The Mystery of the Third Lucretia (19 page)

Jacob had gone into what looked like a warehouse. It had a pointed roof without any decoration. The windows were especially big, and an outside staircase, almost half as wide as the ministreet itself, crisscrossed the front of it. I remembered something Mom had said, that in Amsterdam, stairs like this were meant for loading, so bulky things could be carried into and out of the big windows on each of the floors because the stairways inside were too skinny.

The buildings were so tall and the street so narrow that it was almost dark. As we watched, a light went on in the top window, five floors up.

“Let's climb up the stairs and look inside,” Lucas said.

“Lucas! No way! This has been dangerous enough! Besides, it's six o'clock. Let's get out of here. We have to be back at six thirty.” I looked hard at Lucas. I knew she wanted to stay and explore, but I wasn't going to back down on this one.

When I started walking back the way we came, she said, “Okay, okay, but we've got to come back here. Maybe tomorrow.”

“Lucas, I could have been killed! Don't you understand?”

“Next time we'll stay together,” she said.

I couldn't even think of anything to say. Sometimes her nerves of steel grate on my regular ones.

 

 

We were lucky. The tram we needed pulled up as soon as we got to the stop. It was only about ten after six, and I knew we'd get back with time to spare.

It wasn't until we were sitting in the tram that my near-death experience hit me and I started shaking. I had to keep my mouth shut tight so my teeth wouldn't chatter. I wondered if this was how Lucas had felt in London when she was almost run over.

Lucas wasn't looking at me at first. At last she turned around to say something, opened her mouth, stopped, and said, “Kari, are you okay?”

“N-n-not especially,” I said. And right there in the tram Lucas gave me a big hug, and it helped. I stopped shaking.

Back in our hotel I got a Coke on the way up to our room, and after I'd drunk most of it I started feeling almost normal. Lucas and I were lounging around, looking very casual, when Mom breezed in, saying, “Hi, guys, what's new and wonderful?”

We told her about watching TV and taking a walk in the rain. It felt like London again, covering up what we'd done. I realized that what had happened to me was exactly the kind of thing Mom had been worried about, and why she'd made us promise no funny stuff.

“Did you get hold of the guy at the Art Institute?” I asked. I thought changing the subject might make me feel less guilty.

Mom stepped out of her shoes and flopped down on her bed, her hands behind her head. “Well, I got through to the Art Institute. The director's on vacation. Believe it or not, he's taking a boat trip up the Amazon. He won't be back until next week.”

Lucas gave me an I-told-you-so look.

“So what are we going to do?” I asked.

“We'll ask Bill at dinner if he knows of anybody who can help us.”

I'd totally forgotten about going to dinner with Bill.

“By the way, he asked if I'd go with him to a concert tomorrow night. I told him yes. I figured you guys would love to have an evening free of your elderly traveling companion.”

It didn't take an Einstein to figure out that from that moment on Lucas was thinking of what we were going to do during our evening alone.

 

 

Bill was medium height and had straight, shiny dark hair and big brown eyes that made him look kind of like a sweet little puppy.

He took us to an Indonesian restaurant—there are lots of them in Amsterdam, because Indonesia used to be a Dutch colony—and we had something called rijsttafel. It turned out to be a big bowl of rice surrounded by thirty-six little bowls of stuff to go on it, like meats with different kinds of sauces, lots of vegetables and pickles, fruit, nuts, and toasted coconut. You put whatever you wanted onto your rice. It was fun.

When Bill went to the men's room, Mom asked, now that we'd met him, if we'd feel comfortable having her tell him what we'd found out about the Third Lucretia. We said yes. Bill was the kind of guy you could trust. So when we were walking home and there was absolutely nobody around who could hear us, Mom told him. He seemed very impressed.

“Do you want to be the one to break this story in the newspapers?” he asked Mom.

“No, I'm not a reporter anymore. I just want to write a background feature piece I can sell to a magazine.”

“Then I know exactly the person who can help you,” he said. “Johanna Heimstra. Works for one of the big dailies here. Always after a good story. I'll give her a call in the morning. I won't tell her much, just that it's a major scoop and she has to talk to you.”

 

 

“How much do you want to bet Bill can't reach his friend?” Lucas whispered into my ear when we were lying in bed. Mom sleeps with earplugs, so we can usually get by with whispering to each other if we're careful to make almost no noise at all.

“Probably on vacation on the Riviera,” I answered.

“Or climbing in the Alps,” Lucas said.

“Exploring Norwegian fjords by sea.”

“Sitting on an Egyptian pyramid.”

“In India studying yoga.”

“So,” Lucas whispered after we'd kept this up for a while, “when are we going back to visit Jacob's house?”

“Are you nuts? I'm not going back there! You don't understand. If it hadn't been for those drunks singing and throwing a bottle down at the end of Jacob's street, I'd probably be dead by now! And if Mom had found out, she'd have me cut in little pieces and dropped into a canal. Besides, it's just a stupid thing for girls our age to do. End of story.”

“Listen,” Lucas said. “I understand how scared you were. But if we plan it out—”

“Lucas, I'm not sure anymore that Jacob doesn't know who we are and that we're here. I know you don't believe me, but I still think he was the one driving the Jaguar in London. . . .”

I could feel her take a breath, ready to say something about this, when Mom said, “What are you two whispering about over there?”

“Nothing,” I said. The good old standard, all-purpose line.

“Well, keep it down. I'm trying to get some rest here.”

“I'm not going back over there, and that's final,” I breathed into Lucas's ear.

“We'll talk about it in the morning,” Lucas breathed back.

There was a message to call Bill when we got back upstairs from breakfast.

Venice. That's where his friend was. Venice. She was doing a story on how they're trying to keep their buildings from sinking into the water. Her boyfriend said she'd be back in town on Friday evening.

