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paintings they stole. An ex-boyfriend of Kate's in Italy, Luca Bartoli, took care of the rest of it. Sometimes they went into a house for a single painting, the buyer already waiting for his new property, sometimes they went in on speculation. Their luck had run out in the summer of 2006 with a job that had gone very bad very fast. In the aftermath they got out of the business and left the country. They weren't exactly fugitives, but they had made a mess of things and didn't care to stick around in case the police wanted to ask a lot of difficult questions.
    'Where do you find these people?' Reto asked him.
    Ethan turned and looked through a window. These people, he thought, were some of the most amazing individuals on the continent, but in Reto's world if you didn't climb you weren't worth. . . well, the air you breathed, amongst other things.
    'Kate's dad used to say if you want money, the first thing you need to do is find out where it drinks.'
    Reto laughed, 'They're not letting go of it, dude!' For Reto, money was just something to get him to the base of a rock with decent equipment. 'Me? I'd rather do a whippet than talk to these people.' A whipper was American climbing slang for taking a dive without a rope.
    'A bleeding penguin convention, it is.' Renate muttered in faux English.
    Ethan looked down at his own penguin outfit. 'Is it that bad?'
    Renate laughed, 'It's bad, dude! It's like I don't know you anymore!'
    'So where have you been?' Reto asked him. 'I mean like we haven't seen you for years!'
    'We've been living in France most of the past year. Before that we were hanging out in New York for a few months. Hanging out was Ethan's description of his short stint at NYU after giving up the life of a thief. As it turned out, scholarship, like virtue, hadn't taken. Most of his professors, he had discovered, were singularly without curiosity about certain aspects of the medieval world. Mention the Holy Grail, the Lance of Longinus, the Holy Face of Edessa, or even the Shroud of Turin and they vibrated with a kind of overt anxiety that he had at first found incomprehensible. After a few weeks he figured it out. To an academic, Templar and Grail studies weren't part of serious scholarship. 'If you are looking for the Holy Grail,' his thesis director had told him quite bluntly, 'you're in the wrong place.'
    Ethan dropped out that afternoon - a total of six weeks into the semester. Kate, who was struggling with too much city and not enough rock, threw herself at him, wounding him with kisses. They had settled in France a week later.
    'Where in France?' Renate asked him.
    'We had an apartment in a village a few miles outside of Carcassonne.' A walled, medieval city, Carcassonne was impossible to endure in tourist season, but a different world once the weather cooled and only the locals and the long term visitors settled in.
    'The Pyrenees!' Reto exclaimed with delight.
    Ethan nodded, smiling. 'It was great,' he said.
    Wolfe laughed. 'Americans. . . everything is always great.'
    'What did you like best?' Renate asked.
    Ethan smiled. 'Sun. . . rocks. . . old castles. . . everything! It was. . .' He stopped himself from saying great . To be more precise about what he had liked required confidences he didn't especially care to extend to the likes of Wolfe and Reto. Besides there was no explaining happily-ever-after, especially to a jealous ex-boyfriend.
    'So why leave it for this?' Wolfe asked him. This was cold, dreary Zürich - a good two hours to the base of anything worth climbing.
    'Kate wanted to get Roland's foundation set up, and we both thought it might be nice to come back and see everyone.'
    'Kate!' Reto said. The others, turning and seeing Kate coming toward them, called out to her as well. No one complained to her about the penguins inside. Not one stuffed shirt joke. They told her she looked beautiful, which she did.
    The house,' Karl told her in English, 'is unbelievable.'
    'The paintings are unbelievable!' Renate