Chapter Twenty-Six
In the end, it took a lot more than a train to get where we needed to be. First, we had to reach Podgorica in a hurry which meant flying, and that was an eight-hour trip with two changes. The phrase “you can’t get there from here” was invented for Podgorica. As capitals go, it’s a rough little jewel. It’s tucked into a valley at the foothills of the mountains which give the country its name. It has a tiny pink palace and a miniature Niagara Falls, but it also has a modern millennium bridge and a contemporary art center. You have to love a place that blends the old with the new, and Montenegro was giving it a go—at least in Podgorica. The port in the bay at Kotor was home to superyachts and nightclubs catering to the 1 percent, but the countryside was exactly what you think of when you hear the word “Balkan.” Mountains, hills, escarpments, promontories—and anything else your thesaurus suggests for “mountain.” And when you weren’t looking? They added a few more mountains just for fun. Villages dotted the hillsides up and down, each paved with steep stone streets, but beyond this was countryside that seemed like it hadn’t been touched for centuries. Occasionally, a farmhouse or cottage betrayed its existence by a thread of smoke rising above the pine forests, but mostly it was just trees, crowded so close to the rail line, the branches brushed the windows, leaving tiny trails of pine resin on the glass.
The train station in Podgorica is exactly what you’d expect from former Yugoslavia. It’s long and low, and not even definitive enough in its style to be Brutalist. It’s serviceable and so nondescript it might be any kind of structure built after WWII in just about any town. But a little bar served the most delicious grilled sausages I’d ever had, and it was just busy enough to keep us in a crowd.
Galina and her little henchwoman, Tamara, could be anywhere, in any disguise. We had the photo I’d stolen from Aunt Evgenia and the quick glimpse I’d had of the both of them at the Scala Contarini del Bovolo but not much more. Minka had been able to dig up two other photos, grainy shots from opera events where Galina was just a blurry background figure, but we had nothing on Tamara. Taverner had pressed Wolfie for details but whatever useful information he got could have been jotted on a postcard. While we were in the air somewhere between Venice and Vienna, he dropped a message into the Menopaws app which related that Galina had blue eyes, was five foot four inches tall with a slender build. Her hair was brown, and her favorite snack was mushroom and sour cream potato chips.
“She should be killed for that alone,” I muttered as I clicked out of the app. Hair and eye color were useless, they were far too easy to change. Height was harder to disguise, but it could be done. Lifts, crutches, wheelchairs, platform shoes—any of those could give an impression of a few inches gained or lost. Tamara was forty, brown eyes, black hair, and five feet even which scared the bejesus out of me. I’d learned the hard way over the years—the smaller the dog, the bigger the bite.
I shoved the phone to the bottom of my bag, hiding it under essentials for the train. Minka had handled our papers, getting a fresh set prepped from her guy in Stockholm who met up with us in the Vienna airport for an obscene amount of money. We had minimal trip gear, just a small day bag each with the basics. Since we were traveling carry-on only, we couldn’t even bring Swiss Army knives, so when we landed in Podgorica, we split up, both to finish our shopping and to elude any potential tails. We didn’t really think Galina was still watching us—she’d broken off to take care of whatever deal was going down on the train—but we’d been trained too well to let down our guard completely. We planned to rendezvous on the train the next evening, traveling separately and ready for whatever might come.
When my bag was packed, I looked around the hotel room, a cheap single in a small hotel near the station, busy enough to be discreet, crappy enough to be overlooked. Before a hit, there’s always that moment. Whether the lodgings have been a five-star hotel with hot-and-cold running butlers or a youth hostel with shared toilets and the stink of cheap weed, there’s always a moment when you’re packed but you haven’t walked out the door. And that’s when the thought comes. Not really a thought, just the briefest flicker of an impulse: stay . You have papers—good ones, impeccable ones that would pass the scrutiny of the most zealous border guards. You have some money. Nobody will hunt you down. You could just stay there, inhabiting the personality you’ve put on like a snail shell. You could hang pictures and put down roots. You could get a real job instead of this endless loop of make-believe, this merry-go-round of cover stories and covert assignments.
