Louis returned the following day and questioned the secretary who had so chirpily answered the phone to me. If she was under the impression that he was a cop when she answered his questions, then that was clearly some kind of misunderstanding on her behalf and nothing to do with any vagueness on Louis’s part. She was just a caretaker, hired from a temp agency and required to do nothing more than answer the phone, read her book, and file her nails. She hadn’t seen Sekula or his secretary since the day she’d been hired, and the only means of communication she had for him was through an answering service. She said that some other policemen had called in to the office, following the discovery of the basement room in Williamsburg, but she could tell them nothing more than she had told Louis. She did believe, though, that someone had visited the office after hours, as she thought that some items might have been moved from the secretary’s desk and the shelves behind it. It was also her final day, because the agency had called to say that she was being transferred to another job and should simply activate the answering machine before she left that evening.

“We still have Bosworth, and Stuckler,” I said. “Plus, the auction is due to take place this week, and if Reid and Neddo are right, that map fragment is going to make some people break cover.”

Louis stood abruptly and left the room. I looked to Angel for an explanation.

“It’s a lot of things,” he said. “He hasn’t slept much, hasn’t eaten. Yesterday they released Alice’s remains for burial, and Martha took her home. He told her that he’d keep looking for the men who killed her, but she said it was too late. She said that if he thought he was doing all this for Alice, then he was lying to himself. She wasn’t about to give him a dispensation to hurt someone just so he could feel better about his life. He blames himself for what happened.”

“Does he blame me too?”

Angel shrugged.

“I don’t think it’s that simple. This guy, Brightwell, he knows something about you. Somehow, there’s a connection between you and the man behind Alice’s death, and Louis doesn’t want to hear that, not now. He just needs time to work it out in his own way, that’s all.”

Angel took a beer from the cooler. He offered me one. I shook my head.

“It’s quiet here,” he said. “Have you spoken to her?”

“Briefly.”

“How are they?”

“They’re doing okay.”

“When are they coming back?”

“After all this is over, maybe.”

“Maybe?”

“You heard me.”

Angel stopped drinking and poured the remainder of his beer down the sink.

“Yeah,” he said quietly. “I heard.”

And then he left me alone in the kitchen.

Joachim Stuckler lived in a white two-story house on an acre of waterfront property just outside Nahant, down in Essex County. The land was high-walled and protected by an electronic gate. The grounds were neatly tended, and mature shrubs masked the walls on the inside. From the front, the main house looked like an above average dwelling, albeit one that had been decorated by drunken Greeks nostalgic for their homeland-the façade boasted more pillars than the Acropolis-but as I passed through the gate and followed the driveway I caught a glimpse of the back of the house and saw that it had been extended considerably. Large picture windows gleamed smokily in the sunlight, and a sleek white cruiser rested at a wooden jetty. The lapse of taste in decoration aside, Stuckler seemed to be doing okay financially.

The front door was already open when I pulled up in front of the house, and Murnos was waiting for me. I could tell from his expression that he wasn’t one hundred percent behind his boss’s decision to invite me over, but I got that a lot. I’d learned not to take it personally.

“Are you armed, Mr. Parker?” Murnos asked.

I tried to look sheepish.

“Just a bit.”

“We’ll take care of it for you.”

I handed over the Smith 10. Murnos then produced a circular wand from a drawer and wiped it over me. It beeped a little at my watch and belt. Murnos checked to make sure I wasn’t concealing anything potentially lethal in either, then led me to a living room, where a short, stocky man in a navy pinstripe suit set off by a raging pink tie stood posed by an ornate sideboard, just a few decades too late for Life magazine’s celebrity photographers to immortalize him in glorious black-and-white. His hair was dark gray, and brushed backward from his forehead. His skin was lightly tanned, and he had very white teeth. The watch on his wrist could have paid my mortgage for a year. The furnishings in the room and the art upon the walls could probably have covered the rest of Scarborough’s mortgages for a year. Well, maybe not out on Prouts Neck, but most of the folk on Prouts Neck didn’t need too much help with their bills.

He rose and stretched out a hand. It was a very clean hand. I felt kind of bad about shaking it, in case he was just being polite and secretly hoped that I wasn’t going to sully him with any form of contact.

“Joachim Stuckler,” he said. “I’m pleased to make your acquaintance. Alexis has told me all about you. His trip to Maine proved quite expensive. I will have to compensate the men who were hurt.”

“You could have just called.”

“I have to be-”

Stuckler paused, poised like a man in an orchard searching for a particularly ripe apple, then plucked the word from the air with a delicate hand gesture.

“-cautious,” he concluded. “As I’m sure you’re aware by now, there are dangerous men about.”

I wondered if Stuckler, despite his posturing and vague effeminacy, was one of them. He invited me to take a seat, then offered me tea.

“You can have coffee, if you prefer. It’s just a habit of mine to take midmorning tea.”

“Tea is fine.”

Murnos picked up the receiver of an old black telephone and dialed an extension. Seconds later a flunky arrived carrying a tray. He carefully set out a big china pot and two matching cups, along with a sugar bowl, milk, and a small plate of lemon slices. A second plate contained a selection of pastries. They looked crumbly and hard to eat. The cups were very delicate and lined with gold. Stuckler poured a little tea into a cup, then allowed it to flow more freely once he was content with the color. When both cups were filled, he asked me how I preferred to take my tea.

“Black is fine,” I said.

Stuckler winced slightly, but otherwise he hid his displeasure manfully.

We sipped our tea. It was all very pleasant. We just needed some dim bulb called Algy to wander in wearing tennis whites and carrying a racket and we could have been in a drawing room comedy, except that Stuckler was considerably more interesting than he appeared. Another call to Ross, this time answered a little more quickly than before, had given me some background on the neat, grinning man before me. According to Ross’s contact in the IWG-the Interagency Working Group, created in 1998 to delve into, among other things, the records relating to Nazi and Japanese war crimes in order to assess evidence of cooperation between U.S. organizations and individuals of questionable background from the former regimes-Stuckler’s mother, Maria, had traveled to the United States with her only son shortly after the end of the war. The INS tried to have a great many of these people deported, but the preference in the CIA and, in particular, in Hoover’s FBI, was to keep them in the States so they could report back on Communist sympathizers within their own communities. The U.S. government wasn’t too particular about whom it welcomed in those days: five associates of Adolf Eichmann, each of whom had played a part in the “Final Solution,” worked for the CIA, and efforts were made to recruit at least a further two dozen war criminals and collaborators.