“I don’t even know when I first heard them—the rumors,” she said. “I can’t remember anyone ever saying a word to me. Not directly. It was just always in the air somehow. That Daddy had got rich off black-market art from the war. That everything we had was somehow … tainted, you know.” She looked at him, added quickly: “There’s never been anything dodgy on my watch. Not ever.” Storm didn’t let his gaze waver or darken. So she went on: “It’s just … now and then … I don’t know. I’d find an entry in some account I don’t control and I’d start to wonder. Or …” He saw her mouth twist with distaste. “Once or twice, someone’s approached me. At the gallery. Someone not quite … savory. Sometimes someone like that would speak to me … familiarly, if you see what I mean. As if they expected me to do something for them, as if it were understood.” She pulled into herself as if a spider had walked across her hand. “No one’s ever done it twice, though. No one.” She glanced at him. He breathed her in. He loved her eyes: besieged, alone, unyielding. He thought he saw almost everything now. “You probably think I should have done something, said something. But one doesn’t. In my family. And anyway …” It hurt him to see her face pull down, her mouth pull down convulsively. “It would’ve killed him. Any hint of scandal. Even just to know for certain that I knew … it would’ve killed him. I couldn’t have stood it.” She closed her eyes a moment. “I always took care of him, you see. After my mother died. My sister got married and my brother … well, of course, he wasn’t interested. And Daddy was always so helpless about the little things. ‘Where have I left my diary, Sophia?” Where is my dinner jacket?’ I think it was the one area in which we could communicate, really. And then at the gallery …” She let her drink go, drummed the surface of the table softly with her fist. “It’s all so long ago. The war. What does it matter now? I mean, at the end of the day—at the end of the day, it’s only art, isn’t it? It’s only paintings he’s dealing in. It isn’t as if he ever killed anyone.”

“Then why were you so ready to believe he was the guy the resurrectionists were looking for?” said Storm at once.

“I … Well, it was just …” She looked at him, pleading.

“Tell me what happened to your mom,” he said.

Sophia covered her face with her hands.

“ ‘My heart swims in blood because my legion of sins has made a monster of me in God’s holy eyes,’ ” she said wistfully. “How did you know it was my favorite?”