REID #2
You wanted her to help the investigation, I try to tell myself. She is doing exactly that.
“Let’s check the wing,” she says and walks away. “I have to see it in person.”
Rachel aims to follow her, but I hold her back for a second.
“Do not avert your eyes from her. We brought the fox into the henhouse, and she is really, really good. Watch her hands at all times.”
Rachel nods, and we follow Avery.
We enter the massive room with Greek and Roman art with its black floor, huge columns, and many busts on display. The glass roof above has a hole cut into it.
Avery walks directly underneath the hole, glances up and around. I have to say, seeing her in her natural habitat—she is art, and art is her.
She squats, brushes over the floor, smells it. Lies down, flat on the floor, and picks up something with her finger. Smells it again, tastes it with the tip of her tongue.
“Firstly, they cut it with a laser,” she says. “There are just two manufacturers in a 500-mile radius who offer a mobile version strong enough to cut through that glass, and I happen to know both of them.”
Of course she does.
“Secondly,” she says as she gets up and walks past us with her heels resounding loudly through the silent room. We follow her.
She walks around a bust. Bends to look for whatever it is she is looking for, then takes her hand and fumbles somewhere under it.
I meanwhile read the sign: Marble portrait bust of the emperor Gaius, known as Caligula.
“Yep,” she says. “Come here.”
I walk around and stand in the back of the bust,
“Give me your hand,” she says.
I don’t give her my hand.
She groans.
“I might need to add a requirement of food for you before I work with you,” she says, grasps my hand, and guides my finger to a spot underneath the bust.
“Feel that?” she asks and circles my finger over a spot.
I mean, I feel it; there is a difference in material, but I am completely distracted by the way she moves my finger—
She lets go of my hand, and I retract it. Only then do I realize my lips are slightly parted.
“What is there?” asks Rachel, and brings me back to what is reality. I still can’t grasp what just happened.
“A filled drill hole,” says Avery. “This wasn’t a heist; this was a handover.”
“Let us get someone from the curation; we need to open that bust.”
“No need,” Avery says.
“Yes,” I say, “you will not touch—“
She holds a small rolled-up parchment up for me to see between her fingers.
“How the hell did you do that?” I rage at her. I didn’t even look after my eyes for three seconds, and she got it out right in front of our eyes.
“If someone places it as a handover, it needs to be easily removable during working hours without much trouble,” she says casually.
“There could be fingerprints on it!”
“No one who goes to these lengths leaves fingerprints on a parchment,” she says, which is likely, and yet—she disobeys rules. My rules.
I take out my gloves, slip them on, and then take the parchment from her.
I unroll it.
There is something inked onto it. It looks like a symbol; it could be Egyptian.
“Uhhh, a scavenger hunt,” she says, eyes glittering.
Just the thing I needed: a scavenger hunt through a museum with an art thief by my side.
“Do you believe it references another artifact?” I ask. It’s the first idea that comes to me.
“I am certain,” she says, “And I know where to look.”
She walks us the entire way to the other wing of the Met to the Egyptian Art Gallery.
“There,” she says as she comes to a halt in front of a stone stela. It’s called the Stela of the Steward Mentuwoser.
“Hmmm,” she says as she looks over the stela. I watch her very closely. She stops, glances around, tilts her head, and moves directly next to the stela.
“He’s pointing towards it,” she finally says, and points at the engraving of a man on the stela.
“Give me a torch,” she says and holds out her hand. Apparently, I am her butler now.
She puts it directly onto the hand of the engraved man. The light shines into nothingness.
“No, it wasn’t,” she says, walks over to the wall, caresses it, pushes, presses; nothing happens. I am getting slightly annoyed because none of it makes sense to me.
Maybe she’s orchestrating everything to distract us.
She leans against the wall, makes herself slightly smaller, and glances into the room.
“There,” she says, and points somewhere behind me.
“There what?”
“I have to revoke my statement from earlier,” she says without answering my question. “Those stolen objects weren’t a random distraction; they are a map.”
“What?” I ask incredulously.
“What exactly was stolen?” she asks, and Rachel hands her a list.
“What the hell is going on?” I ask, but she doesn’t answer.
Instead hunts through the entire museum with us for over an hour.
She calls someone to open a display, robs over the floor, and when we reach the seventh room, after she touched the balls of a bust, stuck her fingers into the mouth of a mask, lay on the floor, and glanced at an empty ceiling. I am close to losing my mind entirely.
“Okay, you tell me right now what you are doing or—“
“Psst,” she hisses at me as she stares at a painting close to where the violin was taken.
“Listen,” I begin, and build myself up.
“Three,” she says, interrupting me again. “Its coordinates.”
“Coordinates?” I ask incredulously, all grudge forgotten.
“Yep,” she says, “40°46’14.4” N 73°58’17.3” W"
“How—“
“Every piece, every object held a number or pointed to one,” she says.
“You consolidated that all in your mind?” I ask her incredulously.
“Of course I have,” she says in her arrogance. “Don’t tell me you can’t remember a sequence of numbers.”
“Of course I can,” I say, enter the coordinates into my phone, and think the rest I want to say to myself.
What a lovely person she is.