The Mystery of the Third Lucretia (10 page)

Ten minutes later, Lucas walked back into the restroom, cool as could be, and announced, “I just had a fight with Gallery Guy.”

“You
what
?” I stood up so fast I almost dropped the canvas.

“Gallery Guy caught me. I think Bert might have talked to him after he saw you and told him he was being spied on. Anyway, I was doing the tagging-along-with-a-family routine and I got closer to his canvas than usual, like I said I would, when he flung this cloth over it, got off his stool, and said, ‘Why are you spying on me?'”

My eyes felt like they'd pop out of my face. “What did you say?” I almost shouted.

“I said, ‘That question seems to mean you have something to hide.'”

Only Lucas could have come up with that answer. She's going to make a heck of a lawyer.

She'd worn her hair up on this trip, and now she started undoing it. “‘I saw you here spying on me yesterday, too,' he said, and I said, ‘So?' Then I crossed my arms and waited for him to talk. One of my dad's favorite sayings is, ‘Whoever speaks first, loses.'”

By this time she was brushing out her hair. “So then he said, ‘Get out. I don't want to see you here again.' And I said, ‘You must be kidding. Who's going to stop me?'”

“And what did he say?” My chest felt heavy just thinking about it.

“He said, ‘I will, and it would be better for you if you don't have to find out how.' He does have an accent, by the way.”

“And you said . . .”

“I said, ‘Up yours, meep.'” Believe me, meep wasn't the word she said. “Then I left.”

I took a great huge breath. “Didn't you die of fright?”

She looked at me, totally calm. “Do I look dead?”

“But how could you say those things?”

“Grandma Stickney always says the best way to deal with a bully is to bully him back.”

She looked like she'd just told me that she'd walked to the grocery store to buy a quart of milk.

“Let's get out of here.” I started washing paintbrushes.

“We're not giving up, you know,” Lucas said. “I'm going to get a look at that canvas one way or another.”

“You're not actually thinking about coming back here after what just happened!”

“Wanna bet?”

“But Lucas, he's seen you! This guy's dangerous! This started out being fun, but now it's beginning to feel really scary. Getting a copy of that canvas isn't worth it!”

“What if we did it in a way that made absolutely sure he wouldn't recognize us?”

“How? We've already used our disguises. Lucas, this guy is a snake!”

She looked at my reflection in the mirror for a minute, then she got a sneaky little smile on her face. “Two can play at that game.”

 

 

That evening we were eating dinner at Robert's restaurant with Mom and Celia again, when Mom turned to Lucas and me and said, “I'd like you guys to help me tomorrow.”

I almost choked on my burger.

“I'm meeting the photographer for the “London Looks” shoot tomorrow morning and it would be great to have you there,” she continued. “There's always so much stuff to keep track of. You'd be a big help.”

Lucas and I looked at each other. We both gulped.

“What's the problem?” Mom asked.

“Well”—I thought as fast as I could—“I want to take Lucas to see the costumes you did that article on, the ones in the Victoria and Albert Museum.”

“And we kind of thought we could spend most of our day tomorrow in that part of town,” Lucas said. “We've been talking about it a lot.”

“Yeah, and we still have some pictures to take in costumes, for Lucas's mom,” I added. “Of course, if you really need us to help . . .”

“Well, we're doing another shoot on Saturday. If you absolutely promise to help me then, no argument.”

Of course we said we would. We just needed one more day to finish up at the National Gallery, and we wanted to make sure that day came before Gallery Guy finished what he was doing and cleared out.

I felt bad about not helping Mom when she needed us. Plus I didn't like this lying. She does have a suspicious mind, and she is intuitive, so I kept worrying she'd know we weren't telling the truth. But it wasn't just that that made me uncomfortable.

