“What about . . .” Oliver flipped through his notes. “Justin Merritt?”

“Jason Merritt,” McAdams corrected. “He’s the specialist in Russian art. His gallery is in New York and we don’t have a damn thing on him, either.”

“Just like John Latham,” Oliver said.

“No, John Latham’s field of expertise was Soviet-era art,” McAdams told him. “It’s an entirely different field than Russian art. And Soviet art is not very collectible.”

“Why not?”

“Because most of it was propaganda. I’m not saying it’s worthless. Some of the posters are pricey. But because it’s so stylized, it’s more important as a recording of history and culture than as fine art. That’s what John Latham won the Windsor Prize for: Soviet art as a tool for dissemination of propaganda during Stalin’s administration.”

“How’d you find all this out?” Decker asked.

“I’ve had time on my hands, Old Man.”

“What about Russian art?” Oliver asked. “You don’t hear of great Russian artists like you do French impressionists.”

“That’s because the czars were way more interested in western European culture than promoting their own heritage,” McAdams said. “The Hermitage is loaded with great Western art. Most of Russia’s own homegrown painters have been relegated to storage. And once the Bolsheviks took over, they denigrated anything that smelled of Western society.”

Oliver said, “But you just said that the Hermitage is filled with great western European art.”

“That installations came later when Khrushchev made it a point to rebuild all the incredible buildings that the Nazis had destroyed. Probably that was propaganda, too. He wanted to show the West that Russia wasn’t a backwater country.” McAdams thought a moment. “I was talking to my dad in one of the rare moments when he wasn’t screaming at me. We got on the subject of the Hermitage . . . which actually I brought up because I knew my grandfather had been to the Soviet Union when it was mostly closed off to Westerners. Dad told me my grandfather had seen the Hermitage way back when . . . in the forties or fifties maybe. It was an absolute mess . . . just piles and piles of all this invaluable art. The Soviets originally put it on display to show the extreme wealth of the aristocracy at the expense of the proletariat.”

“So you’re saying that there is no valuable Russian art?” Oliver asked.

“No, no,” Decker said. “The older stuff is quite valuable because a lot of it was destroyed in the revolution. Mostly religious stuff like icons.”

“So is there any kind of Russian art worth killing for?” Oliver asked.