by Leslie Jones
“Why’s that?” Trevor asked.
“Because Swiss banks don’t open their records for anyone. Not unless you’re the name on the account. And none of the twelve families were on the account.”
“Do you know whose name was?”
“No one does. That’s the crux of the problem. Some suspect the banker put everything under his own name. We’ll never know, because he was killed before the war ended.” Dr. Berkowicz leaned forward, resting her clasped hands on the desk. “Without the account information—name, account number, and password—no one can claim that wealth. My theory is that Max’s grandfather, as the coordinator for the twelve families, received instructions on how to access their collective property. For whatever reason, he never acted on that information, because the contents of that vault have never been touched. That’s the one fact that the Banque Privée confirmed for me. Well, for one of my grad students.”
Shelby turned a palm up. “That explains Max’s interest in lost World War Two art. It doesn’t connect him to the Bedlamites, or explain why he’s funding the destruction of artwork.”
Dr. Berkowicz shrugged. “By the time I’d puzzled out all this information about his grandfather, Max became convinced that he’d hidden the account information inside one of the pieces he sent to Cape Town with his family.”
Shelby looked up, pulse racing. “Did Max give you some sort of list? Because we know that when Max and his mother fled Cape Town in 1977, the art collection shipped with them as part of their household belongings. But only a portion of it made it to England with them.”
“Mother? I had no idea. He claimed both his parents died during an uprising in Cape Town.”
“A bit of an exaggeration on his part,” Trevor said.
“Why would he lie about that?”
“We went to visit her. She’s a black South African woman.”
Understanding and disgust warred on the professor’s face. “I see. No, he never gave me a list.”
Shelby shifted around on the straight-backed chair, trying to get comfortable. “Do you think you might have documentation on works of art that came back to Great Britain after the war?”
“Yes, well, I might have some sort of ancillary data, but only if a claim was made against a piece as having been stolen. Max tried to pressure me to use my resources to search for some pieces, but I don’t remember which ones. Either way, I couldn’t help him. My focus is and always has been to find artwork stolen by the Nazis from Jewish families.”
Shelby cleared her throat. “So that was the end of it?”
“Almost. My knowledge is free for the taking, or was.”
Trevor straightened from the filing cabinet. “He threatened you?”
“Oh, he couched it in pleasant terms, of course. But he did mention how old this building was, how faulty the wiring. He mentioned that it would be discouraging if any of my records were lost. I have two interns scanning and collating, but I have over sixty years of research accumulated. The loss would be devastating. I gave him the names of some other art investigators who might be able to help him, but I still refused to stray from my primary mission. I’m only telling you any of this because Simon sent you.”
Shelby grimaced. “I’m so sorry. Thank you for sharing with us, though.”
Lark leaned around to look at Trevor. “If we can find out what’s missing from the grandfather’s collection, we could get ahead of Max and figure out what he’s going after next.”
Dr. Berkowicz frowned. “Unfortunately, I can think of only one way to find that out. But I’m assuming you can’t simply ask Max?”
“Uh, that would be a resounding no,” Lark said. “He’s the villain in this piece.”
“Yes, so I see.”
Trevor asked, “If you know all of this, why isn’t it in any of your books? Why isn’t it published anywhere?”
“Young man, my reputation rests on my being able to prove what I know. I verify everything through at least three sources. The information I’ve given you about the twelve families was pieced together from various bits of data, including the boat captain’s ledger, but I can’t prove any of it.”
“When the bombings started, why didn’t you go to the police with your suspicions?”
She gave Trevor a quizzical look. “And tell them what? Until you told me, I had no idea the museum bombings weren’t just the actions of raving lunatics. I stopped dealing with Max years ago.”
Shelby propped her chin on her hand. “So, in your professional opinion, the valuables are lost?”
“The twelve families thought so. They went on with their lives. You have to understand that what they thought they were safeguarding was only a fraction of their worth. Anyway, it’s pretty much all hearsay and innuendo.”
“And without the account information, there’s no way to know. So Max believes his grandfather hid that information in with his art collection, and is finding the lost pieces to search for it.” Shelby sat back, discouraged. “And we don’t know what he had or lost.”
“I’m sorry I can’t be of more help,” Dr. Berkowicz said.
“Did you ever run across a set of numbers that didn’t make sense to you?” asked Lark.
Dr. Berkowicz gave Lark a smile of condescension. “No, dear, that never occurred to me.”
Lark pinkened. “Sorry,” she muttered.
“You understand this hasn’t been the focus of my work. I investigate theft claims from people victimized by the Nazi regime. This information has all been ancillary. I doubt I’d even have remembered it, if it weren’t for Max’s threats.”
Trevor slouched back against the filing cabinet. “So we still have no way of proving Max is linked to the Bedlamites.”
“Unfortunately, I can’t help you there.”
“Well, thanks for all the great info. I’m sure I’ll get an A on my thesis.”
Dr. Berkowicz smiled. “I might be an old lady, young one, but don’t take me for a fool.”
