The Guggenheim Mystery

by Robin Stevens

  Aunt Gloria was not using her right to remain silent. I wanted to point this out to her. I nudged Mum, but she said, ‘Not now, Ted. Glo, you know I’m coming with you. It’ll be all right. I’ll be there. You go downstairs with Lieutenant Leigh, and I’ll be right behind you. Now: Salim, Kat, Ted, listen to me.’

  Aunt Gloria was being led out of the door by the detective. He moved awkwardly, as though his left leg did not know what his right leg was doing. I was watching him, and Mum had to take my arm to turn me towards her. ‘I’m going to go with Gloria,’ she said to us. ‘It will all be OK, I promise, but I don’t know how long we will be. So Glo has called Sandra, and she’ll be here soon. She’s going to look after you. You have to stay with her, and be good, until we’re back. Do you all hear me? Ted, are you listening? Do you promise to wait here for Sandra?’

  ‘Yes, Mum,’ I said.

  ‘Kat, Salim, do you promise?’ asked Mum.

  ‘Yes, Mum,’ said Kat.

  ‘Yes, Aunt Faith,’ said Salim.

  ‘And Kat, you’ll look after Ted, won’t you?’ asked Mum.

  ‘Yes, Mum!’ said Kat.

  ‘Oh,’ said Mum, and her eyes were suddenly wet. ‘I’m sorry about all this. Salim – I’m so sorry. I promise it will be all right.’

  Then she turned and went out of the door after Aunt Gloria and the detective. The door slammed behind her and we were alone.

  Salim’s mouth was turned down and his eyes were small. He was upset. Kat reached out her right hand and patted his arm.

  ‘It’ll be all right,’ she said.

  ‘It won’t,’ said Salim. ‘It’s just – it really happened. Mum got arrested.’

  ‘Yeah, she did,’ said Kat. ‘But that doesn’t change anything. We can’t just wait for Sandra. We can’t change our plan. It’s even more important now. Come on. We don’t have much time.’

  She went running into her room, and came back with her leopardskin backpack bulging as though it was about to spill open. I realized that inside it was Salim’s new camera, and anything else she thought we might need to be detectives in New York – I could see the New York guidebook, a notebook, her tiger-striped pen and three bottles of water, and I was proud of Kat. She still wanted us to detect, and I realized that she was right, and that she was making good decisions. This made me feel safer.

  ‘Ready?’ asked Kat.

  ‘Ready,’ said Salim. ‘Ted?’

  I liked that he was asking me what I thought. And although I knew that Mum and Aunt Gloria would be angry with us for lying to them, and not waiting for Sandra, I finally understood how important it was that we solved this mystery. It was worth disobeying the adults for. It was worth stepping out of the apartment into a city I did not know. ‘I’m ready,’ I said.

  And, just like that, we walked out of the apartment again. I was in New York with my lightning-bolt sister and my practical-joker cousin, and we had a mystery to solve.

  TWENTY

  Seeing Billy

  This time we walked to the Guggenheim using side streets. This was so that Sandra wouldn’t see us on her way to the apartment. Salim turned off his phone, which meant that Sandra couldn’t call us either. It made me feel as if Salim and Kat and I were on an important mission, or possibly even a quest.

  I realized, though, that it might be hard to hide in New York. This is because the street names in New York are very sensible. They are set out in a numbered grid that starts at the bottom right-hand corner of Manhattan (Manhattan is the part of New York we were in) and you count upwards, both south to north, and east to west. The Guggenheim, for example, is on the fifth street to the west: Fifth Avenue, between 88th and 89th Streets. New York is a city set up for logical people, but this meant that it would be more difficult to move randomly through it and confuse anyone who might be looking for us.

  We came out onto Fifth Avenue at 90th Street and stared down it at the Guggenheim. As we moved closer, I saw that there was still police tape all around it. It flapped in the breeze, white and blue, set out in a square, but a lopsided one. There were also two cars parked in front of the Guggenheim’s main door – two white and blue police cars, to match the police tape.

