Enter Peabody. Actually, he had already entered. It was Pythag’s habit to be the first guest to walk through the museum doors in the morning, and the last to leave at closing. He made himself at home in the Natural History Museum, just as he once had in the art museum, and in the zoo. (The trouble at Ye Olde Medieval Restaurant & Go-Cart Track occurred before we were acquainted, but Pythag once hinted that it had something to do with giving the waiters’ lances to the young drivers and encouraging them to “joust.”)
I have said I will give a fair accounting, and I will. Pythag was a man who knew no boundaries. His was a genius, he often reminded me, that could not be confined to the paths that others were pleased to follow. I know some stiff-rumped bureaucrats will not agree, but if he were here to defend himself, Pythag would undoubtedly say, “If you don’t want a gentleman born with an enviable amount of curiosity to climb into an elephants’ compound, for goodness sakes, rely on more than a waist-high fence and a silly excuse for a moat to keep him out.”
Likewise, he would tell you that if your art museum docent becomes rattled when a gentleman with a carrying voice follows along with a second group of unsuspecting art lovers, telling them a thing or two the docent failed to mention to his own group, well then, the docent stands in need of better training. Pythag enjoyed himself immensely on these “tour” occasions, tapping on glass cases and reading aloud from wall plaques to begin his speeches.
He soon varied from the information in these written guides, however. He often told visitors that when X-rayed, the canvases beneath the museum’s most famous oil paintings were shown to be covered with little blue numbers, a number one being a red, two a blue, and so forth. This, he claimed, was how the museum’s restoration department could make a perfect match when repairing a damaged work of art. He also claimed to be such an expert as to be able to see the numbers with his naked eye, which, he said, “Has quite spoiled most of these for me.”
The art museum director, Pythag declared, would soon be under arrest for the murder of Elvis-the director’s supposed motive for the killing being to increase the value of his secret, private collection of velvet portraits of The King. (I understand the We Tip Hotline, tiring of Pythag’s relentless pursuit of this idea, blocked calls from the Peabody home number.)
I’ll wager a tour with Pythag was much more interesting, if less enlightening, than one taken with the regular docents. The art museum, however, was unwilling to offer this alternative. It seemed a little harsh to tell him that he, and not the director, risked arrest if he returned. As Persephone argued when she came to fetch him home, how could anyone in his right mind fault a person for being creative in an art museum?
Please don’t bother to mention Pythag’s exile from the Museum of Transportation. Pythag would tell you that a velvet rope may be seen by a man with panache (and if he could have withstood one more p in his moniker, panache would have been Pythag’s middle name) as less a barrier than an invitation to step over it and into the past. He went into the past by way of an eighteenth-century carriage, as it happened, and ever seeking the most realistic experience possible, Pythag had to bounce in it a bit. “I promise you,” Pythag told the irate curator, “the King of Spain bounced when he rode in the dratted thing.”
Perhaps you have already seen from these examples that Pythag was the perfect man to consult on the matter of the missing carbuncle. Who was more qualified to determine what a clever boy, let loose in a museum, might do? Indeed, I readily admit that for all his genius, Pythag’s enthusiasm sometimes led him into rather childish behavior. I concede that he was subject to bouts of stubbornness over silly things, bouts that made him not much more than a child himself at times.
On the very afternoon the carbuncle was stolen, for example, he insisted on staring into the penguins’ eyes in the Antarctic exhibit, convinced that each penguin retained on his retina a memory of its last moments. If he could catch the reflection of this last recollection, he decided, he could experience the thing itself-it would be, he said, “Bird’s eye déjà vu.” This was one of those times when, were I not courting Persephone, I would have been tempted to leave the exhibit without him. Nothing I said would convince him that memory resides in the brain rather than the eye. He utterly rejected my claim that these were not the penguins’ actual eyes, but glass reproductions, and rebuked me loudly and in horrified accents for suggesting such a thing.
But as Persephone was most appreciative of my willingness to watch over her brother and accompany him to public venues, I did my best to overlook his occasionally irritating behaviors. Persephone, brilliant and far less given to acting on impulse than her brother, told me that restraining orders were a small price for Pythag’s genius, but she’d just as soon not be asked to pay any larger prices for it.
Thus I made an effort to distract him from the penguins by mentioning his beloved mastodon. (Pythag had a fondness for all things the names of which begin with the letter “p.” His attachment to the mastodon puzzled me, and I wondered if he was taking on the letter “m” as well, until I noticed that he constantly referred to it as the “proboscidean mammal.”) Pretending to be struck by a sudden inspiration, I muttered something to the effect of, “an elephant’s ancestors might also ‘never forget,’ ” then asked Pythag if he thought there might be some memory retained in the eye socket of the mastodon. The ruse worked, and soon we were off to the Prehistoric Hall.
Here he was again distracted, this time by the sight of several policemen carefully searching for the carbuncle. Pythag managed, in his inimitable way, to quickly convince a detective that he was an official at the museum. He induced the fellow to follow him to the planetarium-not a bad notion, for the young thief had most certainly visited this facility during his flight.
The carbuncle being ruby in color, Pythag’s theory was based on meteorology. “Red sky at night is a young rogue’s delight!” he shouted as we ran after him. He believed the boy might have been planning to alter the color of the light in the planetarium projector. With the help of the policeman, he hastily disassembled the rather costly mechanism, but alas, it was not the hiding place.
At my suggestion that they both might want to quickly take themselves as far away from the results of their work as possible, Pythag made one of his lightning-like leaps of logic, and announced that “Polaris was beckoning.” We sped back to the polar exhibits.
Here Pythag had another brainstorm, saying that there was something not quite right about the Eskimos, and delved his hand into an Inuit mannequin’s hide game bag. In triumph, Pythag removed the carbuncle.
On that day, you will remember, he was the museum’s darling. Pythag’s new policeman friend, perhaps distracting his fellows from the disassembled projector, extolled Pythag’s genius in solving the mystery of the missing gem, and proclaimed him “Professor Peabody,” by which address the world would know him during the brief remaining span of his lifetime.
Not many days later, tragedy struck. Having dissuaded him from climbing atop the mastodon skeleton’s back, and seeing that he was again entranced by the penguins, I felt that it was reasonably safe for me to answer the call of nature at the Natural History Museum. But when I returned from the gents, Pythag was nowhere to be found.