And it looked like the strange art was about to get a little stranger.
“I am not an art expert,” Boris said, “but I think The Great Warrior of Montauban has a problem with his hand.”
The Warrior of Montauban had problems with other body parts, too. He was missing his knees and the bottom parts of his legs. He was also missing pants. And a shirt.
He had a sword, though, a big one behind his back. And he had very muscular arms. One of his arms extended out to the side, and at the end of that arm was a giant hand. But his thumb was hanging from his hand at an odd angle.
“Maybe it’s getting rusty,” said Jake.
Nanny X squatted down beneath the arm and looked up at the thumb to get a closer look.
“Watch out!” I said.
The thumb waved a little, like it was barely even attached. Then it plunked like a raindrop, straight onto Nanny X’s head. Our nanny swayed back and forth as the thumb thumped onto the grass. Boris caught her before she joined it. He set her down, gently. When he removed her mirrored sunglasses, her eyes were closed. “She’s unconscious,” he said. He slid the thumb, which looked like it weighed about fifty pounds, into an evidence bag.
“Nanny X, wake up!” I said. I wondered what NAP would do about an agent who lost a computer and got knocked out on the same mission. I fanned her with my hands, because sometimes air revives people when they are unconscious. Soon our nanny’s eyes fluttered. When she opened them, the first thing she did was look at her watch. I thought it was because she was trying to figure out how long she’d been knocked out, but I was wrong. “It’s almost noon,” she said. “The thumb is a warning.”
She didn’t say who was warning us, but we knew: The Angler.
We tried to help Nanny X over to a bench.
“I am not a frail old lady,” she said. “I’m very spry.” She plopped down on the bench, reached into the diaper bag and grabbed Mr. Ow, a cold pack in the shape of an octopus that Eliza uses when she gets a bad bump. Nanny X took off her fishing hat, put Mr. Ow on her head and set the fishing hat back in place. Then she opened up her mini computer.
The screen was blue. The computer made a sound, sort of like Moo, Sweet Cow, only it sounded a little more like Moo, Sick Cow. Nanny X slammed the computer shut again.
“We’re running out of time,” I said, which didn’t help.
“Indeed,” said Boris, dropping Montauban’s thumb into the diaper bag. “We will have to choose our plan carefully.”
While Boris and Nanny X talked about their strategy, I walked over to the Yoko Ono Wishing Tree, the spot in the sculpture garden where people write down wishes and hang them from the branches.
A lot of the wishes were for world peace. One said, “I wish for a million dollars.” One said, “I wish my mom would get better.”
I took a pencil and wrote on a slip of paper: “I wish we could catch The Angler.” I wrote “we.” I meant “I.” But I knew it was going to take more than wishes to solve our case.
I found a low branch and was hanging up my wish when I noticed another wish, in swirly, slanted handwriting. “I wish the president would get some new art for his front lawn,” it said. On the back of the paper it had one word: “Mine.”
I guess there could be a lot of people who wanted their art to be discovered. But there were not a lot of people who said out loud that they wanted their art to be on the front lawn of the White House. I looked at the swirly handwriting again. It had an artistic quality to it. It also looked like a woman’s handwriting. I don’t know why we all automatically thought we were searching for a bad guy. Maybe The Angler was a woman.
“Hey,” I yelled.
“Hay is for horses,” said Nanny X. That meant that she was feeling a little better. She came over to see.
Except for the “mine,” the white tag was unsigned, like all of the other wishes.
“It’s a clue,” I said. “The Angler was just here.”
“Wait a minute, now,” Boris said. “How often do they collect these wishes? I’m not saying it’s not The Angler, but this wish could have been hanging on the tree for a very long time.”
“I know how to find out,” I said. I ran up the steps of the garden, two at a time. Stinky followed me, even though I could have done it alone. I guess he felt that as a safety patrol, it was one of his responsibilities to see that I got across the street safely.
“Where are you going?” he asked.