  When we saw those police cars, Kat made a noise and Salim said, ‘Quick!’ and pulled Kat and me back off Fifth Avenue onto 89th Street. This was because he didn’t want to be caught by them, since we had run away from Sandra.

  While we were on 89th Street, across the road from the museum, we were hidden from the police and their cars. I could look at the Guggenheim from a new angle. The curve of the main building was to our right, scribbled all over with scaffolding, and there was a tall tower in front of us. From Fifth Avenue, I had seen the Guggenheim as just a white shell shape, but from this side I saw how the tower building, where the painting had been stolen from, was also part of it. The tower had been added onto the back of Frank Lloyd Wright’s round building in 1992. This was done because the people who ran the Guggenheim needed more space to work, as well as show paintings. The new tower is made of concrete and it looks just like all the other high buildings around it. It is very ordinary. At the base was the loading bay where the removals company had collected the packing crate yesterday, with – although they had not realized it at the time – the stolen painting hidden inside.

  Its doors were closed now, and there was more police tape around the loading area, as well as markings on the ground and small yellow plastic stands with numbers painted on them. I deduced that the police had left these to show where they had found clues.

  A woman in a grey suit and sunglasses walked past us, tapping at her phone. She pushed past a man in a grey suit and sunglasses coming the other way and also tapping at his phone. I wondered whether this part of New York had a uniform, like I did. That idea made me feel pleased.

  Neither of the people looked down at a white man on the ground, sitting between a black iron gate that read 1080 and a black double door that read NATIONAL ACADEMY MUSEUM. He was sitting on a flat piece of cardboard that read UNMAID R, he had dirty green trousers and a dirty blue shirt with two buttons missing, and his face was covered in a hairy brown beard. There was a notebook sitting in his lap, and he was holding a pencil.

  I know from The Odyssey that how people look has nothing to do with how important they are. Odysseus dresses up as a beggar so that he can creep back into his house. His enemies do not see him because he doesn’t look how they expect a hero to look, and that is how Odysseus finally defeats them. This story is a good reminder that you should notice everyone you meet, especially when you are on a quest.

  ‘Billy!’ said Salim, waving at him.

  Kat’s face scrunched up in a way that I knew meant disgust, because Billy looked and smelled as though he had not washed for a long time, and she hitched her leopardskin backpack further up her shoulder.

  The man grinned up at us. His top left incisor was missing. ‘It’s my friend Salim!’ he said. He did not speak very clearly.

  At that moment a policeman in a blue uniform came round the side of the Guggenheim. He was looking to his right, at the loading-bay door, and not to his left, across the road at us.

  ‘Quick!’ said Salim, waving his arms. ‘Down!’ He crouched down on the pavement, his arms resting on his knees, and shuffled backwards until he was leaning against the black double door next to Billy. Kat copied him, and I did too.

  ‘On the run from the law?’ asked Billy. I wondered how he had lost his tooth.

  ‘The usual,’ said Salim, and he closed one eye at Billy. Salim was winking to show that he was joking with Billy.

  ‘I knew I liked you, Salim,’ said Billy.

  ‘How’s the morning been?’ asked Salim.

  ‘Not bad, not bad,’ said Billy, lifting his shoulders and twisting his face up. ‘Mostly police plates. Local. Got that Oregon one over there, though, and there was a van from Ohio at nine fifty-two.’

  ‘Billy collects cars – well, mostly he collects their number plates,’ said Sal
im to me and Kat.

  ‘Got ’em all in my book!’ said Billy, hitting it with his hand. ‘Got almost all the fifty states. Just waiting on Hawaii.’

  ‘Oh!’ said Kat, and her mouth made an O as well.

  Now I understood why Salim had brought us here. Billy wrote down the number plates of cars that passed him. He would have written down the number plate of the removal van yesterday, and we could use it to get to the painting.

  ‘What vans do you have in your book from …’ Salim paused.

  ‘Ten twenty-one onwards, yesterday morning,’ I said. That had been the moment the alarm went off. I had seen it on my weather watch.

  ‘That’s why we keep you around, Ted,’ said Salim, and he smiled at me. I was pleased.

