"You've been here before, right?" she asked.
"No."
"No? Why not?"
"I guess I just never got round to it."
Something in his tone told her not to probe further. Not now, at least. She decided to change the subject. "That must be it — the Hermitage."
"That's it," Tom confirmed.
"So that one's the Winter Palace." She pointed at the extravagant Baroque building on the left, its white-and-pista-chio-colored facade adorned with gleaming sculptures and covered with an intricate pattern of decorative motifs that flickered with the golden sparkle of a thousand tiny candles.
"I think so."
"It's huge." She shook her head in disbelief.
"I read that if you spent eight hours a day here, it would take seventy years just to glance at every single one of its exhibits."
"That long?"
"Thirteen miles of galleries, three million items… Actually, that sounds pretty quick."
"And you really think the missing Bellak painting is in there?" she asked skeptically. Even now, she wasn't sure that their combined logic had led them to the right place.
They had reached the riverbank and were standing on the Palace Bridge, looking out toward the Peter and Paul Fortress. Tom leaned against the parapet, deep in thought, before answering.
"Have you ever heard of Schliemann's Gold?"
Dominique nodded. From what she could remember, back in the 1870s, Schliemann had been a pioneering archaeologist. Obsessed with The Iliad, he had set about finding the site of Troy, using Homer's text as his map. In 1873 he had finally hit pay dirt, uncovering the remains of the city and a hoard of bronze, silver, and gold objects that he christened Priam's Treasure, after the ancient King of Troy.
"Just before he died," Tom explained, "he gave the treasure he had found in Troy to the National Museum in Berlin, where it stayed until 1945."
"Until 1945? You mean the Russians took it?" Dominique guessed.
"Exactly. The Soviets were almost as obsessed with securing valuables and art as the Nazis. When Berlin fell, Stalin sent in his 'Trophy Squad,' a team specially trained to search out and confiscate as much Nazi loot as possible. They found Priam's Treasure in a bunker beneath the Berlin Zoo, along with thousands of other artifacts. Of course, no one knew all this until recently. The treasure was thought to have been lost or destroyed in the war. Only in 1993 did the Russians finally admit that they had it, only to claim ownership in lieu of reparations. It's on display now in the Pushkin Museum in Moscow."
"And you think something similar must have happened to the painting?"
"That's certainly what the telegram was saying," Tom confirmed with a nod. "It makes sense. Himmler's headquarters would have been one of the Russians' key strategic targets. If Himmler really couldn't bring himself to destroy Bellak's painting of his daughter, I think there's every chance the Russians found it there and carried it back here as a trophy. The problem is going to be finding it."
"Why's that?"
"You know I said there are three million items in there?" She nodded. "Well, only one hundred and fifty thousand are actually on display. The other two million eight hundred and fifty thousand are housed in vast attic storerooms and underground depositories. What's more, most of what they've got down there is so poorly catalogued that they probably don't even know they've got it themselves."
"I still don't understand why Bellak would have cooperated with the Order by hiding messages in his paintings?"
Tom shook his head. "As far as I know, Bellak was already dead by the time the Gold Train set out, so he can't have been involved. Besides, the clue you found wasn't hidden in the painting itself but had been added later by making those holes. I imagine they chose his paintings precisely because of who he was and their subject matter. After all, who would have suspected that a painting of a synagogue by a Jewish artist would have led us to a hidden SS crypt?"
There was a long silence. As she stared pensively out over the water, Dominique was suddenly struck by how, apart from the isolated perpendicular thrust of the Admiralty spires, the Peter and Paul Fortress, and the Mikhailovsky Castle, the city seemed to be dominated by horizontal rather than vertical lines, like layers of rock strata. Partly this was due to the matching rooflines that had largely been kept strictly to that of the Winter Palace or below, but principally it was due to the incredible abundance of water. Everywhere that the flat surfaces of St. Petersburg's forty rivers and twenty canals touched the shore, it created the illusion of a perfectly straight line.
She was about to point this out to Tom when she caught the distant look in his eye and thought better of it.
"Tom, what's really kept you from coming here before?"
He didn't answer right away, his eyes firmly fixed on the far shore. "When I was eight, my father bought me a book about St. Petersburg. We used to read it together — well, look at the pictures, mainly. He told me that he'd bring me here one day. That we'd organize a trip, just the two of us. That he'd show me all its secrets. I guess I was waiting for him to ask me. I never thought I'd come here without him."
Dominique was silent. Then, surprising herself more than anyone, she reached up and gave him a kiss on the cheek.
CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE
Boris Kristenko felt guilty. It wasn't just that he had slipped out of the office and that if his boss found out there would be questions. He was more worried about letting his colleagues down. With only three weeks to go till the grand opening of the new Rembrandt exhibition, they were working flat out. He should have been back at the museum, coordinating the hanging. But he'd made a promise and he liked to keep his promises — especially when they were to his mother.
So he hurried along, head bowed, trying not to make eye contact for fear someone from work might recognize him, although he could just as well have asked them what they were doing out themselves. That realization emboldened him somewhat, and he allowed himself to look up, although he quickened his step to compensate for his bravery as he crossed the Neva and headed along the Leytenanta Schmidta embankment.
His mother wanted three Russian dolls. Apparently she couldn't get such nice pieces out in the suburbs, although Kristenko doubted she'd even looked. He knew his mother; this was her way of getting him to both pay for the items and deliver them.
Not that they were for her, of course. The matryoshka were intended as gifts for her nephews and nieces over in America, her brother having swapped the cold Russian winters for humid Miami summers about fifteen years ago. God, how Kristenko envied him.
It was a small shop, catering mainly for tourists, with a fine selection of Russian souvenirs. He purchased the dolls and emerged back onto the street, checking his watch. He'd been away twenty minutes. Maybe if he ran he'd be back before anyone had noticed he'd even gone.
The first punch, to the side of the head, caught him completely unawares. The second, he saw coming, although it still winded him as it slammed into his stomach. He dropped to the ground, gasping for air, his head ringing.
"Get him over there." He registered a voice, then felt himself being dragged by his arms and hair into an alleyway. He didn't have the strength or the will to fight them. He knew who they were and he knew he couldn't win.
They threw him to the filthy cobblestones, smeared with rotting food and dog excrement. His head bounced off a wall, and he felt a tooth break as his chin connected with the bricks.
"Where's our money, Boris Ivanovich?" came the voice. He looked up and saw three of them, looming over him like upended coffins.