The Guggenheim Mystery

by Robin Stevens

  ‘Yes, she did,’ said Salim. ‘I’m her son and these are my cousins.’

  The woman said, ‘Come upstairs, honey. All three of you, come on.’

  I was not sure if we should follow her – we did not know her, after all – but Kat was stepping forward, and so was Salim. I decided to copy them. This woman was the first test we had to face as part of our quest.

  We climbed the stairs, first Kat, then Salim, then me. The woman held the door open and, as I passed her, I looked into her face. It had bright pink lipstick, and its mouth was still turned down. I couldn’t tell whether it meant anger, or sadness, or something else. Then I looked down from her face and saw her bosom, which was very large and also too big for her dress. I felt alarmed, and my head turned itself to the side.

  The room she led us into was small and grey and brown, with lots of squares in it – squares of filing cabinets and desks and piles of papers. It did not look very clean. I worried about germs. The woman leaned against the square of one of the desks.

  ‘So,’ she said to Salim. ‘I’m Sarah. I’m the manager here. But you know that, right? I’m sure Gloria told you. She’s sent you to make sure things are OK after the police visited, right?’ The corners of her mouth went up. ‘You know,’ she added, ‘you’ve got the same kind of funny accent as Gloria. You British?’

  ‘Manchester,’ said Salim. ‘Ted and Kat are from London. But – you’re sure you talked to Mum?’

  ‘If your mom’s Gloria McCloud, then yes. She called on Monday to book a van for yesterday morning at ten forty, to pick an item up from the Guggenheim back entrance on 89th Street. She said that it would be all boxed up in the loading bay, ready to go. We don’t ask questions at Effortless, so I said fine.’

  I felt very strange. Sarah was sure that the person she had spoken to on the phone had been Aunt Gloria. She was also sure that Aunt Gloria really had stolen a painting – and that we were helping her. This was not right. I wanted to say something. Then Kat kicked me. When I looked over at her, she was shaking her head. I understood that she was telling me not to say anything.

  ‘She gave me her credit-card details and that was it,’ said Sarah. ‘I guess you want that receipt, hmm? I’ve got it here. I told the police I couldn’t find it.’ She opened a drawer of one of the filing cabinets and flicked through it. It didn’t look in order, which was bad business practice. ‘Here you go,’ she said after a few minutes. ‘Look. Dated the sixth of this month, at three fifteen p.m.’

  I thought. Today was the tenth, Friday. The sixth had been Monday.

  Salim’s mouth was turned far down, and I saw that his hand was shaking as he took the receipt and put it in his pocket. Then he quickly raised his camera and took a photograph of Sarah, with the office behind her.

  ‘Hey!’ said Sarah, holding up her hand, which had pink painted nails. ‘No photos of me, all right? Look, I don’t know why your mom’s sent you here so soon – but you tell her that everything went as she planned it. I mean, my driver got there a few minutes early, but the crate was already there. So he picked it up and drove back here, and we passed it straight on to the next driver.’

  ‘The next?’ asked Kat.

  ‘That’s what Gloria asked for,’ said Sarah. ‘A guy from Elephant Removals in Queens came to get it. He had his instructions too – also from your mom. Everything was in order. So we handed it over. That’s the last we saw of it. I told the police it had been collected, but said I couldn’t remember their details and couldn’t find the paperwork. Hope that threw them off the scent for a while. You can tell your mom that we sure held up our end of the deal.’

  I was very upset. Sarah was saying that she had lied to the police, and she thought that the person who had hired her to lie was Aunt Gloria. I did not want to believe it. I did not want to be in her office any more. I wanted to get away from it as fast as I could.

  I also wanted Mum there, to tell us what to do. But Mum was not there. We were on our own, in Brooklyn, and our first clue had led to some upsetting answers. Aunt Gloria’s bank account had paid for the removal. A woman with a British accent had ordered the van. The person who had taken the call, Sarah, thought that Aunt Gloria was guilty. And she had told us that the crate, with In the Black Square in it, had been sent on to Queens, which I knew was almost the opposite side of New York to Brooklyn. We were in the wrong place after all. When I looked at Salim’s downturned face, I knew that he felt very upset as well.