But you don’t. Because the person you’re supposed to kill has been chosen for a good reason. Whatever contract exists between human beings, a contract of decency and common humanity, they’ve broken it. If life is a chessboard, they’re the players that have gone rogue, the knight riding diagonally across the board, smashing whatever is in his path, the king who refuses to stop at one space. The basic rules that apply to the rest of the world— thou shalt not kill , for starters—don’t matter to them. They do as they please, and they don’t care about the carnage they leave behind. Somebody has to put the chessboard to rights, pick up the wrecked pieces and set it back to the start. So you pick up your bag and you close the door behind you, just like you’ve closed a hundred other doors. And you know that every time you do, you’ve left another piece of you behind.
—
I didn’t meet up with the others until we were on the train, each of us making our way solo to the compartment Minka had booked for us. If the rolling stock had been a toy, it wouldn’t exactly have been “mint in box”—more the “played with hard and sold for a quarter in a garage sale” kind of train. Our compartment was narrow and utilitarian, the sort of accommodations Spartans would have turned down as being too luxurious, but only just. The cars were clearly holdovers from the old days, back when Yugoslavia was still a country held in Tito’s iron grip as he thumbed his nose at Moscow. Our compartment was a sleeper with berths three tiers high. The upper berths had been folded back to show some truly questionable art—landscapes of Montenegro done in a style I like to call “Nouveau Fascist,” all stylized trees and square-jawed men with equally square-jawed women in kerchiefs marching over the hills. The lower berths served as banquettes facing each other across a narrow table. A wide window was the cleanest thing in the place. Toilets were down the corridor, and we’d been warned to bring our own toilet paper. Simple and no frills.
I arrived first, dressed neatly with no remarkable labels or accessories. Whatever the Eastern European version of Chico’s is, I was wearing it. Elasticized and forgettable, which is exactly what I intended.
Helen arrived next wearing the habit of an Orthodox nun and looking distinctly rotund.
“Did you stuff your habit?” I asked as I shoved my weekender bag out of sight.
“I have it on good authority that Balkan trains are either boiling hot or freezing cold. I am gambling on the latter and came prepared. Two layers under the habit,” she told me, lifting the skirt portion to show her woolen leggings.
“Where did you read that? The Museum briefing guide?” One of the lighter tasks of the Museum’s Provenance department was compiling guidebooks to every conceivable destination. In their spare time, they inserted updates, but some places were too far off the beaten path to merit much attention. The last time I’d logged into the archive, I’d poked around the Argentina section just for fun. The Pampas prison where I’d been held for three months was still listed as open, but I’d burned it down when I left. I’d have to tell Naomi to make a note.
Helen shook her head. “Lonely Planet. Did you know the world’s oldest olive tree is here in Montenegro? Two thousand years.”
“Maybe we’ll see it when we’re done,” I told her. But I didn’t really figure we would. This job never left much time for sightseeing.
Next came Mary Alice wearing a sweatshirt that had been decorated with vacation Bible school slogans in puff paint. She wore a scrunchie in her hair and socks with her SAS shoes.
“Not a goddamned word,” she said as she shoved her bag into the storage cubby.
I grinned. “Would you like to tell me about your close, personal relationship with Jesus?”
She flipped me the bird. “Did you know they don’t check tickets on this train? Second-class passengers grab seats in first and nobody cares. I can’t decide if that’s democratic or annoying. Also, this is the only sleeper car. The others are Serbian seated carriages.”
“What does that mean?” Helen inquired.
