She shook her head violently to force herself to stay awake. “What am I missing?” she asked herself. Allyson had even smacked her cheeks a few times to keep from falling asleep. She’d tried everything she could think of to unravel the meaning of the words from Graupe’s headstone, but nothing made sense.
A long, regretful glance over at the clock told her how late it was. Time to give her brain a break for a while, she thought. She rubbed her face and stood up. Her legs shuddered at the sudden movement after sitting still for so long. She’d only stood once the whole time to stretch out and try to get her blood flowing. It had all been for naught.
Allyson walked away from the mess surrounding the desk and flitted into the bathroom. She pulled on the shiny metal handle in the shower and stepped back as the water began to spray. She sniffled a little and then slipped out of her clothes.
The hot water felt good as it soaked through her hair and cascaded over her skin. She needed the moment to relax, but peace would not come easily. Beneath the fatigue, a fury raged. How could she not figure out something so simple? She shook her head. It would be fine, she thought. She would do what she did best: siphon off the hard work of others. Adriana and the professor, if she brought him along, would no doubt already be in Baden-Baden. They were likely asleep in a hotel somewhere and would make an early day of it the following morning. Koenig would lead Adriana to Graupe’s grave and, in turn, would lead Allyson to the riddle’s answer.
She smiled at the idea and began to feel the soothing warmth of the water reach into her muscles. Once she knew who had purchased the Rubens, Allyson would eliminate the competition.
8
The sun had yet to peek over the mountains in the east when Adriana and Koenig left the hotel. Their breath came out in puffs of white cloud as they made their way to the car in the chilly morning air.
“How far away is this cemetery?” Adriana asked.
“Not far,” he answered, shaking his head. “Five minutes. And I can take you straight to the gravesite.”
That was exactly what Adriana wanted to hear.
They’d arrived around sunset in the western German spa town. She could see why people chose Baden-Baden as a retreat. The heavily forested hills and mountains made for some gorgeous views. No matter where one looked, there was no escaping the natural beauty surrounding the area. In spite of the tension she was feeling in her heart, there was something relaxing about this place that couldn’t be avoided.
Adriana and the professor had grabbed a few pieces of toast, jam, and fruit in the hotel on their way out. Koenig had protested eating in his immaculately clean BMW, but he also realized they needed to hurry, especially when Adriana reminded him that the other woman could still be out there — and if she were, she’d be headed their way. After that, the two snagged a couple of coffees to go with their light breakfast and made their way out of the hotel.
The drive to the cemetery only lasted a minute longer than Koenig predicted, and that was due to a pesky traffic light that seemed to last forever. They parked in front of a bookstore across the street from the cemetery.
“This cemetery is very old,” Koenig explained as they passed through the gate. “Some of the graves have been here for several hundred years, so long that many of them cannot be read anymore.”
Adriana nodded but said nothing. She’d visited many old cemeteries in her life. It always fascinated her to see memorials to people who’d lived so long ago. Their lives were so much different to hers, and she tried to imagine what each person’s life must have been like in the dash between the years of their birth and death.
Now, however, her focus was on one thing: finding what it was Graupe had to say about the missing Rubens.
Koenig led her to a fork in the path and then to the left, toward a maintenance building. A thick forest lay just behind the wall and fence, casting permanent shade on that area of the graveyard.
“It’s just over here,” he said, pointing at a spot underneath the heavy limbs of an oak.
Six tombstones were all that occupied that part of the land, kept separate from the others.
“Being Jewish,” Koenig was explaining, “Graupe would have preferred to be buried in a Jewish cemetery. However, after his exile and the experience he had with the Nazis, he wasn’t convinced that Jewish graves wouldn’t be disturbed or vandalized. So he chose to be buried in a common place.”
“To avoid having his memorial desecrated,” she finished the thought.
“Exactly.”
Adriana followed the professor past the first three headstones. She stopped when he halted at the fourth. He held out his hand as if presenting a prize.
“The grave of Paul Graupe,” Adriana whispered.
She stepped forward, making sure not to walk on the actual grave itself, a concave section of earth that was lower than the surrounding ground by about three inches. On bended knee, she leaned in closely and examined the headstone. She pressed her finger to the odd words at the bottom, Inom Jannimt.
“What does this mean?” she asked, looking back at Koenig who stood with his hands folded in front of him.
The smile on his face told her she was about to learn the bane of his investigation. “That, my dear, is what has kept me from discovering the buyer all these years. If I knew what those strange words meant, I doubt we would be standing here. If The Annunciation still exists, I would have certainly found who had purchased it, assuming those words are the name of the person who bought it.”
She frowned and turned back to the gravestone. “But it’s not a person.” Her voice was half epiphany, half disappointment.
“No. I have searched the world for the meaning of those two words. I spent hundreds of hours in libraries and on the Internet, desperately trying to figure out what they mean or, if it was a person, who that person might have been. After all that effort and time, nothing made any sense. I eventually came to the conclusion that I would never find out who purchased the Rubens and what may have happened to it.” The sadness in his voice was only faint, the result of a few years passing and relieving him of the failure.
“You found nothing? Not even a clue as to what it could mean?”
He shook his head and shrugged. “For the first word, I found absolutely nothing. Not a name, not a place, nothing. The second word, Jannimt, does have some Danish roots, but once again, there was nothing conclusive. I’d considered a Dane might have purchased the painting and preferred to remain anonymous. The German occupation of Denmark during the war was somewhat passive with only a small underground resistance coming from the Danes. If a Danish citizen had purchased the Rubens, it would have been of high importance to keep his name off the books.”
“So why did you rule out that theory?”
“I guess because I didn’t find anything conclusive. Jannimt was a dead end.”
“And Inom doesn’t exist.”
Adriana stood up and placed her hands on her hips. She considered the problem while staring at the stone. After a few moments, she took out her phone and snapped a few photos of the odd writing. She put the device back in her pocket and rested her chin on her fingers. A light breeze brushed the leaves in the trees above, wrestling a few loose and tossing them through the air.
She paced around for five minutes, working out what the possible meaning could be. With phone in hand, Adriana searched the web for answers. Possibilities zipped by her mind’s eye with remarkable speed. Figuring out clues to riddles and puzzles was something Adriana learned as a child. Memories began to mingle with the words from the tombstone, cluttering her focus.