Relic

by Steve Whibley

  “You have problems,” I said.

  “I saw a couple of the monks when we were in line,” Lisa said. “The young one is probably with them. Just keep your head down and Colin and I will bring you close to him so you can say you’re sorry.”

  “Keep my head down? Like I did in the line? Yeah, that worked pretty well. No one recognized me at all.”

  As if on cue, an angry male voice spoke up from behind me. “Hey, you’re that kid. The one from the newspaper.”

  I instinctively lowered my head and let Colin and Lisa step up to block me from the voice.

  “Nope,” Colin said, “my…little brother hasn’t ever been in the newspaper.” I guess I should have been grateful that I was at least Colin’s brother rather than his sister, but I didn’t know why he didn’t just say I was his friend.

  “Hey, guys,” the man called. “Over here.”

  The man was waving over a group of twenty people or so. Some of them had signs held over their heads. As the group started walking toward us, I decided it was time to move on and promptly jogged away.

  “Where are you going?” the man shouted. “I was talking to you.” There was a pause, and I imagined that the man was telling everyone who I was. More angry shouts came from the group, but I didn’t bother to acknowledge them.

  Lisa nudged me toward a small grove of trees on the chunk of lawn that separated the museum from the street. It was far enough from the building that the protestors probably wouldn’t be interested in it, and since it was off the sidewalk, we might not be noticed.

  “Just ignore them,” Lisa said once we were standing beneath the branches.

  “Yeah,” Colin said. “Half those people are crazy, and the other half would probably protest a new traffic light for being too controlling.” He thought for a second and then added, “But I guess your disguise isn’t really as good as I thought it was.”

  “My disguise is a hat,” I said. “That doesn’t qualify as a disguise in anyone’s book.”

  “Just wait here,” Colin said. “Lisa and I will go see if we can find the monk and get him to come over here.” He nodded to Lisa. “Right?”

  Lisa didn’t answer. Her attention was fixed on something in the small park across the street. “Is that…?”

  I followed her gaze to the small patch of green. Something orange moved between the branches of the trees and shrubs around the park’s perimeter.

  “What?” I said, squinting. I blinked and finally realized what Lisa was looking at. The orange was the distinctive color of the robes the monks wore, and sure enough, a second later, a monk paced past a small break in the trees, then turned and disappeared behind them again.

  It was just enough time for us to see it was the young monk.

  Colin nudged me. “C’mon, let’s get this over with.”

  I bit my lip and nodded.

  Chapter 15

  The park wasn’t really a park. It was too small for that. It was the size of a classroom. The green space was enclosed in a chain-link fence lined with chest-high bushes. Saplings, about the height of a basketball net, were evenly spaced around the perimeter, and the monk was speaking to a man in casual street clothes, positioned behind one of the slender trunks. We were too far away to hear anything, but it was clear by the way the monk was swinging his hands and pointing angrily at the museum that he wasn’t happy. It probably had to do with being kicked out of the building.

  “That was easy,” Colin said. He looked at Lisa and then me. “C’mon, what are we waiting for?”

  “He doesn’t look too happy,” I said. The monk had to be at least a year older than us, and he was a bit bigger than me, so I was pretty sure he’d be upset about how the newspaper had made him look. “He might still be mad. Maybe it’s better if I just write him a note.”

  “You’re not writing him a note,” Lisa said, prodding me forward. “Let’s hurry up before someone spots you.”

  As we moved toward the crosswalk, I realized that the monk was actually completely hidden from the view of anyone standing near the museum. In fact, if we hadn’t been standing at the grove on the edge of the property, we’d never have spotted him. We approached slowly once we were on the other side of the street. Even Lisa, who I thought was feeling pretty confident about the whole thing, shifted from a brisk march to the tips of her toes once the muffled voices drifted over the fence. It wasn’t until we were a meter or two from the actual fence that their voices became clear. They weren’t speaking English, but I recognized the language from school.

  “They’re speaking French,” Lisa whispered. “Not Khmer.”

