Starry Nights

by Daisy Whitney

  Oliver and Cass Middleton are notorious, the father and teenage daughter pair of British forgers who conned the art world a few years ago, pulling off magnificent fakes. They fooled art historians, curators, and gallery owners across continents and far into the vaunted halls of auction houses in London and New York, of collectors in Stuttgart and Kyoto, and of museums in St. Petersburg, Boston, Madrid, and here in Paris too. They were very nearly caught in a scandal involving a fake Gauguin a year ago, but there wasn’t enough evidence so the case was dropped. It had been widely rumored that they’d resurfaced in France, but this is the first I’ve heard of where they landed, here in a vintage shop in the Marais.

  “Great. So we’ve just broken into the Middletons’ shop and you’re eating falafel.”

  “Well technically, Julien, I’m the one who broke in. But c’mon. Let’s go to the back.” She wraps the remaining bits of her sandwich into the wax paper, balling it up in her hand and tossing it into a trash can by the counter.

  The store is large and haphazardly laid out with meandering paths through the goods, like a maze for rats. We walk and the store stretches back, offering up jewelry boxes stacked on bureaus with gilded mirrors, next to hats in pastel hatboxes and retro purses arranged on velvet couches.

  Sophie points to a coffee-colored door, marked with peeling paint and a long scratch near the keyhole. “See that door? It’s locked. But that’s where the guy was dummying up the papers. Trying to claim that painting was his when it’s been in our family the whole time.”

  Sophie snorts, and she sounds so indignant.

  “Why is this so important to you?” I ask her. “I mean, I know it’s your family’s painting. But is that all there is to it? Why do you care so much, Sophie?” I’m not averse to snooping in a back room for evidence of forgery; I can’t stand forgers, but I know why the painting matters to me personally. I want to know the raison d’être for Sophie and her family, and since the painting was a gift to the museum, it’s not about money. “You’re asking me to break into a room. Tell me why this is so important to you.”

  She rolls her eyes. “Sheesh. Now, Julien? You want to go through all my reasons now?”

  “Yes. Now.”

  She counts off on her index finger. “One. Because of Suzanne Valadon. My great-great-great-however-many-greats. She always believed anyone could make art. And I believe that too. So that’s why Bonheur and I call ourselves the Avant-Garde, like an art society, to keep that idea alive.”

  “Fine,” I say, because I’m cool with art societies. The history of art is sprinkled with groups of artists banding together around an ideology or a goal, from architects evangelizing new ways of building to painters trying to resurrect the past. “Her artistic politics as Bonheur said. Gotcha. What else?”

  She adds in the middle finger to the count. “Two. Because she asked our family to keep that painting safe because of the curse on it.”

  “Wait. There’s a curse on the painting?” I ask, but perhaps that’s why Clio is trapped—because the painting is cursed.

  “Obviously. Suzanne said there was a girl in it. That’s why we had to keep it away from Renoir’s family all these years. To keep the girl safe.”

  Valadon and Renoir. Once contemporaries, then enemies. That’s the connection I was seeking when I researched Bonheur’s home. “Why would they be enemies?”

  “Because Renoir believed art and inspiration was only for great artists. Valadon didn’t, and the Muses don’t either. They believed that one day there would be an age of great artistic creation and expression. For everyone.” Sophie holds her arms out wide, as if she were parting the artistic seas.

  “So there’s a curse on that painting because Valadon had some inclusive view of art and Renoir was an elitist? Well, that’s all I need to know. Let me just get out the crowbar I keep in my backpack to break into this room.”

  “There’s one other little teensy, tiny detail.” She points exaggeratedly to me. “That would be the inspiration part of the whole shebang. The whole human muse thingamajig. Muses have always been eternal, but when the first human muse arrived on the scene—humans, who live, love and die and so on—that would mark the start of this great age of artistic expression.” She taps me now with that index finger. “You, doofus. You.”

  “Me?”

