Tales of the Talking Picture

by Tom Slemen

  "Please come downstairs Juliette. I beg of you; just until you feel better." Alain stroked her hand.

  The girl relented. "Okay."

  Alain led her out of the flat with his arm curled around her. As they descended the stairs, they encountered Jean-Louis and Claude coming up. Claude carried a magnum of champagne.

  "Oh, I didn't know you were entertaining the young lady," said Jean-Louis, and he smiled insincerely at Juliette.

  "What's up?" said Alain, suspiciously.

  "We just wanted to discuss business," said Claude, trying dismally to be discreet, “That type of stuff.”

  "Business?" said Alain, He smiled at Juliette, then glanced back at a serious-looking Claude.

  "Yes. Confidential business," said Claude.

  "Its okay, Claude. We're all friends here," said Alain. He introduced Juliette to his partners in crime. "Juliette, this is Jean-Louis, and this secretive young man is Claude."

  "How do you do?" Juliette nodded at each of them, and they all went inside Alain’s flat.

  "Now, what's this business you were talking about?" Alain searched for three glasses in the junk of his badly-lit kitchen.

  "Well, er, me and Jean-Louis were thinking about the feasibility of a bank heist. You see there is this empty shop next to the Emerie Capital Bank on the Rue Maublanc. Now, if we were to blow our way through the wall of the shop into the bank - " Claude was saying.

  "Never mind the technical details," Alain came out of the kitchen bearing three clinking wine glasses. "What's the bottom line? How much?"

  "I'm not sure. Perhaps half a million Francs?" Claude expected Alain to show some interest, but his friend just handed him a glass in a placid sort of manner. It was so uncharacteristic of him.

  "So, we take it you're not interested?" said Jean-Louis, popping the champagne cork.

  "No. I want big takings. Mega-takings." Alain replied. He sat next to Juliette on the edge of his bed. He seemed pensive all of a sudden.

  Juliette was excited by the big talk. She held her glass out and Jean-Louis filled it. "What have you got in mind, Alain? Some big robbery, like Spaggiari's?"

  "Better than Spaggiari, " said Alain, “bigger than Spaggiari!”

  "Hey, where’s your glass? Aren’t you drinking?" Claude asked Alain.

  "No thanks my friend, It dulls the mind, and I need to think.” Alain stood up, then began pacing up and down near the window.

  "So what's this grand plan of yours?" said Jean-Louis, sarcastically.

  "I want to steal La Gioconda," said Alain, without a break in his pacing, “And that’s just for starters.”

  "The Mona Lisa? No, come on, seriously. What's the plan?" said Jean-Louis. He gulped a glass of champagne, poured another, and waited for a reply.

  "I'm serious. I want the most valuable work of art in the world." Alain stopped pacing and stared out the window.

  "She's also the most heavily-guarded work of art in the world. How on earth could we take her? And even, if by some miracle, we somehow managed to steal her, what would we do with her? No one would take her off our hands. She' s too well-kown," reasoned Jean-Louis, and he shook his head and drank more champagne.

  "Here’s the plan. Are you all paying attention?" Alain turned away from the window.

  "Yeah, yeah. " laughed Jean-Louis. He shook his head again and said to an intrigued Juliette, "I've got to hear this."

  "Quiet," said Juliette, "Go on, Alain."

  "A couple of years ago, the Mona Lisa was taken to the United States for a short exhibition, and she was assessed for insurance purposes at three hundred million dollars. She is exhibited at the Louvre off the main Picture Gallery known as the Salle des Etats, where she hangs behind bullet-proof glass in an alcove where the very air around her is humidity-regulated and temperature-controlled to the decimal point. The only obstacle to the would-be art thief is the small army of security guards stationed around the salons and galleries of the building. But I have thought of something that should take care of them. Now, as Jean-Louis has pointed out, no receiver in his right mind would handle the world's hottest painting. But that's irrelevant. We tell the authorities this is a kidnap situation, and we demand the ransom. Or La Giaconda is rubbed down with turpentine."

  "Magnificent," said Juliette, She became excited at the thought of the Mona Lisa being barbarically erased. She hated old art. Her heroes were Warhol, Dali and Magritte.

