Zoe fought the sadness and tears as she craned her head back; with both hands she massaged at the tension in the back of her neck. She opened her eyes. Above her, the joists and the rusty iron pipes and the fire sprinkler heads made precise geometric shadow paintings on the age-yellowed floorboards of the office above.

Just then, movement caught her eye. Zoe turned her head and saw the door swing slowly open. Quickly pulling the tissue from her ears, Zoe stood up as her hulking jailor stood for a moment in the doorway. The giant stumplike man whose arms and legs did not seem long enough to match his oversized torso filled up the opening; almost engulfed in his huge fist was the usual paper Movenpick take-away sack filled with her dinner.

“Welcome to Chez Bastille. I’m Andre, your maitre d’,” Zoe said in English, knowing the man spoke only Russian. “Will this be a table for one?” As he had done every evening, he raised one woolly eyebrow at her, then set about scrutinizing the room. He motioned to her with his head; Zoe acknowledged his nod by stepping over to the far corner of her cell. She stood by the chamber pot at the foot of her bed while he placed the bag on the battered desk next to the old PC. He then made a circuit of the room, studying every surface for signs of an escape attempt. The Hulk gave her a brief victorious look and walked to the door. But instead of immediately exiting as usual, he stood to one side and nodded.

A moment later Thalia Yastrubinetsky appeared at the door holding a silver tray with a bone china tea service. Incongruously, a Movenpick bag sat next to the ornately enameled teapot.

“I thought we could discuss the progress of your reports,” Thalia nodded at the old PC as she walked into the room. She gave Zoe a wink as she set the tray down on a two-drawer filing cabinet next to the desk.

Zoe frowned. True, in the absence of books and magazines, she passed much of her incarcerated time at the keyboard of the old 486 PC allowing the comforting familiarity and beauty of art to transport her from her dingy cell. Zoe spent hours transcribing her notes of the previous day’s examinations, documenting her findings, and creating the best records of provenance possible—a task simplified by the anal-retentive Nazi mentality that saw the path to Valhalla paved with both the bodies of inferior races and the proper documentation of their stolen treasures.

But anxiety turned uneasily in Zoe’s chest. Thalia had made only infrequent visits here and it was always to drop off a book or records. She had never lingered. Something was wrong.

“Well,” Zoe said tentatively, “I don’t have much more than earlier today, since I usually do the work after I eat.”

“Well then, let’s eat!” Thalia said with a genuine enthusiasm she reserved for great art and food of almost any class. She was an impressively tall, ample woman in her mid-forties with long curly red hair and a beatific face. She was the daughter of an elderly Minsk art dealer who had fallen behind on his payments to a Moscow Mafia loan shark. Instead of beating the old man as they ordinarily would, the bosses forced him into business with them, using his once legitimate business to dispose of stolen artworks and antiquities, a task that had led to the treasures at Kreuzlingen. As her father’s assistant, the actual work had fallen into Thalia’s hands.