“It’s a very strange sentence,” said Jean. “And it turns up again and again in these articles. I think every time Columbia House returns a book, they send a copy of a press release to the local papers. It’s like they’re more interested in getting publicity than in actually reuniting people with lost heirlooms. And if they have really returned a thousand books, how come I could only find a few dozen articles? I will say this, they seem to return books all over the world—Germany, the UK, a woman on the Upper East Side of New York City.”

“Let me guess. You called the New Yorker.”

“She said she received a book a couple of months ago that supposedly belonged to her great-uncle. She never thought to question the story, but she called me back an hour later to say she found some marginalia in the book that was definitely not in her great-uncle’s handwriting.”

“He might have loaned the book to someone or bought it secondhand.”

“Maybe,” said Jean, “but there seems to be a pattern here. And there’s one more thing.”

“What’s that?”

“The name of the company. Columbia House.”

“The same as that outfit that used to get you to buy records, right?”

“That’s what everyone in our generation thinks of, but there’s another antecedent. Columbia-Haus was one of the first Nazi concentration camps. It’s not well known because it was only open for three years from 1933 to 1936, before they tore it down to make way for an expansion of the Berlin airport.”

“So you think Ingrid Weiss is living on a Nazi street in a Nazi neighborhood and running a company with a Nazi name in order to send people books for free that they actually have no right to?”

“Sounds ridiculous, I know.”

“There’s a narrative that explains it all,” said Peter. “You just haven’t discovered it yet. But there’s something else that’s bothering me.”

“Besides the fact that my book was stolen from the national library in Prague?”

“Oh right, that,” said Peter, sliding the book across the table to Jean. “Look at page 157 and at the rear endpaper. In both cases you’ll see someone has tried to sand off a library stamp, but the ink has gone too deep into the paper to be so easily erased. If you look at the verso of those pages you can just make out the stamp of the Public and University Library of Czechoslovakia—what’s now the National Library of the Czech Republic.”

“Maybe it ended up there after the Nazis stole it from my grandfather.”

“The stamp has an acquisition date—1921,” said Peter.

“So it’s been there since it was published.”

“Until someone walked off with it.”

“I doubt that was my grandfather,” said Jean.

“Seems unlikely,” said Peter.

“What was the other thing bothering you?”