“Your sister gets all the credit for this,” Pierre said when we were seated at a table by the window. “The renovation happened before I arrived, but I was told it was Juliet’s vision.”

I glanced around again, spotting her handiwork in the clean-lined, modern steel furniture paired with gilded mosaics. “Juliet takes every detail seriously.”

“She took over the global portfolio after you left,” Pierre said. “Frankly, I miss working with you. Why did you leave, Theo? I never understood.”

Pierre worked for my family—and only on the legitimate side of the business—so there was only so much I could say. Still, I wanted to be as truthful as I could. “When I was growing up, I would see these amazing works of art—Babylonian lions, Egyptian funeral art, great paintings—coming through my father’s hotels. Sometimes they’d go on display; sometimes they’d end up being sold. But I’d see them and think, ‘That belongs in a museum.’”

“I understand. When I was a kid, my family vacationed in the South of France,” Pierre said. “One time, we went to a museum that had been an artist’s house. There were a pair of ancient Egyptian statues there—tremendous things, taller than me.” He gestured with his hands. “I couldn’t believe they had ended up in a private home. They clearly belonged in a museum.”

“There’s always been a gray market for pieces like that,” I said. “A lot of institutions won’t take pieces anymore if they don’t know their provenance, but private collectors will. I told my father that if he wanted me to work with him in the hotel business, he had to stop taking part in it.”

“But he did, yes? Honestly, there’s nothing like that being moved through here. There wasn’t in Paris either.”

I took a breath. “My father is clever about technicalities. He feels like he’s honored our agreement, but he was skirting the edges of it. That’s why I quit.”

That was as much as I could tell Pierre. The truth was, as far as I knew, my father had stopped trafficking in stolen antiquities. However, he’d embarked on a different illegal venture with some new partners. That was it for me. I’d told Caroline exactly what he was up to. She hadn’t cared. What does it matter, when there’s so much good you can do with the money? she’d asked me. We were, from that moment on, an ocean apart, figuratively and literally.

“That is why you do what you do now?” Pierre said appraisingly. “Please do not tell me that you are here to take our Nefertiti away. Germany acquired it from Egypt legally.”