“Let’s go,” Gus said. “We’ve got to get in and out fast.”
“Fast?” Kitteredge said. “I’m going to need some time with the painting.”
“How much time?” Gus said.
“Ideally a couple of decades,” Kitteredge said. “We’re talking about the solution to a puzzle that has gone unanswered for more than a hundred years.”
“The only way you’re getting decades is if they agree to hang the picture in your cell,” Shawn said. “You’ve got three minutes, tops.”
“Three minutes!” Kitteredge said. “That’s almost worse than nothing.”
“Then we might as well leave now,” Shawn said. “Because it’s not going to take much more than three minutes to clear everyone out of this place. Then they’re going to lock it down and start going room by room to make sure nothing is missing. And since you are technically missing, you really don’t want anyone to find you here.”
Kitteredge looked helplessly to Gus, as if hoping the higher court would overturn the verdict. “If Jean-Francois Champollion had only been able to study the Rosetta Stone for three minutes, he never would have been able to work out the translations between demotic and hieroglyphics.”
“If his choice had been between looking at the stone and spending the rest of his life breaking rocks, I think we both know which way he would have gone,” Gus said.
“But we have something that Champ guy never dreamed of,” Shawn said. He dug in the roomy pocket of his rental pants and pulled out his cell phone. “As the new counter girl at Burger Town said to Gus, take a picture; it will last longer.”
Kitteredge’s face lit up in joy, and Gus was so pleased that Shawn had found a way to answer everyone’s needs that he was willing to ignore the fact that the counter girl had actually been talking to Shawn, and that she had appended an extra word to the end of her sentence that had rendered her photographic suggestion even less friendly.
With Kitteredge clutching the cell phone, they started across the vestibule, heading straight for the crime scene tape. Shawn was just reaching out to push open the glass door when a gruff voice called out from behind them.
“Hey!” the voice said. “You can’t go that way.”
The voice belonged to the uniformed police officer who had been standing guard at the gallery door. And he was marching up to them.
Chapter Eighteen
Now what? Gus thought desperately. There was no way the cop was going to let them in to see the painting. They’d be lucky if he didn’t arrest them just for trying. And if he got any kind of look at Kitteredge’s face, the professor would be in prison awaiting trial for murder, and they’d be sharing a cell for aiding and abetting.
“We’re just trying to get out, Officer,” Shawn said in the same voice he’d been using to feign innocence when caught red-handed since he was spotted dumping a jar of green tempera powder on Suki Stern in kindergarten.
“There’s no exit through that door,” the officer said.
“Well, thank God you came along to let us know that in time,” Shawn said, an extra coating of sugar on his tone. “If we’d gone in there, we might have been broiled alive.”
As opposed to simply getting the lethal injection, Gus thought. Which is what we’ll be facing once that cop recognizes Professor Kitteredge.
“No danger of that,” the officer said. “There’s no fire. But we are evacuating the building. Follow me and I’ll show you the way to the exit.”
“Thank you again, Officer,” Shawn said.
“That is, if your friend feels like getting off the phone,” the officer said.
Gus turned to see that Kitteredge was holding Shawn’s phone to his left ear with his right hand, allowing him to cover most of his face with forearm and elbow.
“That’s Uncle Leroy for you,” Shawn said. “Anything interesting happens, he’s got to tell Aunt Mabel about it right away. Come on, Uncle Leroy.”
Kitteredge seemed to recognize his cue. “Don’t worry about me, Mabel. You’ve got to see to those chickens,” he said into the phone. “And when you’re done, the cows are going to need milking. And the hay needs to be baled. Plus there are those pies to bake.”
Shawn took Kitteredge’s free elbow and started to guide him toward the cop. “That’s plenty of rustic charm, Uncle Leroy,” he said. “I’m sure Aunt Mabel remembers what to do.”
“I’m glad somebody does,” the cop said, turning and headed toward the main lobby. He was expecting them to follow, and if they didn’t he’d come back fast to find out why. And the first place he’d look would be Guenevere ’s gallery. Forget about three minutes with the painting; they’d be lucky to get three seconds.
Shawn was shuffling his feet, moving as slowly as possible while still maintaining a defensible level of forward momentum in case the cop glanced back, when there was a shout from behind them.
“Police! Help!” a man’s voice shouted.
Gus turned to see the long-haul trucker from the cafe rushing past them to reach the officer, trailing his two small children behind him.
“What’s the problem?” the cop said.
“It’s my wife,” the trucker said. “She’s stuck in Chinese porcelain. You’ve got to help her.”
“Is she hurt?” the cop said.
“Her feelings are,” the trucker said. “And believe me, that’s bad enough. She saw you helping that pregnant woman out a couple of minutes ago.”
“So?” the officer said.
“She says she’s entitled to the same level of service as anyone else,” the trucker said. “And if assistance is being offered, she wants some, too.”
The cop stared at him, dumbfounded. “Are you serious?”
“I wish I wasn’t,” the trucker said. “She’s sitting on the floor and won’t get up until she gets everything she deserves. Even if that means burning up in an inferno and leaving our poor children motherless.”
The cop looked down at the children, who stared back up at him seriously. Then he muttered something under his breath and turned back to Shawn. “Exit’s that way,” he said pointing in the direction he’d been heading. “Follow the crowd and you can’t miss it. Don’t be here when I get back.”
The trucker led the officer back in the direction he’d come from. Gus let out a sigh of relief as the three of them crept back to the gallery entrance and pushed the door open. They bolted through and let the door shut behind them.
As Gus looked around the deserted gallery he marveled that less than twenty hours had passed since he’d been here. Since then the entire world had changed. The man he respected most in the world was a wanted fugitive, and Gus was helping him escape the police. He might have expected the gallery to have changed in that time to reflect the new situation, for the lights to be lower or the walls to be closing in or the floor split by a jagged fissure through which they could fall straight into hell.
But nothing looked any different than it had the night before. Sure, there were gray smudges on the walls where crime scene techs had brushed for fingerprints, and there was some dried blood etched in the grout between the marble tiles of the floor. But if you didn’t know what you were looking for, you’d never know this had been the scene of such a terrible crime. You couldn’t even see the tape outline of Filkins’ body on the ground, as the red velvet drape had been closed over the painting again.
“Okay, Professor,” Shawn said. “You’ve got three minutes.”
Gus looked back to see that Kitteredge was frozen by the gallery door. “Professor Kitteredge?” he said.
Kitteredge seemed to shake off the spell. “Sorry,” he said. “This picture has haunted me for so long, it’s hard to believe that it’s actually behind that curtain, even though I saw it last night.”