“I came that close to purchasing it.” He pinched off a distance between his forefinger and his thumb. “But then he told me it came from Germany. He claimed to have checked out the provenance and that it went back a hundred years. I went on the Art Loss Register. I went through as many books on religious items as I could find. I couldn’t place the object anywhere. Perhaps the provenance was legitimate. But it was an expensive item and I couldn’t take the chance.”

“Okay.” Decker thought a moment. “Why did you have a problem with an object that came from Germany? Did you think that the icon was looted by the Nazis?”

“That’s exactly what I thought.”

Decker digested the information. “I’m not a history buff but I seem to recall that Hitler’s invasion into Russia was a big disaster, that it was the turning point of the war. They bombed the cities, but the Germans never got into Moscow with boots on the ground. My dad used to tell me that the Russian winters did more to decimate Hitler’s armies than all the bombs of Europe.”

McAdams was already on his iPhone looking up a condensed piece of history. “Operation Barbarossa was the code name of the Soviet invasion by Hitler. Huge invasion . . . successful at first. And . . . eventually it was an utter failure.”

“As far as a war tactic, yes, it was a failure,” Merritt said. “And it was the turning point of the war. But the big picture doesn’t tell the whole story. St. Petersburg—Leningrad back then—was under siege for two and a half years. The Germans didn’t occupy the city because they didn’t want to feed the residents in times of shortage. So with the Finns, the Germans closed all the access roads in and out of the city, hoping to starve the population before they’d take over the land. But the city wasn’t impenetrable. German soldiers went in and looted. And some lucky individuals got out mostly through Lake Ladoga, which was how the Red Cross got its meager supplies into a starving population.”

“Okay,” Decker said. “So you’re telling me that Nazis crossed enemy lines to loot Russian art while the city was under siege?”

“To that statement I say to you that someone dismantled the original Amber Room before Catherine’s Palace was bombed to smithereens.”

Decker turned to McAdams. “Want to look up the Amber Room for me?”

“Already on it.”

Merritt said, “You don’t know about the Amber Room?”

“It rings a very faint bell,” Decker said. “If I had to guess, I’d say it was a room with a lot of amber in it.”