So we spent the rest of the night getting about a billion instructions from Mom. She said we should call her every hour. Plus she told us don’t talk to strangers, stay together, always stop and look at which way the cars are coming before you cross the street, be polite to everyone, etcetera, etcetera.
She did not say, “And if a mystery pops up right in front of your face, stay out of it.” Which was a good thing. Because the next day we stepped right into the middle of a mystery, and we could start solving it with a clear conscience.
9
Go A-way
Here’s another place the story begins: in the National Gallery.
Lucas and I were supposed to meet Mom at the National Gallery entrance at five thirty. We chose to meet there because it’s in the middle of London on a place called Trafalgar Square, right across from the Lord Nelson column Robert had talked about. By the way, Lord Nelson is the guy who led the Battle of Trafalgar, where the English navy defeated Napoleon. If you’re interested in that kind of thing.
Anyway, we were having a totally cool time. First I showed Lucas the Tower of London, which is an old, old castle kind of place with teeny slits for windows and a stone wall around it. Famous people used to have their heads chopped off there in the olden days, including a couple of the wives of Henry VIII. While we were there we also went into the part where they keep the Crown Jewels, which are the crowns and things that all the kings and queens of England have worn for hundreds of years. You wouldn’t believe how many diamonds there are on the main crown they use these days, or how big the diamonds are and how they sparkle.
After the Tower of London we found a McDonald’s. Mom had told us that the menu at McDonald’s is different in different countries. She was right. I had a Toasted Deli Sandwich Chicken Salad on a brown roll and an Orange Matchmakers McFlurry. Then we went to Piccadilly Circus, which is not a circus at all. I guess circus is an old word for a ring or circle, and this is a circle right in the middle of town that’s kind of like Times Square in New York only with smaller buildings and not as many signs. We went to a few stores and scoped out the boys. We decided most of them looked just like the guys from Minnesota.
We planned to keep walking around central London all day and not get to the National Gallery until the last minute, but it started to rain, and the museum isn’t far from Piccadilly Circus, so we got there early.
In America, the word museum can mean a place where they have a collection of almost anything, or a place where they mostly have art. But in England, places where they have just art are usually called galleries. So the National Gallery is a place where they just have art. We still called it a museum most of the time, because that’s what it seemed like to us. Besides, it’s kind of confusing, because gallery is also another name for a room inside the museum.
Anyway, like I said, the National Gallery is full of nothing but art, mostly thousands and thousands of old paintings. So we started looking at the paintings, just to pass the time. I actually like a lot of old paintings, but after I’ve seen a few hundred of them, the only way I can possibly not be bored is to try to look for funny things in them.
A lot of the people in paintings are naked, and if you try to have a sense of humor when you look at them, you suddenly see that they’re doing all sorts of weird things, like riding horses and tending sheep and having picnics together in the country and talking to angels, all without any clothes on. If you look at the paintings that way, a lot of them are really funny.
So Lucas and I went from room to room laughing and having a great time, until we got to the Rembrandt room.
One of the things that’s cool about the paintings by Rembrandt is that there are kind of darkish parts, and then there are parts that look like there’s a light shining on them, and Rembrandt was able to make that happen just by using paint. I love that. Also I’ve painted enough to know how hard that is, so I wanted to look at all his pictures carefully to see how he did it.
But Lucas isn’t as crazy about them as I am, and it wasn’t long before she seemed to be more interested in a man who was sitting on a stool with an easel, copying from a big painting called Belshazzar’s Feast, which takes up most of a whole wall at the end of the room. She was trailing along with me, but she kept turning around and looking over at him, obviously trying to see his work. He was sitting just a few inches away from his easel, blocking the view of what he was painting. I kept going around the room looking at one painting after the other and not paying much attention.
It just so happened that we were standing in front of one of the paintings close to Belshazzar’s Feast and Lucas was still glancing at the guy painting at the easel when all of a sudden this bratty ten-year-old boy breaks away from the school group he’s with, comes up really close to the man, and tries to peek between him and the canvas he’s working on. Lucas says the painter actually reached out and shoved the kid away. My back was turned so I didn’t see it, but I heard what he said to the kid plain as day.
You guessed it. He snarled, “Go a-way.”
I turned around. In fact, I probably spun around. I could only see the side of the man’s head, but he must have been giving the boy the world’s dirtiest look, because the kid was moving backward across the room, his eyes huge, like he was scared.
My heart was pounding about twice as fast as usual, and I felt like my face had turned bright red. For some reason I had the feeling that Lucas and I had to get out of there before the man turned around and recognized us from when he’d seen us in Minneapolis.
I did almost the same thing I’d done when we’d been there with him in the Art Institute. Trying to seem as cool as I could, I walked over, grabbed tight on Lucas’s arm, and pulled until she started walking with me out of the room.
Once out, Lucas wanted to stop, but I kept walking, holding on to her arm and almost dragging her until, halfway through the next room, she gave up and fell into step beside me.
