The Mystery of the Third Lucretia (14 page)

Anyway, I saw Mom coming, and when she got up to us, before we even had a chance to say hello, I said, “Mom, did you see the Herald Tribune today?”

“Not yet,” she said. “Should I have?”

Lucas and I smiled at each other. “You will not believe what we have to show you.”

“Okay, show me,” she said.

“Not until we have our food and sit down,” Lucas said. The paper was in her backpack.

“Hmmm,” Mom said. “Am I going to like it?”

I looked at Lucas. “I'm not sure like is the right word. I guarantee you'll be surprised.”

We walked through the narrow, crooked streets to our favorite Greek food stand, and came back to the park with huge gyro sandwiches and fries and bottles of mineral water.

When we sat down, Lucas, who had the newspaper in her hand already opened up to the right page, handed it to Mom. Mom put it in her lap and, holding her sandwich in both hands, turned aside to take a bite so she wouldn't drip yogurt sauce on the story. When she turned back and started reading, it took about three seconds before her mouth stopped chewing. Still with her eyes on the page, she reached for her bottle of water, took a drink, and swallowed.

At last she looked up at us and opened her mouth as if to say something. While she was still trying to figure out what to say, Lucas put her travel journal on top of the newspaper, right next to the picture of the Third Lucretia. The journal was open to the page where Lucas had drawn the hands we'd seen in the middle of Gallery Guy's canvas.

Lucas pointed at the drawing in the journal. “You saw the painting we did of the hands. Well, here's a drawing I made of them while Kari was busy doing the painting.”

You didn't have to be an art expert to see that the hands were exactly the same as the hands of the dead woman in the Third Lucretia.

Mom looked back and forth at the two of us again, still couldn't think of anything to say, and turned back to finish reading the article.

Finally, when she'd finished, she put down the paper and said, “Good Lord. So what he did was go to Minneapolis to get Lucretia's face right. . . .”

“Mm-hmm,” Lucas said, and I nodded.

“And then he went to London to work on the hands.”

“Exactly,” Lucas said.

“And who knows what other museums he went to for the other parts,” I added.

“This is very, very big stuff you two have gotten yourselves into.”

I said, “Mom, we've got to go to Amsterdam.”

She looked at me for a minute. “I know you'd love to see that painting—so would I, for that matter—but I have an assignment in Italy to complete. Besides, exactly what would we do in Amsterdam?”

“Lucas and I talked about this, and here's what we're thinking. There's got to be something more going on than just what's in the newspaper. I mean, how did Gallery Guy's forged painting get into that house on the Heren . . . Heren . . .”

“Herengracht?” Mom said.

“Yeah. Whatever. And if Gallery Guy was doing this for the money, which it makes sense is why he was doing it, then what good does it do him if the Rijksmuseum gives all those millions of dollars to Marianne what's-her-name?”

“Yeah,” Lucas piped up. “And if the Rijksmuseum has these experts, how come they couldn't tell the difference between a real Rembrandt and a fake? Face it, there's no way we're going to convince anybody that Gallery Guy forged that painting if we don't know any more about all this stuff than we can figure out from sitting here reading the newspaper.”

“At least we could go to the museum and see the painting,” I said. “And we think they'll have lots of information in the museum about finding the painting. Museums always do that kind of thing.”

“I suppose you have a point,” Mom said, “but The Scene is expecting me to cover the fashion collections in Milan. I can't just up and change my plans.”

“I'm sure you could come up with stories in Amsterdam that are as good as the ones you're planning to do in Italy,” I said.

“Besides,” Lucas added, “if we have to, we could maybe extend the trip for a few days. Go to Amsterdam first, and go to Milan after that.”

It was time for our big ending. I started. “Mom, ever since I can remember, you've wanted to write for one of those intellectual magazines you think are so cool. The ones we always have around the house. Think of it. You said yourself, this Lucretia business is big stuff. This is your chance, Mom.”

“They'd love this story!” Lucas chimed in. “Imagine the headline.” She looked up and gestured into the air, as if she were seeing the headline written there. “They'd call it, like, ‘How I Helped Two Teenage Girls Uncover the Art Rip-Off of the Century.'”

“Yeah, Mom,” I concluded. “All we have to do is go to Amsterdam, where we can follow all this up and prove the Third Lucretia is a fake. Then you'll be able to write all about it and sell the story for really big money to The Atlantic, or Harper's, or Vanity Fair.”

Mom had put her gyro sandwich down on the bench next to her after that first bite. Now she picked it back up, took another bite, chewed and swallowed, all the time staring off into space like she was thinking. Then she took a third bite, and a fourth, still staring and thinking. First I figured she was thinking of travel schedules. Then, because it was taking so long, I thought she was trying to figure out how Gallery Guy had pulled off the forgery, or what to tell The Scene about not going to Italy.

But finally, when she spoke, what she said was, “Not to mention The New Yorker.”

I overheard the conversation Mom had with her boss at The Scene. She told them she'd had an e-mail from a friend who was covering the fashion shows in Italy, and that this year's designs were either boring or so far-out no teenager would go near them. Mom told the editors she thought Scene readers would be more interested in a story about this hot young Dutch designer who had a new line of clothes for teenagers that was going to be in the department stores beginning in the fall.

I was pretty sure Mom hadn't gotten any e-mail about the Italian shows, and that she'd just made up the story like Lucas and I had made up our stories when we were in London. I thought about telling her that if it was a lie, I was going to have to ground her. But I didn't. Mom has a good sense of humor, but I wasn't sure she'd think that was as funny as I did.

True or not true, Mom's story worked. The editor said okay.

