CJ leaned in to whisper. “I think Zaki’s seen enough old paint.”
“After tomorrow, we can do something else, maybe explore the forests… if you think that’ll make him happy.”
Chapter 7
The Louvre
Li Li had wanted to enter the museum through the shopping mall underneath the complex, no doubt hoping she’d be allowed to forego the art altogether, and be left to her own devices among all the boutiques and teenagers. She’d even taken the trouble to ascertain the existence of a shop that sold discounted gallery passes, along with its collection of snow globes and post cards. But her scheme went awry when Andie announced a desire to see the Jardin des Tuileries, which meant getting off at the Tuileries metro stop and walking above the ground the rest of the way to the glass pyramid entrance.
“Why can’t I go this way?” she pleaded, once they’d finally descended the main escalator. The main atrium underneath the pyramid was brightly lit even on an overcast day, and she tugged on Emily’s arm as the others tried to decide which of the three smaller escalators to choose, each one leading to a different wing of the museum. “Perry can come with me, if you’re worried. I bet he doesn’t want to look at a bunch of stupid paintings all day either.”
“It’s not going to be all day,” Andie said. “Besides, we do things together in this family.”
Emily had been studying the floor plan of the museum this whole time, with one ear cocked to Li Li’s complaint. She glanced at Perry and smiled, and he returned one of those sad puppy expressions that meant, “Please don’t make me go shopping with a teenager,” or something to that effect.
“I doubt Perry really wants to go clothes shopping, sweetheart.”
“Fine. Then I can go on my own. I can find my way around.”
Emily glanced at the floor plan one more time. “How about you and Perry and I go to the Richelieu wing? That’s where they keep all the cool sculpture. I think Stone will prefer to explore the Denon wing, where all the famous paintings are. Okay?”
Li Li grudgingly assented to this proposition, and Emily had guessed right. It wasn’t the museum she really objected to, but the prospect of having to go wherever Stone wanted, to see and do what he wanted. Emily turned to Stone, and ran her fingers through his shaggy hair, and pulled it away from his face. “Is that okay with you?” He nodded, his eyes a little watery.
Finally, she turned to Andie and Yuki. “We’ll meet here,” she said, pointing to a room marked in red on the plan. “It’s the main hall on the first level. Two hours?”
“Shall we keep Ethan and Jerry with us?” Andie asked, and Emily nodded.
“We’ll be okay on our own.” Emily knew this thought would thrill Li Li, and maybe she deserved some special treatment.
Ethan and Jerry had been with the Cardano family the longest of anyone on the security team. Jerry was a former Army Ranger who’d fallen on hard times when Michael Cardano rescued him from a county lockup in Arizona, and Ethan had been a soldier in the Israeli army and a Mossad operative until he washed out for “insufficient spirit of the homeland,” his dismissal letter said. As the Director of Clandestine Services at CIA, Michael Cardano didn’t need to have private security for his family. But long experience had taught him the value of personal loyalty, and the transience of the institutional variety, and he kept most of his own security people close throughout.
His wife Andie didn’t care to be trailed by a squad of security, though that would be Michael’s clear preference. Ethan and Jerry were the compromise they’d reached over the years, since the one more or less resembled a T-Rex stuffed into the largest suit one could purchase off the rack, and the other possessed the sharp eyes of a lynx. Andie liked to think that her entry into a room wasn’t like the Marines establishing a beachhead, and for this trip, at least, Michael was content, especially since Emily would be nearby. Stuck in London meetings for the next few days, he would have to bear the risk until he could join the family in Rome.
The crowd in the Cours Marly was pleasantly thin, a surprise for this time of year, and Emily attributed it to the Richelieu Wing’s displays of period furnishings being less popular at the moment. The famous attractions, like the ‘Mona Lisa’ or Rafael’s various ‘Madonnas,’ were housed across the way, in the Denon Wing. Rooms fitted out as they might have been for Napoleon, had he ever deigned to live in the Louvre, didn’t suit the current taste. But the Cours Marly itself could still enchant under its glass roof, where many of the sculptures from Louis XIV’s pleasure palace had been collected on four levels of polished granite, along with a few dozen potted ficus trees. Li Li was content.
