We enter the massive room with Greek and Roman art with its black floor, huge columns, and many busts on display. The glass roof above has a hole cut into it.
Avery walks directly underneath the hole, glances up and around. I have to say, seeing her in her natural habitat—she is art, and art is her.
She squats, brushes over the floor, smells it. Lies down, flat on the floor, and picks up something with her finger. Smells it again, tastes it with the tip of her tongue.
“Firstly, they cut it with a laser,” she says. “There are just two manufacturers in a 500-mile radius who offer a mobile version strong enough to cut through that glass, and I happen to know both of them.”
Of course she does.
“Secondly,” she says as she gets up and walks past us with her heels resounding loudly through the silent room. We follow her.
She walks around a bust. Bends to look for whatever it is she is looking for, then takes her hand and fumbles somewhere under it.
I meanwhile read the sign: Marble portrait bust of the emperor Gaius, known as Caligula.
“Yep,” she says. “Come here.”
I walk around and stand in the back of the bust,
“Give me your hand,” she says.
I don’t give her my hand.
She groans.
“I might need to add a requirement of food for you before I work with you,” she says, grasps my hand, and guides my finger to a spot underneath the bust.
“Feel that?” she asks and circles my finger over a spot.
I mean, I feel it; there is a difference in material, but I am completely distracted by the way she moves my finger?—
She lets go of my hand, and I retract it. Only then do I realize my lips are slightly parted.
“What is there?” asks Rachel, and brings me back to what is reality. I still can’t grasp what just happened.
“A filled drill hole,” says Avery. “This wasn’t a heist; this was a handover.”
“Let us get someone from the curation; we need to open that bust.”
“No need,” Avery says.
“Yes,” I say, “you will not touch?—“
She holds a small rolled-up parchment up for me to see between her fingers.
“How the hell did you do that?” I rage at her. I didn’t even look after my eyes for three seconds, and she got it out right in front of our eyes.
“If someone places it as a handover, it needs to be easily removable during working hours without much trouble,” she says casually.
“There could be fingerprints on it!”
“No one who goes to these lengths leaves fingerprints on a parchment,” she says, which is likely, and yet—she disobeys rules. My rules.
I take out my gloves, slip them on, and then take the parchment from her.
I unroll it.
There is something inked onto it. It looks like a symbol; it could be Egyptian.
