Bernard Darties reviews recent French museum thefts, noting a Brittany ivory stolen in 1996 and a silk tapestry taken earlier that year by a suspected male–female duo. He drafts a memo tying numerous cases, hypothesizing a cultured, possibly married pair with refined taste and unusual skill.

Drawing on his antiterrorism background, Darties views the spree’s psychological impact as destabilizing. The most alarming case is the 1996 disappearance of Corneille de Lyon’s portrait of Madeleine de France in Blois: the small painting, double framed, vanishes without disturbance, leaving the large outer frame intact and a void at its center.

With no names or clear images, Darties opts for discretion, restricting the inquiry within France’s art-crime unit, unaware that Swiss inspector Alexandre Von der Mühll is independently pursuing similar leads. Both sides set quiet traps, scrutinizing every new theft for links.

Witnesses continue to cite a man and woman at fresh crime scenes: a Basel museum loses a seventeenth-century violin; a Saintes museum a Flemish still life; Nantes a bronze boar; with similar disappearances in Vendôme, Orléans, and Bailleul. The accumulation prompts a third, separate French regional police investigation, intensifying pressure and suggesting the couple’s luck will run out.