“Seats arranged like Amtrak,” Mary Alice said. “Those poor bastards are going to be sitting up for the next twelve hours. And I brought snacks,” she added, holding up a bag. The plan was for us to be off the train well before the final destination in Belgrade—actually, we would be long gone before the train even crossed the Serbian frontier. We’d ditch somewhere before the Montenegrin border patrol boarded the train to check papers, and make our way on foot to the nearest town to arrange transportation back to Podgorica and catch flights from there back to Venice. With any luck, we’d be safely back in Italy before the Serbian police even figured out that something worth investigating had gone down.
“What kind of snacks?” I asked just as Natalie arrived. Whatever Mary Alice was about to say died on her lips at the sight of her. Nat was dressed as a proper Montenegrin grandma with layers of peasant skirts, three separate cardigans, and a headscarf. But what really sold it for me was the live chicken under her arm.
“Natalie, what the fuck ?” Mary Alice hissed. “You cannot bring a live chicken on this train.”
“Of course I can,” Nat said calmly. “She’s very tame. Her name is Nula.”
“That just means ‘zero,’?” I told her.
Nat cuddled her chicken closer. “I know. It’s the first number I found in the phrase book. You’re a lovely chicken, aren’t you, Nula?”
“I am having a fever dream,” Mary Alice said as she flopped onto one of the banquettes. “That is the only possible explanation.”
“Oh, keep your panties on,” Nat replied. “I must have seen a hundred women dressed just like me roaming around Podgorica and every damned one of them had a chicken.”
“A hundred?” Helen pressed gently.
“Okay, maybe one. But she looked really convincing as a peasant grandmother,” Natalie said.
“She looked convincing because she was a peasant grandmother.” Mary Alice’s teeth were gritted so hard, if she chewed coal she’d be spitting diamonds.
“I don’t think we’re supposed to say ‘peasant,’?” Helen put in primly.
“Sorry,” Mary Alice said with a sincere stab at contrition. “Economically disadvantaged Montenegrin.”
“Natalie,” I asked politely, “have you considered where that chicken is going to shit?”
Nat stared at the chicken for a long minute. “No,” she said in a small voice.
Mary Alice groaned and Natalie turned on her. “Well, excuse me for attempting to introduce a little verisimilitude to my cover, Mary Alice. Posing as a missionary from Iowa will give you every opportunity to play the judgmental bitch card. I’m sure you have a full house by now.”
Mary Alice turned to lambaste her, and I held up a hand. “Not now. We’re supposed to be strangers, remember? Fighting is for people who know each other.”
Helen and Nat murmured noises that I decided to take as agreement. Mary Alice gave me a sullen look. “Idaho,” she grumbled to Natalie.
“Pardon me?” Nat asked with exaggerated politeness.
“It’s not Iowa. It’s Idaho.”
“And I know just where you can shove your potatoes, Mary Alice.” Before Nat could get herself on a roll, the chicken started making soft clucking noises. “I hope you’re happy. You have upset my chicken.”
“That chicken is going to be soup before this trip is over with,” Mary Alice promised her.
“Enough,” I said with just enough edge in my voice to make them sit up. “No more English for you two,” I said to Helen and Nat. “You’re supposed to be unobtrusive—at least as unobtrusive as you can manage.” I shoved a phrase book at Mary Alice. “And you’re supposed to be learning. Look up how to ask people about the state of their souls and if they’ll send money to your church.”
“?‘Da li pri?ate Engleski?’?” she read out, butchering the pronunciation. While she did that, Helen and I, nearest the window, kept a discreet lookout for anything interesting. Helen’s gaze was raised just above the newspaper she held in front of her face. I pretended to study a travel guide as we surveyed the passengers still boarding. There weren’t many. Trains used to make this route in seven hours, and they were always packed. But with the decline of the rolling stock, the trip had lengthened. It was scheduled for twelve hours but often took more than fourteen. Montenegrins who could afford their own cars drove them, abandoning the train for hatchbacks and minivans. Now it was mostly less affluent locals and some crunchy granola backpacker types who made the trip by rail, and carriages were never crowded. Conductors didn’t much care where you sat, and dining cars were a distant memory. Instead there was a guy who boarded at Podgorica with a cooler full of beers he sold for a euro each before hopping off again. It was a pretty good hustle, I thought, although I’d have been happier to see someone with a box full of tacos.
