Artifice

by Sharon Cameron

Genres: YA Historical Fiction

Synopsis

A dramatic story of duplicity and resistance, betrayal and loyalty, set against the backdrop of World War II, by the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Light in Hidden Places.

Isa de Smit was raised in the vibrant, glittering world of her parents’ small art gallery in Amsterdam, a hub of beauty, creativity, and expression, until the Nazi occupation wiped the color from her city’s palette. The “degenerate” art of the Gallery de Smit is confiscated, the artists in hiding or deported, her best friend, Truus, fled to join the shadowy Dutch resistance. And masterpiece by masterpiece, the Nazis are buying and stealing her country’s heritage, feeding the Third Reich’s ravenous appetite for culture and art.

 

So when the unpaid taxes threaten her beloved but empty gallery, Isa decides to make the Nazis pay. She sells them a fake—a Rembrandt copy drawn by her talented father—a sale that sets Isa perilously close to the second most hated class of people in Amsterdam: the collaborators. Isa sells her beautiful forgery to none other than Hitler himself, and on the way to the auction, discovers that Truus is part of a resistance ring to smuggle Jewish babies out of Amsterdam.

 

But Truus cannot save more children without money. A lot of money. And Isa thinks she knows how to get it. One more forgery, a copy of an exquisite Vermeer, and the Nazis will pay for the rescue of the very children they are trying annihilate. To make the sale, though, Isa will need to learn the art of a master forger, before the children can be deported, and before she can be outed as a collaborator. And she finds an unlikely source to help her do it: the young Nazi soldier, a blackmailer and thief of Dutch art, who now says he wants to desert the German army.

 

Yet, worth is not always seen from the surface, and a fake can be difficult to spot. Both in art, and in people. Based on the true stories of Han Van Meegeren, a master art forger who sold fakes to Hermann Goering, and Johann van Hulst, credited with saving 600 Jewish children from death in Amsterdam, Sharon Cameron weaves a gorgeously evocative thriller, simmering with twists, that looks for the forgotten color of beauty, even in an ugly world.

 

Praise for Artifice

 

“War, resistance, and art are Cameron’s canvas; her palette is a balance of trust and perfidy, beauty and defiance, new life and old. Artifice is a vibrantly-hued and many-layered story, exploring our very human inability to spot a fake when we long to believe that the object of all our desire is the real thing.” -- Elizabeth Wein, New York Times bestselling author of Code Name Verity

 

* "Painterly prose...filled with rich intrigue depicts constantly shifting issues of trust in this complex, absorbing tale." -- Publishers Weekly, starred review

 

Read more

Release date: November 7, 2023

Publisher: Scholastic Press

Print pages: 409

Sample

Chapter 1

Amsterdam, The Netherlands

September 1943

 

EVERY EYE FOLLOWS when you walk like you have something to hide.

So Isa de Smit slowed her steps. Hummed. Dug for a handkerchief in the pocket of her tatty wool coat. Blended into the background. Faded into a landscape of steep-stepped gables and moving feet. And the gazes passed her by on the morning-misted street, glancing across her cheeks with the barest of brushstrokes.

Isa wanted to be seen and remain unnoticed.

Because Isa had something to hide.

She tucked her package tight beneath her arm.

Amsterdam was a colorful city. Blue boats and blue doors. A butter-framed window in marmalade brick. Leaves that were autumn-tinted, fog-frosted, marbling the pale acid-lime of a copper patina. But there were new shades on the city’s palette now. Spattered on the walls, dripping down the flagpoles.

Black on bloodred. Army olive. Khaki brown.

Nazi brown.

A German soldier leaned against the iron railing of the canal bridge, rifle in one hand, cigarette in the other, a silhouette against waters of rippling viridian. His gaze flicked to Isa once and away. The package under her arm was awkward—flat, square, and slippery—wrapped in brown paper and tied up with string. As if she’d decided to truss up a window and take it for a stroll. Isa adjusted her grip. The soldier studied the curling smoke of his cigarette. And her feet changed their rhythm.

Faster. Closer. A little faster.

She was eyeing the middle button of the soldier’s jacket, a spot of gleaming brass set squarely in the center of his drab brown chest. Imagining the coolness of the metal. How it might press into her palm when she gave it a sharp and sudden shove. Imagining the indignation. The surprise.

The splash.

Her feet went faster. Closer.

