“Maybe it wasn’t,” I said. “Maybe someone just thinks it was.”
“And that person killed Joel? But why?”
“They thought he knew something he wasn’t telling? Things were stolen from his office. That’s why Mulgrew’s thinking robbery. But what if that was just opportunistic? What if the real point was to search the place?”
“I suppose that’s possible. But to find what?”
“Whatever they thought Joel knew?”
Alice nodded thoughtfully. Bill sipped coffee thoughtfully. I wished I had a thought or two, but I had only questions. “Alice, didn’t you grow up in Shanghai? Mr. Friedman says this brooch, the Shanghai Moon, is famous. You’ve never heard of it?”
“I was born there, yes, but I was four when we were sent to the internment camp. When we were released three years later, we took the first ship home we could get.” She stirred her tea. “These aren’t memories I return to very often. As you might imagine, the camp was a bad place. Heat and mud in summer. Clammy cold in winter. Nothing was clean and there was never enough food. Everyone was sick, worse and worse as the war ground on. A lot of people died. The land was so swampy they wrapped bricks in the binding cloths—there were no coffins—so the bodies wouldn’t rise back to the surface. But sometimes it didn’t work. You’d see a hand, a leg . . .
“I was a child. That was my entire world. Our entire world. If outside the camp there was someone called Rosalie Gilder, and she married someone called Chen Kai-rong, and they had a brooch created to celebrate, we wouldn’t have known. Then, once we came to America, everyone tried to put Shanghai far behind.”
I said, “That sounds terrible. I’m sorry.”
“It was. But we lived, and came here, and prospered. Many didn’t. Still, you can see why Shanghai may mean something quite different to me from what it meant to Rosalie Gilder.”
“Yes, of course.”
From the window, Bill said, “What about your clients? They never told you about the Shanghai Moon?”
“No,” Alice said, frowning over that. I frowned, too; the question seemed a little insensitive right at the moment. Although I had an insensitive question of my own I’d been looking for a time to ask.
“Alice, Joel was wondering something. About you. It made me wonder, too. I don’t mean to offend you—”
“No, please. If you think it will help discover what happened to Joel.”
I didn’t see how it could, but it seemed like something I should find out, because Joel had wanted to know. “It’s this: Why do you do the work you do? Holocaust asset recovery?”
She smiled. “You mean as a gentile? Don’t worry, I’ve been asked that before. The camp . . . It was the war that sent us there. We lost so much, as so many people did. As I grew, I learned that what we’d been through, horrible as it was, wasn’t the half of it. I hated that war. But a war that’s over is an elusive enemy. My sister urged me to put it behind me, and I tried, but I couldn’t. I felt—as we were saying earlier—angry and helpless. When the asset recovery movement started to grow, I saw it as a chance to right some of those wrongs.”
“Joel said most people who do the work you do see it as a religious calling.”
“Did he? I suppose, in a way, I do. And not all my clients are Jewish, you know. Most are. But Catholics, Hungarians, Poles, homosexuals, Gypsies—that war had many victims.”
“Wouldn’t your argument really have been with the Japanese?” Bill asked. “That’s who put you in the camp.”
“There’s no reparations movement against Japan, except on behalf of ‘comfort women.’ But Germany and Japan were allies. Prying stolen treasures out of German hands is about the best I can do. For me, it’s enough.”
When there’s not much you can do, something still beats nothing. Well, I could second that.
The desk phone rang. Alice spoke and then, slipping the receiver back, told us, “Detective Mulgrew’s on his way up.”
“Maybe I’ll make myself scarce.” Bill rose from his perch.
“You’d deprive yourself of the pleasure of meeting Mulgrew?” I asked. “And the pleasure of more of the Waldorf’s coffee?”
“Good as the coffee is, from what I hear the one doesn’t begin to make up for the other. And the NYPD doesn’t like crowds.”
That was true. Also, certain elements in the NYPD don’t like Bill. Mulgrew seemed to be the type who’d check around and find