At the bedroom window, Seth leaned against the sill and stared out at the street. The rain clouds had cleared, leaving the stars to burn tiny bright holes in the sky.

“Why, God?” He asked softly, his breath lightly frosting the window. “What did I ever do to deserve this? I’ve prayed; I’ve tried to be moral, ethical. Why did you let this happen?” Then he struggled again not to think the thoughts that were occurring to him with increasing frequency: maybe there was no God. Or maybe God didn’t care.

Across the street, the Toyota had been replaced by a dark American-looking sedan with two men in it. He felt a momentary irritation at the surveillance, but quickly dismissed it. Stratton was just doing his job.

Fully awake now, he turned to his bed, reached under it, and withdrew the painting. He set the package on the bed and unwrapped it. He held it loosely in his hands in the darkness for several moments and then leaned over to switch on the lamp next to the bed. He examined the painting once again.

It was just as Weinstock had described it A painting of an alpine meadow, done in the warm yellow tones of the Florentine masters. There was a prominent rock face at the right side of the picture, and what looked like the entrance to a mine in the distance almost at the left border. The picture itself contained no clues that he could find.

It was mounted in a plain black wooden frame and sealed with brown paper.

He turned the frame over and gazed at the oval sticker affixed to one corner of the sealing paper. “Jacob Yost and Sons, Fine Frames for Fine Art,” the label read, “II Augustinergasse, Zurich.”

He stared at the label. The name of the shop that had framed the picture was the only clue he had. Why, he wondered, had it been framed in Zurich and not somewhere in Germany? He looked at the sticker again. There was a notation of some sort but the ink was too faded to decipher it. He held it closer to the light. The notation was illegible, but by holding the frame at the right angle to the light he could make out a date—May 19, 1937—and a series of numbers: 16-16. Before the invasion of Poland, before the holocaust atrocities, while Hitler was still a respectable European leader and his people were free to travel without being hampered by battles or hostile borders. They had come to Zurich with the painting. And what else? he wondered.

He looked at the painting again. His thoughts wandered. Zurich was famous for its banks and for its stability. It was also infamous in his own mind as the place from which Zoe had disappeared. The Nazis too were famous for their hoarding of gold and other valuables. Was it unreasonable to speculate that they had come to Zurich before the war to open accounts and to set up banking ties? Perhaps Hitler or Stahl or some other Nazi just happened to bring the painting along with him on such a trip and just happened to drop it by Herr Yost’s framing shop.