Seth told him about his search in Zurich, about Rebecca Weinstock, about the killers in Los Angeles, the killers in Amsterdam, and the men who now looked for him in Zurich. Before the story was over, Yost had refilled his pipe twice.

“I’m sorry for my outburst in your gallery yesterday,” Seth said. “I’ll be happy to pay for the damage.”

“Don’t be sorry,” Yost chuckled. “It’s the most exciting thing that has happened to those two spoiled idiots in their entire pampered lives.” He laughed again. “Jacob”—he tilted his head toward the door of the study—“is the only one of my sons with any brains at all. And he takes things far too seriously.” Yost sighed.

Yost leaned over to knock the dottle of his pipe against an enormous glass ashtray. He scraped and poked at the bowl with a pipe tool and finally sat up to face Seth again.

“Nothing you’ve told me is surprising,” Yost said. “So I suppose I should tell you why I’m not surprised.”

He paused while he refilled the bowl of the pipe again.

“It began in 1939, when a man brought the painting into my frame shop. It was summer and I was just out of the university and working for my father. I had taken a degree in art history and had intended to become an expert in restoration.

“The visitor conducted himself with the officiousness of a minor functionary employed by important people,” remembered Yost “He stepped from a black limousine and brought the unframed picture into the shop. I was unimpressed by this uninspiring little scene painted on a small piece of wood and smelling of fresh paint It was an unexciting sort of painting, created with skill but no genius. The man wanted the picture framed by evening. It was an unusual request but not an impossible one. I finished it before the deadline with no trouble.

“I later found out that the man worked for none other than Hermann Goering. The painting was a present for Goering’s boss, Adolf Hitler.

“As the European war intensified, my family followed Goering with interest, fascinated in a black sort of way that he had actually been that close to us. But Goering was of more than academic interest to some of my relatives who had settled in Salzburg.

“My aunt, a sister on my father’s side, had married an art dealer there in twenty-eight. Life deteriorated after Hitler’s annexation of Austria and her husband had been drafted and killed in action. In forty-three I was sent to Salzburg by my father to see if I could get her back to Switzerland.

“But before I could leave Salzburg with my aunt German soldiers arrived. They were canvassing art galleries, university art departments, and museums, looking, they said, for ‘patriotic citizens’ to help care for priceless works of art that were arriving daily in Munich from all over Europe.”

Yost told Seth that he and his aunt tried to explain to the pigheaded soldiers that the true art expert, her husband, had been killed as a lowly private in the Wehrmacht. That was all right, said the soldiers who knew more about scrubbing garbage cans than fine art, certainly Yost’s aunt had learned something from her husband that would be useful, and would she and her nephew stop wasting their time and please get into the trucks out front for the short drive back to Munich.