“The sale is in three days,” she said. “I’ll handle the rest.”
Whitney put on her white gloves. She opened the satchel, lifted out the grubby little book, and turned its pages with reverent slowness. “Exquisite,” she whispered. Then she closed it, locked it in a safe, and handed O’Flaherty a receipt.
“It’s St. John-Cambro. And the price is ten thousand, cash, no receipt.” whitney st john cambro
“And you belong out there, pretending you don’t belong in here with me.”
She walked out into the grey English rain, her heels clicking a rhythm of rage. But by the time she reached her car, the rage had cooled into something harder: a plan. “The sale is in three days,” she said
“Of course he will. But the Art Newspaper loves a good Nazi-era restitution story. And I’ve already sent a copy to the FBI’s Art Crime Team, Interpol, and a journalist named Emma Lund, who won a Pulitzer last year for exactly this sort of thing.”
Whit—lovely to see the old name still doing work. The Marbury Codex. I know who really owns it. Hint: it’s not O’Flaherty. Meet me Friday, or I start making calls. “Exquisite,” she whispered
She had flown to Cork, sat in the seller’s kitchen (linoleum floor, cat on the fridge), and said, “Mr. O’Flaherty, the other houses will lowball you, then sell the codex to a private collector who will lock it in a vault in Geneva. I will find you a museum that actually wants it, and I will take a flat five percent.”