The Guggenheim Mystery

by Robin Stevens

  ‘What are you doing here?’ she asked.

  ‘I was just taking them on a tour,’ said Salim.

  ‘Didn’t I tell you not to bother me?’ asked Sandra. ‘Go away! I’m just off the phone with the Director, and now I’m preparing for my meeting with Lieutenant Leigh. I don’t have time.’ Her eyes narrowed. ‘Why isn’t Lionel with you?’

  We left before she could ask us anything else.

  ‘They’re all like that,’ said Salim in a low voice when we were back out on the stairs. ‘Both floors of offices. I didn’t want to say anything, but … it’s impossible. The café’s all open as well, like you saw. There’s so little space to store things that they’re always running out of food. I know you don’t want to believe it, but there’s no way that the painting could still be in the museum.’

  Then I heard a sound below us. It was a low hum. It was the sound of a hoover – and there had been a hoover at the Guggenheim just before the robbery.

  ‘Kat!’ I said. ‘Salim! The hoover!’

  Salim looked as though he didn’t understand me, but Kat’s eyes widened. ‘Salim!’ she said. ‘We still haven’t spoken to Rafael. I bet that’s him!’

  We went running down the stairs again. The triangles made me dizzy, and I bumped my shoulder against the stone wall. I was going to keep running, but then Kat caught my arm and pulled me to the right, and then right again. I saw that she had brought me into the second-floor tower gallery, from where In the Black Square had been stolen. The blue-and-white police tape was still across the place where the painting had been, but there was a man in the middle of the floor, spinning a large machine in circles.

  The man turned and then saw us. He was medium height, with lots of curly black hair and big, bushy eyebrows, and he had brown skin. He was wearing a navy blue jumpsuit with the Guggenheim Museum’s logo sewn on it in white on his shoulder. This was definitely Rafael, who had come out with Ben the day the Guggenheim was robbed.

  ‘Rafael!’ said Salim. ‘It’s you! We heard someone cleaning.’

  ‘Salim, hey!’ said Rafael. ‘I heard about your mom. I’m sorry.’

  Salim’s face tightened and his jaw clenched. ‘She didn’t do it,’ he said. ‘She was framed.’

  Rafael held up his hands. ‘All I’m saying is what I’ve heard,’ he said. ‘She’s been arrested, hasn’t she? That’s what Sandra told me when she called me to come in today.’

  ‘Yes, but … it wasn’t Mum!’ said Salim. ‘Look, did you see anything on Thursday? Anything that might help her?’

  ‘I didn’t see anything,’ said Rafael. ‘But, man, it was awful, wasn’t it? As soon as the smoke started up I got out. Left the vacuum cleaner in the third-floor gallery, went running straight down the side stairs. I came out on the first floor and ran into Ben. Knocked him over. It would’ve been funny if, you know, we hadn’t been afraid we might die. We got up and ran out together.’

  Kat nudged me. I knew what she meant. Rafael and Ben’s stories fitted together.

  ‘I almost didn’t come back today, but like I said, Sandra told me to. This place’s gotta be cleaned, now that the police have been through it. They left footprints everywhere!’

  Salim nodded at him. ‘Thanks,’ he said.

  ‘I need to ask you one more question,’ I said. ‘Were you here on Monday?’

  ‘Monday?’ asked Rafael. ‘Nope. Had to call in sick. Got a vomiting bug, and I was throwing up all day. My mom looked after me. Why?’

  ‘It’s not important,’ I said. It was not. Rafael had been ruled out as well.

  He turned away, back to his hoover, and as he started to spin it across the floor, Salim took a photograph.

  FORTY-FIVE

  Spinning in Circles

  Rafael spun his way out of the tower gallery, and we were left alone in its square white space, facing the empty place on the far wall where In the Black Square should have been. But the painting was not there. The probability of it being somewhere else in the universe was 100 per cent, and that was good in a way, because at least it was certain.

  I looked around the rest of the gallery. It was filled with paintings, large and bright and strange. Why had In the Black Square been stolen instead of one of them? It was not worth more than the rest of them. It was worth millions of pounds, but they were too. And it was not as big, or as colourful, as some of them. I wondered if it was true, what I had been thinking about at Sandra’s – that the thief had stolen the Kandinsky because they liked it and thought it was special.

