The Rathskeller was Ridgefield’s rebellion against Starbucks—a throwback to the time when coffee shops near college campuses were more about poetry and folk music than lattes and cappuccinos. Located in the basement of a building on the strip across from the main entrance to campus, it had dark corners, cheap coffee, spotty cell service, and no Wi-Fi. It was the best place in Ridgefield to have a chance of spotting the socially anxious Peter Byerly in public, and Jean knew that. The two of them sat in a booth in a back corner where Jean sipped a coffee and Peter ignored a mug of tepid tea.

“I don’t think this book belonged to your grandfather,” said Peter, indicating the volume that sat on the table between them, “and I don’t think anyone rescued it from a charity shop or bought it from a rare book dealer. I think somebody stole it from the National Library of the Czech Republic in Prague.”

“That’s a very specific suspicion,” said Jean.

“Tell me what you found out about Weiss.”

“Nothing concrete,” said Jean. “Just a pastiche of oddities that may or may not add up to something.”

“Oddities like what?”

“For starters, she lives on Döbereinerstrasse in a neighborhood of Munich called Obermenzing.”

“And other than a chance for you to show off your German pronunciation, what’s disturbing about that?”

“I went to a conference on art forgery once and the mantra was never take anything at face value. Always look below the surface. So, I looked below the surface of Ingrid Weiss’s address and she lives in a district that was popular with Nazis back in the day. And Döbereinerstrasse wasn’t always called that. During the war it was Hermann Göring Strasse. Göring lived in the neighborhood for a while, although I can’t find his exact address.”

“Surely there are plenty of neighborhoods in Germany once inhabited by Nazis,” said Peter. “And plenty of streets that once had—shall we say, politically incorrect names.”

“Of course, but that’s just the beginning. She runs an organization called Columbia House, but other than giving away old books, I can’t figure out what they do. The website says something vague about international business concerns but the only mentions I can find elsewhere are about their charitable work returning books stolen by the Nazis.”

“Seems reasonable that those activities would get the press.”

“True, and I did track down several dozen stories about books being returned. It looks like they’ve been doing it for a year or so.”

“Then what’s the problem?”

“I read about forty or fifty of these articles, and almost half of them include this same sentence, with the exact same wording—‘Columbia House has returned over a thousand volumes of literature and academia usurped by Nazi Germany to their rightful owners.’ ”

“That’s a strange sentence,” said Peter.