The Guggenheim Mystery

by Robin Stevens

  I was wondering how she knew whether Solomon Guggenheim, who was the man who had paid for the museum, would be proud or not, since he was dead and couldn’t explain anything, but then she pushed on the front of the spinning glass door and it spun us inside. Even more noise hit me all at once.

  On the ground in front of me was an enormous shiny medal that read LET EACH MAN EXERCISE THE ART HE KNOWS. That made me worried. I know the universe, but I don’t know any art. I also do not like exercising. I hoped that this was another figure of speech. We walked over it, past a tall, round-faced black man in a navy blue uniform who smiled and winked at us and waved us on, and out into a huge, round, bright white room. I stared up at it. This was the main gallery of the Guggenheim Museum.

  I saw what I already knew from my encyclopaedia: there were circles everywhere inside the Guggenheim. The main gallery we were in was round. There was a wide curved ramp that started in front of me and curled round the sides of the big circular rotunda gallery six times, making six floors.

  This ramp is the most special thing about the Guggenheim. It has smooth stone floors and smooth white sides. It curves upwards at a steady three-per-cent gradient, so it is not hard to walk up. When you are going up or down it, the half-wall on your left is low, even for someone my height. Beyond it you can always see the circle of the Guggenheim floor, and the ramp on the other side. This means that you can look across at the other side of the museum and see all the paintings hanging on it on all the levels at once. This is important, and this is what makes the Guggenheim so special. Here you can see things differently and look at them together, up and down as well as next to each other.

  On the right of the ramp the wall tilts slightly outwards, and that is where the paintings are hung. There is lighting that climbs upwards with the ramp, protected by a long triangle of glass that is translucent rather than transparent. When it’s turned on, it should give out a soft yellow light, but that morning the lights on the second and third floors (which would be the first and second floors in London: in New York there is no such thing as a ground floor, so they begin counting at the first) were off.

  The ramp circled all the way to a huge round window at the top, ninety-six feet above the ground. I squinted up and I could see the broken window pane Aunt Gloria had mentioned, a place where the colour of the sky was brighter.

  On my left, across the circle-patterned stone floor of the Guggenheim, was a set of triangular white stairs and a shiny metal lift. I knew that the lift and the stairs went all the way up the six floors of the building, like the ramp. Next to the stairs, on each level, were smaller side galleries in the tower building, separate from the main one, where other paintings and sculptures were displayed.

  This was all correct, and exactly how I had imagined it. But what was wrong was everything else.

  There were ten tall, thin, wooden packing crates stacked on the floor near where I was standing, so I couldn’t see any of the circle patterns properly. I could smell paint. A stocky white man with big shoulders and a wide freckly face, wearing overalls, was standing next to the bottom of the ramp, holding a hammer. On the first level, above us, a woman with dark hair tied back behind her ears was sawing through a piece of wood. She looked like my science teacher Mrs Huang, so I thought she might be Chinese. A short white woman with red hair walked in front of us up the ramp with some thin plywood boards, and the Chinese woman shouted at her not to drop any. A skinny young black man walked past the Chinese woman, head and shoulders low, and vanished up the curve of the ramp. Ten seconds later, a drill began whirring. Two curves of the ramp up from him, another man was working, but I couldn’t see him properly. There was a hoover running somewhere above us, and it mixed up with the drill noise and the people shouting at each other.

  My hand shook itself out, and I could feel my head going sideways. ‘Hrumm,’ I said. ‘Hrummmmm.’

  Mum put her hand on my arm. ‘It’s all right, Ted,’ she said.

  But she was wrong.

  EIGHT

  Ways of Seeing

  ‘This will all be gone in time for the opening, of course!’ Aunt Gloria called through the banging and whining and buzzing. Every noise echoed around the Guggenheim, just like someone blowing into a shell. ‘Our special maintenance crew have taken down the old paintings and put them in their boxes, and once they have finished repainting the ramp and altering the space they’ll get out the new paintings and hang them up. I’ve been very particular about where each one goes. It’ll look so lovely! Fai, have I told you how the Guggenheim is altered for each new exhibition? Sometimes they even add in false walls for the paintings to hang from. It’s so clever.’

