The Calder Game

by Blue Balliett

  They marched up to the wagon, trying to look as if they ordered police food every day.

  “I know, I know, you’re the Chicago kids,” the officer behind the lunch counter said, and made his eyes big and then squinty. “We heard about you on the walkie-talkies.”

  Petra elbowed Tommy not to say anything, and he didn’t. They studied the selection of sandwiches. “We’ll have a cheese-and-pickle and a chicken-and-tomato. And two hot chocolates,” she said, trying to sound like a busy person who ordered lunch all the time.

  The detective wouldn’t take money (“No, no, this is all paid for!”), so they thanked him politely and hurried off into one of the gardens.

  “Ha, you sounded just like Mrs. Sharpe!” Tommy crowed.

  “I tried,” Petra said, not insulted at all. “Here, how about this wall?”

  Neither realized, until they were eating, that they were facing a large and very bare bottom, a woman’s bottom attached to a statue in the fountain. There were plenty of bare, female bottoms in the Art Institute, in Chicago, but not too many out in the parks. Petra looked around. Here, bottoms were everywhere. There were even quite a few bare, male bottoms. Both Tommy and Petra pretended, as they ate, that they hadn’t noticed all the nakedness.

  After lunch, they walked toward the Queen Pool, as that part of the lake was called. If they crossed the Vanbrugh Bridge, the old one with arches, they should be able to find the well.

  Heading off into a clump of trees, relieved to be leaving the police and the nude bodies behind, they talked as if their talking was nothing astounding. So much had shifted since breakfast.

  “Maybe Calder went through the maze, and then …” Tommy’s voice trailed off. “Strange that no one remembers seeing him in the park with another person.”

  “I know, my mind just keeps hitting dead ends, too.” Petra sighed. “It’s hard not to imagine bad things.”

  “But doesn’t this place seem pretty safe to you? I mean, all the English stuff seems so — polite. Like everyone has good manners.”

  Petra laughed, remembering the bottoms. “I think people here just sound polite because we’re not used to their accents and some of their vocabulary. But I know what you mean, and I guess it is safer, statistically, than Chicago.”

  Just as she spoke, a man’s deep voice boomed nearby, and another shouted back. They heard the sounds of running feet and a boat engine. They broke into a trot, reached the top of a hill, and slithered down the bank to the crowd of police officers gathered near a small, blue police boat.

  From where they stood on a pile of rocks, both could see: Curled in the stern of the boat, wrapped in red blankets, was a body.

  As Tommy and Petra learned that day in Blenheim, passing time isn’t a steady thing. People try to measure it, but some days seem to have years packed into them, and others pass in the blink of an eye. Some days matter, and others don’t.

  That day in England was an endless one, a day filled with extraordinary glimpses and brightly colored shocks. It was a day neither kid ever forgot.

  It had started with Mrs. Sharpe treating them like adults, then there was Tommy’s coin, then they miraculously started to like and help each other. Now this: the body.

  Side by side on the bank of the Queen Pool, both felt as though they were falling out of their world and out of familiar time. No, falling wasn’t a fast enough word. They were hurtling.

  Calder … Calder dead … Calder under blankets … Calder.

  By the time they heard the word man coming from the police, both were weeping. Seeing the two of them frozen in place, faces crumpled, one of the officers walked over.

  “Now, now, no one’s dead,” he said consolingly. “At least not yet. No, it’s not your mate. It’s a man.”

  Petra sat down on a too-hard rock. Man, she thought, they found a man. Tommy busily blew his nose into a bush. Man, he thought, man, the word was a miracle. Both wiped their faces on sleeves and a number of other surfaces. Petra’s ponytail snagged on a branch, the elastic snapped, and she practically disappeared in a puff of black curls. The officer only shook his head.

  “Off you go, you two. We’ve a lot to do. Man’s in need of emergency treatment before we can get him back to town. Head injury, and not a pretty thing.” The officer’s voice went up and down in a matter-of-fact way, as if he were talking about groceries or an approaching rain shower.