  ‘You OK, kids?’ asked Sarah. ‘Do you need anything else? Otherwise I’ve got a lot to do. You can show yourselves out, right?’

  TWENTY-THREE

  Subway Blues

  We walked back to the subway without saying anything. I matched my walk to Salim’s again, so that we could keep on being Ted-and-Salim. Salim turned his head and smiled at me, but I was worried that he was making his face lie again. I couldn’t see what he had to be happy about.

  Hurricane Kat hit when we were halfway between East Broadway and Delancey Street.

  ‘THIS CAN’T BE IT!’ she shouted, waving her arms.

  ‘Quiet, kid!’ said the old man sitting on the silver metal seat opposite us. Kat made a rude face.

  ‘No,’ she repeated. ‘This can’t be it, Salim! I don’t believe it! Auntie Glo wouldn’t steal a painting. We know her! I know that Sarah thinks she did it, but that’s not like Auntie Glo! Whoever really did it is framing her.’

  ‘But Sarah said the person who called had a British accent,’ said Salim. He was sitting hunched forward with his hands dangling between his knees. I hunched forward as well, to keep on copying him.

  ‘Exactly! Anyone could pretend to be British,’ said Kat. ‘Look – it’s not hard for someone to frame Auntie Glo. Anyone at the Guggenheim who knows her knows her accent. And they also know how scatty she is. She’s always leaving things around, isn’t she? Someone could easily have taken her card out of her handbag while she wasn’t paying attention on Monday and used it to call the removals companies from her work telephone, and also to buy the smoke bombs. And we know more than we did before. We know that the call was made on Monday afternoon, and we know that the caller gave an exact time for the removal yesterday. So they already knew when the robbery would happen – this was planned for when they knew the museum would be almost empty, and when Auntie Glo would be in it. She told everyone we were coming, didn’t she? And when she was going to show us around. Lionel said we were expected, didn’t he? So I bet the real thief heard and decided it would be the perfect opportunity to steal the painting and frame her.’

  ‘Frame her,’ I repeated. Framed is a good word that, according to my dictionary, means producing false evidence against a person to pretend they are guilty. Pictures can also be framed, literally not metaphorically. I thought about In the Black Square, and the way it looked as though it had not one frame but two. Kat was making sense, and I thought that her hypotheses were good.

  ‘Exactly, Ted,’ said Kat. ‘Exactly! And that means we really need to help Aunt Gloria. Someone planned this! We can’t just give up! Come on! Think!’

  I thought.

  ‘What if Sarah was the person who stole the painting?’

  I thought this was a good idea, but Salim sat up and shook his head. ‘No, Ted,’ he said. ‘It must have been someone in the museum, like we’ve already said, because of the telephone and the credit card. We’d have noticed Sarah if she was there yesterday too, and I think she thought she was telling the truth about Mum. No, I think she’s just a bit shady – sorry, Ted, I mean she’s not very honest. She was happy to help the thief steal a painting, wasn’t she?’

  I thought that Effortless Light Removals, with its dark staircase and dim office, was a shady place to be.

  ‘And if the real thief knew about Effortless Light Removals, that means they knew how to steal things. They really knew what they were doing!’ said Kat. ‘Auntie Glo wouldn’t have any idea. Look – we can narrow our suspect list down because now we know when the thief used Au
ntie Glo’s credit card, and we know that Effortless Light Removals received the call from a phone number at the Guggenheim. The person who took it, and the painting, has to have been at the Guggenheim yesterday and on Monday – or at least they must have made the telephone call then, and gone through her bag to get the card details before that.’

  ‘Yes!’ shouted Salim. He slapped his palm against Kat’s, and then Kat punched me on the arm. It hurt.

  ‘OW!’ I said.

  The train rattled. Underground lights flashed past the window. ‘Shush!’ said a young woman with glasses.

  ‘Listen,’ said Kat, more quietly. Her eyes were wide. ‘There’s no point chasing after the painting. If it can be found, the police will find it. So we’ve got to focus on working out who really stole it, not where it is.’

