by Peter Glenn
But we had bigger problems to contend with. Like finding where to go.
“So, where are we headed?” I asked Rick and Sheila.
“Umm,” Rick muttered, “I’m checking…”
He was holding one of the map brochures they gave you that listed out all the exhibits and things you could expect to go and see at the museum that day, looking at it cross-eyed.
“Just a minute,” he pleaded. “My French is pretty rusty.”
I laughed. “What? Ancient Culture Professor Richard Veinne doesn’t know a modern language?”
Even Sheila snickered a little bit at that one.
“Hey!” Rick whined. “Not even I know everything.” His emphasis on the last word made it clear that he still thought he knew almost everything, though.
“Don’t they print those things in French and English?” I said. “Maybe turn it over and look at the other side?”
Rick huffed. “Don’t you think I tried that, already?”
Sheila snickered once more and crinkled the map with her hand, drawing Rick’s attention away from it. “It’s okay, Richard. New exhibits are over this way.” She pointed with one of her bony fingers toward the right hallway. “I’ve been here before. I know my way around.”
“Why thank you, Sheila,” I told her, face beaming. “How kind of you.”
I shot Rick a bit of a silly grin and turned away before he could do anything about it. It was kind of fun seeing him squirm just when he should have been in his element. Kind of a payback for how mean he’d been to me the whole time.
Rick was fuming, but he didn’t say anything else and followed Sheila and I down the hallway.
We passed by several more intricate native pieces on the way before we came to a rather ornate archway that had “Traveling Exhibits” written on the top of it in both French and English. Finally, we were there.
I stepped through the archway first, eager to see whatever it was we were keen to get our hands on.
All at once, the whole atmosphere changed. Gone were all the native artifacts, the totem poles, feather headdresses, and the like, replaced with a vast collection of items made of cold metal and harsh wool. The contrast was rather striking, but it made one thing abundantly clear: we were in the right spot.
“Let’s spread out,” I suggested. “Cover more ground.” Rick and Sheila nodded.
I’d seen no sign of Lanky Guy and his cronies yet, so I felt safe enough. If they showed up, they’d certainly make quite the entrance, which would give us time. So it only made sense to split up.
We fanned out, with Sheila taking the left side of the room, me the right, and Rick heading toward the back.
I started hunting down the exhibits on the right side of the room, each of them sheltered behind a veritable wall of thick glass.
There were little signs in front of each collection of items detailing what it was I was looking at. Each of the plaques had a single name on it that mentioned which of the ancient Celtic tribes that collection belonged to, most of which I couldn’t pronounce well.
I read the tribe name of each plaque out loud anyway, butchering them horribly, and no doubt annoying the other museum patrons; and probably Rick and Sheila, too, but I didn’t care.
About five plaques in, I found it. “Iceni,” I said out loud. A big grin creased my face.
This was it. This was the display we were looking for. Some of the items in the case even looked familiar, like they could have been in Boudicca’s tomb along with that torc I’d stolen several weeks ago.
And there, sitting at the top of the exhibit on its own little pedestal, was a simple gold circlet. It was rather unassuming by itself, just a small circle of gold with nary a hint of filigree or detail work, but a circlet could only mean one thing - royalty.
“Rick, Sheila, come here!” I said, ushering them toward me. “Look!”
They came over and their eyes bulged about as much as mine had.
“Do you suppose that’s it?” I asked. “Boudicca’s crown?”
It would make a certain amount of sense. How many royal members of the Iceni tribe would they have artifacts on loan for? If you were going to display any of them, it’d be the ones from the most memorable characters in history, right? And Boudicca fit that bill nicely.
“Has to be,” Rick mumbled. His eyes had a glassy look like he was mesmerized by the history displayed before his eyes.
“Mmm, I’m not so sure,” Sheila said, shaking her head. “Look there, at the plaque below it.”
The plaque was written in French, but I knew a few words of it, having picked them up from a trip I’d taken to Paris several years ago. Not many, I’ll admit, but enough to be somewhat conversational.
I peered at the small plaque, squinting to make the words pop. “This crown... regional... treasure... facsimile...”
The last word made my heart plummet. “Facsimile,” I repeated. “Don’t need a translator to know what that one means.”
Rick shook his head. “No, you don’t.” He scoffed. “It’s a fake, then. I guess it was pointless to come here after all.”
I patted Rick on the shoulder. “It’s all good, man. You did the best you could. No hard feelings.”
Rick let out a long sigh and shook his head. “I should have known they wouldn’t display a real priceless artifact out in the open like that,” he said. “Not even under all that glass. Too easy for someone to come by and steal it.”
“Someone like us?” I asked, grinning like a madman.
“Hey!” Rick said, smacking me. “Don’t say that so loud!”
I flinched a little. “Sorry,” I said in a hushed tone.
Another thought struck me. “Say, you don’t suppose they have the real thing locked away in a vault in the basement, do you?”
Rick looked thoughtful for a moment. “Why do you ask?”
