Chapter 28
28
She is the poison, and she is the cure.
“It’s like a debt,” she says in an even voice. She taps her chest. “One I have to repay.”
She sounds resigned, but resolute.
Meanwhile, I feel like I’ve been pummeled. Cut off at the knees.
I always knew that Clio and I had met in a strange and wonderful otherness that couldn’t last forever. I thought we’d simply have to part, and that would have been hard enough. But this is worse, far worse.
Loving her unrequited.
Loving a woman who no longer loves me.
Tears streak down her cheeks, and even though I feel so heavy I could sink to the ocean floor, I wrap her in my arms so she can muffle her sadness against my shirt. I want to take her pain away. Even though I know I’ll be wearing all her pain soon.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “I’m so sorry. That only took a tiny bit away.” She touches my cheek, so soft and tender that I have to close my eyes just to contain all the feelings that threaten to burst out of my heart. “I’m still crazy about you now, Julien.”
Now. But soon, not at all.
“So I guess I should let you out the door. To do the repairs.” My voice is empty.
“No. As long as I’m part of the painting, no one can see me except you. But once I leave the museum, I’m no longer bound, and anyone can see me then. Which makes doors and security guards a problem.”
She keeps talking, thinking out loud. “I need time to focus, and to put my hands on the art. I’ll have to be there when no one else is.” I know what she’s about to say, and I want to stop her, but I can’t. “To repair the art, I need your help.”
It’s a sucker punch.
And I’m winded, doubled over.
“Because with me, you can go at night and travel through the paintings.” My voice is flat. I’ll help her, but I can’t make myself excited about losing her love. “We can cross Monet’s bridges when we touch them at the same time.”
“Exactly. Most of the museums we need have Monets with bridges, don’t they? He made all those paintings after I was trapped, so we know they’ll be intact. We can travel through them almost instantly.”
She’s put those details together fast. She’s brilliant, and breaking into a museum through a painting should be the coolest thing I’ve ever done, but it means I’ll have to witness my own execution. I’ll have to watch her fall out of love with me.
“Let’s go now,” I say, walking to the nearest bridge painting. I want to get this over with. The longer I have to think about it, the harder it will be.
Clio shakes her head. “There’s a problem with now.”
“What’s that?”
“The Louvre doesn’t have any Monets, or any other Impressionist paintings of the bridge. We can’t get in that way. And I think we need to start where the problem started.”
There is logic to that, but I don’t feel logical. I want to rip off the Band-Aid.
As if she can read my thoughts, she wipes a hand across her face to dry her tears and steels herself. “Look, this is my problem. I can do it myself during the day after you free me. It’s riskier but not impossible.”
“Clio . . .” Now I feel like an asshole.
Probably because I’m being an asshole.
She shakes her head. “I should never have asked you. It’s not fair.”
“That’s true,” I say, and she blinks in surprise. “It sucks in every way imaginable. But I’m in this with you, and we have to fix it together. I want to protect you, and I will. The trouble is anyone can see me anytime. We have to come up with a way that I won’t be spotted on security cameras roaming about foreign museums in the middle of the night.”
“I actually have a few ideas,” she says with a grin. “But what about the Louvre?” She looks over at the nearest Monet. “Can we somehow get one of these Japanese bridges into the Louvre?”
“Seriously?”
“Yes, seriously,” she says. “Maybe . . . one from a private collection?”
“Sure. All my friends have a Monet or two lying around?—”
Hang on.
Hang the hell on.
I grin, and this is the first time I’ve felt anything good since she told me the news.
I picture dusky-blue light on the slatted bridge, and I look at Clio and smile. “As a matter of fact . . . I do know someone.”
* * *
We spend the rest of the night making a plan that would shame Ethan Hunt and his Mission: Impossible team. We study the layouts of the museums, mapping where the Monets are relative to the damaged paintings and plotting the fastest way to get from one to the other. I’m sure that’s not what the museums intended their interactive maps to be used for, but we end up with a plan.
The Louvre will be the toughest. It’s huge and has the most paintings that need attention, and our solution for getting in is complex, which means more points where it could go wrong. Anything that starts in a restroom is bound to be dicey.
The final thing we need—other than the loan of a Monet—is the phone number of Gustave’s buddy on the night shift at the Louvre. We manage that by the grace of Clio’s pickpocketing skill and dumb luck that Gustave doesn’t have a passcode on his cell phone. Number jotted down and phone returned, we’ve done all we can tonight.
