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  Harold Green, I suspected, was a rich man. You’ve never heard of Martin Johnson Heade. Don’t be embarrassed, most other people have never heard of him either. He was an American, died in 1904. He painted marshes, beach scenes, flowers, and birds, mostly in Florida. And today one of his hummingbird paintings could be worth $800,000.

  Wilfredo Lam? Only art students have heard of him. Still, he is the most important modern painter from Cuba. His best paintings—and the one Harold Green owned was pretty good—sell for around $1,000,000.

  That’s also what you’d have to pay for a Tom Thomson, at least one as beautiful as the painting Harold Green owned. Together, Harold Green’s paintings were worth almost $3,000,000.

  Who was Harold Green?

  It’s a short walk from the Art Gallery of Ontario to the Toronto Public Library. I spent the next two hours there, reading old newspapers and reference books, finding out all I could about Harold Green.

  Green had started in the army. Then he’d worked for the government, all over the world, but mostly in the Middle East. He could speak Arabic and also Farsi, the language of Iran. Now he was retired. He divided his time between homes in Toronto, the Bahamas, and Paris. I guessed his money came from his wife, the daughter of a billionaire real-estate developer.

  Most of these details came from Who’s Who, the reference book that tells you everything about important people. But I also read an article on Green and his art collection in the Toronto Star. He’d added a modern addition to his big brick house to hold his paintings. He painted, too. In one photo, he was standing beside an easel. “I’m terrible,” he had said, “but painting helps me understand and appreciate the real thing.”

  The real thing. Like the three paintings he’d loaned the gallery, the three paintings Zena was planning to steal.

  What else could I think?

  Zena and Victor were planning to steal Green’s paintings, and somehow my three pictures were involved.

  Zena the Beautiful; Victor the Crook. I sat back in my chair. How could she do it? “You’re crazy!” I blurted out loud.

  The librarian turned toward me with a frown and put a finger to her lips. “Shh!”

  Chapter Four

  Coffee and Crime

  You’ve heard the expression, “running around like a chicken with its head cut off”? That was me for the next few days. I didn’t know what to do. I was completely confused. One morning, I went to Zena’s apartment building, hoping to catch her as she came out, but she didn’t. Next I went around to Victor’s shop—but at the last minute I didn’t go in. What would I say to him? Then I tried to forget about it. If Zena wanted to do crazy things, that was her business.

  But as I told you, this had nothing to do with money; it was all about love. I kept seeing those beautiful eyes! The day the exhibition at the gallery ended, I drove out to Harold Green’s place on my motorcycle. I watched the house for an hour. I don’t know what I was trying to prove. Rain began to fall. Soon, I was soaked. And to show you how crazy I was, I showed up again the next morning.

  But that was more interesting.

  The street was quiet, shaded by old maple trees. The big brick house had three stories, with lots of chimneys. At one end, the modern addition stuck out. It was low and made of varnished wood. I knew, from the newspaper story, that this was where Green kept his paintings.

  A police car came up the street, a van marked Security right behind it. They turned in at Green’s house. Two men got out of the van, and a cop got out the car. The door of Green’s house opened. With the cop watching, the two men carried the pictures inside: they were being returned from the gallery.

  Just then, a car pulled away from the curb, about half a block down from me. A blue Toyota. Zena. She had been watching, too. Of course! They couldn’t steal the paintings until they came back from the gallery.

  I watched her speed away down the street. She was going too fast for me to catch her, but now I made up my mind. Maybe I was a chicken, maybe I’d lost my head, but I was going to stop running around. I gave the Suzuki a kick and headed for Victor’s shop.

  Closed.

  But I always know where to find Victor. Within three blocks of his place, there’s a Starbucks and two other coffee shops. He doesn’t usually go to Starbucks. He prefers something special. Today, it was a dark, dim place called the Lively Bean. Ugly booths. Plastic seats. But the room was filled with the wonderful smell of roasting coffee.