I shrugged. “Well, I heard a while back that museums actually have like nine times more artifacts than they actually exhibit at any given time, and they store the rest away in a basement somewhere locked away in a vault that no one ever touches.”
“Tch.” Rick shook his head again. “It’s not quite like that in reality, Damian, but you’re not far off.”
He looked lost in thought again for a moment, then let out another sigh. “Still, I doubt it. This is a traveling exhibit. If they’d had the real thing, they wouldn’t have locked it away. They would have just hired extra guards for the exhibit instead. The real thing can draw a crowd like nothing else can.”
Rick paused for a moment before continuing. “No, more likely the piece never came over from the British Museum in the first place.” He patted me on the back and hung his head. “Guess our visit really was for nothing, like I said earlier.”
“Not necessarily,” Sheila said, interrupting our brooding moment. “Look here.”
She was holding out her phone. An article from the daily Vancouver newspaper was blaring across the screen. It was dated two days ago.
I skimmed the headline and started reading through the article as quickly as I could. “Celtic collection...” I said out loud. “Boudicca’s personal effects... bought at auction... winner is a local businessman...”
My voice trailed off and everyone went silent for a moment.
“Sheila, darling, do you know what this means?” I asked her.
She smiled back at me. Even Rick’s visage perked up a bit. “Yes, I do.”
“We’re digging in the wrong place!” We both said in unison.
Rick wrinkled his nose and shot me an icy glare. “Beg pardon?”
“Sorry,” I said, bowing my head a bit. “It’s a movie line. Kind of an inside joke between the two of us.”
Rick shook his head. “My parents didn’t let me watch many movies as a kid. Said it would give me too much imagination.”
I shrugged. “Well, tell you what; when this is all over, I’ll show it to you. What do you say?”
Rick nodded. “Sounds like a plan. But in the meantim
e, I still wouldn’t mind an explanation.”
My cheeks blushed. “Oh, of course! What we meant was we were looking at the wrong treasure trove. We spent all our time looking at the museum’s collection of artifacts when we should have been looking for a local art collector instead!”
Rick scowled. “Well then, why didn’t you just say that?”
I let out a small laugh. “I did. Well, sort of anyway. Sheila understood me.” I pointed at her and grinned.
Rick rolled his eyes at both of us. “Well, okay then, geniuses. Where are we going to next?”
I put my arm around Rick, totally ignoring the fact that he didn’t like touching, and started walking with him toward the exit.
“Well, Rick, buddy, I am so glad you asked.”
13
We arrived at the collector’s mansion a little after ten o’clock. The sky wasn’t really that dark yet, but it was starting to darken, which was a good thing, since we were trying to steal from them. The dark could hide a lot of our unseemly activities.
Plus, it usually meant fewer guards, which was kind of odd in a way, because a lot of burglaries happened at night, so you’d expect there to be more guards at night vs. in the morning, but it never seemed to work out that way. At least, not in my experience. And loathe as I was to admit it, I had way more experience breaking into places than I probably should have.
Go figure.
“All right, I’ll handle the locks, you two stand back,” I said to Rick and Sheila. Partly so that I could work in peace, but also partly in case there was a magical trap on the door.
I don’t see a lot of magical traps on normal houses, even with magic being known to the world in general. Not because they were hard to make or anything, but because they were expensive. The people who knew how to make them charged a premium for their services. But this was the mansion of an art collector, so it was much more likely that there’d be a trap. And if there was, I wanted it to spring on me and not them.
After all, I was still technically immortal. And stupid lucky. So I’d probably make it out just fine.
I sauntered up to the front door and peered inside the little window in the wood frame. Much to my surprise, I didn’t see anyone waiting on the other side. It appeared the collector’s mansion was a little lax on security.
Tch. They wouldn’t be after I was done with the place.
“Come here, Mr. Lock,” I said to the locking mechanism on the door. It was one of those keypad-type locks, where instead of a key there was a number pad, and you had to enter in the right sequence to unlock it. “Tell me your secrets.”
I’d come prepared for this. I sprayed a little powder on the buttons. It was a magical powder that stuck to organic material. Like the fingerprint residue left over from touching it. Sheila kept a few bottles of it at her place and she’d let me borrow one. So long as the owner didn’t use gloves every time he opened the door, it should work like a charm.
A moment or two later, I saw a shiny film show up on four of the buttons. Excellent. Now I just had to guess the right order.
Fortunately, it only took about five tries.
“Three, seven, eight, four,” I said softly as I pressed the keys. Two short beeps greeted me, and the light turned green.
Grinning like an idiot, I turned the lock to disarm it and swung the door open as silently as I could. I hadn’t seen anyone on the other side, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t still be there somewhere.
I paused for several seconds to see if an alarm would blare or someone would come running to attack me, but nothing happened. Honestly, I was kind of shocked. Not that I minded or anything.
“All done,” I said to my compatriots, spinning around to look at them. “The place is ours.”
Rick shook his head. “I should have known breaking into places would come easy to you.”
