Loose And Easy

Okay. There was an end in sight.

“Let’s go,” he said, gesturing for her to lead the way.

No, he didn’t have PTSD, but neither had he come down from his last deployment. His instincts were still on high alert, which meant “weapon ready.” He hadn’t decompressed. Two weeks at home wasn’t enough to bring him back down, and neither was one beer in the Blue Iguana.

Dammit. He shouldn’t have drawn his pistol. Instincts were good; giving into irrational impulses wasn’t. But this place, this tu

Unfinished business, that was his problem, and he needed to finish it. He’d been carrying the letter in his pocket around with him for months, and he needed to deal with it.

Great. Now he had it all figured out-for about the hundred millionth time. He knew what he had to do. He just hadn’t found the guts to do it, and now he was in this damn tu

Nachman was ahead of them, still shuffling along in his slippers, until he came to a heavy steel door set into solid rock. Joh

Geezus.

He glanced at “Miss Esme” and realized she’d been here before. She’d expected all this. She wasn’t struck dumb with amazement, and he was damn close.

“Welcome to my closet, Mr. Ramos,” Nachman said, letting the steel door swing open.

Closet was a misnomer, but Joh

“Have you heard of the Alt Aussee, Mr. Ramos?” Nachman asked, leading the way inside, keeping his hand on the door.

“No, sir.”

“It’s a salt mine in Austria, southeast of Salzburg, a veritable labyrinth.”

When Joh

Joh

Perfect.

Not exactly nightmare material, but close- being locked inside an underground vault deep inside a mountain.

Very close, actually.

Maybe even a little closer than Joh

Dammit.

But the art was stu

“The Nazis used the Alt Aussee to store their plunder, literally thousands of pieces of stolen art,” Nachman said, “all of it nearly destroyed toward the end of the war, when the Germans set explosives inside the salt mine. Fortunately, the plot was discovered by the resistance fighters, and the bombs were never detonated. Some of those saved paintings reside here, now, Mr. Ramos, some of them awaiting proof of provenance so that I can return them to their rightful owners, many of them here because their rightful owners wish them to remain hidden from the world and safe, and a few of them rightly mine. And yet…” Nachman turned and looked at Esme.

“And yet some of Mr. Nachman’s most cherished pieces are still missing, pieces like the Monet,” she said.

“Pieces like the Henstenburgh,” the old man added.

“Yes, the Henstenburgh,” Esme echoed.

“And the…” Nachman’s voice drifted into a soft whisper.

“We don’t have to talk about it,” Esme assured him, and from the look on the old man’s face, pained and distressed, Joh

“No,” Nachman insisted. “Mr. Ramos should know the depth of our loss.”

Not necessarily, Joh

“There was a Rembrandt, Mr. Ramos,” Nachman continued. “And… and another, the other. They’re both priceless, utterly priceless, and they belong here.” The old man made a sweeping gesture with his arm, including the whole vault-and Joh

“Isaac,” Esme said gently, when Nachman simply continued to stand there, his arm outstretched, his gaze distant, his lips quivering.

Joh

Please, he thought. Please spare us Nachman’s tears.

Sobbing was only going to make things worse, besides making him personally uncomfortable. Nachman was old, yes, but he was still a guy underneath that silk bathrobe, which was as far as Joh

He looked to Esme, silently asking her to “get on with it,” whatever “it” needed getting on with.

“Isaac,” she said again. “May we continue with the authentication?”

It took the old man a moment, but in the end, he nodded and continued on to a table set up in the middle of the vault.

“My dear,” he said, picking up a handheld black light and handing her a small screwdriver from a tool kit on the table.

Esme had already reopened the case, and now she used the screwdriver to undo the wooden frame holding the protective covering in place. When the frame was disassembled, she laid the painting out on the table, and then Nachman hit a switch on the side of the table, and the lights went out.

All the lights.

In an instant, it was completely, heavily, oppressively pitch-fucking-dark in the vault, which in Joh

Extra perfect.

Now he couldn’t breathe.

Geezus.

He’d never had any freaking phobias. He didn’t have any phobias now, he was sure. He just couldn’t breathe, because suddenly some idiot in a fucking bathrobe had turned off all the lights-off, out, extinguished-and they were God knew how far underground with the weight of the whole freaking world bearing down on them, and-

The black light came on.

It wasn’t much, a purple glow falling on the Meinhard, but without anything to reflect. There wasn’t any Day-Glo paint anywhere, which was probably a good thing in this room.

“No luminescence,” Esme said, and he could just make her out, leaning over the painting, watching Nachman slowly run the light over the piece.

“Oh, my, Miss Esme, you are oh, so right,” Nachman barely breathed the words, his attention rapt. “I believe we have the Meinhard.”

He passed the black light over the painting two more times, with excruciating slowness, and all Joh

But he kept those words to himself. To anyone in the room, which he knew made for a very small audience, had they been able to see him, which he knew they could not, he would have appeared perfectly normal, perfectly stoic, not a flicker of emotion, not a twitch of a muscle.