  Victor was a regular. Instead of a booth, he has his own little table. He was dressed in his usual shapeless hat and grey suit, with a grubby tie knotted around his neck. His watery eyes looked up as I came in. “Paul, dear boy. How lovely to see you.”

  “Victor, this isn’t a social call.”

  “No? But you’ll have some coffee.” He waved to the waitress. “Mabel, bring my young friend some of the Jamaican.”

  As Mabel brought it, I said, “You like to give lectures about discretion. Keeping your mouth shut.”

  “It’s a good habit, my boy.”

  “Well, I’m going to break it.”

  “Dear, dear.”

  “You’re going to say this is none of my business, only you made it my business.”

  Victor sipped his coffee and murmured, “Did I?”

  “Admit it. You told Zena to come to me for those paintings.”

  “Perhaps I did.” He put his cup down and looked at me, straight on. “Which is why I’ve been expecting to see you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I knew you’d catch on.”

  “But you’ve fooled Zena.”

  Victor laughed. “I don’t think so. Paul, the beautiful Zena is far from a fool.”

  “Victor, I don’t want her mixed up with you.”

  He laughed again. “Dear boy, I believe you’re in love with her. You should see your face. Such passion! You’re going to save this beautiful lady from wicked old me!”

  “Something like that,” I said.

  “Well, you’ve got it wrong. And there are other values in life besides love. Money counts for something, surely.”

  “Victor, you know all about that.”

  “So does your beautiful friend,” Victor replied. “I hope it won’t shock you to learn that this was entirely her idea. I’m not involving her in anything, she involved me. If you don’t believe it, ask her yourself.”

  He looked up.

  I turned around. Zena had come in. She was wearing a light grey suit, and her hair was pulled back from her face. She looked like the most beautiful businesswoman in the world.

  “Hello, Mr. Stone,” she said. And then she smiled. “Hello, Paul, I mean.”

  Victor murmured beside me. “She involved me, dear boy. Now we want to involve you.”

  Chapter Five

  I Sign On

  “The moment I saw you,” Zena said, “I knew you were perfect.”

  The moment I saw you, I thought, I knew you were perfect, too. But I only thought this, keeping my mouth shut. Victor would approve; I was being discreet. But then I did ask, “Perfect for what?”

  When she smiled, she had dimples, two sweet little hollows in her cheeks. She glanced quickly at Victor. “Well,” she said, “I knew it would be easier with three.”

  Victor took a sip of his coffee, then set it down. “Zena is being polite, for my sake. It’s a question of my physical abilities. You are a good deal younger, stronger, fitter. Those qualities will be a help in our little job.”

  “You’re crazy. You want me to hit someone over the head?”

  Victor laughed. “No, no, dear boy. Nothing like that. You shock me. Surely you know me better.”

  I was a little surprised, to tell you the truth. Victor was no angel, but violence wasn’t his line. “Then you better explain,” I said.

  I looked at Zena. It was a great pleasure to look at Zena. This close, I could even smell her perfume: light, spicy. I wanted to press my face in her hair and—I resisted. “Why don’t you start at th
e beginning?” I said.

  She began to talk in a low, quick voice. She’d gone to work for Harold Green as his secretary when Green was writing a book. “It was about peace,” she said. “What a two-faced liar he is! A hypocrite! All he really cares about is being rich.” As she’d worked for him, she’d learned the routine of his house, and how the paintings were guarded.

  “Wait,” I said. “Back up a moment. How did you meet Green?”

  “I was born in Iran—well, we still like to think of it as Persia. I speak Farsi, the language of Persia, and so does Green, but he can’t write Farsi. He wanted a person who could.”

  “Did you live there? In the house?”

  “No, but sometimes I did stay overnight.” She looked at me. “No, it’s not what you think.” From the look on her face, I knew it wasn’t. For some reason, she hated Harold Green. I was curious. Why?

  “If the paintings are stolen,” I asked, “won’t he think of you?”

