“Hey,” said Crane.

Hall looked at him.

“That’s our gold,” said Crane.

“What do you mean, ‘our gold’?”

Crane gestured at the sacks with the muzzle of his gun.

“We saved their lives, right? We deserve some reward.”

He pointed his gun at the monk.

“Leave it,” said Crane.

The monk didn’t even pause.

“Arret!” said Crane, then added, just in case: “Arret! Français, oui? Arret!

By then the monk had refilled the sacks and was lifting one with each hand, preparing to take them away. Crane sent a burst of gunfire across his path. The monk stopped suddenly, waited for a second or two, then continued on his way.

The next shots took him in the back. He stumbled, the sacks falling to the ground once again, then found purchase against the wall of the church. He remained like that, propping himself up, until his knees buckled, and he crumpled in a heap by the door.

“The hell are you doing?” said Hall. “You killed him! You killed a monk.”

“It’s ours,” said Crane. “It’s our future. I didn’t survive this long to go back home poor, and I don’t believe you want to go back to working on no farm.”

The old monk was staring blankly at the body in the doorway.

“You know what you got to do,” said Crane.

“We can walk away,” said Hall.

“No. You don’t think he’ll tell someone what we done? He’ll remember us. We’ll be shot as looters, as murderers.”

No, you’ll be shot, thought Hall. I’m a hero. I killed SS men and saved treasure. I’ll get-what? A commendation? A medal? Maybe not even that. There was nothing heroic about what I did. I turned a big gun on a bunch of Nazis. They didn’t even get a shot off in response. He stared into Larry Crane’s eyes and knew that no German had killed the monk with the chest wound. Even then, Larry had his plan in place.

“You kill him,” said Crane.

“Or?”

The muzzle of Crane’s gun hung in the air, midway between Hall and the monk. The message was clear.

“We’re in this together,” said Crane, “or we’re not in this at all.”

Later, Hall would argue to himself that he would have died had he not colluded with Crane, but deep inside he knew that it wasn’t true. He could have fought back, even then. He could have tried reasoning and waited for his chance to make a move, but he didn’t. In part, it was because he knew from past efforts that Larry Crane wasn’t a man to be reasoned with, but there was more to his decision than that. Hall wanted more than a commendation or a medal. He wanted comfort, a start in life. Crane was right: he didn’t want to return home as dirt poor as he was when he left. There was no turning back, not since Crane had killed one, and probably two, unarmed men. It was time to choose, and in that instant Hall realized that maybe he and Larry Crane had been meant to find each other, and that they weren’t so different after all. From the corner of his eye he registered the last of the monks make a move toward the church door, and he turned his BAR upon him. Hall stopped counting after five shots. When the muzzle flare had died, and the spots had disappeared from in front of his eyes, he saw the cross lying inches from the old man’s outstretched fingers, droplets of blood scattered like jewels around it.

They carried the sacks and the box almost to Narbonne, and buried them in the woods behind the ruins of a farmhouse. Two hours later a convoy of green trucks entered the village, and they rejoined their comrades and fought their way across Europe, with varying degrees of valor, until the time came to be shipped home. Both elected to stay in Europe for a time, and returned to Narbonne in a jeep that was surplus to requirements, or became surplus as soon as they paid a suitable bribe. Hall made contact with people in the antique business, who were acting in turn as middlemen for some of the less scrupulous collectors of art and relics, already picking their way through the bones of Europe’s postwar culture. None of them seemed very much interested in the silver box or its contents. The vellum document was unpleasant at best, and even if worth anything, would be difficult to dispose of to anyone but a very specialized collector. And so Crane and Hall had divided that item into two halves, with Crane taking the primitive silver box and Hall retaining the document fragment. Crane had tried to sell the box once, but had been offered next to nothing for it, so he decided to hold on to it as a souvenir. After all, he kind of liked the memories that went with it.

Larry Crane found some long matches in a drawer, and lit his cigarette. He was watching the empty birdbath in the backyard when he heard the sound of footsteps descending the stairs.

“In here,” he called.

Hall came into the kitchen.

“I don’t remember inviting you inside,” he said.

“Needed a light for my smoke,” said Crane. “You got that paper?”

“No,” said Hall.

“You listen here,” said Crane, then stopped as Hall stepped toward him. Now the two old men were face-to-face, Crane with his back against the sink, Hall before him.

“No,” said Hall. “You listen. I’m sick of you. You’ve been like a bad debt my whole life, a bad debt that I can never pay off. It ends here, today.”

Crane blew a stream of smoke into Hall’s face.

“You’re forgettin somethin, boy. I know what you did back there outside that church. I saw you do it. I go down, and I’ll take you with me, you mark me.”

He leaned in close to Hall. His breath smelled foul as he spoke: “It’s over when I say it’s over.”

Crane’s eyes suddenly bulged in their sockets. His mouth opened in a great oval of shock, the last of the cigarette smoke shooting forth through the gap, accompanied by a spray of spittle that struck Hall on the side of the face. Hall’s left hand extended in a familiar movement, closing Crane’s mouth, while his right forced the blade of the SS dagger up under Crane’s breastbone.

Hall knew what he was doing. After all, he’d done it before. Larry Crane’s body sagged against him, and he smelled the old man’s innards as he lost control of himself.

“Say it, Larry,” whispered Hall. “Say it’s over now.”

There was blood, but less than Hall had expected. It didn’t take him long to clean it up. He drove the Volvo around the back of his house, then wrapped Crane’s body in plastic sheeting from the garage, left over from the last round of renovations on the house. When he was certain that Crane was wrapped up tight, he placed him, with a little trouble, in the trunk of the car, then went for a ride into the swamps.

Tucson airport was undergoing renovation, and a temporary tunnel led from the baggage claim to the car rental counters. The two men were given a Camry, which caused the smaller of the pair to complain bitterly as they made their way into the garage.

“Maybe if you lost some of that weight off your ass, then you wouldn’t find it so damn pokey,” said Louis. “I got a foot on you, and I can fit into a Camry.”

Angel stopped.

“You think I’m fat?”

“Gettin there.”

“You never said nothing about it before.”

“The hell you mean, I never said nothing? I been telling you ever since I met you that your problem is you got a sweet tooth. You need to go on that Atkins shit.”

“I’d starve.”

“I think you are missing the point. Folks in Africa starve. You go on a diet, you be like a squirrel. You just need to nap, let your body burn off what’s already there.”

Angel tried to give the flesh on his waist a discreet squeeze.

“How much can I squeeze and still be healthy?”

“They say an inch, like on the TV.”

Angel looked at what he had clenched in his hand.

“Is that across, or up?”

“Man, you even have to ask and you in trouble.”