Secret Scouts and The Lost Leonardo

by Mr.

  “A Samsung?” suggested Lisa.

  “That’s enough.” Sophie tried to sound serious.

  “But really, I mean it.” Lisa tried to keep a straight face, but she couldn’t hide a little smile.

  “So okay, there’s a lot of drawings and a whole lot of text, but if you ask me I think it’s written in mirror image and probably in a foreign language as well!”

  “Wait a minute!” Sophie let her fingers glide down the middle of the book from the top to the bottom of the page. “There are a couple of pages missing! Here, right smack in the middle!”

  Lisa ran her fingers along the torn edges and nodded in agreement.

  “If we want to know what’s written here, we’ll first have to reverse the writing and then figure out which language it is. If we can do that, we can probably translate a few pages word for word,” Sophie said.

  “It’s probably some crazy lady’s shopping list.” Lisa sat up straight and wrinkled her face. “Ooh, dear diary,” she said theatrically in an old lady’s voice. “I must not forget to buy milk and eggs tomorrow.”

  Sophie looked up and tried to keep from laughing as Lisa continued her theatrics.

  “And I must not forget to take out my dentures tonight and put the telephone back on the hook.”

  Sophie burst out laughing. “Lisa, stop it, I’m going to pee my pants.”

  Lisa jumped up from the bed and put the laptop on her desk. “Let’s go downstairs. I smell food. I think Mom’s cooking dinner.”

  At the exact same moment they heard their mother shouting up the stairs, “SOPHIE AND LISA! We’re ho-ome, dinner is served!”

  “You see. I’m psychic.”

  Sophie got up and walked back to her own bedroom with the book under her arm. She opened the desk drawer, placed the book inside, and turned around. She looked sternly at her sister, who was standing at the door, and made a zipping motion with her fingers across her lips.

  “Duh,” responded Lisa. “I won’t say a thing.”

  Downstairs in the kitchen their mother was thumbing through a cookbook. “Hi girls, I heard you giggling upstairs,” she said, while running her hands through Lisa’s curls.

  Sophie gave her mother a kiss, saying, “We just found out that long ago people used to keep very interesting diaries.”

  “Hmm, this feels like one of those ‘you had to be there’ moments,” their mother responded, not understanding.

  During dinner, Lisa and Sophie talked about their day and how Mrs. Prattle had given them a sketch, tactically omitting the part about discovering the secret room.

  “Wow, what’s with the cake?” Lisa asked, a little too enthusiastically, when her mother put an apple pie down on the table.

  “Your father and I have a surprise. He will be finished writing an important presentation at the end of the week and has a few days off. We thought we’d go to Paris on Friday for a long weekend!”

  Sophie and Lisa leapt up from the table and danced around the kitchen. “Par-is. Par-is. Par-is!”

  “That’s so cool!” Sophie said.

  “Are we going to visit Hans?” Lisa asked her mother hopefully.

  “Of course, we’ll be staying at his house.”

  “Parlez-vous français,” teased Sophie.

  “Un petit peu,” replied Lisa.

  “What an awesome day today! First...” Sophie began, before Lisa, who was always there to save her sister from disaster, quickly nudged her to stop her from finishing the sentence.

  “Uh, first... uh... the sketch and now a vacation,” said Sophie.

  “Actually, where’s that sketch you were just talking about? Can I have a look at it?” their father suddenly asked them.

  Sophie felt the blood rushing to her face.

  Her father didn’t notice, however, and instead looked at his watch. “On second thoughts, it’ll have to wait... I have some work to do on my presentation. I’ll have a look at it tomorrow. I’m very curious!” Their father was already walking out of the kitchen towards his study.

  Relieved, Lisa and Sophie looked at each other and knew they should leave the kitchen before their mother started asking questions as well. Lisa motioned to Sophie to stand up.

  Sophie understood immediately, got up from the table and stretched her arms above her head. “Man, I’m tired!”

  Lisa yawned loudly. “Yeah, me too. I’m hitting the sack early. Night Mom,” she said, while slipping quickly into the hallway.

