Trouble in Paradise (15 page)

“We need to go to the special quarters,” Ray said.

“This way,
sir
,” the soldier replied. “I’ll show you, sir.”

He led and we followed.

I fell in beside Ray. “Doesn’t he recognize you?” I whispered. “Doesn’t he know you’re not a real general?”

Ray shook his head. “Most people only look at the stars on the sleeve, not the face above them,” he said quietly, so the soldier couldn’t hear him. “It’s the same with priests. They only look at the collar.”

“How big is this ship?” I asked.

Ray tapped his stars. “Sorry, can’t help you. I’m in the army, not the navy. If I had decided to wear an admiral’s uniform, I could have told you everything.”

“No, seriously.”

“Seriously. I have no idea. I just know it’s not my job to search the whole ship. I’m only responsible for the safe in one of the cabins.”

“And the rest of these guys, they have to search the whole ship?” Jack asked.

“Every square inch.”

“How long have they got?” I asked.

“Twelve hours, and then they have to let the ship go on.”

“Can they really search the whole thing in that time?” Jack asked.

“They have a lot of people going over it with a fine-tooth comb,” Ray said, “but again, I’m only interested in the safe.”

As we walked, following the soldier, the ship rocked slightly with the waves, and I kept a hand on the wall of the corridor. As we passed each open door, I saw people inside, moving, sorting, searching.

What I also noticed was the condition of the ship. The walls were pocked and rusted and desperately needed to be scoured and painted. There was dirt and grime on the floor, and I suddenly feared that they
had
brought me here to sweep and clean, after all.

“Do you really think there’s treasure on this garbage scow?” Jack asked.

“Don’t let appearances fool you,” Ray cautioned.

“He’s right,” I agreed. “If you want to hide treasure, you don’t put it on a ship that looks like it
could
have treasure.”

“I get it,” Jack said. “It’s sort of like when you want to kill somebody, you smile as you walk toward them.”

“Exactly,” Ray said. “Not that I’d know anything about killing anybody, but it’s classic misdirection, something both magicians and pickpockets do. Speaking of which …”

He held out his hand … which was holding my watch!

Jack started to laugh and then stopped himself. He looked at his own bare wrist.

Ray was now holding Jack’s watch, too.

He handed us back our watches—just as the soldier who was leading us stopped, and we bumped into him. “Here it is, General, sir!” he yelled as he snapped to attention and saluted.

“Yeah, good … thanks,” Ray mumbled in a not very general-like manner.

We walked into the cabin and Ray closed the door behind us.

“This is different,” Jack said.

“Is it ever!” I agreed.

We had left behind the garbage scow and were now on a luxury liner—or at least what I figured one would
look like. There were carpets on the floor, and expensive furniture, and paintings on the walls, and in the corner was a full-sized grand piano, similar to the one in the lobby of The Princess.

“The occupant of this cabin is an aristocrat—I think he’s related somehow to Spanish royalty—and he wanted to travel in the manner to which he was accustomed,” Ray explained. “Pretty fancy digs. Him being on this ship is one of the things that tipped off our agents in Barcelona.”

“Always look for what doesn’t fit,” I said.

“Always,” Ray agreed.

“Has this cabin been searched?” I asked.

“Completely. Everything except the safe.”

I looked around. “I don’t see a safe.”

Ray walked over and, with one hand, swung a huge picture away from the wall, revealing a big wall safe hidden behind it.

“Nice safe. Fairly complicated, expensive and difficult to crack. That’s good.”

“How is that good?” I asked.

“Nobody has a safe like this installed on a ship unless there’s something in there worth stealing,” he explained.

That made sense. “Can you open it?” Jack asked.

“Actually that’s why I brought George along. He’s going to open it.”

“Me?” I exclaimed, and Ray burst into laughter—he was obviously joking.

“I could teach you, but not today. It’s a little tricky, and we don’t have a lot of time.”

Ray pulled a stethoscope out of his pocket and placed it around his neck.

“Are you going to pretend to be a doctor now?” Jack asked.