“What are you doing?” she said. “Where are you going?” But I didn’t answer her. I didn’t even look at her. I just walked fast, zigzagging through a bunch of rooms of paintings until I figured that if the guy left the Rembrandt room for any reason, there was no way he was going to find us. Then I dropped onto a bench in the middle of a very crowded and noisy gallery, and Lucas sat down beside me.
“It’s him,” I said.
“Him who?” “Him who?”
“Him the man we saw in the Art Institute painting the Lucretias. Remember? I went up to look at his easel and he said, ‘Go a-way,’ just like that guy just did. We called him Gallery Guy.”
First Lucas looked blank, and then all of a sudden her face changed.
“Gallery Guy! I remember now,” she said. “He did sound the same. But he doesn’t look the same. Didn’t the man in the Art Institute have gray hair?”
I nodded. “Back then he didn’t look anything like he does now. He had a gray ponytail. And I’m almost sure he didn’t wear glasses. And when he was in Minneapolis he was wearing something scruffy, like an old flannel shirt and jeans.” The guy we’d just seen had slicked-back dark hair, a dark beard, and a mustache. He wore a nice black shirt tucked into black trousers, loafers, and trendy glasses. The one thing the two men had in common was that they both had broad shoulders and looked like they’d be tall if they stood up.
“It must be a coincidence,” Lucas said.
I looked at the gazillion people milling around near our bench and lowered my voice. “What do you think the chances are that two totally different men would be copying paintings by the same artist, and when someone went up to look at their work they would say, ‘Go a-way,’ just like that guy did? Huh?”
She looked up and stared at a corner of the ceiling—sometimes she does that when she’s thinking—but this time she sat that way for what seemed like a long time.
“Earth to Lucas, Earth to Lucas,” I said at last.
She turned back to me. “I was just trying to think of what that man in Minneapolis would lo
ok like if I drew him with dark, slicked-back hair and a beard. You’re right, it is the same guy,” she said.
I thought I’d stopped being surprised by Lucas’s photographic memory, but it seemed incredible that even after more than a year, she could just think back about the man we’d called Gallery Guy and remember what he looked like so perfectly that she could have drawn him. I was also totally glad I wasn’t the only one thinking there was a connection between the men we’d seen in the two museums.
I didn’t want to show her how impressed I was, or how much it meant to me to have her agree with me. So I just said, “See, I knew it was the same guy!” Then I added, “I wonder . . .”
“What he’s doing that makes him think he has to wear a disguise?” Lucas finished for me.
“Uh-huh.”
Now we were both quiet for a minute. “What are you thinking?” I asked finally. She had an expression I’d seen before.
“Oh, nothing.”
“Nothing my meep. When you get that look, it usually means you’re making some plan that’s going to get us in trouble.”
“No, no, nothing like that,” she said, trying to sound all innocent.
But I was right. She was planning something. In fact, that afternoon in the National Gallery was the beginning of something that would get us into more trouble—and put the whole Gleesome Threesome in more danger—than we’d ever been in before.
10
Keeping the Truth from Mom
I looked at my watch. “It’s almost five thirty already. Mom’s going to be here in a minute.”
We got up from where we were sitting and headed for the front steps, where we were supposed to meet her.
I was still worried about what Lucas was thinking. I figured it had to do with Gallery Guy, and I had a really bad feeling about him. “I want to stay away from that man,” I said as we walked into the next room. “He might recognize us.”
“From the Art Institute?”
I nodded.
“Are you nuts? He must chase away kids who are trying to look at his canvas all the time. How could he remember all of them? Besides, think about how different we look now than we did then.”
She was right that we’d changed a lot. In the last year both of us had gotten our braces off, Lucas had grown about two inches, and we’d both gotten—well, not big boobs exactly, but a more womanly shape, as they say. I’d cut my hair to just below shoulder length, and I’d stopped wearing glasses and started wearing contacts.
“But you remembered his face well enough to know it was the same guy even with his disguise. What if he has a photographic memory, too?”
“Not many people do. Probably not more than one in a thousand. And besides, what if he did recognize us? It’s not like seeing him in both places is against the law or anything.”
“I’m not so sure about him needing a photographic memory to remember us. My dad doesn’t have a photographic memory, but he’s painted enough portraits that he has a good memory for faces. Besides, there’s something about that guy that just creeps me out. He’s mean.”
“You’re right. Even I can tell that.” Lucas may be smarter than I am, but I have a lot more intuition than she does, and a lot of the time I feel things that she doesn’t. If she felt something was wrong about Gallery Guy, I knew he must be sending off some scary vibes.
When we got to the building’s big entryway, it had stopped raining. We went outside and hung over the railing at the top of the entrance steps and looked over Trafalgar Square. Part of the reason we did that was just because it was a great view: the square with its pigeons and tourists, the huge, enormous column with the Lord Nelson statue on top of it, the other statues, the big fountain spurting up and landing in a pool, the red double-decker buses and all the other traffic racing around.
But mostly it was because we hoped if we got out where there were lots of people and hung way over the side of the railing, Gallery Guy wouldn’t notice us if he came out before Mom got there. Somehow, although neither of us could explain why, we just didn’t want to be noticed.
