Starry Nights (24 page)

She smiles. “Yes. You're so easy to like. Falling for you is the most wonderful thing I have done. It's more like floating,” she says,
and she looks radiant, like she's glowing because of me, and the incongruity of the moment—of this admission in the midst of this destruction—is not lost on me, but even so I am unable to resist touching her. I grab her and kiss her hard on the mouth, holding her face.

These lips, this face, this heat, this life. More, more, more.

But then I flash onto the paintings, to how the sickness started at the Louvre, slowly at first, with a few coughs and sniffles. Until the fuse was lit in
Starry Night
, and the morning after the Géricault drowned in its own waves.

We stop kissing.

“So how do we do it?”

“I have to do it,” she says. “I have to heal the art. There are sick paintings in London and New York and at the Louvre, right?”

“And St. Petersburg and Chicago now too. And you need to touch the paintings, right? You need to be able to go to all those museums and touch the art, right?”

“Yes,” she says in a careful, measured voice. “But it's not just that.”

“What is it then?” I ask, but I doubt I want to hear the answer.

“I need to try it first. Where is the Cézanne from last night?”

“Where it was last night, so it doesn't get any worse. But roped off.”

We walk a few rooms over to the Cézanne. The bag of sand is nestled at the foot of the frame. The canvas is a messy stew of mottled oils.

“So, first I'll just touch it,” she says, and places her palms on
the remains. Nothing happens. “Now, I'll concentrate on putting love back into it.” She lays her hands on the canvas once more, closes her eyes. Her lips part, and she looks so beautiful, the way she looked when she first told me she was in love with me. It makes my chest hurt, and it makes me want her at the same awful time.

As she stands like that, the sand from the bag swirls around her, a gentle wind, then dances back to the frame, where it returns to paint and the colors become grass and sea and trees again, reforming a ravaged landscape into the luscious one Cézanne created.

I have seen so many amazing things. I've had my mind blown many times, but watching art repaired, like time-lapse photography run backward, has got to be the top.

When Clio opens her eyes, she looks the slightest bit different. It's hard to pinpoint the change, but she looks a bit less like Clio and more like Thalia. Not in her features, but in her demeanor. As if she's been sharpened.

“The thing is, it's not enough for me to love the art. I have to put the love I feel for you into paintings. To save the art, I have to stop loving you.”

She is the poison and she is the cure.

“It's like a debt. And I have to repay,” she says.

I always knew we were stolen. I always knew that we existed in a strange and wonderful
otherness
, but I thought we'd simply have to part. And that would have been hard enough. But this is worse. Because I won't stop feeling for her.

I sink to the floor. My body feels like stone. Clio is crying. Tears streak down her cheeks. “I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. That only took a tiny bit away.” She touches my cheek, so soft and tender that I have to close my eyes just to contain all the feelings that threaten to burst out of my heart. “I'm still crazy about you now, Julien.”

Now.
But soon, not at all.

“So I guess I should let you out the door.” My voice is empty.

“No. As long as I'm part of the painting no one can see me except you. But once I leave the museum, I'm no longer bound to
the painting. Anyone can see me then, and I'd have to go into the front doors of all the museums, and I might not be able to touch the art long enough to fix it. When Thalia touched the paintings yesterday, she said it was only for a few seconds, right? That's why no one stopped her, plus there was so much commotion, I'm sure.”

I nod.

She keeps talking. “But for this to work, I really have to focus. You saw what it takes. I'll need a few minutes with each piece. I have to hold my hands on the art and send them my love. I can't do it when there are crowds, or guards would stop me.” The selfish part of me wants to scream
how is that my problem?
But I can't. I love the same things she loves. “To repair the art, I need your help.”

“Like how? Am I supposed to smuggle you in? Be your Sherpa?” I say in a cutting voice that makes me feel like a jerk.

“We don't have to go in through the front doors, Julien. We go at night through the bridges. Remember? The Japanese bridges, how they all connect but only when we touch them together? Most of the museums with the sick art have Monets in them with bridges. Because he made all the bridge paintings after me, they'll be intact. We can travel through them almost instantly.”

I want to kiss her and tell her she's brilliant. I want to pump a fist high in the air because breaking into a museum through a painting is the smartest, coolest thing I've ever heard. But it hardly feels like we're on the same team. “Okay, so we'll go together,” I say, and it hits me—I have to witness my own execution. I'll have to watch her fall out of love with me.

“Let's go now,” I say and walk over to the nearest bridge painting. I want to get this over with. I want to drop in and out of the world's museums in the dark of night, and then I want to open the door and say good-bye to her because I will barely be able to stand this at all.

“There's only one problem with going now.”

“What's that?”

“The Louvre doesn't have any Monets, or any other Impressionist paintings of the bridge. We can't get into the Louvre that way. And I think we should start at the Louvre,” she says, and I can see the logic—the outbreak, for whatever random reason, started at the Louvre.

“Let's go there now. Walk over. It's just across the river. There's got to be a door that's open somewhere,” I say even though it's a horrible idea—you can't just walk into the Louvre at night—but I feel horrible.