  “No. Not if we make it look like an ordinary art theft. Don’t people steal paintings? Yes, all the time. Besides, I’m a woman. Harold Green wouldn’t think a woman could be strong enough to do such a thing.”

  “Okay, so how can you do it?”

  She leaned closer to me. She put her hand over mine. That made listening hard, but I did my best. “The whole house is protected by alarms. But they are only turned on at night, at 11:30. The alarms are turned on by a computer in Green’s study, the room where he works. When I was with him, that’s where I used to work, too. I saw everything.”

  “But how can you stop the alarms coming on?”

  “Simple. Like all computers, this one has a clock. Before 11:30, you simply set the clock back. Then everything will seem to be normal, you see.”

  Victor looked at me. “You see how smart this young lady is?”

  “All right, but to get to the computer you have to get into the house—”

  “Every night, the man who looks after the house—the butler—takes the garbage out to a shed. His name is Bellows. He likes to smoke cigars, but he can’t in the house. It’s bad for the paintings. All over the house are smoke detectors. So, every night, Bellows takes out the garbage and smokes a cigar. Of course, he has to come back inside before 11:30, before the computer sets the alarms. But we can slip in ahead of him and change the clock. Then, he will come back in and go to bed, and we can take the paintings.”

  Victor said, “I watched him one night. He walks away from the house and behind the shed. If you’re quick, you’ll be able to go in the back door. He won’t see you. The next part is more difficult. That’s where you come in. I was going to do it, but you’ll do it much better.”

  I took a sip of my coffee. “So what’s this difficult part?”

  Zena leaned toward me. “The computer runs the house alarms. But each of the paintings has its own alarm, built into its hanger on the wall. These alarms work on a spring. If you take the painting away—remove its weight—the spring moves up and the alarm goes off. So here’s what we’ll do. We’ll slip a loop of wire over the painting so it catches on the hanger. Then we’ll run this loop to a turnbuckle, a gadget invented for exactly this job: tightening wires. We’ll attach the turnbuckle to an eye bolt we’ll screw into the floor. By twisting on the turnbuckle, we’ll tighten the wire so it pulls down on the spring. When it’s pulling down with the same weight as the painting, we can take the painting away.”

  I thought about it. “All right. That might work. You’d have to do it very carefully.”

  “Indeed, dear boy,” said Victor. “It will take young nerves and muscles, and yours are so much younger than mine. That’s why we need you—if I did it, those alarms would be ringing so loudly they’d wake the dead.”

  I wanted a moment to think things over. I was really thinking about Zena, asking myself the question, what is she really up to? But I looked at Victor and said, “Okay, Victor, I supply steady nerves and young muscle. What’s your contribution? How do you earn your share?”

  He leaned forward, folding his hands in front of him. “Well, when you talk about shares—money—you are certainly coming around to me. Think. We have the paintings, but we want to change them into money. We could try to sell them, of course, but that would be dangerous. Soon, every gallery and museum and police force, all over the world, will have photographs of those paintings. But Harold Green is a careful man. Those paintings are insured... for how much, do you think?”

  “I’d guess $3,000,000.”

  “A very good guess, I expect. So, if the paintings are stolen, Green will claim $3,000,000 from the insurance company. But I’ll arrange to sell them back to the company for only $600,000. We’ll split it three ways, $200,000 each. The insurance company will be delighted, truly happy. They won’t have to pay the $3,000,000 claim, only our—shall we say, our fee? Even Harold Green should be pleased. He’ll get his paintings back. The only person who might be unhappy is Bellows, the butler. I’m afraid he may take a certain amount of the blame.”

  “Victor, you’re such a sensitive fellow, to worry about him.”

  Victor smiled. “What do you say?”

  “I’d like a little time to think about it.”

  “Harold Green is in Paris. We should do it before he comes back.”

  “And when is that?” I asked.

  “Friday.”

  “Today’s Wednesday!”

  Victor raised his eyebrow. “Are you busy tomorrow night?”

  Zena squeezed my hand. I looked into those eyes... those eyes! I keep telling you, it had nothing to do with the money...