The rules about lying are pretty complicated. First, you're taught that lying is wrong. Then when you're about eight or so, you start learning about the kind of lying that's okay. The kind you do not to hurt people's feelings, like telling your relatives you like the Christmas gifts they gave you even if you don't. But this lying to Mom was in the first category. I knew it wasn't right, and I felt guilty for doing something that was so obviously wrong. Besides, I had the feeling that eventually I was going to have to pay for doing it. Big-time.

I was still thinking about this when I heard Lucas say, “Celia, where would I go to buy a black wig?”

Both Mom and Celia looked at her, startled.

“Why would you need a black wig?” Mom asked.

“To go with my sari,” Lucas said. We'd already told Celia about all our clothes, and having to take pictures. The saris were still in our suitcases, about the only things we hadn't worn. “I should probably not be wearing a sari at all since I'm not from India or Pakistan, but what makes it even worse is that I'm a blonde,” Lucas said. “Besides, I thought it would be fun to freak my mom out a little bit.”

“I feel like a coconspirator,” Celia said, smiling and rubbing her hands together. “I have a black wig. I used to use it for auditions when I was trying out for Latin parts. And how about some dark makeup?”

After she and Celia finished discussing the disguise, Lucas said, “Oh, and Gillian, do you remember when you said I could use the leather jacket whenever I wanted to and you could borrow Celia's raincoat?”

“Mm-hmm,” Mom answered. “Want to use it tomorrow?”

“Yeah, if it's not too much trouble.”

“Well I should think you could, since it's actually yours.”

“No it isn't. It's yours now,” Lucas said, “but I think tomorrow's a good day to take that picture with me wearing it.”

 

 

The next day we took the leather jacket, one sari, the wig, and the makeup to the city center, stopped at the drugstore again, found a pet shop, and entered the museum, ready to go to war with a snake.

About one thirty in the afternoon, Lucas walked into the Rembrandt room. She was wearing the turquoise sari draped over her head and she carried the end of the fabric over one arm. She was all done up in Celia's wig, she had a red dot on her forehead, kohl pencil around her eyes, and wherever you could see her skin we'd put dark makeup on it. Except for her blue eyes, she looked just like the girls from India and Pakistan who are always wandering around Trafalgar Square.

If you looked closely, you could see that under where the sari hung over her arm she was carrying a little box.

Coming into the room about thirty seconds after her, wearing torn jeans and a dirty T-shirt, a leather jacket, a ring through her eyebrow (fake), a row of pierced earrings in her left ear (fake), one big metal stud in her right ear (real), and spiked-out hair, was yours truly, feeling excited, terrified, and stupid, all at the same time.

We were following a bunch of French tourists on a guided tour.

Lucas turned in the opposite direction from Gallery Guy and Belshazzar's Feast as soon as she came in the door. I went over to hang around the edge of the French tour group. They were all standing on one side of Gallery Guy, looking at Rembrandt's self-portrait. I stood just on the other side.

Lucas sauntered around as if looking at the paintings, moving closer and closer to where Gallery Guy was sitting and I was standing. She seemed to drop something on the floor, and leaned over as if to pick it up. Then she casually stepped over in my direction.

Suddenly somebody yelled something in French, and all meep broke loose. People were running and pushing, women were screaming and men were shouting.

And the word all the French people were using was something that sounded like “Sair-pah, sair-pah!”

It was French for serpent. Because there was an eighteen-inch snake crawling across the middle of the floor.

The place was totally panicked. Bert must have pulled a switch, because the museum alarms went off. Guards poured in from both entrances.

The doors were blocked with French people trying to get out, and other people trying to get in to see what the fuss was about. People kept screaming. One of the guards yelled, “Stay calm, stay calm.” The French guide was yelling something that sounded like
“Calm-may voo! Calm-may voo!”
A couple of the guards were walking around the room, making sure all the paintings were safe and talking into little walkie-talkies.

Bert was running around after the snake. Another guard said, “Pick up the bleedin' thing!”

“I hate ruddy snakes!” Bert yelled back.