“To ask a question about my clue.” I used “my” just to remind him that whatever answer I got was mine, too. If I couldn’t solve the mystery first, I wanted to solve it the best.
I spotted a security guard near the fountain and ran straight up to her.
“What happens to the wishes on the Yoko Tree?” I said it really fast, Nanny X style.
“Well, they’re harvested,” she said. “Like apples. And sent to Iceland, to the Yoko Ono Peace Tower.”
“How often do you harvest them?” That was the important part.
“Every day.”
That meant the wish had to have been written in the last twenty-four hours. The Angler was close.
“Thank you,” I shouted, and ran back to the others, with Stinky looking both ways as we crossed the street. Nanny X snapped a photo of the wish with her diaper phone, and Boris used his modified iPod to scan the wish for fingerprints. Stinky said it played “Secret Agent Man” whenever he did that, but we couldn’t hear it without the ear buds. If I solved the case, I would write a song called “Secret Agent Woman.”
Boris put the iPod away and started punching words into his phone. “Fish.” “President.” “Sculpture.” It may not have been connected to the same crime databases as Nanny X’s computer, but a whole bunch of stories came up. There was one about a sculpture of a hogfish that had been given to President Kennedy by the president of Bermuda.
There were stories that didn’t have anything to do with presidents, fish or sculptures. And then there was this story in Artsy Bartsy magazine: “Fish Art Overstays Welcome.”
The story was a review of a show by an artist named Ursula (no last name) that was appearing at a Georgetown gallery. Apparently most of her artwork had to do with fish.
“I am trying to capture the beauty of the ocean before it is destroyed by global warming,” she said, which made Stinky like her right off. But the magazine’s reviewer, a guy named Bartholomew Huffleberger, didn’t like her one bit.
“The problem with fish,” he wrote, “is that they stink after a relatively short time. We would be better off if this exhibit closed immediately.”
10. Jake
Nanny X Heads for the White House
My homework for Monday was as good as done, because that art review had more reading-connection words than I’ve ever found in one place. It started like this:
An artist known by the moniker of Ursula opened her one-woman show at Gallery 24 in Georgetown last night, and I, for one, would have been in a more convivial mood had I been attending a closing instead. Ursula’s work is didactic, shows no innovation, and is redundant besides. Her inspiration is the fish, and like the creature she so admires, I find her work malodorous. Her paintings appear realistic enough, but her fishes’ sad eyes give them the twee appearance of Precious Moments figurines. Like Ursula’s much-loved salmon, the artist will have to fight her way upstream. This reviewer was not hooked, and when he told the artist of his disappointment, she smeared his suit with salmon pâté.
Nanny X explained some of the words: “didactic” (which means you’re being too lecture-y), “convivial” (which means pleasant and agreeable), “pâté” (which means ground-up meat or fish) and “moniker” (which I already figured out meant name). The part I didn’t have to ask about came in the last paragraph, when he said that one of Ursula’s fish sculptures looked like a turnip and she should go back to doing arts and crafts with the local Girl Scout troop. Plus, he said that the gallery should have installed a show by his eight-year-old niece instead.
<
br /> Boris punched more words into his phone—“Ursula,” “fish” and “art”—so we could find a picture of her work. All he got was a bunch of pictures of the Sea Witch from The Little Mermaid.
But he also saw a breaking news story about the art world. Portrait of President Washington Disappears from National Gallery of Art,” the headline said.
Nanny X looked at her watch again. “Ten past noon,” she said. “This is it. The Angler has made the first move.”
Ali stared at the ground and looked like she’d been the one who was hit in the head with a giant thumb. It was a full minute before any of us said anything.
“A portrait of George Washington doesn’t seem like much of a treasure,” I said, to make everybody feel better. “As long as it wasn’t the one of him crossing the Delaware. There are loads of portraits of Washington. Aren’t there?”
Boris shook his head. “It says here that this was a rare portrait painted by the artist Salvador Dali. He did not live in Washington’s time, of course, but he’s very famous. Nobody knew the portrait existed until three months ago when it was discovered at a flea market. This article even hails it as ‘a new national treasure.’ It’s worth millions.”