  Mum whispered in my ear, ‘Breathe, Ted. Stay calm.’

  I thought about Odysseus on his ship. That calmed me, so when a man came up to us and said, ‘Ms McCloud!’ I could look across at him. I wondered who he meant, and then remembered that Mum’s name before she married Dad was Faith McCloud, and so Aunt Gloria’s name would be McCloud too. I realized that this was the tall black man who had waved us through the revolving door. He was the security guard, and he was finally coming to make sure that we were secure.

  ‘Good morning, Lionel!’ said Aunt Gloria. Her voice had gone high and nasal again. ‘I hope it’s all going well?’

  ‘Absolutely, Ms McCloud,’ said Lionel, showing all his teeth. ‘No problems here. Salim, what’s happening?’

  ‘Lionel!’ said Salim. He was smiling – he was happy to see Lionel. ‘This is my aunt Faith and my cousins Ted and Kat Spark. Remember, I told you about them? Sparks, this is Lionel. He’s one of the security guys here. He’s brilliant.’

  I looked at Lionel, who had a round stomach as well as a round face, and very short dark hair. He was smiling, calm and casual. He winked at me. I wondered how good Lionel was at being a security guard. He seemed very friendly, and he smiled all the time.

  ‘So this is the Guggenheim,’ said Salim to Kat and me, nodding around at it. ‘I thought it’d be really boring at first. But I’ve actually realized that it’s cool. It’s way better than Mum’s last job, anyway. Do you want to see some paintings? The tower gallery on the second floor’s still got paintings, even though the rotunda is empty. Lionel, am I OK to take them up?’

  ‘Go crazy,’ said Lionel, grinning at Salim again. ‘Your mom told us she’d be here by this time, so you’re all expected. Just don’t knock anything off the walls, all right?’

  Lionel had made a joke. So Salim and Lionel were friends too.

  We did not go into the lift to get up to the tower gallery – we went up the steps themselves, two sets of nine of them, turning through two sets of ninety degrees, with small triangular lights set into the walls. Then we were facing the huge white ramp of the Guggenheim again, one level up, on the second floor in New York.

  To our right there was a doorway, and when we stepped through it we were suddenly in a rectangular room with white walls and a low ceiling. The tower galleries are shaped like normal museum rooms, but they have hidden layers that made them much more interesting than they seemed at first. At the other end of the room from the doorway the wall was only half as high as it should be, and light came up from below and above it. All the tower rooms in the Guggenheim are connected by a space that you can stare down into or up at, depending on where you are. Below us was the gift shop and above us was the tower gallery on the third floor.

  Then I noticed the paintings on the gallery walls. On my right was a painting that was a rush of greens and oranges and blacks, bursting left and right and up and down. There was no pattern to it. Next I looked at a painting that was just scribbles and dots on white. I thought it looked like Morse code, but I couldn’t read it. Then I found myself staring across at a painting where a green woman floated in a red sky.

  ‘It looks like a dream!’ said Mum.

  I did not agree. I do not dream like that.

  On the wall opposite the green woman, just underneath a square white security camera, was
a painting that looked like it had been framed twice – first in a thin white square, and then inside that in a lopsided black border of paint. It made the rest of the painting look tilted, off centre, with red and black and yellow lines and shapes shooting in all directions.

  ‘That’s by a man called Vasily Kandinsky,’ said Salim. ‘It’s called In the Black Square. You should like it, Ted. It’s all about the weather.’

  I looked back at the painting. It did not look like the weather at all. It looked like chaos.

  ‘It is!’ insisted Salim. ‘Look, that’s a rainbow, and those are clouds, and that’s the sun.’

  ‘How do you know that?’ asked Kat, blinking at him.

  ‘Hey, I pretend not to listen to Mum, but I do pick some things up,’ said Salim. He glanced at Aunt Gloria, and she raised her hands and pursed her lips.

  ‘My boy!’ she said. ‘Fai, what can I do with him?’

