Ruthie took a candle and rooted around in the sacristy, but didn’t find much—a few flower vases, an old missal, a small glass bowl she supposed must be for holy water, but nothing that would be of use to them in their current situation. When she returned to the nave, Jean had calmed down and now simply sat staring at the fresco, as if she wanted to memorize it, preserve it in her mind as a way of compensating for its destruction.

“All right,” said Nemo, striding back into the chapel with Patton in his wake, “let’s do this before Weiss shows up.”

“We’ve got at least a few hours,” said Ruthie.

“And we might need them,” said Nemo, approaching the fresco with the tire iron. He hesitated for a moment, pressing his hand against the cool plaster. “Where to start?”

“Melchior’s golden casket,” said Jean softly. She had left her seat and joined the others standing by the altar.

“Fine,” said Nemo.

He approached the painting with reverence, almost as if he were approaching Christ himself, though instead of gold, frankincense, or myrrh, he brought the gift of a tire iron. Despite the chilly night, his hands sweated against the cold metal. Nemo had spent plenty of time in churches. If you wanted to disappear in a big city, the back of a church wasn’t a bad place to do it. He liked Catholic churches especially—not just because of the paintings and mosaics and the ornate woodwork and tiling and all the rest of it, works of art you could look at all day for free. He liked confessionals. He never confessed his actual sins, or at least not the worst ones, the ones that made up his career. But he liked sitting in the dark and talking to someone who could not see him. His only real therapy had come in churches.

He looked at the three kings before him—life-sized figures in a scene he seemed about to step into. The artist had portrayed them as a dark-skinned African, an Arab, and a dark-haired Caucasian who was certainly not Aryan. The inferior races, Himmler had called them. And if the supremacists saw them as inferior, how much more so would they view Nemo, a man of unknown but well-mixed racial origins? A mongrel, as people had called him. Well, this was one mongrel who would stand up to the likes of Ingrid Weiss and her cronies. He hadn’t done much good with his life, but now he had a chance. Certainly the Magi would understand that. Certainly the Christ child would understand. Almost reflexively, though he rarely did it even in the confines of a church, Nemo muttered a short prayer under his breath. Then so the others could hear, he said, “Lord, forgive me,” and struck.