“Why are all the men doing stuff, and the women are just lying there?” she asked.
“Doing stuff?” Perry asked.
“Look at that guy, he’s spearing a boar, and that guy over there is wrestling a horse… and that guy… Stone would love it in here.”
“This guy here looks like a sea god,” Emily said.
“Yeah, I think the trident kinda gives that away,” Li Li said.
Perry nudged the girls up the nearest staircase. “What about these horses? They’re sort of cool, aren’t they?”
“I like that one.” Li Li pointed to a rearing, winged horse at the top of the stairs, whose rider had turned back to blow on a long horn. “Is he leading a hunt, or something?”
“He seems very pleased with himself.”
“If it’s allegorical, maybe he’s supposed to be vanity,” Emily said, and slipped an arm around Li Li’s shoulder. “… or maybe fame.”
“Allegorical?” Li Li asked.
“Yeah, you know… they stand for some idea. Besides, don’t the wings suggest it’s not just a horse?”
“How could we tell if it’s really allegorical, Emmy?”
“I suppose if we could read French,” Perry said, pointing to a plaque on the base of the statue.
“There’s four of them,” Emily said. “If they’re a set, maybe you can figure out the other ones.”
Li Li scampered around the upper level, sizing up each statue. “This guy has wings on his feet,” she called out.
“He must be Mercury,” Perry said.
She concluded that the other two probably weren’t allegorical, mainly because the horses didn’t have wings. But before she could take full advantage of this insight with Emily, she noticed three statues of female figures, one running in full stride, one pressing a sword into her belly, and the last lifting up her robe and looking back over shoulder.
“Emmy, come look at these. Who’s this supposed to be?”
“She’s running, so maybe Atalanta. You remember, right? She was the fastest, but lost a race when she stopped to pick up golden apples.”
“Is she an allegory, too, then?”
“If she is,” – Perry rubbed his chin as he contemplated the statue – “…she probably stands for greed… or vanity, maybe.”
“This one looks more like vanity,” Emily said. “I mean, she’s hiked up her dress and is checking out her butt.”
Li Li giggled at this idea. “Did they really do stuff like that back then?” She pressed her face into Emily’s chest and waited for the familiar arms to wrap around.
“You mean check out their butts?” Perry asked.
“No, silly,” she said from under Emily’s arm. “Did they really make jokes like that?”
“I suppose they did,” Emily said. “What about her? She doesn’t look like she’s joking.”
“The sign says Dido,” Perry said. “Whoever that is.”
“Don’t you SEALs read anything?”
“Who is she, Emmy?” Li Li asked.
“She loved Aeneas too well, and when the gods commanded him to leave her and go found Rome, she killed herself.”
“He sounds like a jerk.”
“Yeah, that’s pretty much every jerk’s exit line,” Perry said. “Sorry, babe, it’s not you. I just have to go found Rome.”
The furnished royal apa
rtments seemed more palatable than they might otherwise have been after the sculpture garden. Li Li’s curiosity about how kings lived had been piqued once she’d encountered Louis’s sense of humor. Long tables, ornate chairs that didn’t look particularly comfortable, gold leaf on every surface – “It must suck to have to be surrounded by art all the time,” she said, at one point.
The Islamic art collection didn’t hold her attention as firmly. Walls displaying elaborately filigreed tiles, like carpet patterns in ceramic, occupied the three of them for a few minutes. But Li Li was of a mind to find allegories, now that Emily had cued her to them, and the tiles did not oblige. By the time they’d gotten around to the Denon wing, Stone had pushed Andie and Yuki through the entire French and Italian Renaissance collections, and they had the bleary eyes of people who could look no more with the intensity of an artist’s eye. But Stone had not had his fill.
