“I’ll be back. . . .” She stopped and studied Hale. The look in his eyes told her that if her father’s safety were something he could have purchased, he would have written her a check, sold his Monet, his Bentley, his soul. She wanted to thank him, to ask why someone like him would choose to be halfway around the world with someone like her.
But all she choked out was a pitiful, “I’ll be back soon.” And then she walked away, into the cold.
Kat wasn’t sure how long she’d been gone, or where she was going. Hours passed. The surveillance video Arturo Taccone had given her played in a constant loop in her mind until, finally, she found herself in the doorway of a bakery. She savored the smell of bread and realized that she was hungry. Then, just as suddenly, she realized she wasn’t alone.
“If you die of pneumonia, I’m pretty sure there are at least a dozen guys who’ll try to kill me and make it look like an accident.”
Kat studied Hale’s reflection in the bakery window. He didn’t smile. He didn’t scold. He simply handed her a cup of hot chocolate and draped his heavy coat around her shoulders.
All around them, the snow was falling harder, covering the streets like a blanket—a fresh start. But Kat was an excellent thief; she knew not even an Austrian winter could help them hide their tracks.
She turned and looked up and down the street. A trolley car ran silently across a cobblestone square. Snowcapped mountains and ornate eighteenth century buildings stretched out in every direction, and Kat felt extraordinarily small in the shadows of the Alps. Especially young in a place so old.
“What do we do now, Hale?” Kat didn’t want to cry. She willed her voice not to crack. “What do we do now?”
“Uncle Eddie said not to do anything.” He placed his arm around her and steered her down the sidewalk. For a second, Kat felt that perhaps her legs had frozen; she’d forgotten how to move. “Do you trust Uncle Eddie?” he asked.
“Of course. He’d do anything for me.”
Hale stopped. His breath was a foggy, fine mist. “What would he do for your dad ?”
Sometimes it takes an outsider, someone with fresh eyes to see the truth. Standing there, Kat knew that was the question she should have been asking all along. She thought of Uncle Eddie’s order and Arturo Taccone’s cold eyes.
Arturo Taccone wasn’t going to get his paintings back.
Arturo Taccone was never going to see his paintings again.
She brought the cocoa to her lips, but it was too hot. She stared into the swirls of chocolate as the snow fell into her cup, and, in her mind, the video kept playing.
“We’re crazy,” Hale said, shivering without his coat. He took her arm, tried to lead her into the shelter of a nearby café. But Kat stood staring at the snow as fat flakes melted into her steaming cocoa. Suddenly, she remembered a red door. She recalled playing among stacks of books and sitting quietly on her mother’s lap.
“What is it?” Hale asked, stepping closer.
Kat closed her eyes and tried to pretend she was back at Colgan, taking a test. The answer was in a book she’d read, a lecture she’d heard—all she had to do was go into the vault of her mind and steal the truth that lay inside.
“Kat.” Hale tried to break through her concentration. “I said—”
“Why doesn’t Taccone go to the police?” she blurted.
Hale held his hands out as if the answer should be obvious. And it was. “He doesn’t like the police. And he doesn’t want them getting their nasty fingerprints all over his pretty pictures.”
“But what if it’s more than that?” she prompted. “Why keep them hidden under the moat? Why not have them insured? What if . . .”
“They aren’t really his?”
Around them, shops were closing for the night. She looked at the darkened windows, still looking for the red door that was hundreds of miles away.
“Kat—”
“Warsaw.” Church bells began to chime. “We need to go to Warsaw.”
8 Days Until Deadline
Chapter 14
Abiram Stein was not unaccustomed to teenagers arriving on his doorstep. Most were students, they’d tell him, there to search for a better grade somewhere among his rows of files and stacks of books. A few were treasure seekers, convinced that they had seen a misplaced Renoir or a Rembrandt tucked inside their grandmother’s attic and were curious to know what—if any—finder’s fee might be coming their way.
But when he woke to the sound of knocking that Monday morning, he pulled on his robe and moved through the dark house, completely unsure what he might find.
“Wer ist da?” he said, throwing open the door, expecting to have to squint against the light, but he had misgauged the time. The sun was still too low to shine over the bookstore across the road. “Was wollen Sie? Es ist mal smach ehr früh,” Mr. Stein snapped in his native German.
The pair of teenagers standing on his stoop wore backpacks like the students, and had nervous, hopeful eyes like the treasure hunters. But Mr. Stein could not determine to which group they belonged. He only knew that his bed upstairs was warm and soft while that stoop was cold and hard, and he was quite certain which one he preferred to see before the sun.
“Ich entschuldige mich für die Stunde, Herr Stein.”
The girl spoke German with the faintest hint of an American accent. The boy didn’t speak at all.
More than anything, Mr. Stein wanted to close the door and go back upstairs, but something had taken a hold in him, a curiosity about this girl. And the boy, too, he supposed. Because, of all the backpacks and wide eyes he had seen on his small stoop, none had ever come before the sun.