The Mystery of the Third Lucretia (8 page)

Belshazzar's Feast was at one end of the room. Gallery Guy was back and off to the left of center if you were looking at the painting. There was a bench smack in the middle of everything, and both the exit doors were close to the other end of the room. So with people coming and going the way they do in art galleries, we thought we'd go through the Rembrandt room over and over again as long as Gallery Guy didn't turn around and notice us, and as long as we managed to fool Bert.

Were we going to be able to do it? I wasn't sure. My heart was pounding so hard I wondered if the two guys could hear it.

If you were a complete stranger and didn't know anything about who Lucas and I and the other people were, this is what you would have seen if you'd been there that afternoon.

About a quarter past three, a young woman walked into Gallery 23. She had curly, strawberry blond hair, and was wearing a green polka-dot dress and green shoes. She didn't use the entrance where the museum guard was standing. Instead she came in from the door on the other side of the room.

She was studying a copy of A Room-to-Room Guide to the National Gallery that she'd bought in the gift shop, and when she came through the door her head was down as if she was busy reading. As she walked by the first few pictures, she made little notes in the book with a pencil.

The guard never saw the face of the young woman in the green dress because somehow she always managed to have her back to him or her head down in her book. And she didn't seem to have the slightest interest in the paintings hanging near where he was standing.

Just outside the same entrance the girl in green had used was another young woman. She was standing where she couldn't be seen either by the man guarding the Rembrandt room or by the man who was busy copying one of Rembrandt's paintings. She had dark hair, wore a black skirt and crinkly white shirt, and was watching the first young woman carefully.

She noticed that the young woman in green stood for a long time in front of a painting called
Belshazzar's Feast
and slightly behind a man painting at an easel. And though the head of the girl in green was lowered as if she was really interested in her guidebook, her eyes were actually looking toward the painter's canvas. Whenever she glanced over in that direction, she'd look back and make another note in the guidebook. When the artist turned around—probably because he felt someone looking at him—the young woman was slightly turned away from him, studying her book again.

After one last glance over the painter's shoulder, the young woman in green left the Rembrandt room and walked into the gallery where the other young woman was waiting.

Five minutes later the young woman in the black skirt and white shirt walked into the Rembrandt room. She, too, kept her back toward the guard standing at the central entrance. Eventually, after she'd spent a lot of time standing behind the guy painting at the easel, and looking at the pictures that hung near the one called Belshazzar's Feast, she sat down on the bench in the room and pulled some postcards from a bag she'd gotten at the gift shop. Keeping her head down, she appeared to be writing on the postcards. Then she put the postcards back in the gift shop bag, wandered over behind the painter again, then went out of the room the way she'd come in.

Later, two girls who looked and acted about twelve or thirteen came into the gallery together. Both girls had their hair pulled back in buns like ballet dancers have. One of the girls had a silver retainer on her teeth. The other one wore glasses.

The girl with the reddish blond hair was dressed in jeans and a long-sleeved T-shirt. The other girl was wearing a green sweater with black pants. As they stood looking at the painting around the corner from the one called Belshazzar's Feast, the first girl was whispering to the second girl in French about a boy she liked at school. While the strawberry blonde whispered, the brunette was glancing over the shoulder of the man who was painting at an easel. As the man turned to look at them, the two started giggling at what the first girl said, and ran into the next gallery.

A half hour before the museum closed, a group of German tourists was taking a guided tour through the National Gallery. When they got as far as the Rembrandt room, the guide, speaking in German, stopped in front of one of two Rembrandt self-portraits. Toward the back of the group, wearing a sweater, tight jeans, and a jeans jacket, was a brunette with dark hair pulled back in a messy ponytail, a lot of heavy eye makeup, and dark lipstick.