  Petra and Tommy climbed the bank, silent and suddenly exhausted, and headed on shaky legs in the direction of the palace. Crossing the bridge to Rosamund’s Well was clearly not possible until the police had finished in the area. Neither kid had to speak to share; good and bad were so tangled that words wouldn’t help, at least not yet.

  She looked down at her shoes and Tommy’s shoes, walking, walking, walking, one step at a time … walking while some man lay injured in the boat.

  “Calder walking, I can’t wait to see Calder walking,” she said aloud.

  Tommy nodded. “I know,” he said. “Calder walking.”

  As they approached the palace, they saw Walter Pillay and Mrs. Sharpe in the distance. Mrs. Sharpe held onto Walter Pillay’s arm, which was bent at the elbow. They were headed for the Garden of the Bottoms.

  Petra and Tommy ran to catch up. They shared the news.

  “Really!” Mrs. Sharpe said. She stood up straighter.

  “My god,” Calder’s dad said in a weak voice. “Who was he? Was he conscious?”

  “Don’t know,” Petra said. “We were just so relieved — I mean …”

  “Yes,” Calder’s dad said quickly. “Of course.”

  “Come, let’s sit down and talk,” Mrs. Sharpe said. “There are seats in the Temple of Diana, and I’ve brought a couple of fresh Rock Buns. I know, dreadful name.” The old woman waved her walking stick in the direction of a small stone building, and off they went, the other three feeling relieved, at that moment, to be ordered around.

  Open on one side, the building looked like a tiny Greek temple. The four sat in a row inside, on a stone bench.

  Mrs. Sharpe spoke first. “This is where Winston Churchill asked his wife, Clementine, to marry him,” she said. “She remarked later that she was expecting he would, and while she waited, she watched a beetle crawling on the floor. She thought that if the beetle crossed a certain crack, he’d ask, and if it didn’t, he wouldn’t. It did.”

  Mrs. Sharpe’s businesslike voice was comforting. She pulled out a package wrapped in brown paper, and everyone shared the buttery scones.

  “Tommy and I were on our way to the bridge when we saw the body in the boat,” Petra said. “I mean the man.”

  “We’ve been trying to do exactly what we thought Calder would do here,” Tommy added. “We started at the maze.”

  “Reasonable,” Mrs. Sharpe said, surprising them all. She hardly ever sounded this uncritical.

  “How did you get those Chicago Police cards for us?” Petra asked, thinking it might be a good moment. “Were you really a private investigator?”

  “I’ve always investigated, and I’ve always been private,” Mrs. Sharpe snapped, her tone making it clear that the subject was closed.

  Petra nodded and swallowed.

  Walter Pillay, who had been quiet, cleared his throat. “Well, I’ve done some research.”

  There was a silence. The other three waited.

  “I started by finding out that Alexander Calder’s Minotaur was privately owned before it was given to Woodstock and then installed in the square three weeks ago. Although the donor wanted to remain anonymous, I did some backdoor digging, and managed to find out who had it for the past ten years: It was a man by the name of Arthur Wish.”

  Tommy and Petra both said, “WISH-WISH!” in the same breath, and then elbowed each other. Mrs. Sharpe said nothing, but one eyebrow rose slowly.

  “And guess what,” Walter Pillay went on. “He lives in Chicago. Or lived: No one seems to know where he is. He hasn’t appeared in public for at least a couple of years, and peo
ple in his foundation explained that he travels, communicates by computer, and is rarely available.”

  “Foundation?” This was Mrs. Sharpe.

  “Oh, yes. He’s a millionaire, perhaps even a billionaire, and collects modern art. He owns many, many Calder sculptures and mobiles; I believe he has one of the largest private collections in the United States.

  “He started a foundation called Free Art: Share It! five years ago. The idea was to make art available to everyone — he donated the funds that made it possible to offer the Calder show at the MCA without charging admission. And he gave a great deal of money that went into organizing the show, and even setting up the Take Five room. He believes that the art world is stuffy, and that too much of it is about having money and making money, not celebrating the experience of art. As he put it, he wanted to help give art back to the people, especially to children. He’s put lots into community programs that invite kids to experience and make art in their own ways. And believe it or not, that’s his real name: Arthur — or Art — Wish.”

