporting material, Mathieu sends a copy of a Jesuit account describing a baby found alive near Saint-Louis with a cameo pinned to his swaddling clothes, along with a baptismal record and a close-up photograph of the stone reportedly recovered from the New York ruins. The account makes New York part of a much older chain of evidence: the reported modern recovery appears to connect the battered family jewel to the infant’s American origins.

Yet the letter proves less than it appears to. It reports what the D’Anjous believe about the recovery and uses the photographed object to support a disputed family claim; it does not establish, on its own, that the photographed stone is authentic. The distinction matters because Charles later recognizes the image as showing the old scratch on the Castor cameo, but judges that the mark in the photographs is recent and imitated. New York is therefore linked not simply to the jewel’s return, but to the problem of distinguishing the original from an apparently convincing reproduction.

Counterfeit returns and an unresolved trail

Charles realizes that the D’Anjous have received the same kind of false cameo that he himself received from New York in 2003. Examining their clear printed photograph and the higher-resolution images on a USB drive, he studies the supposed old damage on the onyx and concludes that it was copied, probably from a photograph. The shared counterfeit does not settle the object’s identity; it resets the dispute. The family’s evidence and Charles’s own earlier receipt now point to two reproductions rather than to two independent confirmations of an authentic stone.

Charles reasons that New York authorities must have sent two false cameos in response to separate claims. For him, the substitution implies that someone found the real jewel and stole it, replacing it with copies. He takes the existence of the fakes as evidence that the original was recovered, while admitting, in effect, that he cannot trace it. This remains his inference, not a confirmed account of what happened to the authentic cameo. His conviction that the stone has been found coexists with the practical fact that its present location is unknown, and with his fear that the D’Anjous may nevertheless have a genuine claim to it.

Charles’s search in the city

New York also becomes the setting for a direct attempt to turn the uncertain trail into a lead. Less than two weeks after considering the D’Anjous’ evidence, Charles travels to the city to meet Jeff privately. He shows him photographs of the cameo and explains the matter; Jeff responds that he thinks he has seen a jewel of that kind. The meeting does not yet identify where Jeff saw it, but it gives Charles a possible route beyond the conflicting photographs and claims. His visit shifts the investigation from interpreting copies to seeking someone who may have encountered the object itself.

The encounter also shows how the cameo’s history moves through personal connections as well as documents. Charles’s question is prompted by the possibility that Jeff can help recover what he believes was lost or diverted, while the brief recollection offers no final proof of possession or transfer. New York functions here as a meeting place in an investigation whose key evidence remains incomplete: a photograph can be studied, a resemblance noticed, and a witness approached, yet the chain of custody is still missing.

The World Trade Center as a measure of survival

The novel repeatedly sets the cameo’s uncertain fate against the destruction of the World Trade Center. After the later fire that destroys the castle where Charles displays the two stones together, Loïc wonders whether the pair has been crushed, pulverized, or destroyed in the collapse. The comparison reaches back eighteen years to the towers: if the cameo survived that catastrophe, Loïc reasons, it might have survived the castle fire as well. In this reflection, New York supplies a precedent for the stone’s apparent ability to emerge from devastation, not a reliable record of where it ended up.

That possibility makes the city’s role deliberately unstable. The reported recovery from the New York ruins seems to offer closure, but the counterfeit photographs undo that certainty; the later comparison with the towers allows the jewel to remain a possible survivor even when its location cannot be established. New York is thus both a hinge in the cameo’s modern circulation and a test of the difference between apparent evidence and authenticated fact. The city anchors the story’s claims of discovery, return, and survival, while leaving the central question—the whereabouts of the genuine stone—open.