The scroll was covered with bizarre images, illuminated in blues, reds, greens, and golds. A green dragon stood upon a winged globe; a scowling sun shed tears on a dove with the head of a king; a red-bearded man held a two-handled glass bottle inside of which was something akin to a graphic novel—scenes showing a group of people standing around a flask holding a woman who seemed to undergo some sort of transformation. In the center the same bearded man held aloft a crown of glittering gold which shone more brightly than anything else in the scroll. Helmut thought it must be decorated with actual gold leaf.

“What is it?” said Helmut.

“An alchemical scroll of the fifteenth century,” said the Reichsführer, his eyes sparkling with delight.

“Certainly it is beautiful,” said Helmut. “But I do not understand how it will assist with Projekt Alchemie.”

“You are a good and faithful servant,” said Himmler, laying a hand on Helmut’s shoulder. “But not everything is for you to understand.”

“You know who owns the catalog of Heinrich Himmler’s library?” said Patton.

“The world of Nazi collecting is small, and when something like that turns up, people know about it,” said Alex. “It’s like when the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs announced that they had Hermann Göring’s catalog of his art collection. We all knew. I first heard about the Himmler catalog four or five years ago. Rumor was it had been stolen out of a library where it had been sitting in a crate that hadn’t been unpacked in forty years or something. You hear this kind of thing all the time—collections that were packed up after the war and never got unpacked. Anyway, apparently some library employee recognized it and, since it wasn’t in the library cataloging system, just walked off with it.”

“You can’t trust librarians,” said Nemo with a smile toward Patton.

“Do you know where the library was?” said Patton.

“Somewhere in eastern Europe I think,” said Alex. “It was all very hazy rumors traded late at night on the dark web. But wherever it came from, someone offered it for sale. I tried to make an offer, but I was too late. The seller told me it went to a private buyer in Germany named Ingrid Weiss.”

“Never heard of her,” said Patton.

“She has a special interest in books stolen by Nazis. Runs some charity called Columbia House that tries to return books to the families they were stolen from.”

“I’ve heard of doing that with paintings and sculptures,” said Patton, “but books? Didn’t the Nazis burn books?”

“Not all of them,” said Alex. “Weiss has emailed me a number of times asking me to donate books in my collection that might have been stolen.”

“And did you?” said Patton.