She noticed one of her conservators sponging roughly at a Polish poster of Rebecca and smacked his shoulder. “Careful! She’s been through a lot, that poor girl. Show her some care. Handle her gently, like a lover.” Taking Evan by the arm, she snapped back to English: “I feel sorry for Mihn’s wife. In bed she must feel like hamburger meat.”

She walked as she talked, casting an eagle eye across the workstations.

“I’m trying to find a man,” he said.

“Me, too.” A sideways glance. “Okay, okay. Let’s find your man. It’ll bring some excitement to my life.”

“I doubt your life lacks excitement.”

“Let me cook you dinner sometime, and you can find out.”

“Deal. But for now—”

“But for now, a man.”

“Yes. I believe he’s left the country. He’s off the radar, and he’s been careful to cover all the usual bases. I was in his house briefly. It was filled with luxury items, some rare. I’m hoping I can track him through unusual purchases he’s made.”

“Why that approach?”

“Because,” Evan said, “that’s how he tracked me.”

“No, no, no!” She paused by a giant plywood worktable, lifting the padded earphone free of a painter’s head to shout in his ear. “Use Bestine to remove the tape adhesive residue.”

She let the headphone snap back to the man’s skull and kept on. “So you’d like to track down which purchase?”

“He had an original Monet.”

“How could you tell it wasn’t a fake?”

“I’m pretty sure.”

“If I made it, you wouldn’t be able to tell.”

“I’m assuming you didn’t make it.”

She gave a demure tilt of her chin. Proceed.

“It was of water lilies—”

“Of course,” she said. “It’s always water lilies with him. How many water lilies can a guy paint?”

“He didn’t just do water lilies.”

“Right. Haystacks. Lotsa haystacks.” She sighed. “Give me a Metropolis poster from the thirties any day. Have you seen the Boris Karloff Frankenstein? It just went at auction for—”

“Can you track a Monet like that?”

“Evan, the guy painted hundreds of them. Plus the forgeries—only Starry Night’s been knocked off more. Even if you knew it was real, how could you tell which water-lily painting it was? They all look like … well, like water lilies.”

From his jacket Evan pulled the printouts of the crime-scene pictures and fanned through them. But no dining-room shot of the Monet had magically appeared since he’d last perused the stack.

She read his face. “I’m sorry. Was there anything else you saw in the house that you could track?”

“Lexan.”

“What?”

“Bullet-resistant polycarbonate resin acquired on the black market.”

She screwed up her face. “Good luck there.”