HENRY SLEZAR

THE MUSEUM

"I SAW HER IN PARIS LAST month," Stearman said, "and she looked different. She
wasn't the same old gal. I thought it was me, my eyesight maybe, or the little
drop of muscatel I had with my breakfast. What, never had wine on your corn
flakes? How old are you, anyway?"

The young woman in the black dress smiled, but she didn't look happy to be
trapped in a corner of the gallery, impaled by Stearman's heavy whiskey breath.
Mason didn't know the girl, but it was his party, and his responsibility to
rescue her. He extricated himself from two bearded men arguing about Claes
Oldenberg, and clapped his friend on the shoulder.

"That's just like you, Stearman, monopolizing the prettiest woman in the room."
He grinned at the girl, who mumbled something about her "friend" and ducked
under Stearman's imprisoning arm. Stearman blinked at him, flushed and jowly,
and with a pang Mason remembered that they were the same age.

"It's true," Stearman said, as if Mason had been part of the conversation. "Mrs.
Gheraldini didn't look like herself. Nobody else noticed it, but you know me,
Mason. I'm her steady customer."

Mason made the connection. "Lisa Gheraldini. Mona Lisa." He knew about
Stearman's obsessive attachment to the painting. There had even been an article
in Art News about him: "Seeing the Mona Lisa -- 1,9.00 Times."

"You know what I think?" Stearman poked Mason's breastbone. "I think somebody
swiped it. I think they put up a hell of a good copy. But nobody can tell me
that's the original Da Vinci. Hey, why don't you look into it, Mason? That's
your line of work, isn't it?"

"Not anymore," Mason Graves said. "I've settled down, or haven't you noticed?"
He looked around the small gallery, as if it made the statement self-evident.
There were only three people left in the room, and they seemed ready to leave.
There couldn't have been more than a dozen at the start; people weren't
venturing out into the unseasonable weather, a miasmic heat that had lingered
well into November. Or it may have been the artist he was exhibiting. He had
called himself a neorealist, which seemed to mean ugly portraiture, and only one
picture had been sold.

"Somebody's got to do something about it," Stearman said. "I wrote to the
Louvre, I told them about the switch. They wrote back and said I was wrong. What
else would they say? But I'm not wrong. I know my babe. That wasn't her, buddy.
No way."

Mason closed up at midnight and went home. He rented a studio apartment only
three blocks from the gallery. His answering machine was blinking, and he
guessed correctly about the first two recorded calls. One was the artist,
enraged by the poor turnout at the opening. The other was his ex-wife, asking
for money. The third was from Bodo Shieffer, the assistant curator of the
Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna.

Mason thought twice about returning the call the next morning. He was counting
pennies, and beginning to doubt his recent investments. But he hadn't seen Bodo
for five or six years, whenever it had been that he had recovered the missing
Brueghel in the museum's own workshop.

Calculating the six-hour time difference, he reached Bodo at closing time. Bodo
started exclaiming in German before Mason reminded him of the language problem.
In perfect English, Bodo said:

"Please keep this confidential, Mason. It may be another silly misplacement,
like the Brueghel, but I doubt it. The Cellini was in an unbreakable glass case,
and the lock was jimmied."

"The Cellini! Are you saying it's missing?"

"Yes. The pepper pot, the beautiful silver one, with the figures. I can't swear
how long ago it was removed. We don't take inventory that often, although that's
what we've been doing, ever since we discovered the piece was gone." He answered
Mason's questions impatiently. "Yes, yes, of course we called the police, the
Museum directors called everyone, but I'm the only one who thought of calling
you, so don't disappoint me!"

Mason explained that he was no longer doing investigatory work, that he was now
a legitimate gallery owner, and he would have gone on making excuses if Bodo
hadn't dropped a five-figure fee into the conversation. Non-refundable, even if
Mason failed? "Yes," Bodo said.

Stearman's return from Europe proved a godsend. Mason asked his friend if he
would manage the gallery for a few weeks, and Stearman was delighted. His only
condition was Mason's promise to "look in" on his beloved Madonna.

Stearman drove him to the airport, a favor Mason regretted when his friend
launched into his usual complaint about the frustrations of their calling.