  “Yeah, night-night Mom,” said Sophie, following her sister.

  Before their mother could respond, they were already running up the stairs, leaving her standing there in the kitchen with a bemused look on her face.

  Wednesday, June 18th, morning

  They arrived at school early for a change. Sophie walked into the classroom first. As usual, she took a seat at the back of the class and saved the chair next to her for Jack.

  When he came in, Jack waved cheerfully and quickly sat down next to her.

  “Were they handing out free gel this morning?” Sophie joked when she saw him.

  “Did you two discover anything more last night,” he asked, wisely ignoring her remark.

  “Well, yes and no,” Sophie said, “but I have the book in my bag, we can look at it during break,” she whispered.

  Jack rocked back and forth on his chair. He looked at Sophie inquiringly. He hadn’t stopped thinking about the book and the secret room since he’d left their house yesterday. He had hardly slept, with so many questions running through his head.

  “What else did you do yesterday? What did you find out? Do you already know what the text means? Spit it out!”

  “Whoa, relax cowboy. I’ll tell you everything. Take it easy, you’re only drawing attention to us,” Sophie said softly.

  Jack balanced on the back legs of his chair while, in hushed tones, Sophie told him everything they’d read and discovered. ‘We still don’t know what language it is. It’s not English, otherwise we would have recognized some words.”

  The front legs of Jack’s chair dropped towards the floor and hovered above the ground. His calves tensed as he balanced on the tips of his toes. He was too anxious to sit still, but he listened attentively.

  “I already have an idea how we can make the text easier to read, but we still need to find out what language it is.”

  “Maybe it’s the Bible,” suggested Jack.

  Sophie shot him a skeptical look.

  “That’s, like, really old, do you think it could be? Jesus! Maybe He wrote the book Himself, or God? Maybe God wrote it?” Jack’s eyeballs nearly popped out of their sockets at the thought. “If that’s the case, we’re billionaires!” He had dollar signs in his eyes already and had to restrain himself from jumping up out of his chair.

  Sophie looked at him as if he’d gone crazy. “God didn’t write the Bible, nor did Jesus. It’s about God and Jesus. I’m not exactly sure who did write it, but they certainly didn’t.”

  Jack looked deflated.

  “And obviously, it’s not the Bible. That doesn’t have any drawings in it, does it?” She gave Jack a playful slap on the arm.

  “How am I supposed to know?” he said.

  “Uhm, maybe by paying more attention in class?”

  Jack ignored her and stared sullenly ahead.

  “Lisa and I have to go back to the secret room today because we forgot Prattle’s sketch and my father wants to see it. You up for another go? You never know what other cool things we might find.”

  “So we’ve hit a dead end with the book?”

  Sophie looked up and saw that Mr. Hackett was busy with some paperwork.

  “Yeah, kind of.” She discretely pulled the book out of her bag and slid it onto Jack’s lap. “See for yourself, Einstein, but you’ve got to be super careful. We’ll be in serious trouble if Hackett spots it.”

  Jack took the book in his hands and flipped carefully through it. He looked at the cover first, then at a few pages. “Some of the pages are
missing.”

  “No kidding, Lisa and I noticed that too. Thanks for the tip.”

  “And look at this!” Sophie pointed to the scratches on the cover.

  “L... uh... O... V...” mumbled Jack.

  “LOV...”

  “Love,” he joked. “Maybe someone wrote this book for his girlfriend.” Jack stuck up his hand.

  “What are you doing?!” asked Sophie, suddenly alarmed.

  Ignoring her, Jack quickly slid the book back onto her lap. “Put it back in your bag,” he said firmly.

  A couple of their classmates turned towards them.

  “Ahem,” Jack coughed in an attempt to grab Hackett’s attention.

  Hackett was facing the interactive whiteboard when he heard the noise. He turned around and peered at the class until he saw Jack’s raised hand.

  “Jack?” Hackett asked. “What is it?”

  The tough guy who was facing Sophie a few seconds earlier suddenly turned bright red. Overwhelmed by uncertainty and doubt, he began rocking back and forth again on the back legs of his chair.

