The Mystery of the Third Lucretia (9 page)

I was glad. I had the feeling that the more we lied, the more trouble we might get into eventually.

 

 

That night when we were packing up our disguises for the next day, I noticed Lucas was quieter than usual.

“What's wrong?” I asked.

She folded up a shirt, stuffed it in a bag, and shrugged. I personally hate it when you're trying to get somebody to say something and all they do is shrug.

I was getting ready to let her have it when she said, “Are you sure we're not doing something totally stupid?”

“Lucas, this was your idea!”

“Well, maybe it was a really crummy idea.”

I remembered how excited we were when we'd given each other Oscars in front of the mirror in the women's loo, and I figured I knew what Lucas was feeling.

“I think it's just the letdown,” I said, wrapping up a pair of shoes in a plastic bag before putting them in with the other clothes. “It's like after that time we called Brendon Thorpe and I was so excited for a while, and then later I was sure everything we said to him was so stupid.” Brendon Thorpe is this cute guy who was in my English class last year. “Remember? I think it always works that way. After you have a big, like, rush or whatever, like talking to Brendon or what we did this afternoon, you're always going to feel let down.”

“Maybe. But we have absolutely no real reason to be doing what we're doing. I mean, yeah, it would make sense to make a copy of what Gallery Guy is painting to use as evidence if we ever find out there's been an art crime. But how do we know he's not just some incredibly rude amateur painter who likes to copy paintings by Rembrandt?”

I sat down on the bed and faced her. “Look, Lucas. I know all we have to go on is circumstantial evidence. We don't have any smoking gun.”

“Circumstantial evidence? Smoking gun? Girl, you've been watching too many cop shows.”

“You know what I mean,” I said. “We don't have any real proof that Gallery Guy is doing something illegal, but it sure looks like he is. It's not like we've only seen him in London. Remember, he was in Minneapolis, too, also copying a picture by Rembrandt.”

“So maybe he has a lot of money, likes to travel, likes to paint, plus likes to copy paintings by Rembrandt.”

“Don't tell me he's been working on drawing fingernails for an entire year!” It seemed like she was just being stubborn. “Listen, Lucas, we have a ton of reasons to be suspicious. First, he's been in two different museums, thousands of miles apart, copying pictures by Rembrandt. Second, he's wearing a disguise that makes him look totally different from the guy we saw in Minneapolis. The only reason I can think of for somebody to do that is to make sure nobody who saw him
there
would recognize him here.

“Third”—by this time I was holding up my fingers and counting off the points—“the way he leans over his canvas, he for sure doesn't want anybody to see what he's working on. And fourth, both in Minneapolis and here, when somebody tried to see what he's painting, he got all bent out of shape and said, ‘Go a-
way
.' Any one of those things could be totally random, but together, you've got to admit, it's suspicious. He must be up to something.”

I could tell by Lucas's expression that I was convincing her. “Besides,
as you pointed out
,” I added, “if we weren't doing this, what else would we be doing?”

“Yeah, I guess you're right.”

There was another argument, but I wasn't going to use it. The thing is, like I've said, Lucas is a lot smarter than I am. I get good grades, but those tests you take in school show that she's almost a genius.

But also like I've said, I have way better intuition than she has. She might get straight As without having to study, and she might get first prize in physics contests, but lots of times I know things without knowing why or how I know them. Not school stuff of course, but about situations, and especially about people and what they're like.

Now my intuition was saying that Gallery Guy was up to something big. And we had to get that painting copied, I just knew it. It seemed like a race against time.

I wasn't going to tell Lucas that. I figured she'd make fun of me if I told her I thought it was a race against time. But I knew we had to do what we were doing, and I knew we had to do it in a hurry, even if I didn't know why.

The next day, Lucas was back to normal. And Mom was finally getting used to us being on our own—she seemed to take our trip into central London for granted.

We had a lot to do that morning, so we got up early. Right after breakfast we grabbed the stuff we'd packed the night before and made one more trip from Robert's place to downtown.

We'd just left the tube station and were crossing an incredibly busy street with about a thousand other pedestrians when Lucas poked me in the side with her elbow and said, “Don't look now, but there's Gallery Guy.”

Of course I did look, and there he was, behind the wheel of a long, low, shiny black car that was stopped first in line at the crosswalk. Fortunately he wasn't paying any attention to the people who were walking in a bunch right in front of him.

“Wouldn't you know he'd be driving a Jaguar,” Lucas said. “It's so perfect.”

I'm not as into cars as she is. “Is that a Jaguar?” I asked. By this time we'd gotten to the other side of the street. I turned around in time to see Gallery Guy's car speed off.

“Haven't you ever seen one before? Some of my parents' friends have them. It's expensive, like a Mercedes or Lexus. The coolest thing is the hood ornament. It's a jaguar springing forward.”

“Oh, I've seen those. Why do you think it's like Gallery Guy to have one?”

“I've never known a woman who drives a Jaguar,” Lucas explained. “It seems like all the people who own them are guys who want to feel macho and important.”

“Yeah, that seems like the kind of person Gallery Guy is, all right.”

 

 

Before heading into the National Gallery, we had three stops to make. First, we found an ATM and Lucas took out a bunch of money. (Lucas's parents let her have her own ATM card—in some ways it actually does pay to be rich.) Then we found a drugstore where we got some air freshener for the bathroom and a pair of glasses with clear lenses that I could use for a disguise. Finally we stopped at the gift shop at the National Gallery to get an acrylic paint set and a reproduction of Belshazzar's Feast.

We'd come up with a plan that would use both Lucas's photographic memory and drawing talent and my talent for painting. Lucas would keep going into the Rembrandt room and do whatever she could to get a good look at what Gallery Guy was painting so she could sketch it all out on our canvas. She'd also draw him sitting at his easel, the way we'd planned.