“I think Gallery Guy is doing something suspicious,” Lucas said. She kept her voice low so the people around us couldn’t hear.
“I think you’re right. But if he is, it’s something we don’t want to know anything about.”
I could have been talking to a wall.
“It’s probably even against the law, or he wouldn’t be so worried about being recognized. And we’re maybe the only people in the entire world who know there’s something fishy going on.”
I hadn’t thought of it that way, and I had to admit, it was pretty cool being one of the only two people who knew that something against the law was happening. Somehow Lucas always finds a way of getting me interested in whatever she’s interested in.
“If we only knew what the crime was,” Lucas said. “Let’s think. What kind of crimes have to do with art?”
“There’s stealing paintings.”
“Art theft,” Lucas corrected.
“That’s what I said. Stealing paintings. He could be, like, planning to . . .”
Suddenly somebody was pressing up behind me, and just for a second I was sure it was Gallery Guy and he was going to push me over the edge. I turned around, but it was only a very overweight man trying to work his way between some other people and me.
I started my sentence over again, still keeping my voice down. “He could be planning to copy a couple Rembrandts, then replace the real ones with his own fakes in museums and sell the real ones.”
“That’s way complicated,” Lucas said. “I think it’s more likely he’s going to try just plain art forgery, painting something and pretending it was by Rembrandt.”
“But why would he need to go to two museums?”
“I don’t have a clue. But if what he’s doing turns out to be big, we’ll probably hear about it. If anything new happens about a Rembrandt painting, the story will probably be in Time.” Lucas has to read Time magazine every week for her social studies class.
“I suppose.” It was a relief to think about this. If it was going to be in Time magazine, that meant it would be a big, famous story. Lucas and I were just two normal fourteen-year-old girls, so it wouldn’t have anything to do with us.
“One thing is for sure, he has something to hide,” Lucas said. “If he was doing something normal, he wouldn’t be so paranoid about having somebody see what he’s doing, and he wouldn’t be wearing a disguise.”
“Maybe we should ask Mom what he might be up to.”
She turned to look at me. “I don’t think we should tell your mom about this.”
I thought for a minute. “Yeah, she might think it was just one of those kid things.”
“Maybe, but your mom has a suspicious mind. I think she might believe something was up, but she’d probably make us promise not to come back here.”
“So?”
“We have to come back!” Lucas said. “Tomorrow.”
“What do you mean, we have to come back?”
“We have to find out what Gallery Guy is up to. It will be fun, Kari! We’ve already been to a bunch of tourist places. This will give us something interesting to do.”
“You mean, like, spy on Gallery Guy? I don’t think that’s such a great idea, Lucas. He’s not a nice man. Even you think he’s mean.”
“Hello-o! How much trouble do you think we can get into in the middle of a crowded museum like this? What’s he going to do—pull a gun or chase us around with a knife in front of hundreds of people? It will be fun!” she said again.
Suddenly I realized she was right. We’d been to a whole lot of tourist places, most of which I’d been to when Mom and I were in London before. Most tourist places are more set up for grown-ups than for teenagers, and to be honest, sometimes they’re boring. Spying on a guy who might be up to something really big and important did seem way more interesting.
During this whole time, we were so busy with what we were saying that
we’d sort of forgotten to look for Mom. Suddenly I felt a tap on my back, which scared the meep out of me, and there she was, standing behind us. I felt like Lucas and I needed more time to figure out how to handle the situation, but we just had to go on the best we could.
“Hi, Mom,” I said, trying to smile.
“Hi, guys,” she said. “I’m glad to see you survived your day in one piece.”
Normally Lucas and I would have made some sarcastic comments, asking her how much trouble she thought we could get into when we had to talk to her on Robert’s mobile phone every hour. But I for one was too busy thinking about Gallery Guy to come up with any smart remarks.
Mom squeezed in beside me at the rail. “How was it seeing London on your own?”
“Fine,” I said, “just fine.” Great conversation I was making.
“We’re kind of tired,” Lucas said, as if explaining why I couldn’t think of anything more original to say. “Why don’t you tell us about your day first? How was it? We’ll tell you about our day later.” Lucas is always cool in a crisis.
“Okay,” Mom said, but she raised her eyebrows a little, as if she wasn’t sure what was going on. She really does have a suspicious mind.
“How was my day? Well, I’m having a heck of a time. I have a photographer to help me take pictures in the British Museum and we’re going to start shooting tomorrow, but I don’t like any of the themes I’ve come up with for the story, so I’m not even sure what we’re going to take pictures of.”
The National Gallery was about to close, and the landing was getting more and more crowded. A school group had come out behind us, and all these little kids were playing around and jostling us.
I started giving them dirty looks over my shoulder and said, “Mom, could we—” I was going to ask if we could get the meep out of there, when suddenly I saw Gallery Guy coming out the museum door. He didn’t have his easel or his painting with him, and he didn’t even glance in our direction. I was glad he didn’t see us, but having him so close to us still made me nervous.
The Mystery of the Third Lucretia Page 4