LITMIR.BIZ

       ONE

       Pinkas Synagogue, Prague, Czech Republic

       2nd January – 10.04 a.m.

      The shattered glass crunched under the leather soles of Tom Kirk’s Lobb shoes like fresh snow. Instinctively, he glanced up to see where it had come from. High in the wall above him white sheeting had been taped across a window frame’s jagged carcase, the plastic bulging every so often like a sail as it trapped the biting winter wind. He lowered his gaze to the man opposite him.

      ‘Is that how they got in?’

      ‘No.’

      Rabbi Spiegel shook his head, his sidelocks bumping against his cheeks. Although smartly dressed in a dark suit and white shirt, he was thin and frail and the material seemed to hang off him like loose skin. A faded black silk yarmulke covered the top of his head, firmly clipped to a fierce growth of wiry grey hair. His face was hiding behind a wide spade of a beard, his watery eyes peering through small gold-framed glasses. Eyes that burned, Tom could see now, with anger.

      ‘They came in through the back. Broke the lock. The window…that was just for fun.’

      Tom’s face set into a grim frown. In his mid-thirties and about six feet tall, he had the lithe, sinewy physique of a squash player or a cross-country runner – supple yet strong. Clean-shaven and wearing a dark blue cashmere overcoat with a black velvet collar over a single-breasted grey woollen Huntsman suit, his short, normally scruffy brown hair had been combed into place. His coral-blue eyes were set into a handsome, angular face.

      ‘And then they did this?’ he asked, indicating the devastation around them. Rabbi Spiegel nodded and a single tear ran down his right cheek.

      There were eighty thousand names in all – Holocaust victims from Bohemia and Moravia, each painstakingly painted on the synagogue’s walls in the 1950s with family names and capital letters picked out in blood red. It was a moving sight; an unrelenting tapestry of death recording the annihilation of a whole people.

      The bright yellow graffiti that had been sprayed over the walls served only to deepen the unspoken weight of individual suffering that each name represented. On the left-hand wall, a large Star of David had been painted, obscuring the text underneath it. It was pierced by a crudely rendered dagger from which several large drops of yellow blood trickled towards the floor.

      Tom walked towards it, his footsteps echoing in the synagogue’s icy stillness. Up close he could see the ghostly imprint of the names that had been concealed under the paint, fighting to remain visible lest they be forgotten. He lifted a small digital camera to his face and took a picture, a loud electronic shutter-click echoing across the room’s ashen stillness.

      ‘They are evil, the people who did this. Evil.’ Rabbi Spiegel’s voice came from over his left shoulder and Tom turned to see him pointing at another piece of graffiti on the opposite wall. Tom recognised it as the deceivingly optimistic motto set above the gates of all Nazi concentration camps: Arbeit macht frei – work sets you free.

      ‘Why have you asked me here, Rabbi?’ Tom asked gently, not wanting to appear unfeeling, but conscious that anything useful that the rabbi might have to tell him could soon be lost in the emotion of the moment.

      ‘I understand that you recover stolen artefacts?’

      ‘We try to help where we can, yes.’

      ‘Paintings?’

      ‘Amongst other things.’

      Tom sensed that his voice still had an edge of uncertainty to it. Not enough for the rabbi to pick up on, perhaps, but there all the same. He wasn’t surprised. It was only just over six months since he had gone into business with Archie Connolly. The idea was simple – they helped museums, collectors, governments even, recover stolen or lost art. What made their partnership unusual was that, after turning his back on the CIA, Tom had spent ten years as a high-end art thief – the best in the business, many said. Archie had been his long-term fence and front man, finding the buyers, identifying the targets, researching the security set-up. For both of them, therefore, this new venture represented a fresh start on the right side of the law that they were still coming to terms with. Archie especially.

      ‘Then come upstairs. Please.’ The rabbi pointed towards a narrow staircase in the far corner of the room. ‘I have something to show you.’

      The staircase emerged into a vaulted room, the pale morning light filtering in from windows set high in the white walls. Here there were no graffiti, just a series of shattered wooden display cases and a tiled floor strewn with drawings and water-colours, some torn into pieces, others screwed up into loose balls, still more covered in dirty black bootprints.

      ‘This was a permanent exhibition of children’s drawings from Terezin, a transit camp not far from here. Whole families were held there before being shipped east,’ the rabbi explained in a half whisper. ‘You see, there is a certain awful innocence about war when seen through the eyes of a child.’

      Tom shifted his weight on to his other foot but said nothing, knowing that anything he might mumble in response would be inadequate.

      Rabbi Spiegel gave a sad smile. ‘Still, we will recover from this as we have recovered from much worse before. Come,’ he said, crossing to the far wall, ‘here’s what I wanted to show you.’

      A gilt frame, perhaps two feet across and a foot wide, hung empty on the wall, only whitewashed stonework visible where the painting should have been. Tom edged towards it.

      ‘What was there?’

      ‘An oil painting of this synagogue completed in the early thirties.’

      ‘It’s been cut out,’ Tom said thoughtfully, running his finger along the rippled canvas edge where the painting had been sliced from the frame.

      ‘That’s why I asked you to come,’ the rabbi said excitedly. ‘They could have left it in its frame if all they wanted to do was damage or destroy it. Do you think maybe they took it with them?’

      ‘I doubt it,’ Tom said with a frown. ‘The people who did this don’t strike me as art lovers.’

      ‘Especially not a painting by this artist,’ the rabbi agreed grudgingly.

      ‘Why, who was it by?’

      ‘A Jewish artist. Not well known, but dear to us because he lived here in Prague – until the Nazis murdered him. He was called Karel Bellak.’

      ‘Bellak?’ Tom drilled him with a questioning look.

      ‘You’ve heard of him?’ the rabbi asked, clearly surprised.

      ‘I’ve heard the name,’ Tom said slowly. ‘I’m just not sure where. I’ll need to speak to my colleague back in London to be sure I’m thinking of the same person. Do you have a photo of the painting?’

      ‘Of course.’ Rabbi Spiegel produced a photograph from his pocket and handed it to Tom. ‘We made a few copies of this one a few years ago for the insurance company. They told us the painting wasn’t worth much, but to us it was priceless.’

      ‘May I?’ Tom asked.

      ‘Keep

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