The Mystery of the Third Lucretia

by Susan Runholt

  I was pretty sure Mom hadn’t gotten any e-mail about the Italian shows, and that she’d just made up the story like Lucas and I had made up our stories when we were in London. I thought about telling her that if it was a lie, I was going to have to ground her. But I didn’t. Mom has a good sense of humor, but I wasn’t sure she’d think that was as funny as I did.

  True or not true, Mom’s story worked. The editor said okay.

  Mom decided to hurry up everything she was doing in Paris so we could get to the exhibit on Sunday. Then she called an old friend of hers who lived in Amsterdam, an American guy named Bill, to ask him to recommend a good hotel. Finally, she called the person at The Scene who’s in charge of making travel reservations to switch all the arrangements, and by Saturday afternoon we were sitting on a train, heading north to Amsterdam.

  This was totally awesome, because it was a high-speed train, which goes hurtling along at almost two hundred miles an hour. It’s way more exciting than riding in an airplane because you can see how fast you’re going just by looking out the window.

  The only thing on the train trip that had anything at all to do with our mystery was that we went through Antwerp, which was the place Gallery Guy said he was from when he was painting in the National Gallery. But we didn’t even have time to get out.

  Mom lived in Amsterdam her first year out of college, before she married Dad, and she spent the last part of the trip telling us about how it was back then. I guess even before she lived there it had started being Drug City, which it still is, pretty much, because drugs are legal there. Anyway, back then kids would come with backpacks from all over the world and hang out at this place called Dam Square and buy and use drugs. Mom said she didn’t do that. She’d managed to get a job as a waitress in an American-style restaurant just so she could stay in Amsterdam, which she loved, and lived a regular life. I don’t know if I believe her. Bill, the guy she’d called about the hotel, was somebody she’d met back then.

  When Mom got done telling us about this, Lucas said, “So. About this Bill guy. Do you two have some kind of romantic thing going?”

  “Well, at one time in my life, believe it or not, there were men. Relationships. Romance,” Mom said, and she got a far-off look in her eyes, hamming it up. For the next few minutes she told us how she and Bill had met, dated for a while, then decided to be just friends, and how they’d stayed friends even though they’d both gotten married to other people. Now they were both divorced, but as far as Mom was concerned, romance with him wasn’t in the cards.

  “But he’s a great guy,” she said. “He had something scheduled for tonight and couldn’t meet our train, but you’ll have a chance to meet him while we’re here. I think you’ll like him.”

  It was seven o’clock when we got into Amsterdam.

  It’s hard to imagine how different all the cities in Europe look from each other until you go there. Compared to London and Paris, Amsterdam is like another whole world. It has these canals running through it in U shapes, one inside the other. There’s also a big river right in the middle of things. They have streets, too—it’s not like Venice, where everyone goes around in boats. But everywhere you look in Amsterdam, there’s water.

  Kind of at the very top of the town, above and in the middle of all the Us of the canals, is the incredibly big, monstrous, humongous Centraal Station, where we came in on the train.

  When you come out of the train station you’re on a big plaza where all kinds of things are going on. That night there was a guy with an accordion, a Caribbean drum group, and some man Mom said was from Turkey doing a weird whirling dance in a costume with a big skirt and tall hat. Mom says it’s always like that. What a place.

  Well, that’s just the beginning. When you look down the main street from the Centraal Station you start to see the buildings that Amsterdam is famous for. You’ve probably seen them in pictures. They’re old and tall and skinny, and they have pointed roofs that mostly have little decorations on them. They’re on both sides of all the canals and the river, and you can see their reflections in the water. Amsterdam has to be the most picturesque place I’ve ever been.

  Anyway, since we were traveling light and had our little rolling suitcases, we decided to take a tram to our hotel, which was down in a quiet section where they have the big museums and the concert hall. Trams, or streetcars, are like small trains, and they run everywhere in Amsterdam on tracks in the streets.