We waved off the beer seller, focused on the people mingling on the platform. Galina and Tamara had left Venice by train, and Minka had been able to confirm for us that they’d changed a few times but kept a slow, steady progress towards Podgorica, following Pasha’s original itinerary. But if we were right about their reasons for being on the train, whoever they were meeting would be boarding here.
People watching is always fascinating, and never more so than when you’re assessing a crowd for a potential mark. Most of the people we kill are not very nice; they’re aware of the fact that there are folks who’d like to see them dead, so they take precautions. They might travel with a pack of bodyguards which is a nuisance but never insurmountable. In fact, having bodyguards often means people lower their watchfulness because they’re paying someone else to sniff out threats. (See: Lazarov, Pasha.) Or they might become reclusive—a complete pain in the ass because it means setting up a cover identity you have to inhabit for months in order to get close enough to kill them. Or they might take to wearing disguises—an option they choose more often than you’d expect, mostly because it’s fun, I think. People have always enjoyed an excuse to wear a mask—Carnevale, Halloween, costume parties. They love dressing up and trying on a new face. The problem is, most people aren’t nearly as good as they think they are at test-driving a new personality. Identity isn’t just your collection of facial features and the clothes on your back. It’s how you hold yourself, how you communicate, how you move through the world. It’s a thousand little details that are so ingrained in our behavior, they might as well be etched in cathedral stone. It takes years of training and careful study to be able to truly inhabit a new skin, and if you know your mark well enough, you can spot them through any disguise.
With Galina, we had almost nothing to draw on, no Provenance dossier, no social media profile. She was less than a shadow; she was a silhouette projected on a white screen, the details completely obscured. That wasn’t surprising. Lots of our marks kept a low profile and someone running a club drug operation wouldn’t want to attract the wrong kind of attention—from law enforcement agencies or from criminals higher up in the food chain who might decide to take a bite out of her business. Or she might have just been so damaged from her father’s assassination and her mother’s death that she had kept herself aloof, clutching her privacy like a security blanket. Who am I to psychoanalyze anybody?
There was a final flurry of activity and the train began to move, although it always looks to me like it’s the platform moving away from the train and not the other way around. We pulled out of the station and in a matter of minutes were out of Podgorica proper and on our way. Podgorica was only an hour from the coast, at the foot of the mountains. The route we followed to the east climbed the Dinaric Alps, the landscape changing from canyons to forests to river gorges and everything in between. It was rugged country with no highway system, just the same narrow byways that had been cart tracks under the feet of Roman centurions. Those roads had been traveled by a lot of folks since—Greeks, Illyrians, Ottomans, Austro-Hungarians. Anybody who’d had an empire in that part of the world had crossed Montenegro at some point.
“What do you think it is?” Nat asked. The chicken had settled down politely at her feet but I still didn’t trust it. Chickens have reptile eyes and my policy is never to turn my back on one.
“What do we think what is?” Helen asked.
“The thing Galina is after. Schematics for a new superweapon? Priceless statue? Only child of the kingpin of a narco-collective?”
“A child?” Mary Alice stared. “You think she is stealing a child?”
Natalie shrugged. “For ransom. Nobody thinks it’s going to happen until it does.”
“What even is a narco-collective? Did you just make that up?”
“Of course not. I read about it in—”
That’s the point when I tuned out. Natalie and Mary Alice can spar for days, and as long as it didn’t end in bloodshed, I wasn’t going to put a stop to it. We were all feeling out of sorts and maybe a little friendly sniping would take the edge off.
