Heist Society

“These . . .” he said finally. His voice was sharper as he demanded, “How? Where?”

“It’s . . .” Kat stumbled when she realized she had finally met someone to whom she didn’t know how to lie.

Fortunately, Hale never had that problem. “We saw a sort of home movie recently. Those were on it.”

Mr. Stein’s eyes grew even wider. “They’re together? All in one place?”

Hale nodded. “We think so. It’s a collection we—”

“This is no collection!” Abiram Stein shouted. “They are prisoners of war.”

Kat thought back to the room hidden beneath a moat, guarded by one of the best security systems in the world, and she knew that he was right. Arturo Taccone had taken five priceless pieces of history and locked them away until the night Visily Romani set them free.

“Do you know what this is, young man?” Mr. Stein asked Hale, holding up a photo of a painting: a graceful young woman in a pale white dress stood behind a curtain, peering out at a stage.

“It looks like Degas,” Hale answered.

“It is.” Mr. Stein nodded his approval of Kat’s choice of companions. “It’s called Dancer Waiting in the Wings.” The man pushed himself out of his chair and crossed the room to a filing cabinet overrun with books and magazines and creeping plants that draped all the way to the dusty floor. He opened the drawer and removed a folder, brought it back to his desk.

“I presume you are a well-traveled young man,” Mr. Stein stated. “Tell me, have you seen that painting before?”

Hale shook his head.

“That is because no one has seen it in more than half a century.” Mr. Stein settled into his hard wooden seat as if he’d used all his energy crossing the room and no longer had the strength to stand. “Johan Schulhoff was a banker in a small but prosperous town near the Austrian border in 1938. He had a lovely daughter. A beautiful wife. A nice home.”

Mr. Stein opened the folder where a photocopy of a family portrait was taped inside. It showed a family of three in their best clothes, smiling their best smiles, while Dancer Waiting in the Wings looked on from the wall behind them.

“This painting hung in their dining room until the day the Nazis came and took it—and every member of his family—away. None of them was ever seen again.” He stared at the photo. Tears gathered in his eyes as he whispered, “Until now.”

Kat thought of her mother, who had sat in this very chair and sifted through these very files but had never come this close to finding something that was all but lost.

“But you already knew this, didn’t you, Katarina?” Mr. Stein asked. He held another photograph for them to see. “This is Renoir’s Two Boys Running Through a Field of Haystacks.” Kat and Hale leaned closer to the picture of two boys in a hayfield. One boy’s hat had blown free and was tumbling through the meadow. They were chasing it.

“It was commissioned by a wealthy French official and pictures his two sons playing at his chateau near Nice. It hung in the oldest son’s home in Paris until the German occupation. One of the brothers survived the camps. This”—Mr. Stein stopped to wipe his eyes—“we had feared did not.”

Kat and Hale sat quietly as Mr. Stein told them about a Vermeer called The Philosopher, and a Rembrandt of the prodigal son. And, if possible, he grew even more serious as he held the final image toward them as carefully as if he were holding the missing masterpiece itself.

“Do you know this painting, Katarina?”

“No.” Kat’s voice cracked.

“Look closely,” he urged again.

“I don’t know it,” Kat said, sensing his disappointment.

“It is called Girl Praying to Saint Nicholas,” Mr. Stein said, gazing at the picture again and then at Kat. “It is a long, long way from home.”

Mr. Stein studied Kat closely.

“Your mother used to sit in that very chair and listen to this old man rant about the lines on maps and laws in books that, even decades later, can stand between right and wrong. Countries with their laws of provenance,” he scoffed. “Museums with fake bills of sale.”

Mr. Stein’s sadness turned to fervor. “And that is why your mother came to this room. . . . She told me that sometimes it takes a thief to catch a thief.” His eyes shone. “You’re going to steal these paintings, aren’t you, Katarina?”

Kat wanted to explain everything, but right then the truth seemed like the cruelest thing of all.

“Mr. Stein.” Hale’s voice was calm and even. “I’m afraid it’s a very long story.”

The man nodded. “I see.” He looked at Kat in the way of a man who had long since given up trying to right all the wrongs of the world himself.

“The men who took Dancer Waiting in the Wings from the Schulhoffs’ dining room wall were evil, my dear. The men those men gave it to were evil. These paintings were traded for terrible favors in terrible times.” Mr. Stein took a deep breath. “No one good could have that group of paintings, Katarina.” Kat nodded. “So wherever you have to go”—he stood—“whatever you have to do—”

He reached out his hand. And when Kat’s small hand was wrapped in his own, he looked into her eyes and said, “Be careful.”

Standing on Abiram Stein’s front steps, facing the street, Kat felt very different from when she’d stood in that same spot forty minutes earlier, facing the door. Suspicions were facts. Fears were real. And ghosts were alive as she stood where her mother had once stood, unsure how to follow in her footsteps.