Lark grinned. “Never.”
Shelby asked, “Can I leave my number with you, in case anything else occurs to you?”
“Certainly.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
LARK CURSED.
The late afternoon sun slanted through Lark’s kitchen window, throwing a glare onto Shelby’s laptop screen. She didn’t even glance up at the profanity. Lark had been swearing for the past hour.
After their visit to Olga Berkowicz, the three had eaten lunch in Kingston upon Thames before returning to London. They’d stopped to buy more clothes and gun-cleaning supplies for Trevor. Now the two women worked at the kitchen table while Trevor grumbled in the living room.
While Lark searched for the cargo ship manifest from Nandi and Max’s return to England, she combed every news source she could think of to find records of robberies or mutilations of artwork in Europe, then expanded her search to include South Africa.
She could get the information so much faster, she mused, if she could use the resources she had at her fingertips as a political analyst. Interpol member countries fed their data into a global network to facilitate multinational investigations, and included a stolen arts database. Their enormous store of information might give them what they needed. She glanced into the living room at Trevor, who had broken down all six handguns and was cleaning them. He’d never approve.
Dare she risk it? She needed her State Department credentials to log in, which would flag her account. On the other hand, they couldn’t go on this way for much longer. All three of them had lives to return to.
“Lark.”
“Yeah.” She didn’t pause as her fingers raced across the keyboard. “I’m going to find the shit out of you, you mother—”
“Lark,” she hissed.
Lark’s head came up and she focused on Shelby, who scooted her kitchen chair close.
“I need your help,” she whispered. “I need to use my ID to log into Interpol. Can you make it so no one can track me that way?”
“Easy peasy. I’ll mask your IP and bounce you through proxy servers. They’ll never know what hit them. Let’s do it on my computer. I wrote an app to do just that.”
While Lark started some programs running, Shelby stared blindly out the kitchen window. The Bedlamites would strike again and again until Max either found what he sought or gave up. They had the small advantage now of knowing the truth, but everything hinged on beating him to his next target. They had to be stopped. All of them.
And after they succeeded, she would invite Trevor to go away with her. Two weeks somewhere tropical, where they could laze away the days sipping piña coladas by the pool and making love on the beach after dark. She craved Trevor’s sweet, drugging kisses. His strong fingers caressing every inch of her. His hard body rocking against her as they . . .
She stopped cold as realization hit her. They hadn’t used protection. She’d been so lost in his touch two days ago that the thought of a condom hadn’t even entered her mind.
She’d had unprotected sex.
Mentally calculating her cycle, she felt a wash of relief. Mother Nature would visit soon. It was highly unlikely she’d conceived. Still, the chance always existed. Without conscious volition, she opened her laptop and did a quick search. There was a pharmacy only a few blocks down. She could go and be back in ten minutes.
Now too anxious to sit still, she pulled the remains of her emergency cash from her pocket and counted. Six pounds and some coins. Not enough.
“I have to run to the pharmacy,” she said, voice low. “Can I borrow a little money?”
Lark nodded, eyes still glued to her screen. “There’s fifty pounds in the pantry, under the canned tomatoes. I’m almost ready.”
“I’d . . . like to do this without Trevor breathing down my neck.”
That got Lark’s full attention. “Why?”
“It’s personal, that’s all.”
Lark rose from the table and ran water into the kettle. As it heated, she found a scrap of paper and handed it to Shelby.
“Give me your login ID and password. And what I should be searching for. I’ll start that while you’re gone.”
Shelby scribbled down the information. “I need you to access Interpol’s crime database, and cross reference robberies or mutilations with their stolen artwork database.”
“If it’s there, I’ll find it,” she promised. Walking over to the now-whistling kettle, she grabbed a mug, put her left hand over the top of it, and poured the boiling water onto her hand and into the cup. She cried out in pain, dropping the kettle.
“Lark, what the hell did you do?” Shelby leapt to her feet and rushed over. Trevor was by her side in an instant.
“What happened?”
“Lark burned her hand.”
Trevor took Lark’s wrist gently and examined the burns.
“I have burn ointment in the medicine cabinet, in the bathroom. Which is where we should go. Right now.” She leveled a meaningful look at Shelby as she led Trevor from the room.
For long moments, Shelby wavered between the need to leave and worry for her friend. But Lark had burned herself deliberately to give her the chance to leave undetected. Best not to waste the opportunity.
Crazy woman.
She jogged nearly the whole way to the pharmacy. Inside, with shaking hands, she picked out a pregnancy test. Should she take it right away?
Now that she held the box in her hands, common sense reasserted itself and she halted in place. After only a couple of days, a test would tell her nothing. She had been silly to panic and run out of the apartment. And Trevor and Lark would be done in the bathroom by now and wondering where she was.
What if she were pregnant, though?
Trevor had told Lark they were a couple, but what did that mean in his world? And how on earth was she going to raise a child on her own if he let her down?
