After a moment, she nodded again and he released her. His voice grew softer, the words came faster. “I have arranged for the piece to be auctioned on behalf of a charitable organization—an anonymous donation with good title, all arranged. It will be in Sotheby’s mid-January. I’ve arranged for it to remain in transit until then, so I think it will be safe. That is what I will tell them when …” She saw his Adam’s apple work between the collars of the jacket. “When they find me,” he finished. He went on more slowly. “He will buy it, he will pay anything for it. Do you see? At the auction, he will finally show himself. Do you see?”

The wind whirled. The clouds barreled by. An arc of the full moon shone above their ruffled fringes. The fingery branches of winter trees waved sable against the sky.

“No,” Sophia said, staring blankly up at them, frowning. “No, I don’t see. Why should he pay anything? Why should he kill for it? The thing isn’t worth more than twenty-five thousand pounds, fifty thousand possibly, if you find the other two panels. How can you be so sure this is what he’ll do? Your people—”

“Are all dead,” said the young man. The naked, urgent earnestness had come into his expression again. “They are all dead. And I am sure. I have come to know him, in a way. He is afraid of nothing; he will let no one else do it for him. He will be there.”

Now, at last, he stepped back from her. Sophia felt as if she had been released from a smothering embrace. The young man glanced up and down the street again. Peered at her from what already seemed a great distance. “I don’t know why he kills for it, or why he will pay,” he said. “But he has killed, and he will pay. He will pay anything, more than anyone. So the one who buys the painting, he is the man. The Devil from Hell. That is what you must remember. Whoever buys the painting …”

He seemed to be slipping from her, slipping away into the current of the night. She wanted to stop him, to stop the whole thing. “Look,” she said. “You really must go to the police. I can’t—”

“Remember,” he said—it came out hoarsely, but the word carried to her even as he moved across the street. “Whoever buys the painting has murdered me, has murdered all of us. Whoever buys The Magi …”

Sophia stood and watched him: stepping up onto the opposite pavement; moving into the shadows of the park wall; grasped by the shadows of branches and drawn into them.

“Whoever buys The Magi …”

But she could not have heard him whisper it again. He was already gone.