  Kat was right. We knew two very important things about the thief: that they were one of the people working in the Guggenheim on the day the painting was stolen, and that they had been near enough to Aunt Gloria to take her credit card from her purse and then call the removals company on Monday afternoon. That had been after the conversation I had overheard between Mum and Dad about us going to New York, and after Aunt Gloria had planned our trip, including our visit to the Guggenheim, so the real thief had known then that Aunt Gloria would be in the Guggenheim on Thursday morning. Therefore we were looking for someone who had been at the Guggenheim on Thursday, and also who’d had access to Aunt Gloria’s bag to steal her card on Monday.

  Salim rubbed his hands across his face and blinked.

  ‘You really think we can do this?’ he asked quietly.

  ‘We’ve got Ted,’ said Kat. ‘He’s our secret weapon. I bet the police don’t have anyone like him.’

  I watched Salim’s mouth. After four seconds its corners finally turned upwards. ‘We do have Ted,’ he said.

  ‘And we’ve got you,’ said Kat. ‘You know the Guggenheim, right? You know the people who work there, and where to find them today. You know who our suspects are!’

  She got her notebook out of her leopardskin backpack, and turned to the list we had made a few hours ago. I saw that we could make a new list to show who we thought were suspects, and who we had ruled out. We took Aunt Gloria, Sandra and the fire crew off, and that left us with eight people. Kat wrote them all out, in pen, in her notebook.

  This is what we now had:

  Who could have stolen the painting?

  Lionel. (Security guard. The second-last person to leave the museum. Because he is the security guard, he must know how to shut down the burglar alarms and security cameras, and we know they were down yesterday morning.)

  Helen. (Head of the maintenance crew. Third last to leave.)

  Jacob. (Member of the maintenance crew. Fourth last.)

  Ty. (Member of the maintenance crew. Fifth last.)

  Lana. (Member of the maintenance crew. Third person out of the museum after us.) Less likely to be her, though we can’t rule her out yet.

  Ben. (Member of the maintenance crew. Joint first out of the museum after us. He was also with Rafael. Does this rule him out?) Less likely to be him, though we can’t rule him out yet.

  Rafael. (Janitor. Joint first out of the museum after us. He was also with Ben. Does this rule him out?) Less likely to be him, though we can’t rule him out yet either.

  The builder, Gabriel. (This is very unlikely. He was working on the outside of the building, and never went inside. Although he might have climbed in through the broken skylight to steal the painting (this is Ted’s idea. We need to test it to see if it is possible). Gabriel was also late for the roll call, which is suspicious.

  Who has been ruled out?

  Aunt Gloria (because she is being framed), Sandra (because she is too small to have carried the painting, and also she was wearing very high heels), the fire crew (because none of them could have been at the Guggenheim on Monday).

  ‘Good,’ said Kat. ‘Right. We’ve got to interview our suspects and work out which one is guilty. We need you, Salim.’

  I was glad that Kat seemed to have stopped being Mean Kat, now that we were working on this case. She had told Salim a kind thing that he needed to hear.

  The train pulled in to Delancey Street. Seven people got out of our carriage, and nine got on. ‘Come on, Salim,’ said Kat. ‘Where do we go first?’

  Salim’s face firmed up. He lifted his shoulders. ‘We’re going to see Ty,’ he said.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Building a Case

  We got out of the F train at Broadway–Lafayette Street, which was back in Manhattan. Everywhere we went, New York seemed like a different city. I imagined us like Odysseus, travelling to different islands and facing a different task 0n each one. I wondered what we would find here.

  This street was very wide, and striped with white lines that told people where to cross. There were large flat billboards sticking up into the sky, covered in pictures of people with no expressions on their faces. Traffic lights hung in the air as well, on curved yellow and white poles. The buildings behind the boards and the lights were big and brown, with lots of windows. I counted only three trees, which was a bad thing. There are not enough trees in New York. Trees are good, because during the process of photosynthesis, in the daytime, they take in carbon dioxide (which is what human beings breathe out every four seconds on average) and give out oxygen. I imagined New York like a seesaw (this is a simile again), with all the people on one side, and the trees on the other. It did not balance out. As a future meteorologist, I was concerned by this.

  I noticed that the air smelled rotten and there were dirty stains on the edges of the road. ‘Kat!’ I said. ‘This place is not very hygienic.’

