The Mystery of the Third Lucretia (15 page)

“Then what do we do?” I asked. “Shall we call each other over? Or just read it ourselves and make a report?”

We all looked at each other.

“I know,” Lucas said. “How about if we each read our own panels and only call each other if there are interesting pictures?”

“Great idea,” Mom said. “Just in time, too. On your marks . . .”

There was a sound behind the entry door, and suddenly we were let in.

“Go!” Mom said, and the three of us took off, almost but not quite running, down into the gigantic entrance courtyard where we showed the tickets Mom had bought online, then through another part of the building and, finally, into the special exhibit room.

And there she was. Lucretia.

Because we'd come so fast, we had her all to ourselves for a few seconds, and being alone there with her was totally awesome for me.

First when I saw the painting, just the look and the size of it made me want to stop in my tracks. I couldn't stop for more than a second, of course, or I would have gotten trampled and ended up nothing but a grease spot on the Rijksmuseum floor. But it was the kind of scene that, like, took a person's breath away. And suddenly I got all emotional, feeling lots of things at the same time.

The painting was set up to look dramatic, with no other paintings in the exhibit room, and low lighting with a big spotlight on the picture, which was huge.

And, as I said, there Lucretia was. Looking just like herself, with her reddish brown hair and light gold skin, and the sad mouth with the dark shadow at the corner on the side we could see.

Only she was dead, and everything in the painting seemed very still and quiet and mournful.

Which brings me to another thing I was feeling, which was sadness for the dead Lucretia. Okay, call it silly, but it turned out that Mom had the same feeling, and she said it was a sign of how well the picture had been painted that it could make a person feel truly sad that the woman had died. I think I felt it especially, because I'd always loved the Lucretia paintings, and she was like a real person to me.

Then there were the hands. The closer I got to the painting, the more familiar those hands looked. When I finally saw them close up, I actually recognized the brush-strokes. And for a minute I had this incredibly confusing feeling that it wasn't Rembrandt's painting hanging there, or even Gallery Guy's. It was my painting. After a few seconds everything went back to normal, but I didn't stop feeling like I was part of that painting, somehow. I wondered if Lucas felt it, too.

“Lucas,” I whispered, “recognize that spot of pink on the first knuckle, and the yellow on the side of the thumb?”

She nodded and grinned at me.

I looked for a while longer at the hands, and at the cute, sad-looking little black-and-white dog at the foot of Lucretia's bed. And at the people standing around the bed, looking as sad and quiet as they would have looked in real life.

Then the crowd got to be too much, and it was time to move on.

Mom was right. There were panels around the walls of the room. Each one was about something different, and they were all written in Dutch, with translations in English, French, German, and some Asian language. Mom was already busy reading one of them. Lucas had gone all the way to the one farthest away from the painting, and now she was looking at the panel next to that.

I passed by the panel called “Who Was Lucretia?” and went on to the one labeled “Identifying a Masterpiece.”

Right at the top there was a photo of a tall blond man looking through a magnifying glass at a painting that was lying on a table. It was the guy I'd just seen outside the museum. He still looked like Sting, but he also seemed familiar in other ways.

I looked hard at his face. At his cheeks, at his ears, and I looked a lot at his nose. And then I knew who it was.

You guessed it—Gallery Guy. Only the words under the picture said, “Jacob Hannekroot, Curator of Dutch Art, Rijksmuseum.”

That gave me the shivers, I can tell you that. I quick turned to look for Lucas and Mom, but I couldn't see them because of people in the way. Before I left to go get them, I couldn't help reading what was on the panel and giving the picture a closer look.

With the beard, slicked-back black hair, and the glasses he'd had in London, Gallery Guy hadn't looked especially gorgeous. But it turned out he was a very good-looking guy. In England he'd had brown eyes, but here his eyes were bright blue. I thought he probably was into colored contacts and had both a brown pair and a blue pair, because even if his eyes were naturally blue they couldn't be this blue.

