They tiptoed past and kept on going. Finally at the end of the hallway, a door on the right was marked REKORDBURO. Amy nodded, and, after listening for a minute, they cautiously pushed it open. The office was empty.

“Whew,” Amy whispered after they closed the door behind them. “Lucky. I think this is where the records are kept.”

Unlike the elegant offices they’d glimpsed, this room was small and cluttered. A small desk with a fax machine was shoved in between a table and the door. The rest of the room was filled with filing cabinets. The old files could be right here.

“I don’t think they would have digitized their transactions from eighty years ago. But they should have dead files.”

Amy peered at the labels on the filing cabinets. “Bingo. These are the records from the 1950s. There are no records for the 1940s … they closed the business during World War Two … so … here!” She stopped before the last filing cabinet. “The records from the 1930s.” She opened the drawer and groaned. “This could take a while. They aren’t filed by the name of the object. It’s by date. We know it’s 1932, but we don’t know what month.” She handed Dan a hanging file. “Let’s get started. We have to get this done before the auction is over so we can leave with the crowd.”

She opened the first file. Records were kept in a tiny, neat handwriting. Amy slumped against the cabinet. “These are in German. Of course they would be.”

“It’s all right,” Dan said. “It will still say ‘de Virga.’”

She and Dan bent over the files. They had to keep the light off, so they used their penlights, flipping through paper after paper. Their eyes almost crossed trying to decipher the thin, spidery handwriting or faint typewriter ink, all written in a language they didn’t know. Occasionally, they would freeze if they heard footsteps outside. Amy’s palms were damp with nerves. If they got caught, what would they say?

Finally, just when wild goose chase was starting to dance around in Amy’s brain, Dan whispered, “Got it.”