Lucie offers her condolences.
I do the same, crossing my fingers that he’ll go on and tell us what happened to the fan.
And he does. “My dad bequeathed his antiques and textiles collection to his favorite museum.”
“The Textile Arts Museum?” Lucie jumps in. “It’s my favorite, too!”
“And mine,” Constantin says with a chuckle. “But notmy father’s. He preferred a much smaller and lesser-known museum, the Mermoz Treasury.”
“Never heard of it,” Lucie mouths to me.
I whip out my phone and look it up. “Found it!”
We thank Constantin and ride themétrosoutheast to the Mermoz quarter of Lyon. It’s four fifteen when we get to the museum and it’s still open.
Phew!
After I buy the tickets and we pass the turnstile, Lucie turns to me. “What’s the plan? We find a curator and ask them to show us the fan?”
I debated the matter while we rode the subway and decided that it’s a safer bet for me to cue in Lucie rather than the curator.
“We can’t,” I say. “I’ll need to crack the fan’s handle open. No curator would authorize such a violation of an object in their charge.”
She frowns. “I thought you needed to study the carved pattern or the images painted on the silk…”
“I need to see if the handle still contains the key that was encased in it over two hundred years ago.”
She stares at me without uttering a word.
“Our options, as I see them, are as follows,” I plow on. “Number one, we find the curator and try to bribe them. Number two, we locate the fan, hide until everyone is gone, wait for the night guard to check the fan room, sneak in, open the fan, retrieve the key, put the fan back, and lay low until the museum reopens in the morning.”
“Your first option is totally unethical.”
I ignore her moral qualms. “There’s a risk with buying off the curator. He or she may turn out to be an upstanding, incorruptible civil servant. They’re a dying breed, for sure, but far from extinct.”
“Your second option isn’t much better.”
“Yes, yes, but pragmatically speaking, the Mermoz Treasury is a small, underfunded outfit with only one guard that I could see so far, hardly any video cameras?—”
“I can’t believe I’m hearing this from a neat and diligent conserver of heritage!” She tut-tuts. “How disappointing.”
“It’s to save the world.”
She cocks her head. “Yeah, right.”
“OK, it’s to saveaworld.”
“Which?”
Uncle Richard and Carlo will kill me for this, and then Theo will rekill my lifeless body, but I’m too fed up with lying to Lucie Laborde.
“Mine,” I say.
She feigns shock. “Oh my God, is this where you confess you’re a little green man from Alpha Centauri?”
I might as well.
Admitting that I’m a prince of a hidden country bordering France just a few hours’ drive from here would probably sound more outrageous than telling her I’m an alien from another solar system. Perhaps what I should do instead is nudge her gently to the right conclusion, given how perceptive she is…
