Framed!

by James Ponti

  “You said that?”

  “Of course I did,” I replied.

  “That’s really sweet,” she said. “But trust me when I say that nothing stays secret in Washington. It may just be passed along as a whisper or rumor, but people will find out. They’ll find out because they’ll be desperate. Because no one else will be able to help them. That’s when they’ll come looking for us.”

  “Us?”

  “Yeah, us,” she said. “I’m going to be your partner. You’re great with clues, but let’s face it, your people skills are lacking.”

  “What’s wrong with my people skills?” I asked incredulously.

  “That’s the beauty of it. You don’t have to worry about what’s wrong with your people skills because I’ve got it covered,” she said. “I’ll also help you with the investigating. I’ve gotten pretty good at TOAST. If we work together, there’s no mystery we can’t solve.”

  “I can’t tell if you’re joking or not.”

  She gave me a look. “No joke. In fact, we’ve already gotten our first case.”

  “We have? Who’s the client?”

  Her expression changed and she forced a little smile. “Me.”

  “And what mystery do you want solved? Because if you want me to spy on the team you guys are playing in the finals I’m going to have to say no.”

  “It’s nothing like that,” she said. “I don’t need your help to win a soccer game.”

  “Then what do you need it for?”

  “I want you to find my parents. My birth parents. I want you to find out who they are and why they abandoned me at the fire station.”

  This caught me completely off guard and the mood took a sudden turn from silly to serious. I didn’t know what to say.

  “When we were in the SUV with Agent Rivers, he knew everything about you,” she continued. “He knew your birthday. The name of the hospital where you were born. He knew your entire history. But he skipped over those parts with me. That’s because even the FBI can’t figure out where I come from. But you can, Florian. If anyone can do it, it’s you.”

  “I think it’s really dangerous,” I said.

  “No one’s going to hurt us.”

  “Not dangerous like that,” I explained. “But you might find out something bad. You might find out something you don’t really want to know.”

  “This isn’t something I just came up with. I’ve wanted to know this my whole life. Believe me, I’m glad they gave me up. I love my parents, but I’m incomplete. Like a book with the first chapter torn out. I need to know. . . .”

  I realized there was only one answer I could give her.

  “Okay. I’ll do it.”

  “Really?” she said excitedly.

  “Yes,” I said. “I’ll look for your parents.”

  “You’re not going to look for them, Florian,” she said. “You’re going to find them.”

  I didn’t want to make a promise I couldn’t keep, but she was persuasive. “Yes. I’ll find them.”

  There was that big smile again. The one I saw the first day we met.

  “But I can’t work on it today,” I added. “I’ve got to go back to the National Gallery. I’m still trying to figure out something about the robbery.”

  “Okay,” she said, doing a pretty bad job of masking her disappointment. “I’ll see you later then.”

  I swallowed my last spoonful of cereal and got up to rinse the bowl in the sink. “Why later? Aren’t you coming with me to the museum?”

  “I thought the FBI stuff was all top secret.”

  “Yeah, well, I thought you just said we were partners.”

  And that’s where it became official. As I rinsed my bowl in the sink. Florian Bates Investigations was born.

  13.

  Nerds United

  “SO WHY ARE WE GOING to the museum?” Margaret asked as we walked from the Metro station toward the National Gallery. “What are we looking for?”

  “I’m not sure . . . but something,” I answered, not meaning to sound so mysterious. “It just doesn’t add up for me. Like the time I built the Death Star out of Legos. It looked good. Everything fit together. But I still had pieces left over. Turns out I’d skipped an entire level with a docking bay.”

  She flashed a smile. “Death Stars and docking bays. You really are a nerd, aren’t you?”

  “Nerds make the world go round,” I said proudly.

  “Yes, we do,” she replied. “But I don’t know what leftover pieces there could possibly be. We identified Novak’s picture and know that he’s back in the Czech Republic. All that’s here are the paintings, and you already found those.”

  “I just think we may have missed something.”

  She gave me a look. “And by ‘we,’ you actually mean the FBI, the crime scene unit, and museum security?”

  “Yeah,” I said sheepishly. “That’s how it goes with TOAST. You have to look for the crumbs, too.”

  When we entered the museum, we saw a crush of people in the rotunda and Margaret asked, “Is it my imagination, or is it more crowded than usual?”

  “It’s not your imagination at all,” I answered. “Today’s the first day they’ve reopened the two rooms where the pictures were stolen. Mom said attendance is expected to be high for a couple weeks. I guess everyone’s suddenly interested in art.”

  “Either that or they think they’re smarter than the FBI and can uncover some clue the experts missed,” she said with a sly grin.

  “Who would be crazy enough to believe that?” I replied as we both laughed.

  Unfortunately, the crowds were the biggest in the rooms where we wanted to go. Our first stop was Gallery 83, which is where we saw Novak the first time, when he was asleep on the couch.