  I stared at the picture again, and this time I imagined that I was not looking at a sky, but the code for a sky, like the way when you are drawing a circuit diagram in science a light bulb becomes just a circle with a curved line through it. If those lines in the painting were like isobars in a weather forecast, and those circles were all the places the sun is in one afternoon, laid out on the same space, like a time-lapse photograph … I suddenly saw it.

  And I liked the picture very much.

  NINE

  Protons, Electrons and Neutrons

  Then another woman came hurrying into the gallery. She was white, about the same age as Aunt Gloria, and her blonde hair was pulled back neatly on her narrow, neat head. She was very small and slim, and she wore a tight blue skirt, a white shirt and high-heeled blue shoes. She was carrying a big handbag, which she shifted around on her shoulder.

  ‘Gloria!’ she said. ‘Not the Kandinskys again!’

  ‘I love them, Sandra,’ said Aunt Gloria, laughing. ‘I can’t help it – I know you don’t feel the same way! Sandra, this is my wonderful sister, Faith, and her kids, Kat and Ted. I’ve told you all about them and their visit. They’re my lifelines, truly they are. I’m so lucky they are here.’

  Aunt Gloria often exaggerates. I saw Mum’s mouth purse at wonderful, and her eyebrows go up. But then her mouth went up in a smile and she put her arm round Aunt Gloria. ‘We are so happy to be here,’ she said. ‘And what a lovely museum this is!’

  ‘It is very special,’ said Sandra, her mouth going up too. ‘I’m so pleased to meet you. The whole museum heard you’d be coming today. I’m Sandra Cook. I’m—’

  ‘My assistant curator!’ cried Aunt Gloria. ‘My other lifeline, ever since I arrived here. I don’t know what I would have done without her! Sandra’s been here for five years, and what she doesn’t know about this museum …’

  She didn’t finish her sentence, and I wondered what it was that Sandra didn’t know.

  Dad would have explained, I thought, and I wanted him there. With only Mum, things felt out of balance, changed. Inside an atom there are electrons, protons and neutrons. Remove one of the protons and the atom becomes something different, a new element. If my family were all parts of an atom (this is a metaphor, and I was proud I’d worked it out), then Kat, Aunt Gloria and Salim were definitely electrons, spiky and unpredictable and flying in circles, and Mum and Dad were sensible protons. I decided that I was a neutron, which has no electric charge at all. These are only there to give the nucleus of the atom mass, and so sometimes scientists do not notice them until they are gone.

  Would this mean that Kat and Salim would only properly notice me if I wasn’t there? I glanced over at where they were standing together, whispering and laughing. Then I checked my weather watch to see what time it was in London. It was 3.21 p.m., which meant that here it was 10.21 a.m. I felt better.

  Then I realized that I was not hearing the conversation happening around me. Sandra and Aunt Gloria were still talking. ‘She’s been such a help to me as I’ve navigated the first few months of this wonderful opportunity,’ said Aunt Gloria. ‘Really, Fai, I feel like this is finally where I’m supposed to be. They take me seriously here, and this art – it’s simply priceless. Salim likes it too.’

  Salim sighed.

  ‘Salim!’ said Aunt Gloria. ‘You know you’ve taken to the Guggenheim. You know everyone and you’re here almost every day. Quite a favourite, my Salim.’

  ‘I’m here almost every day because ever since what happened in London, whenever I’m not at school you won’t let me out of your sight!’ said Salim. His mouth was twisted as though he was joking, but his arms were folded. It was as though the two parts of his body were saying different things. I deduced from what he was saying now, and what I had overheard last night, that Salim was not happy that Aunt Gloria was worrying about him so much.

  Then my nose began tickling. I smelled something strong, and it made me cough. I turned towards the doorway we had all come through. I walked towards it, and my eyes stung as well. It was like I had felt the time when I had been in the garden and Kat had dropped a cigarette behind the garden shed. It had caught fire and burned a tall scorch mark on the shed wall before Dad put it out.

  ‘Mum!’ I said urgently. ‘Mum! I think something’s on fire!’

  TEN

  Fire, Fire!

  ‘Don’t be silly, Ted!’ said Mum. ‘It’s just— Oh!’

  Suddenly a new noise went shrilling through the air. It was very high and loud, and it made my hand shake itself out so hard that it hit Kat. She yelled, and hit me back. I glared at her.

