Jean’s phone call to Columbia House, and the questions she had for Ingrid Weiss, had gone unanswered, but as she began to hear back from the other people for whom she had left messages earlier in the day, she decided it was just as well Ingrid Weiss didn’t know what she was doing. Even though Jean didn’t exactly know herself, she suspected her investigation might not end well for Miss Weiss. After talking to Peter she had returned to her office and called back Suzie Stein, the woman in New York who had received a book from Columbia House. Suzie had promised to examine the book for signs it had been stolen from a library. Jean explained to Suzie and to Manfred Hopkins, just outside Birmingham, England, how to look for rough spots on the pages where someone might have sanded off a library marking. Hopkins was another “heir” mentioned in the articles about Columbia House as having received a book stolen from a family member by Nazis. In her search of newspaper archives, Jean had uncovered the names of several Americans who had received books from Columbia House. She had sent messages to eight of them through their social media accounts asking them to phone her. The first call came from Stanley Marx, of Oyster Bay, Long Island.

“I looked through the book,” said Stanley, “and there are four pages with spots that look like they’ve been sanded, just like you said.”

“Could you tell what had been printed there?” asked Jean.

“Not at first,” said Stanley. “But I photographed the pages and zoomed in on my computer and on one page I definitely saw the words . . . my German pronunciation isn’t very good, but it said, ‘Bayerische Staatsbibliothek.’ ”

“The Bavarian State Library,” said Jean. “One of the largest research libraries in Europe. It’s in Munich.”

“You think this book was stolen?” said Stanley.

“I’m afraid it might have been,” said Jean.

“I was rather pleased when it arrived. My grandfather was an art dealer in Berlin. It seemed perfectly reasonable that he would have owned a book on the old masters.”

Twenty minutes later, after two similar phone calls, a pattern had begun to emerge. Jean had spoken to three owners of “returned” books and all of the volumes showed signs of having been stolen from libraries—two from the National Library of the Czech Republic in Prague and one from the Bavarian State Library in Munich. Ingrid Weiss had done her homework, though. In every case there was a reasonable link between the book and the person who had once allegedly owned it. She had spoken to the recipients of the stolen books while waiting to board her flight to Vienna. The next morning, she would be in Europe.