And now the Nazi was watching her walk, a line between his eyes. And then the number 14 tram rolled to a stop and Isa took it. She made her way down the narrow aisle, to the very last seat, package perched on her knees. The tram lurched, and the electric motor purred.

It was not the tram she had meant to take. Now she would have to change. Now she was late.

But she had removed temptation.

The polished wood interior was dim where it should have gleamed, dull where it should have been cheerful. The passengers rode in silence. And then four Nazi soldiers climbed on, taking the two front seats on either side of the aisle. The tram was loud with German. Laughing. Joking. Isa saw her stop, and let it pass. She let the next stop pass, and the next. She did not want to thread the narrow way between the soldiers. Not with her package. They might as well have formed a blockade.

The tram bumped and leaned around a curve. No one got off. Some elected not to get on. Shoulders brushed, umbrellas knocking against knees, until the soldiers finally stood and left the tram at Plantage. The passengers breathed a collective sigh. Then the tram hurtled around the corner to the next stop and disgorged.

Isa stepped down to the sidewalk with her package. Chin up. Eyes up. Invisible.

She walked past burnt-umber roof tiles. Wine-purple pansies spilling from their pots. The clean lead-white of a grocer’s empty shelves. Around the corner, and the trees were torches lit with russet-gold. Across the street, and the windows were smoke-stained, blackened teeth of broken glass, soft gray soot smearing the cinnabar bricks of the Records Office, firebombed five months ago by the Resistance.

Arondeus had done that, with thirteen others—artists, musicians, and students—burning up records so the Nazis couldn’t uncover false identities. So they couldn’t find Jews. Only, the Nazis had found someone. They’d found Arondeus. And ten more.

And they had shot them.

Isa had liked Arondeus, a shy man—odd, but funny—a favorite in her mother’s studio. She missed him. She missed them all. And then she turned the corner and there was the stop where she could catch the number 4. And there was the brown again, Nazi brown—too much brown—the soldiers who had been on the tram now passing a bottle with the guard of a derelict theater on the other side of the street. The theater had been gutted, windows boarded over, the handles of its grand doors chained.

It was a deportation site. A holding place. A prison for Jews.

And here came the tram, the number 8, clattering down the center of the pavement, blocking the view of the soldiers. And here came Truus, quick down the steps of the teaching college, the soles of her sensible lace-ups making a bright, smart slap against the stone. She had a leather overnight bag gripped by its handles, swinging at the level of her skirt hem.

Truus was supposed to be away. Living in a forest. Blowing up train tracks and cutting telephone wires.

Isa was supposed to be at home. With her father. Making sure he didn’t burn down the kitchen.

The people locked in the theater should have been at home, too, and the Nazis should have stayed in Germany.

No one was where they were supposed to be today.

Isa paused on the pavement. “Truus!” she said.

Truus froze, one foot behind her on the step.

“What are you doing in the city?” Isa asked.

Truus had eyes as soft as a new spring sky. Isa could remember a time when they were innocent. The leather bag in her hand squirmed. Once. Twice. And then Truus walked away, fast down the street. Shoulders hunched. Eyes down, locked on her path. Like she didn’t want to be seen. Like she didn’t want to be seen so much that she was going to make herself be seen.

Isa turned her back. So she couldn’t watch Truus go. She breathed, and didn’t let the air out again.

The tram squeaked and rumbled away, and there were the Germans, still milling in front of the prison-theater, leaning against the columns. Two of them were laughing, one unlocking the chain looped through the handles of the building’s front doors. And one soldier had his gaze fixed on Isa, with her awkward package and a lock of flame-red hair sticking out from a hole in her knitted hat, standing stock-still and staring on the opposite side of the street.

Exposed.

Memorable.

Isa released the air from her lungs, and she walked slow—too slow—hesitating down the sidewalk. Looking back. Looking front and looking back again. Letting the soldier see. Letting his eyes follow her instead of Truus. Remember her instead of Truus. Two steps. Three. Away from the teaching college, clutching the package against her side.

There was a drawing inside her package. A Rembrandt. Irreplaceable and priceless.

Or worthless, depending on who you asked.

Because the picture inside Isa’s package was a fake.

What Truus had been carrying was priceless, too. Or worthless, depending on who you asked. Only what Truus had was real. All too real.

Because what Truus had been carrying in that bag was a baby.

