At first the picture looked no different, even as flakes of colored plaster fell to the floor and the ringing of the tire iron hitting the wall echoed in the chapel. The other three stepped back as Nemo swung the iron three times. Five times. Ten times. Then stopped.

Where Melchior’s casket had been, glittering in golden paint, a ragged hole an inch or two deep still glittered, reflecting the same golden light of the candles.

“Is that—” said Patton, stepping forward and reaching up to feel the interior of the wall. Her fingers touched not rough stone or brick, but smooth, cold metal.

“Gold,” said Nemo.

“How much?” said Ruthie.

“Can’t tell,” said Nemo. “I hate to say it, Miss Simpson, but it might all have to go.”

And in the end it all did. Once Nemo got a good start, they could pull chunks of plaster off the wall with their hands.

“Clearly gold doesn’t make a good surface for a fresco,” commented Jean, resigned to the fate of the artwork.

The more plaster they cleared, the more gold they revealed. By the time Pegronini’s fresco lay in a heap around them they had uncovered a wall of gold ingots eight feet high and twelve feet wide gleaming bright despite the residue of plaster.

There before them stood Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler’s insurance policy for the future of the Reich.

“Where did all this come from?” said Patton, basking in the glow of the wall of gold.

Jean, whose grandparents had died in the Dachau camp, did not answer but wept silent tears, because she knew in an instant the answer to the question. It came from wedding rings cherished long after a spouse had passed, signs of a bond that neither separation nor death could break. It came from brooches handed down from grandmothers, bestowed on their favorite granddaughters, the ones who took the time to visit and to write. It came from watch covers and watch chains and watch fobs no longer needed as time no longer mattered to those who had carefully polished those covers and chains and fobs, week in and week out, year after year. It came from necklaces and bracelets and earrings worn for the reassurance of the weight on the neck or wrist or earlobe, a weight that meant safety if anything went wrong, a reassurance that had proved specious. It came from teeth carefully, or sometimes not so carefully, removed—usually, but not always, postmortem. It came from the rims of eyeglasses and from the collar studs and cuff links and money clips of those who would never again need to attach collars or link cuffs or clip money. A coin here, a bauble there, multiplied by eleven million. Yes, Himmler had found a way to turn what were, in his warped mind, “base materials” into gold.