The jailor stepped into the hallway, closing the door behind him. The dead bolt slammed into its secured position with enough force to make a point.

“Such an attitude,” Thalia said, staring briefly at the door. Her accent was more New York than Minsk. Then, she turned in a slow full circle to take in the room. “You really ought to do something with this place.” Most of Thalia’s family had been among the Russian Jews granted exit visas during the administration of President Jimmy Carter. Only her widowed father remained behind. He was frail and in love with his art business. To leave, he would have been required to liquidate himself into poverty in order to pay the punitive emigration taxes assessed by the Soviets. Instead, he remained and sent her to live with her aunts and cousins in New York City and paid her tuition through Columbia. She later learned he had borrowed the tuition money from Moscow loan sharks, confident that he would be dead before time came to collect.

“You didn’t come down here tonight to talk about the interior design,” Zoe said as she walked over to the desk.

Thalia shrugged as she grabbed Zoe’s Movenpick bag and thrust it at her. “Here. Put some meat on your bones.” She turned abruptly to grab her own bag. “Go! Sit! Sit!” Thalia pulled out the room’s only chair for Zoe and then concentrated on unloading her own dinner. After a long moment, Zoe moved the chair back where she could see Thalia better and pulled a cold-cut sandwich from the bag along with a tall plastic cup of vegetable soup. She set them on the desk and opened the soup and took a sip.

Thalia stood by the silver platter and mounted an athletic assault on an identical sandwich. The room’s mechanical cacophony filled the silence. Thalia looked at the door, then set her sandwich down and moved closer to Zoe.

“This is the only place we can talk,” Thalia said quietly. “They monitor us everywhere else.” Zoe nodded. “They’re pushing me to wrap things up,” Thalia said. “Something’s jerked their chain and they want to close up shop as quickly as possible.”

“But what?”

“Who knows? Maybe the police are on to them? Maybe your husband if he’s as good a detective as you say.”

Zoe’s heart lifted at the thought of Seth searching for her. She had dreams about him appearing at the door to her cell.

“How long do we have?” Zoe asked.

“A week at the outside.”

“But we still have all those Goddess figures to examine!” Unexpectedly, the take from Kreuzlingen included a massive packing case jammed with hundreds of statuettes, figurines, and other representations of the Great Goddess—some called them Venus figures—that spanned more than ten thousand years, starting with the paleolithic and neolithic. It was the most incredible find among an unbelievable collection.

“Those will take months to do properly,” Zoe protested.

“We don’t have months,” Thalia said. “What’s more, all the fakes you’ve pulled out of the other parts of the collection have priority. They’re pretty upset that you think so many of them are counterfeit.”