  “Mabel,” Victor called to the waitress. “Bring us another cup, if you would.”

  But I wanted something stronger than coffee... rye whiskey, perhaps.

  Chapter Six

  Break-in

  10:00 p.m. A dark night, with no moon.

  I crouched down in the lilac bushes behind Green’s house. A breeze rustled through the leaves. Far off, I could hear the rumble of traffic and, beside me, the soft rise and fall of Zena’s breathing.

  She wore blue jeans, a grey sweater, black Nikes. As beautiful as ever—that sweater was wonderfully tight. She carried a big cloth bag filled with the tools we’d need to fool the alarms on the paintings. I was wearing jeans and a black jacket. In the darkness, we were almost invisible.

  “He won’t be long now,” Zena whispered.

  Actually, Bellows didn’t appear until 10:42. A light came on over the back door, and he backed through it, lugging two plastic bags of garbage. He was a tall, old guy with a stoop. He went up the narrow walk to a little shed, and a sliding door rumbled open. Zena put her hand on my arm. “Wait,” she hissed.

  She was right. Bellows went back into the house and came out again, with two more bags. He tossed them into the shed and then slid the door shut. A moment later, a match flared. I had a quick glimpse of his face, bent down to the light. Then I could smell his cigar.

  He walked slowly away, through the garden, enjoying his smoke. Soon, all I could see was the red tip of his cigar. Then even that disappeared.

  Zena nudged me. We ran softly toward the door. Here was the real moment of danger. The light over the door wasn’t bright, but if Bellows looked back, he might see us.

  He didn’t.

  We slipped through.

  We were in a dark room with a tiled floor. Zena led the way—she knew where she was going, and she had a little flashlight.

  We tiptoed upstairs, into a hall. Here, the lights were on. Zena took my arm. “This way.”

  We stepped through a door. In this room, the lights were off. Zena quickly flashed her light into the dark. A big room, set up like an office. Desk. File cabinets. Two big leather chairs—they gleamed black in the light. Zena stepped behind the desk, but she didn’t sit down. Smart. A chair might creak. Leaning forward, she tapped a key on the keyboard. The computer screen lit up. She whispered, “You see, it is always on.”

  I was worried about the light from th
e screen, but Zena was quick. She found the menu for “Clock Set.” I looked at my watch. 11:05. She set the time back to 10:00. At 11:30, when the alarms were supposed to come on, the computer would think there was more than an hour to go.

  “Come,” Zena said, “I’ll show you where we can hide.”

  She led me to the back of Green’s office. Here, she pushed against a folding door. We stepped into a small storeroom, its shelves piled high with paper and boxes of office supplies.

  How long did we sit there? Forever. I strained my ears. Finally, I heard a door close somewhere, and Zena whispered, “That is Bellows. He always tests the front door and bangs it shut before he locks it. Now he’ll go up to his room, on the third floor.”

  It was 11:25. As far as Bellows knew, the alarms would come on in five minutes. We gave him ten. Then Zena pushed the door open and we stepped back into the office. Bellows had turned out all the lights in the house and closed the curtains. I suppose that’s how he kept the house when Green was away. It was really dark. I kept one hand on Zena’s shoulder. Twice, I hit my knees against tables or chairs, but we didn’t knock anything over. Green’s special gallery was at the far end of house. I was glad when we finally reached it.

  A fan hummed softly, keeping the air dry for the paintings. Zena flashed the light around, but kept it low, on the floor. The room was shaped like a shoebox. I could see that Green’s paintings were on the long back wall. The windows along the front wall were covered by heavy drapes—strong sunlight hurts paintings. An easel and a table with tin cans full of brushes and palette knives, and twisted tubes of old paint, stood against the shorter outside wall. I remembered that Green liked to paint. But he hadn’t painted the pictures in his gallery. Very impressive. I almost whistled. I counted them. Eighteen. And at least a dozen were worth stealing, though the three we wanted were certainly the best.