  Billy opened the book and flicked through the pages. Salim raised his camera and took a picture of him while his head was bent, reading. Light and shade fell down across Billy’s body and the white page. I saw that it would be a good picture.

  ‘Black Toyota,’ he said. ‘Grey Chevrolet. Blue Toyota. White Chrysler. White Fiat Ducato. Fire trucks at ten thirty-two, but they came from downtown and parked off Fifth, so I just heard ’em, didn’t see ’em. Wait – ten thirty-four – here’s one. Green van. New York plate. NJK AND. I remember that one particularly: driver got out and loaded up a packing crate from the Guggenheim bay, then drove away again.’

  I felt my heart speed up in my chest.

  ‘That’s it!’ hissed Kat. ‘That’s the painting!’

  Our theory, and the police’s theory, had been partly proved: the removals company had taken away a packing crate. We were on the right track.

  ‘Did you notice anything about it – anything on the van?’ asked Salim.

  Billy narrowed his eyes at his notebook. ‘Yeah. There was a light bulb on the side, and it had a funny name … There it is. Effortless Light Removals. That help? What’s this about, anyway?’

  Salim’s mouth stretched into a very wide smile. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Just the painting that was stolen yesterday.’

  ‘No one tells me anything,’ said Billy.

  We had our first clue.

  Salim got up from his crouch to see if the policeman had gone. Then he nodded at us and stood all the way up. While Kat and I stretched, Salim pulled out his mobile phone and turned it on to call directory enquiries.

  ‘Hello,’ he said, his voice very flat and calm even though his face was upset. I watched him, trying to learn how to make my voice lie like that. ‘Can I have the telephone number and address for Effortless Light Removals?’

  I have noticed that New Yorkers do not say please. My theory is that they are moving too fast for it, just like those people in business suits were moving too fast to see Billy. That made me worry again about the speed of our investigation. What if we were too slow to solve the mystery in this city?

  While I was wondering this, Kat zipped open her backpack and pulled out her pen with tiger stripes and a notebook with pink and green flowers. She held them out to Salim, and he took them and wrote, leaning the notebook against Kat’s sparkly shoulder as he did so. Then Salim just hung up the phone (no saying thank you) and switched it off again so that Sandra could not call us. Then he turned to us, eyes wide.

  ‘They’re in Brooklyn,’ he said. ‘Water Street.’

  Kat folded her arms and stuck her chin out. This was the Kat I knew from the mystery of the London Eye, the Kat who had run halfway across London following leads, the Kat who did not let anything stop her. I knew this Kat, and I liked her.

  ‘Right,’ she said. ‘Salim, take us to Brooklyn.’

  TWENTY-ONE

  Brooklyn Weather

  To go to Brooklyn, we had to get on the subway.

  Here are some things I know about the New York subway. It is more than one hundred years old. It was opened in 1904, and it never stops. It runs twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, like an electrical circuit.

  I also know that the New York subway map is not like the London tube map. The tube map is topological, which means that it shows the relationships between stations, but not how far apart they really are. You always know how the station you are at connects to all the other stations, and that feels very sensible. But the New York subway map shows the true space between things.

  I had been looking at the subway map before we arrived in New York. I knew that the nearest lines to Aunt Gloria’s apartment, and the Guggenheim, were the Four, the Five and the Six trains, and the codes for them all are green circles with the numbers inside them (in London, green means the District line). But everything I had learned about the subway still did not prepare me for what it felt like to be in the subway itself.

  The London tube is tiled, and the stations where the trains pull in are smooth white parabolic curves that are perfect for holding the red and blue curves of the trains. The New York subway is concrete and metal. You can see all its wires, down the tracks into the black tunnels. Everything is shiny, and people’s voices echo around in it and make my head hurt. When I saw the station platform, I stepped backwards and my head went sideways. My arm began to flap.

  ‘Come on, Ted!’ said Kat. ‘It’s not so bad.’