Before she goes into her painting, Clio heals the warped Degas, and the orchestra stops playing out of tune. I’m afraid to look at her, afraid she won’t care for me anymore, but she gives me one more kiss good night, and I savor it for what it is.
The last of its kind.
* * *
Museum security is nothing like the movies, where master thieves rappel in through skylights and hack surveillance cameras. And forget ridiculously complicated webs of infrared beams.
Most museums have alarms and monitors not much different than those in houses these days, plus a couple of yawning guards patrolling the galleries after dark. But the real deterrent is that it’s virtually impossible to fence a museum piece anywhere, so robberies aren’t worth the risk.
That said, I’d rather not be spotted by camera lenses or human eyes, and while we can travel between paintings of Monet’s bridge, I can’t take anything through the canvases but the clothes I’m wearing—no cheating with pockets. So, to be able to draw handy things into existence, I’ll need the help of an advance party. Which is where my friends come in.
We meet up in a café that day, and, using the maps and layouts of each museum, I explain what I’ll need in each city. The rest is the basic who, why, and where of the mission. I leave out the part about Clio falling out of love with me. I don’t want pity. More than that, I don’t want to hear myself say it.
Simon’s buddy Patrick can help in London, where the Turner seascapes pour out of their frames at each high tide. Lucy used to live in Chicago, and a friend there owes her a favor. She snaps a pic of the diagram that shows where the pencil and paper need to be in the Art Institute, and texts it to her contact.
Remy, of course, knows tons of people in New York who can pop into the Met, but we’re out of luck in Saint Petersburg, so Clio and I will have to get creative.
We call it a “scavenger hunt,” and recruiting remote help is surprisingly easy. Talking Remy into loaning us his Monet isn’t even that hard—the challenge is keeping him from hysterics when I explain what I need to do with it.
* * *
Outside the pyramid at the Louvre, I almost don’t recognize Remy in jeans and a brown T-shirt. Sophie describes her own outfit as “unobtrusively understated.” What they’re about to do is totally legal, but it pushes the line from eccentric to odd enough that if anyone notices, it will throw a wrench in the whole plan.
Remy clamps his messenger bag between his arm and his side, but not too tightly. “It’s like carrying around a freaking diamond. No—thousands of diamonds.” He puts his fingers to the side of his neck, then grabs my hand and presses my fingers somewhere sort of around his pulse point. “Feel this. My heart is beating ten thousand times a minute.”
I pat his shoulder with a small laugh. “You’ll live. You want to go over it again? The Monet canvas is inside the bag, right?”
He nods. Walking himself through the steps does seem to settle him a little. “We took it out of the frame and off the stretcher bars,” he says, referring to the wooden bars that keep canvases taut inside their frames. “Then we put it into a padded envelope and caught a taxi, because there was no way I was taking a Monet on the Metro.”
“Correction. I took it off the stretchers. Your hands were shaking too much to do that,” Sophie points out.
Remy holds up a now steady palm to his sister. “Whatever.”
I continue to review the plan. “Security will scan your bag like any other bag. There’s nothing to set off an alert, but even if they decide to look through it, there’s no law that says you can’t take a work of art you own out for a stroll.”
“Plus,” says Sophie, “who is going to believe that it’s the original? Because that would be crazy, carrying around an original Monet in a mailing envelope.”
“Right. Right.” Remy nods as if the repetitive motion will calm his nerves. “Then we go to the ladies’ room on the second floor.”
“The small one by the far stairwell,” I confirm. “The one least likely to be patrolled.”
“I have the double-sided tape in my purse,” Sophie says, as always up for anything. “I take the canvas from the envelope and hang it under the sink where no one will see it. Then we leave the padded envelope behind in the bathroom.”
“Piece of cake,” I say, and clap them both on the back. “I have complete faith in you both. Now, get in there quick, before they close.”
Remy salutes me, and Sophie grabs his elbow, and they head inside through the pyramid entrance. I can’t take the chance of being seen there by someone I know.
So I wait and I pace, and twenty minutes later, they rush out, breathless and elated.
“We did it!” Sophie declares, then tells me how she hung their prized Monet. It’s now out of sight, taped to the wooden underside of the sink counter. “It’s not as bad as it sounds. I secured it on the very outer edge of the canvas, painted side down to further hide it, not risking a brushstroke of Monet’s.”
“Excellent.”
Now all I have to do is hope that no one goes into that bathroom for the next several hours.