Heist Society

“You would prefer English, would you not?” he asked.

Kat had thought she was using her best German, but the man had placed her accent too easily. Colgan, she feared, might have taken more from her than she knew.

“I’m fine either way,” the girl said, but Mr. Stein nodded at the boy beside her.

“I believe your companion would not agree.”

Hale yawned. His expression was vacant. And Kat remembered that despite the chauffeurs and private jets, there were some things even Hales could not buy, and a proper night’s sleep was one of them.

“We’re sorry for the hour, Mr. Stein,” Kat said, her (apparently rusty) German abandoned. “I’m afraid we’ve just arrived in Warsaw. We would have waited—”

“Then wait!” the man grumbled, starting to close the door.

He may have been sleepy, but Hale was still quick, and he silently leaned against the red door as if he simply needed a way to stay upright.

“I’m afraid we don’t have the time to wait, sir,” Kat said.

“My time is valuable too, fräulein. Almost as valuable as my rest.”

“Of course,” Kat said, glancing down. Despite the freezing wind, she pulled her black ski cap from her head. In the glass of the door’s small window she saw her hair standing on end, felt the static coursing through her—a charge that had been building for days. She knew answers lay behind that red door. Not all. But some. And she feared that if she turned to walk away now, gripped the metal railing of the stairs, the charge might stop her heart.

“We have some questions, sir . . . about art.” She paused, waiting, but the man merely stared at her with sleepy eyes. Behind him, rows of filing cabinets lined the wall in front of several windows, blocking out the early morning light. Stacks of papers ran through the space like a maze.

“Try the Smithsonian, pretty American girl,” he said with a faint smile. “I’m just a crazy old man with too much time and too few friends.”

“Sir, I was told that you could help me.”

“By whom?” he snapped.

Hale looked at Kat as if he had the same question. Mr. Stein stepped closer. The first rays of the sun were just peeking over the buildings across the street. They illuminated the features of a small girl with a mane of dark hair, and before she even spoke, he knew what her answer would be.

“My mother.”

“You look like her,” Abiram Stein said, handing Kat a cup of coffee. “You have been told this before, I suspect.”

Kat had often wondered what was more cruel: to so closely resemble a mother who had left too soon, making you equal parts daughter and ghost, or to have nothing of your parent in your features—to be, aesthetically speaking, more than one generation removed. But Kat liked the way Mr. Stein was looking at her. It was different from the way Uncle Eddie seemed to be measuring her against her mother as a thief. It was nothing like the moments when her father seemed startled by her, as if his eyes had mistaken her for his long-lost wife.

But when Mr. Stein sipped his hot coffee and watched Kat drink hers, he smiled the way he might if he saw a replica of his favorite childhood toy in a shop window—happy that something he loved wasn’t entirely gone from the world.

“I thought you might come to see me again someday,” he said after a long silence.

Beside her, Hale was coming awake, taking in every aspect of Abiram Stein’s cluttered existence. “Don’t you have a computer?”

Mr. Stein scoffed. Kat answered for him. “He is the computer.”

Mr. Stein eyed her again and nodded appreciatively.

“I manage to maintain a good deal of my research”—the older man tapped his head—“in safe places.” He leaned on his cluttered desk. “But I have a feeling that my organizational systems are not why you’re here.”

“We were traveling and we had some questions—”

“About art,” Mr. Stein said with a roll of his hands, gesturing for Kat to get to the good stuff.

“And my mother always spoke highly of you.”

“You remember your visit here?” he asked.

Kat nodded. “My cocoa was too hot, so you opened a window and held the cup outside until it caught some snowflakes.” She smiled at the memory. “I drove my parents crazy for a month after that, refusing to take anything but fresh snow in my hot chocolate.”

Mr. Stein looked as if he wanted to laugh but had forgotten how. “You were so little that day. And so much like your mother. You lost her too soon, Katarina,” he said. “We. We all lost her too soon.”

“Thank you. Your work was very important to her.”

“And does your appearance here mean that you’ve made a discovery relevant to our work together?”

Kat shook her head. Hale shifted, and she felt his patience wane.

“Unfortunately, I’m here on another matter.”

The man leaned back in his old wooden chair. “I see. And what sort of matter would this be?”

Hale glanced at Kat—a quick look with only one translation: Can we trust him? Her reply was a simple: We have to.

“The kind of matter my mother did when she wasn’t researching here. With you.”

Kat had wondered off and on for the past few hours how much of her mother’s life Mr. Stein knew about. But the answer, it turned out, was in Abiram Stein’s eyes as he smiled. “I see.”

“We need to know,” Kat went on. “I need to know if these . . . mean anything to you.”

Hale reached into his coat pocket and removed five sheets of paper. Five pictures—grainy images from odd angles captured from a piece of video footage. Mr. Stein laid them across the cluttered desk and sat for a long time, whispering quietly in a language Kat didn’t understand. For a moment she was sure he had forgotten that she and Hale were even in the room. He studied the images as if they were a deck of cards and he were a fortune-teller, trying to read his own fate.