Last Chance, page 15
‘Over there!’ he said. They scrambled to their feet and took off again. They could hear the voices of the thieves now.
‘They must have stopped moving,’ panted Friday. ‘We’re getting closer.’ Her eyes were adjusting to the dark. This time, when the walkway stopped in front of them, she saw it. ‘Watch out! There’s a bend.’
They skidded to a halt and turned into the new tunnel. This tunnel was much bigger. Several different sewers fed into it. There was a boat floating on the sewerage water and the thieves were climbing in.
‘How did they get a boat down here?’ asked Ian.
‘Run!’ cried Friday. ‘We have to stop them before they take off.’
They sprinted down the walkway, but it was no good. They were still thirty metres way when the boat’s engine roared to life, and it took off. Friday and Ian ran after it. The sewer was a confined space, so it couldn’t go fast. They were able to keep pace until the boat got to the next bend. When Friday and Ian turned, this new tunnel was different. It was massive. Like a cathedral of sewerage.
‘What is this place?’ asked Ian. ‘How much poop can Paris have to need a sewer this big?’
‘The sewers mimic the roads above,’ said Friday. ‘The only road in Paris that’s this big is the Champs-Élysées.’
‘They’re heading west,’ said Ian, checking the compass on his phone.
‘Towards the Arc de Triomphe,’ said Friday.
‘We’ll never catch them on foot,’ said Ian.
Friday spotted something dangling on a pipe above the sewer.
‘We don’t need to,’ said Friday. ‘Do you have a credit card?’
‘What?’ asked Ian.
Friday pointed to the pipe above Ian’s head. There was an electric share scooter hanging by its handlebar just above them.
‘Do you think it would still work?’ asked Ian.
‘There’s one way to find out,’ said Friday.
A minute later they were zipping along the walkway at the scooter’s maximum speed. Friday was standing in front of Ian on the running board. Ian was driving because he was the one with a sense of balance. It would have been fun, if Ian hadn’t kept banging his head on pipes and wires attached to the ceiling, and if they weren’t in a stinky sewer.
The boat came into view up ahead. It had pulled over to the walkway and all the thieves were all clambering out.
‘They’ve opened up a manhole onto the street,’ said Ian.
Friday’s eyes weren’t as good, but even she could now see the thieves climbing up a ladder.
‘We’re not going to get there in time,’ said Ian.
‘We’ve got to try,’ said Friday.
The scooter skidded to a halt at the base of the ladder just as the last foot disappeared up through the manhole. Luckily the thieves were in such a hurry to get away they didn’t think to replace the cover behind them. Ian leapt up onto the ladder. Friday followed as quickly as someone with a total lack of natural athleticism can leap off a scooter and climb a ladder while not falling into a river of sewerage.
The ladder was gross. It was damp. Friday didn’t want to think what was making it wet. It couldn’t have been good. Her feet slipped on the rungs, but she hurried after Ian as best she could. She didn’t want to lose sight of the thieves and she didn’t want to lose sight of Ian either. She grabbed the final rung and pulled her head up through the hole – only to have it nearly knocked off by a speeding car.
‘Friday!’ cried Ian.
Friday had momentarily ducked back down. Ian reached in and grabbed her wrist. With his help, she climbed out onto the street as quickly as she could. Another car blasted its horn as it veered around them, missing them by just centimetres. Friday looked about. They were right next to the Arc de Triomphe!
‘Wow!’ said Friday, looking up at the huge structure. ‘It’s massive up close.’
Another car honked as it skidded to a halt, just missing them. The driver leaned out the window and abused them in French.
Friday realised that they were standing in the middle of the traffic. The Arc de Triomphe – apart from being a monument to France’s military greatness – was also a traffic roundabout. Twelve different roads fed into the junction. There was enough room for eight cars to drive side-by-side around it, but there weren’t eight lanes, because there were no lane markings! None at all. It was a huge angry swirl of traffic and Friday and Ian were standing right in the middle of it.
‘Where did they go?’ asked Friday.
‘In every direction,’ said Ian.