  “Khmer?” Colin looked puzzled.

  “That’s what they speak in Cambodia.”

  “How do you know that?” Colin whispered.

  Lisa waved her hand at him to shut up, and the three of us inched closer to the fence until our faces were almost pressed against the chain links. I wasn’t really sure why we were trying to eavesdrop on the conversation, but it seemed like the most practical thing to do for some reason.

  “D'accord, nous le ferons ce soir,” a man’s voice said.

  I searched my mind for a translation. I’d taken French an hour a day since kindergarten, like pretty much everyone I knew, but French wasn’t my thing, and honestly, I was lucky if I could introduce myself properly. Lisa was different, though. Her parents had sent her to Quebec for a month a few years ago, and she’d come back speaking better than anyone in our class. I looked at her expectantly.

  “Well?” I whispered.

  She pressed her fingers to her lips and leaned a bit farther over the fence. I did the same, even though it really didn’t matter how close I got. They could speak through a megaphone and it wouldn’t be any easier for me to understand.

  “Qu'est-ce que c'était?”

  Lisa stood up straight as a bolt just a second before the hedge parted and I came face-to-face with the young monk.

  His eyes narrowed as he stared at me, and then he let out an exasperated sigh. “Oh, of course.” The man he was talking to turned abruptly, jogged the few meters across the tiny park, and vaulted the fence on the other side, leaping through the bushes without hesitation. I turned back and found the monk glaring at me. “What do you want?” he asked.

  “I…I, um, I just…you speak French?”

  He rolled his eyes. “No.” The hole in the bushes vanished, but the monk’s voice flitted through the leaves. “Now get lost.”

  I groaned. I was here to deliver an apology, and that’s what I was going to do. Flanked by Lisa and Colin, I marched down the fence line, pushed through the gate, and continued across the grass, only faltering when the monk turned to face me. He put his fists on his hips, his orange robes draping over his body like heavy blankets, and I was reminded once again of all the kung fu movies I’d seen at Colin’s house.

  He glared at me for a few long seconds until I swallowed and spoke. “Look,” I said with a sigh. “We got off on the wrong foot yesterday. I’m not the kind of guy who makes fun of important things, and I really am sorry about what happened.”

  The monk looked up at the leaves of one of the saplings and drew in a long, slow breath. He let it out in a single burst. Then he extended his hand. “I’m Sokhem,” he said. “Sokhem Pram. But most of my friends back home just call me Sok.”

  I stared at his outstretched hand, wondering if I really wanted to make contact with someone else, but then I remembered that we’d already had plenty of contact. I smiled at his name, but didn’t laugh. “I’m Dean Curse,” I said, grabbing his hand and shaking it. “And these are my friends, Lisa and Colin.”

  Colin snickered. “Nice to meet you, Sok.”

  The monk rolled his eyes. “It’s S-O-K, not S-O-C-K.” He turned to me. “I know you weren’t trying to hit me yesterday. And you weren’t really that rude. It’s just…it gets frustrating. I can’t really go home until we get the relic back, and as long as people want to see it, the museum won’t even consider our requests.”
He gave his head a shake. “Anyway, I took out my frustration on you guys first, so I guess I’m sorry too.”

  “Home?” Colin asked. “To Cambodia?”

  “No, London,” Sok replied.

  That explained the English accent. I scratched the back of my head. “You’re a Cambodian monk from London? And you speak French?”

  “I was born in Cambodia, but I grew up in London. I live there with my mum. I promised my grandfather…” He opened a hole in the bushes and pointed at the three robed men standing to the side of the protestors in front of the museum. “That’s him on the right; he’s the one who taught me French. Anyway, I promised him I’d spend a few months as a monk in the monastery in his village over summer vacation. But before I got there, the artifact was stolen and it turned up not long after in Amsterdam.” He shook his head. “That was almost three months ago. I was supposed to be back in London by now. But like I said, my grandfather doesn’t want me to leave until we have it back.”

  “Is there anything we could do to help?” Lisa asked.

