by James Ponti
“Okay, but if I don’t drive, then I get to take a first-day-of-school picture in front of the house,” she said, suddenly turning it into a negotiation. “And one with a real smile, not the I’m-twelve-and-hate-having-my-picture-taken pretend smile.”
I carefully considered her offer. “Are you going to post the picture online?”
“I’m going to post some picture online,” she said. “It will either be this one or that adorable one of you as a baby dancing in a diaper. I’ll let you pick.”
She’s a tough negotiator, my mother.
“All right, then,” I said, cutting my losses. “Let’s take some pictures.”
I posed for a few solo shots and a couple more with Margaret. Once Mom was satisfied, Margaret and I started walking. We’d made it to the end of the driveway when Mom called out random encouragement: “Seventh grade will be seventh heaven! Be your true self! I love you!”
I turned to face her. “That’s why you can’t drive me on the first day, Mom. Because you say stuff like that. Out loud. Where people can hear.”
“I know. It’s just that I care so much.”
“I know you do, Mom.”
“Don’t worry, Mrs. B.,” Margaret said. “I’ll keep an eye on him.”
We waved good-bye and started down the sidewalk—although I can’t be certain Mom didn’t secretly follow us in her car.
“Sorry about that,” I said to Margaret once we were far enough away.
“Are you kidding?” she replied. “At seven fifteen I was in the middle of a video chat with my grandmother so she could see my outfit.”
It’s always hard to start at a new school, but at least it wasn’t in the middle of the year. We moved to London in February and that was a total nightmare. I got the worst seat in every classroom and never really found a group of friends.
This time I had high hopes. I also had Margaret helping guide the way and answering any questions. Like when we walked through the front door and I saw the security setup.
“Metal detectors and X-ray machines?” I asked. “Is this an everyday thing?”
She shrugged like it was no big deal. “You get used to it. They use them throughout the District.”
“The school’s safe, isn’t it?”
“Totally,” she said. “Besides, this will help keep out any strangers, you know, like the Romanian Mafia.”
I laughed. “Well, when you put it that way, I guess it’s a good thing.”
Because Deal was so large, each grade was split into teams of five teachers and about a hundred students. The teams were named after major international cities and we were assigned to Team Cairo.
Margaret and I had three classes together: English, ancient history, and algebra. But more important, we were both in the same lunch. Breakfast may be the most important meal of the day nutritionally speaking, but lunch is the one that matters the most when it comes to socializing. It really helps to have a friend.
The biggest struggle I had that first week had nothing to do with schoolwork or making friends, and everything to do with coming back to reality. I’d just spent a summer during which I went to the FBI training academy, helped discover a spy ring trying to infiltrate the CIA, and been part of the investigation into nearly $100 million in stolen paintings. And now I was a seventh grader.
Just a seventh grader.
I was a normal kid in a class full of normal kids, and I couldn’t even tell anyone about all the cool adventures. My English teacher asked us to write about what happened over the summer and I couldn’t think of anything interesting that hadn’t been classified by the government.
The most exciting moment came on Tuesday afternoon when Margaret and I were walking home from school. She kept a constant lookout for anyone suspicious and was certain the man in the slow-moving Volkswagen was an EEL operative. When he stopped and got out of his car, she was prepared to, as she put it, “unleash the fury of my kung fu.” Luckily she managed to stop herself when we realized he was delivering a pizza to the house we were standing in front of.
“Do you normally unleash that power with or without pepperoni?” I asked as we both struggled to keep a straight face.
By Friday even she was no longer concerned about the Romanian Mafia. On Saturday afternoon I was in full sprawl on the couch watching television when Mom asked me if I had any homework.
“Five pages of algebra and five hundred words about my summer,” I said.
“How close are you to being done?” she asked.
I smiled. “I’ve got the whole weekend to do it. I haven’t even started.”
She gave me that Mom look and said, “Too bad.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Because our deal was that you couldn’t save the country until after you’d finished your homework.”
I shot upright on the couch. “What? Is there work for me to do? Detective work?”
She held up two manila envelopes. “Agent Rivers had these dropped off today.”
“Let me see them,” I said.
She held them out for me, but then snapped them back as I reached for them. “Let me see your homework.”
I got the point and instantly turned off the television and rushed upstairs to get my backpack. “I’ll have it done right away,” I promised.
“No, you’ll have it done right,” she corrected. “Do not rush your homework. I’m going to check everything before I consider it done.”
The algebra went pretty quickly, but the five hundred words were a different story. I didn’t know what to write. Like I said, all the cool stuff was classified, so I decided to write about our move to America and the change of culture.
“Pffftt,” Mom said after she read it. “There’s nothing there.”
“That’s because nothing happened,” I said. “Except for the FBI stuff, but I can’t write about that.”
“Nothing happened, huh?” she said. “Well, this is your first chance to let anyone at the school get to know you.”
“Not really,” I replied. “Margaret knows me.”