Instead I followed my own train of thought, considering the question Nat had just posed. The possible answers were too many to count. Galina could be after just about anything. Lots of folks in the west think that since Montenegro joined NATO, it’s one of us. But like most places in the Balkans, it’s not that simple. Russians still kept an eagle eye on the warm-water ports of its Adriatic coast, and while Montenegro was a democracy, it was a flawed one. If that assessment sounds harsh, it isn’t mine. Blame The Economist Intelligence Unit. They’re paid to evaluate the realpolitik of various countries so other people can decide where to put their money. Stable governments make for good investments, but there’s money to be had in rocky ones too. Montenegro’s most prominent politicians kept power by circulating through different offices in order to circumvent term limitations. Returning to private life is a luxury you can’t afford if you’re afraid of being prosecuted for a little light corruption or attempting a coup or two. The last coup attempt—allegedly—had been done at the behest of the Russians and it wasn’t as far in the past as you might think. And Russians sniffing around all but guaranteed Chinese interest. Beijing had been loud and proud about wanting to spend a fair bit of coin in Montenegro to build a highway system as part of their modern Silk Road project. Being meddled with by two much larger countries would have divided Montenegrins enough, but there are always the usual historical Balkan issues of Serb vs. Croat vs. Albanian vs. Greek—you get the picture. And then there were the folks who kept a candle burning in front of Tito’s picture with a rheumy-eyed longing for the old days. Sure, he might have been a dictator and they didn’t get to vote very often, but crime rates were low, employment was high, and there had always been a chicken in every pot when Josip was in charge, they would tell you.
So what pretty crumbs did any of that leave for Galina? Club drugs were lucrative, but pretty small potatoes, criminally speaking. It made sense that she was looking to level up in the underworld, maybe branch into something really juicy. Blackmail material on a Montenegrin politician? Something that could help her engineer a coup of her own? Plans for a secret military base? None of that seemed likely, and even if it were, so what? It didn’t change our job. She was out to kill us, so our only option was to get there first.
There’s a moment in every trip where the train picks up speed and everybody seems to settle in to traveling. We hit that point just outside of Podgorica. The noise lessened considerably. A conductor moved through the cars, checking tickets, but without any of the urgency you find on slicker trains. He gave our tickets the most cursory of glances and didn’t even raise an eyebrow at the chicken.
“Told you,” Nat muttered as he left. She craned out the compartment to watch him move to the next car. “He’s gone. It’s time.”
We’d gone over the plan enough to know what we were doing. We’d split into teams of two to check the entire train, Nat and Helen going forward, Mary Alice and I aft. We were looking for Galina or Tamara, but failing that, anything out of the ordinary. We had our notifications set to push on the Menopaws app, our only means of communication when we were separated. Nat said good-bye to the chicken, who clucked softly to herself as we left. We’d decided not to be precious about it. Whoever found Galina got to kill her, it was that simple. We weren’t going to waste time on making a full posse out of it.
With one final look, we split up. Nat and Helen moved up the corridor while Mary Alice and I turned the opposite direction. We glanced into each compartment as we went, surprising a few folks, but most just gave us curious looks and went back to what they’d been doing. There were grandmas—none with chickens though—and grubby-looking backpackers doing the Bar-to-Belgrade trip. A small group of scouts took up several compartments, shooting spitballs at each other as their troop leaders passed out sandwiches and smacked the perpetrators gently on their heads. Beyond that lay the toilet, which doesn’t bear thinking about, so I won’t.
Mary Alice put her mouth close to my ear. “Unless she’s disguised herself as a Boy Scout, I think this car is clear.”
“I wouldn’t put it past her,” I said. I opened the door and we stepped into the narrow no-man’s-land between carriages. The next car was just as uneventful, same grandmas, same backpackers, until we got to the last compartment. We’d been peeking through windows or open doors, but this compartment had the door jammed, the window shade drawn.
I flicked up a brow at Mary Alice. She shrugged. “Could be napping. Or having sex.”
“Or something else,” I said. “I hope you know the Montenegrin for ‘sorry to interrupt’ because I’m going in.”