  ‘Oh, good Lord!’ cried Aunt Gloria. She rushed us out of the tower gallery and back into the main rotunda, and I saw that thick white smoke was billowing up towards us from the first floor, filling the round main space of the Guggenheim.

  ‘Fire!’ gasped Aunt Gloria. ‘Oh, Lord, not today, not now! Faith, take the children outside, quickly. Sandra, help them! Go out through the front door. It’s quickest! I need to stay and send everyone else out that way – I’m a fire marshal, I have to make sure they’re all safe.’

  Sandra rushed us down the ramp to the first floor, through the thick cloud of smoke, and then motioned us out of the spinning door that we had walked through earlier. ‘Go on!’ she said. ‘Go and wait outside on Fifth Avenue. I have to go back for the others!’

  Mum’s hands were grabbing hold of me, her nails scratching my neck. I wriggled, but she ignored me. We ran out of the main door, coughing and rubbing our eyes. A crowd of tourists was gathering, talking and pointing at the smoke. It was very thick now, and even though the spinning door was glass I could not see anyone inside.

  I looked at Salim, and saw that his eyes were wide and his mouth was very thin.

  ‘Is Auntie Glo going to be all right?’ Kat asked.

  ‘Of course she is,’ said Mum, but her lips were thin too. ‘She just has to make sure everyone else is all right. Salim, Kat, stay here and don’t worry.’

  We watched the doors. Then they spun open, and the people who had been working in the museum began to come out, coughing like we had been. I saw the stocky, freckled white man from the maintenance crew, along with another man I had not seen before. He was medium height, and he had brown skin and lots of dark curly hair on his head and face. He was wearing a dark blue Guggenheim uniform. Then I saw the red-haired woman. Sandra came to the doorway and ushered out the skinny black boy, who I now saw was not much older than Salim, and had his hair cut in a big square around his thin head, and then an old black man. This man was very short and small, with a small white beard, and his eyes were crinkled up in his wrinkly face. The Chinese woman with the ponytail followed him, striding along, her wide mouth twisted up and her nose wrinkled, and then Lionel, who was not smiling any more either.

  The red-haired woman was running when she came outside, her pink cheeks puffing out, and so was the old man, but Lionel and the boy and the Chinese woman moved slowly. I thought that they must be telling their bodies to act calmly, and I was impressed. They all gathered
around us.

  Sandra was standing just outside the door, her blonde hair coming out of its bun. Lionel the security guard was shouting something into a mobile phone. Everyone’s arms and bodies were very close. I could also hear sirens coming from behind me and to my right, and the alarm was still going.

  Smoke poured out of the Guggenheim’s main door every time it spun open, thick and white, and I realized that in a few minutes I might see the fire. I imagined it like a tongue, licking at the inside of the building. This made me think about all the atoms of wood and paint turning into atoms of charcoal in the fire. It seems like a magic trick, but it’s only chemistry.

  ‘Thank heavens there aren’t more people in there!’ gasped Mum, watching the smoke. ‘Though – goodness, think of all those paintings!’

  ‘But they’re priceless, Mum,’ I said sensibly.

  ‘Priceless means expensive, you neek,’ said Kat.

  That was very Mean Kat of her – ‘neek’ is what some people at my school call me. It is a cross between nerd and geek, but worse than both. Then I felt angry at people who do not use words in a scientific way. How could priceless mean exactly the opposite of itself?

  Salim’s face twisted up, and he said, ‘Aunt Faith, Mum’s all right, isn’t she?’

  ‘Of course she will be,’ said Mum. ‘She’ll be out in a moment.’

  But I was worried that she was telling a lie.

  ELEVEN

  No Smoke Without …?

  Just then, Aunt Gloria burst out of the smoke that was filling the main entrance to the Guggenheim. I glanced down at my weather watch. It was 10.28, exactly seven minutes after the alarm had sounded and we had left the museum. Her mouth was open and her eyes were wide, and she was wearing a bright orange vest over her dress. ‘Everyone is out!’ she gasped. ‘Oh, what a disaster!’