Chapter 31
Emma
“I would let you defuse a bomb,” I say to Lucie as she finishes organizing our equipment while wearing her full bomb squad uniform in a suite at the Hotel Montalembert, only blocks from the museum. We’re ready for this, as ready as we’ll ever be.
“That sounds vaguely dirty.” Lucie giggles.
“I don’t even want to know what ‘defuse a bomb’ could be a euphemism for,” I reply.
“Perhaps the female orgasm,” Stella says. “Similarly complex.”
Lucie has toned herself down. She’s added makeup to mottle her smooth skin, creating dark circles beneath her eyes, red splotches on her otherwise golden cheeks.
The uniform is a size too big and hangs off her lithe frame like a trench coat on a hanger.
I am the opposite. For me she has played up all my features and overdone it with the makeup.
When I look in the mirror I see a glamorous stranger.
I think again about how much we are risking to help Stella destroy the Swansons.
And not for the first time I wonder if it’s worth it, for any of us.
We could sell Stella’s precious Van Gogh and be comfortable for the rest of our lives, but Stella is hell-bent on revenge.
It’s what’s been fueling her, and it is the price the three of us will pay to receive a slice of the promised millions.
“I still can’t believe you were able to get all this equipment.” I look at the hard-shelled rolling suitcases that typically contain bomb detection gear. We’ve removed their guts and hollowed out a safe space for a stolen painting within each one.
“One day I’ll tell you everything I had to do to get it.” Lucie sighs with affectionate exasperation. She enjoys the Rock Star much more than the rest of her clients, and sometimes I wonder if what they have is more than transactional, or if it ever could be.
“Be careful,” Colette warns. “The packing compartments are the perfect sizes for the canvases in their original frames, but you must place them in delicately.”
“I know how to handle art,” I say.
“I’m allowed to be the nervous mother,” Colette says with authority. “I’ll say it again. Be careful. This paint chips very easily.”
“Shall we use code names to communicate during the heist?” Stella asks.
“Absolutely not,” I say at the same time as Lucie cheers.
“I would quite like to be Pussy Galore,” Stella announces.
“Oh, would you?” I ask.
“Maxwell and I once had a wild weekend in St. Moritz with Sir Sean Connery. He was absolutely the best of the Bonds, don’t you think? And I always admired Pussy. She was quite capable at judo.”
“I’m not going to call you Pussy Galore,” I say firmly.
“Then I won’t call you the Starry Knife.”
“I did not ask you to call me that.”
“Or the Fresh Prince of Bernini.”
“No code names, Stella.”
“I am going to be Picasshole,” Lucie says.
She loops her arm around the furry neck of the latest member of our motley crew, a German shepherd named Clovis that we’ve borrowed from the owner of our favorite kebab shop, Paristanbul.
He’s gigantic, with massive teeth, and would be terrifying if he weren’t exceptionally lazy, friendly, and mostly deaf.
He’s wearing the tactical harness we had specially made for him that reads escouade anti-bombes.
He yawns when Lucie hugs him and goes back to sleep.
“Can we focus?” I ask them. “Please. I’m still freaked out about Caroline showing up at the apartment.
” Her sudden appearance shook me last week, and in my addled state I slipped down our fire escape rather than let her in.
Something about her presence there terrified me, but I couldn’t pinpoint why.
There was no sign of her or the fancy car when I returned hours later, but I was convinced it was some kind of surveillance.
Had someone checked the safe at the chateau? Were the Swansons after me?
Stella blew off all my fears when I first told her. “Caroline was probably delivering some note from a poor lovesick Matthew.” But I thought I saw a look of concern cross her features as she said it then, and again when she brushes it off now.
“They don’t know anything. If they did, they would have had you arrested,” she asserts. “Trust me.”
I don’t really have a choice in the matter. We have to move forward so I drop it. “What if we go over the plan for tonight one more time, then. What if there are real police around the museum tonight? It’s New Year’s Eve. Anything can happen.”
“We’ll wait them out. We have all night,” Lucie says. “It can happen before midnight or after. There will be fireworks and distractions all night long. Colette will be our eyes outside the entire time, and Stella will be here in the hotel monitoring the police scanners.”
Truth be told, the plan for the heist is rather simple.
We’ve learned from Colette’s insider at the museum that tonight’s security team is much more bare-bones than usual because of the holiday, and that there will be a shift change around midnight due to various scheduling anomalies, making it even more sparse for a couple of hours.
The trick will be making sure security doesn’t accompany us into the galleries.
We’ll warn the security staff to stay on the main floor for safety reasons while we make our pretend sweep to search for a bomb and then take the paintings off the wall and replace them with the ones I painted.
The French inclination toward bureaucratic rule following is on our side.
There is a likelihood they will ring the curator to inform him of the visit, but there’s no way he will be able to make it from his own residence, where we were assured he is throwing a New Year’s party of his own, to the Orsay in the midst of holiday traffic in under an hour.
Our plan hinges on most of Paris being properly blitzed by midnight.
We will need less than twenty minutes because we are simply replacing the paintings, not stealing them, not even removing them from their frames.
I gaze at the pieces now with pride. Finishing the Van Gogh nearly broke me, but I did it and it’s perfect in every single way.
By being careful not to blend the paint too much, I was able to create actual wood-like brushstrokes on all the furniture in Vincent’s bedroom.
The coats hanging on the wall look worn and wrinkled, and yet all the lines are wobbly enough to make the viewer feel as though they’ve just awoken from the deepest of sleeps.
I dried the paintings in a low-heat oven in one of the studios I could still access at school and then applied an extra layer of metal salts to encourage a small amount of craquelure, the fine network of cracks that naturally appears on the surface of old paintings.
Those lines won’t be identical, but it will be close enough.
The cracks are like the tiniest birthmarks or scars and are often used by experts to expose a fraud.
But no one will be looking at these paintings under a microscope.
There are holes in the plan, a hundred of them. But with Colette’s intelligence and Stella’s insider knowledge of the Orsay from years of working with them on donations, we may be better equipped and informed than most art thieves.
I want to draw this part out, to sit here with them preparing for another thousand hours instead of moving to the next part of it.
Though I do worry they’re not taking this seriously enough.
I worry Lucie will get too cocky. I worry one of the guards will recognize me from the hours I’ve spent in the museum, though Lucie and Stella have told me that I’m wearing so much makeup even they don’t recognize me.
All my other fears continue to flash through my mind: police handcuffs clicking around my wrists, newspaper headlines about the failed heist, my mother alone in Philadelphia with no one to care for her.
I called my mom at her facility last night. She was shockingly lucid and asked when I would be home to visit.
“Soon,” I promised.
“I’d like to watch you paint,” was her reply. “I dream about doing that.” My heart does a cartwheel at the memory as I fiddle with my own wig of dark curls.
If something goes wrong, this could be the last time I get to be with all three of them like this. I try to put it out of my mind, but something makes me turn and rush over to Stella, to hug her one last time.
“Thank you,” I whisper into her ear.
She pulls me in tighter than I expected. She’s not a hugger. “Thank me when you’re a very rich woman.”