“Stuckler has two faces, and two collections. One he displays to the public, and the other is entirely private. The public collection consists of paintings, sculpture, antiques, all with ironclad provenance, and above reproach in both taste and source. The second collection betrays his origins. Stuckler’s father was a major in Der Führer Regiment of the Second SS Panzer Division. He was a veteran of the Russian front, and he was one of those who later carved a bloody trail through France in 1944. He was at Tulle when they hanged ninety-nine civilians from lampposts as reprisals for attacks on German forces by the Maquis, and he had gasoline on his hands after the slaughter and burning of over six hundred civilians at Oradour-sur-Glane. Mathias Stuckler followed orders, apparently without question, just as might be expected of one of the army’s elite.

“His other role was as a treasure seeker for the Nazis. Stuckler had a background in art history. He was a cultured man, but as with a great many cultured men, his taste for beautiful things coexisted with a barbarous nature. He helped to loot the Hapsburg royal family’s treasures from Vienna in 1938, including what some fool believed was the spear of Longinus, and he was a favorite of Himmler’s. Himmler had a particular passion for the occult; after all, this was a man who sent expeditions to Tibet to seek the origins of the Aryan race, and who used slave labor to renovate Wewelsburg castle to resemble Camelot, complete with round table. Personally, I don’t think Stuckler believed a word of it, but it gave him an excuse to loot and to acquire treasures for his own gratification and reward, which he set aside carefully as the opportunity arose.

“After the war, those treasures found their way to his son, and that is what we believe forms the bulk of the private collection. If the rumors are true, some of Goering’s art collection has also since found its way to Joachim Stuckler’s vaults. Goering attempted to send a train-load of stolen art to safety by train from his hunting lodge in Bavaria toward the end of the war, but the train was abandoned and the collection disappeared. A painting by François Boucher, stolen from a Paris gallery in 1943 and known to be part of Goering’s trove, was quietly repatriated last year, and Stuckler was reputed to have been the source. It seems that he made inquiries about selling it, and its provenance was discovered. To avoid embarrassment, he handed it back to the French, claiming that he himself had purchased it some years earlier under a misapprehension. Stuckler has always denied the existence of a secret cache, and claims that if his father did manage to assemble such a trove of looted items-and he has publicly stated his belief that this is a lie-then its whereabouts died with his father.”

“What happened to his father?”

“Mathias Stuckler was killed late in the summer of 1944 during an incident at the French Cistercian monastery of Fontfroide in the Corbière Hills. The circumstances have never been fully explained, but a party of SS soldiers, a number of civilian liaisons from the University of Nuremberg, and four Cistercian monks were shot to death during a confrontation in the monastery courtyard. Stuckler was doing his master’s bidding, but something unexpected occurred. In any event, the treasure at Fontfroide was denied him.”

“And what was the treasure?”

“Ostensibly a valuable fourteenth-century gold crucifix, various gold coins, a quantity of gemstones, two gold chalices, and a small, jeweled monstrance.”

“It doesn’t sound like the kind of haul that would drag the SS up a mountain in the face of the enemy.”

“The gold was a decoy. The real treasure lay in a nondescript silver box. It was a fragment of a coded map, one of a number of pieces placed in similar boxes during the fifteenth century, then dispersed. The knowledge contained within them has since been lost to us, which might have been for the best if the boxes too had been irretrievably lost.”

“Careless of you to mislay your own statue,” I said.

Reid flinched slightly, but otherwise gave no indication that my awareness of the Black Angel, and the story of its creation, was perhaps greater than he had anticipated.

“It wasn’t an item that the order was anxious to display,” he said. “From the beginning, there were those who said that it should be destroyed utterly.”

“Why wasn’t it?”

“Because, if one believes the myth of its creation, they feared that any attempt to destroy it would release what lay within. Those were more credulous times, I hasten to add. Instead, it was hidden, and the knowledge of its whereabouts dispersed to trusted abbots in the form of vellum fragments. Each fragment contains a great deal of ancillary information-illustrations, dimensions of rooms, partial accounts of the creation of the statue you mentioned-and a numerical reference alongside a single letter: either D or S, for ‘dexter’ or ‘sinister,’ right or left. They are units of measurement, all taken from a single starting point. Combined together, they are supposed to give the precise location of a vault. Stuckler was trying to assemble the map when he died, as many others before him had tried to do. The Fontfroide fragment disappeared following the attack and has not been seen since.

“You know that the statue is rumored to lie buried in the vault. That’s what Stuckler was attempting to recover, and that’s what the Believers are also trying to locate. Recent developments have given their search a new impetus. A fragment of the map was found earlier this year at Sedlec, in the Czech Republic, but subsequently disappeared before it could be examined. We believe that a second went missing from a house in Brooklyn some weeks back.”

“Winston’s house.”

“Which is how you came to be involved, for we now know that two women were present in the house when the killings occurred, and were subsequently hunted down in the belief that they were in possession of the fragment.”

“That’s two pieces, excluding Fontfroide.”

“Three more pieces, one from Bohemia, one from Italy, and another from England, have been missing for centuries. The contents of the Italian section have long been common knowledge, but the rest are almost certainly in the wrong hands. Yesterday, we received information that a fragment, possibly the missing piece from Fontfroide, may have been acquired in Georgia. Two veterans of World War II were found dead in a swamp. It’s not clear how they died, but both were survivors of an attack by SS soldiers near Fontfroide, the same SS soldiers who were subsequently killed at the monastery.”

“Was Stuckler responsible for the deaths of the veterans?”

“He may have been, although it would be out of character for him. We believe that he has at least one fragment, and possibly more. He is certainly driven in his quest.”

I couldn’t see Murnos colluding in the deaths of two old men. He didn’t seem like the type.

“Is Stuckler a Believer?”

“We have no evidence to suggest that he is, but they keep themselves well hidden. It is entirely possible that Stuckler is one of them, or he may even be a renegade, one who has chosen to take his chances against his fellows.”

“So it could be that he’s competing with them for possession of this map?”

“A fragment is due to be offered for sale this week at an auction house in Boston run by a woman named Claudia Stern. It is our understanding that this is the Sedlec fragment, although we cannot prove it. The map and the box went missing from Sedlec soon after the discovery, and before a proper examination could be made. We have investigated the possibility of taking legal action to stop the sale until its provenance can be determined, but we have been instructed that any such attempt would fail. We have no proof that it was taken from Sedlec, or that the Cistercian order has any claim to its ownership. Soon, all the pieces will be available for examination; and then the Believers will go hunting for the statue.”