Artifice by Sharon Cameron

Author:Sharon Cameron [Cameron, Sharon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

“Thou shalt not extinguish thy anger, but master it …”

—Commandment Three, from The Dutch Ten Commandments to Foil the Nazis

ISA SAT BACK down at the table in front of the café, apologizing to Mrs. Breem and promising to pay. Mrs. Breem brought her another coffee, for which she would also pay, and went back inside to prop up her feet on a heater. Isa sipped, considering her life with her father. Her life ever since her mother had died.

And so many things made sense now. So many things that should have never been.

Her bones had a marrow of vermilion. It was a color that made her want to cry.

Michel finally came, more than half an hour late, walking casually around the corner from Kalverstraat to slide into her table’s second seat. He wasn’t a Nazi today. He wasn’t even a young man wearing ill-fitting pants. He had on a light blue shirt and a pair of dark trousers. Street shoes. She barely knew him.

“I am sorry to be late,” he said. “But you should look very glad to see me, because I am out with a woman I have taken up with, and I am almost certainly being watched.”

Isa had to glance behind her before she realized the “woman he’d taken up with” was her. “What do you mean you’re being watched? Who’s following you?”

“Hofer, I would think. Not personally, of course. But he is very concerned that I could go to Gurlitt, and that Gurlitt might snatch his prize. We need to be seen, and I did not want them to have your address.” Michel smiled. “So say hello, and make my lies look real, please.”

Isa sat forward, elbows on the table, smiling, coffee in hand. “Hello,” she said, and then, “His prize?”

“Oh, yes,” Michel replied. “Hofer is hooked, sight unseen. He did not expect another Vermeer to surface on this trip, and Goering has been … insistent. You would think that men who have risen so high in their profession might wonder at the sudden emergence of so many Vermeers, but … they do not.”

Isa put her chin in her hand. She glanced at Kalverstraat. She couldn’t see anyone. Michel leaned even closer.

“I think he will pay more than Gurlitt. He wants to pay more than Gurlitt. So that Goering may brag, the greedy bastard.”

He’d said it with a smile. Isa wasn’t smiling.

“How much more?”

“Enough to brag about.”

Isa tried to imagine handing two million guilders to Truus.

She’d have to get a trunk.

“So, Sofonisba …”

Isa opened her eyes, dreamy.

“… we have very little time. Hofer will want to make sure I am speaking the truth, that I am not acting on Gurlitt’s behalf, trying to humiliate him. So I will be watched. I have invented a story about a young woman, to explain how I came across the painting. It also explains my neglect of duty, and my purchases on Gurlitt’s account …”

So that’s where his money was coming from.

“… and my purchase of civilian clothes. My young woman does not wish me to be identified, because she is married.

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