  There was one particular painting that my eyes saw. It was only circles on a dark background that looked cloudy, as though someone had spilled water across it. The circles were blues and yellows and reds, and they overlapped each other like the primary colour tests Miss Woodfine, our art teacher, had made us do in Year Four. Blue and red makes purple, blue and yellow makes green.

  When I mixed the colours, though, all I got was brown. I looked it up in my encyclopaedia, and found that when you mix paints together, the more you add, the darker everything goes. Blue and red and yellow paint makes black. But when you mix light instead of paint, blue and red and green (green is a primary colour for light, not yellow) make a white light. This is because white light is not really white at all – it’s made up of all the visible frequencies of light in exactly the right balance.

  I liked that idea, and when I looked at that painting, I wondered whether Kandinsky, who had painted this as well as In the Black Square, had heard about white light too. I thought he had. The circles looked as though they were getting paler, not darker, the more they overlapped.

  I stared at the painting, which was called Several Circles. Salim said, ‘That’s worth thirty million dollars, you know.’

  Kat gasped, and said, ‘No way!’

  ‘Why?’ I asked.

  Salim understood. I knew he would. ‘Because there’s only one of it in the world,’ he said. ‘Because millions of people want it, but it can only belong in one place at a time.’

  ‘And because it’s beautiful,’ said Kat. ‘It’s exciting. It makes me feel – stretched. I want to do that when I make clothes.’

  I stared at the circles of the painting. For a moment I understood what Kat meant. Looking at that painting was like trying to understand something new. It was Kandinsky’s special code, like In the Black Square had been.

  ‘I thought I hated modern art before Mum got this job,’ said Salim. ‘But it’s not so bad, really. At least it’s not horses in fields and people on swings. I look at some old paintings and I know that those posh white people would hate me. I’d be a servant, right? Or I’d be the person the soldiers were fighting. But circles and lines and colours aren’t like that. They’re – I don’t know – open.’

  ‘Yes,’ I agreed. But I was still thinking about these paintings, and comparing them to the posters in the gift shop downstairs. I said this to Salim.

  ‘That’s just photography,’ said Salim. ‘That’s not real art, not really.’

  ‘It so is!’ said Kat.

  ‘Do you think?’ asked Salim. ‘But, Ted, the difference is the paint. When you go up to a real painting, you can see all the time the painter has spent on it. A photographic print is a different thing.’

  ‘But what about forgeries?’ I asked. ‘They’re paint.’

  ‘Ted!’ said Kat. ‘Stop asking questions! It’s not relevant.’

  ‘Forgeries aren’t the right kind of real,’ said Salim. ‘Mum says that a painting is a piece of the artist’s soul.’

  I translated this from Aunt Gloria speak, and realized that she was saying the same thing that I had been thinking. You can’t copy a brain. It is special. I had to think about the stolen painting as a part of Kandinsky’s brain. It was important to find who had taken the painting because it would help Aunt Gloria. But I saw for the first time that it was also important because it wasn’t just a thing that had been lost. It was a part of a person.

  ‘It doesn’t seem possible,’ said K
at, staring at the blank space on the wall under the security camera. ‘How can it have been taken?’ She pulled out the notebook with the flowers on it. She held her tiger-striped pen over our new theories. ‘We might as well get rid of Ted’s latest theory,’ she said. She pressed down with her finger, and the black dot of the pen squeezed down on the page. Then the pen – and Kat’s finger – paused.

  ‘Copies,’ she said. ‘Photographs.’

  I wondered if Kat wanted us to say something, but I stayed quiet, because I couldn’t see what the next word in the pattern she was making would be.

  ‘Er, Kat?’ asked Salim.

  Kat’s head jerked up, and she stared at him. But even though her eyes were pointing at his face, they were looking somewhere very far away. ‘Salim,’ she said. ‘TED! I’ve just thought of something. I think – oh, my God – I think I know where the painting is!’

  FORTY-SIX

  Priceless

  ‘Where?’ asked Salim.

