"Mr. Vantricht," Mara said, keeping her voice at the register of the room, "I'll ask you to give us one minute."
He looked at her with the direct, unhurried appraisal of a man who had spent thirty-one years waiting and had developed a considerable tolerance for being asked to wait further. Then he looked at Lena.
Lena was still. Not the composed stillness she had carried since Mara sat down — this was the particular stillness of someone recalculating.
"One minute," she said.
Vantricht tilted his head fractionally and turned his attention to the older men by the window with the studied courtesy of a person removing themselves from a conversation while remaining in the room.
Mara kept her voice very low. "How long have you been in contact with him?"
"Six weeks." Lena did not look at Vantricht. "He reached me through the same channel I used to begin building the file. I didn't invite him to Venice. I told him nothing about tonight."
"How did he find the bar?"
A pause that lasted one second too long. "I don't know."
Mara looked at the envelope between them. "You were about to tell me where the original is."
"I was."
"Can you still tell me with him here?"
Lena's eyes moved to Vantricht's profile and back. "What I am about to tell you changes what he is able to do. It changes what everyone at this table is able to do." She pressed one finger against the table edge. "I need to know that the painting goes back to his family through a legitimate process — not through him walking into a location and picking it up. That is not restitution. That is recovery, and recovery without documentation can be challenged, seized, litigated away from them again." Her voice was precise and without sentiment. "I have been building this for eighteen months. I will not have it end in a calle at midnight because a Belgian man couldn't wait."
"I hear you," Mara said.
"Do you agree?"
"I agree."
Lena looked at her for a moment, then turned to Vantricht. "You may stay. You will not speak until I've finished. If you interrupt me I will leave and you will have nothing."
Vantricht turned back from the window. He nodded once, with the grace of a man who knew when he was beaten on points.
Lena opened her mouth.
The door opened again. This time Mara did turn immediately, because Lena's face had just told her it was not catastrophic and she needed to see why.
Sione. Dark jacket, slightly out of breath, phone in hand. He looked at the table — at the addition of Vantricht, at the envelope — and absorbed it in one sweep without breaking stride. He pulled a chair from the adjacent empty table and sat at the end, close to the door.
"There's something you need to hear before she continues," he said quietly.
Lena closed her mouth.
"The Antwerp specialist," he said. "The one who produced the work upstairs." He looked at Mara. "He's in Venice. Has been since yesterday."
The lamp above the bar did not sway this time. Everything was very still.
"His name?" Mara said.
"Roelandt Maes. Sixty-three. He's been operating out of Antwerp for thirty years — restoration, conservation, and, when the commission is right and the client is trusted, reproduction work. He is not a forger in the criminal sense. He is a craftsman who has occasionally accepted work he shouldn't have." Sione set his phone face-down on the table. "He arrived on the afternoon train from Milan. He checked into a small hotel near the Frari under his own name, which means either he doesn't think anyone is watching or he wants to be findable."