Obviously Gallery Guy didn't like snakes either. Lucas had let the creature out of its box right behind him, then she'd given it a poke with her toe so it would go right toward the easel. Seeing it curve across the floor almost at his feet, Gallery Guy jumped from his stool. I was standing so close that when he popped up he almost knocked me over.

That's what was supposed to happen. Now it was time for my big part. “Watchit, Dad,” I said in my best East Ender accent, just like Robert had taught me, and I gave Gallery Guy a shove with my elbow, which made him stumble and knock over his easel.

While he was trying to get his balance and watching so he didn't step on the snake, Gallery Guy was too distracted to notice Lucas, who was busy memorizing the lines and colors of the big set of hands in the middle of his canvas, now lying on the floor in plain sight.

It wasn't until Bert marched from the room, grasping the wriggling snake by what you might call the neck if snakes had necks and holding it way out in front of him, that Gallery Guy remembered his canvas, and by that time Lucas had seen what she needed to see and was flouncing out of the room, where I was waiting for her.

I tell you, that girl has nerves of steel.

All the way back to Robert's we were totally pumped. We'd planned it so we'd get back earlier than anyone else that afternoon. We ended up with almost an hour and a half to work on drawing the hands. Lucas was close to finished when somebody came in, and we slid our painting and drawing things under a bed upstairs in the loft that was our bedroom.

On Saturday we helped Mom do “London Looks,” this time at Covent Garden, where Lucas and I spent most of our time watching the buskers, or street entertainers. That night Robert had to work, and Mom and Celia went out to have a fancy dinner and hear some jazz. The minute everyone was gone, we pulled our canvas out again and spent six whole hours painting the hands as well as Lucas could remember them, with me trying to make the brushstrokes and color mixtures look like Rembrandt's. Lucas thought I did a great job. I'd spent enough time studying Rembrandt's paintings to know that it wasn't great, but it was the best I could do in a hurry.

When the canvas was dry, we rolled it up with the drawings Lucas had made of Gallery Guy on her sketch pad and the print we'd bought of
Belshazzar's Feast
, and stuck the whole roll in the cardboard poster tube the print came in. We figured we could take it back home that way and Mom would just think it was the print.

Then we put our paints and dirty brushes in a plastic shopping bag and dropped the whole thing into the garbage can (what Robert calls the dustbin) out by his garden shed and opened Robert's windows to make sure we got rid of the paint smell.

And that was that. It made me depressed. It was like we were saying good-bye to our whole adventure in London, and absolutely nothing had come of it. I wished we could just go home and I could forget about the whole thing. Instead, we were stuck there for three more days.

What I didn't know was that some of the most important parts of our London adventure were still to come.

 

 

On Sunday we took a drive in the English countryside. But on Monday it was pouring down rain and the forecast said it would probably rain all day. The last thing Mom had to do before we left on Wednesday was another “London Looks,” which she wanted to do outdoors if possible, so she decided to take the day off.

It was Mom's choice about what to do, because she hadn't had any time to sightsee. Guess where she wanted to go.

The National Gallery.

“Great,” Lucas said when she and I went back up to our loft. “We get to go back and see all those paintings we've seen a billion times.”

“We could give her our own guided tour,” I said.

“I could even give her a guided tour in French,” Lucas responded, with a dry look.

“Maybe we can go back to the women's loo in the education section, just for old time's sake.”

“Spray a little air freshener.” That one got me giggling.

“You know, this won't be the first time we've gone through the National Gallery with a grown-up. But it will be the first time we've gone with a grown-up who's ever laid eyes on us before,” I said, and now Lucas was giggling, too.

“I might have to fight an uncontrollable urge to run into the restroom and change my clothes,” she added.

By this time we were laughing hysterically. After we'd gotten control of ourselves, I said, “I bet Gallery Guy's gone. He was almost finished with what he was doing, and I bet he's left town.”