My expression soured. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Both of you, shut it,” Sheila demanded. Her eyes were dark and had an ominous look to them. “You’re going to get us captured, or killed, if you don’t knock it off.”
I bowed my head. Rick followed suit a second later.
“Yes, Sheila,” we both said.
She nodded once. “That’s better. Now, I’m going to wait in the car in case we need to make a fast getaway. You two get in there and try to be quick about it.” She gave us both a hard glare for several seconds.
I felt my throat tighten at her intense stare. “You got it,” I said in a hoarse whisper.
With that, Rick and I piled into the house, and I closed the door gently behind us. No sense in letting anyone from the outside world know we were in here.
The inside was… massive. I swore it was bigger than the museum we’d been to earlier, and this was a house for only one person. The majority of the foyer was taken up by some sort of dinosaur fish fossil. A whale-like creature with big, sharp, pointy teeth in its bony jaws. The way it was poised made you feel like it was going to come to life and bite your head off if you looked at it the wrong way.
Not exactly a warm and fuzzy feel to the place.
Behind the statue, two grand staircases spun upward in a lazy spiral taking you to the upper floors, and I could barely make out a series of doors behind them that undoubtedly led to servant quarters and other rooms like the kitchen.
While I’d never been in this particular mansion before, I knew how they typically operated. The bottom floors were for your servants and working staff to hang around in. The upper floors would be where the collector slept, and where he’d keep his fancier treasures locked up in cases for display.
I only hoped that pattern would hold true for this one as well.
Rick nudged my shoulder to rouse me from my thoughts. I looked at him, and he was pointing all around the room with one finger as if to ask where to go next.
I nodded and pointed toward one of the staircases while mouthing the words “up there” as best I could.
He gave me a light nod in return, and we crept forward, keeping to the darker bits of the room as much as possible while we made our way toward the stairs.
About halfway through the room, I spotted some sort of strange movement out of the corner of my eye. I froze instantly and motioned for Rick to do the same.
The hair on the back of my neck was standing on edge, and a glance at my palm told me it was trembling. If we were found out this early, we’d be screwed.
I waited several moments to see if the movement would come again, but nothing happened. Most likely, it had been a shadow from someone walking along the street outside the building and not actually a guard or anything.
The coast was clear, so I motioned for Rick to get moving again, and we continued our trek.
When we reached the stairs, I had him stop again for a moment and took out another small bottle of spray – another gift from Sheila. I’d have to do something big to thank her when this was all over. This one would make any invisible traps show up, kind of like the stuff you see in movies. Except this worked on both mundane traps like laser beams and the more magical ones.
Once again, there was nothing. I couldn’t believe it. This guy must have never been robbed before. I mean Canada is nice and all, but this was insane.
I beckoned for Rick to follow me, and we made our way up the staircase in complete silence. It was so quiet I could hear the beating of my heart in my chest as the tempo slowly increased with each upward step.
A clattering noise came from off to the left the moment we reached the upstairs landing, and I froze again, standing still as a statue.
My eyes darted in both directions, looking for the source of the noise, but I couldn’t make anything out in the dim light. The upstairs was even darker than the main floor, with fewer windows around to let in the moonlight. Which was good for skulking about, but bad for finding potential threats. And my night vision wasn’t any better than a normal human’s, so I had few options to work with.
Off to the left, I spotted a
downed candlestick laying on the carpet. That must have been what had made the clattering noise. I looked behind me at Rick, who looked even more spooked than I felt, and pointed off in that direction. He nodded, and we both started creeping toward it.
Each step felt like it took an hour as we practically crawled across the floor, heading toward the downed candlestick.
Then the noise came again, but this time from behind us. I spun around, hand on my katana hilt, ready to face the threat. Much to my delight and surprise, it was a small white house cat, playing with the decorations on a small end table.
I released a long, slow breath, letting the tension that had filled me since we’d come up here leave my body. I shook my head slightly. Spooked by a cat. I should have known better. If it was a guard, they wouldn’t have given away their position like that.
Rick was still tense, so I grabbed his arm and pointed at the cat. He let out a slight laugh at the tiny animal as the tension eased. I shushed him a second later, and he ducked his head and mouthed the word “sorry.”
I was glad there wasn’t anyone up here after us, I really was, but we still had to be quiet. The news had said the collector was on holiday, but there could still be guards or servants up here. We had to be careful.
I spared the cat one more quick glance, then got to business. There were seven doors lining the hallway. The one right in front of the stairs was probably the collector’s bedroom, but there was no way to be certain.
Better check them all, just to be safe.
My hand reached out to touch the ornate handle on the door. The door itself was made of some sort of cherry wood, or at least stained to look like it, and the handle was a delicate brass. I couldn’t detect any traps on it, but I used my little spray anyway just to be safe.
Sure enough, the coast was clear. I pressed down on the button on the handle and pressed in as gently as I could to keep from disturbing anyone that might be in there. Once the door was open a couple inches, I peeked my head into the crack to get a better look within.