“I will,” he promised. “And perhaps I can convince the duchess to come, too.”
“Ahhhh, I pray that I live to see her again!”
They left him clinging to that hope and picked their way through the weeds back to the car. Natalie was a quivering bundle of nerves but the deep crease between Dom’s eyes kept her silent while he keyed the ignition, maneuvered a tight turn and regained the road that snaked up and over the pass. Neither of them spoke until he pulled into a scenic turnout that gave an eagle’s-eye view of the valley below.
When Dom swung toward her, his face was still tight. “Start at the beginning. Tell what you remember.”
She rewound the DVD again. She focused her growing absorption with both the codicil and Canaletto but glossed over the ignoble desire to rub a certain someone’s nose in her research.
“I was there in Vienna, only a little over an hour away. I wanted to see the castle the duchess had told me about during our interviews, perhaps talk to some locals who might remember her.”
“Like Friedrich Müller.”
“Like Friedrich Müller,” she confirmed. “I’d done a review of census records and knew he was one of only a handful of people old enough to have lived through the 1956 Uprising. I intended to go to the address listed as his current residence, but met him by chance there at the ruins instead.”
“What a string of coincidences,” Dom muttered, shaking his head. “Incredible.”
“Not really,” she countered, defensive on behalf of her research. “Pretty much everything one needs to know is documented somewhere. You just have to look for it.”
He conceded the point. “So you met Friedrich, and he told you about Lagy. What did you do then?”
“I researched him on Google as soon as I got back to my hotel in Vienna. Took me a while to find the right Lagy. It’s a fairly common name in Hungary. But I finally tracked him to his office at his bank. His secretary wouldn’t put me through until I identified myself as Sarah St. Sebastian Hunter’s research assistant and said I was helping with her book dealing with lost works of art. Evidently Janos is something of a collector. He came on the line a few minutes later.”
“Did you tell him you were trying to track the Canaletto?”
“Yes, and he asked why I’d contacted him about it. I didn’t want to go into detail over the phone, just said I thought I’d found a possible link through his grandfather that I’d like to pursue with him. He asked if I’d discussed this link with anyone else and I told him no, that I wanted to verify it first. I offered to drive to Budapest but he generously offered to meet me halfway.”
“In Gyür.”
“On the tour boat,” she confirmed. “He said cruising the Danube was one of his favorite ways to relax, that if I hadn’t taken a day trip on the river before I would most certainly enjoy it. I knew I wouldn’t. I hate boats, loathe being on the water. But I was so eager to talk to him I agreed. I drove down to Gyür the next day.”
“And you met Lagy aboard?”
“No. He called after the damned boat had left the dock and said he’d been unavoidably detained. He apologized profusely and said he would meet me when it docked in Budapest instead.”
She made a moue of distaste, remembering the long, queasy hours trying not to fixate on the slap of the current against the hull or the constant engine vibration under her feet.
“We didn’t approach Budapest until late afternoon. By then I was huddled at the rail near the back of the boat, praying I wouldn’t be sick. I remember getting another call. Remember reaching too fast for my phone and feeling really dizzy. I leaned over the rail, thinking I was going to puke.” Frowning, she slid her hand under her hair and fingered the still tender spot at the base of her skull. “I must have banged my head on one of the support poles because there was pain. Nasty, nasty pain. And the next thing I know someone’s leaning on my chest, pumping water out of my lungs!”
“You never saw Janos Lagy? Never connected with him?”
“Not unless he was one of the guys who fished me out of the river. Who is he, Dom? How do you know him?”
“We went to school together.”
“You’re friends with him?” she asked incredulously.
“Acquaintances. My grandfather was not one to forgive or forget old wrongs. He knew Jan’s grandfather had served in the Soviet Army and didn’t want me to have anything to do with the Lagy family. He didn’t know the bastard had commanded the squad that leveled Karlenburgh Castle, though. I didn’t either, until today.”