"People like us are never happy," he said. "We love Art. We live for Art. But
we're not artists, and nothing we do in Art satisfies our hunger. Art is like a
beautiful mistress who won't let us into her boudoir .... "

"Don't miss the exit," Mason said.

Aboard the plane, he managed to get the attention of a flight attendant carrying
the morning papers. He spread the Times on his lap and skimmed the headlines.
The lead stories were about a Senatorial scandal, the imminent launch of the
space station, the heat wave, the standoff in the Mideast. But only one headline
stopped his eye.

"PRICELESS PAINTING MISSING FROM MET. Vermeer's 'Young Woman with Water Jug'
Vanishes in Apparent Theft."

He was so wrapped up in the text that he wasn't aware of the takeoff, a blessing
for a white-knuckled flier. There had been surprisingly few thefts at the
Metropolitan Museum, considering its vastness. And how even a clever thief could
make off with such a rare and famous work was mind-boggling.

Mason thought about the stolen Vermeer for most of the flight across the ocean,
chastising himself for not paying more attention to the problem he was being
paid to solve. Of course, "Woman with Jug" was virtually unsaleable, so a ransom
demand would probably follow. Unless, of course, it was an act of madness or
whimsy, like that of Vincenzo Perugia, who swiped the Mona Lisa back in 1908,
simply to return it to his native Italy.

Mona Lisa. She just wasn't the same babe...

He shook off the sound of Stearman's voice in his head, and asked for a drink.
By the time it arrived, Mason was asleep.

Vienna wasn't one of Mason's favorite cities. He knew there was a baroque
romanticism behind the cold edifices of the Esterhazy and Auersperg palaces,
that there was Music in the fiber of the city, but all he had ever seen was the
inside of its Art Museum and the Hilton Hotel with its Art Noveau and Art Deco
concentration, not a conducive setting for a man of Renaissance leanings. The
air conditioning worked, however, and he was grateful for it, the heat wave
having blanketed Europe as well.

In the morning he set up a meeting with Bodo Shieffer and two of the Museum's
directors.

They were all agreed about one thing. It could not have been an inside job. The
only guard who might have connived to let someone carry out the Cellini pot had
been with the Kunsthistorisches for almost two decades. In tears, he had begged
for a lie detector test to prove his innocence. Nor was there any question of
the piece being hidden in the Museum itself for later reclamation. They had
searched every nook and cranny, or the Deutsche equivalent of the phrase. And
who had been the last person observed near the Cellini? A man of impeccable
credentials, Hugh Barrows of England's National Gallery. Mason listened to their
fervent pleadings with the ironic realization that they were denying that the
theft could possibly have occurred. But there was no denying the sprung lock,
the empty case.

"Give us a theory," Bodo begged him. "Anything at all, Mason!"

"All right," Mason said obligingly. "First of all, the lock was probably broken
before the theft took place, hours or even days before."

"Aber warum?" a director asked.

"Because if the act had been observed, the thief could have claimed it was only
an accident. Suspicious, but not enough to warrant his arrest."

"And nobody noticed the broken lock?"

"You don't take inventory every day, and you don't examine locks every day. Do
you? The thief knew he could come by at a later, safer time, and remove the
pepper pot without a sound during some quiet hour."

"But how would he get it past the guard?"

"He could have brought the means with him. A workman with a tool box, a 'fat'
man with an inflated balloon under his coat. A false umbrella, a bumbershoot big
enough to accept the pepper pot. There are many ways these things are done."

Mason was feeling a trifle smug at having explained the inexplicable, but Bodo
and the directors didn't seem impressed.

"The guards don't remember any workman, any fat man, and the sun has been
shining for weeks!"

"And even if what you describe is true, how do we find the man?"

The last question had to be translated.

"I don't know yet," Mason said. "I never said I was Sherlock Holmes with a
magnifying glass. What I do best is talk to people. People involved in this sort
of crime, who have committed art thefts before, and know what's going on."

"Informants," Bodo said.

"In the States, we call them stoolies."

He didn't mention that most of his connections hadn't heard from him in half a
dozen years.

When he returned to his hotel, he flipped on the television set, and the first
story on CNN International was from Spain. Goya's "Naked Maja" had been stolen
from the Prado.

Mason sat heavily on the bed and stared at the screen, long after it had started
reporting other stories, from Bosnia and South Africa.