I thought we would go straight to the gallery until Ali said, “We should go see Bartholomew Huffleberger. I’ll bet he could give us a list of people who could have made the fish statue. He could tell us if one of them was Ursula.”
“How can he do that if he’s never seen the fish statue?” I said. “We haven’t even seen it.” I looked at Nanny X. “Do we have a picture?”
Nanny X lifted her hat. She took Mr. Ow off her head and put it back in the diaper bag. “I checked on that last night,” she said. “The statue was in transit to the White House. No photo was available.”
“I checked this morning,” Boris said, “and was told the same thing. But surely the statue must be there by now.”
“Then we should go see it,” Stinky said.
“Museum,” I said.
“Reviewer,” said Ali.
“We are a big team, no?” said Boris. “Perhaps we need to divide and conquer once more. I will take Ali to see this Artsy Bartsy.”
“I’ll take Jake to the White House and get a visual,” said Nanny X. “We’ll meet at the National Gallery.”
Of course they were doing my idea last. I pretended that was because it was the best, like when you’re the cleanup batter in baseball. “Howard gets to come with us, though, right?” I said.
“Right.”
“We get Yeti,” said Ali.
“And me,” added Stinky. He turned a little reddish, probably because he’d just said we should be going to the White House. Or maybe because he liked my sister. It is amazing the things you can notice when you are working on your powers of observation. I was ready for action, even if my shoes were still squishy.
Nanny X called the White House to let them know we were coming. Her diaper phone has a direct line there.
“You’re sure you’re okay?” Boris asked Nanny X.
“Fine,” she said, touching her hat.
“Okay, then.” Boris took off with my sister and Stinky. Nanny X reached into her diaper bag and pulled out her bunny slippers. At first I thought she was going to give them to me instead of my squishy shoes. But she took off her own shoes and slid them on. Then she whistled. A pedicab driver came biking toward us, pulling a chair like a chariot.
“Get in,” said Nanny X. “You too, Howard.”
Howard adjusted his bonnet and climbed from the stroller into the pedicab. “Sixteen hundred Pennsylvania Avenue,” Nanny X told the driver.
“The White House?”
“Precisely.”
“What about you and Eliza?” I said. Nanny X had just gotten conked on the head. She needed to sit down. But the pedicab would be a little crowded with four of us, plus Eliza’s stroller.
“Don’t worry about me,” said Nanny X. She reached into the bag and pulled out an old-fashioned motorcycle helmet, the leather kind that matched her motorcycle jacket. Then she pushed the noses on her bunny slippers. Wheels popped out of the bottoms. She looked pretty spry as she skated over to the bike path, pushing Eliza in the stroller.
I leaned over to Howard. “She’s being conspicuous again,” I said. “Very conspicuous.”
At least no one was looking at him anymore; they were looking at our nanny, who was skating expertly down Independence Avenue.
Howard and I settled back as our driver pedaled past a bus. He signaled right and turned onto Fourteenth Street. Howard signaled, too, like he knew just what it meant. He gave me a thumbs-up as the driver put on the brakes, right in front of the White House gate.
11. Alison
Nanny X Is Out of the Picture
I was running ahead of Stinky even though he had longer legs and even though it wasn’t supposed to be a race. Sometimes it felt like the only thing I was the best at was biting my fingernails. I wanted to be the best at something real and important, like solving our case so we could keep our jobs. Being faster than Stinky made me feel better.
But when I looked back over my shoulder and saw our nanny roller-skating in a blur of pink bunny slippers, I stopped running and started laughing.
“Are those bunny slippers?” Boris asked as Nanny X passed a line of people riding on Segways, which look like dollies, the kind the UPS man uses for moving heavy packages.
I nodded.
“State of the art!” he said. “This is the first time I’ve seen them in action.” I could tell he was wishing for bunny slippers, too. But he’d been assigned the case first. Maybe he didn’t need bunny slippers to get ahead.