  By the time we got settled in our hotel and went downstairs to the restaurant to have something to eat, all we had time to do was take a quick walk around the neighborhood before it was time for bed. We were all beat. Traveling is hard work.

  The next day we were some of the first people in line outside the Rijksmuseum waiting for it to open.

  You go into the museum through a gigantic entry passageway that runs completely through the building. As usual, I was busy with my journal, so instead of standing in line with Mom and Lucas, I was on a bench out in the sunshine. Mostly I had my head down. But once, when I looked up, I caught a glimpse of a good-looking blond man walking into the passageway.

  It would be easy to say I didn’t think anything of it at the time—after all, I only saw him from the back. But to be honest, I have to admit that watching him walk and move, I was sure he was somebody I should know. I wondered if he was an actor or a rock star or something. But he was dressed up in a suit and tie and carrying a briefcase, so I figured he worked at the museum. I finally decided that the reason he seemed familiar was because he looked a lot like Sting, only with longer hair. I picked up my journal again and kept on writing.

  If I’d watched him, I might have seen him stop and look closely at Lucas and then at Mom. But I didn’t watch him, and I didn’t see him do it. And that was a big, big, big mistake.

  26

  The Third Lucretia

  “This does not look good,” Mom muttered, her eyes darting back and forth over the crowd behind us as we waited to get into the museum. I’d come over from my bench because it was getting close to opening time.

  “I have a feeling we’re going to get trampled,” Mom continued. “Just look out there. It’s a teeming sea of humanity.” The crowd stretched all the way through the passageway and out into the plaza.

  “Listen,” Mom said, “we need a strategy.” She turned away from the crowd and motioned for us to huddle near her.

  Talking softly so nobody else could hear, she said, “This isn’t going to be like Minnesota, where everybody keeps their place in line. Amsterdam is a very cool city, and the Dutch have many good qualities, but Amsterdammers are famous for being pushy.

  “Even as we speak, I’ll bet four out of every five of those people in line behind us are figuring out how they can elbow us out of the way and be the first to see the Third Lucretia. We’d better make a run for it. When they open the doors, we move. Got that?”

  We nodded.

  “First, we get in front of Lucretia and do some serious gazing. Then we fan out. I’m pretty sure there’ll be panels that’ll tell about other things. Like the story of Lucretia and the two other paintings in the States, and all that.”

  “We don’t need to spend our time on that,” Lucas said. “We know that stuff.”

  “Exactly,” Mom said. “Let’s each of us look for something more interesting. Anything that tells about finding the painting or figuring out that it was a real Rembrandt, that kind of thing. Okay?”

  “Then what do we do?” I asked. “Shall we call each other over? Or just read it ourselves and make a report?”

  We all looked at each other.

  “I know,” Lucas said. “How about if we each read our own panels and only call each other if there are interesting pictures?”

  “Great idea,” Mom said. “Just in time, too. On your marks . . .”

  There was a sound behind the entry door, and suddenly we were let in.

  “Go!” Mom said, and the three of us took off, almost but not quite running, down into
the gigantic entrance courtyard where we showed the tickets Mom had bought online, then through another part of the building and, finally, into the special exhibit room.

  And there she was. Lucretia.

  Because we’d come so fast, we had her all to ourselves for a few seconds, and being alone there with her was totally awesome for me.

  First when I saw the painting, just the look and the size of it made me want to stop in my tracks. I couldn’t stop for more than a second, of course, or I would have gotten trampled and ended up nothing but a grease spot on the Rijksmuseum floor. But it was the kind of scene that, like, took a person’s breath away. And suddenly I got all emotional, feeling lots of things at the same time.

  The painting was set up to look dramatic, with no other paintings in the exhibit room, and low lighting with a big spotlight on the picture, which was huge.

  And, as I said, there Lucretia was. Looking just like herself, with her reddish brown hair and light gold skin, and the sad mouth with the dark shadow at the corner on the side we could see.

  Only she was dead, and everything in the painting seemed very still and quiet and mournful.

