I just studied it for a while. Then I wandered a bit.
Back on the ground floor, I walked through a room full of eighteenth-century French canvases, Boucher and Fragonard, idealized bucolic scenes of fauns and nymphs, shepherds and Bo-Peeps. One canvas showed a pair of barefoot rustics picnicking in a sylvan glade, and studying that canvas under a uniformed guard’s watchful gaze were Carolyn and Alison.
“You’ll notice,” I murmured to them, “that both of those little innocents have Morton’s Foot.”
“What’s that mean?”
“It means their second toes are longer than their big toes,” I said, “and they’ll need special orthotic implants if they’re planning to run marathons.”
“They don’t look like runners to me,” Carolyn said. “They look horny as toads, as a matter of fact, and the only kind of marathon they’re likely to be in is-”
“Jared and his friends are in position outside,” I cut in. “Give them five minutes to get started. Okay?”
“Okay.”
In a stall in the men’s room I took off my jacket and shirt, then put them on again and walked somewhat less stiffly to the gallery where the Mondrian was hanging. No one paid me any attention because there was a lot of noise and commotion out in front of the building and people were drifting toward the entrance to see what was going on.
The sound of rhythmic chanting rose to my ears. “Two, four, six, eight! We need art to appreciate!”
I stepped closer to the Mondrian. Time crawled and the kids went on chanting and I glanced for the thousandth time at my watch and started wondering what they were waiting for when suddenly all hell broke loose.
There was a loud noise like a clap of thunder, or a truck backfiring, or a bomb going off, or, actually, rather like a cherry bomb left over from the Fourth of July. And then, from another direction there was a great deal of smoke and cries of “Fire! Fire! Run for your lives!”
Smoke positively billowed. People bolted. And what did I do? I grabbed the Mondrian off the wall and ran into the men’s room.
And caromed off a balding fat man who was just emerging from a stall. “Fire!” I shouted at him. “Run! Run for your life!”
“My word,” he said, and away he went.
A few minutes later, so did I. I left the men’s room and hastened down a flight of stairs and out the main entrance. Fire trucks had drawn up and police were everywhere and Jared and his troops brandished their signs, dodging cops and throwing themselves in front of portable TV cameras. Throughout it all, the Hewlett’s security staff kept a tight rein on things, making sure no one walked off with a masterpiece.
I perspired beneath my hat, blinked behind my glasses, and walked right past all of it.
I caught the six o’clock news in a dark and dingy tavern on Third Avenue, and there was young Jared Raphaelson, angrily asserting Youth’s right of access to great public art collections, then quickly disclaiming all responsibility for the terrorist assault on the Hewlett and the mysterious disappearance of Piet Mondrian’s masterpiece, Composition with Color.
“We don’t think the kids are directly involved,” a police spokesman told the camera. “It’s a little early to tell yet, but it looks as though some quick-witted thief took the opportunity to cut the painting from its frame. We found the frame itself, all broken and with shreds of canvas adhering to it, in the second-floor washroom. Now it looks as though the kids must be responsible for the fire, although they deny it. What happened was somebody tossed an explosive device called a cherry bomb of the type used to celebrate Independence Day, and it happened to go off in a wastebasket in which some tourist had evidently discarded a few rolls of film, and what would have been a big bang turned into a full-scale trash fire. The fire itself didn’t cause any real damage. It put out a lot of smoke and shook people up some, but it didn’t amount to anything except to provide cover to the thief.”
Ah, well, I thought. Accidents will happen. And I kept a close eye on the screen, looking for a sign of the quick-witted opportunistic thief. But I didn’t see him. Not on that channel, at any rate.
A museum official expressed chagrin at the loss of the painting. He talked about its artistic importance and with some reluctance estimated its value at a quarter of a million dollars. The announcer mentioned the recent robbery-cum-murder at the Charlemagne, in which another Mondrian was taken, and wondered whether press coverage of that theft might have led the present thief to pick Mondrian rather than some other masterpiece.
The museum official thought that was highly possible. “He might have taken a van Gogh or a Turner, even a Rembrandt,” he said. “We have paintings worth ten or more times what the Mondrian might bring. That’s why this strikes me as an impulsive, spur-of-the-moment act. He knew the Mondrian was valuable, he’d heard what the Onderdonk Mondrian was valued at, and when the opportunity presented itself he acted swiftly and decisively.”
They cut for a commercial. In Carney’s Bar and Grill, an impulsive, spur-of-the-moment guy in horn-rims and a fedora picked up his glass of beer and swiftly and decisively drank it down.
CHAPTER Twenty-one
“What you got in there?” the child de-manded. “Fission poles?”
Fission poles?
“Andrew, don’t bother the man,” said its mother, and flashed me a brave smile. “He’s at that age,” she said. “He’s learned how to talk, and he hasn’t learned how to shut up.”
“Man goin’ fishin’,” said Andrew.
Oh. Fishin’ poles.
Andrew and Andrew’s mother and I, along with perhaps four other people, were sheltering ourselves behind a transparent barrier designed to protect bus passengers from the elements, even as its construction had enriched several public officials a few scandals ago. I had one arm around a cylindrical cardboard tube which stood five feet tall and ran about four inches in diameter. I forebore advising Andrew that it did not contain fishing poles. It contained-what? Bait?
Something like that.
Two buses came. They’re like cops in bad neighborhoods; they travel in pairs. Andrew and his mother got on one of them, along with our other companions in the shelter. I remained behind, but there was nothing remarkable in this. A variety of buses travel south on Fifth Avenue, bound for a variety of destinations, so I merely seemed to be waiting for another bus.
I don’t know what I was waiting for. Divine intervention, perhaps.
Across the street and a little to my left loomed the massive bulk of the Charlemagne, as fiercely impregnable as ever. I’d breached its portals three times, once at Onderdonk’s invitation, twice bearing flowers, and in fairy tales the third time is the charm. But now I had to get in there a fourth time, and everyone who worked for the building knew me by now, and you couldn’t get into the goddamned building even if nobody knew you from Adam.
There’s always a way, I told myself. What little story had I made up for Andrea? Something about a helicopter to the roof? Well, that was fanciful, surely, but was it absolutely out of the question? There were private helicopter services. They’d take you up for a couple of hours of soaring over the city for a fee. For a considerably higher fee, one such bold entrepreneur would no doubt drop you off on a particular roof, especially if he weren’t required to stand by and lift you off again.
There were problems, however. I didn’t have the money to hire a limousine, let alone a helicopter, and I hadn’t the faintest idea where to find an avaricious helicopter pilot, and I rather suspected they didn’t do business at night anyway.
Hell.
The buildings that adjoined the Charlemagne were no help, either. All were significantly lower than their neighbor, by a minimum of four floors. It was theoretically possible to outfit oneself with Alpine climbing gear and proceed from the roof of one of those buildings, sinking pitons into the mortar between the Charlemagne’s bricks, clambering hand over hand to the top of the Charlemagne’s roof, and getting in that way. It was also theoretically possible to master the lost art of levitation and float halfway to heaven, and this struck me as a little easier than pretending the Charlemagne was the Matterhorn.