  “Two paintings were stolen from here: The Dance Class by Edgar Degas and Girl in White by Vincent van Gogh,” I said as I pointed to each, both now back where they belonged on each side of the door.

  “And Novak was sleeping, or at least pretending to sleep, here,” Margaret added as she sat down on the couch right where we saw him. I sat next to her and we scanned the room, looking at what he would have seen that day.

  Margaret noticed a guard standing in the corner of the room.

  “Was there a guard in here before?” she asked, motioning to the guard in the corner.

  I leaned over and whispered to her, “I don’t think he’s actually a guard. I think he’s FBI. Agent Rivers said they’re going to keep a heightened presence here to see if anyone suspicious returns to the scene of the crime.”

  We both got a charge from the undercover feel of it all.

  “But that day there wasn’t anyone there?”

  “Not permanently,” I said. “Each guard normally rotates between three or four rooms, which is probably why Novak was here in the first place. He wanted to figure out the pattern.”

  “So he pretends to sleep and runs his video camera for about thirty minutes, which gives him a good sense of their schedule,” she replied. “But how does he find out when the security system is going to be upgraded? Does he overhear someone talking about it?”

  “No way,” I said. “Information like that is kept secret. The guards probably didn’t even know it was going to happen until a day or two before. My guess is that his partner found that out.”

  “Partner? You mean the guy who dressed up as the other custodian?”

  “That would make sense,” I replied. “He has to have some sort of inside connection to get the custodian’s uniform. Maybe that same connection is how he found out about the security system.”

  “Which means it could be someone who works here at the museum,” she said.

  “That’s a definite possibility. Somehow the thief knew they were going to reset the security system at exactly one fifteen in the morning.”

  “Does the FBI think there was an insider?”

  “If so, they didn’t share that with me,” I said. “But I do know Agent Rivers is here investigating today
. Maybe that’s why.”

  “We should say hi.”

  “Covert asset,” I reminded her. “If I see him in public, I’m supposed to act like I don’t know him. You too.”

  I opened up a little notebook and drew a diagram of the room, making sure to mark where each picture hung and the locations of the three doorways. I wanted to have notes to refer to later at home.

  “So explain this to me,” she said.

  “What?”

  “If you’re already on the inside and know when the entire security system is going to be reset, then why do you even need to have someone study the guards? And why do you go to the trouble of flying that person all the way from the Czech Republic and making him change his identity?”

  “That’s the part that doesn’t make sense to me,” I answered. “He’s supposed to be an expert art thief, but you don’t use him to actually steal the paintings. It’s like having LeBron James on your basketball team but only having him sell hot dogs. If they just needed surveillance, I’m sure they could have found someone else. He must have had another job, something more specialized that made it worth bringing him here.”

  “I bet Paul and Vince know,” she said.

  “Who?”

  “Gauguin and Van Gogh,” she replied, pointing at their self-portraits in the room. “I bet they saw it all, but they’re keeping it a secret just like they kept the secret of who cut off Van Gogh’s ear.”

  I turned to look at her for a moment and said, “You’re really a nerd too.”

  We shared a smile and it dawned on me that Margaret was the first friend I had with whom I could truly be myself. Next we went into Gallery 85, which is where we’d seen Novak painting the copy of Woman with a Parasol and where Renoir’s Child with Toys was stolen. Like the first room, this one was more crowded than usual and had a guard (possibly an agent) stationed in the corner keeping an eye on things.

  “And this is where he posed as a copyist,” said Margaret.

  “He wasn’t posing,” I reminded her. “He may have lied about his name, but his copy of the painting was amazing. He’s supertalented. Agent Rivers says that he was a star student at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague.”

  She gave me a confused look. “How does a talented artist get involved with criminals?”

  “It’s hard to make a living as a painter,” I reasoned. “Maybe someone offered him too much money to pass up.”

  “Okay, then let’s rephrase the question,” she said. “How does an art thief from the Czech Republic even meet someone with an inside connection to a museum in Washington?”

  “That’s a great question. It could be like my parents. After all, my mom’s from Italy, and my dad’s from Boston.”

  “How’d they meet?”

  I smiled at the memory of a story I’d heard many times. “She was working at a small museum in Rome, and went to an international conference in London to give a speech about techniques in art conservation. My dad was at the same conference and was supposed to attend a presentation about motion detectors but walked into the wrong room by mistake. He was just about to leave when she stood up to give her talk.”

  “And when he saw her he decided to stay?” Margaret asked.

  “Exactly,” I replied. “A week later that small museum in Rome was really surprised when an American security expert offered an amazingly low price to come and consult about their new alarm system. It took him two weeks of consulting to finally work up the courage to ask her out.”

  Margaret laughed. “Nicely played, Mr. B. So do you think the same thing could have happened here? One of the conservators or curators or security people was in Europe going to a conference and bumped into Novak by accident? They get to know each other and instead of getting married like your parents, they decide to commit a felony.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “But here’s another question for you. Why paint Woman with a Parasol instead of The Japanese Footbridge?”