Of all the people in the German group, this young woman was the one standing closest to the man at the easel. When the guide walked to the next room and the tourists began to follow, the young woman seemed to be jostled by someone in front of her. She took a quick step backward, slightly brushing the back of the painter. But as he turned to say something nasty to her, she moved to his other side, where she leaned toward him briefly to say, “Sorry,” with a little accent. Then, before he could catch a glimpse of her face, she'd turned and was gone with the rest of the group.

In all that time, Bert never realized that these were all the same two girls.

“We are sooooooo GOOD!” Lucas shouted as we got back to the women's room.

“And for the best performance by an actress . . . may I have the envelope, please,” I said into the mirror. I was still wearing my German tourist outfit.

Lucas handed me her Room-to-Room Guide, then when I frowned she found my bag of postcards and gave it to me with a flourish.

“And the Oscar goes to . . .” I pulled a postcard from the bag with a huge gesture. “Oh my goodness, there's been a tie! The winners are Lucas Stickney and Kari Sundgren!”

We did the Hollywood thing of “dahling” and kisses on both cheeks.

Lucas picked up a shoe, walked closer to the mirror, and bent her head, as if she was about to talk into a microphone. “We'd like to thank the Academy,” she said, holding the shoe as if it were the Oscar, “and we'd like to thank Gillian Welles Sundgren, who made our performance possible. And Mr. Gallery Guy, without whose help we wouldn't be here this evening.”

She looked at me and bit her lip, as if she knew there were more people to thank, but she'd forgotten who they were. She was totally getting into this.

I whispered to her.

“And Camellia Stickney for supplying the costumes, and Rembrandt, and
The Scene
magazine. Oh, and a guard at the National Gallery in London, who inspired our performance.”

She stepped aside, still holding Oscar. I approached the invisible mike with the other shoe.

“And we'd like to thank our families, except for Allen the Meep and the Brat Child, who don't deserve thanks for anything.” We'd just watched the Academy Awards a few weeks before and I'd seen some guy talking about some political thing until he had to be almost shoved off the stage, so I added, “And while I'm at the microphone, I'd like to call the Academy's attention to the continuing problem of discrimination against people who wear size eight shoes. . . .”

Lucas cracked up.

We'd promised each other we wouldn't let ourselves get too excited until after the whole day was over and we'd managed it all without being found out. Now we let it all loose, and we laughed and hooted and joked around the whole time we were getting back into normal clothes, and all the way down to the tube station where we started our trip back to Robert's house.

After the morning at the British Museum, Mom had gone back to Hackney to do some writing. So together with her we'd plotted out our route home taking the tube and a bus, and she left us on our own with our London Transport passes. She only asked that we call every hour again, and one last time when we were ready to start back so she'd know when to expect us, and we'd done that.

We spent the entire tube ride talking about what had happened—what good actresses we were, how neither Bert nor Gallery Guy seemed to have noticed us, how glad Lucas was that in her stuck-up private school she'd been taking French since third grade, how well I'd managed the German tourist thing, etcetera, etcetera.

Once on the bus, we pulled out what we'd written and drawn. Lucas had her drawing on the inside back cover of her guidebook. I'd used the back of two postcards. We'd drawn everything we'd seen of Gallery Guy's canvas.

But the only thing we'd seen that looked like anything in particular was exactly one fingertip.

That's it. Just a fingertip. It looked like a woman's fingertip. The fingernail side.

I was the one who'd seen it sticking up about six inches from the top of the canvas. Lucas had seen something that looked like gold, lacy fabric on the left side, and we'd both seen dark red on the right that we thought was like a background or something.

Of course we'd used plain old pencils to make our copies, so nothing was in color.

From what we'd seen, it was hard to figure out what part of Rembrandt's painting Gallery Guy was copying. I suppose I should explain about Belshazzar's Feast. It's big, about seven feet wide and as tall as I am. In the middle is this guy in a turban—Belshazzar, from the Bible story. God warned him about something by writing a message to him on the wall when he was surrounded by people, having a holy feast or an orgy or something. You know how people say, “I saw the handwriting on the wall”? Well, Belshazzar was the first one to see the handwriting on the wall. At least that's what it says in the Bible.