I grabbed the handle of the sliding door and pulled. It took three tries before it gave way, and I realized it wasn’t because the door was jammed. In the track where the slider was supposed to run, something was blocking the way. Well, some one , to be exact. A body had fallen against the door, wedging it shut until I applied enough pressure to pop it free of the slider track. When it came loose, I was able to move the body aside easily enough but that was probably because of all the blood. Before it coagulates and gets sticky, blood is slippery, especially if there’s a lot of it.
Mary Alice and I ducked in and shut the door again, putting our backs to it as we surveyed the scene.
“What the hell ?” she breathed. The air was thick with the metallic smell of fresh butchery, and I made a quick, professional assessment. The body was wearing a business suit, stark black and good quality. Not custom, but not off a cheap rack either. His shoes were Italian, and the watch on his wrist was a low-end but perfectly decent Rolex. The nails were buffed. This wasn’t a generic messenger or goon. This had been someone’s number two or maybe three, the kind of guy who functions well as a cog in a criminal machine because he gives the easy impression of respectability. He wouldn’t make the big decisions, but he’d have the ear of the guy who did. His body was slender, not the overblown muscles of the enforcers, and his hands looked pretty youthful—early thirties I guessed.
If you’re wondering why I didn’t just look at his face, it’s because he didn’t have one. The only sign of violence on his body was the lack of a head, and it took me a minute to realize it had rolled under a lower berth.
“I am not picking that up,” Mary Alice said flatly.
“We don’t have to,” I said, patting him down for a wallet. I found it in his hip pocket which meant getting a little friendlier with his corpse than I would have liked. There was no phone which meant the killer had probably taken it.
I flipped the wallet open and checked the contents. Some Montenegrin currency which I left, a few family pictures—cute kids who I hoped wouldn’t miss him too much—and a prayer card with a little charm dedicated to St. Harlampy. He’s a Montenegrin martyr who’s supposed to protect the faithful from unexpected death. “Wouldn’t count this one as a win,” I told the icon before I turned to the driver’s license.
The name was Montenegrin and meant nothing to me, but I’d have bet my last jelly doughnut it would find a match on a list of Jovan Muri?’s known associates.
“Looks like Galina has already collected what she came for,” Mary Alice said.
“With Tamara’s help, I’d bet, because I’d be surprised if Galina likes getting her hands dirty,” I replied. The head had been taken off neatly, with a good knife, recently sharpened. There were a few deep, clean cuts on the palms and fingers, defensive wounds. They weren’t significant, probably because he hadn’t expected to be jumped, especially by a woman who wouldn’t pass the You Must Be This High to Ride This Ride sign at Disneyland.
“Goddammit,” Mary Alice said. “If she’s got it—whatever it is—she might already be off the train.”
“Not a chance,” I said absently. I’d spotted something half-hidden under the seat—not the one with the head. The other side. In fact, it was the head that made me look there in the first place. The eyes were still open, staring across the floor towards the other side of the compartment. Rising like a little island in the lake of blood was a piece of wood. I plucked it out of the gore. It was narrow, marked with deep pits of old staples. A series of letters and numbers had been inked on it.
It was easy to see what had happened. The courier—the guy currently lying around without a head—must have opened the parcel he was carrying. Then, before he could pack it up again, Galina and her henchwoman had arrived to take it off him. In the struggle, it had been damaged a little—and only a little, I hoped. The fact that the wood had been left behind meant they’d cleared out in a hurry. They should have retrieved it. The whole thing would be more valuable intact.
“What is it?” Mary Alice asked.
“Something I never thought I’d see in this lifetime.”
I took a tissue from my pocket and wrapped up the fragment of wood with the numbers on it. It stuck out from my pocket just a little, but there was no way I was leaving it behind.
