In an era when museums had been scorched repeatedly by provenance scandals, the director of the National Gallery of Art had felt compelled to reveal much of her sordid past. She had been sold in Amsterdam in 1936 to a man named Abraham Herzfeld, acquired by coercion in 1943 by an SS officer named Kurt Voss, and sold twenty-one years later in a private transaction conducted by the Hoffmann Gallery of Lucerne. At the request of the White House, the National Gallery never revealed the name of the Zurich bank where she had been hidden for several years, nor was there any mention of the document once hidden inside her. Her links to a looted Holocaust fortune had been carefully erased, just like the bullet hole in her forehead and the blood that had stained her garment. No one named Landesmann had ever laid hands on her. No one named Landesmann had ever killed to protect her terrible secret.

Her scandalous past did nothing to tarnish her reception. In fact, it only added to her allure. There was no escaping her face in Washington. She stared from billboards and buses, from souvenir shirts and coffee mugs, and even from a hot-air balloon that floated over the city the day before her unveiling. Gabriel and Chiara saw her for the first time minutes after stepping off their plane at Dulles Airport, gazing at them disapprovingly from an advertisement as they glided through customs on false passports. They saw her again peering from a giant banner as they hurried up the steps of the museum through an evening thunderstorm, this time as if urging them to quicken their pace. Uncharacteristically, they were running late. The fault was entirely Gabriel’s. After years of toiling in the shadows of the art world, he’d had serious misgivings about stepping onto so public a stage, even clandestinely.

The exhibition opening was a formal, invitation-only affair. Even so, all guests had to have their possessions searched, a policy instituted at the gallery immediately after the attacks of 9/11. Julian Isherwood was waiting just beyond the checkpoint beneath the soaring main rotunda, gazing nervously at his wristwatch. Seeing Gabriel and Chiara, he made a theatrical gesture of relief. Then, looking at Gabriel’s clothing, he tried unsuccessfully to conceal a smile.

“I never thought I would live to see the day you put on a tuxedo.”

“Neither did I, Julian. And if you make any more cracks—”

Chiara silenced Gabriel with a discreet elbow to the ribs. “If it would be at all possible, I’d like to get through the evening without you threatening to kill anyone.”

Gabriel frowned. “If it wasn’t for me, Julian would be trying to scrounge up forty-five million dollars right now. The least he can do is show me a modicum of respect.”

“There’ll be plenty of time for that later,” Isherwood said. “But right now there are two people who are very anxious to see you.”

“Where are they?”

“Upstairs.”