“Uhm… thank their lucky stars?” Mandy asked, as baffled as he was.
“You’d think. But there was also a claim of theft,” Carl told her. “From a private collector. When the museum said, ‘Uhm, it turned up, but our provenance is the last to be notarized,’ the private collector stopped talking. Anyway it’s a mess, and they need someone who can look at stuff and sign things, and that’s me.” He gave a playful wave. “The stuff-looker and thing-signer.”
Mandy giggled and waved him on his way.
When he got to France the next day, his first stop had been the private collector, who had been pouting his way through trying to make a claim. He’d filled out the paperwork—and even paid his premium—but the collector, a dour old man with no hair and a lip pulled up in a permanent sneer, could not be pinned down for a straight answer about where the piece had come from, or even who the artist was.
“So you don’t have provenance?” Carl had asked finally, out of patience.
“I didn’t say that!” the old man barked in French. “Here!” Stumping on his cane, he made his way to a giant dusty monstrosity of a desk and pulled a file from one of the drawers. “Here! Here is my provenance! See? It is signed by someone from your own company! Mr. Thomakins.”
He practically threw the file at Carl, who leafed through it, eyebrows raised. “It looks in order,” he said weakly—and it did. Every i dotted, every t crossed, right down to the watermark his company used to document provenance.
But Carl worked in a specialized field with relatively few players, and Carl had never seen the name Thomakins before.
Besides… it sounded like something from a “Puss in Boots” story.
“I told you—”
“Wait,” Carl muttered. “Wait. It says here the piece was a twenty-inch terracotta model of a John Flaxman memorial piece—the Virgin Ascends. But you weren’t keeping it anywhere heat and humidity controlled. What, were you trying to age it like a pot?” He knew that keeping terracotta pots somewhere warm and damp was a great way to get the clay to change colors and appear vintage, but who wanted to do that to an expensive piece of art?
“That Thomakins guy complained about it too,” the old man sneered. “But it sat in my solarium like it sat in my father’s. I don’t see the problem. He signed off on it, didn’t he?”
Yeah, Carl thought resentfully. Right before he stole it and took it to the museum.
He didn’t say that, though. Instead he smiled politely and went about getting as many details about “Thomakins” as he possibly could.
Then he looked at the setup and wondered why this man hadn’t just put a “steal me” sign on his property. The pedestal looked great: marble, with a cushion of black velvet on which to display the statue. It had some mild security—motion detectors on the glass bell jar that protected the thing from dust and standard break-in security to the man’s villa in general, but other than that? Any reasonably competent thief with steady hands could lift the bell jar without setting off the alarm.
And a man who had been inside to assess the security would have been in a prime position to insert a piece of tinfoil over a couple of window breakers to fool the basic system.
The only real wrinkle would have been the pressure point under the statue, but apparently their light-fingered thief had replaced the statue with a counterweight without even a hiccup.
Carl frowned, remembering that. “Can I see what they used as a counterweight?” he asked. There was almost always a clue in that—something in the soil if it was rocks in a bag, something in the fabric itself. Even carefully gathered lead balls held secrets of origin that could lead Carl to the perpetrator.
But when he saw what the man held in his hand, Carl’s voice squeaked. “That?” The thing in the man’s hand was so undignified.
“Bastard was laughing at me,” the old man snarled, and Carl couldn’t argue.
The counterweight was terracotta as well but obviously a more recent work, done by an immature if not juvenile hand.
“It’s some sort of cartoon character,” the owner snapped, and Carl nodded. He didn’t have nephews or nieces, but the cartoon was everywhere. Even he recognized the Squidward character from SpongeBob SquarePants.
“That will be very helpful,” he said dryly. “May I keep it?”
“Oui.”
Carl took the thing, noting its weight, its texture. It really had been formed from terracotta, no matter how inexpertly, and it was almost perfect in dimension.
This Thomakins, whoever he was, was a very clever, very unusual thief.
CARL’S NEXT stop was the museum in which the original statue had appeared. Or reappeared, as it were. The Musée du Quai Branly in Paris was a creative mix of the traditional and contemporary, right down to the architecture. Half of the building was ivy-covered brick and glass with wide curving windows, and the other half was a colorful hodgepodge of various room-sized “boxes” rising from a wooden-shingled wall. A small strip of gardened walkways graced one side, but the aspect that faced the street was the dramatic contrast of new and old, chaotic and ordered.
Carl was more of a sucker for the Louvre, himself, but that was because he was never there on business. Quai Branly was not a small venue—but that’s what made it so perfect for breaking into.
Which was where Carl’s mind was supposed to be as he walked up the steps, only to fall in line behind two uncles, he assumed, helping a small boy up the wide steps.
They were singing together, in French.
It was the theme song to SpongeBob SquarePants.
Carl’s heart thundered in his ears for a moment, that adrenaline-fueled thrill that meant he’d cracked a case, but he had to make himself sit for a minute. Could it be? These two perfectly nice men and the little boy between them were singing a song that literally millions of children around the world knew. It would be like accusing someone of theft because they knew the theme song to Friends. Even people who hated that show knew the song. It was a supremely dumb way to make a connection.
Then they started singing it in Italian.
And English.
And Spanish.
They hopped sideways on the steps as they sang, as though this was a game they played all the time. As Carl neared the front door, the boy began speaking in a patois of all three languages, and Carl felt secretly resentful. He’d studied languages since he hit high school, and he’d never be that good.
“Your mother will be out in a moment,” the smaller of the men said in flawless French. He was… arresting looking, with curly brown hair, vulpine features, and teeth that were slightly crooked in the front. European! Carl thought, because Americans, it seemed, were the ones who stressed so much about slight imperfections in the smile.
“Where would you like to go for lunch?” the taller man asked. Bold and blond, with a radiant handsomeness and perfectly straight teeth, he spoke English with an American accent.
The boy began to babble. A series of café names bubbled out of his mouth until the smaller man told him laughingly that they would eat at the first place that served peanut butter and jelly and the boy would like it.
“Yes, Uncle Danny, I would like it! Make sure the bread is crusty, and there is butter too.”