  "No, no. I wouldn't harm the painting. But the authorities don't know that. They'd just pay up," Alain explained.

  "This is all very hypothetical," said Claude, "But what do we do about the, guards?"

  "We put them to sleep, " Alain sat on the bed next to Juliette and rubbed his temple. He had a slight headache.

  "With gas?" said Claude.

  Alain shook his head. "No. I've thought of an electronic device that will incapacitate the security men and the police."

  "Eh?" Jean-Louis knew that Alain was hopeless with anything remotely connected to electrical hardware. He couldn’t even wire a fused plug correctly.

  "This may sound a little technical, but please try and concentrate. It is a scientific fact that there are four basic wave patterns in the human brain associated with definite mental states. These four brainwaves are known as beta, alpha, theta and delta waves patterns, Everybody still following me?" Alain paused and waited impatiently for a reply.

  "Yeah, yeah, go on," said Juliette, leaning towards him.

  "The beta brainwave has a frequency of thirteen to thirty cycles a second, and occurs when the brain is in an alert state. When a man is in a state of poised relaxation, his brain generates alpha waves. When he starts to drop off, when he is drowsy, or has had too much to drink, his brain will produce theta waves. Now, when he is asleep, the theta waves slow down to become delta waves, which have a sluggish frequency of zero point five to four cycles per second. The delta wave frequency is the frequency of deep dreamless sleep."

  "Talking of sleep; will you get to the point before we all drop off?" said Jean-Louis. He faked a sizable yawn.

  "Now, it is another scientific fact that these waves can be made to occur in the head of person by transmitting high-powered radio signals into his brain." Alain smiled, as if he were enjoying a private joke. "Get it now?"

  "I think so." said Juliette, with a half-baffled look.

  "I think you're drunk,” said Jean-Louis. His lack of comprehension made him feel inferior, and Juliette's presence made that complex worse.

  "Imagine if we had a transmitter that could induce delta waves in people. We'd be able to send them into a deep sleep. No violence. No gas or guns.“ Alain waited for the response from the other three. They still seemed to have difficulty grasping the concept.

  "But we don’t have a transmitter, Alain," said Claude.

  "No, but we will tomorrow. In the morning, you and Jean-Louis will visit the electrical shop on the Rue de Rouselle and purchase all the electronic components we need to construct the transmitter." Alain tore a blank page from the end papers of the neurostimulator manual. He folded the page, tore it in two, then went to the wardrobe and took two pens from the jacket hanging there. "Here are the lists." Alain wrote simultaneously on both scraps of paper with a pen in each hand.

  "Are you ambidextrous?" Juliette asked him.

  "Yes," said Alain, without hesitating as he scribbled.

  Jean-Louis and Claude looked on at their friend, amazed.

  At 10 a. m. on the following morning, Claude and Jean-Louis went to get all the electronic components and bits and pieces from the electrical store, and Alain went to the public library with Juliette for a couple of hours to feed his data addiction.

  Just before noon, Alain returned to his flat and found Claude and Jean-Louis watching the horseracing on the TV. Jean-Louis had put the last of the money from the safe job on the favourite, but the horse was literally pipped at the post by a 50-1 outsider.

  Alain checked the purchased components, then began his work. He chos
e to start constructing the delta-wave transmitter on an ironing board in a quiet corner of the kitchen.

  "How long will it take to make this thing?" Claude asked.

  "Two to three hours," said Alain, plugging the soldering iron into an AC outlet.

  "Haven't you got a circuit diagram to work from?" said Claude, inching his way to the ironing board with his hands in his pockets. He had nothing to do, and the ennui was killing him.

  "The plans are in my head. Go and watch TV and stop bothering me," Alain said, in an emotionless voice.

  Claude frowned like a scolded schoolkid and left the kitchen.

  "What did you read at the library?" Juliette asked. She had spent the time at the library browsing through the pop art books.

  "Three books on cosmology." Alain inserted three microchips into a vero-board and touched the tip of the soldering iron with a length of solder. The solder sizzled and produced a small cloud of smoke. The iron was hot enough to begin.

