She drops the phone, cupping her free hand under the revolver to steady it. She points it squarely at Vance, and Billie moves into the room. It is standard procedure in such situations, and it is how they have been trained to respond. Two possible places to shoot confuses a target, buying them extra time.
“It’s alright,” Vance says confidently. “If she hasn’t shot yet, she won’t.”
He almost finishes the last word before the baroness fires, clipping his collar. “I’ll be damned,” he mutters, clapping his hand to where the bullet has skimmed his skin, burning it before burying itself in a painting on the wall behind.
Before she can pull the trigger again, Billie puts her hand over the baroness’s. It feels like a collection of bird bones in Billie’s palm, the skin cold and lifeless, the spare flesh winnowed away until only the brittle framework remains.
She looks up at Billie with eyes that are black and bright with hatred. She says something that Billie barely hears, her ears still ringing from the sound of the shot in the small room. In the time it has taken Billie to reach the baroness’s side, she has swept the night table and seen the basket of knitting, balls of wool impaled by a pair of long steel needles.
Billie raises her hand and the baroness feels nothing, only a small punch angling down behind her collarbone. Then Billie removes her fist and the warmth comes, gushing wetly. The subclavian artery, nicknamed “the well” for how much liquid it pumps, is severed cleanly. A young and healthy person will bleed out in as little as two minutes from such an injury, but the baroness is already sinking. Her mouth opens several times but she says nothing else. She does not close her eyes but watches Billie as the life drains out of her, and the last thing she sees is a blond girl smiling in satisfaction at a job well done.
Vance’s hand is clapped to his neck, red seeping between his fingers; his face is a mask of fury and Billie realizes too late what she’s done. It has been more than a decade since the Museum has found a Nazi to execute and it should have been Vance’s kill.
“She was mine,” he says hoarsely.
“She shot you—”
Vance looms over her, putting his face so close to hers she can see her reflection in his pupils, upside down and very, very small.
“She. Was. Mine.”
For an instant Billie thinks he means to hit her, and her fingers tighten on the knitting needle still in her hand. She won’t strike first, but if he touches her, she won’t go down without a fight.
He glances down at the knitting needle and his grin is humorless and cold. “Little girl, if I wanted to punish you for this, you’d be dead before you ever saw me coming. You are not my equal, and don’t you ever make the mistake of thinking you are. I’ve forgotten more about how to kill people than you will ever learn, so finish the job and stay out of my way,” he orders. He points to the painting on the wall. “Get it down. It’s on the manifest.”
She grabs the painting off the wall and hurries out to the dining room, where Natalie is wrapping the last of the paintings. They form a chain, hauling the artworks into the cellar under cover of darkness until the house is stripped. They shift the paintings down the tunnel, barricading the cellar behind them as they go with piles of debris. They stack the art carefully and build another pile of debris to shield it from the excavation side.
Filthy and tired, they move to the stand of banana trees and wait. Carapaz has timed it perfectly, and just as they settle in beneath the wide green leaves, the gas tank explodes. He has left a trail of fuel through the house and it catches quickly, climbing the walls and lighting the roof. There is a muffled whoosh when the fire reaches the baroness’s room. The windows blow out from the heat and the warmth of it touches their faces as they watch.
“Holy shit,” Natalie breathes.
The walls of the house seem to inhale, puffing outwards as smoke billows into the night sky. Billie edges forward, but the roof suddenly collapses in a shower of sparks. The beams crash down with a roar and the night itself erupts.
But the plantation is isolated, the nearest neighbor several miles away, and no one comes. When the fire settles to smoldering ash, they turn to the paintings. Vance Gilchrist has the manifest, and as they identify each of the recovered pieces of art, he marks them off.
“Van Gogh. The Woman in the Wood. Caravaggio. The Gorgon Tisiphone. Bruegel. The Plague Doctor.”
To ship the paintings, they have purchased a set of Gujarati doors, heavily carved but not particularly valuable. Each door comprises a front and back panel, held together with strips nailed around the circumference. Their evenings have been spent carefully removing the nails securing the bottom strips, the section the Customs inspectors are least likely to scrutinize. The same small prybars are used to remove each heavy frame from the paintings and unpick the tacks securing the canvases to their stretchers. Freed, the canvases are slipped inside the opening in the doors. The doors will be crated up and shipped to an import furniture company in Milan that is owned by the Museum. From there, the paintings will be cleaned and remounted and quietly restored to the families from whom they were looted. The Provenance department prides itself on finding the lost owners, searching immigration records and gallery catalogs until they can piece together the rightful claims. Any art they cannot restore to its owners is held in a climate-controlled Swiss warehouse in the hopes they will someday be able to place it.