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Not security, not museum affiliated and so that only left one more category that these two men could be for Henriette, and that was crazy.

These two guys were crazy.

Henriette's head instantly started spinning with questions.

Had they broken in here to sleep the night?

Why was the one man just wearing one sock and one slipper?

Where were the other sock and the other slipper?

Were they possibly on drugs?

Were they trying to rob the museum to buy drugs?

Honestly though, looking at how old everything was, it was clear to Henriette that breaking and entering didn't appear to be particularly difficult here. They had a priceless Monet on the wall yet had never felt the need to even put locks on the windows.

Millions on the wall but then security like this. This museum was truly unbelievable.

Eventhough these guys didn't strike Henriette as your conventional burglars, that didn't mean anything. Henriette was in New York of all places. For all she knew they could end up being some of those batshit crazy people who roamed the streets at night and ended up in the news for doing some weird Florida man type of shit.

Henriette had a hard time believing many things, but this was not one of them. She guessed she was truly being blatantly robbed in a museum by armed yet shoeless tweed wearing God knows whats.

Time to abandon the use of logic and just focus on an exit strategy.

Both men were starting to grow restless with her, so Henriette knew she would have to come up with something fast. Tweed guy had retreated a few steps but sock guy continued to stand his ground and positively growled at her now,

"Let's start at the beginning. Last time, who are you?"

Once again Henriette fell silent. She needed to get out of here somehow and it needed to happen ASAP. Frantically glancing around for something that could be of help to her, Henriette quickly zeroed in on her own backpack that lay upended on the floor across from her. And then as if she was struck by lightning, Henriette remembered the universal solver of all problems.

"Mo-ney," she squeaked, "I can give you money!"

Unlike the rest of her belongings that were strewn across the floor similar to her backpack, it had taken Henriette until now to remember that she'd had her wallet in her back pocket the whole time. Slowly reaching out behind her as not to startle the two men with her sudden movement again, Henriette slowly shimmied her wallet out her pants before returning her shaking hand back to her lap. Both men watched her suspiciously but didn't do anything to stop her.

Taking their silence as approval for monetary compensation, Henriette took out all the money she had exchanged that morning and held the dollars up towards them.

But to her surprise one sock man declined.

"Stop messing around," he said seemingly offended now, "Answer me. Who are you?"

Over her, hopefully not so soon dead body, Henriette decided, was she actually going to tell them her real name.

Gripping tightly to what appeared her only life line, Henriette tried to offer the money again,

"My name is... is Leonie! Please, please don't hurt me!" she begged them, "Take my money! I won't tell anybody, and I won't ever go to the police! Please just let me go!!"

Fake tears started to well in Henriette's eyes-

Okay, real tears started to well in Henriette's eyes and eventually the tears may have also possibly morphed into light sobs. But anyway,

Between sobs and continuous heart wrenching pleas to take her money, it was becoming evidently clear that this entire scenario made utterly no sense. They weren't taking her money but also not letting her go. The two men obviously didn't seem to know what to make of the whole thing either because the confusion was clear-cut on their faces. Henriette was quite sure the sobbing had definitely thrown them off a bit.

The totally not real sobbing only stopped however after Henriette started to hiccup.

It dawned on her that these men were probably not robbing her but had some other agenda, based on the fact that they had quickly declined a whopping 386$ (bad exchange rates).

It was becoming clear to Henriette that something else was going on here for sure. And it felt really really off. How had everyone just disappeared and left her here? Honestly this place was tiny, you couldn't just miss an unconscious woman sprawled on the floor. And it was clearly already nighttime; did that mean she'd been lying around here for hours? She couldn't even recall what happened before she fainted, her memory was all fuzzy and vague-

-But regardless she knew everything here was plainly just wrong.

And then like a boomerang, something came back to her.

A certain picture of a certain someone, on a certain page, in a certain pamphlet, that Henriette had recently stared at for an extended period of time not too long ago outside these very exact doors.

One could say a picture that came alive in the room.

As in, it was alive and in the room.

Funnily enough, in that moment one sock sweater vest man seemed to have a similar picture-perfect idea, as a tiny image of herself was thrust into Henriette's face in the form of her passport.

But then he couldn't be called one sock-sweater vest man anymore, could he? Henriette knew that face...

Ignoring her passport, Henriette's eyes widened with realization, and she simply stared at the man in open astonishment.

Undoubtably once again pleased her reaction, he continued to wave the passport in front of her face, taunting her, as if it were a red cape and she was a Spanish bull,

"Well Leonie, how come this beautiful document here, that coincidentally also has your own picture on it, says your name is Henriette Falberg and not Leonie?"

Henriette didn't even blink, her mind was still busy calculating the chances of the man standing in front of her being who she thought he was.

Tweed man took her silence as validation and triumphantly grinned at her. Without invitation he deposited himself on the sofa next to her as one sock man remained standing, with the gun still securely aimed at her. Comfortably crossing one leg over the other, he took the passport from his buddy and drove some more nails into what he seemed to think was her proverbial coffin,

" ...And what's this? born 1992? Issued in Berlin? and what's this European Union? Ha! Who are you trying to fool with this?! Complete idiots?"

Not in a particularly romantic sense but at the moment Henriette only had eyes for the gun and the specific man holding it. Apart from the occasional involuntary hiccup, she stayed as silent as a flat earther in physics class.

Tweed man's arm slid up behind her and he flashed her another smile that was far from friendly,

" Now come Miss Falberg," despite his accent being very American, his pronunciation of her name was spot on German, "You are obviously here for a reason. My friend over here, is just a little skeptical about what that reason might be. You see, visitors who enter a house uninvited tend to raise some questions..."

"...Especially those visitors who then collapse in your living room." Man who shall not be named felt the need to add.

Tweed man was still on a roll though, "Now it's been a while since we've had a visitor come from a German republic," sarcasm clear in his voice, "But who's to say you haven't had a bit of Russian encouragement? Eh? Berlin was it?"

Henriette's blood ran cold. More precisely, it ran cold again, having chilled sometime around when the gun made its first appearance in her peripheral vision. When people holding a gun on you also mentioned Russians, it usually didn't end well.

Suppressing another hiccup, she kept her silence, but only with more wide-eyed staring at one sock man.

A short eternity later, after Henriette managed to scrape her last bit of courage together, the deathly silence was finally broken. Nonetheless the tension felt like a gas leak waiting for someone to strike a match.

She essentially forced the words out of herself,

"Errr... em...Sir... ahem...are you by chance..."

Both men froze, sensing their interrogatee was finally ready to respond.

Henriette clenched her fists so tight the money crumpled in her hands,

"... Are.... You...ha ha..."

The words barely came out a whisper,

"That Theodore Jamison?"

She asked,

"The one born in 1924?"

And much later, when Henriette would look back at this whole story, she would always remember that moment; that second when that last question left her lips, as the moment her new reality began and her life changed forever.

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