  "Cosmology? Isn' t that something to do with the universe?" said Juliette, who was something of a New Age disciple.

  "It's the study of the universe as a system," said Alain, reading from the vivid page of memorised text in his head.

  "I wonder how it all began? The universe, that is? Why are we all here? Why do we exist?" said Juliette, in one of her philosophical moods.

  The question had a profound effect on Alain. He stopped soldering the microchips into the board, and stared at the wall with his mouth half open. He shuddered once, and put his hand over his brow.

  "What's wrong? Headache?" Juliette came over to him and looked into his eyes. They seemed dead. They just stared at her, lifelessly.

  "It's nothing," Alain continued with the soldering.

  Two hours and fifteen minutes later, Alain had completed the construction of his original device, and showed his odd-looking machine to the rest of the gang. The delta-wave transmitter's circuitry was housed in a round biscuit tin, and a thick coaxial wire ran from the tin to a small tubular device set in a parabolic reflector that had been removed from an electric fire. The other wire that ran from the biscuit tin led to a plug that Claude had the honour of inserting into the mains outlet, Alain also showed the group two strips of copper dotted with small electrical coils, and explained that Jean-Louis and Claude would have to wear these bands on their heads at all times during the art raid so that they wouldn’t succumb to the sleep-inducing waves that would be beamed at the Louvre. The bands acted as a shield to the delta-waves.

  "Won’t you have to wear one of those bands too?" asked Jean-Louis.

  "No. I will be operating the machine, I won't be at the scene of the crime," Alain replied in a confident tone.

  Jean-Louis shook his head. "That thing'd better work."

  "We'll have to try it out to see how quickly the waves take effect," said Alain, and he positioned the machine near the window.

  Claude went to the window with him and stared down into the narrow street at the people below. He pointed to the gendarme who was walking down the street towards a busker. "Here goes." Alain opened the window and pointed the curved reflector at the policeman. With his other hand, he flicked on the toggle switch mounted on the biscuit tin. The faint buzzing of the machine's mains transformer could suddenly be heard as the device powered up.

  Down in the street, the policeman halted in front of the busker, who had now stopped playing. The gendarme went to caution the busker, but suddenly gave a tremendous yawn, then fell to his knees. He then fell forward, almost landing flat on his face. A few seconds later, the busker put down his guitar and sat on the floor with his drowsy head bowed for a moment. A crowd of bemused and curious bystanders looked on at the busker and the policeman who were now curled up on the pavement. The policeman started to snore. One member of the crowd looked about, suspiciously, suspecting his reaction to the strange event was being filmed for some hidden-camera TV show.

  "Ha! Ha! It works!" cried Claude. The crowd looked up at Alain’s window.

  "Quiet, you fool. Okay, the test's over." Alain switched the machine off and closed the window. Down below, the innocent victims of the delta-wave transmitter continued to slumber.

  "So, when do we put the plan into action?" Claude asked. His eyes shone with devilish glee.

  "Tomorrow, if possible," said Alain, unplugging the sleep machine from the mains. "We will need to move to a location within five hundred metres of the Louvre, and the location would obviously have to be as high as possible s for a wider coverage area."

  "We could book into a hotel,” Claude suggested.

  "No, wait. How high does the location have to be?" Juliette asked Alain.

  "Around rooftop level," Alain told her.

  "My friend Monique has a place on the Right Bank, a mere stone's throw from the Louvre. I could ask her if I could use her garret for my artwork."

  "But then there'll be five of us," said Jean-Louis, "And no disrespect for your friend, Juliette, but is she trustworthy?"

  "Yes!" Juliette's pale blue indignant eyes gazed like cold steel at the man from Marseilles, "She’s eighty-seven years of age, and she's known me since I was a child. I'd trust her with my life."

  At five-thirty-five that afternoon, the telephone on the desk of Inspector Charroux rang. The inspector had just suspended his paperwork to go across the street for a well-earned sandwich and a coffee, and was just about to leave his stuffy office. He walked back to his desk cursing the phone and grabbed the receiver.

  "Inspector Charroux."