  “Jack?” repeated Hackett.

  “Actually, I have a question about history, is that okay?”

  “Well Jack, we’re doing math right now. You are aware of that, right?”

  Jack looked at the board in surprise. He even felt his ears going red now.

  “Sure I did, Mr. Hackett, but I was thinking... oh... never mind, forget it.”

  Hackett raised his eyebrows. “Go ahead Jack, it’s okay. It’s always good to ask questions. What did you want to know?”

  “It’s actually a question about old books,” Jack said quietly. Without realizing it, he was now balancing himself perfectly on the chair’s back legs.

  A buzz went around the class.

  “Ssshhh,” Hackett commanded the class. “It’s okay, what do you want to know exactly?”

  “Uhm…” Jack stammered. “Do you know any authors that go by the initials L.O.V.?”

  Hackett shrugged his shoulders and sighed deeply. The question seemed to irritate him, but after a long pause he said: “No, Jack, I can’t think of anyone right now. Why?”

  “I was just wondering,” said Jack as nonchalantly as possible.

  “Is that all, Jack?”

  “Do old books sometimes have leather covers?” Sophie suddenly asked.

  The entire class turned around.

  “Of course, Sophie. It was quite normal long ago to use leather for book covers. Wait, let me look it up for you.”

  Hackett opened his laptop and began typing. The whiteboard behind him suddenly came to life, showing a list of Google search results. Hackett clicked on Images and several photos of old books appeared on the screen.

  The Codex Leicester by Leonardo da Vinci, written between 1506 and 1510, was sold at auction to Bill Gates in 1994 for US $30,802,500.

  The class was all eyes and ears now, thankful for the unexpected distraction.

  Sophie tried to memorize all the photos. They showed books that looked old, but not as old as the book they had found yesterday.

  “Yeah, those kinds of books,” Sophie said, “but then older. Are there older ones?”

  Hackett looked up at the ceiling, as if he thought he’d find the answer up there. Then he turned back to his laptop and continued his internet search. Various Wikipedia pages flashed by on the large screen behind him.

  “This is what I was looking for,” Hackett said, making sure the internet page filled the entire screen. The word Codex appeared prominently at the top.

  “When people first began writing things down, they used scrolls of paper. Later, they wrote on single sheets of paper that were bound together in what we now know as the first books. A book like that is called a codex.”

  Hackett moved the mouse to Images. Most of the photos that appeared on the screen were of pages taken from a codex but then without a cover. The pages had the same yellowish color as the ones in the book they had found.

  Hackett scrolled down through the images. “Look, here’s one that has a leather cover.” He clicked on the photo. “Is that what you mean?”

  The image on the screen showed an old book with a leather cover almost identical to their own. Sophie felt a shiver run down her spine. She actually wanted to scream, but then thought about how, in situations like these, her sister would deflect attention from herself by keeping a straight face. She managed to keep that face even when the euphoric sound of drum rolls and trumpets started ringing inside her head. Now that she knew they had found a codex, the answers to their questions were closer than ever.

  “Yes, thanks,” she mumbled, quickly grabbing her notebook and pretending to focus on her math assignment.

  “Why the interest?” Hackett suddenly asked, once again causing the entire class to turn around and look at them.

  “Uhm...” They hadn’t expected another question and now had to think on their feet. “Nothing special, Jack and I saw it on TV yesterday.”

  “Okay, now everyone, back to the sums!” Hackett said, already turning to face the board again.

  Then Jack raised his hand again. Sophie was mortified. Everything had gone so smoothly; they knew what they needed to know.

  “Don’t! We’ll Google whatever it is you need to know at home!” she hissed.

  “What?” Jacked said, shrugging his shoulders. “Relax. Just trust me.”

  “Mr. Hackett, I have one more question,” Jack called across the classroom.

  Hackett looked back at Jack. “Let’s hear it,” Hackett said. He was clearly enjoying the fact that he’d been asked more genuine questions today than he probably had in his entire teaching career up to now.

  “Do you know of any books... old books... like, uhm... like the codex books you just showed us, that were written in mirror image?”