  Sok turned and gave a weak laugh. “No.”

  “That’s it?” Lisa asked when Sok didn’t elaborate. “Just, no?”

  “Look,” Sok began, “I appreciate the thought, but we’ve tried everything. A stolen artifact from a tiny little village in Cambodia isn’t top priority for anyone. Especially when our only proof is a couple blurry photographs and the eyewitness accounts of three very old monks.”

  “They don’t believe them?” Colin asked.

  Sok shook his head. “And all the protests seem to make matters worse. They just generate more interest, and the more interest the statue gets, the more the museum wants to keep it. We’ve raised some money, though—enough to buy it back—but they won’t sell it.” He waved his hand. “It doesn’t matter, I’ve made arrangements—” He cut himself off abruptly, and his gaze flicked across the park to where the French-speaking man had disappeared. “To go back to London in a couple weeks,” he added finally.

  “You’re just giving up on it?” Lisa asked. “But what about your grandfather?”

  He shrugged. “I said he doesn’t want me to leave, not that I’m a prisoner. I have school. I’ve done everything I can. He’ll just have to get over it.”

  Sok didn’t seem as upset as I thought he should be, but what did I know? Maybe he was just accepting the inevitable. Lisa and Colin continued to ask Sok questions, but their voices faded into the background as a new thought hit me: the robbery. I tilted my head and scrutinized Sok, trying to determine if he was capable of pulling off a grand heist. I focused on his eyes and pulled up the mental image of the masked guy in my vision. After a minute, I blinked. I had seen nothing of the man in my vision but the eyes; I hadn’t even noticed how tall he was. I shook my head. The museum was stocked full of valuable items. Things like gold, jewelry, and paintings, and I’d bet all of those would be a million times more valuable than a Buddha head.

  No. People were going to die, I reminded myself. A security guard and a thief, and even though Sok looked like he could get pretty angry, he didn’t look like a killer.

  Sok nodded when we were done talking, and strolled away through the gate and out of the park.

  “That went well,” Colin said.

  Lisa parted the bushes around the fence and watched Sok jog across the street. “You guys don’t think that he’s the…”

  “I thought the same thing,” I said. “But I don’t think so. He doesn’t really strike me as the killer type.”

  “It’s just,” Lisa continued, “that man who ran away, did you guys hear what he said?”

  “I heard him,” Colin said, “but I didn’t understand him.”

  “He said, ‘Nous le ferons ce soir,’” Lisa repeated with a French accent. “That means, ‘Let’s do it tonight.’”

  “It does?” Colin asked.

  “They could have been talking about anything,” I said. “It might be entirely innocent.” I only half believed my own words. My mind was already flipping through various scenarios in which Sok used the money the village had raised to buy back the relic to hire a thief to steal it back. Maybe his mystery friend would get into a scuffle with an armed guard and a gun would go off—accidentally or otherwise. Plus, it wasn’t like Sok and his mystery friend were meeting out in the open, and that guy had run away pretty quick when we’d shown up at the playground.

  I shook my head. “It doesn’t matter. We need to talk to Archer, and he’ll help us figure this out. It’ll be fine.” I told that to myself again and again and planned to keep telling myself until I believed it.

  Colin tapped his watch. “Let’s get to the park. I’ve wanted to talk to Archer all day long. I think maybe he can get us some crime-fighting tools. Like grappling hooks and throwing stars and x-ray glasses and—”

  “He’s not a spy,” Lisa said with an exasperated sigh.

  The two of them argued as we crossed the park and made our way down the street toward the bus stop. Just before we rounded the corner, I glanced back. Sok was standing at the corner of the building, peering curiously down an alley between the museum and the bakery.

  Could it be him? I wondered. Could he be the guy from my vision?

  Chapter 16

  The idea that Sok might be the burglar hung in my head like a neon sign. I couldn’t ignore it. Lisa and Colin were thinking the same thing, and argued while we rode the bus.

