They were silent for a moment. Remembering faces. Remembering how far Vesper One was willing to go.

“Well,” Amy said. “Let’s get moving.”

Dan hung up the phone. Amy bent over the paper, her finger moving back and forth over the names.

She looked up at him. “We’re on the wrong track.”

“I didn’t know we had a track.”

“We keep focusing on the map itself. We should be thinking about the world around the map. What was going on in Europe at the time? What did all those names have in common?”

“They were all rich,” Dan said.

“The war,” Amy said. “It was 1932. World War Two was still years away. But the world was gearing up for it. The Nazis were coming to power in Germany.”

She accessed a search engine on the computer. Dan looked over her shoulder. “What are you looking for?”

“No idea,” she murmured. “But sometimes you have to go fishing.”

He saw her type in Jane Sperling, then start to scroll through material. “Interesting,” she said. “Jane Sperling was Jewish. Did she know her teacher was a Nazi? Hang on.” She tapped a few more words into the computer and then turned back to Dan. “Just what I thought. The Nazis took over the government in 1933. Jewish students were pressured to leave universities as early as 1932. Eventually, the Nazis expelled Jewish students from every university in Germany.”

“I didn’t know that part,” Dan said. “Those guys were nasty dudes.”

Amy looked up. “Why was she at the same auction as her Nazi professor? Coincidence? I just don’t buy it.”

He tried to follow Amy’s logic. He’d learned about World War II and the Nazis in school, had read books about it. But to put himself in the heads of the people who actually lived the horror of it – that was harder. Amy had a gift for it.

“She was a young girl alone – she was only nineteen,” Amy continued. “You can bet her parents wanted her to come home. Germany was turning into a scary place for Jews. But she stayed. She stayed, Dan!” Amy smacked the pillow next to her. “She had courage. So, maybe she knew that her Nazi professor was coming to bid on a famous historical document. The family who owned the de Virga was Jewish. Maybe she was trying to protect it!”