He was wearing a pale pink shirt with the sleeves rolled up over his elbows. The shirt was open at the collar, perfectly pressed, and there was something about his posture that made it all look “casually elegant,” as they say. He wasn't young, but he looked good.

Just then I heard someone call my name, and when I looked over my shoulder I saw Lucas leaning around some people and gesturing for me.

I fought my way over to where she was standing just as Mom came over from the other side. Lucas had been looking at a panel called “A Dutch National Treasure.” It was the story of the Rijksmuseum's decision to buy the Third Lucretia, and there was a picture of the museum's director in front of the painting.

But Lucas hadn't called us over to look at him. She wanted us to look at the other people in the picture with him.

There, standing on the director's right, was Marianne Mannefeldt. She was a tall, gorgeous blonde who was totally hot. The dress she was wearing was buttoned all the way up to her neck, but it was tight enough that you could see that she had a fantastic body.

On the other side of the museum director was Jacob Hannekroot, Gallery Guy, dressed in a suit this time and looking just as handsome as he'd looked in the panel I'd been reading a minute ago. Maybe even more handsome.

Lucas pointed at him and gave me a Look—she'd recognized him, too—and I gave her a Look back and moved my head up and down in a big nod.

Mom said, “Now come over and look at this.”

She led the way, pushing through the crowd to the panel she'd been reading. There was the story of the Mannefeldt family, a picture of the canal house where the Rembrandt had supposedly been discovered, and a big picture of Marianne with her husband who had died. It had been taken at a party. He was in a tuxedo and she was wearing a low-cut black dress and lots of jewelry. Willem Mannefeldt was completely bald and had a long nose and almost no chin. He looked like a vulture. He had his arm around his wife like she was some kind of a prize he'd won for being so rich and important.

“Not exactly a GQ model, is he?” Mom whispered, pointing to Willem.

“She and that curator of Dutch art guy from the other panel make a much cuter couple,” I said, whispering back, and I raised my eyebrows a couple times to let Mom know there was something up.

Mom gave me a questioning look. Then, under her breath, she said, “Makes you wonder how dear old Willem managed to kick the bucket, doesn't it?”

“Are Jacob Hannekroot and Gallery Guy the same person, or what!” I burst out the instant we were through the crowd and walking away from the museum.

“No joke,” Lucas chimed in. “Wait till we sit down. I'll draw a picture and show you.”

Mom just looked at us. I think she couldn't believe what we were saying. Then she put her finger to her lips and gestured with her head to a group in front of us and people whizzing by on bicycles. Amsterdam is absolutely full of bicycles.

We didn't say any more until we found an outdoor table where our conversation would be covered up by traffic noises. We decided to have lunch even though it was early.

This is probably as good a time as any to tell you about how to say some of the Dutch names, if you're interested in that kind of thing. Jacob Hannekroot is pronounced as if it was spelled YAH-kub HAH-nuh-krote. (Two o's in a row make a long o sound in Dutch.) The letter w is pronounced like v, so Willem is pronounced like Villem, and Marianne sounds like MAH-ree-AH-nuh.

Anyway, as soon as Lucas had taken a quick look at the menu, she whipped out her journal, found a blank page, and started drawing. By the time the waiter had taken our orders, she was almost ready.

“By the way,” I said while we were waiting for her, “I think I saw Jacob Hannekroot outside the Rijksmuseum while I was on the bench.”

Before anybody had a chance to comment, Lucas turned her journal around and we could see a rough sketch of a man. “That's Jacob Hannekroot all right,” Mom said.

Lucas didn't say anything. She just started drawing again. It didn't take her long before she'd turned the drawing of Jacob into Gallery Guy just by adding a beard, slicked-back dark hair, and glasses. She showed it to Mom, then she turned back to the pictures she'd drawn of Gallery Guy when we were in London. The two pictures were identical.

“Well, that's clear enough,” Mom said. “Okay, let me get this straight. The Rijksmuseum's curator of Dutch art is the same person who painted the hands on the picture we just saw, which means he probably painted the whole Third Lucretia.”