“Why didn’t the Secret Service just release a photo of the fish statue when they got the threat?” I asked. “It should have been in the news.”
“That is exactly what The Angler wanted,” Boris said. “Publicity.”
Stinky added: “If The Angler’s fish was on the front page of the paper, everyone would be sending statues to the president.”
We started running again, a gentle jog this time, not a race (except that I was still in the lead). Soon we reached the Artsy Bartsy office.
I imagined Jake knocking on the door of the White House, but I wasn’t jealous; I’d been on a field trip there just before Christmas. Ms. Bertram had spent half the time yelling at us because we’d tried to whistle for the president’s dog.
I knocked on Artsy Bartsy’s blue door. I was still knocking when I heard an “Ahem” behind me. It came from a tall man with black hair that stood up a little. He wore the tweedy jacket professors wear when they want to look like professors. He also had small, rectangular glasses, which were perched on a nose that was longish and kind of skinny.
“Were you looking for me?”
“Are you Bartholomew Huffleberger?” asked Boris.
“I am.”
“We’d like to ask some questions about an art exhibit you reviewed six months ago.”
“Which one?” the critic said.
“It featured an artist named Ursula.”
His skinny nose wrinkled.
“Was her show really that bad?” asked Boris.
“It depends on what you mean by ‘bad,’ ” said the critic. “Did it make a statement? Perhaps. But what a disaster. It was as if she’d thrown her entire wardrobe of clothing onto the floor and said, ‘There. How do I look?’ Some of the pieces were okay, but was it groundbreaking? No. Was it truly art?”
“I thought everything counted as art,” said Stinky. Our art teacher, Mrs. Bonawali, told us that even a can of soup could be art.
“The woman paints realistic fish with sad eyes,” Mr. Huffleberger said. “Excuse me while I faint from excitement.”
“Your review mentioned a sculpture,” I said.
“She created some sculptures, yes. So does a child with a can of Play-Doh. I saw Ursula’s work once long ago at a county fair. Believe me, she hasn’t improved.”
“Do you have any
photographs of the artist’s work?” Boris asked. “We’re trying to see if there’s a link between her and a certain sculpture we’re researching.” He didn’t mention the president.
“Is this a school project?” Mr. Huffleberger looked at me and Stinky. “No matter. I have one photo here.” He pulled out his phone and scrolled through until he found a photo of a painting of a sad-eyed fish. It looked pretty good from a distance.
“I noticed her website disappeared not long after my review,” Mr. Huffleberger continued. “But I have her original publicity prints inside, if you’d like to take a look.” He glanced at Yeti. “Wait here. I am a cat person.”
He unlocked his office door and made a gasping sound. The room was as neat as Mr. Huffleberger himself. But the desk looked like someone had emptied a recycling bin on top of it. There were papers everywhere, with bite-sized chunks taken out of them.
“What’s this?” said Mr. Huffleberger. “Picasso? Picasso, where are you?” I thought maybe Mr. Huffleberger had a Picasso painting hanging on his wall, which would count as a national treasure, and that someone—The Angler, for instance—had stolen it. But he rushed behind his desk and bear-hugged the world’s largest cat, who was puffed up like a balloon at the Thanksgiving parade. Mr. Huffleberger looked through the door at us. “Who did you say you were?”
“Investigators,” said Boris.
“Then investigate!”
I tied Yeti’s leash around the lamppost and Stinky and I followed Boris into Mr. Huffleberger’s office. Aside from the desk, everything was in its place. There was a lamp with a green shade and a coatrack with no coats. On the wall there was only one painting, and it wasn’t by Picasso. The picture was of a moose. In the corner it said “Huffleberger.”
“You paint?” Boris asked, as Mr. Huffleberger inspected the cat to make sure he hadn’t been injured.
Mr. Huffleberger smiled a thin-lipped smile. “I used to,” he said. “But I learned that my true calling is words.”
Nanny X Returns Page 4