The thieves, in their blue boiler suits, were running all over the place – each one of them carrying a rectangular package under their arm. They had broken apart like balls at the start of a pool game – all fired off in random different directions.
‘What are they doing?’ muttered Friday. She watched as one jumped into a taxi. Then saw another get on a bus.
‘That one just got in an Uber,’ said Ian, pointing in a different direction.
‘They’re escaping,’ said Friday. ‘In ten different ways.’
‘We don’t know which one of them has the real Mona Lisa,’ said Ian, his head whipping round as he watched all the different thieves disperse.
‘It’s brilliant,’ said Friday, turning back and forth, trying to see where they all went. One was heading for the metro, another had grabbed an e-scooter, one jumped on the back of a courier’s motorcycle. ‘They’re trying to trick us with nine separate wild-goose chases.’
‘They’re all getting away,’ said Ian.
They could hear the wail of police sirens getting closer but still some distance away.
‘No,’ cried Friday. ‘Over there!’
Ian looked in the direction she was pointing. There was no thief in a boiler suit. It was just a Giuseppe’s Pizza delivery rider, weaving his e-bike through the traffic.
‘We’ve got to stop him!’ said Friday.
‘Now is not the time to think of food,’ said Ian.
But Friday had already taken off running. The pizza bike slowed down to navigate around a woman pushing a pram, and that’s when Friday did the most athletic thing she had ever done in her entire life. She leapt through the air and crash-tackled the cyclist, knocking him and his bike to the ground. The pizza hotbox broke off from the bike’s rack and tumbled away.
‘Get the box!’ Friday yelled to Ian. He ran over and grabbed it.
The pizza delivery guy struggled to get out of Friday’s grasp, but Friday held tenaciously to his leg. Eventually the delivery guy got himself into a position where he could pull back his other leg and he kicked Friday in the face.
‘Nooo!’ cried Ian. He dumped the box and leapt on the pizza delivery guy, flattening him to the ground.
‘Oomph,’ said Friday as their combined weight squashed her more. Then there was another impact. The Interpol car had pulled up and Agent Okeke, being much quicker than Bernie, had leapt into the fray.
Then things went a little bit crazy, because that’s when the counter-terrorism squad arrived. They saw what looked like an armed black woman attacking three citizens and launched into action. A half-dozen of France’s most fearsome and burly police officers rushed in to join the scuffle. They didn’t bother discriminating between who was a criminal and who was a victim. They just put everyone in handcuffs.
When Friday was eventually turned over and allowed to sit up, she blinked to clear her watering eyes. Bernie had picked up the hotbox.
‘Is it in here?’ asked Bernie.
Friday nodded, too tired to speak.
Bernie unzipped the hotbox, reached in and pulled out – a pizza box. He looked up at Friday. ‘Friday, what have you done?’
‘Open the pizza box,’ said Friday.
Bernie raised the lid. He gasped. He turned to show the others. The Mona Lisa was inside.
‘This is crazy,’ said Bernie.
‘No,’ said Friday. ‘This is art. This whole thing is just one big piece of performance art staged by the biggest ego on the art scene.’
‘Who?’ asked Bernie.
Friday couldn’t point because her hands were still cuffed, so she tipped her head in the direction of the delivery guy who was still being pressed face down into the concrete footpath.
The officers rolled him over and they immediately recognised – Giorgio.
‘You!’ said Agent Okeke. She had been handcuffed too, but she reached out with her foot and tried to kick him.
‘This whole thing was just a stunt?’ said Bernie.
‘Not a stunt,’ said Friday. ‘A total humiliation of the art establishment.’
Giorgio smiled smugly. ‘This is my masterpiece. My Mona Lisa of guerrilla art.’
‘Because only a great artist could forge a letter so perfectly,’ said Friday.
‘Exactly,’ said Giorgio.
‘It all fits,’ said Friday, nodding as the pieces of the puzzle fell into place in her mind. ‘When you did your street graffiti, you used to wear hi-vis clothes and pass yourself off as a council worker. You did the same thing to get into Signora Peruggia’s apartment. You posed as a council worker come to modernise her toilet cistern, then pretended to “find” the letter you had forged.’
