“And my mother always spoke highly of you.”
“You remember your visit here?” he asked.
Kat nodded. “My cocoa was too hot, so you opened a window and held the cup outside until it caught some snowflakes.” She smiled at the memory. “I drove my parents crazy for a month after that, refusing to take anything but fresh snow in my hot chocolate.”
Mr. Stein looked as if he wanted to laugh but had forgotten how. “You were so little that day. And so much like your mother. You lost her too soon, Katarina,” he said. “We. We all lost her too soon.”
“Thank you. Your work was very important to her.”
“And does your appearance here mean that you’ve made a discovery relevant to our work together?”
Kat shook her head. Hale shifted, and she felt his patience wane.
“Unfortunately, I’m here on another matter.”
The man leaned back in his old wooden chair. “I see. And what sort of matter would this be?”
Hale glanced at Kat—a quick look with only one translation: Can we trust him? Her reply was a simple: We have to.
“The kind of matter my mother did when she wasn’t researching here. With you.”
Kat had wondered off and on for the past few hours how much of her mother’s life Mr. Stein knew about. But the answer, it turned out, was in Abiram Stein’s eyes as he smiled. “I see.”
“We need to know,” Kat went on. “I need to know if these . . . mean anything to you.”
Hale reached into his coat pocket and removed five sheets of paper. Five pictures—grainy images from odd angles captured from a piece of video footage. Mr. Stein laid them across the cluttered desk and sat for a long time, whispering quietly in a language Kat didn’t understand. For a moment she was sure he had forgotten that she and Hale were even in the room. He studied the images as if they were a deck of cards and he were a fortune-teller, trying to read his own fate.
“These . . .” he said finally. His voice was sharper as he demanded, “How? Where?”
“It’s . . .” Kat stumbled when she realized she had finally met someone to whom she didn’t know how to lie.
Fortunately, Hale never had that problem. “We saw a sort of home movie recently. Those were on it.”
Mr. Stein’s eyes grew even wider. “They’re together? All in one place?”
Hale nodded. “We think so. It’s a collection we—”
“This is no collection!” Abiram Stein shouted. “They are prisoners of war.”
Kat thought back to the room hidden beneath a moat, guarded by one of the best security systems in the world, and she knew that he was right. Arturo Taccone had taken five priceless pieces of history and locked them away until the night Visily Romani set them free.
“Do you know what this is, young man?” Mr. Stein asked Hale, holding up a photo of a painting: a graceful young woman in a pale white dress stood behind a curtain, peering out at a stage.
“It looks like Degas,” Hale answered.
“It is.” Mr. Stein nodded his approval of Kat’s choice of companions. “It’s called Dancer Waiting in the Wings.” The man pushed himself out of his chair and crossed the room to a filing cabinet overrun with books and magazines and creeping plants that draped all the way to the dusty floor. He opened the drawer and removed a folder, brought it back to his desk.
“I presume you are a well-traveled young man,” Mr. Stein stated. “Tell me, have you seen that painting before?”
Hale shook his head.
“That is because no one has seen it in more than half a century.” Mr. Stein settled into his hard wooden seat as if he’d used all his energy crossing the room and no longer had the strength to stand. “Johan Schulhoff was a banker in a small but prosperous town near the Austrian border in 1938. He had a lovely daughter. A beautiful wife. A nice home.”
Mr. Stein opened the folder where a photocopy of a family portrait was taped inside. It showed a family of three in their best clothes, smiling their best smiles, while Dancer Waiting in the Wings looked on from the wall behind them.
“This painting hung in their dining room until the day the Nazis came and took it—and every member of his family—away. None of them was ever seen again.” He stared at the photo. Tears gathered in his eyes as he whispered, “Until now.”
Kat thought of her mother, who had sat in this very chair and sifted through these very files but had never come this close to finding something that was all but lost.