“Not today … although I have on occasion pretended to be a doctor. It’s amazing how people take orders from a doctor or just let him into places. I remember this one time, in London, it was—”

“What do you need the stethoscope for?” I asked, cutting him off. I knew that once Ray went off on a story, it could be a long time before we got him back.

“I need this to listen to the safe.”

He put the earpieces in his ears and then placed the other part against the safe. He started slowly turning the tumbler dial.

“Can you really—?”

“Ssshhhh!” Ray hissed.

“Sorry,” Jack whispered.

Ray went back to concentrating on the safe. I took Jack by the arm and moved us toward the far end of the cabin. Slowly, quietly, we sat down on two of the soft leather chairs. With nothing else to do, I looked at the room.

In the far corner was a large, solid, wooden desk. The wood was reddish and gleamed in the light coming in through the porthole. It was made of the same wood as the grand piano. A big leather chesterfield matched the chairs Jack and I were sitting on. There were fancy lamps, and hanging from the ceiling was a crystal chandelier. It was easy to believe that the occupant of this room was royalty. The room seemed more suited to a palace than a broken-down ship. The closest thing I’d ever seen to this cabin was, of course, at The Princess Hotel, but even that didn’t quite live up to these standards.

“There, got it!” Ray sang out.

He pushed down the handle of the safe and then pulled open the door. Jack and I jumped out of the chairs and rushed over.

“Hold this,” Ray said. He had pulled out a painting and handed it to Jack. “Do you recognize it?”

I looked at the painting. “It does look familiar … I guess,” Jack said.

“You might recognize the artist. It’s a Gauguin.”

“I don’t know that name,” I replied.

Ray snorted. “And here’s one for you,” he said as he handed a second painting to me. It was smaller and darker—a portrait of a woman.

“Then you might have heard of this painter … his name was Rembrandt.”

“Yeah, right. Who is it really by?” I asked.

“Rembrandt.”

“I’m holding a Rembrandt?” I gasped.

“One of his smaller pieces. You ever wonder what a million dollars looks like?” Ray asked.

“I can’t even imagine that much … wait … are you saying this painting is worth a million dollars?”

“
Easily
.”

He pulled out another painting. “This is a Picasso.” He set it down on the floor. “And this is a Monet … and a second Picasso.” He pulled out both paintings.

“How much are these worth all together?” Jack asked.

“Enough money for the three of us to live like kings for the rest of our lives. Finding something of this value is like a dream come true for a safecracker, but of course it could never happen in the real world.”

“Why not?” Jack asked.

“These pieces would be under the highest security imaginable, with guards, in museums. It’s only because the Nazis already stole them and were going to sell them that a bloke like me even has a
chance
to steal them. My hands are sweating just being around them.”

I suddenly thought about the sweat from my hands getting on the Rembrandt. I made sure I was holding it by the simple wooden frame.

“Might be a good thing that you boys are around, so I’m not tempted to skip off with these myself,” Ray said. “I’m surprised … I thought there might be more of them,” he said, looking inside the safe.

“There’s nothing else in there?” Jack asked.

“Oh, there are other things but nothing else I can take.” He reached in and brought out a thick stack of money! “This is probably being used to finance some purchases for the Nazi cause, but I can’t prove it so I can’t take it.”

He closed the door of the safe, pulled up the handle and then spun the dial.

“But you can take these?” I asked.

“That’s why we’re here.”

“But won’t that Spanish guy object, or protest or … or …”

“Call the police?” Ray asked, and then he chuckled. “He can’t complain because if he did, then we’d have to arrest
him
.”

“What?”

“It’s simple. He can’t protest our taking the paintings because then he’d have to explain why he had them in the first place, since we all know they were pilfered by the Nazis.”

“I get it,” Jack said. “He can’t complain about you stealing them because they’re already stolen!”

“Exactly!” Ray turned to me. “He catches on fast. Now, since our work is done, we should go before you
two get into trouble for not doing your chores. Just leave the paintings. I’ll make sure they’re taken off the ship.”