  ‘Save it, Ted,’ said Kat. ‘Follow Salim – come on!’

  Salim was moving very fast. He has long legs, and this means that he can walk more quickly than I can. Kat is almost as tall as he is, but she was trying to wait for me. Then she got tired of waiting, and grabbed my arm, dragging me forward.

  ‘Hrumm!’ I said urgently.

  ‘Save it, Ted!’ snapped Kat again. ‘We don’t have time!’

  I looked at my weather watch. It was 1.17 p.m. New York time, which meant that it was 6.17 p.m. in London. I thought that we did have time, plenty of it. I imagined the two times next to each other, as though we could balance between them, in two places at once, and felt good. But I couldn’t explain this to Kat, and so I had to hurry after her, my school uniform shirt itching my arms, all the way to a very tall white building with glass windows and glass sliding doors. Salim was waiting for us, his face wrinkled up and cheeks red.

  ‘This is the Center for Architecture,’ he panted. ‘Ty messaged me this morning – he’s working here today while the police have the Guggenheim shut down.’

  We went through the glass doors into a rush of coolness that flowed down from the top of my head to my fingertips. It felt good. But there were several people looking at us, which was less good.

  ‘Hurry!’ muttered Salim.

  One of the women, in a purple dress and a hairstyle that looked not real – like a cumulus cloud formation glued to her head – came up to us.

  ‘What are you doing here, young man?’ she asked Salim.

  I opened my mouth to tell her, but Kat spoke first. ‘We’re here to see our father,’ she said in a loud voice.

  ‘And what is your father’s name?’ asked the woman.

  I saw Kat’s eyes flicker, and then settle on something behind the woman’s head. It was a glass board covered in names. I began to read them, A to Z. I was only on C when Kat said, ‘Norman Ruby.’

  ‘Oh!’ said the woman, her eyes wide. ‘I didn’t know—’

  ‘He doesn’t talk about us much,’ said Kat, lowering her voice. ‘We’re from his first marriage.’

  ‘Oh!’ said the woman, and her cheeks turned red.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘And Salim is our friend, not our cousin.’

  This was the fifth lie I have ever told.


  The woman looked at me strangely, but she said to Salim, ‘Well, if you’re with them – go on then. Young lady, your father’s in his office.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Kat politely. Her face was very calm. ‘Come on, Ted and Salim.’ We walked up a ramp, and through some sliding glass doors, and then Kat’s face slipped into a grin that made her whole face wobble. ‘Ted!’ she squawked, leaning against a wall and putting her hands on her stomach. ‘You nearly gave us away! Salim is our friend, not our cousin!’

  Salim laughed too, leaning against Kat.

  ‘Where is Ty?’ I asked. ‘Is he studying to be an architect here?’

  ‘Not exactly,’ said Salim. ‘I mean – yeah, one day. That’s the plan. He’s saving up. But right now he’s just their electrician.’

  We found Ty at the end of a long marble corridor. He was wearing a dark red boiler suit and a baseball cap over his big hairstyle, and he was working on a panel of wires that stuck out of the wall. He looked up and saw us, and a smile appeared on his face.

  ‘Salim!’ he said. ‘Kat and Ted! Hey! What’re you doing here?’

  I wondered whether Salim would lie this time, but he didn’t. ‘We’re here about the painting,’ he said. ‘Ty – Mum’s been arrested.’

  Ty’s face stopped smiling. His lips pursed up small, and his eyes narrowed. ‘Are you sure?’ he asked.

  ‘We were there!’ said Salim. ‘She’s been taken away by that detective. But, Ty, she didn’t do it! She’s being framed. We know she is. We’re trying to work out who did it.’

  ‘Salim,’ said Ty quietly. ‘Man. Don’t get involved with the police, OK? This is their business. They’ll most likely drop it once they can’t get any leads. Your mom’s respectable. They won’t be able to hold her.’

  ‘Yeah, but we can’t take that chance!’ said Salim, his eyes very wide. ‘And the detective who took her away – I could tell he didn’t trust her. You’ve got to help us! We know that the person who framed her was at the Guggenheim on Monday. Do you know who was working there that day?’