My part was to get ready to do the painting by studying the way Rembrandt had painted those hands. And that meant I had to go into the Rembrandt room, too.

If I hadn't taken those classes at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, I would have wondered why Gallery Guy would take a risk like sitting in a busy room in a famous museum to copy Rembrandt's painting instead of just using a copy he could imitate in private.

But those art classes answered that question for me. When the teacher sent us into the galleries to copy paintings, I learned that there's no way to imitate a painter's brushstrokes by working from even a really good copy of a painting. You have to see how thick the paint is and whether it's put on smooth or bumpy, plus the colors on a reproduction are never quite right. That meant even though we'd gotten our own big copy of Belshazzar's Feast to use as a guide, I still needed to see the original up close. Because if Gallery Guy was trying to paint the way Rembrandt painted, then I should be trying to paint that way, too.

We went on a few tours. A couple of times we tagged along with families, trying to blend in. Of course every time we went through we used different clothes and hairdos and sometimes used glasses, makeup, or our retainers for even more of a disguise. When one of us left the gallery, we came straight back to the loo to report to each other, change our clothes, and waste a little time before we went in again.

It wasn't so bad for me. Lucas had made a drawing for me of the woman's hands that seemed kind of stuck together, and of the hand that was sticking out of the cloud—at least that one had fingernails—and I was making progress figuring out exactly what brushstrokes and color mixtures Rembrandt used to paint them. I'd work on a section like a shadow or a knuckle while I waited for Lucas.

But after a few trips Lucas started getting frustrated. No matter how hard she tried, she was never able to see very much of the painting.

The way Gallery Guy painted was really weird. He didn't hold a palette in one hand and his brush in the other and stand or sit back from the canvas, like my dad and other painters do. Instead, he had his palette on a little shelf connected to the easel. He was left-handed, and it was on the left side where he could reach with his brush without leaning back. He kept his right arm resting on top of the canvas. He always looked around to make sure nobody was watching him before he left his canvas uncovered to change brushes or reach for a new tube of paint.

It sounds suspicious-looking, but he must have been painting like that for a long time, because he made the way he sat look natural.

Lucas tried everything she could think of to see what was on the middle of the canvas, but she only managed to see the edges. On one trip she spotted the fingertip I'd seen, and actually saw the very top of a second fingertip, but that didn't do us a lot of good. She tried tricks—tying her shoe to see the bottom right corner, dropping her museum map to see the bottom left, but all she saw was a little more of the lacy fabric and the red background.

By this time she wasn't just frustrated, she was extremely frustrated.

Instead of drawing what Gallery Guy was painting, she was stuck spending all her time in the bathroom making sketches of him on a big art tablet we'd bought in the museum shop. She drew him from a bunch of angles, then did an awesome drawing of him with the Rembrandt paintings around him. You could even tell which paintings were which from what she drew.

One thing about Lucas, she isn't a quitter. She kept on trying. But as the afternoon went on, I started having a little feeling that we should quit. Pack up and go home.

It was my intuition talking to me. But did I pay attention? NoooOOOoooo.

See, I wanted to get one more look at Rembrandt's brushstrokes on the woman's middle finger. So I decided to go in again. I put on a long, baggy white shirt, a pair of khakis and my Sketchers, pulled my hair back in a ponytail, and walked to Gallery 22, waiting for something to happen. Sure enough, along came a guided tour in Spanish, and I tagged along behind. The guide stopped in front of Rembrandt's self-portrait, and I'd just turned toward Gallery Guy's canvas when, miracle of miracles, he actually leaned over to get a new brush out of his metal kit on the floor without glancing around first to see if anyone was looking.

In all the time we'd watched him, he'd never done anything so careless before. He only moved about a foot before he caught himself and straightened back up, but I'd seen what was in the middle of his painting.

It was a huge set of hands coming out of gold sleeves. The fingers were twined together, the palms resting on a rounded something painted cream and gold. The painting was so beautiful I almost gasped. Before Gallery Guy could look around to see if I was looking—which I knew he would—I quick turned in the other direction.

And I looked straight at Bert, who was looking straight at me. I mean
straight
at me. Glaring.

My heart started beating like the drum at the end of a heavy metal song. I froze. What should I do. Stay? Run? What?

But then I could almost hear Lucas saying, “Stay cool, Kari.” So I pretended like nothing had happened. I walked with the Spanish group into the next room, then kept walking as fast as I could without looking suspicious through the room that led from there to the education wing and down the stairs to the women's loo.

“I've got some good news and some bad news,” I said, bursting through the door, and I told Lucas what had happened.

She listened, then leaned against the counter with the sinks in it, folded her arms across her chest, and stared up toward the ceiling.

Finally she said, “You'd better cool it for a while. Bert strikes me as the ‘stick your nose in everybody else's business' type who might feel it was his duty or something to tell Gallery Guy he's being spied on.”

That was fine with me. I didn't wantto go back. “Okay, from now on it's up to you.”

She turned around and used the mirror to look at me. “I'm getting sick of this. I've made six trips trying to see the middle of his canvas. I think it's time I just make it happen.”

She straightened and moved toward the door. “I'm going to make one last trip through since I'm already dressed for it, and this time I'm going to be aggressive. What have we got to lose?” With that she was out of the loo before I could say anything back.

I settled on the floor next to the sink, the canvas in my lap and the paints beside me, and thought about what she'd just said. What did we have to lose? If she once got a good look at the canvas, we didn't need to see Gallery Guy ever again. Or Bert either, for that matter.

But somehow I still didn't want Gallery Guy to know what we were up to. He was a bad guy, and there was no telling what he'd do if he knew he was being spied on.