  “Art Wish!” Petra said, delighted.

  “Wonderful name,” Mrs. Sharpe said slowly. Tommy nodded.

  Walter Pillay went on, “I heard from Isabel Hussey this morning that your teacher Ms. Button has been back to the Calder show many times, on her own. She apparently noticed a drawing for an anonymous mobile that consists of a plan to place five Alexander Calder sculptures in five different public spaces around the world. One would be in England, and the other four in Japan, Chile, Turkey, and Russia.”

  “Whoa!” Petra said. “What an idea!”

  “The Button? Back at the museum? What’s gotten into her?” Tommy asked, his face a study in both alarm and surprise.

  Mrs. Sharpe waved at them to be quiet.

  Walter Pillay continued, “The entire mobile would be visible and complete once the five sculptures were donated and installed. There’s a sketch of one of the sculptures on the sheet of paper, and guess what? It’s a drawing of the Minotaur, with the words ‘Market Square, Woodstock, England.’”

  Mrs. Sharpe thumped her cane twice on the stone floor of the temple, but didn’t interrupt him. Petra’s and Tommy’s mouths were open.

  He went on, “I also found out that Art Wish loved to visit England and admired some of their forward-thinking ideas about art. For instance, museums in England charge no admission fee these days, making art far more available.

  “Then I found, from reading interviews online, that there is one modern artist in particular that Art Wish admired. His name is Banksy, and he’s British.

  “People either love him or hate him. He’s an expert troublemaker, and the strange thing is that he could be anyone. He doesn’t, you see, have a face.”

  Noticing Tommy’s and Petra’s horrified expressions, Walter Pillay added quickly, “Nobody knows what he looks like. He’s somehow managed to protect his identity.”

  “Ohh,” Tommy said, looking relieved. “So he could be pretending to be someone else. He could be anyone.”

  “Exactly, and he could be anywhere,” Walter Pillay said.

  “He could be the man in the boat,” Petra murmured.

  “Exactly,” Walter Pillay said again. “Banksy started out as a graffiti artist, and of course that’s illegal. It’s considered vandalism in most countries, at least by law. But he’s talented and witty and has some powerful ideas about giving art back to the people, about defying mindless authority. He also has a wicked sense of humor. He creates things, sometimes crazy, funny things, to make people stop and think and question. In 2005, he made four small pieces of art, and over a number of days smuggled them into four major museums in New York City. He stuck them all up on the wall without getting caught. Then he managed to have photographs taken — he must have been working with a friend or assistant — and recorded how long it was before his ‘fakes’ were spotted and taken down.

  “Each of his pieces of art made fun of the traditions of a particular museum, but in a subtle way: For the Metropolitan Museum, there was an old-fashioned portrait of a lovely woman with a gas mask on her face, and for the Museum of Modern Art, a plain image of a British soup can. The Brooklyn Museum was given a painting of a colonial American soldier holding a spray-paint can, with anti-war graffiti visible behind him. At the Museum of Natural History, Banksy hung a real beetle equipped with fighter wings and missiles, elegantly displayed in a glass case. The one at the Metropolitan was only up for two hours, but the others were up for six days, eight days, and an amazing twelve! Maybe that says something about how carefully most people look at what they see in museums.

  “Banksy’s comment was that he hated the way museum art was selected by a rich few, people with money who decided what made a piece of art worth looking at or owning. He thought art should also be by the people, for the people, and free.

  “No one seems to know if Banksy and Art Wish have ever met, but Art Wish clearly loved what Banksy was saying, and wanted to join in, in his own way. His intent was to give away some of the museum art he owned, and give it away so that it was accessible to the public. And he apparently wanted the local people to decide if a sculpture belonged in a certain place. He wasn’t going to force his ideas on anyone.

  “And the people in Woodstock …” Walter Pillay paused, and seemed to be choosing his words. “It’s very sad, really. As far as I can see, they didn’t want the sculpture. Except, perhaps, for one girl.”

