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ONE

I hate spam. Well, obviously everyone hates spam, but I hate it with an admittedly unwarranted ferocity.

When I see it, my blood pressure rises, my fingers curl inward, and my jaw throbs.

A bit excessive, I know. But this response is mild compared to my reaction when spam is audible.

Unwanted emails and phishing texts are bad enough, but when spam hits my voicemail, my nerves migrate to the outside of my skin and I’m ready to scream.

I block and I block and I block. I report and report and report.

I unsubscribe and unsubscribe and unsubscribe.

I get free trials to Clean Spam, Robokiller, and Barracuda.

I register my number with the National Do Not Call database.

And still the spam arrives. My head and my chest verge on explosion. Hello, heart attack.

“Jonathan Stein” says he’s a lawyer representing this so-called Claims Conference—why does a conference need a lawyer?

—and has something very important to discuss with me.

Which we can only do in person. Right, like I’m an idiot who’s going to run off to meet some fake guy because he says it’s “very important.” I wonder how many people he has to contact before he gets a hit.

Got to be thousands. What a way to make a living.

A tiny part of me wants to hear what he has to say, but most of me wants to wrap my hands around his neck and squeeze.

It’s important to note that I’m no killer—I have friends who claim to love me and have stuck around for decades—I’m just suffering from millennial outrage, trying to weather the stormy twenty-first century.

And after a harried day at work, this outraged millennial loses it.

In a way I don’t think I have ever before.

When Stein leaves another voicemail as I’m walking home, I hit return call and start in on him as soon as he answers.

“What exactly is it you want?” I demand loud enough that a few people on the sidewalk turn to look at me.

“You’re Tamara Rubin, I take it,” Jonathan Stein says with what sounds like a smile in his voice.

This is even more infuriating. “If you contact me one more time, I’m taking out a restraining order against you and your so-called conference.” I have no idea if I can do this, but it sounds good.

“Okay, I get it. Feeling like you’re being harassed is—”

“I don’t feel like I’m being harassed. I am being harassed.”

“Please just check me out, check us out. We’re legit. What I need to tell you is legit—and it could be a life changer.”

I bark a laugh. “That’s what all you scammers say.” I end the call with a punch of my thumb, ridiculously pleased with myself. But by the time I arrive home, I’m not so pleased. Rudeness isn’t my thing. Or it wasn’t my thing. Deep breaths.

Curiosity wins over my natural cynicism, and I plop down in front of my computer, put on my glasses, then hesitate.

Could searching his name be part of the plan?

A way to steal my identity or whatever else these scammers do?

But, lo and behold, Jonathan Stein is an attorney at the Boston office of the Claims Conference, a nonprofit that, as stated on its website, “secures material compensation for Holocaust survivors.” Since no one in my family is a Holocaust survivor, I’m still not buying it.

Whoever called me could easily have found this website, and using an actual lawyer’s identity, contacted me because my last name sounds Jewish.

I close the site and pull up the incomplete regulatory dossier I have to submit to the FDA tomorrow.

In my previous job as senior VP of regulatory affairs at EVTX, a multinational biotech firm, I had an operations team of five to do this kind of thing—as well as support from regulatory affairs specialists and groups dedicated to pharmacovigilance, compliance, and intelligence.

But as senior VP of regulatory affairs at Calliope, a biotech start-up with about fifty employees, I have a dedicated staff of two, along with an assistant I share with the senior VP of quality assurance.

So in conjunction with my management responsibilities, I’m also personally responsible for tasks I used to happily delegate.

This is both incredibly frustrating—particularly because it reminds me of the misogyny that necessitated my job change in the first place—and leads to sixty-hour work weeks.

Which could be why I lost it with Jonathan Stein.

I’M UP UNTIL two finishing the damn dossier, and getting out of bed at six isn’t easy.

I make a double-strength cup of coffee and stare out my window overlooking Tremont Street, barely able to focus through my exhaustion, ruminating on the unfairness of my lot.

I know, I know—this is despicable, given my privilege and all the horror and heartbreak in the world.

But in addition to being outraged, I’m also still resentful because of the EVTX hoodwink.

Or am I outraged because I’m resentful? Hard to figure.

It’s just that Nick Winspear turned out to be a bad bet—following my bad bet on Simon, my ex-husband.

You know how it is at the beginning of a relationship.

You’re not at your most discriminating, dismissing the red flags as unimportant, biking without a helmet for the pure exhilaration of the ride.

Wind in your hair and all that crap. And then you smash right into a tree.

It’s Nick’s fault I’m currently underemployed, overworked, and taking home tens of thousands of dollars less than I was previously paid.

Well, to be perfectly fair, the blame also rests with the inbred men on the EVTX board.

It was ostensibly my choice to leave, but it wasn’t a choice at all.

One positive is that Calliope is much closer to where I live than EVTX was, walking distance instead of a maddening commute. So there’s that.

Despite my orneriness, when I get outside, I’ve got to acknowledge it’s a beautiful October morning, although all the tourists who are currently swarming the city in search of fall foliage are going to be disappointed.

The leaves don’t change until November in Boston, no matter what the brochures tell you.

Which is fine with me. The longer the green lasts, the better.