“She does?” said my mother. “When did she get to know you?”
“This summer . . .” My words trailed off when I realized what she was trying to do.
“I guess something did happen,” she replied.
I went back upstairs and wrote about my friendship with Margaret. I didn’t make it all gushy. I just started writing about things we did, and by the time I stopped to take a look, I’d already finished 627 words.
“Magnifico,” Mom said when she read it. “If you’d like I can give you one of the pictures I took of the two of you and you can turn it in with the essay.”
“Thanks, but no thanks, Mom.”
Margaret came over the next morning and we went down into the basement to start working. Agent Rivers had sent two envelopes. One had a record of every museum employee who had traveled to Europe on official business over the past three years. The other had records of all the auctions for major works of Impressionism going back five years.
“Which do you want to do first?” I asked.
“Let’s start with the travel,” she said.
Our goal with the travel was to figure out how someone at the museum might have met Pavel Novak.
“Let’s look at who went to conventions and expositions,” I said. “That’s the most likely place for them to have bumped into each other.”
“Sounds good,” said Margaret.
“I got this list of them from my mom,” I said. “She’s a member of some art group and gets invited to all of them.”
The fact that the room was unfinished is what made the Underground such a great place to work. We didn’t have to worry about ruining anything like the paint on the wall, because there wasn’t any paint on the wall. So Margaret wrote the name and date of each convention on separate index cards and taped them to the walls.
“Now let’s see which of these dates and places line up with trips by museum staff,” she said.
At first none of the dates lined up, which didn’t make any sense. After all, someone had to at least go to some meeting.
“I got it,” I said when I realized what we’d done wrong. “The dates on the travel documents are in the American style and the dates on the events are European.”
“We use different dates?” she asked.
“Americans write the month first and then the day, while Europeans write the day first and then the month. So June thirteenth is 6/13 in America, and it’s 13/6 in Europe.”
When we fixed this, all of the trips lined up perfectly.
“So in the last three years, there were seven conventions where museum staff went to Europe,” Margaret said, looking at our wall.
“Any of them in the Czech Republic?” I asked hopefully.
“No,” she said. “Two of them were in London, and the others were in Munich, Copenhagen, Florence, Budapest, and Warsaw.”
“Okay, so that’s where the staff went,” I said, thinking out loud. “Which ones would Pavel Novak go to? He was a star student at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague. He wants to find a job. He wants to get hired to paint.”
“Then that knocks out Copenhagen,” said Margaret. “Because it’s a forum for fund-raising, and Munich, because it’s just for security people.”
“That’s good,” I said as I took those lists down. “Now we’re down to five.”
“And we can eliminate Florence, too,” said Margaret.
“How?”
“Because the only person to go to that one was a curator named Michael Jennings,” she said. “And according to the museum’s website, he left to work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York over a year ago.”
We’d cut the list to four, but it still felt a little needle-in-a-haystack-ish. We just sat there stumped and stared at the wall.
“By the way,” I said, “I wanted to warn you that my mother posted those first-day-of-school pictures of us online and now all my relatives want to meet you when they visit. So be prepared to get swarmed at the holidays.”
“I can handle it,” she said. “That’s the danger of social media.”
That gave me an idea. I hopped up and went over to the computer.
“What are you doing?”
“Checking social media,” I answered.
“I thought we were working,” she protested.
“This is work,” I told her. “Maybe mothers aren’t the only ones who share too much. What if schools do too?”
I typed in “Academy of Fine Arts in Prague.”
“Check it out,” I said when the results filled the screen.
We spent the next twenty minutes scrolling through all of the pictures, posts, tweets, and mentions the academy had put up. We found what we were looking for in a picture posted fifteen months earlier.
“Alumni get-together at ArtFest in Budapest,” said the caption.
“Top row, third from the left,” I said. “I think that’s our boy.”
Margaret leaned in close to get a good look, and when she turned to face me, she had a big smile. “Got him!”
I got up and went to the wall where we’d taped the roster for the ArtFest in Budapest.
“Who do we have?” she asked.
I started reading off the names. “Michael Jennings, Kendra May, Ryan Thigpen . . .”
The bottom two took my breath away.
“Who is it?”
I held up the paper and said, “Serena Miller and Earl Jackson.”
22.
Extra-Credit Algebra
I COULDN’T BELIEVE THAT SERENA Miller and Earl Jackson could possibly be involved in the theft of Woman with a Parasol.
Or maybe I just didn’t want to believe it.
Miller was a family friend and Jackson was so nice and unassuming he insisted I call him by his first name. But I also couldn’t ignore the fact that both were at ArtFest in Budapest at the same time as Pavel Novak.
“It could just be a coincidence,” offered Margaret. “Remember when you were first teaching me about TOAST? You warned me that just because something is unexpected, doesn’t mean it’s suspicious.”
