“Sooner than that,” Mary Alice said. “You forgot about passport control and it comes around twice—once leaving Montenegro and once entering Serbia. They’ll check every compartment and they’ll find him.”
“I don’t want to be questioned by Montenegrin police about a headless body, but I really,reallydon’t want to be questioned by Serbian cops,” I said. Montenegrin law enforcement didn’t have much of a reputation internationally, but the less said about Serbian skull-breakers the better. Anybody who had anything to hide gave them a wide berth. (Train pun intended.)
“Agreed.” Helen checked the map and looked at her watch. “We’re running a little behind schedule, but not much. We stamp out of Montenegro at Bijelo Polje. That’s where the first set of border guards will come aboard.”
“How long?” Mary Alice asked.
“Best guess? At the rate we’re going, I’d say maybe elevenpm. Quarter to if we’re unlucky.”
“There’s more,” I told them. “I know what Galina took.”
I put the piece of wood I’d taken from the crime scene on the narrow table. The markings were faint with age and harder to see now that blood had seeped into the grain, but there was no mistaking the letters and numbers.
“It’s a piece of a stretcher from a painting,” Nat said quickly.
“That’s a Nazi inventory code,” Mary Alice said, peering closely.
“Not just any inventory code,” I corrected.
Helen was the first to get it.
“Oh my god,” she said, sitting back against the banquette.
Nat looked around. “What is it? What am I missing?”
“Hell if I know,” Mary Alice said. “There were thousands if not millions of paintings marked with inventory codes by the Nazis when they were looting half of Europe. How do we know the significance of this one without a catalog?”
“Because we’ve seen it before,” I told her. “Fermín Bosque.”
“Holy shit,” Mary Alice said. To her everlasting credit, Nat didn’t say a word.
I looked at Helen who was wearing an expression like she’d just witnessed the second coming. “Do you really think she’s on the train?”
“Billie just said Galina has to still be here,” Nat told her.
“Not Galina,” Helen said softly. “Leda.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
There was a quiet intakeof breath, the sort you hear just before a prayer.
“That’swhat Galina is after?” Nat asked. She turned to me. “How sure are you?”
“I memorized that code on the Bosque job, and I’ve never forgotten it. It’s her.”
“She’s our white whale,” Helen said. “The one that got away.”
“After all this time,” Mary Alice said. “I never thought she would surface again.”
Truth be told, I hadn’t thought so either. I could still taste the rage and regret the day we realized Fermín Bosque had removed her from his cave in the Valley of the Kings before we could get to her. God only knew where she had been since.
We were all thinking the same thing. Helen is the one whovoiced it. “Where do you think she’s been? And how did Jovan Muric get his hands on her?”
I shrugged. “We know Bosque had buyers for every load he took out of Egypt. She could have gone anywhere. Who knows after that?”
“It’s beendecades,” Mary Alice pointed out. “She could have been sitting in someone’s vault in a free port the whole time. She could have been hanging on a wall or shoved under a bed. Or she could have been circulating in the underworld as currency. The one thing we do know is that she couldn’t have been put up for legitimate sale or the Provenance department would have spotted her.”
I thought for a minute. “I wonder if the Provenance agent—the one who gave the Lazarovs our names—spotted something in the files on Muric that tipped them to the fact that he had the painting.”