“He came to our flat…” the man started, but the woman’s whisper was all that Kat could hear.
“Romani.” She drew a deep breath. “He said his name was Visily Romani.”
CHAPTER 4
Perhaps you have never heard the name Visily Romani. Until two separate cards bearing that name appeared at the Henley four months before, very few people ever had. Kat had never heard those words until that time, but Kat was still a very young person in a very old world. Since then, Kat herself would say, she’d gotten much, much older.
At least that was how she felt an hour later as she sat beside Hale in a small quiet diner not far from Uncle Eddie’s brownstone on the Brooklyn side of the bridge. The old woman and her companion sat on the other side of the booth. Wordless and worn, both looking as if they’d traveled a long, long way to get there.
The place was nearly empty, and yet the young man kept looking over his shoulder at the waitress wiping down tables and the college girl who sat by the window wearing headphones and studying a book on constitutional law. He took the room in with sharp brown eyes behind horn-rimmed glasses.
When he asked, “Are you sure we shouldn’t go someplace more private?” he actually sounded afraid.
“This is private enough,” Hale answered.
“But—” the guy started, but then Kat placed her elbows on the table.
“Who are you and why are you looking for me?”
“My name is Constance Miller, Miss Bishop,” the white-haired woman said. “Or, may I call you by your given name? I feel as if I know you—you and Mr. Hale.” She smiled at Hale. “Such a lovely young couple.” Kat shifted on her seat, but the old woman went on. “I’ve become something of a fan.” She sounded almost giddy, as if her whole life had been comprised of bake sales and Agatha Christie novels, and now she found herself inside the latter.
“I mean to say,” the woman went on, “that there’s something I would like for you to steal.”
“Grandmother, please.”
“Oh, Marshall,” the woman said, patting her grandson’s hands, “they’re professionals.”
Hale raised his eyebrows and smirked at Kat. Kat kicked him and gestured for the woman to go on.
“But, Grandmother, they’re…” He glanced across the table and dropped his voice. “Kids.”
“You’re twenty-five,” she told him.
“What does that have to do with anything?”
She shrugged. “To me, you’re all children.”
Kat didn’t want to like this woman. Affection makes people get sloppy, take risks. Do favors. So Kat didn’t allow herself to smile. She just focused on the single thing she really had to know.
“How did you meet Visily Romani?”
“He came to see me in London two weeks ago. He was familiar with our situation and said that you—”
“What did he look like?” Kat found herself leaning across the table, pushing closer to the only person she’d ever met who’d looked Romani in the eye. “What did he say? Did he give you anything or—”
“Have you ever been to Egypt, Katarina?” the old woman asked, but didn’t wait for a reply. “I was born there.” She smiled then. “Oh, it was a beautiful place to be a child. The cities were alive and the deserts were so big and vast—like the ocean, you see. We slept under big white nets and played in the sun. My father, he was a brilliant man. Strong and brave and gutsy,” the woman said with a shake of a fist. “He was an archaeologist—he and my mother—and in that day…well…in that day, Egypt was the only place to be.”
“That’s nice, ma’am, but I believe you said something about—” Hale started, but the woman kept on going.
“Some looked at the sand and the sun and said it was a barren, uncivilized land. But my father and mother, they knew that it is not the surface of a place that matters. Civilization is not made out of sand—it’s out of blood. My parents searched for years. Wars raged, and they searched. Children were born, and they searched. The past, it called to them.” Her gaze shifted into space. “As I guess now it calls to me.”
Kat nodded and thought of the treasures stolen more than a half century before, paintings she had never seen that she longed to touch and hold.
“Grandmother,” Marshall said softly, laying a hand on the woman’s shoulder, “perhaps we should get you some tea.”
“I don’t want tea! I want justice!” Her frail fist banged the table. “I want that man to lose his stone just like my parents lost everything they had!”
“Stone?” Hale said, sitting straighter. “What stone?”