“Yes, but it’s the closest we’ve come to connecting Novak with anyone at the museum,” I said. “Even worse, they were both directly involved with updating the security software. You couldn’t pick anyone in a better position to orchestrate the whole burglary.”
I sat down in my chair and slumped.
“I haven’t met either one of them, so I don’t know what they’re like,” she said. “But there were three other people from the museum at that convention. What about them?”
These were the names and titles listed on the itinerary:
Michael Jennings, PhD, Curator
Kendra May, Conservator
Ryan Thigpen, Project Manager
Serena Miller, Director of Security
Earl Jackson, Security Manager
“We know it’s not Jennings because he moved to New York over a year ago to work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art,” I said.
“What about the other two?” Margaret asked. “If Kendra May is a conservator, then she probably works with your mom.”
“You’re right,” I said. “Let’s find out.”
We headed upstairs and found Mom in the front yard painting a picture of the house. It’s a tradition she’s done of every home we’ve lived in.
“Wow,” Margaret said, admiring it. “That’s beautiful, Mrs. B.”
Mom smiled. “Thanks. It may not be nice enough for the National Gallery, but we should be able to find a spot for it somewhere in the house.”
“Don’t let her modesty fool you,” I said. “She’s sold paintings in some really nice galleries.”
“And don’t let sales fool you,” she responded. “Van Gogh only sold two paintings in his entire life. We could talk for hours about the difference between what’s true art and what sells. But I don’t think that’s why you came up here. You look like you have a question.”
“Two actually,” I said. “Do you know a project manager named Ryan Thigpen?”
She thought about it for a moment. “The name’s familiar. But I don’t know him. I think he oversees modern-art installations in the East Building.”
“What about Kendra May?”
“Of course,” said Mom. “Kendra’s extremely talented. She specializes in the Impressionists and the Postimpressionists, like I do. She did an amazing job repairing a Degas that had been damaged in storage.”
“So if her specialty is the Impressionists, then she’d be a fan of Monet, right?” reasoned Margaret.
“Who isn’t a fan of Monet?” answered Mom. “But sure. In fact, I think she did some academic research about him for her PhD.”
So far, so good.
“What’s she like as a person?” I asked. “Is she nice?”
Mom laughed a little as she considered this. “She’s not mean. But she’s also not too friendly. She likes to do her own thing. And she really gets upset if anyone moves her lunch in the break room refrigerator.”
Margaret and I shared a look. I already liked her much more as a candidate than Serena and Earl.
“Why do you ask?” Mom wanted to know.
“It’s part of what I’m looking into for Agent Rivers,” I said. “It turns out she was at a convention in Hungary at the same time as the man who painted the forgery of Woman with a Parasol.”
“And you think she might be involved?” asked Mom.
I shrugged. “Maybe.”
“Well then, I have bad news,” she said. “Kendra had a baby a few days before the burglary. A boy named Vincent.”
Suddenly, Kendra May seemed much less likely to be the one we were looking for. I can’t imagine anyone planning a major museum heist to coincide with giving birth. It would just make everything too unpredictable.
Margaret and I grabbed some apples from the kitchen and headed back to the basement.
“Here’s what I’m thinking,” Margaret
said as we got back to work. “You’re not going to meet someone and instantly hatch a plan to rob the National Gallery. You’d want to meet at least another time or two.”
“That’s true,” I said. “So let’s go back to all the records and see who went back to Europe.”
This time we didn’t consider only convention and trade show trips. We looked at all travel involving any of our potential candidates.
“Here’s one for Ryan Thigpen,” said Margaret. “Stockholm, Sweden, in January of this year.”
“That sounds unbearably cold,” I replied. “Anything for Kendra May?”
“No,” she said. “I’m thinking that and the baby give her a pretty good alibi.”
I was scanning through the papers when I came across a trip to Berlin by Earl Jackson. “Four days meeting with consultants,” I said, reading off the description on the trip.
“Oh no,” said Margaret.
“What is it?”
“Two trips by Serena Miller,” she said, looking up at me. “One last September and one just a few weeks before we saw Novak in the museum.”
“Where to?” I asked.
“The first one to Paris and the second Prague.”
TOAST is about the accumulation of many little details, and for the moment at least, those details weren’t looking too good for Serena. I was bummed, so Margaret reminded me that we had an entirely different lead to follow.
“You never know how it all might shake out,” she said. “Let’s see if the auctions show us anything interesting.”
Because his insurance company worked with all the prestigious auction houses, Oliver Hobbes had been able to access complete bidding records for major auctions involving the big names of Impressionism. Normally, the public only finds out who winds up with the painting. But this gave us a much bigger picture of who was interested in the paintings the burglar targeted. We hoped we could find a mastermind hidden among the bidders.
“Each auction is printed on a separate piece of paper,” I said to Margaret. “So let’s line them up in chronological order.”
Just like we’d done with the names of the conventions, we taped the results of each auction on the wall. This way we could walk along the evidence and look at the big picture instead of only bit by bit on a computer screen.