Then I went into the corpse’s pockets again and retrieved his keys. I stripped off his jacket and tied it awkwardly over what was left of his neck. It wasn’t tidy, but at least it would sop up some of the blood. Together Mary Alice and I hefted the corpse up into the third berth. I retrieved his head and put it into a pillowcase, tucking the whole thing above the shoulders. The naked pillow went over that, and if you peeked in the compartment quickly, you’d just see a guy sleeping under his pillow. Mary Alice waited with the body while I retreated to the toilet compartment. I’d seen a bucket in there and I filled it with tepid water and some slimy soap. It took three trips to sluice the blood off the floor and we had to use Mary Alice’s jacket to wipe up the last of it. I bundled the jacket out the window before Mary Alice and I left the compartment. There was no way to lock the door behind us, but at least if anyone peeked in, it wouldn’t be immediately obvious that there was a corpse inside. The last thing we needed was an emergency stop with police swarming the train because somebody had stumbled over a headless body.
We hurried back to our compartment, Mary Alice messaging the others as we went. They met us a few minutes later. We closed the door and lowered the shade. The chicken was asleep, swaying gently with the movement of the train as it gathered speed on the climb to the Pannonian Plain.
“What did you find?” Helen asked.
“Headless body,” Mary Alice told her.
“Holy shit,” Nat replied. “Whose?”
“We think it’s one of Muri?’s guys,” I said.
“The courier,” Mary Alice clarified.
“Then Galina has whatever she’s after,” Helen said.
“Shit, shit, shit,” Nat added.
Mary Alice sighed. “Natalie, remind me to get you a thesaurus for Hanukkah next year. Just to mix things up.”
“Galina’s still on the train,” I reminded them. “It hasn’t stopped, and unless she has a death wish, she’s not jumping on this trip.” I nodded towards the window where a panorama of mountain scenery was unfolding. On the corridor side of the train, we were up against a wall of rock. On the other side, it was a sheer drop to the valley below, far enough that anybody who took a flyer would be in worse shape than Jovan Muri?’s courier. “We’ve got to find her before we cross into Serbia,” I added.
“Sooner than that,” Mary Alice said. “You forgot about passport control and it comes around twice—once leaving Montenegro and once entering Serbia. They’ll check every compartment and they’ll find him.”
“I don’t want to be questioned by Montenegrin police about a headless body, but I really, really don’t want to be questioned by Serbian cops,” I said. Montenegrin law enforcement didn’t have much of a reputation internationally, but the less said about Serbian skull-breakers the better. Anybody who had anything to hide gave them a wide berth. (Train pun intended.)
“Agreed.” Helen checked the map and looked at her watch. “We’re running a little behind schedule, but not much. We stamp out of Montenegro at Bijelo Polje. That’s where the first set of border guards will come aboard.”
“How long?” Mary Alice asked.
“Best guess? At the rate we’re going, I’d say maybe eleven pm . Quarter to if we’re unlucky.”
“There’s more,” I told them. “I know what Galina took.”
I put the piece of wood I’d taken from the crime scene on the narrow table. The markings were faint with age and harder to see now that blood had seeped into the grain, but there was no mistaking the letters and numbers.
“It’s a piece of a stretcher from a painting,” Nat said quickly.
“That’s a Nazi inventory code,” Mary Alice said, peering closely.
“Not just any inventory code,” I corrected.
Helen was the first to get it.
“Oh my god,” she said, sitting back against the banquette.
Nat looked around. “What is it? What am I missing?”
“Hell if I know,” Mary Alice said. “There were thousands if not millions of paintings marked with inventory codes by the Nazis when they were looting half of Europe. How do we know the significance of this one without a catalog?”
“Because we’ve seen it before,” I told her. “Fermín Bosque.”
“Holy shit,” Mary Alice said. To her everlasting credit, Nat didn’t say a word.
I looked at Helen who was wearing an expression like she’d just witnessed the second coming. “Do you really think she’s on the train?”
“Billie just said Galina has to still be here,” Nat told her.
“Not Galina,” Helen said softly. “ Leda. ”