Lucas and I nodded.

“And the Rijksmuseum's curator of Dutch art, this same Jacob Hannekroot, is the art expert who then identified the Third Lucretia, his own painting, as a real Rembrandt.”

We nodded again. Having Mom say this out loud made me feel like holding my breath, I was so excited.

“And the person whose house the phony painting was in is an incredibly beautiful woman whose husband just died, and who insisted on taking the painting to the Rijksmuseum for identification.”

“And Jacob is also incredibly good-looking,” I said.

“And her husband was old and ugly,” Lucas said.

“So Marianne and Jacob were almost certainly in it together,” Mom said. She's never chewed her fingernails, but she has a habit, when she's thinking, of taking the nail of her right thumb between her teeth and, like, slowly clamping up and down on it. She did that now. After a minute she said, “What a setup. What an unbelievably smooth, foolproof setup!”

“Except for one thing,” I said. “Us.” And I broke into a big smile.

Lucas and I were smiling when our food came, but Mom looked more worried than happy about what I'd just said. “Okay, what else did we find out in the museum?” she asked, taking a bite of her quiche.

“Nothing much on my panel,” Lucas said. “Just stuff about why the Rijksmuseum decided to buy it. About how Dutch art should stay in the Netherlands and stuff like that. By the way, it said Marianne has decided not to sell her house here in Amsterdam.”

“If you suddenly had a cool twenty million, you wouldn't have to sell any of your houses either,” Mom said. “Kari, what was on your panels?”

“Well,” I began, “you already know the first thing I found out. That Jacob is the curator of Dutch art who looked at the painting Marianne Mannefeldt brought him and said it was a real Rembrandt. It said he did a test of how old the paint was, then he looked at it to see if it was like Rembrandt's style. He looked at the overall subject and composition and everything. You could say he looked at the big picture.”

“Ho, ho, ho,” Lucas said.

“I'm going to do you a favor and forget you said that,” Mom said.

“Obviously you can't take a joke. Anyway, if you know about the other Lucretia paintings, you can see right away it's the same woman, so that was the big thing. Then he looked at the way the light came into the painting.”

“Rembrandt is famous for the way he painted light,” Mom said. Lucas and I already knew this from spending so much time in the Rembrandt room in London, but we didn't say anything.

“A lot of the Dutch painters are,” she continued, “like van Gogh and Vermeer—” She broke off because I was giving her my this-is-more-than-I-wanted-to-know look.

“Right. I'll shut up,” she said. “You were saying . . .”

“Well, supposedly whoever did this painting—”

“Jacob Hannekroot,” Lucas broke in.

“Jacob Hannekroot painted the light coming in from the side just like Rembrandt did in all his paintings,” I continued. “And then, get this. This is the most interesting part. There's the thing about the symbols. See, Rembrandt didn't use many symbols, even though lots of other painters did. But in this painting there are symbols.”

“The dog stands for loyalty, the mirror stands for either Lucretia's soul or her knowledge of herself, and the candle stands for God's presence,” Lucas said.

Mom and I looked at her, figuring this was just one of the millions of things Lucas seemed to know from having read it somewhere.

“It said so on the first panel I looked at,” she said, as if she was defending herself.

“Anyway,” I continued, “Rembrandt didn't usually use symbols. So what Jacob said was, if this was a forgery, whoever made the forgery wouldn't have used symbols because it wasn't like Rembrandt to use them. So, get this, it has to be not a forgery, because there are symbols in it, which Rembrandt didn't use.”

Mom screwed up her face. “You're kidding.”

“That's way complicated,” Lucas said.

“That's what was on the panel,” I said with a shrug.

“Reverse psychology,” Mom said, shaking her head. “This guy thought of everything.”

“Then there's the fancy helmet her husband is wearing in the picture,” I continued.

“I noticed that,” Mom said. “He probably copied that from another Rembrandt painting, in Berlin, or the one in Glasgow.”