The pale rectangle was the first thing she saw.
Not the room — the room assembled itself in fragments, floor tiles and lamplight and the smell of old wood and something faintly chemical beneath it — but first, before any of that, the rectangle. Above the fireplace, at the eye-line of someone standing in the centre of the room: a section of wall slightly paler than its surroundings, approximately eighty by sixty centimetres, the plaster lighter where sixty years of lamplight had not reached it. A nail still set at the upper centre, the paint around it cracked and slightly darkened. A small brass hook.
Empty.
Mara stopped three paces inside the door. Sione came in behind her and stopped when she stopped. Maes came through last and did not stop at all — he walked forward two paces and looked at the rectangle and then looked at the nail, and something in his face went very still in the way that things go still when they have already decided not to become anything visible.
Vantricht was seated at the kitchen table. Across from him, in the chair that faced the door: a woman in her mid-seventies, grey-haired, her hands folded on the table in front of her with the composed deliberateness of someone who had decided to be still and was executing the decision carefully. She looked at Mara with the direct, slightly appraising expression of a person who has been expecting arrivals and is assessing whether this one is the last.
The voices they had heard through the door were coming from a radio set on the kitchen shelf. No one had turned it off.
"You should sit down," the woman said. Her Italian was Venetian-accented, unhurried, the vowels opened by decades in this sestiere.
No one sat immediately. Mara looked at Vantricht. He met her gaze with an expression she had not seen on him before — not the compressed patience of a man waiting for his moment, but something older and quieter. He had arrived first and seen the wall first and had been sitting here long enough to begin absorbing it.
"How long?" Mara said.
The woman understood the question. "They collected it on Saturday morning. Early — before nine. Two men, a van, a letter with the estate seal." She paused. "Everything was in order. The signature was his. I have managed this agreement for forty-one years and I knew the letterhead and I knew the seal and the signature matched every other document I had received from him." She looked at the rectangle on the wall. "I had no reason to refuse."
Sione sat down. Mara sat across from Vantricht. Maes did not sit. He had moved to stand near the fireplace, not looking at the woman, not looking at the rectangle — looking at the floor in the particular way of a man doing arithmetic about something that cannot be calculated.
"Tell me about the men," Mara said.
"The first spoke Italian well but formally, the way people speak it when they have studied it rather than grown up in it. The second did not speak. He handled the piece — correctly, the way someone handles a painting they have been trained to handle. No hurry." She unfolded her hands, then folded them again. "I asked for a receipt. The first man produced one — typed, dated, signed. His name and a firm address." She reached to the table beside her and produced a folded sheet of white paper.
She set it on the table.
Mara picked it up. A standard removal receipt — date, description of item (oil on panel, 17th century Northern European, one piece, sealed in fitted transit case), recipient's name, a firm address in Brussels. The firm name was not Brancati's. It was not a name she had seen in any of the provenance documentation. A law firm — four surnames run together with the formality of a Belgian practice established before anyone had decided such things needed to be brief.
She turned the paper so Vantricht could read it.
He read it. His expression did not change in any way that moved the muscles of his face. But something changed behind it — a quality of containment, the specific look of a man recognising a name he did not expect in a context he did not expect and choosing, very deliberately, not to react until he understood what reaction was correct.
"You know this firm," Mara said.
He looked at the paper for another moment.
"They represent me," he said. "In the Brussels restitution claim."