  Which brings me to another thing I was feeling, which was sadness for the dead Lucretia. Okay, call it silly, but it turned out that Mom had the same feeling, and she said it was a sign of how well the picture had been painted that it could make a person feel truly sad that the woman had died. I think I felt it especially, because I’d always loved the Lucretia paintings, and she was like a real person to me.

  Then there were the hands. The closer I got to the painting, the more familiar those hands looked. When I finally saw them close up, I actually recognized the brush-strokes. And for a minute I had this incredibly confusing feeling that it wasn’t Rembrandt’s painting hanging there, or even Gallery Guy’s. It was my painting. After a few seconds everything went back to normal, but I didn’t stop feeling like I was part of that painting, somehow. I wondered if Lucas felt it, too.

  “Lucas,” I whispered, “recognize that spot of pink on the first knuckle, and the yellow on the side of the thumb?”

  She nodded and grinned at me.

  I looked for a while longer at the hands, and at the cute, sad-looking little black-and-white dog at the foot of Lucretia’s bed. And at the people standing around the bed, looking as sad and quiet as they would have looked in real life.

  Then the crowd got to be too much, and it was time to move on.

  Mom was right. There were panels around the walls of the room. Each one was about something different, and they were all written in Dutch, with translations in English, French, German, and some Asian language. Mom was already busy reading one of them. Lucas had gone all the way to the one farthest away from the painting, and now she was looking at the panel next to that.

  I passed by the panel called “Who Was Lucretia?” and went on to the one labeled “Identifying a Masterpiece.”

  Right at the top there was a photo of a tall blond man looking through a magnifying glass at a painting that was lying on a table. It was the guy I’d just seen outside the museum. He still looked like Sting, but he also seemed familiar in other ways.

  I looked hard at his face. At his cheeks, at his ears, and I looked a lot at his nose. And then I knew who it was.

  You guessed it—Gallery Guy. Only the words under the picture said, “Jacob Hannekroot, Curator of Dutch Art, Rijksmuseum.”

  That gave me the shivers, I can tell you that. I quick turned to look for Lucas and Mom, but I couldn’t see them because of people in the way. Before I left to go get them, I couldn’t help reading what was on the panel and giving the picture a closer look.

  With the beard, slicked-back black hair, and the glasses he’d had in London, Gallery Guy hadn’t looked especially gorgeous. But it turned out he was a very good-looking guy. In England he’d had brown eyes, but here his eyes were bright blue. I thought he probably was into colored contacts and had both a brown pair and a blue pair, because even if his eyes were naturally blue they couldn’t be this blue.

  He was wearing a pale pink shirt with the sleeves rolled up over his elbows. The shirt was open at the collar, perfectly pressed, and there was something about his posture that made it all look “casually elegant,” as they say. He wasn’t young, but he looked good.

  Just then I heard someone call my name, and when I looked over my shoulder I saw Lucas leaning around some people and gesturing for me.

  I fought my way over to where she was standing just as Mom came over from the other side. Lucas had been looking at a panel called “A Dutch National Treasure.” It was the story of the Rijksmuseum’s decision to buy the Third Lucretia, and there was a picture of the museum’s director in front of the painting.

  But Lucas hadn’t called us over to look at him. She wanted us to look at the other people in the picture with him.

  There, standing on the director’s right, was Marianne Mannefeldt. She was a tall, gorgeous blonde who was totally hot. The dress she was wearing was buttoned all the way up to her neck, but it was tight enough that you could see that she had a fantastic body.

  On the other side of the museum director was Jacob Hannekroot, Gallery Guy, dressed in a suit this time and looking just as handsome as he’d looked in the panel I’d been reading a minute ago. Maybe even more handsome.

  Lucas pointed at him and gave me a Look—she’d recognized him, too—and I gave her a Look back and moved my head up and down in a big nod.

  Mom said, “Now come over and look at this.”