  I took ten deep breaths. Then the metal turnstile bit down behind me and I was on the platform, just as a train shot into the station, its surface rippling with reflected strip lights. It was very hot, and people were talking. I saw an old man in a baseball hat with his lip hanging down and a stain on his collar. I saw a girl with her hair cut into a bright blue peak like a mountain. She had ear buds in and she was nodding along to something only she could hear. I saw a woman in high-heels running forward with a cup of coffee. A drop splashed on her arm, and she wiped it away. I tried to make the people around me into a pattern, so I could cope.

  When I finally stepped on the train, I thought about astronauts. I imagined that the silver train was a spaceship, and the blackness around us was as empty as space.

  ‘Hey, Ted,’ said Salim. ‘Look. We started at the 86th Street stop, and we’re counting downwards with the streets. The next one’s 59th Street, right, and then 51st. When we get to Bleecker Street, below 14th Street, we change trains.’

  I knew Salim was trying. I tried too, because we were on a quest. I sat the way he was, with my back against the seat and my legs stretched out, and watched ‘59’ becoming ‘51’ becoming ‘42’ becoming ‘33’. I listened to the rattle of the train’s wheels or the hiss of music coming from ten pairs of headphones or the old lady singing to herself in the window seat.

  ‘Ted!’ said Salim in my ear. ‘Time to change trains!’

  We crossed the platform, the hard white lights above us flickering.

  Then we took the F train (orange, like the Overground in London). This train rattled through three stations and suddenly burst out of the tunnel into bright light. We were on a bridge over a river. The bridge was brown metal and it made diamond patterns against the window as I stared out. It felt like being on Waterloo Bridge, and that was good. I was coping, and I was proud of myself.

  But when we stepped off the train, I thought that we had come out in a different city. We were in a construction site surrounded by big grey and brown warehouses. The bridge was above us, stretching back to New York (or forward, into Brooklyn, depending on how you looked at it), and in front of us the road was dirty, covered with torn paper and plastic bags and drinks cans. Even the sky looked more yellow. I knew that this was just an effect of the sun shining through pollution – it was a trick the sky was playing on me – but it still felt bad. Salim raised his camera and took a picture.

  ‘We’ve come to the wrong place,’ I whispered to Kat.

  ‘No we haven’t,’ she said. ‘This is Brooklyn. It’s just another part of New York. It’s just like being in … Stratford, Ted. Or Brixton. Or … Ealing Broadway. Before, we were in Manhattan, which is like – Russell Square, or Piccadilly Circus. It’s still all the same city, like London. Do you see?’

  Kat had made a
pattern in her head. She had laid out the map of New York and put a map of London on top of it – a topological map, not one that followed real geography. I was impressed. Kat was also seeing the world differently, and if Kat could do it, then so could I.

  So I let Salim lead us across the loud, dirty road and down a side street. We passed a yellow sign for a taxi service and a blue sign for costumes, and then I saw a green sign with a light bulb on it that read EFFORTLESS LIGHT REMOVALS. Little Guys, Big Plans read smaller words under it. That felt like a sign to me. Perhaps the universe was making a pattern after all.

  Salim pressed a buzzer. There was silence, a crackle, and then the door opened with a thump.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Oh, Honey

  We were in a dark stairwell, with seventeen steps leading up to a brown door. It opened and a woman’s face peered out. I was suddenly worried again. I remembered that we were somewhere we were not supposed to be, meeting people we did not know anything about. What if she had a gun? Americans always have guns in films.

  ‘Hello?’ she called down to us. She saw us, and then all her face appeared, along with her body, wearing a short black dress that was too small for her. She was white, with shiny brown hair and a small straight nose. ‘Hello!’ she said again. ‘Can I help you?’

  Kat nudged Salim. Salim nudged Kat.

  ‘We’re here because my aunt is being accused of stealing a painting, which she did not do,’ I explained. I thought I was being helpful, but then Kat kicked me and hissed, ‘TED!’ I remembered about lying, and that I am not very good at it.

  ‘What do you mean?’ asked the woman. She had an expression on her face that I couldn’t understand.

  ‘Don’t worry about him,’ said Kat loudly. ‘He doesn’t know what he’s talking about. We’ve been sent by Gloria.’

  The woman’s face changed. She said, ‘Oh, honey!’ She stretched her hands out towards us. ‘If Gloria sent you, come in.’