A grimace appeared on the inspector’s heavily lined face. “Ah, it’s always the same story wherever you look. Poles versus the Russians. Arabs versus the Jews. Americans versus”—a smile—“everyone.”

Middleton ignored him. “The Twenty-First supposedly had another job too. With the fall of Italy and an Allied invasion a sure thing, Himmler and Goering and other Nazis who’d been looting art from Eastern Europe wanted secure places to hide it—so that even if Germany fell, the Allies couldn’t find it. The Twenty-First reportedly brought truckloads to Kosovo. Made sense. A small, little populated, out-of-the-mainstream country. Who’d think to look there for a missing Cezanne or Manet?

“What the British general had found was an old Eastern Orthodox church. It was abandoned years ago and being used as a dormitory for displaced Serbs by a U.N. relief organization. In the basement his soldiers unearthed 50 or 60 boxes of rare books, paintings and music folios.”

“My, that many?”

“Oh, yes. A lot was damaged, some beyond repair, but other items were virtually untouched. I didn’t know much about the paintings or the books, but I’d studied music history in college and I’ve collected recordings and manuscripts for years. I got the okay to fly up and take a look.”

“And what did you find?”

“Oh, it was astonishing. Original pieces by Bach and his sons, Mozart, Handel, sketches by Wagner—some of them had never been seen before. I was speechless.”

“Valuable?”

“Well, you can’t really put a dollar value on a find like that. It’s the cultural benefit, not the financial.”

“But still, worth millions?”

“I suppose.”

“What happened then?”

“I reported what I’d found to the British and to my general, and he cleared it with Washington for me to stay there for a few days and catalog what I could. Good press, you know.”

“True in police work too.” The cigarette got crushed out forcefully under a yellow thumb, as if Padlo were quitting forever.

Middleton explained that that night he took all the manuscripts and folios that he could carry back to British quarters in Pristina and worked for hours cataloging and examining what he’d found.

“The next morning I was very excited, wondering what else I’d find. I got up early to return . . . ”

The American stared at a limp yellow file folder on the inspector’s desktop, the one with three faded checkmarks on it. He looked up and heard Padlo say, “The church was St. Sophia.”

“You know about it?” Middleton was surprised. The incident had made the news but by then—with the world focusing on the millennium and the Y2K crisis, the Balkans had become simply a footnote to fading history.

“Yes, I do. I didn’t realize you were involved.”