“Well Nemo did threaten to burn down my place if anything happened to you, so my interest is not totally unselfish,” said Alex. “But I did decide to pick a side and make a stand.”

“We appreciate the rescue,” said Nemo, leaning against the side of the van, “but as far as making a stand against Ingrid Weiss, I’m afraid you’re too late. She left with three quarters of a billion dollars in Nazi gold about a half hour ago and we have no idea where she’s headed.”

Alex gave a low whistle. “I’d always heard rumors of a secret stash of Nazi gold,” he said. “I’ve got a whole notebook devoted to the various theories about where it came from and where it went, but I never thought Ingrid Weiss would be the person to find it.”

“We found it,” said Patton. “Weiss stole it.”

“Just how much do you know about Ingrid Weiss?” said Jean, who had finally caught her breath after the dash to escape the chapel.

“What I know is not a lot more than you know,” said Alex. “She’s some sort of businesswoman who runs a charity that returns stolen Nazi items, mostly books, to their families of origin. That’s what I know. But the folks who trade conspiracy theories late at night in the darkest recesses of the Internet claim that her grandfather was some sort of influential Nazi—Himmler’s secret right-hand man or something like that—and that all her charitable work is an attempt to expiate the guilt she feels about her family’s past.”

“I can believe the grandfather bit,” said Patton, “but I doubt that woman feels the slightest twinge of guilt. We think she wants to use the gold to promote the ideals of the Third Reich.”

“Especially Himmler’s rubbish about Aryan supremacy,” said Jean. “That woman’s tried to kill me twice now, but what really makes my skin crawl is hearing the way she talks about Himmler—like he was some kind of god or something. And now she’s got . . . all that money. All that money to promote her sick agenda.”

“She stole it from you; why don’t we steal it back from her?” said Alex. “I wouldn’t mind adding an ingot of Nazi gold to my collection.”

“Is that all you care about?” spat Patton, suddenly angry. “Your goddamn collection? What about justice, what about civil rights, what about racial equality?”

“Yeah, sure, I care about all that stuff, too,” said Alex. “I came here to help you, didn’t I? I got noble, didn’t I?”