He comes up next to me. “All good things, I hope.”
“We should make our way down to the car park,” Bes says abruptly. “Anders is waiting for us.”
I stick out my bottom lip. “What about breakfast?”
Cec offers me a thick napkin folded over. “Fear not, I braved the kitchen galley for a slice of today’s savory torte.”
I flip the top of the napkin back to see what he brought me. It reminds me of the one I whip up from time to time: its main ingredient is scrambled eggs, sprinkled with greens and tomatoes, and shaped like a long triangle. I gobble it up in three bites.
Licking my fingers, I look up to find Bes staring at me and Cec smirking.
“This should not surprise you,” I reason, mouth full.
Cec chuckles. “You sound like a ravenous hyena when you eat. I can only imagine how it looks.”
“I always look beautiful,” I tell him, “even when I’m eating.”
He bows his head. “Forgive me.”
I can’t help glancing over at Bes, whose attention lingers on my mouth a moment longer before he looks anywhere but at me.
The three of us make for the car park in silence. Which is fine with me, considering I’m a ball of nerves. I always get anxiousbefore heading out on an expedition: it’s a heady concoction of both excitement and fear of the unknown. It keeps me on my toes—and might also be giving me ulcers.
Once we reach the bottom of the stairs, we head for a different car than the one we drove in last time. It sits on its own facing the tunnel entrance, the color an unappealing dark brown, metal rusted around the wheels. Anders waits in the driver’s seat with the window down, facing forward.
“Will this hunk of junk make it to Liechtenstein?” I wonder.
Anders’s response is terse. “It drives fine. And we don’t have time to argue the matter.”
I raise a brow but don’t debate the topic.
Piling in, Anders and Cec seem to be purposefully avoiding each other.Wonder what that’s about.Bes takes the front passenger seat again, leaving Cec and I to fill in the back. I toss my bag onto the space between us.
Anders wastes no time starting the car.
I speak over the low rumble of the engine as Anders pulls forward and rolls us down the dark tunnel. “Remind me where exactly we’re going again?”
“Gutenberg Castle in Balzers,” Bes explains.
Another place I’ve never been.
We stop at the end and Bes gets out, heading toward the rock wall in the semi-dark. At the sound of a lever being pulled, he heads back and the mechanism starts.
Idling for a moment, we wait for the grate to drop. The amount of light doesn’t change much the further the mechanism draws it down, and I remember it’s early-morning and the sun hasn’t risen. Clearly, I’ve suffered greatly from sunlight deficiency.
I turn to Cec. “Didn’t you say this man was staying with an acquaintance?”
Bes answers instead. “The artist who owns the castle is named Egon Rheinberger. He studied art in Munich, as did our target,Hildebrand Gurlitt. It’s possible they crossed paths at some point, though we haven’t been able to confirm it.”
Cec rubs his eyes and adds his two cents. “Besides the fact that Rheinberger is over twenty years older than Gurlitt.”
“That doesn’t mean he wouldn’t be willing to help out a fellow aesthete, at the very least,” Bes argues.
I frown. “Do you think Rheinberger is one of the God Men as well? Or a Nazi?”
Bes considers this. “Unlikely, given he’s originally from Liechtenstein. Though he may be sympathetic to their cause.”
How could a person ever be sympathetic to any cause of the Third Reich?