  She led the way, pushing through the crowd to the panel she’d been reading. There was the story of the Mannefeldt family, a picture of the canal house where the Rembrandt had supposedly been discovered, and a big picture of Marianne with her husband who had died. It had been taken at a party. He was in a tuxedo and she was wearing a low-cut black dress and lots of jewelry. Willem Mannefeldt was completely bald and had a long nose and almost no chin. He looked like a vulture. He had his arm around his wife like she was some kind of a prize he’d won for being so rich and important.

  “Not exactly a GQ model, is he?” Mom whispered, pointing to Willem.

  “She and that curator of Dutch art guy from the other panel make a much cuter couple,” I said, whispering back, and I raised my eyebrows a couple times to let Mom know there was something up.

  Mom gave me a questioning look. Then, under her breath, she said, “Makes you wonder how dear old Willem managed to kick the bucket, doesn’t it?”

  27

  Figuring It Out

  “Are Jacob Hannekroot and Gallery Guy the same person, or what!” I burst out the instant we were through the crowd and walking away from the museum.

  “No joke,” Lucas chimed in. “Wait till we sit down. I’ll draw a picture and show you.”

  Mom just looked at us. I think she couldn’t believe what we were saying. Then she put her finger to her lips and gestured with her head to a group in front of us and people whizzing by on bicycles. Amsterdam is absolutely full of bicycles.

  We didn’t say any more until we found an outdoor table where our conversation would be covered up by traffic noises. We decided to have lunch even though it was early.

  This is probably as good a time as any to tell you about how to say some of the Dutch names, if you’re interested in that kind of thing. Jacob Hannekroot is pronounced as if it was spelled YAH-kub HAH-nuh-krote. (Two o’s in a row make a long o sound in Dutch.) The letter w is pronounced like v, so Willem is pronounced like Villem, and Marianne sounds like MAH-ree-AH-nuh.

  Anyway, as soon as Lucas had taken a quick look at the menu, she whipped out her journal, found a blank page, and started drawing. By the time the waiter had taken our orders, she was almost ready.

  “By the way,” I said while we were waiting for her, “I think I saw Jacob Hannekroot outside the Rijksmuseum while I was on the bench.”

  Before anybody had a chance to comment, Lucas turned her journal around and we could see a rough sketch of
a man. “That’s Jacob Hannekroot all right,” Mom said.

  Lucas didn’t say anything. She just started drawing again. It didn’t take her long before she’d turned the drawing of Jacob into Gallery Guy just by adding a beard, slicked-back dark hair, and glasses. She showed it to Mom, then she turned back to the pictures she’d drawn of Gallery Guy when we were in London. The two pictures were identical.

  “Well, that’s clear enough,” Mom said. “Okay, let me get this straight. The Rijksmuseum’s curator of Dutch art is the same person who painted the hands on the picture we just saw, which means he probably painted the whole Third Lucretia.”

  Lucas and I nodded.

  “And the Rijksmuseum’s curator of Dutch art, this same Jacob Hannekroot, is the art expert who then identified the Third Lucretia, his own painting, as a real Rembrandt.”

  We nodded again. Having Mom say this out loud made me feel like holding my breath, I was so excited.

  “And the person whose house the phony painting was in is an incredibly beautiful woman whose husband just died, and who insisted on taking the painting to the Rijksmuseum for identification.”

  “And Jacob is also incredibly good-looking,” I said.

  “And her husband was old and ugly,” Lucas said.

  “So Marianne and Jacob were almost certainly in it together,” Mom said. She’s never chewed her fingernails, but she has a habit, when she’s thinking, of taking the nail of her right thumb between her teeth and, like, slowly clamping up and down on it. She did that now. After a minute she said, “What a setup. What an unbelievably smooth, foolproof setup!”

  “Except for one thing,” I said. “Us.” And I broke into a big smile.

  Lucas and I were smiling when our food came, but Mom looked more worried than happy about what I’d just said. “Okay, what else did we find out in the museum?” she asked, taking a bite of her quiche.