“I’m not going to call you Pussy Galore,” I say firmly.
“Then I won’t call you the Starry Knife.”
“I did not ask you to call me that.”
“Or the Fresh Prince of Bernini.”
“No code names, Stella.”
“I am going to be Picasshole,” Lucie says. She loops her armaround the furry neck of the latest member of our motley crew, a German shepherd named Clovis that we’ve borrowed from the owner of our favorite kebab shop, Paristanbul. He’s gigantic, with massive teeth, and would be terrifying if he weren’t exceptionally lazy, friendly, and mostly deaf. He’s wearing the tactical harness we had specially made for him that readsescouade anti-bombes. He yawns when Lucie hugs him and goes back to sleep.
“Can we focus?” I ask them. “Please. I’m still freaked out about Caroline showing up at the apartment.” Her sudden appearance shook me last week, and in my addled state I slipped down our fire escape rather than let her in. Something about her presence there terrified me, but I couldn’t pinpoint why. There was no sign of her or the fancy car when I returned hours later, but I was convinced it was some kind of surveillance. Had someone checked the safe at the château? Were the Swansons after me?
Stella blew off all my fears when I first told her. “Caroline was probably delivering some note from a poor lovesick Matthew.” But I thought I saw a look of concern cross her features as she said it then, and again when she brushes it off now.
“They don’t know anything. If they did, they would have had you arrested,” she asserts. “Trust me.”
I don’t really have a choice in the matter. We have to move forward so I drop it. “What if we go over the plan for tonight one more time, then. What if there are real police around the museum tonight? It’s New Year’s Eve. Anything can happen.”
“We’ll wait them out. We have all night,” Lucie says. “It can happen before midnight or after. There will be fireworks and distractions all night long. Colette will be our eyes outside the entire time, and Stella will be here in the hotel monitoring the police scanners.”
Truth be told, the plan for the heist is rather simple. We’ve learned from Colette’s insider at the museum that tonight’s security team is much more bare-bones than usual because of the holiday, and that there will be a shift change around midnightdue to various scheduling anomalies, making it even more sparse for a couple of hours.
The trick will be making sure security doesn’t accompany us into the galleries. We’ll warn the security staff to stay on the main floor for safety reasons while we make our pretend sweep to search for a bomb and then take the paintings off the wall and replace them with the ones I painted. The French inclination toward bureaucratic rule following is on our side. There is a likelihood they will ring the curator to inform him of the visit, but there’s no way he will be able to make it from his own residence, where we were assured he is throwing a New Year’s party of his own, to the Orsay in the midst of holiday traffic in under an hour. Our plan hinges on most of Paris being properly blitzed by midnight. We will need less than twenty minutes because we are simply replacing the paintings, not stealing them, not even removing them from their frames. I gaze at the pieces now with pride. Finishing the Van Gogh nearly broke me, but I did it and it’s perfect in every single way. By being careful not to blend the paint too much, I was able to create actual wood-like brushstrokes on all the furniture in Vincent’s bedroom. The coats hanging on the wall look worn and wrinkled, and yet all the lines are wobbly enough to make the viewer feel as though they’ve just awoken from the deepest of sleeps.
I dried the paintings in a low-heat oven in one of the studios I could still access at school and then applied an extra layer of metal salts to encourage a small amount of craquelure, the fine network of cracks that naturally appears on the surface of old paintings. Those lines won’t be identical, but it will be close enough. The cracks are like the tiniest birthmarks or scars and are often used by experts to expose a fraud. But no one will be looking at these paintings under a microscope.
There are holes in the plan, a hundred of them. But with Colette’s intelligence and Stella’s insider knowledge of the Orsayfrom years of working with them on donations, we may be better equipped and informed than most art thieves.
I want to draw this part out, to sit here with them preparing for another thousand hours instead of moving to the next part of it. Though I do worry they’re not taking this seriously enough. I worry Lucie will get too cocky. I worry one of the guards will recognize me from the hours I’ve spent in the museum, though Lucie and Stella have told me that I’m wearing so much makeup even they don’t recognize me. All my other fears continue to flash through my mind: police handcuffs clicking around my wrists, newspaper headlines about the failed heist, my mother alone in Philadelphia with no one to care for her.
I called my mom at her facility last night. She was shockingly lucid and asked when I would be home to visit.
“Soon,” I promised.
“I’d like to watch you paint,” was her reply. “I dream about doing that.” My heart does a cartwheel at the memory as I fiddle with my own wig of dark curls.
If something goes wrong, this could be the last time I get to be with all three of them like this. I try to put it out of my mind, but something makes me turn and rush over to Stella, to hug her one last time.
“Thank you,” I whisper into her ear.
She pulls me in tighter than I expected. She’s not a hugger. “Thank me when you’re a very richwoman.”
32
Claire
Jo hasn’t returneda single one of my letters. Johan came to move her final things out of the boardinghouse and into their Amsterdam apartment. He was warm enough. Given the distance between them I can’t imagine she told him of my deceptions.
I saw her once when I was visiting the city and I know she saw me, but she turned and sped up her gait, hustled to a side street, and when I followed her down the road she was gone. I do not deserve her friendship and yet I still long for it.
There is to be a show of Vincent’s work at the Stedelijk Museum. It is the big one she’s been lobbying for since she arrived nearly fifteen years ago. I only know about it because it’s been mentioned in all the newspapers and art magazines. There will be more than four hundred works on display, paintings and drawings, along with many of Vincent’s letters, the ones I have translated and curated with Jo over the years. I read a half dozen interviews with her about it. She doesn’t mention me in any ofthem, though she used to in others. I’ve been erased from her life, as I deserve to be.
My daughter keeps telling me to enjoy the ease I’ve earned, but there are times I fear I’ve become addicted to the struggle. When you’re born with less than nothing and you have no choice but to claw your way to comfort, you simply don’t know any other way. It may be why I continue to pursue Jo. My letters to her get longer, more desperate. I only send a few of them. The rest I burn.
I have to see her, and Vincent’s show may be my only opportunity.
I’m standing in front ofThe Reaper, a swirling golden wheat field with a solitary figure bent over in the act of harvesting. Next to it is a framed letter from Vincent explaining how he wished to elevate ordinary people through art.
