Free Eternal Empire by Alec Nevala-Lee Page A

play across the walls, which were covered in a network of exposed pipes. In one corner stood a sad Hotpoint refrigerator, its closed door coated thickly with dust. A few feet away, lying on the ground, she saw something else. It was a steamer trunk.
    Crossing the floor, Wolfe went up to the trunk, which turned out to be the kind covered in canvas, now old and brittle, secured by a brass clasp. When she tried the lid with one gloved hand, she found it wouldn’t budge. She called up to the others. “Can you give me more light?”
    Asthana and the constable obliged at once. Wolfe set down her own flashlight, then took the pry bar in both hands. Rearing back, she struck it against the lock of the trunk, the metal ringing under the blow, and felt the clasp give slightly. A second blow knocked the lock off altogether. She set the pry bar aside. Then she reached down and lifted up the lid.
    Inside was a mouse’s nest. Wolfe saw countless pairs of tiny eyes turn in her direction, paws scampering as the rodents fled from the thicket of grass and leaves that had been woven together inside. At the back of the trunk, there was a hole the size of her fist where the mice had gnawed their way in.
    Wolfe tried to laugh but couldn’t. A second later, she clearly saw the absurdity of what she was doing. Rising, she picked up the pry bar and flashlight. “This is ridiculous. I’m coming up.”
    Turning away from the trunk, she began to move gingerly back across the basement floor. As she did, her eye fell on the refrigerator in the corner. It was an ancient model, the kind with a metal door pull, and before she could quite understand what she was doing, she reached for the handle.
    The door opened with surprising ease. Looking at what lay within, Wolfe knew at once what had been left here for her to find. But for a long moment, she could only stare silently at the man’s body, its withered legs tucked under its chin, that had been awaiting her arrival for so long.

10
    M addy put her plan into effect the following morning. For two hours, she had been studying the files on her desk, a stack of financial records from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. As the clock on her computer crept toward twelve, however, she found it increasingly hard to concentrate, and her eyes kept straying to the open door of her office and its view of the hallway beyond.
    Over the course of many surreptitious observations, she had determined that each of the binders in the file room had a date on its spine. Most binders seemed to cover a single year, while a few years were divided across two or more. Above each date, there was a printed word in Russian. Yesterday, while glancing at these labels on one of her trips along the corridor, she had finally seen the word that Powell had taught her to recognize:
zhurnal
, or
journal
.
    The file room itself was frequented primarily by the head of financial operations and his assistant, who shared an office down the hall. The two men ate lunch at their desks and were rarely more than a few feet from the files. To be safe, Maddy knew that she had to wait until both of them were gone.
    At shortly before twelve, the moment came. Through her office door, Maddy heard footsteps, followed by voices in Russian. Rising quietly from her desk, she went over to the window, which looked out on the walled garden next to the extension. A minute later, she saw the two men appear outside in their coats, sharing a smoke where the view was most pleasant.
    Maddy turned and went back to her desk, on which she had set a black plastic binder identical to the ones in which the financial records were kept. Earlier that morning, she had taken this binder from the archives room where she did most of her authorized work, having already determined that it was the same kind as the ones in the file room next door.
    The binder she had selected happened to contain provenance information for works by the artist Nicholas Roerich, a