Li Li found him on the main staircase, the enormous Escalier Daru, itself an architectural feat, meant to display the Winged Victory of Samothrace. He’d installed himself on an upper landing to sketch the monumental marble sculpture, a fragment, missing arms and head, but with wings intact, standing forth on the prow of a now-broken ship, to sanctify the arrival of the hero, whoever he might have been. He’d already drawn her in charcoal and ink from several angles, when Li Li touched his shoulder.
“Everyone’s waiting in the next gallery, Stone.”
He turned to look at his best friend and sister, eyes a little watery, and closed up his pad and put away his pen. The Salle Daru, which housed the great paintings of Revolutionary France, had been packed a few minutes earlier, but was quiet again, as the crowd pulsed through in waves. Jacques-Louis David’s gigantic Coronation of the Emperor Napoleon, which was nearly twenty feet high and thirty feet wide, loomed over their little party, huddled along one of the large, upholstered banquettes near the center of the gallery.
“I need to find a ladies room,” Andie said.
“We’ll wait here for you,” Yuki said. “I think everyone’s getting hungry. Maybe we should think about where we’ll eat.”
“I’ll be fine,” Andie said, when Ethan moved to accompany her. “I saw one downstairs, you know, by all the Roman statues.”
Emily consulted a floor plan, and said, “The nearest one is on this floor, in the Spanish gallery… just down that way. You remember, right?”
Andie looked over Emily’s shoulder. “I see. Left down there and then right to the next gallery. Okay, I’ll be right back.”
Ethan wasn’t pleased, and conferred with Jerry. They’d already scoped out the non-emergency exits, which are pretty much invisible to the average tourist, and most of the galleries were designed to be sealed if needed. This was the security expert’s curse, that they could never simply be in a location, but always had one eye on the door.
“Don’t worry, big guy,” Emily said, once she became aware of his anxiety. “I’ll go keep an eye on her.”
“We’ll have everyone ready to go when you get back,” he said.
Another wave of tourists was building at the far end of the gallery, having gotten their fill of the Winged Victory, when the first tremor shook the building. The crowd stalled at the entrance, perhaps only dimly aware that anything was wrong. But Emily knew, and so did Perry. She stopped at the other end of the gallery and called back: “Get them out, Ethan. Perry and I will fetch Andie. You get my mom and the kids out.”
Ethan nodded, signaled to Jerry, and rushed their charges to a small staircase behind a snack bar between two galleries. A moment later, the alarms went off, cycling between claxons, sirens and buzzers. Perry ran after Emily, who was moving at speed when the lights went out. Another explosion and smoke filled the halls, muffled gunfire rattled in the distance and thee was screaming everywhere. At the end of the second gallery, down a darkened hallway, people rushed to squeeze past them in the other direction. Emily paused at the entrance to the Spanish gallery to get her bearings, when two more explosions thundered through the building.
“They’re flash-bangs, Em,” Perry called out as loudly as he dared.
“Smokers, too, right? It doesn’t smell like a real fire.”
Emily felt Perry’s hand on her shoulder as she crouched behind a pillar in the passage between the Italian and Spanish galleries. Red emergency lights gave the clouds of smoke an eerie glow, but were insufficient to illuminate much else.
“I saw two cloaked figures run past a moment ago… I think.”
“Which way did Andie go?” Perry asked.
“I sent her that way,” she said, pointing in the opposite direction. “What do you make of the gunfire?”
“Blank rounds, you think?”
“Well… if they’re using flash-bangs… I didn’t hear any impacts and the muzzle blast sounded too small.”
“They could be using suppressors.”
“Maybe, but I think there’s no one in the Spanish Gallery. I’m gonna chance it and go get her.”
She ran in a low crouch, hugging the wall and using the occasional pedestal for cover. Perry ran along the opposite wall and found the side door to the rest rooms first.
“Nobody here,” he said.
“Did you actually go inside the ladies?”
Perry gave her one of those looks, then pulled a piece of cardboard from the door. “Look at this sign.” He tried to read it in the red light, its words repeated in French, German and English. “I think it says the nearest working rest room is in the Sully wing… back the way we came.”