  “Yes. Didn’t my brother tell you all this? The paintings come alive for you. You dance with them at night or whatever. What did you think, you were hallucinating? The Muses have always told us a human muse would eventually appear, and I guess they saw you hanging out with the Degas dancers some night and figured out that you’re the first human muse. There are Eternal Muses and now there are human muses. Now, let’s go into that room,” she says, so offhand, so matter-of-fact that she could be telling me about her geometry lesson or giving me directions to Notre Dame from here. Turn down this road, cross this bridge, and there you are. Muses. Human muses.

  “Oh, sure. Human muses. That makes sense. And naturally, I’m one. Me. Of course,” I say, feeling like a pawn in some cat-and-mouse game cooked up by Bonheur and his wacky little sister. “I think maybe I’ll just leave this whole idea of curses and Muses behind, and let the experts do the actual authentication instead of an art society consisting of two people who believe in Muses.”

  “You don’t believe me?”

  “No, I don’t. I think that all sounds ridiculous.” I’m about to walk away when I think of Clio’s eyes. How she’s not like the other art. How she’s just a girl trapped in a painting for all those years. How I’m the only one who can see her. I can’t just stop. I have to help, even though the idea of human muses is ludicrous.

  “Julien,” Sophie says in a quiet plea. Her face transforms to a kind of reverence. “I’m not putting you on. I swear. You’re not the only one who loves art. You’re not the only one who believes in its power. I do too. So does my brother. But you are the only one who can do this. You’re a human muse. You’re the only one who can keep that painting safe.” Her expression is tinged with desperation, with the kind of yearning an art society can stoke. She believes this so deeply, but I just don’t know how to take this news. I thought Muses were all women. I thought Muses were a closed club that wasn’t taking any new members. I also once thought peaches and cats and dancers stayed put in their frames.

  “Why me?” I ask.

  “Why not you?”

  Because I’m not a scholar, not a genius, not even a terribly talented artist, I want to say. Because I’m just a boy who loves art—all art. “How do you want to get in the room?” I ask, pointing out the practical problem. “You said the door was locked. You’ll have to find another way in.”

  “You’re the other way.”

  “I’m the other way?”

  “You brought the calf, right? With the Muse dust in it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then let me prove it to you. That you have a talent we don’t have. That we need you.”

  I hardly know what to make of Sophie’s conviction, but my world has become so topsy-turvy that anything seems possible, even something as absurd as what Sophie’s suggesting. I take the pink polka-dotted calf I won at the party from my backpack and hand it to Sophie. As crazy as the idea of human muses is, it would also explain all the things I see. It would mean I’m not losing my mind.

  Sophie takes off the cap from the calf’s fifth leg and taps some of the silvery dust into her palm. “See? Draw a key and touch it with the silver in here.”

  She closes her fist around the dust.

  I could not feel stupider right now. I could not be more certain the joke is on me. But then I remember the cat’s hair, how a piece of it materialized where I had drawn her, when I rubbed my silver-coated hand across the page. This can’t be. But what if? I want to know if maybe I can do something with my second-rate talent with a pencil and paper. Something that matters. Something that makes a difference.

  Sophie reaches into her pocket, takes out a sheet of paper, and
thrusts it at me. She turns around and bends her back so she’s fashioned her body into a drafting table. I take the pencil from my backpack, hoping against hope, praying against prayer. I glance at the lock; it’s the kind that’ll happily let in an old-fashioned skeleton key. I shake my head, wanting to believe but knowing better, and yet still I draw. A precise, pristine skeleton key.

  Sophie straightens and opens her hand. She pinches some dust and sprinkles it on the drawing. Nothing happens. “Now you do it,” Sophie instructs.

  I’m convinced now that I’m crazy, but I do it anyway, tracing the outline of the key with the silver dust that remains on my fingers. Here, in my hand, as Sophie promised, a skeleton key appears.

  Chapter 13

  Rubies Found

  “It’s Harold and the Purple Crayon,” I say in wonderment at the key that has weight and shape and even scent. I bring it to my nose, and I smell rusty metal. I want to laugh out loud. I want to cackle with amazement. I have officially blown my own mind. Maybe Sophie is right about me.