‘I’m smarter than I look, no?’ said Giorgio. He was enjoying this. His favourite part of every prank was when people realised how clever he was.
‘And totally immoral,’ said Friday. ‘You stole a shirt from your own son, and a bike from your brother, so you could disguise yourself as a pizza deliverer.’
‘I protected Roberto,’ protested Giorgio. ‘I made sure he was safely shut away with the Sphinx before we began.’
‘That was you?’ said Friday. ‘You locked us in?’
‘Of course, I had everything planned. They should be honoured to be part of my great masterpiece,’ said Giorgio. ‘The art world will remember this forever.’
‘You’ve just staged an armed robbery!’ exclaimed Uncle Bernie. ‘You’re going to jail forever!’
‘Pah,’ said Giorgio, dismissively. ‘I was not armed. The guns were loaded with blanks. I would never hurt anyone.’
‘You idiot,’ said Bernie. ‘It doesn’t matter that you used blanks. You made people think you were using live ammunition. That’s just as bad in the eyes of the law. You terrified people. You endangered lives. You brought the whole counter-terrorism squad into action on the busiest intersection in Paris. What if they had started shooting? This could have been a disaster. You will do serious jail time.’
‘Plus you drugged the guards at the Louvre so they fell asleep on duty and lost their jobs,’ said Friday. ‘Did you make sure they were replaced with your stooges? Were they the others in the boiler suits?’
‘So what? There’s no harm done,’ protested Giorgio. He was starting to look worried.
‘Only through sheer miraculous good fortune,’ said Uncle Bernie. ‘You are under arrest.’
Several hours later, Friday, Ian, Agent Okeke and Bernie finally emerged from the police station. Melanie had arrived, bringing a town car to give them all a lift back to the Institute.
‘That is the weirdest crime we have ever solved,’ said Friday.
‘We?’ said Ian. ‘You’re the one who figured it out. No-one else’s mind was twisted enough to imagine such a strange crime.’
‘It was clever,’ said Friday. ‘As long as the Mona Lisa was in her case she was perfectly safe. So the only way to steal it was to trick the gallery into taking it out. And the only reason they would do that was if enough people believed it was not the Mona Lisa.’
‘The sad part is,’ said Bernie, ‘after all this, even more people will believe it’s a fake.’
‘Yes, but that’s part of the Mona Lisa’s mystique,’ said Friday. ‘It’s a small dark painting of a merchant’s wife. It only became the most famous painting in the world because Vincent Peruggia stole it a hundred years ago and that captured everyone’s imagination. Today’s adventure is just another chapter in her story.’
‘Is the painting all right?’ asked Ian.
‘Apparently,’ said Bernie. ‘It was taken straight back to the Louvre. A team of their best art restorers have been checking it, but so far it appears no harm done.’
‘That’s a miracle,’ said Ian.
‘There was enough harm done to my face,’ said Agent Okeke grumpily. She was holding an icepack to her eye.
‘Yeah,’ agreed Ian. ‘We’d feel bad for you if we hadn’t seen the other guys.’
‘How many of your counter-terrorism colleagues did you put in hospital?’ asked Melanie.
‘Three,’ said Agent Okeke, with a small satisfied smile (not unlike the Mona Lisa’s small smile). ‘They only had themselves to blame. They shouldn’t have resisted when I resisted arrest.’
‘How did you know he was the pizza delivery guy?’ asked Ian. ‘He was wearing a full-faced helmet. You couldn’t see it was Giorgio.’
‘The shirt,’ said Friday. ‘Roberto’s shirt had gone missing, just after his dad visited the apartment. Giuseppe is Giorgio’s brother – it would have been easy for him to swipe one of the delivery bikes too.’
‘Poor Roberto,’ said Melanie.
‘He’ll be fine,’ said Ian. ‘When you’ve got a dad like that . . .’ And Ian did have a dad like that, so he knew. ‘. . . it’s easier when they’re in jail. At least you know where to send a Christmas card.’
‘Come on,’ said Bernie. ‘All this talk of pizza is making me hungry. I’ll take you all for dinner.’
‘Wait right there!’