Teenage pregnancy had been almost a town tradition in Coon Bluff. Her sister had gotten knocked up her junior year of high school, married Zeke Skelly, and went to live with his parents. By the time Shelby left for college, she had two babies and a third on the way. She was miserable, depressed, and drinking heavily.
Raeanne’s situation was even worse. Six months after she married her husband, she ended up with bruises so bad she lost her baby. She’d stayed with him because, in her mind, what choice did she have in that small town?
Babies meant lost opportunities and dead dreams.
She set the box back on the shelf. She wouldn’t know for a couple of weeks one way or another. And she’d exposed them enough just by leaving the apartment.
When she walked back into the living room, Lark was curled up on the sofa with one hand in a bowl of water and her computer balanced on her lap.
“How’s your hand?”
She closed the laptop and set it on the coffee table. Shelby sat next to her and looked into the bowl. Lark’s skin had reddened where she’d burned herself, leaving three small blisters.
“That was a crazy thing to do, Lark.”
“Did you get what you needed?” she asked, voice low.
“Yeah.” Shelby squeezed her good hand and went toward the kitchen.
Trevor was stirring a pot of sauce that smelled so good her mouth watered. He stopped what he was doing as she paused in the doorway. “Is everything all right?”
“Yes, everything’s fine.”
“Where did you go?”
“Just for a walk. I needed to clear my head. Too much staring at computer screens.”
“Please don’t go out again without me,” he said, obviously trying to sound calm. “We know Jukes is actively searching for us through the city’s surveillance system. I worried when I saw you gone.”
“I was gone ten minutes. He couldn’t have found me in that time.”
“I don’t know that, and neither do you.”
Looking more closely, she saw how upset he was, though he was trying to conceal it. He had been more than worried.
“I’m sorry,” she said, meaning it. “I won’t do it again.”
He nodded and returned to the pot, but she saw how tense the muscles in his back were. It had taken a lot for him not to try to find her, she realized.
Lark moved into the kitchen with her computer. Shelby scooped up the bowl and followed her, setting it in her lap. She dropped her hand back into it with a sigh. Trevor measured out pasta and placed it in another pot. While he finished shaping homemade meatballs for the spaghetti, Shelby brought mismatched plates and an odd assortment of cutlery to the table, and thought how domestic this felt—and how right. Lark added a bottle of Chianti and three wineglasses. When the table was set, Lark grabbed Shelby’s hand and dragged her out of the kitchen.
“I’m going to see if I can find some candles,” she called over her shoulder. Shelby followed her to the tiny linen closet at the end of the short hall. Lark yanked it open, but instead of searching for candles, she looked Shelby over curiously.
“So what was so important for you to buy earlier?”
She was surprised it had taken Lark this long to ask. The woman’s curiosity was insatiable. “Nothing. I’m sorry I brought you into this.”
“It was condoms, I bet. Was it condoms? You two seem pretty hot and heavy.”
Shelby gave an internal eye roll. “No, it wasn’t condoms. Leave it, okay?”
“Sure.” The silence lasted all of two seconds as she rummaged through a plastic bin on one shelf. “He’s really into you.”
“He might change his mind if . . .” She just shook her head, unable to continue.
Lark’s face fell. “You won’t tell me? You suck. Here’s a candle.”
They ate d
inner under the flickering flame of a pear-scented Yankee Candle.
Lark raised her wineglass. “Here’s to us. Three caped crusaders seeking justice while being hunted on all sides. As Fezzik said to Inigo, I hope we win.”
She said the last bit in a fair imitation of André the Giant in The Princess Bride. Shelby laughed.
“Hell, I’ll drink to that,” Trevor muttered.
“Where did you learn to cook?” Shelby asked. “This is delicious.”
He rested his elbows on the table, pushing his plate away with a contented sigh. “Boarding school. I lived there a good part of the year from thirteen on, until I took my A-levels at eighteen. Our house master taught us during mid-afternoon tea. I found I enjoyed it. It calms me.”
Lark forked a huge mouthful of pasta and slurped the strands into her mouth. “I have no patience for it. Why bother?”
“Yes, I did notice the SpaghettiOs in the cupboard.” Trevor’s lip curled. “That slop isn’t even fit for hogs.”
“No, well, this is so much tastier,” Lark hastened to assure him.
Shelby eased back in her chair, twirling the wineglass idly by the stem. As dire as their predicament seemed, she would miss this easy camaraderie when they each went back to their individual lives. She collected the used plates and washed up while Lark got back on her computer, typing and muttering and swearing. Joining Trevor on the sofa, she curled her legs under her as he watched Top Gear on BBC Three. When he put an arm around her, she relaxed into his chest as though it were the most natural thing in the world.
Two and a half hours later, Lark bounced into the room. “So, I’m brilliant.”
“What’s up?” Trevor sat up, dislodging Shelby. He put a hand on her knee in apology.
Lark winked at Shelby and said, “I had the clever idea to use Interpol’s enormous databases to cross-check known pieces of stolen art from private-home or museum robberies slash mutilations.”
Trevor gaped at her. “You hacked into Interpol? Are you off your rocker?”