“So how will you get your paintings now?” Frank asked with a little trepidation.
“You and I will pinch them ourselves,” Orcrist announced with a smile and a wave of his glass.
Frank had a quick vision of himself bleeding out the last of his lifeblood on the floor of the Pre-Raphaelite room. “Make Pons do it,” he suggested.
“Now Frank, I know you don’t mean that. I knew when I first saw you that you had an adventurer’s heart. ‘The lad’s got an adventurer’s heart,’ I said to myself.” Frank looked closely at Orcrist, unable to tell whether or not he was being kidded. “Besides,” Orcrist went on, “I once gave Pons a chance to ... prove himself under fire, and he absolutely failed to measure up. He’s a fine doorman and butler, but he does not have an adventurer’s heart.”
“Oh,” said Frank, wondering how adventurous his own heart really was.
“At any rate, Frank, we’ll begin tonight. Since it’s your first crack at this sort of thing, I plan to start with the Hauteur Museum. It’s an easy place.”
“I’m glad of that.”
“Relax, you’ll enjoy it. Now go get something to eat. We’ll leave at ten.”
As Frank crossed to the door, he heard a soft creak behind it, and when he stepped into the hall he saw the door of Pons’s room being eased quietly shut.
THE Hauteur Museum had once been Munson’s pride, but with the building of several new theaters in the Ishmael Village district to the north, the Hauteur found itself no longer the heart of metropolitan culture. It was still well-thought-of when anyone did think of it, and it could still boast some influential paintings and sculptures, but its heyday had passed.
At eleven o’clock Frank and Orcrist entered its cellar, having wormed their way up a laundry chute that had once, when the Hauteur had been a hotel two centuries before, emptied into a now-abandoned sub-basement. Orcrist had carefully lifted off the mahogany panel that hid the forgotten laundry chute. “We want to replace it when we’re done, you see,” he told Frank in a whisper, “in case we ever want to come back again.”
They stole silently up the carpeted cellar stairs. Their way was lit by moonlight filtering through street-level grates set high in the walls, and Frank realized with a pang of homesickness how long it had been since he had seen real moonlight. I hope the museum has windows, he thought.
The door at the top of the stairs was unlocked, which Frank thought was careless of the owners. The two adventurers swung it open as quietly as they could. Orcrist motioned Frank to wait while he padded off into the darkness of the museum. Frank waited nervously, only now beginning to realize just how much trouble this night’s enterprise could lead to. Holy saints, he thought with a chill of real fear, if I’m caught they’ll send me back to Barclay! I’ve still got that tattoo on my chest.
After a few uneasy minutes he heard a thump, then a multiple thud like a bag of logs thrown on a floor. God help us, he thought. What was that?
“Frank!” Orcrist’s whisper cut the thick silence. “It’s all clear! Carefully, now, go down the aisle on your left!”
When Frank did as he was told, he found himself in the main room. Paintings hung on every side, and he saw with delight a window opening on a quiet street and a deep, starry sky.
“Get away from the window, for God’s sake,” whispered Orcrist. Frank turned back to the room to see the older man standing over an unconscious uniformed body. “Come on,” he hissed to Frank. “There are two paintings over here we ought to get.”
Working in silence, Frank helped Orcrist unframe and roll two mediocre Havreville canvases. Orcrist thrust them inside his coat. “See anything else worth carrying?” he asked.
Frank was beginning to relax, and he strolled up and down the dim aisles, peering at paintings and statues with a critical eye. Not bad, most of it, he thought, but none of it seems worth the trouble to forge. I’m not even very impressed with those Havrevilles. As he turned to rejoin Orcrist he noticed, with a thrill of recognition, a small portrait hung between two gross seascapes. He stared intently at it, remembering the hot July day on which it had been painted. His father had been very fond of the model, and had frequently sent young Frank out for coffee or paint or simply “fresh air.”
“Anything?” Orcrist inquired impatiently.
“No,” whispered Frank in reply. “Let’s clear out.”
Chapter 6
The Schilling Gallery, on which they made an assault four days later, was “not such an easy peach to pluck,” as Orcrist was subsequently to observe to Frank. They failed to locate the drain that Orcrist swore would lead them directly into the gallery’s office, and they had to bash a hole in the tile floor from beneath with an old wooden piling they found in the sewer. The noise was horribly loud, and they weren’t in the gallery five minutes before armed guards were pounding at the doors. Orcrist refused to flee, though, determined to make off with a genuine Monet, which the Schilling had on loan from another planet.
“Let’s get the hell out of here!” pleaded Frank, who saw the doors shaking as they were battered by boots and sword hilts on the other side. “One of them may have gone to get a key! We don’t have thirty seconds!”
“Wait, I found it!” called Orcrist. He carefully took the canvas out of its frame and rolled it. He was sliding it into his pocket when the east door gave way with a rending crack of splintering wood. Four yelling, sword-waving guards raced toward the two thieves.
Frank leaped sideways, grabbed a life-size bronze statue of a man by the shoulder, and with a wrenching effort pulled it over. It broke on the tiles directly in front of the charging guards, and one of them pitched headlong over the hollow trunk which was ringing like a great bell from the impact of its fall. Frank snatched up a cracked bronze arm and swung it at another guard’s head—it hit him hard over the eye and he fell without a word.
“Come on, Frank!” called Orcrist, standing over the jagged hole through which they’d entered. Frank impulsively picked up one of the statue’s ears, which had broken off; then he ran toward Orcrist. The other two guards were also running toward Orcrist from the other side of the room, their rapiers held straight out in front of them. Orcrist’s hand darted under his cape, and then the front of the cape exploded outward in a spray of fire, and the two guards were slammed away from him as if they’d been hit by a truck. They lay where they fell, their faces splashed with blood and their uniforms tom up across the front. The harsh smell of gunpowder rasped in Frank’s nose as he leaped down through the hole after Orcrist.
Twenty minutes later, as they caught their breath in Orcrist’s sitting room after a furtive race through a dozen narrow, low-ceilinged understreet alleys, Frank showed Orcrist the bronze ear he’d stolen.
“And what do you mean to do with that?” asked Orcrist, painfully flexing his right hand.
“I’m going to run a string through it, and wear it where my right ear used to be. Like an eye patch, you know.”
“An ear patch.”
“Exactly,” agreed Frank. “How’s the Monet?” Orcrist gingerly pulled the canvas out of his jacket and unrolled it. “No harm done,” he said, examining it. “Monet is a durable painter.”
“I guess so. What the hell was that weapon?” Frank asked in an awed tone.
“That impressed you, did it? That was a two-barrelled twelve gauge shotgun, barrels sawed down to six inches, and equipped with a pistol grip. I think I broke my hand shooting it. Ruined my cape for sure. We’re lucky I didn’t put the canvas in the line of fire.”