We hadn't thought of Venice.

“We'll just have to wait,” Mom said. “Remember. The Third Lucretia isn't going anywhere. We're not going anywhere. Friday will be here soon enough.”

Easy for her to say. It was only Wednesday. Friday seemed like twenty years away.

The minute Mom was out of the hotel, Lucas took up our conversation exactly where we'd left off the night before. “Look,” she said, “if we don't get this last little piece of evidence, we don't have a very strong case about Jacob being Gallery Guy.”

“What last little piece of evidence? Besides, I think we have a very strong case.” I was pretty sure I was being conned.

“Well, what do you think we're going to find in that place in the Quarter? You think Jacob lives on that ugly little street? Jacob? With his fancy clothes and his big-deal job?”

I thought a minute. At first I thought she meant that Jacob might use the space to meet Marianne. But I couldn't see a woman like Marianne, who was used to having big bucks, sneaking over to meet Jacob in a building that might be full of rats and spiders.

Finally I figured out what Lucas was getting at. I remembered how big the windows were, and that his apartment was on the top floor where the light probably shone in. “It has to be his studio, where he does his painting.”

“Exactly.”

“What do you think he's working on—another forgery?”

“Who knows? Maybe. But if we can tell that reporter or the cops or whoever that Jacob Hannekroot has a secret art studio at such-and-such an address, and if we can tell them that in that studio there might be studies for the Lucretia painting, or even other forgeries that he's working on, then we'll have him for sure. It'll be even better than catching him and Marianne together. The case will be as good as proved.”

“We have a lot of evidence now! How about the hands we painted? That canvas is in the States, on my closet shelf. We had to have painted it from what we saw in London, and those hands are the hands in the Third Lucretia.”

“But somebody else could be painting them right now from pictures of the Third Lucretia that must be in all the magazines this week.”

“Are you kidding? As careful as I was to paint it like Rembrandt? You couldn't get that from a magazine picture. Besides, what if Jacob catches us this time? Even if he wasn't the one who tried to kill you in London, he's still dangerous. He killed those museum guards.”

“He's not going to kill us right across the street from a mission, for goodness' sake. Besides, it'll be night and he'll be gone. Artists don't paint at night. They need daylight.”

“He was at his studio last night when it was dark enough he had to put a light on.”

“Yeah, but that was way in the back of his apartment. The bathroom or whatever, not toward the front. He's on the top floor. If he works by the window, I'll bet he was able to paint for at least another hour, even though it was cloudy. Anyway, we'll wait till it's a lot darker and we'll make sure there aren't any lights on in the building. And we'll take a flashlight. If we find out it really is his studio, it's just what we need to prove the whole thing.”

“So what if it is? And what if he's even in the middle of forging another painting? How do we get the authorities to believe us? Besides, what'll we tell Mom? Honestly, Lucas, I don't want to seem goody-goody or anything, but I'm really getting tired of lying to my mother. It makes me feel . . . not very good. I was already grounded for three weeks after the London thing.”

“I don't like it either. I wouldn't so much mind lying to my mother, but your mom's different. This will be the last time. I promise. The last thing we do that we have to cover up.”

I wanted to ask her how she knew, and how long this promise covered—a week? a month? a year? Instead I said, “What are we going to tell her if we find something?”

Lucas sighed and turned her head to stare at the wall. “I haven't quite figured that out yet. But we'll come up with something. We always do.”

“Suppose we go to Jacob's place, and suppose he's not there. What if he has friends in the neighborhood? Somebody in one of those bars farther down the block, or a neighbor. Or in the mission! What if somebody says to him, ‘You know, Jacob, I saw these two girls looking at your house the other day,' and he asks them to call him on his cell phone if they see us again.”

“We'd better wear black.”

“They'll still see us! What if he comes after us?”

“We've outsmarted him before, Kari. We can do it again. But I think it would be better if we didn't look so different from everybody else who hangs out around there. I wonder how we could look like we fit into the neighborhood.”

After a minute I said, “You know, I think I have an idea.”

Somehow at the time I didn't even realize I'd lost the argument. That's what happens when I try debating with Lucas.

 

 

So we went out and spent some of Lucas's money. We met Mom for lunch, and in the afternoon we helped her with an “Amsterdam Looks” in front of a big department store.

When we stopped for sandwiches on the way back to our hotel, Mom announced that she had very big news. She'd gotten an appointment to see Jacob on Friday at two. She couldn't see Marianne Mannefeldt until Saturday morning. She figured she was going to be able to put together an awesome feature story on the forgery after Bill's friend broke the news in her paper.

“Does that mean we'll be in it? Your story, I mean?” I asked.

“Of course! You'll be the stars!”

Lucas and I looked at each other and smiled. It would be sweet to be the stars of a magazine story, even if it wasn't the kind of magazine our friends would read.

That night Bill was going to pick Mom up at six thirty for a glass of wine, then they were going to hear an orchestra performance at the Concertgebouw, which was the big concert hall near our hotel. After the concert they were going to go out to supper somewhere.

“What are you going to hear?” I asked as I ate my salami sandwich on a little bun. I didn't care about the music, of course. I was just leading up to some time-and-place questions, but I had to work them into the conversation.

“I don't know. It's the Concertgebouw Orchestra. I don't even know who the soloist is. I just hope it isn't music by some composer I can't stand, like Schoenberg or Schumann. I don't think I could take it tonight. I'm beat.”

“Are you and Bill going to some special restaurant afterward?” I tried to make the question sound as casual as I could, but it seemed like I was grilling her.

I was surprised when Mom answered me back as if she thought I was really interested. “Yeah, kind of. We're going to the restaurant at the American Hotel. It's an extremely cool place.”