The hotel was three floors and no lift, the kind of building that had been a family residence before it became a place for people to sleep briefly and leave. The stairwell smelled of old plaster and the particular damp that came from canals pressing against foundations for five hundred years. Mara went up alone. Sione waited below at the entrance with Vantricht, who had agreed, after a conversation conducted entirely in looks, to remain outside.
Room seven was on the second floor. She knocked twice — not loudly, not tentatively — the knock of someone who belonged in a corridor and was being straightforward about it.
Footsteps. A pause at the door that lasted three seconds, which was the pause of someone looking through a peephole or deciding whether to pretend they were not inside.
Then the handle moved, and Roelandt Maes opened the door.
He was sixty-three but looked assembled from parts of different ages — the hands older, the eyes younger, the face somewhere in between, carrying the specific exhaustion of a man who had been managing something for a very long time. He wore a dark shirt untucked over grey trousers, the clothes of a man who had been sitting at a desk for hours. He looked at Mara.
And she watched him understand that she was not who he had been waiting for.
Not fear — something more complicated. A recalibration, rapid and practiced, the expression of a man who had learned that surprises were rarely good and had developed the habit of absorbing them without showing the seam.
"Ms. Selles," he said.
She had not told him her name. She noted this without showing it. "Mr. Maes."
He stepped back from the door. Not an invitation precisely — more an acknowledgement that the alternative, closing it, was no longer an option that served him. She came in.
The room was small and very orderly. A single bag, closed and squared against the wall. A jacket on the back of the chair, hung with care. On the desk: a lamp, a glass of water, and two envelopes — both open, both face-down. Whatever was in them, he had read and replaced.
He did not offer her the chair. She did not take it. They stood on opposite sides of the small room in the amber light of the desk lamp with the canal-side window behind him showing the dark water three floors below.
"You were expecting someone else," she said.
"Yes."
"Who?"
He looked at the envelopes on the desk. Not at her. "There is a restitution officer. From the commission — the European cultural body. She contacted me six weeks ago. She had been tracing Brancati's provenance documentation and she had found an inconsistency in the material I — contributed to." He paused at the word. Did not replace it. "She asked to meet. I put her off twice. Then I stopped putting her off."
"You came to Venice to meet a restitution officer," Mara said.
"I came to Venice because this is where the matter ends," he said. "One way or another."
He crossed to the desk, picked up the nearer envelope, and held it out to her. She took it. Inside: a single printed page, official header, a name and contact number at the bottom. A summons — gentle in language, unambiguous in implication. He had been asked to provide a voluntary statement regarding his involvement in the production of works later identified as substitutions within a provenance investigation.
Works. Plural.
She looked up. "How many?"
His jaw moved. "The de Hooch is the one that matters. The others were — smaller. Private commissions, different clients. Two of them I no longer believe were legitimate reproduction work." He said it with the flatness of a man reading a list he had recited many times alone. "I understood this at the time and I accepted the commission anyway."
"When?"
"The first was 1994. I was thirty-one. Brancati was not the client for the first — he came later. By the time he sent me the commission letter in 2019, I had already done enough that refusing seemed — disproportionate." He sat on the edge of the bed and looked at his hands. "This is the logic that compounds. You do the first thing and then the second thing is easier and by the third thing you are no longer a person who refuses."