  Calder’s dad scratched his head. “Calder and I saw her taking pictures of the Minotaur late one afternoon. And then we saw her get in trouble with her father, even though she pretended just to be drawing the sculpture when he showed up. Somehow, she seemed intensely interested in it, and he didn’t want her to be.

  “The afternoon that I saw Calder in the square talking with a man, I was about to get off the bus and I happened to see this same girl taking another picture of the Minotaur, but out of a second-story window. Her photograph must have included Calder and the man, and I thought she might have caught the man’s face. Since no one’s been able to identify him, it could be important — very important.

  “And then I saw her duck out of the bed-and-breakfast this morning. I’m afraid I frightened her by leaping out the front door and shouting.” Walter Pillay paused, and shook his head. “Strangest thing, but she turns out to be a cousin of Miss Knowsley’s. I can’t get her to talk, or to give me her name. And Miss Knowsley just looked flustered when I asked. She didn’t answer, either.

  “The girl seemed nervous and worried when I asked about the photo, and wouldn’t look me in the face. She whispered something like, ‘No film in the camera. I was just practicing.’

  “Then I asked her if she knew the man in the square, and she shook her head violently and ran off.” Calder’s dad shrugged and held his hands palm up. “I suppose the next step is to point her out to the police, but I’d hate to get her in trouble with her dad, who seemed like quite a brute. I’ll bet he didn’t know she had the camera. Funny little thing, she only seems to wear black.”

  Everyone stayed silent, thinking about this latest piece of news. Petra was frowning, thinking back to the girl in black who seemed to be eavesdropping when she and Tommy were in the town square talking yesterday. Could it be the same girl? She hadn’t seemed quite as innocent to Petra.

  Walter Pillay sighed. “So, back to what I did manage to find out: Arthur Wish has a tragic past. He married early and had two children. His entire family was killed years ago in a terrible car accident. He never married again, and apparently has been somewhat reclusive right up to the point at which he became unavailable. It does seem, though, that he’s still alive. Otherwise, who could have given the Minotaur to Woodstock? Unfortunately, I can’t seem to get any deeper into his personal history than that. Like Banksy, he’s learned to protect his privacy.”

  “So who stenciled WISH-WISH on the market square the night the Minotaur was stolen?” Tommy asked.

  “The Thames Valley Police suspect Banksy,
although I imagine that’s all wrong. Stealing a huge piece of art isn’t something he’d do, as far as I can tell.”

  “But why would a real criminal bother with painting the WISH-WISH?” Mrs. Sharpe mused. “Doesn’t seem likely.”

  “You mean it might have been done by someone local, someone who didn’t like the sculpture.”

  “Possible, although no one in Woodstock was supposed to know the donor’s name. And if it was someone local, why would they want to deface their precious town square with graffiti? It doesn’t make sense.” Mrs. Sharpe was fiddling with her gold bracelet, sliding it off and on her wrist.

  “Well, here’s what I think,” Walter Pillay said. “The sculpture disappearing must be some kind of game. Art Wish was playing the Calder Game when he shared his marvelous plan to give away five Calders, but he must have been a philanthropist who had many enemies. Someone bold always does. Perhaps the wrong person in Chicago, someone besides Ms. Button, saw the Calder Game mobile that Mr. Wish made and decided to jump in for personal reasons. Maybe they came to Woodstock and are here now. Maybe they’re playing their own Calder Game.”

  “Hey, maybe Art Wish had some secrets that weren’t so nice,” Tommy said. “Something he did a long time ago. Sometimes that happens, an old crime catches up with a person.”

  Mrs. Sharpe gave Tommy a piercing look. “Very astute, boy. Close to my own thoughts.”

  Tommy sucked in his cheeks and looked at the ground.

  “So … if my Calder got roped into some kind of game, and it felt important enough, that could explain his being gone. And if it was a game, he’ll be fine — even if it was some game that was meant to make fun of Art Wish. I can’t imagine anyone would want to organize anything seriously bad here, can you?”

  The question hung in the air as a police car drove slowly toward the temple and stopped in front. The officer driving rolled down his window. “Got news, Mr. Pillay. Not about your son, I’m afraid,” he added quickly, seeing Walter Pillay’s eager expression.