  "I have just heard on the radio that there is a reward for information leading to the arrest of the gang who blew Professor Goldstein's safe," said Michelle Arouet, Claude's ex-girlfriend.

  "Yes, go on," said Charroux, grabbing a ballpoint. He rapidly flicked through his notebook for a blank page on which he could take down the details.

  Michelle told the policeman everything Claude had told her. Within twenty minutes, La Sage and six other men had broken into Alain's flat, but were heavily disappointed to find that the wanted man and his accomplices were not there, During the thorough search that followed, La Sage found the neurostimulator and its manual - and the two lists of the electronic components for the delta-wave transmitter, but as there was no circuit plan, no one would be able to tell what the parts were for.

  A useful recent photograph of Alain was removed from an album of holiday snapshots by La Sage. He stared at the photograph that would soon be transmitted on all the TV news programmes in France, and was sickened to see that it was the man he had seen sitting at the table with Jean-Louis Deveau and Claude Picot outside the Café de Flore. So that's what those cockroaches were up to, La Sage thought.

  After the neurostimulator had been dusted for fingerprints, it was taken to Professor Goldstein by La Sage. The professor examined his invention and was shocked to discover that the device's circuits had been tampered with in such a way that the thinking cap had been reset to its highest, and most dangerous level of stimulation. This work had obviously been carried out by someone who had possessed the knowledge of an electronics expert - and Goldstein suspected that that expert had been the wearer of the cap.

  "This man - Chabrol," said Goldstein, looking shaken after his inspection of the neurostimulator, "he must be caught. Before it’s too late."

  "A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, and all that. Yeah, we know,“ scoffed La Sage.

  Over at the house on the Right Bank, Juliette knelt before her old friend Monique, while Alain, Jean-Louis and Claude sat awkwardly in a row on an old chaise-longue.

  "So you want to use the garret for your painting?" said Monique. Her pampered ginger cat Voltaire looked at the three strangers sitting on his sofa. His tail writhed, then the cat sprang onto Monique' s lap.

  "Yes," said Juliette, stroking Voltaire.

  "And these men are - models?" Monique scanned the rough and craggy faces of the three criminals through her pebble-lensed spectacles.

  "Yes. But they won't be taki
ng their clothes off." Juliette gave a little contrived laugh. "It's a surrealist thing. I'll only need the garret for a day. What do you say?"

  "Yes, of course you can. But it's a bit cluttered up there. All my late husband' s books are all over the place," said Monique, and she glanced back at the three faces, and saw that they were all smiling and nodding at her.

  On the following day at 10.45am, the plan went into action as Jean-Louis and Claude walked into the Louvre. Claude had a small crowbar secreted up the arm of his coat, and Jean-Louis carried the headbands into the museum by wearing them around his neck under a polo-neck sweater.

  Up in the garret of Monique' s house on the nearby Rue de Rivoli, Alain was looking at his watch. Behind him Juliette sat on one of the many tea chests containing musky old books. Next to her on an antique card table rested the delta-wave transmitter. Alain had plugged the machine into the lightbulb socket that dangled from the ceiling.

  "How long to go now?" Juliette asked, running her hand backwards through her thick golden hair.

  "Just under twenty minutes." Alain picked the reflector on the floor up by its handle, then opened the grimy window and looked at the misty image of the Palais du Louvre in the distance.

  Over the Seine at the Bon Marche Delicatessen store, Juliette's ex-boyfriend Francois lifted the counter flap and left the shop to help the overdue delivery man to unload six trays of assorted cakes from his van. On his way to the van, Francois noticed the face of Alain Chabrol on the TV set in the window of the neighbouring electrical hardware store. Francois trotted to the shop and entered it to catch the rest of the news report, and learned that the man who had thrown him out of Juliette's flat was wanted by the police.

  Francois left the shop and used the phone in the delicatessen store to ring police headquarters. He told Charroux about Alain's assault on him, and how he had subsequently stole his fiancée from him. Charroux instructed La Sage to visit the delicatessen to question and take a statement from Francois. La Sage asked the young man for the names and addresses of Juliette's friends. The first piece of information that Francois uttered in response to the policeman's questioning was the name and address of Monique.