A man in a grey suit and two uniformed police officers surged out of the building. The man grabbed Friday by the shoulder.
‘Freitag Barnes?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ said Friday. Her birth had been registered in Switzerland and her father was incompetent, so the German word for Friday, Freitag, was what was written on her birth certificate and passport.
‘We need you to come with us for questioning,’ said the man.
‘What for?’ demanded Bernie.
‘I’m not going anywhere,’ said Friday. She was starting to panic. She did not like the look in the officer’s eyes. They were holding back. There was something going on that they wanted to keep from her.
The man in the suit nodded to one of the uniformed officers.
‘Then I’m arresting you,’ said the man.
Friday gasped. The next moment, the uniformed officer had stepped behind her and snapped handcuffs onto her wrists.
‘What for?’ repeated Bernie.
‘Conspiracy to commit an act of treason,’ said the man. ‘And providing military secrets to a hostile regime.’
‘You’re accusing her of terrorism?’ cried Ian incredulously.
‘Not again,’ moaned Friday.
Friday Barnes was not an unhappy child. That said, she wasn’t deliriously over the moon either. She was sort of just left to get on with things. You see, Friday Barnes was the youngest of five children. Now I know what you’re thinking: ‘Five children! Her mother must have been so busy. What a workload! What a chaotic house they must have had!’ Well, that’s not how it was at all.
Friday’s mother was a very systematic woman. You don’t get to have a PhD in theoretical physics if you’re not good at being methodical. And that is how Mrs Barnes approached child-rearing. She decided she wanted children, so she allocated four-and-a-half years out of her career to have them. She spaced them exactly eighteen months apart and when the oldest started school and the younger two were in daycare, she went back to work.
Now I’m sure if you’re good at maths, you will have noticed that if you have children eighteen months apart over a four-and-a-half-year period, that gives you four children in total. Mr and Mrs Barnes had their four children and everything went to plan. They taught them to read with flash cards, they sent them to the best extra-curricular maths workshops and they even allowed them to participate in sport. If you call yoga sport.
Then nine years later, just as their youngest child was gaining early admission to high school, the unexpected happened: Mrs Barnes got pregnant again. There was no time in her schedule for childbirth. On the due date, she was committed to speak at a conference in Bern, Switzerland about the possibility of the International Super Collider opening a black hole and destroying the planet. For the first time in her adult life, Mrs Barnes saw her iron-clad grasp on order and reason begin to slip.
Mr Barnes was, however, a man of action. If the action did not require him to leave his office or get up from his desk. He googled Bern and maternity hospitals. They discovered that there was one just three kilometres from the conference centre. Mr and Mrs Barnes both breathed a sigh of relief. From that moment on, life proceeded exactly as if Friday did not exist.
Later in her third trimester Mrs Barnes travelled to Switzerland and gave her lecture. Halfway through she started to feel labour pains, but she was able to hold on throughout the powerpoint presentation. And only the people in the front row noticed when her waters broke.
And so Friday was born. And she was named Friday because that was what her parents thought was the day of the week. (Being academics they often became confused about such trivial matters as times and dates.) It was actually a Thursday. But the people at the births registry did not question the name; they just assumed Mr and Mrs Barnes were Robinson Crusoe fans, which of course they were not because neither of them believed in reading fiction.
Eleven years later, Friday Barnes had largely raised herself. She was fairly small and dull-looking, with light brown hair, muddy brown eyes and the trick of finding the exact spot in a room with the least light, so that if she stood perfectly still nobody would notice she was there.
Friday found it was best to go unnoticed as much as possible. Being noticed just caused trouble. If her mother noticed Friday was eating an entire block of milk chocolate, she would take it off her and tell her to eat an apple. If she didn’t notice, Friday could eat as much as she liked.
If her father noticed that Friday was reading a shocking tell-all book about serial killers, he would take it off her and give her a copy of the periodic table to memorise (never having noticed that she already memorised it by the age of four). Friday found that if she was able to go unnoticed, which is very easy when you have academic parents whose brains are totally consumed with thoughts of quasars and electrons all day long, then she could do whatever she liked.