Isa glanced back. The soldier was still watching her while the others chatted. She met his eyes over the slick, black metal of a slow-moving car. And then she hurried. Let him remember the girl half running down the street with a strange, window-shaped, paper-wrapped package. So the

memory of another girl—a girl with a precious leather bag—would fade, bleached like a print left too long in the sun.

It must have been a Jewish baby. There was no other sort of baby Truus would need to smuggle. But what was a Jewish baby doing in the teaching college? And where was Truus taking it?

One cry. One whimper. One wrong glance from the wrong person. One soldier watching Truus walk like she had something to hide and she would be caught.

Truus would be shot. Or worse.

If Isa was caught selling forgeries, then the Nazis might shoot her, too.

Or worse.

And if Isa was found selling away her country’s artistic heritage, feeding the greed of the invading Nazis with the art treasures of the Netherlands, then Truus might be the one doing the shooting, because shooting was what could happen to a collaborator in Amsterdam. Or a bomb. Or a rope around the neck. A quiet drowning, at midnight in the canal.

The Nazi gaze on her back felt like a rubber band—stretching, stretching—until a truck, its tall back draped in olive canvas, cranked to a stop in front of the theater, snapping their connection. The truck motor chugged, brash over the rattle of the door chains, and Isa risked a last backward glance. Truus and her bag were gone, lost to the color and the thinning fog. The rear gate of the truck screeched down onto the pavement, a metal tongue scraping the street. An open mouth.

The guard who had been watching her was fully occupied now, beating and bullying prisoners out of the theater. She could hear the sound of sticks and rifle butts, the soft, sickening thwack of wood against flesh, the cries and the protests. Dutch. Yiddish. The bark of a German order. And the prisoners vanished into the wide, dark mouth. Like Moshe had. Like Levvy and Hilde.

She knew what deportation meant now. What it really meant. Everyone knew what the trucks meant now.

Damn the Nazis. Damn them straight into the flames of Goya’s hell.

Isa walked to the next tram stop, package held tight against her side.

Blending. Fading.

Invisible.

There were so many different  ways to die today.

 

Chapter 2

 

ISA STEPPED OFF the number 4 tram at the Herengracht. The buildings on either side of the canal stood tall, skinny, red-bricked and honey-stoned, with yellow shutters, navy shutters, no shutters, leaning this way and that way, out and in, like old men who had dropped a guilder.

She knew these buildings. She knew them in every light.

The fog rose. The smell dampened. Water lapped in a sudden rain of rusty leaves. Isa passed the guard on the bridge without a glance, and at number 458, she climbed broad stone steps to a set of double doors, paint rubbed elegantly from their edges. There was a guard beside the doors, eyes forward, back erect in his repellent brown, as if the cargo rope dangling from the roof peak was the most fascinating thing Amsterdam had ever shown him. Isa opened a door.

And stepped into the smell of old things and money. The familiar creak of floorboards beneath shuffling feet. The soft running static of whispers. Rumors. Who? When? And most important, how much? The auction houses had been her world before the war. The world of her childhood, holding her father’s pigment-stained hand. The world of her teenage years, a pencil stuck behind one ear, calculating commissions in the shadow of her papa’s sun.

It was not her world now.

This was the world of collaborators.

Isa stood to one side with her package.

Paintings sat propped against the walls, frame to frame, some stacked two or three deep. Goudstikker would have never allowed a painting to be treated in such a fashion, but this was not Goudstikker’s auction house. Not anymore. Goudstikker had caught a ship. So he couldn’t be put on the back of a truck. Little groups of threes and fours hovered around the leaning art—all men, no women—rubbing their chins, muttering. And they were strangers. Not one dealer she knew. Isa looked them over, assessing.

Buying at an auction was like walking down a Nazi-laden street. Best to pass unnoticed, nondescript, with your fat pockets hidden. But selling was different. When you were selling, you should look like mink is something you snatch off your coatrack. Like diamonds live in your side drawer. Like you ate gilded nuts for your breakfast. Or, alternatively, you could put on tatty wool and a knit hat barely fit for a sewer and come through the door wide-eyed, just out of Grandmama’s attic. An innocent eighteen-year-old with a cobwebbed masterpiece you really don’t know very much about.

Isa tucked a bright, stray lock back into the hole in her hat, displaying the frayed end of a coat sleeve. She’d only just stopped short of rubbing soot on her nose. She knew how this game was played, or she used to. When she wasn’t a criminal. When she’d only been playing with her livelihood, not her life.