  Hackett smiled broadly. Looking pleased as punch, he walked out from behind his desk. The classroom went quiet. Everyone waited anxiously for the answer.

  “Listen up,” he addressed the class, “does anyone know who was famous for writing in mirror image?”

  A murmur went around the class. A few names were muttered, but no one gave an answer.

  Hackett walked back to his laptop and spoke as he typed. “CODEX.” He looked up at the class while he typed. “LE-O-NAR-DO... DA... VIN... CI.”

  Hackett pushed ‘Enter’ and the search results appeared on the white screen behind him. He clicked on Images again and the screen filled with pictures of various books and writings by Leonardo da Vinci.

  “Leonardo da Vinci was one of the greatest artists that ever lived,” Hackett said. “He lived in Italy around 1500 and made some of the world’s most famous paintings. But he also drew anatomical sketches and came up with all sorts of innovations that were hypermodern for his time. And with regard to your question, Jack, Leonardo also wrote in mirror image. But we’re getting very distracted now. Has anyone finished the sum yet?” Hackett gave the class a look that told them to carry on with their calculations.

  Jack quickly copied the names from the whiteboard. Leonardo da Vinci... Codex... old book, paper scrolls. He then got a shock when he looked at what he had written. He held his breath, focused his eyes, and underlined three of the letters several times. Then he elbowed Sophie.

  “Look!” He pointed at the three underlined letters. “L... D... V... ” he said softly. “Leonardo da Vinci!” he whispered to Sophie. “L.D.V.!” he said again and pointed to her bag. “Look at the book. It’s not LOV but LDV.”

  Sophie slid the book out of her bag and onto her lap so she could see the marks. She ran her fingers over the letters.

  “You’re right! L... D... V...” she said quietly. She felt her sweater beginning to stick to her back.

  “Man, I can’t stand it any more, there’s still half a day of school left,” said Jack, suddenly looking completely befuddled.

  Sophie raised her hand. “Uhm, Mr. Hackett? Sorry, but may I ask one more question?”

  The expressi
on on Mr. Hackett’s face went from irritation to surprise to elation and back again. He waved his arm in a gesture that invited her to ask her question.

  “Uhm, suppose that a codix...”

  “Codex,” he corrected her. “With an ‘e’.”

  “A codex, by Leonardo. Would that be worth anything?”

  Sophie twisted her hair and tried to look as uninterested as possible. Jack thought it was a great question and leaned back again, balancing on the back legs of his chair. Hackett’s laugh resonated throughout the classroom. He took a step forward and addressed Sophie.

  “Sophie, Leonardo da Vinci wrote numerous codices during his lifetime. I think more than 10,000 pages in all. But...” To emphasize his words Hackett now gazed intensely at Sophie, “... they are all owned by museums. You can’t buy them at a bookstore, and you won’t find them on eBay either,” he joked.

  “How do you know all of them were found,” Sophie asked in a serious voice.

  “You never know for sure, of course, but after more than 500 years it’s safe to assume that there are no more lying around anywhere.” He paused for a moment, and then ran his hand over his face and shook his head as if he was trying to remember something. “I just realized that isn’t entirely true. Wait a second, I’ll look it up.”

  Everyone watched in nervous anticipation to see what Hackett would do next.

  “What I said was that all of Leonardo’s codices are owned by museums, but that’s not entirely correct. Let me see.” Although he had disconnected his laptop from the whiteboard, it was clear to everyone he was busy typing.

  “Here it is!” Satisfied that he’d found what he was looking for, Hackett tapped the screen with his finger. “Sophie? You wanted to know if it was worth anything, right?”

  Sophie nodded.

  Hackett began citing the text aloud. “The Codex Leicester, by Leonardo da Vinci, is the only privately owned codex. The codex was sold in 1994,” Hackett looked at his class triumphantly. The entire class stared at him, eager for him to go on.

  “In other words, almost all of the known codices are owned by museums,” repeated Hackett, “except one, which has remained in private hands. And in 1994 the owner sold it to none other than Bill Gates! Some of you probably recognize that name, he’s the founder of Microsoft.”