I’m less than a mile from the office, and I always walk unless it’s storming or freezing.

One of the many pleasures of my small big city. Or big small city.

As usual, the excursion cheers me. From the bustle of Tremont to the brick sidewalks and fine nineteenth-century town houses of West Canton Street to the Southwest Corridor Park, blooming with so many flowers you’d think it was June, not October.

Puffy pink-and-white sedum, purple Jim Crocketts, tons of bright chrysanthemums, and all those colorful tiny pansy faces that remind me of Sagan, the beloved dog I lost a year ago.

And then there’s the wildlife. Parents with strollers, kids on scooters, squirrels scrambling up trees, dogs of every type and size walked by owners of every type and size.

Men and women carrying backpacks and briefcases, some dressed for success, others who look as if they’re still in their pajamas.

Runners. Walkers. Sitters. Teenagers smoking pot, adults doing the same.

There are also the homeless people, usually two or three talking quietly—or not so quietly—sometimes sleeping alone on a bench, wrapped in a blanket.

My sadly and gloriously diversified city.

Black, white, brown, Asian, combos of all the above.

Old, young, in the middle. Rich, poor, in the middle.

Some folks are exhilarated by nature, the quiet and serenity of mountains and fields. For me, it’s the bustle, the hustle.

WHEN MY HALF ASSISTANT sticks his head in the door, it’s already getting dark.

This is how you know it’s October, not June, as it’s not yet five o’clock.

“There’s a Jonathan Stein downstairs, who says he needs to see you,” Alexander informs me.

“Wouldn’t tell me what he wanted, but figured I’d check with you before I told him to take a hike. ”

This is exactly what I’d like Jonathan Stein to do, but I decide to check the guy out, maybe even to hear his pitch, so I say, “Buzz him in, please.”

I don’t know what I was expecting, but Jonathan Stein isn’t it.

Would it be awful stereotyping to admit I was imagining him as some nebbishy short guy with glasses?

Instead, he’s close to six feet, no glasses, wearing nice jeans, a collared shirt, and white Hoka running shoes.

His skin is golden, his eyes dark brown.

Quite handsome, actually. He looks me directly in the eye and smiles with no unease or shiftiness. “Had to give it one more try,” he says.

But just because he doesn’t look like I thought he would on the outside, that doesn’t mean he isn’t who I thought he was on the inside. I don’t invite him to sit. I let him stand there. “Why don’t you tell me what it is you want, Mr. Stein.”

He glances at the open door, at Alexander watching us from his desk, then back at me.

I push my glasses up on my nose and say nothing.

He takes a couple of steps closer. “Are you aware you have relatives whose property was stolen by the Nazis?”

“All of my family was here before the war, so that isn’t possible.”

“I see.” He takes a seat in the chair in front of me. “Do the names Colette and Samuel Bernheim mean anything to you?” he asks. “They lived in Paris, and after the Germans occupied France, they escaped and immigrated here.”

I tell him I’ve never heard of either of them.

“This isn’t the way we usually work—most of the time it’s the family who contacts us to investigate their lost art, not the other way around. But in this case, the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany started with the painting.”

“And this has to do with me because…?”

“The Conference has established that the Bernheims were your great-great-grandparents,” he explains. “That you’re their only living heir, and as such, you’re now the owner of what appears to be a masterwork by édouard Manet, Party on the Seine , which was part of their confiscated art collection.”

I’m not an art connoisseur by any stretch, but I’m knowledgeable enough to know that édouard Manet is one of the most famous French Impressionists—and that his work has to sell for six or seven, if not eight, figures.

Stein seems sure of himself and his information, and even to my overly skeptical mind, he appears pretty straightforward. Trustworthy, even.

“We don’t want anything from you.” He stands and places his card on my desk. “Our job is to return stolen goods to their rightful owners. And in this case, we believe the rightful owner is you. Please do your due diligence and contact me so we can get this moving.”

I SEARCH ONLINE for “édouard Manet, Party on the Seine ,” and then to do a deeper dive into the Claims Conference and Jonathan Stein.

I find a photo confirming that the man who came to my office is actually Stein, and discover the Claims Conference has been in operation since 1951, doing what he said they do: disbursing many millions of dollars of the German government’s money to Holocaust survivors and their families, along with returning—or providing reparations for—Jewish property stolen before and during the war.

édouard Manet is even more of a superstar than I thought, but I was right about the value of his work.

Party on the Seine is apparently both large and critically acclaimed—and likely worth a lot.

Especially because it was—I guess up until now—mourned as a lost masterpiece, either destroyed or hanging in the home of some SS officer’s descendant.

I can’t imagine a scenario in which it might belong to me.

There’s nothing online about Colette or Samuel Bernheim. My dad died when I was ten, and my mom’s dementia took her down four years ago, so I can’t ask them. They were both only children, and I have no siblings either, which means I’m shit out of luck on family confirmation either way.

Although I must admit that my lack of relatives does lend an odd credence to the whole only-heir business.

As does the fact that Party on the Seine disappeared sometime in the late 1930s.

There’s no mention anywhere about its rediscovery, which could be because Jonathan Stein is making it all up—an option that’s looking more and more unlikely—or because he’s telling the truth, and it’s such a new discovery that almost no one is aware of it yet.