The whispering men looked her up and down. Assessing.

There was a table at the far end of the room, where Goudstikker had taken registrations for his auctions, a row of Dutchmen with long coats and longer faces now lined up in front of it. Isa caught a hint of gold from a blanketed frame. A pale marble elbow peeking out from beneath butcher paper. Art leaving Amsterdam. By the crate load. By the trainload.

A man left the desk, trudging past Isa and out the door, hat pulled low, a fistful of reichsmarks disappearing into his pocket. The next in line stepped forward, a blue-and-white vase cradled in his arms like a child. The man was so thin Isa could guess the shape of his skull.

Collaborators. That’s the name Truus would have given them. Isa would have called them desperate. Both terms were probably accurate.

Damn the Nazis. Damn the Nazis straight into the nightmares of Giovanni’s hell.

Isa took her package to the last place in line.

There was a man standing behind the desk, hair slicked back, lips pursed, exquisitely dressed in a navy striped suit with a watch chain and a pocket square of mustard-print silk. No one else could look so well fed and satisfied in wartime. No one but a Nazi.

Isa watched him examine the marble statue emerging from the butcher paper, a woman with a water jug on her hip. A nice piece. He looked down his nose at it, peered with a loupe held against one eye, speaking quiet German to a young soldier seated at the desk. The soldier’s pen scratched in a ledger book, then onto a label that went around the marble woman’s neck.

A guard watched the proceedings from the shadow of the back wall, stoic, alert, a pistol at his side.

The soldier at the desk

unlocked a metal box, reached inside, counting, and then handed the Dutchman a fresh stack of reichsmarks. The sound of a rumor rose, speculating. The tagged woman with a water jug went to stand against the wall with the other art, and the lips that had been pursed stretched flat. Smug.

This was not an auction, Isa realized. It was a sale. A sale where the Dutch took whatever the Nazis would give them.

It was better than what they had given to Goudstikker. Which was nothing.

And then she heard a whisper, a clear word in the hum. “Goering.”

“Goes to Goering,” said another.

Isa glanced behind herself, but she couldn’t see the whisperers, so she stared fixedly at the floor. Hermann Goering was second-in-command of the Reich. The head of the Luftwaffe. The man who had ordered Rotterdam bombed into a fiery oblivion. Was this smug little dealer Hermann Goering’s agent?

Hermann Goering deserved to be sold a fake.

“Fräulein? Name, please?”

Isa looked up and there was no one in the line ahead of her. Only Goering’s oily-headed agent, the soldier with the gun, and the soldier at the desk, who was now looking at her steadily, pen hovering above his ledger. He was young, neat and clipped, with heavy brows over eyes in a shade of brown that clashed with the Nazi of his uniform. There were shadows beneath those eyes. The rape of Holland must be heavy work. He looked her over, one dark brow rising ever so slightly.

“Papers?” he tried again, in decent Dutch.

Isa set the package on her scuffed shoes and reached into her ridiculous coat. She let herself be nervous. Big-eyed. Allowed her little identity booklet to shake when she handed it over. Which was not that difficult. Her papers were as fake as her art. The soldier glanced at them and at her. That brow was very high now.

“Elsa Groot?” he confirmed. She nodded. The pen scratched. The Nazi against the wall adjusted his pistol.

“You will unwrap the paper,” Goering’s dapper little agent said. In German. But the message was clear. Isa began picking at the string.

“I was looking … in the attic,” she stuttered, working at the knot, “looking for … for something to … so we could …”

Pick. Pick.

“Looking for something so we can …” She let them fill in the blanks with “looking for something to sell so we can eat.”

Pick. Pick. Pick.

The soldier translated what she was saying while he wrote down the fake address from her fake papers. The agent got irritated. The hoverers watched from the edges of the room, whispering.

“Grandmama,” she went on, pulling slowly, painstakingly at the newspaper, “it must have belonged to her. It might not be worth … but perhaps … I heard, maybe, you would want to buy …” She let the brown paper slither into a heap and turned the frame.

The soldier at the desk must have known art as well as Dutch. His German slowed and both his brows were up over his tired brown eyes, hiding beneath the brim

of his cap. His gaze darted to Goering’s agent, who was leaning forward over the table, the loupe already against his eye.

Isa watched, and she waited.

