Harper’s squat form hobbled through the light and shade until she was at his elbow. Little Jorge lagged, fussing, gesturing helplessly at the lectern in the alcove beside him.

Storm and Harper looked at the picture together. “This is one of the reasons I brought you here,” she said.

It was an old black-and-white photo, much enlarged, much distorted and blurred by the enlargement. The grain—plus the haze and smoke in the scene itself—gave the setting a poetic, dreamlike quality. So Harper, anyway, had always felt. The photo depicted a compound of wooden barracks in the process of burning to the ground. In the moment at which the shutter had snapped, the flames of the individual buildings were being swept together into a single surging inferno. The smoke was thick. The sky was black with it. The barracks were no more than spectral suggestions at the core of the thing. Only one human figure was visible, there in the forefront: a smallish form charging through the blaze, charging through the tall wooden gate of the compound’s entry way, charging, it seemed, to safety, cradling a bundle in the shelter of its arms.

Jorge had written the legend:

THE END OF IAGO

A female follower of “Saint Iago” carries a baby through the fire that destroyed the cult leader’s compound in northeast Argentina. One hundred thirty-three of Iago’s followers are thought to have died in the blaze. At least forty-four of the dead were children, many of them believed to have been fathered by the cult leader himself. Aside from this disputed photograph, there is no other evidence that the event took place. The fate of the escaping woman, therefore, remains a mystery.

(Cat. 44)

“This …” said Storm.

“Yes,” said Harper.

He was pressing his finger to the glazing, pointing at the high crossbar of the gate above the escaping figure. Burnt into the crossbar’s wood, just visible through the grain and haze, was a symbol: something like a horseshoe enclosing something like a figure eight.

“It’s the same as her brooch,” said Storm.

“Exactly,” said Harper.

She heard him curse under his breath. “What’re you trying to tell me? This picture has something to do with Sophia and her mother and everything?”

“I’m telling you it might.”

He glowered down at her. “All right,” he said. “So who the hell is Iago?”

Harper’s gravelly voice, her brusque, marble-mouthed accent, seemed somehow far more suited to the form of narrative than conversation. She never began a long story without a certain hint of relish in the set of her pale lips, a certain glint of it in her eyes.