Page 70 of The Muse (Beautiful Magic 1)
We spend the rest of the night making a plan that would shame Ethan Hunt and his Mission: Impossible team. We study the layouts of the museums, mapping where the Monets are relative to the damaged paintings and plotting the fastest way to get from one to the other. I’m sure that’s not what the museums intended their interactive maps to be used for, but we end up with a plan.
The Louvre will be the toughest. It’s huge and has the most paintings that need attention, and our solution for getting in is complex, which means more points where it could go wrong. Anything that starts in a restroom is bound to be dicey.
The final thing we need—other than the loan of a Monet—is the phone number of Gustave’s buddy on the night shift at the Louvre. We manage that by the grace of Clio’s pickpocketing skill and dumb luck that Gustave doesn’t have a passcode on his cell phone. Number jotted down and phone returned, we’ve done all we can tonight.
Before she goes into her painting, 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 savor it for what it is.
The last of its kind.
Museum security is nothing like the movies, where master thieves rappel in through skylights and hack surveillance cameras. And forget ridiculously complicated webs of infrared beams.
Most museums have alarms and monitors not much different than those in houses these days, plus a couple of yawning guards patrolling the galleries after dark. But the real deterrent is that it’s virtually impossible to fence a museum piece anywhere, so robberies aren’t worth the risk.
That said, I’d rather not be spotted by camera lenses or human eyes, and while we can travel between paintings of Monet’s bridge, I can’t take anything through the canvases but the clothes I’m wearing—no cheating with pockets. So, to be able to draw handy things into existence, I’ll need the help of an advance party. Which is where my friends come in.
We meet up in a café that day, and, using the maps and layouts of each museum, I explain what I’ll need in each city. The rest is the basic 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. More than that, I don’t want to hear myself say it.
Simon’s buddy Patrick can help in London, where the Turner seascapes pour out of their frames at each high tide. Lucy used to live in Chicago, and a friend there owes her a favor. She snaps a pic of the diagram that shows where the pencil and paper need to be in the Art Institute, and texts it to her contact.
Remy, of course, knows tons of people in New York who can pop into the Met, but we’re out of luck in Saint Petersburg, so Clio and I will have to get creative.
We call it a “scavenger hunt,” and recruiting remote help is surprisingly easy. Talking Remy into loaning us his Monet isn’t even that hard—the challenge is keeping him from hysterics when I explain what I need to do with it.
Outside the pyramid at the Louvre, I almost don’t recognize Remy in jeans and a brown T-shirt. Sophie describes her own outfit as “unobtrusively understated.” What they’re about to do is totally legal, but it pushes the line from eccentric to odd enough that if anyone notices, it will throw a wrench in the whole plan.
Remy clamps his messenger bag between his arm and his side, but not too tightly. “It’s like carrying around a freaking diamond. No—thousands of diamonds.” He puts his fingers to the side of his neck, then grabs my hand and presses my fingers somewhere sort of around his pulse point. “Feel this. My heart is beating ten thousand times a minute.”
I pat his shoulder with a small laugh. “You’ll live. You want to go over it again? The Monet canvas is inside the bag, right?”
He nods. Walking himself through the steps does seem to settle him a little. “We took it out of the frame and off the stretcher bars,” he says, referring to the wooden bars that keep canvases taut inside their frames. “Then we put it into a padded envelope and caught a taxi, because there was no way I was taking a Monet on the Metro.”
“Correction. I took it off the stretchers. Your hands were shaking too much to do that,” Sophie points out.
Remy holds up a now steady palm to his sister. “Whatever.”
I continue to review the plan. “Security will scan your bag like any other bag. There’s nothing to set off an alert, but even if they decide to look through it, there’s no law that says you can’t take a work of art you own out for a stroll.”
