The next morning, Helen awoke to an awfully quiet house. She padded downstairs to a grandfather clock striking six thirty. She could hear Hugo snoring from one of the bedrooms downstairs.

She turned on the light in the kitchen and found the coffee carafe still hot.

Hmm…

Leland dragged herself into the kitchen, walked past Helen without a word, and poured the last drop of coffee into her mug.

“Did you get any sleep?” Helen asked.

“A few hours more than Reuben and Dario—” Leland stopped. “Oops.”

“Have they left?”

“They’ve gone to look for eggs.” Leland avoided Helen’s gaze. “I’m sorry. I told them I wouldn’t say anything.”

“And you haven’t. All we talked about was the lack of sleep some of us are getting.”

“I do have a note for you.” Leland dug around her pockets and fished out a wad of crumpled paper.

Helen flattened it out on the kitchen table. It was from Reuben.

“‘I’ll see you in Venice Friday late morning. We’ll pick you up at the airport.’” She read the note aloud.

“They’ve gone ahead of me. Why not take me with them?” Helen made more coffee.

Leland seemed to be waiting for another cup.

“Anything more about Ondrej?” Helen asked.

“His death was unusual. He had lived in Thessaloniki most of his life. And then he walked off the waterfront into the sea and drowned?”

“Was he drunk?”

“His body was never found.”

“Isn’t that interesting? Two days later, his widow sent three eggs to your mom.” Leland rehashed what they had already known.

“Assuming three was all he had.”

“Exactly.”

Helen sat down across from Leland at the kitchen table. “Suppose Ondrej had more than three Petros eggs…”

“Would he try to sell some of them in the black market?” Leland asked.

“Palmeiro would be all over it. Who else?”

“Costas.”

“Reuben is the only Costa left.” Helen sipped coffee. “His uncle also drowned in the ocean, supposedly.”

“So many watery deaths.”

“Speaking of the Petros eggs, have you tracked down the last known locations of those eggs?” Helen asked.

“Funny you should ask me that. They were scattered everywhere in Europe in the last twenty years.”

“What’s funny about that?” Helen got up from her seat. She peeked into the refrigerator to find something that looked like breakfast.

“Seven out of the twelve eggs showed up at the same time as the sightings of other lost pieces of artwork,” Leland said.

“Like what kind of artwork?”

“Get this. Panels of the Amber Room that used to be in Catherine the Great’s Winter Palace.”

Helen nodded, remembering the information that Hugo had sent her only the day before. “It was begun in the early eighteenth century by the king of Prussia. About fifty years later, the entire room ended up in Russia as a state gift.”

“Right. Then during World War II, Nazi Germany wanted the room back. The entire room. Imagine that.”

“Wasn’t it in 1943 or something?” Helen wasn’t too clear on the history. It hadn’t been something she had any interest in—only because no client had asked her to find the Amber Room.

The reproduction had been made, and the lost original panels seemed to have faded into the cobwebs of past history and folklore.

“Well, 1943 was the last time the Amber Room was ever shown to the world,” Leland said.

“But in the seventies, pieces of it sold in the art underground.”

Leland could barely contain her excitement. “Word is, Palmeiro and Frederico Costa had a bit of a sparring going on. Each trying to be the first to reconstruct at least one wall of the Amber Room.”

“Palmeiro?”

“Apparently he has been looking for anything related to the Amber Room for the last forty-five years. He’s ninety-three years old now, and informers told Dario that he had given up on the search.”

“This is the same patriarch of his family of thieves who is hosting the ball tomorrow night.”

“There is no family of thieves.” Leland got up, poured herself another cup of coffee. “Palmeiro has outlived everyone in his family. He’s the only one left.”

“And he still hasn’t found what he has been looking for all these years.”

“Nope.”

“How sad.” Helen glanced at her pocket watch. It was still working. The mechanics were in shape. One couldn’t tell that it had a homing beacon in it.

Helen returned the pocket watch into its place. She had kept it all these years.

She caught Leland before the hacker ran off. “You were going to show me something, remember?”

“Ah yes.” Leland motioned for Helen to go with her.

“And this is why Dario called you.”

“Right. INTERPOL borrowed the mini receivers from the SIS,” Leland explained. “I’m familiar with them. The manual switches are not hard to activate.”

“Only getting to them is.” Helen sighed.