Page 126 of Gave Proof Through the Night

“Yeah,” Ivy says. “But they know people in this town. The kind that can make someone disappear.”

Nobody needs me to spell out what kind of people she’s talking about.

“Okay, Ginger.” I turn to her. “Are you ready to fence some goodies?”

She cracks her knuckles. “Bring it on.”

That’s when the back gate rattles and Dale wheels in the housekeeping cart from the van he’d parked in the back alley.

“Who wants to do the honors?” I ask.

Everybody looks at everybody else. Nobody moves.

“I think Suri should do it,” Ginger says. “She’s the one who almost got blown up in the vault.”

“That’s not what happened,” Suri says, already reaching for the latch. “But I appreciate the sentiment.”

Suri crouches at the cart and comes up with something flat, a thin sandwich of foam board and glassine paper taped shut like a shipping envelope. She peels back the tape with two fingers, the paper crackling free. Everybody gasps at once.

“Is that—?” Ivy starts.

“Oh my Lanta,” Tanya says.

“Raphael’s Portrait of a Young Man!” Ginger’s voice wobbles on the last word.

“That’s not a fake too, is it?” Rue asks, a little skeptical now.

The whole room goes reverent. Ginger takes it from Suri with both hands like it’s made of eggshells, turning it toward the light, running her thumb along the raw edge of the board without ever touching the paint itself.

“I’d need forensic tests,” she says. “But I’m like ninety-five percent certain this is the real deal.”

Nobody says anything for a second. This painting’s been missing since the Nazis stripped it out of a Polish collection in 1939. It’s right up there with the Amber Room panels and a Dürer drawing nobody’s laid eyes on in eighty years. There are hundreds of thousands of artworks still unaccounted for, and here we are, standing around a piece of history lost since World War Two.

Two more come out of the cart the same way, flattened and taped like contraband cheese. One of them, Ginger says, is Bosschaert, a still life last seen before the war ever started.

The third one is a floral still life. I wouldn’t be able to pick it out of a lineup, but Ginger looks like she’s about to pee her pants.

She turns it over, checks the back, checks it again. Steps back, and shakes her head in disbelief.

“Mignon,” she finally says. “Abraham Mignon. This one’s been at the top of a restitution list for years. Someone thought they saw it on a real estate listing a few years ago. They were able to recover one painting after putting the family on house arrest.”

She sets it down like it might bruise. “When the Argentine police finally raided the place, this one was already gone.”

She looks at all three paintings, then up at me. “You’re going to have two very peeved German-Argentinians on your hands.”

“Not if you fence them first,” I say.

“They’ll sit for a hot minute in the basement of my gallery,” Ginger says.

“I trust you,” I tell her.

She’ll know how to get them off her hands when she returns to New York.

Once the paintings are stacked against the wall, Suri reaches into the cart and goes quiet.

She lifts out a leather attaché case and sets it on the worktable. When she opens it, there are thirty to fifty folded paper parcels. She gently taps the paper so the diamonds slide into a neat line onto the velvet fabric she’d rolled out.

Suri is silent for a solid ten seconds. She holds one stone up between two fingers. Then another. Then a third. Nobody interrupts her. This is Suri’s Super Bowl and every one of us knows it.