“It'll never work that way. You know we can't get in there now,” she says, and wipes a hand across her cheeks. She dries her tears and steels herself. “Look, this is my problem. I'll have to do it myself during the day after you free me and try to be fast. I'll take the risk.”

“That's crazy.”

“I should never have asked you. It's not fair.”

“Of course it's not fair. It sucks in every way imaginable. But I'm in this with you, and we have to fix it together. I want to protect you, and I will. The trouble is anyone can see me anytime. So how do you suppose I not get caught in the Hermitage or the National Gallery in the middle of the night?”

“I actually have a few ideas,” she says with a grin. “But what about the Louvre? Is there any way we can get one of the Japanese bridges from the Musée d'Orsay into the Louvre?”

I shake my head several times. “I can ask, but I seriously don't think I can convince my mom to let me take one of our bridges on a sleepover.”

“Do you know anybody, any private collectors maybe, who have a bridge painting? Anyone at all?”

In a flash, I picture dusky-blue light on the slatted bridge. I smile wickedly. “As a matter of fact, I do know a collector.”

We spend the rest of the night mapping out a plan. We study the layouts of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Met in New York, the National Gallery in London, and the Hermitage in St. Petersburg. I look up the floor plan for the Louvre too, double-checking where the sick paintings reside and plotting the fastest course to the art. The Louvre is a beast and has several sick paintings. But my primary focus with the Louvre maps is in locating the best restroom.

Next, we search through interactive maps, along with pictures of the galleries in each museum that houses one of the Monet bridges, writing down the names of the nearby works and whether they were painted before or after 1885 so we'll know which are safe. We hunt for photos online of the benches inside those rooms. I study the map of the Monet exhibit that's at the Hermitage right now. I try to ignore the fact that we were once planning a date at the Hermitage and now we're preparing for our demise.

The last order of business for Clio is with Gustave. She slips a hand into his pocket, carefully takes out his cell phone, and scrolls through his calls for the one that came from his friend who runs the night shift at the Louvre. She memorizes the number, drops the phone into his pocket, and gives me the digits.

Somehow, I don't think Gustave will mind the small part he's going to inadvertently play. He's always liked art.

Then Clio heals the warped Degas, and the orchestra stops playing out of tune. I'm afraid to look at her, afraid she won't care for me anymore, but she gives me one more kiss good night, and I do my best to savor it.

As I leave I send a group text to Bonheur, Sophie, Simon, and Lucy, letting them know I desperately need their help and could they please meet me in the late morning. I tell Bonheur and Sophie that the girl they've been protecting all these years is a Muse and that she needs our help to fix the art. They don't write back. They're all asleep. I manage to go home and snag a few troubled hours myself. I've had better nights of sleep, that's for sure.

The thing about museum security is this—it's a myth. Those movies where master thieves break into museums inside horse statues and then rewire cameras to show video from the day before, or the ones where infrared lights shine at unpredictable angles and the hero executes a series of acrobatic moves while suspended via ropes? That's all Las Vegas–casino–level stuff. That's the sort of security you need when you have millions of
dollars in cash on hand. Because cash is nameless. Cash goes anywhere. Paintings don't.

The reality is most museums have little more than simple alarms on doors and a couple guards yawning as they stroll a few galleries after dark. It's just not that hard for thieves to slice canvases from frames under the cloak of night, or even in the bright light of day, and slip out among the afternoon crowds with invaluable art tucked inside a shirt. The real security system museums rely on is the astronomical difficulty in selling a priceless work of art. It's virtually impossible to fence a museum piece anywhere, even in countries where it once was popular, like Japan or Switzerland.

Sure, there are some camera systems in the museums I'll need to visit. The Louvre has the most secure setup, but I won't be seen there. If cameras catch me in any of the other four locations, I'm going to have to rely on the sheer logical impossibility of having been anywhere else but Paris in the same night.

Even so, I'd rather not be spotted by camera lenses or human eyes, so once my friends join me at a cafe I run down the basics of the who, why, and where of the mission. I leave out the part about Clio falling out of love with me. I don't want pity.

“So, here in this room in the National Gallery. That's where I need the pencil and paper,” I say as I tap the layout of the museum in London where the Turners have been weeping waves. “Who knows someone in London who can get over there today?”

“I've got a friend there,” Simon says. “My buddy Patrick. He'll do it.”

I down my third coffee of the morning and take a bite of a chicken sandwich. There is a huge plate of french fries on the table that we've been sharing. A grandmotherly old woman with white hair and an even whiter Maltese sits at the table next to us, feeding her dog pieces of ham.

“Next, Chicago. Lucy, you used to live there, right?”

Lucy nods excitedly. She and Simon are done eating, so he's braiding her hair. She leans back into him, as he loops one brown-and-emerald strand over another. I try to quell my jealousy over him being out with his girlfriend during the day, over him likely being out with her tomorrow, and the next day, and the next. “For a year. And I know just who to call.”