“Imagine the art, my child,” her father would say, her legs dangling from a high stool in the reek of turpentine, her chin in hand, watching as he washed out his brushes. Her father’s beard had been brown then, instead of gray. “Imagine the lost art, hidden away in closets and storerooms, unknown and unloved. Paintings tossed aside because the widow or a banker had no regard for them. Because the artist thought them flawed. Unworthy. Imperfect …”

Her father’s eyes would glisten then, dreamy with love. Not for his daughter, but for art. But Isa had not been offended. She had been enraptured.

“But art has no imperfection. You must remember this, my little Sofonisba. Art is imperfection. And when the light shines anew on what has been lost, when our eyes behold the glory, then all we shall see is the hand of the master …”

Theodoor de Smit was an excellent artist, better at imitating a style he loved than finding one of his own. Content with re-creating his imagined lost treasures. He’d done Michelangelo’s studies of the Sistine Chapel. A set of Dürer’s first watercolors, spectacular in their detail, but with a less-sure hand, as if in childhood. And he’d drawn this picture, a Rembrandt self-portrait, black and red chalk on paper, the pretended inspiration for a well-known copper etching made more than three centuries earlier.

A lost masterpiece.

Rembrandt’s face stared out at them from the frame, with a tall black hat and bulbous nose, an open book lying on a stack of books in front of him. Rembrandt had not been a pretty man. He’d never tried to make himself one. But his expression was … thoughtful. Melancholic. With a little lift of humor at the corner of his mouth.

The face might be Rembrandt’s, but the expression was every bit Theodoor de Smit, which had likely been his own private joke when he drew it, when his second love, Isa’s mother, had still been alive, running their small gallery, her chin on his shoulder while he worked. The drawing had lurked in their back hallway for years. And three days ago, Isa had taken it off the wall, thrown coffee grounds on it, then left it on the floor beneath the dining room curtains while she stood on a chair, shaking out the dust.

This had been the extent of her plan. Her ingenious method of fooling the Nazis. Coffee stains and curtain dust.

It did not feel like enough, here, in front of soldiers with guns and Hermann Goering’s agent in the whispering auction house that should still belong to Goudstikker.

Not nearly enough.

Isa’s pulse did what her feet had done at the canal bridge. Moved faster. A little faster. She kept her gaze down.

“Maybe … it isn’t worth anything …” she said, taking a small step back, allowing her voice to quiver. “I should not have come …”

The soldier behind the desk stood, holding out his hands. “May I?”

Isa hadn’t known a Nazi knew how to ask. She let him take the picture.

And now her moment had come.

The soldier and the agent leaned in, peering at the surface, tilting it 

beneath the light. The agent’s upper lip was flattening, the young soldier’s mouth taking the shape of a whistle. And Isa knew.

They wanted it.

They wanted to believe.

Which was as good as believing. And what would be this smug little man’s reward for bringing a Rembrandt to Hermann Goering? More than what Isa would get. Much more. But what Isa would get was so much more than the nothing she had right now.

Isa felt the tiniest release of tension from between her shoulder blades. Nearly let a sigh blow from her lungs. And then she raised her eyes, and her breath stilled.

There was a painting hung on the wall behind the desk, at the level of the guard’s stiff chin. A woman with a wineglass in her hand, tilting on the edge of her fingertips, the still, frozen moment captured just before the glass fell. It was a pensive painting, intense, lush with vermilion. Shimmering in shades of ultramarine. Full of pure, clear light.

Isa knew this painting. She knew it intimately. It was a Vermeer. And it should not be in Goudstikker’s.

It could not be in Goudstikker’s.

Then her eyes snapped back to the table, to the young soldier still bending low over her Rembrandt. His brows had come together, two furrows across his forehead. His head gave a tiny shake, and then another. His gaze lifted.

Isa blinked. Big-eyed. Innocent, the way Truus used to be. It didn’t work.

He knew, damn him. He knew. Something had given her away.

Her pulse revved like an engine.

There were so many ways to die today.

The agent was muttering excitedly in German, while the soldier stared steadily at Isa. His eyes were brown and yet translucent, strong tea poured in a cup of porcelain. He translated, “Herr Hofer would like for you to tell him where this artwork has come from.”

Isa played with her coat collar. “My grandmama … in the attic …”

The agent chattered.

“What family? Were they wealthy?” The soldier’s eyes were not tired and they were not like tea, Isa decided. They were brown glass. Smooth and cold.

