Steven Savile - Silver

She saw Sir Charles was about to naysay her and cut him off before he could get the first word out. “And don’t go telling me he lived through Ireland. That was different on so many levels. Now, cut the macho bullshit and send a woman to do the job this woman is best qualified to do.”

The old man looked at her, then at Ronan, and for a moment didn’t say anything. He seemed to be weighing up the cost of losing face over the value of stubbornness like it was some sort of economic factor-equation where one might somehow balance out the other.

Noah wondered how the hell the old man could say no to her. He knew, roles reversed, he wouldn’t have been able to. Orla was all fire and heat, and like a moth, he wanted to get as close to her flame as he could, right up to where her incandescence had his flesh burning.

Sir Charles rubbed at his nose and twisted his lips into an expression that was anything but a smile. “Sometimes arguing with you makes me feel like Sisyphus with his damned stone,” the old man said. And sometimes, Noah thought, listening to you two makes me wish I’d paid more attention at school. “What part of ‘the end of the discussion’ didn’t you understand, Orla? No, don’t bother answering that one, I know the answer. It was the bit where it meant I was saying no to you. You’re like a willful child sometimes. I have my reasons for wanting to keep you out of Israel, but if you are so damned determined to get yourself killed, go to Israel.

“Ronan, that means you’re on foot patrol here.

“Now, Maxwell is waiting to drive the rest of you to the airfield.”

The old man grappled with his wheelchair, banging the steel rim off the doorframe as he negotiated the turn into one of the many downstairs rooms. He cursed the damned thing, reversed and twisted hard on the right wheel to make sure he made it through on the second attempt. There was no need for it; the wheelchair was electric. He could just as easily have angled it gracefully between the gap using the little joystick set into the armrest, but right now Sir Charles needed to look frustrated. To finish playing the part, he needed to take that “frustration” out with sheer physical exertion. Anything else would have given his satisfaction away.

He slammed the door behind him.

And then he smiled the smile of a man content that he had achieved exactly what he had set out to.

The room was yet another different world within the confines of Nonesuch. It was part study, part retreat. This was the old man’s haven. There was an antique pedestal desk with green leather inlay and matching green glass banker’s lamp and blotter. The pedestals were chipped and scuffed where he had caught them with the wheelchair. Above the desk was a mirror. Reflected in the mirror was a Rembrandt, brooding and dark with thick, heavy oils. The painting was priceless-or more accurately, beyond pricing-because the rest of the world believed it to be among the lost treasures of the art world, a variant on his 1629 masterpiece Judas Repentant. The painting had fascinated Sir Charles, as had the very notion that there could be no rehabilitation for the penitent sinner. What was it Peter had called Judas’ repentance? He remembered: The sorrow of a world which worketh death.

It was getting progressively more difficult to recall the little things, the ephemera of life, which frightened Sir Charles. The idea of his mental acuity slipping into darkness was terrifying. He’d promised himself he would shuffle off this mortal coil if he ever forgot his own name. It wasn’t a promise he was sure he could keep. That was his sorrow. Age.

He studied the painting for the thousandth time. Everything in it appeared to represent genuine shame-the hand-wringing, which mirrored so many portraits of Peter the sinner, the facial expression, even the damage where Judas had been tearing his hair out. They were all classic representations of shame. The difference between this and the original lay in the coins. In the original Judas had been painted as unable to look away from the silver. In this, he offered the blood money up to Mary Magdalene, looking at her with hope, even love, in his eyes. He wasn’t groveling for mercy. Instead, there was a discomforting beauty and truth to the painting that had owned Sir Charles’ soul since he first laid eyes upon it.

He was a boy when his father had taken him to see it hanging in Jacques Goudstikker’s Gallerie in Paris.

It had hung there until the German occupation when, like so many other works of art, it was spirited away into Hermann Goring’s personal collection and thought lost forever in the many vaults beneath the Bahnhofstrasse in Zurich.

After decades of litigation, threat and negotiation, a number of paintings had been recovered, but the process was made all the more difficult. Jacques Goudstikker had left his widow, Marei, a typewritten inventory, but without death certificates the Swiss bankers refused to turn over the treasures gathering dust in their vaults.

Of course, Auschwitz, Belsen and Treblinka hadn’t been in the habit of issuing death certificates for the Jews they gassed.

It was all a face-saving exercise for the Swiss, who of course, vociferously denied any wrongdoing.

Sir Charles had managed to secure a copy of Marei Goudstikker’s list. The interpretation of Judas Repentant, known as The Adoration of Silver, or more simply, Silver, wasn’t on that inventory. Its absence had, in part, been the reason behind his obsession with lost treasures.

It had taken him the best part of a decade to grease the right palms, who, in turn, knew the right vault to crack open. Smuggling the Rembrandt out of the country after that had been a comparatively easy task. And now it hung above his desk, a constant reminder that there were two sides to every story, even the best known of all. He had made arrangements for the painting’s return to the heirs of its rightful owner upon his death. That, too, was the kind of man he was.

The rest of the room was dominated by a huge orthopedic bed. Again the mahogany frame was scarred where the chair had caught it again and again. Angels, demons and so many creatures of nightmare were beautifully rendered in the frieze that decorated the headboard. Sir Charles had discovered the carving in Palermo and had it shipped to Nonesuch, where he had employed a seventy-year-old artisan to craft the art from a thing of curious beauty into the bed where he intended to die.

There was a green oxygen tank beside the neatly made bed, a clear, plastic mask hanging from the closed valve. The third wall was dominated by more books. Beneath the window an exquisitely hand-carved globe caught the moonlight. It was the oldest thing in the room, the contours of its map hopelessly wrong in this world of GPS and satellite navigation. It was filled with places that had long since slipped off modern maps and into mythology: Hy-Brazil, Hawaiki, Nibiru, Lemuria, Ys, Thule and more. Places that were filled with mystery and promise, lost, like Rembrandt’s Silver.

Perhaps, he thought, and not for the first time, they too could be found? There was something curiously soothing about tilting at windmills like Quixote.

Sir Charles angled the chair between the bed and the wall, fastened the mask over his face and breathed deeply as the pure oxygen flooded into his lungs. After several purifying breaths he shut off the valve and hung the mask up again. He closed his eyes. He had always intended that Orla would head up the investigation in Israel. Anything else, as she had so vehemently put it, was a waste of her talents-but he was all too aware of what had happened to her out there. It had to be her choice to return to that forsaken land.

The old man drummed his fingers on the arm of the wheelchair. The rhythm sounded like the funeral march of Geppetto’s wooden toys. His nails clacked and clinked and thunked against the leather, steel and wood. He found his thoughts drifting.