  ‘Come on!’ shouted Kat, stuffing the pen and the notebook into her backpack and running towards the door of the gallery. Salim looked at me, and shrugged with his shoulders. I shrugged back, copying him. Salim began to run too, so I ran after him.

  The echo of Kat running down the triangular side stairs bounced up to my ears. Salim and I followed her noise, moving through the air she had just disturbed as though we were planets being pulled in by her gravity. I felt again that I was on a quest, an adventure, just like Odysseus.

  When we came back out into the main rotunda space, I thought Kat had gone out of the main doors, and I wondered how she had done it without Lionel seeing. But then Salim turned right before we reached the main entrance, and I saw that we were in a new room. In here the lights were off, and the white walls looked cool and grey. I looked up, and saw into the second-floor tower gallery where the painting had gone missing from, and above that into the café. Then I looked to my left, where there were big clean windows. I could see a smooth grey strip of concrete, and then a dark grey strip of street, and then a green strip of park and finally a blue strip of sky. I imagined to myself that I was looking at a painting in two dimensions, but then a yellow New York taxi drove from right to left along the road and I knew I was looking at the real world.

  We were in the gift shop.

  I remembered then that when the Guggenheim was first built, there wasn’t a gift shop in the blueprints, any more than there were lights. Frank Lloyd Wright had wanted where we were standing to be a place where cars could drive straight up to the front door, because he wanted the Guggenheim to be a museum that moved as fast as New York. But, once again, Frank Lloyd Wright’s plan had to change.

  Then I looked right, at the room we were in. It smelled expensive – of perfume and lemon cleaning fluid and paint. There were three large wooden cases, full of pens and pencils and games. I saw a bowl of wooden pens with small wooden Guggenheims on the end of them, a Rubik’s Cube and a game where you can match colours to create different patterns. I thought Kandinsky would probably like that. Usually in gift shops there are clear plastic spinning racks full of postcards, but in this one the postcard holders were on the walls, and they were made of wood and glass. The rest of the walls were fitted with wooden drawers, and inside them were glass cases full of sculptures and jewellery. There were photographic prints of the paintings from the galleries upstairs on the walls, and a set of drawers below them. Kat was crouching in front of these drawers, pulling each of them open in turn, so hard that they thumped at the end of their tracks.

  ‘Kat!’ said Salim. ‘Hey, Kat!’

  ‘What?’ said Kat. Thump. Thump.

  ‘What are you doing?’ asked Salim.

  ‘Finding’ – thump – ‘the’ – thump – ‘picture!’ said Kat, and then all the drawers were open, and she was scrabbling inside, pulling out long rolled-up tubes. These are how prints of paintings are stored, in gift shops. If you like a painting very much when you visit an exhibition, you can come here to buy yourself a copy to take home.

  ‘Kat,’ I said reasonably.

  Kat began to pop open the plastic top at the end of each of the tubes, and pull out the posters inside. Green and red and black and white and yellow pictures scattered across her lap.

  ‘Those aren’t real paintings, Kat. They aren’t worth anything. Salim just told us.’

  ‘EXACTLY!’ shrieked Kat. ‘They aren’t worth anything. They aren’t the real pictures. You said! And then I thought – if I was going to hide something that was worth millions and millions of pounds, why wouldn’t I hide it with all its copies? Who’d ever think to look in the gift shop?’

  ‘You, Kat,’ I said, because that was a question with an obvious answer.

  ‘Yes, me, but – come on, Ted, this could be it! Help me look!’

  ‘Kat, you’re amazing,’ said Salim, and he bent down to wrap his arms around her.

  I knelt down and began to open tubes. I made a careful pile of pictures in front of me, and tubes behind me, and I observed two things. First, that what Kat had suggested was possible. Some of the prints were one metre square, or even larger. Some of them were even prints of In the Black Square. But my other observation was that none of the tubes I opened held the real In the Black Square. All the pictures were on shiny photographic paper, and they all had small printed letters in the corner that said GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM. I opened fifty-eight tubes and this never stopped being true.