“No. Or maybe …” she stuttered. “They … they arranged sales. For estates …”

It was a good story. Probable and yet difficult to verify. And what a shame this young soldier translating her answer so fluently into German knew that it was a lie. But the agent didn’t. He was hooked, touching the paper with ginger love beneath the curtain dust, gazing at the hasty, confident strokes. Rembrandt’s strokes. Her father would have been meticulous about that. How soon would the agent discover what the soldier had? And what would happen when he did?

It would be the truck.

Or something worse.

She should run. Right now. Before this soldier at the desk could say what he knew. Before the soldier in the shadows could draw his gun. Before they could alert the staring Nazi outside the door. She knew the back alleys of

Amsterdam better than they did. She knew how to disappear, and she would do it as soon as the young man holding her forged Rembrandt made a move.

But he did not make a move. He just looked at her, asking the little agent’s excited questions.

“Has anyone else seen this painting, Fräulein? Has it been appraised?” He didn’t bother to translate the shake of her head. Goering’s agent straightened, pleased. Smug. The rumors in the room crescendoed to a buzz.

And suddenly, the whispering hushed. The agent stilled. The young soldier half turned, chin jerking sideways to look behind him. Because the door to the back room had opened—Goudstikker’s former office—and now another man was approaching the desk.

Heavy-lidded and unassuming, with wire-rimmed glasses and a suit in soft, coal black. Understated. Expensive. Perfect, Isa thought, if you’re selling. But she didn’t think this man was selling. This man exuded something more important than tailored elegance. It was in the set of his mouth, the flagpole stiffness of his spine. In the very stride that was bringing him to the desk to examine her forgery.

This man was not invisible. This man walked with power.

Dutch police, Isa thought. SS or Gestapo. Only he had no uniform.

Higher, then. Much higher. Isa dropped her eyes.

And so it would be more than a truck. It would be blood and fists. Clubs, pliers, needles, and knives.

A rope or a bullet.

The soldier against the wall stood alert, hand hovering near his pistol.

Goudstikker had a door in his office, stairs down into a cellar, a cellar with more stairs that led back up again to the street. They would not expect her to run that way. Straight into this powerful man’s lair.

She didn’t think she could get there faster than a bullet.

The man in the dark suit lurked behind the young soldier’s shoulder. The soldier who knew. He held the Rembrandt stone-still, rigid. The man looked. And looked. He adjusted his glasses. And then he leaned down, whispering something into Herr Hofer’s ear.

The tip of Hofer’s ear turned pink. The lips pressed. Livid, Isa thought, and trying very hard not to show it.

Goering’s agent must know now, that he’d nearly been taken. The brown-eyed soldier hadn’t even needed to tell him. Duped by a little girl with a hole in her hat. Made to look a fool.

Sweat trickled down Isa’s neck. She let it trickle. Her left foot twitched, inching toward the office.

Then the man in the dark suit reached out and lifted Rembrandt’s self-portrait from the soldier’s grasp, giving the room one sweeping glance before he walked away, slowly, carrying Theodoor de Smit’s imagined masterwork to the inner sanctum of Goudstikker’s back room. The latch clicked.

The room broke into whispers, rumors, a hum, a buzz of speculation that rose into discord. The young soldier sat down behind the desk, mouth tight. He

didn’t look at Isa anymore, and neither did Goering’s little agent. He was flushed with rage. Or indignation. Or fear, wiping his forehead with the pocket square. The soldier made a note in his ledger and opened the metal box, arms moving as he counted, hands hidden behind the lid. He held out a stack of reichsmarks to Isa.

She took the money. And met his eyes. Brown. Translucent. Murky glass.

Isa could have sworn they were telling her to run.

She didn’t run. She shoved the money and her fake identity card deep into her coat pocket, slowly gathering up the paper and string she’d let fall to the floor. Gaze down, expression blank, past the line of new collaborators who had queued up behind her, shuffling through the door with her arms full of rubbish. Past the guard, along the street, creeping around the bend of the Herengracht until she’d turned the corner, out of sight of the canal guard.

And then Isa ran, darting quick into an alley. She dropped the brown paper into a rubbish heap, stuffed the money and her false identity card into her bra, yanked the cap off her head and tossed it to the trash along with the coat. Just like she’d found them.

