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of Galilee, as well as a Rembrandt etching, a bronze beaker, and a painting by someone named Flinck once attributed to Rembrandt. Six additional works of lesser value were stolen from the second floor. One was the finial from a Napoleonic flag. The robbers also took a Manet painting that was in a room right by the entrance. The total was thirteen objects. All were uninsured. A one-million-dollar reward was offered for the safe return of the stolen art. By now, the reward had been increased to five million. Not a single piece had been recovered.
    Steve was gazing at the frame that had held Rembrandt’s lady and gentleman. “Is this your idea of an upbeat afternoon?” he asked.
    “Romantic,” I corrected. “Not necessarily upbeat.”
    “Can we eat now?”
    In spite of the Sunday-afternoon crowd, we lucked into a small table by the window. The view was of a section of the garden thick with ivy that sprawled over the ground and climbed heavily up the trees. It was raining hard now, so the trees and plants were dripping, and we were warm, dry, and hungry. The menu was a little too ladies’-lunch for Steve’s taste, heavy on light quiche, but he ordered homemade soup and spicy cold linguine and didn’t complain. And he wasn’t the only man there. In fact, there were a lot of other couples. At a table close to ours, a man sat alone. We decided that he had to be an art student. The Gardner is right near the Museum of Fine Arts and the Boston Museum School, so the area is full of art students. This one had thick, dark, curly hair. On his left forearm was a tattoo embellished with such elaborate curlicues that I couldn’t tell what it was supposed to represent.
    “He’s eating quiche,” I said quietly to Steve.
    “Artistic type,” Steve mumbled.
    Raising my voice, I said, “I’m sorry I dragged you here. Rita said I had to do penance for waking you up at two o’clock in the morning by taking you to the most romantic place in Boston. I thought this was it.”
    “The most romantic place in Boston is your bed,” Steve said. “With you in it.”
    “That’s not what the guidebooks say.”
    “Little do they know.”
    “Do you want to go home?”
    He just smiled. Then he asked how my book was coming along. I remember talking mainly about Geraldine R. Dodge and her husband. I also remember how noisy the café was. “Mr. Geraldine R. Dodge had money, too?” Steve asked. “Lots. Not as much as she did, but he was still loaded. His grandfather was the head of Remington Arms and some other companies. The grandfather was Marcellus Hartley. His daughter Emma married a man named Norman White Dodge, and for a wedding present her father gave them a house right next to his. He lived on Madison Avenue. Anyway, Emma died in childbirth, and the grandfather raised the baby, his only grandson. And then when Marcellus Hartley Dodge was a junior in college, at Columbia, when he was only twenty, his grandfather suddenly died, and he inherited everything. He became the head of the family and the head of the companies and everything.”
    “Did he know about her when he married her?” Steve asked, meaning, of course, Geraldine R.
    “I’ve wondered,” I said. “Even then, she must have been a little, uh, eccentric. She was always crazy about animals. But she had other interests. She was a very important art collector. It’s a miracle, when you think about it, that her paintings and things weren’t chewed up by all those dogs, but lots of them were shepherds, and she was very fussy about temperament and training, so maybe they weren’t destructive. And, of course, it wasn’t as if her husband had had to pay for her, uh, extravagances. She had essentially unlimited funds. And they stayed married until he died.”
    Steve smiled. “She got another dog, and he died of apoplexy?”
    “Actually, I don’t know what he died of. I guess it could’ve been apoplexy.” I paused to eat some salad. “What is apoplexy, anyway?”
    “A