  I looked at Kat and Salim, and saw their faces crumple up, their mouths flatten, their eyes narrow. The probability of the painting being in the gift shop dropped to ten per cent, then two per cent, and finally, as Kat opened the last tube, which was empty, sank to absolute zero.

  And that was when Lionel walked into the gift shop.

  FORTY-SEVEN

  Dead Ends

  ‘What are you guys doing here?’ he asked, smiling. Then he saw the prints on the floor, and he stopped smiling. ‘Hey, what are you doing?’ he said, much more loudly. ‘Pick those up!’

  ‘We’re looking for the painting,’ said Kat.

  ‘The painting is miles away by now,’ said Lionel, not smiling at all. ‘We all know that. Come on, put those back!’

  He stood over us until we had rolled up each of the prints and put them back in their tubes. I enjoyed myself. It felt like we were making a circular pattern. We had taken all the pictures out, and now we were putting them all back again. There was one empty tube left over when we had put all the tubes back in their drawers. I put it with the others in the top drawer.

  I looked at Salim. His shoulders were very low, and his mouth was tilted down. When people want to say that someone is upset, they say his face fell. I always imagine a face dropping from its neck and landing on the pavement. At this moment, though, I realized that Salim’s face looked as though it wanted to do that. So the figure of speech was not a figure of speech at all. I understood how much it had hurt Salim that we had not found the picture.

  ‘Lionel,’ said Kat. Her lips were set in a very thin line. I thought she was about to do something potentially risky.

  ‘What’s up?’ asked Lionel.

  ‘What’s up,’ said Kat, ‘is that you still haven’t explained why you came out of the back of the Guggenheim just after the robbery, carrying a box. And we think you were lying about when you called the security company. You didn’t call them until after the painting was stolen, did you? Why should we trust you? How do we know you didn’t steal the painting?’

  Lionel’s face was scrunched up and his mouth was open. ‘I don’t— I didn’t— listen, I swear that what that guy saw had nothing to do with the painting. Nothing!’ He was standing over us, and he was so tall that he blocked out the Guggenheim’s light, as though he was the moon during a solar eclipse, and we were on Earth trying to stare at the sun, or as though I was Odysseus, and he was the Cyclops. ‘Look. You’re right. I didn’t call the security company until eleven, after the painting was gone. But that’s not because I stole the painting. It
’s because of the box I was carrying out to my car, and that has nothing to do with In the Black Square. I’ll tell you, but you’ve gotta promise me you won’t tell anyone.’

  ‘All right,’ said Salim.

  ‘All right,’ said Kat.

  Then I felt something jab into the space between my ribs. It was Kat’s tiger-striped pen, and I realized that Kat was communicating with me without words. She was telling me that she was lying, and that I should lie as well.

  I coughed. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘We will do that. Not tell anyone. Yes.’ That was my seventh lie. They were getting easier.

  Lionel rubbed his hands across his face. I did not breathe. Then he said, ‘OK. That box … that box had food in it. Not some stupid painting. I’ve been going up to the café and taking supplies. Nothing they’ll notice – just cans of tomatoes, bags of pasta.’

  I remembered what Salim had said earlier, about the café running out of food, and thought to myself that Lionel wasn’t correct when he said that no one would notice the food he was taking. Someone had noticed: Salim. He had just not understood what it meant.

  ‘I do it a lot. I take the boxes down the stairwell and leave them in the loading bay until I’m finished with my shift. I’m security, so no one ever asks what I’m doing. I do it every time the cameras break.

  ‘But then, when the smoke happened and the police were on their way – man, I knew I had to get the latest box out before they arrived. I knew they’d notice it and ask me questions. That’s what I was doing when that guy saw me – taking the box to my car. I swear, it was nothing to do with the painting.’

  Salim’s face twisted up. ‘You stole from the Guggenheim because you wanted some food?’ he asked.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Lionel. I noticed that his face was flushed and his voice was shaking. ‘Do you know what I get paid? And do you know what the rent is, even in Brooklyn? My wife died a couple of years ago. It’s just me and my kids now. So, yeah, I do what I can. No one locks up the supplies, so I figure it’s fair game.’ His shoulders lifted in a shrug.