  “He’s a monk, Colin. There’s no way he’d do that,” Lisa said.

  “We could tie him up,” Colin suggested, ignoring Lisa completely. “He can’t get killed if he’s tied up.”

  Lisa rolled her eyes at having been ignored and said, “Even if he was the burglar, and I still don’t think he is, you can’t just tie him up. If you think you make the front page for hitting a monk, what do you think they’d do for kidnapping one? What if we just tell him that if he tries to steal from the museum he’s going to die?”

  Colin laughed. “Tying him up would be better, and we’d probably seem less nuts.”

  “We can’t count on the fact that he’s the burglar,” I said finally, as the bus came to a stop beside the park. “It’s him or it isn’t, and if we waste our time stopping him from doing something that he wasn’t ever going to do in the first place, well, we won’t have stopped anything. Besides, I bet Archer has stopped dozens of robberies. There’s probably a policy in place for this sort of thing. A trick or something that works every time.” I followed them off the bus. “Let’s just find him and get a real plan.”

  Colin and Lisa nodded in agreement. I think they could sense my escalating stress. I had only a few hours left to intervene. What kind of stupid gift only gives you twenty-four hours to act, anyway? Why not forty-eight? Why not a week?

  Finding Archer wasn’t difficult. The gray clouds that had been rolling around the sky barely an hour before had become a menacing blanket blocking out any trace of blue, and reducing the number of kids in the park to a handful. Also, Archer was in an ice cream truck, so we just followed that annoying little jingle. We found him pulled over beside a large play area where a handful of older kids were doing stunts on the swings.

  He smiled and rested his elbows on the sill of the window cut into the side of his truck. “Well, well,” he said, “if it isn’t the angry monk-beater.”

  Lisa and Colin laughed stiffly, but I could only manage a weak grin. Time was slipping away, and we didn’t have a plan yet. Archer’s smile slid off his face. It was clear he noticed that something wasn’t right.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  “Dean had another vision,” Lisa said.

  “A bad one,” Colin added.

  “They’re seldom good,” Archer said, leaning out the window, “but let’s hear it.”

  My hands shook as I stepped a bit closer. I wasn’t sure if I was nervous about talking to Archer or scared about dealing with another vision.

  I clenched my fists and told him everything. Archer didn’t say a word
while I spoke, and Lisa and Colin only interjected once to expand on my thought that maybe, just maybe, Sok was the burglar. When I was done, Archer disappeared into his truck and returned a few seconds later with three ice cream treats. Then he just stood there, lost in thought, until he finally said, “So, what do you think you should do?”

  I flinched. “What do I think I should do? I…I mean, we were hoping that maybe you’d handle this.”

  Archer’s brow rose.

  “I mean, it’s just that we’re talking about a robbery, right? A museum robbery. Those guards have guns.”

  Archer stood up and puffed out his skinny chest. “I may look bulletproof, but I’m quite fragile.”

  “But haven’t you done stuff like this before?” Colin asked.

  “Stopped a museum robbery?” Archer smiled. “Nope. This would be the first.” He leaned over again and stared at me, his lips set in a thin line. “You’ve been kind of thrust into this, Dean, and I’m sorry about that. But we need to get you ready, and believe it or not, this is one case you don’t need me to take care of for you.”

  “What?” Lisa’s eyes bugged out. “You’re not going to help?” Her voice drew glances from the few kids still in the playground, and she blushed and inched back a step.

  “Mr. Astley, please,” I begged. “The last time we tried to intervene with robbers, things didn’t go well.”

  Archer shook his head. “Don’t blame yourselves. All things considered, you didn’t do too badly.” Before I could state the obvious, that my neighbor had died and so we had in fact done quite badly, Archer continued. “I know the outcome wasn’t perfect, but I’ve seen far more experienced members fail at far easier missions. In the end, though, you need to remember it wasn’t your fault.”

  Lisa bit her lip and cast a nervous glance at me, and then she turned back to Archer and spoke, but her words came out almost like a whimper. “You’re really not going to help us?”