Emily pulled out the floor plan and examined it under an emergency light. “Yes, this way. We have to go back past the Winged Victory and turn left into Sully. It should be in the second hallway.”
The return journey was less vexed, as the smoke had begun to clear, and Emily saw that the hallways were empty. She could also see that some of the security cameras in these galleries had been disabled. Perry followed closely as she sprinted through the first few rooms, then slowed as they approached places where the smoke was still thick. In the Italian Galleries, madonnas and annunciation scenes crowded the walls, and owl-eyed virgins contemplated the stark proposition winged destiny offered them.
As she moved past paintings she could only dimly see now, but had considered closely only an hour or so earlier, Emily recalled a lecture in art history at the Naval Academy. At the time, she’d thought only Filippo Lippi, among the Italian renaissance painters, had really captured the dreariness of Mary’s situation. Her reply, “Ecce ancilla Dei,” was not about spiritual enlightenment, Emily thought, but about sheer force of will and resolve, and the Earth didn’t shake in response, as it ought to have done. That’s what Mary understood, and these painters did not.
When Emily asked Andie about it, home on a holiday in her third year, she was surprised to hear how differently her almost-mom, her other-mother, thought about the same story. To Andie, the virgin’s answer anticipated all the suffering her son would witness in the world, and the meaning of the consolation he would offer. “That’s why so many people pray to her, and not just to her son,” she’d said.
Another question occurred to her: where was the museum security force in all of this? Ethan had joked about how heavily armed gendarmes would be on site after a recent incident at a nightclub. She hadn’t seen any of them so far, and had assumed they were lurking in back rooms and corridors. That had seemed like a positive sign at the time, a sign of their professionalism. But now she began to wonder if she was only seeing part of a much larger attack, something happening on several fronts.
Gunfire in the distance snapped her out of this reverie. Perry had stumbled upon a group of people huddled against a wall, and gestured to her. When she got closer, she saw their fear, two women and a man holding smaller children, all crying, and noticed that they appeared to be Asian. She tried speaking to them in Mandarin, and one of the women responded.
“What did they say?” Perry asked.
“Three men with guns ran by
a moment ago, and turned left up ahead.” Emily pulled out the floor plan again. “That’s where the Mona Lisa is. Let’s go.”
“What about them?” Perry gestured to the family.
“I told them it’s safe back in the Spanish Gallery. C’mon, let’s move.”
“Hold on a sec, Em. Why haven’t these galleries been sealed? Doesn’t that seem strange?” Perry pointed to a panel in the lintel above the archway separating one room from another. “They have huge gates that should have come down already.”
Emily shook her head. “I have no idea, but it doesn’t look good. Have they compromised the entire security system?” She glanced at the tourists, who had yet to move from their spot against the wall, and then looked at Perry. “It doesn’t matter. I still have to find Andie.”
She moved ahead, more cautious now, wondering if the Mona Lisa installation might be the real target of whoever had produced this chaos. Important art works had been targets before, so it made a certain amount of sense, though not quite enough to explain everything they’d seen. Perhaps the plan involved leaving an escape route. But terrorists don’t usually want to escape… do they? Emily’s top priority at this moment was still locating Andie, not responding to what increasingly looked like a massive terrorist attack already underway.
“Why didn’t they shoot those folks?” Perry ran by her side now. “What were they shooting at, if not tourists like them?”
“Maybe the guards… I don’t know.”
“Unless they weren’t killing yet, you know… they may just be herding the tourists…”
“… creating a stampede to overwhelm the security people, and trap part of the crowd, for the real event.”
Emily pulled up by the entrance to the Mona Lisa gallery, and took a quick peek around the corner, and Perry looked over her shoulder. The smoke and the dim erratic light made it difficult to see, but a crowd was evident even from her vantage. She could make out fifty, maybe a hundred people, crouching or sitting against one wall, and at least three or four masked men in dark, loose fitting clothes looming over them. But it was impossible to determine if Andie was among them. When the screaming died down, two of the men fired over their heads, as if they wished to provoke more noise from their hostages.
Girl Stalks the Ruins Page 8