Mom decided to hurry up everything she was doing in Paris so we could get to the exhibit on Sunday. Then she called an old friend of hers who lived in Amsterdam, an American guy named Bill, to ask him to recommend a good hotel. Finally, she called the person at The Scene who's in charge of making travel reservations to switch all the arrangements, and by Saturday afternoon we were sitting on a train, heading north to Amsterdam.

This was totally awesome, because it was a high-speed train, which goes hurtling along at almost two hundred miles an hour. It's way more exciting than riding in an airplane because you can see how fast you're going just by looking out the window.

The only thing on the train trip that had anything at all to do with our mystery was that we went through Antwerp, which was the place Gallery Guy said he was from when he was painting in the National Gallery. But we didn't even have time to get out.

Mom lived in Amsterdam her first year out of college, before she married Dad, and she spent the last part of the trip telling us about how it was back then. I guess even before she lived there it had started being Drug City, which it still is, pretty much, because drugs are legal there. Anyway, back then kids would come with backpacks from all over the world and hang out at this place called Dam Square and buy and use drugs. Mom said she didn't do that. She'd managed to get a job as a waitress in an American-style restaurant just so she could stay in Amsterdam, which she loved, and lived a regular life. I don't know if I believe her. Bill, the guy she'd called about the hotel, was somebody she'd met back then.

When Mom got done telling us about this, Lucas said, “So. About this Bill guy. Do you two have some kind of romantic thing going?”

“Well, at one time in my life, believe it or not, there were men. Relationships. Romance,” Mom said, and she got a far-off look in her eyes, hamming it up. For the next few minutes she told us how she and Bill had met, dated for a while, then decided to be just friends, and how they'd stayed friends even though they'd both gotten married to other people. Now they were both divorced, but as far as Mom was concerned, romance with him wasn't in the cards.

“But he's a great guy,” she said. “He had something scheduled for tonight and couldn't meet our train, but you'll have a chance to meet him while we're here. I think you'll like him.”

It was seven o'clock when we got into Amsterdam.

It's hard to imagine how different all the cities in Europe look from each other until you go there. Compared to London and Paris, Amsterdam is like another whole world. It has these canals running through it in U shapes, one inside the other. There's also a big river right in the middle of things. They have streets, too—it's not like Venice, where everyone goes around in boats. But everywhere you look in Amsterdam, there's water.

Kind of at the very top of the town, above and in the middle of all the Us of the canals, is the incredibly big, monstrous, humongous Centraal Station, where we came in on the train.

When you come out of the train station you're on a big plaza where all kinds of things are going on. That night there was a guy with an accordion, a Caribbean drum group, and some man Mom said was from Turkey doing a weird whirling dance in a costume with a big skirt and tall hat. Mom says it's always like that. What a place.

Well, that's just the beginning. When you look down the main street from the Centraal Station you start to see the buildings that Amsterdam is famous for. You've probably seen them in pictures. They're old and tall and skinny, and they have pointed roofs that mostly have little decorations on them. They're on both sides of all the canals and the river, and you can see their reflections in the water. Amsterdam has to be the most picturesque place I've ever been.

Anyway, since we were traveling light and had our little rolling suitcases, we decided to take a tram to our hotel, which was down in a quiet section where they have the big museums and the concert hall. Trams, or streetcars, are like small trains, and they run everywhere in Amsterdam on tracks in the streets.

By the time we got settled in our hotel and went downstairs to the restaurant to have something to eat, all we had time to do was take a quick walk around the neighborhood before it was time for bed. We were all beat. Traveling is hard work.

 

 

The next day we were some of the first people in line outside the Rijksmuseum waiting for it to open.

You go into the museum through a gigantic entry passageway that runs completely through the building. As usual, I was busy with my journal, so instead of standing in line with Mom and Lucas, I was on a bench out in the sunshine. Mostly I had my head down. But once, when I looked up, I caught a glimpse of a good-looking blond man walking into the passageway.

It would be easy to say I didn't think anything of it at the time—after all, I only saw him from the back. But to be honest, I have to admit that watching him walk and move, I was sure he was somebody I should know. I wondered if he was an actor or a rock star or something. But he was dressed up in a suit and tie and carrying a briefcase, so I figured he worked at the museum. I finally decided that the reason he seemed familiar was because he looked a lot like Sting, only with longer hair. I picked up my journal again and kept on writing.

If I'd watched him, I might have seen him stop and look closely at Lucas and then at Mom. But I didn't watch him, and I didn't see him do it. And that was a big, big, big mistake.

“This does not look good,” Mom muttered, her eyes darting back and forth over the crowd behind us as we waited to get into the museum. I'd come over from my bench because it was getting close to opening time.

“I have a feeling we're going to get trampled,” Mom continued. “Just look out there. It's a teeming sea of humanity.” The crowd stretched all the way through the passageway and out into the plaza.

“Listen,” Mom said, “we need a strategy.” She turned away from the crowd and motioned for us to huddle near her.

Talking softly so nobody else could hear, she said, “This isn't going to be like Minnesota, where everybody keeps their place in line. Amsterdam is a very cool city, and the Dutch have many good qualities, but Amsterdammers are famous for being pushy.

“Even as we speak, I'll bet four out of every five of those people in line behind us are figuring out how they can elbow us out of the way and be the first to see the Third Lucretia. We'd better make a run for it. When they open the doors, we move. Got that?”

We nodded.

“First, we get in front of Lucretia and do some serious gazing. Then we fan out. I'm pretty sure there'll be panels that'll tell about other things. Like the story of Lucretia and the two other paintings in the States, and all that.”

“We don't need to spend our time on that,” Lucas said. “We know that stuff.”

“Exactly,” Mom said. “Let's each of us look for something more interesting. Anything that tells about finding the painting or figuring out that it was a real Rembrandt, that kind of thing. Okay?”