“I’ll come right over,” I said to my wife, “I can be there by seven.”

But she said she didn’t want me. She said I should have been there already, that it had happened because I wasn’t there, because I had broken up the family and let nastiness into what should have been the safe refuge of our home, and do you now pretend to offer me comfort? I don’t want your comfort. You have no comfort to give. And now that your children have been taken by gangsters you will be even more free to do whatever it is you want, and do you want to know what I feel? I feel I was so foolish as to want to raise children with a man like you, I thought yes, I could fix it all with love, I could spread a blanket of love around all of us so that in this frightful world there would be one corner that would be for us alone but no, you didn’t want this, you tore it to pieces my poor little blanket and now what will you do, Jake, on what basis will you mourn for your children? Will you even miss them very much? I don’t even know that and so how can you come and sit with me and give me comfort?

And a good deal more in this vein, with me making excuses and defense and for God’s sake Amalie what are you doing? Have the police been notified? And all sorts of operational stuff that I wanted her to focus on, not to mention the thought (which I was not ready to share with her) that the only reason anyone would have snatched my kids was to trade them for the Item. Which I had not got, and had not much hope of getting if Crosetti was right, and on and on talking past each other like people in a postmodernist play, and eventually she said she didn’t want to talk with me at all anymore and asked to speak with Paul. I gave him the phone and sat on the bed, dull and paralyzed, staring at the desk, which happened to be in my direct line of sight. The desk was covered with neat stacks of paper and folders in various colors into which I was arranging the results of my recent legal work, my laptop computer glowed invitingly and the demons put into my mind the thought that oh, well, I still had my work; no family, shame about that, but still…and then followed the realization of what my work actually was, at which point I went matagalp, as I believe they call it in the Philippines.

I let out a howl like King Kong and began to tear the room apart. I overturned the desk, the chair crashed into the mirror, the laptop went clattering into the bathroom. I threw a fairly heavy Regency armchair through the window and was trying to toss all the papers and my briefcase after it when Paul tackled me. I am, of course, much stronger than he is, but he managed to get me in a painful hold of the type used to disable sentries and after a few seconds of painful, futile struggle my rage collapsed into sobbing. I believe I screamed and cried for some time and then the police came because of the broken window, but Paul was able to deal with that, since priests are nearly always given the benefit of the doubt.

Some hours later, having Xanaxed myself into dull apathy, the expected call came through. Paul took it on the hotel phone and handed it to me. The voice was accented, Russian maybe, but not Shvanov’s. This person was not threatening in any way, explained that he was not a barbarian, that my children were safe and comfortable, not taped to chairs in abandoned factories or anything, and neither you nor your wife was going to be so foolish as to involve the police. I assured him we would not. He said that all this could be handled in a civilized way, since I surely knew what they wanted, and that as soon as I had obtained it I should place an ad on such and such a Web site and they would contact me, and when I said I had no idea where the goddamn thing was he said, we’re patient and we have confidence in you and broke the connection. Nearly as soon as I hung up, my cell phone made the noise it makes when there’s a message waiting and I went into my mailbox and there was a photo of both kids smiling and a message from Imogen: “Hi, Dad, we’re okay and healthy and not getting tortured like in the movies. Don’t worry, okay?” Proof of life, they call it, very professional. And she really did sound okay.

Okay, fast-forward a little. Paul’s gone. He wanted to stay and talk but I kicked him out, mainly because he was taking the kidnapping worse than I was and I had no taste for his empathy. I’m alone in the wrecked suite. The management has placed heavy plastic over the window, but I told them I would pick up the place myself, to gather my important confidential papers. Money has been liberally schmeared among the staff. I am actually gathering up the papers and stuffing them any which way into my briefcase, when my eye falls on a thick pack of printouts that I don’t immediately recognize. On closer inspection I see it is the genealogy of the Bracegirdles that Niko prepared for me. I am about to toss it in the can when I notice that it’s the female branch, the one I never looked at. I sit on the edge of the bed and leaf through the stack and learn that Richard Bracegirdle has one surviving female relative in the direct line, a Mary Evans, born 1921, in Newton, Maryland, and still there residing.

It’s 9:30 P.M. here, afternoon on the East Coast. I get the number and make the call. A woman’s voice. No, she’s sorry to say Miss Evans is deceased. Recently deceased. My speaker is Sheila McCorkle, and she’s a church lady from Miss Evans’s church, a Catholic church, of which the late Mary had been a pillar. Mrs. McCorkle is helping to clean out the place, and my! Isn’t there a lot of old stuff! I say I’m calling from London, England, which impresses her, and I ask her if she has disposed of any of Miss Evans’s possessions. No, not yet. Why? I tell her that I am the lawyer for the Bracegirdle family and would like to inspect Miss Evans’s home to see if there are any important memorabilia extant, would that be possible? It would, she supposes. I get her home number and make an appointment for the following day.

Well, I was crazy, I suppose, to believe in such a long shot, but did not the great La Rochefoucauld say that there were situations so dire that one had to be half-crazy to get out of them alive? I called Crosetti and told him to get ready to move to London on my call, because I had a lead I was following up over in the States, and if it paid out I would need someone in England. A brief pause on the line. Shouldn’t he stay with Amalie? I said that this might be our only chance to get our hands on the Item, and that this was perhaps more critical to getting my kids back than any comfort he could give my wife. We made the arrangements and then I hung up on him and called our pilot.

By six the next morning I was in the air flying back across the Atlantic. We had a tailwind and made it to Baltimore-Washington Airport in slightly over seven hours. Three hours after that I was pulling my rental Lincoln up to the front of a modest frame house sitting white and weathered under leafless oaks and dogwoods, in Newton, Maryland. Mrs. McCorkle proved to be a stout fiftyish lady with a homely open face, dressed in country work clothes, an apron, and gloves. Inside, the place had the burdened atmosphere of a long life eviscerated by death. The cartons were out and Mrs. Mc. was valiantly trying to separate the salable from the junk. Miss Evans had been, she told me, a spinster (she used that now very unfamilar antique word), a sad case, had a fiancé once who didn’t come back from the war, had a father who lived too long, she took care of him, never married, poor thing, and yes, she was a Bracegirdle on her mother’s side, Catholic of course, from an old family she said, they came to America in 1679, one of Lord Baltimore’s Catholic shiploads, well, she could believe the old part, look at all this stuff, it looked like they hadn’t got rid of anything since 1680! Feel free to look around. Over there near the fireplace is the stuff I thought would sell. Her will left everything to St. Thomas’s, which is why I’m here.