Over the bridge and across the Singel, where a chill breeze blew and collars turned up and feet moved. Where she blended. Where the sun hung like a slice of lemon above her head, floating in a pool of frosty water. Then left and onto Kalverstraat, quiet where it should have been busy, past open and shuttered shops, bolting left again into the Rozenboomsteeg, a lane so narrow that passersby had to turn to avoid a collision. Isa ducked beneath the awning of a tiny café—dark and empty, not yet open for the day—flattening beside its pane of gilded glass. Waiting. Watching for pursuit.

And fear, Isa thought, was like a paint pot spilling, crawling, creeping, obliterating the colors in its path.

She was far from the theater, where there was one Nazi soldier who would remember her face. Far from the auction house, where everyone would remember it. Where she could never go again. So Truus would not find out she was a collaborator. So the Nazis would not find out she was a forger. A fraudster. A criminal.

Only what she’d done had been worse than a crime. Because Isa de Smit hadn’t just sold some dubious painting to a German officer looking to surprise his wife. She hadn’t even sold a faked Rembrandt to Hermann Goering, the arsonist of Rotterdam. There was only one man whose agent could have superseded Goering’s. Only one who could have walked with such power.

Isa de Smit had just sold a forgery to the Führer himself.

 

Chapter 3

 

WHEN THE NARROW lane remained empty and no one came to arrest her, Isa ventured out from beneath the shadow of the awning. Before Mrs. Breem could unlock the café and ask what she thought she was doing. Rozenboomsteeg veered off-kilter, angling into an alley, leaving the corners of the buildings sharp, triangular, the bricks beneath her feet a pattern of herringbone. To her right were the long sides of two empty houses. To her left the high wall of a convent, spanning as far as she could see, a blank brick canvas cut only by an archway surrounding a pair of thick, wooden doors.

Isa had never seen a nun from inside the walls. She’d never even seen the door opened. But her mother had told her a story once, about Sister Cornelia, who had objected so strongly to the use of their chapel by Protestants that she’d demanded to be buried in the street gutter. The other nuns must have actually liked Sister Cornelia, her mother had said, because when she died, they laid her out in the chapel. Only in the morning, Sister Cornelia was in the gutter. And she put herself in the gutter every night until the nuns gave up and buried her there.

“But which gutter?” Isa had asked, reaching up for her mother’s hand.

“Why, the clean one, of course,” her mother replied.

Isa looked down at the gutter she was standing in. It was not clean. She looked up and down the alley. She did not want to be followed home.

And then she heard footsteps, echoing between high walls, approaching from the café on the lane.

She dug in her skirt pockets, pretending to look for a handkerchief. Utterly confounded by that lack of a handkerchief. Listening to the click of heels on the herringbone. The reichsmarks prickled, poking against her skin, and a woman passed her by without a glance, a shopping bag on her arm, hair wrapped against the fog in a green-and-gold kerchief.

Isa stilled, and as soon as the woman had disappeared down the alley, stepped right and slipped through a chink between the houses. A place where two sharp-cornered walls hadn’t quite met. A crack that led to a weedy, cobbled gully running along the back walls of everything.

And then she hurried, past two gates in the high brick wall on her left—one for a teacher, out of work and fled, one for the deserted home where all three sons had been conscripted to a labor camp in Germany—past the back gardens of three houses on her right, all Jewish, all empty. Then came Mrs. Breem’s and the rear door of the café, and straight ahead to the two buildings facing Kalverstraat—a radio repair shop, now closed, and a seller of antiquities, now dead.

The gully was inconvenient. Damp and unpleasant. A space no one bothered with. No one but Isa. She could have dodged its puddles in the dark. She opened her gate, the third in the wall on the left, shut it fast, and put a shaky key to the back door of the Gallery De Smit.

The lock turned behind her with a comforting snick. And there was no tromp of boots on the gully stones. No shouts. No rifle butts splintering the wood of her door. No one had followed her. No one knew her real name, or where she actually lived. No one knew who had sold a fake Rembrandt to Hitler.

Isa leaned against the wall, where damp grew up the plaster like vines, in the dim light soaking through the blanket she’d tacked over the door’s glass transom. The silence was thick. Soft. A velvet glove.

And Isa felt a shiver. A thrill. Like a streak of pale blue paint over cucumber green, cool and delicious. Because she had outsmarted them. Tricked them. Shown the world that the Nazis were fools. Or, if not the entire world, ...