In Rembrandt's picture a bunch of people are sitting around a table with grapes on it. (Grapes seem to be big in famous paintings.) Everybody in Rembrandt's picture has clothes on, so it probably wasn't an orgy. Belshazzar is kind of half getting up from his chair, and looking at this mysterious hand coming out of a cloud or some smoke or something, and writing on the wall in a foreign alphabet. Belshazzar and the people around him all look worried.

Well, in Rembrandt's painting there's some red in a woman's dress, but it wasn't the same color red as what I'd seen on the right-hand side of Gallery Guy's canvas. The lacy fabric Lucas had seen on the left side might have come from the cape or shawl thing Belshazzar is wearing.

Then there was the fingertip, which didn't seem to match anything in Belshazzar's Feast. You don't notice it unless you're looking for it, but the painting is full of people making gestures with their hands. Trouble was, the fingertip I'd seen was pointed upward—not straight, but up-ish, if you know what I mean. The only fingers pointed even partly upward in Rembrandt's painting are on a woman behind Belshazzar who's holding her hands like you'd do if you were clapping softly and your hands stayed stuck together. Well, it's a little looser than that, but that's kind of it. But even her fingertips weren't pointing upward like the one Gallery Guy had painted. Plus in Rembrandt's painting, those hands weren't really next to the gold on Belshazzar's cape.

God probably knew what Gallery Guy was painting, but we sure didn't.

When we finished comparing what we'd seen, and talking about what Gallery Guy could be working on, we still were a long way from our bus stop, so we began plotting our disguises for the next day.

“Wait,” Lucas said, after we'd been talking about disguises for about five minutes. “Let's stay focused on what we want to do here.”

“What do you mean?” Focused? We were on a roll.

“What I mean is, why are we doing what we're doing?”

“To find out what Gallery Guy is up to.”

“Exactly. We're not here to set some kind of record for getting into the Rembrandt room without being noticed.”

“So what do you think our next step should be?”

“Here's what I think. I'll draw Gallery Guy sitting in the middle of the room, just like we planned, since we can't use the camera. And we can keep looking at what we can see around the sides of his canvas. But mostly let's just do whatever we can to get a look at what he's painting in the middle, and copy it onto a big canvas, like his.”

“Copy the colors? Using what? Oil paints? And where exactly would we set up our canvas? And where would we leave it to dry?” This whole thing sounded like a dumb idea.

“There are some cool starter sets of acrylic paints in the museum gift shop. They dry right away,” Lucas said. “And even if you can't reproduce oil paint colors perfectly with acrylic, you can get them pretty close. And we can do it right there. The classes must be on spring break just like our schools at home because it seems like there's never anybody in the loo.” We were calling bathrooms “loos” all the time now. It just seemed to come naturally.

“The problem is, you remember what you see and draw better than I do,” I said, “but face it: I paint better than you.”

“I know. You mix colors better, and you apply them better, and you're faster, and all that. But we can solve those problems. Let's think about it. Remember, we're soooo GOOD.”

 

 

When we got back to Robert's, Mom had been watching for us, and she greeted us with the kind of smile that let us know she'd been worried about us coming back alone, even though we'd called her just as we got on the bus like we promised. Then she said, “So, how did everything go today?”

Of course we were prepared. All day, every time we called, we told her a fake story about where we were. So now we just had to remember what we'd said. We'd studied our guidebooks so we could make it all seem more real.

We—actually, mostly Lucas, because she lies to Mom a lot better than I do—told her about our tour of Kensington Palace and not seeing anybody from the royal family, and about what we saw at the two famous stamp shops, and by the time we got done with that, Robert came out from his bedroom dressed for work, asked if we'd had fun, made a few jokes, and headed off for the restaurant. When he left, Mom got right back to work on her article, Lucas and I watched TV for the rest of the night and ate bread and cheese and something called a meat pie that Robert had bought for us to munch on, and we didn't have to answer any more questions.