  But Sophie is Miss Practical. She pulls me to the door, takes the key from my hand, and unlocks the entrance to a dark back room. She inches the door closed. She jams the key at me, and I tuck it into my pocket. The room is the size of a large closet, and it’s faintly lit by a desk lamp encased in green glowing plastic, a vintage number that could easily be sold in the store. There’s a large ornate wooden desk against one wall, standing proud on carved and imposing legs. A cabinet is wedged along another wall, meeting the desk in the corner.

  “You could be a cat burglar,” I say, but Sophie is already off and running, foraging through papers, through wax seals from various art galleries, through stationery from state-run museums, through invoices of sales. All the tricks of the forging trade are here.

  “He was here earlier today, so there must be something. Some evidence. Some slip of paper.” She stops rooting around. “Hello? We don’t have all day. Try the trash can.”

  I kneel down and look through trash, and the thought flashes through my mind that seconds ago I drew a key that became manifest, and now I’m picking through litter. “Nothing here but a few apple cores and some rubber bands.”

  “There has to be something. Those hands. Those claw hands. He has to have dropped something. He can’t have gotten it right the first time.”

  I place my palm on Sophie’s arm. “You saw his hands?”

  She nods and turns her hands into something broken—knotty, ragged claws.

  More proof I’m not insane.

  I rifle faster through the papers on the desk, then papers on the file cabinet, then papers in drawers. Nothing.

  Then I see a glint, like the shine of a jewel if I were looking for rubies or diamonds. A handful of pages have slipped into the steep valley between the desk and the file cabinet. I slide my hand along the desk legs, grab the pages, and pull them out. They’re rough copies of fakes, first attempts at forged documents. My heart springs against my chest, a jack-in-the-box boinging and bouncing. Maybe I could be a detective. Maybe that is my true calling. I could be pretty good at this cloak-and-dagger, backroom spying stuff, especially with my newfound magical drawing skill.

  Because this is the evidence, the proof that Max, the street artist and host to Renoir it seems, was here at the headquarters of the art world’s greatest forgers. This shop is vintage all right, it’s retro in the most ironic way, because they’re still doing what they did years ago. Only the shop is just a cover.

  “Hide them. Put them in your pants or something,” Sophie hisses. She tilts her head to the side, like she’s heard something.

  “Are you crazy?”

  “Just do it.”

  I fold the pages in half, then in quarters, then tuck them down the front of my jeans.

  “I hope you’re a good liar because you need to come up with a cover for us,” she says and yanks the door open. I follow, leaving the secret lair from which, I presume, a new reign of art forgeries has begun. I click the door shut behind me, then walk past old phonographs and stiff ballet slippers into the main section of the store, where I am face-to-face with one of the most cunning art forgers in the world.

  Chapter 14

  An Accent Is Worth a Thousand Words

  Cass Middleton is wide eyed and broad shouldered; we’re the same age, but I have a hunch she could take me easily in a fight. She looks like a rugby player, and she reminds me of a tree trunk. Her blond hair is pulled high in a ponytail and she has cinnamon crumbs on the corner of her lips. The cinnamon rugelach across the street are the best in town. She probably burns them off beating up opponents on the field.

  “Are you looking for something in particular?” Her voice is warm as she speaks to us in French, but her gray eyes are sharp and piercing, and she smells a thief, or two, since Sophie is right next to me.

  I don’t have a plan. I don’t have a strategy. But in the span of two seconds I arrive at two conclusions. The first is don’t run. The second is be an American tourist.

  I adopt a doe-eyed clueless look, as if I couldn’t possibly have understood what she said to me. I immediately shift into my best midwestern accent, an American kid here on vacation with his family, checking out the Marais, the most happening, hippest ’hood in Paris, as all the guidebooks say.

  “Sorry, I don’t know French,” I say in English. I’m just a boy from Nebraska, without even a single French phrase to call upon. I don’t need her connecting any dots between the teenage boy in front of her and the curator’s son at the Musée d’Orsay, where the target of the store’s latest forging pursuits resides.

