Mara did not move from the table.
Sione looked at her. "You're going to meet her."
"Yes."
"He may have had the call traced. If he knows she contacted you—"
"Then he already knows," Mara said. "And if he already knows, moving or not moving changes nothing." She put the phone in her coat pocket and looked out at the Giudecca canal, where the lights of the opposite bank lay in long, broken lines across the water. "She said she's running out of time. That means tonight matters. Where is she now?"
He had already looked it up. "There's a bar near Sant'Agnese. Small, back entrance off the calle. She knows it — she mentioned it to a contact of mine eight months ago when she was still deciding whether to come forward."
Mara looked at him.
"You've been aware of Lena Dahl for eight months."
"I've been aware that someone inside Brancati's operation was considering movement. I didn't have a name." He kept his voice even. "I didn't know it was her until you said it."
She held that for a moment. "What do you know about the contact she used?"
"Careful. Discreet. No longer in Venice." He paused. "She chose you because they told her to trust you. Whoever she's been working with on the outside — they vouched for you specifically."
This was new information and she filed it without reacting. "Send me the address."
The bar was three tables and a narrow counter, the kind of place that had survived fifty years of tourism by being invisible to it. A single lamp above the bar threw amber light down onto polished wood. Two older men sat near the window with their backs to the room. No one else.
Lena Dahl was already there. She sat at the table furthest from the door, her coat folded across her lap, a glass of water in front of her that she had not touched. She was younger than Mara had expected — late twenties, possibly thirty — with the careful, contained posture of someone who had been practising composure for a long time and had nearly perfected it. She looked up when Mara came in and did not look at the door behind her, which meant either she had already checked it or she had stopped being careful an hour ago when she made the call.
"You came alone," she said.
"Does that matter?"
"No." She gestured at the chair across from her. "Please."
Mara sat. She did not remove her coat.
"You said you had something you should have sent before I went in," Mara said. "What changed?"
"I lost my window." Lena's accent was northern — Dutch or Flemish, the consonants clipped at the edges. "I had arranged for the document to be waiting for you at the estate office when you arrived — left with the administrative contact, sealed, your name on it, framed as supplementary provenance material. Routine. Brancati would never have seen it." She pressed her fingers flat against the table. "But he arrived two days early. He was not supposed to be in Venice until Thursday. When I realised he was already in the palazzo, I couldn't move the document without him noticing the access."
"So you left it."
"I left it where it had always been — inside the provenance folder, where I put it three weeks ago. I hoped you would find it before he did." A pause. "You found the other thing instead. The paper Cantor hid."
"You knew about that too."
"Cantor told me. Six weeks before he died." Her voice did not change but something behind it did — a quality of restraint that was different from composure. "He called me, not Brancati. He had decided to stop. He wanted me to know that what was in that palazzo was not what it appeared to be, and that there was a name hidden in the margin, and that if anything happened to him, I should make sure someone found it." She looked at the glass of water. "Something happened to him."
The two men by the window laughed at something. The lamp swayed slightly in a draught from the door.
"The document," Mara said.
Lena reached into the inside pocket of her folded coat and produced an envelope — white, standard office weight, unsealed. She set it on the table and kept two fingers resting on it.
"Before I give you this," she said, "I need you to understand what it does and does not do. It is not a confession. It is not a police document. It is a letter of commission — written in 2019, signed by Brancati, directing a specialist in Antwerp to produce a replacement panel consistent with a specific work in the estate's collection." She paused. "The letter does not use the word forgery. It uses the phrase technical reproduction for archival purposes. But it specifies the dimensions, the medium, the age-distressing requirements, and the provenance documentation to be fabricated alongside it." Her fingers moved and the envelope crossed the table. "His name is on it. His personal signature. And the reference number he uses on that letter matches the reference number on the substituted work's estate file."