  “What’s The Japanese Footbridge?” she asked.

  “That picture,” I said, pointing at another painting. “It’s also by Monet. If you copy it, you’re facing two doorways and can see who comes and goes. But Woman with a Parasol is in the corner. When he painted it, he was looking away from everything.”

  “You’re right,” she said. “The other picture seems like the smarter option.”

  “Unless it wasn’t about the room,” I countered. “Maybe this was about access. The copyists keep their supplies and canvases on the same floor where my mother’s studio is. It’s just down the hall from the security center.”

  “So that lets him get downstairs where the public normally can’t go,” Margaret says, picking up on my train of thought. “Maybe that’s when he snoops around and finds out about the security system being reset.”

  I thought this through for a moment.

  “That’s good,” I said. “He goes down there every morning to pick up all his stuff and back again in the evening to put it away. He does a little spy work along the way.”

  “Although it’s hard to sneak around carrying a canvas and all those paints,” joked Margaret.

  I know she was joking, but it was a good point. And it made me think of something. “Wait a second,” I said, suddenly excited. “You’re absolutely right. Paintings are big and bulky.”

  She gave me a blank look. “I hate it when I’m right and I don’t know why. It means I don’t get to gloat about it.”

  I flashed a huge grin. “How did you know my dad borrowed his golf clubs when he was in California?”

  “What?” she said, now totally confused.

  “The time you figured out that my dad had played golf in California. How did you know he’d borrowed somebody else’s golf clubs?”

  “Because he wasn’t carrying any clubs when he came home,” she said. “Why is that important?”

  “That’s the hardest clue to find,” I said. “The clue that’s a clue because it’s missing, not because it’s there.”

  “And . . . ?” she asked.

  “What wasn’t Novak carrying at the airport?” I said, piecing it together.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “He had a suitcase, a backpack”—she smiled and I knew she had it—“but he didn’t have the painting. He didn’t have his copy of Woman with a Parasol. Something that beautiful that you spent eight days painting, you’d bring home with you, right?”

  “I would,” I said.

  “Although he could have just shipped it home in the mail,” she said. “I don’t know if you bring something like that on a plane.”

  “That’s true,” I said. “But think about what we were just saying. He had a special talent worth bringing him all the way from Eastern Europe. What if that talent was his ability to paint? What if he didn’t ship it? What if he never took it out of the museum?”

  We both looked at the painting on the wall.

  “You think that’s his copy on the wall?” she asked.

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. But I think it could be.”

  We walked over and studied the painting, looking for any hint that it might be a forgery. I leaned forward until I was just inches from it. That’s when the guard cleared his throat to get my attention.

  “Back up,” he said firmly.

  “Sorry,” I replied. “It’s just beautiful, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah,” he replied. “But it’s just as beautiful from farther back.”

  I stepped away and he turned his attention to the rest of the room.

  “What do you think?” Margaret whispered. “Is it a forgery?”

  “I don’t know. I’m not an art expert,” I said. “Luckily I know someone who is.”

  I started dialing as we walked toward the elevator. I called Agent Rivers and he told us to stay in my mother’s studio until all of her coworkers were gone. He wanted it to look like we were just waiting for her to finish so we could go home together. It was all part of the plan to keep my involvement hidden. The last person left arou
nd five forty-five, and a few minutes later he arrived. He’d been in the security center, so there was nothing suspicious about him being at the museum.

  “Okay,” he said as he locked the door to assure our privacy. “What’s your big discovery?”

  “It’s not a discovery so much as a theory,” I said, trying to lower his expectations. “But I think maybe four paintings were stolen.”

  Rivers and my mom shared a confused look before turning their attention to me.

  “What’s the fourth painting?” he asked.

  “Woman with a Parasol,” I said.

  “Woman with a Parasol is in Gallery Eighty-Five,” Mom replied. “I saw it this morning.”

  “Yes, but what if it was a copy?” I suggested. “What if you saw the copy that Novak painted?”

  I could see Rivers start to run the idea through his head.

  “It would explain why they went to the trouble of bringing him here,” Margaret added. “Studying the guards was just a side job. The main reason he was involved was so that he could paint the forgery.”

  All eyes turned to Margaret.

  “I’m the partner,” she said proudly. “We figured this part out together.”

  Rivers chuckled and shook his head.

  “Why go to all that trouble?” Mom asked. “Why not just put it with the other paintings in the recycling?”

  “It’s too big,” I said. “Even without the frame it wouldn’t have fit in the recycling bundler.”

  “And you’re basing this on what?” asked Rivers. “You can tell that it’s a forgery?”

  “No,” I said. “It’s just a theory.”

  He considered this for a moment. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s go have a look.”

  We all went up to the main floor, my mom carrying her bag like she was going home. If anyone noticed us it would just look like we were leaving for the day. We stopped in Gallery 85. Rivers made sure no one was around while my mother examined the picture closely.

  “So?” he asked her. “Could it be fake?”