  Being British, Cass Middleton obviously speaks perfect English, so she segues naturally into the new direction of the conversation with the hapless tourist. She repeats the question. “Were you looking for something in particular? Our store was closed for a few minutes, so I didn’t expect to see anyone in here.”

  I let the lightbulb go off in my temporarily Nebraskan brain, and I laugh, like we have a shared joke, and point to the door, that naughty, tricky door. “I didn’t realize the store was closed. And I thought I might find even more treasures in there, but it’s obviously an office, so sorry about that too.” I press my hands together and start riffing, making it up as I go. I can still feel the outline of the key in my front pocket, and it shifts around in that moment. I do my best to ignore it, as I spy the price tag on a purple hat perched atop a nearby lamp. The hat doesn’t cost much. “But yeah, so, I think we’ll take that hat. My sister and I were looking for a gift for our mom and we were just saying this hat is exactly what she’d want. Right, sis?”

  Sophie nods but doesn’t speak.

  “It’s a lovely hat,” Cass says. “Shall I wrap it for you?”

  “Yes. That would be great.”

  “Did you find anything else you wanted?” She shifts her attention to the door; her eyes like razors, her gaze drilling the lock. “Were you looking for something there?”

  “There? No.” I hold up my hands. The key wiggles more in my pocket. I hope she doesn’t notice. I hope the key doesn’t burst from my jeans. That would be all sorts of awkward. “I got turned around, honestly. This store, it’s a little, well, kind of like a maze. Sorry. But that’s great, really. I mean that as a compliment. We don’t have cool stores like this back home in Nebraska. It’s all big-box beasts, you know. With nothing special on the shelves.”

  Cass appraises me from top to bottom with her stone-gray eyes, hunting for evidence of my thievery. I brace myself as the key jiggles around, tickling the top of my thigh. I try not to move or laugh because this key is now bumping and squirming inside my pocket. “I’m so glad you like our shop better than a Walmart. My dad will be delighted to hear that. We pride ourselves on all the, as you say, special items. So would you like a necklace to go with that special hat?” She says, goading me. She may not know exactly what I did, but her radar is up even as she plays the role of helpful employee.

  I answer quickly, because there is onl
y one answer. “I’m sure my mother would love one. Something to match, s’il vous plaît.”

  See? I’m such a thoughtful American tourist.

  “Perhaps a bracelet too?”

  I mentally picture my wallet, and the money I’ve earned from my tours. The hat and necklace aren’t expensive, but I don’t think I can cover more than those two items.

  “She’s not a big bracelet person. Says they’re always getting in the way.”

  “What about gloves then?”

  I don’t answer immediately, because I can feel the key shorten and shrink. Then, as quickly as it arrived on the scene, the key is gone. My pocket is empty again. “She says her hands are naturally warm, so I think I’ll just go with the necklace and hat.”

  “Very well,” Cass says as she heads to the register and rings me up. I join her, and thrum my fingers against the counter, watching as she wraps up the fake gifts, purchased by a fake thief, from a preeminent fake artist of the last few years. “Where did you say you were from? Nebraska?”

  “Yes, ma’am. Nebraska.”

  “What part of Nebraska?”

  Heck if I know. I do accents, not geography. I haven’t a clue about any cities in Nebraska. “Topeka,” I offer, hoping it’s in Nebraska.

  “Oh, I bet it’s lovely there in Topeka, Nebraska. All that space,” she says, then she hands me the newly swaddled gifts. “Come back,” she says, and I escape, many euros lighter, two unnecessary accessories heavier, but with the proof in my pants.

  “You do know that Topeka is in Kansas, not Nebraska, right?” Sophie points out after we leave.

  “Evidently, I didn’t know that. Nor did Cass Middleton. But there’s your brother. Why don’t we ask him if he knows geography as well as he knows magical secrets he keeps to himself?”

  Bonheur is walking toward us on the sidewalk. “Did you find them? The fake papers?”

  “We did,” I say. “And a big thanks for letting me know you thought I was the first human muse.”