I put down the Rembrandt, leaning it carefully against the leg of the desk. I looked at it one last time. It was pretty, but how could it possibly be worth that much money? What made it worth more than the paintings hanging on the walls of this cabin? Actually the paintings on the walls were pretty ugly. I don’t know much about art, but they didn’t seem to fit with the rest of the room. Instead of being fancy and elegant, they were almost cheap … wait … wait.

“Ray, did you really think there would be more paintings on board?” I asked.

“The report indicated that there could be up to ten pieces, but reports are sometimes wrong.”

“But that report, was it right about everything else?” I asked.

“Pretty well. The name of the ship, the passenger’s identity, the location of the safe,” he said.

I walked over and stood in front of one of the paintings. It was an ugly oil painting of a man fighting a bull. It almost looked like one of those paint-by-number kits.

“I was just wondering about this painting,” I said, gesturing to the wall. “And that one, and that one. These paintings are bad.”

“I think even Rembrandt’s children could have done a better job than those,” Jack joked.

“Exactly,” I said. “There’s something about them that’s not right.”

“Almost everything about them isn’t right,” Jack joked. “Guy must have been drunk that day or—”

He suddenly stopped himself mid-sentence. His expression changed. Jack walked over to the painting directly in front of me, took it off the wall and laid it down on the desk. He ran his fingers along the edge of the painting and then took a small knife out of his pocket.

“What are you doing?” Ray demanded.

“I think that maybe there’s something hidden behind—”

“I gathered that, but you can’t be hacking away at it with a pocket knife. Here.”

Ray took the painting out of its frame and then removed a pair of tweezers from his pocket. He used them to carefully pull up a corner of the canvas at the back, and then, with his fingers, he started peeling back the canvas. As he moved to the front and lifted the top canvas, a hidden oil painting was revealed! The face of a woman emerged from beneath the bullfighter, and this painting had the same dark colours of the Rembrandt.

“Wow,” said Ray. “I guess it was your turn to teach me a magic trick. And that one’s a whole lot better than pulling a rabbit out of your hat!”

CHAPTER NINETEEN

“
UNBELIEVABLE
,” the commander said. He was our father’s boss—technically the boss of all operations at the hotel when Little Bill wasn’t there.

“Quite the haul,” Ray agreed.

We were sitting in the office of the commander— along with our parents. I was a little nervous. I’d seen him around but never said more than “hello, sir” as I passed him in the halls of the hotel. It wasn’t like he had much to do with the floor cleaning. I wasn’t really sure why we were all there, except that Ray had told the commander how much we’d helped, and now Ray said he was dead set and determined to get some official permission to, as he said it, “put our God-given talents to work.” And for that we would need the commander’s okay as well as our parents’. I had a feeling I knew which was going to be harder to get.

Around us, either leaning against the walls or laying on the tables, were the pieces of art that had been confiscated from the ship: the five pieces found in the safe and five more discovered underneath other paintings in the cabin.

“What is your estimate of the total value of the paintings?” he asked Ray.

“Could be anywhere up to four million dollars,” Ray replied.

Jack let out a whistle.

“Do you realize that there aren’t more than a dozen museums in the whole world that have more valuable art than we have in this room?” the commander said. “Ten masterpieces.”

“And we would have only had five if it weren’t for the boys here,” Ray said.

“This was a great discovery,” the commander said. “My reports show that the cabin had already been searched and declared clean. You boys saw what others missed, and if you hadn’t been there, those paintings would have sailed off the same way they sailed in. You have struck a valuable blow against the Nazis.” He turned to my parents. “You must be very proud of your boys.”

“We are,” our father said.

“Yes, of course we are, but I still want to know why my boys were even there,” our mother said.

“That’s where I have to apologize,” Ray said. “It was all my idea.”

“Just because you had an idea doesn’t excuse their decision to go with you. They both knew they were not to leave the hotel,” she said.

“We didn’t go very far,” Jack said. “We never really lost
sight
of the hotel.”

“And we did finish our jobs,” I added. As soon as we’d gotten back, we’d made doubly sure that we completed our tasks. Jack finished mopping the ballroom and put all the tables and chairs back in place, and I emptied the garbage cans in all the rooms.