There was no way he could use the word "coincidence" to describe the loss of
three of the world's greatest works of art in as many days. Or was it four? He
grabbed the phone and put in a call to Jean Paul Mattrey, the editor of France's
most prestigious art publication, a consultant to the Louvre, and, thank
heavens, a bilingual friend.

"The Mona Lisa? You're joking, Mason."

"I just want your opinion, and as quickly as possible."

He didn't fall asleep until three, troubled by jet lag and a busy mind. He was
awakened by the telephone, and heard Jean Paul say:

"The lady is in place, Mason. They may have the Venus, but they don't have the
Madonna."

"Venus? What Venus?"

"Then you haven't heard?" the Frenchman said. "Last night, the Venus of Urbino
was stolen. Titian's Venus, remember? You and I once saw it together, at the
Uffizi in Florence. Are you still there, Mason?"

Mason forced his tongue to work. "How in God's name could it have happened? I
never believed in masterminds before --"

"Then don't start," Mattrey snorted. "This was a crude stick-up. They
chloroformed two guards, they rushed the painting out in broad daylight, three
masked men. Mafioso, maybe. It's insanity, Mason! Where will it end?"

He spent a frustrating morning trying to reach Werner Kempel in Berlin, only to
learn that Werner, having been recently released from prison, was now in London.
At least, that was what his Japanese wife Miyako told him, but Miyako was
notoriously protective of her husband.

In Mason's opinion, Werner Kempel was the greatest art thief in history. He had
started as an apprentice to his criminal father t following, you might say, in
his father's fingerprints -- but it was his mother's love of Art which decided
Werner's specialty. His ingenuity was fabled. At twelve, in the costume of a
choirboy, he had lifted a priceless fruitwood Madonna over his head and marched
out with a church processional, singing at the top of his lungs. Of course, he
kept on marching when he reached the street. When he was older, he managed to
steal almost two dozen notable paintings, mostly from private collectors,
churches, or small security-deprived museums. He was sought out by other
specialists in the field, and he was soon part of the network that was operating
to this day.

That was Mason's hope, of course. Werner always knew what the movers and shakers
of the art underworld were about. On occasion, usually when facing yet another
prison term and concerned about money -- Werner was a good family man, with four
children -- he would talk to Mason Graves and drop helpful hints about missing
pieces. Mason could not imagine that Werner Kempel would know nothing about the
recent string of robberies, considering the eminence of the stolen work.

He had some trouble persuading Miyako to give him Werner's address in London.
She sounded nervous on the telephone, devoid of her usual serenity. She had
reason to be grateful to Mason. Miyako painted fake Oriental art on rice paper,
and Werner had once shielded her from prosecution, believing her art was better
than the original. Finally, she told him. Werner was in a boarding house in
Knightsbridge.

There was fog in London when he arrived. There hadn't been a heavy fog in
Blighty since the soft-coal ban, but there was fog now, gray as a dirty
raincoat, the air warm and steamy. It put Mason in a bad mood, which worsened
when he tried the telephone number at the boarding house, and was told that Mr.
Kempel wasn't available. Mason decided on Plan B. He went to the National
Gallery and tried to make an appointment with Hugo Barrows. To his surprise, Mr.
Barrows was willing to see him at once.

Mason had met Barrows before, to discuss a security problem at the Tate, but he
remembered a taller, stouter man with a face like the full moon. This man was
stooped, his suit too large for him, his face drawn and ashen.

"I suppose you're here about the Cellini," he said. "I never thought I'd have
the privilege of being the last person to view the piece."

"You didn't notice if the lock was intact?"

"I'm afraid not." He staggered slightly, and placed his fingertips on the desk
to steady himself.

"Are you all right?" Mason asked.

"It's this intolerable heat," Barrows said. "Anyway, I can't help you. We have
enough problems to deal with here. But I don't suppose you could know about the
Rembrandt."

"Don't tell me! Another theft?"

"The self portrait, at the Tate. It happened only a few hours ago, no one knows
but one museum guard and myself...I'm sure you realize the significance. Some
syndicate is at work, ravishing museums everywhere, private collectors, too --
I've heard rumors -- You should be delighted, Graves, look at all the fees you
can collect. You'll be a rich man before this is over."

"I'm not in the business anymore," Mason said grimly. "The Cellini job was an
exception. But I think you're right. This is an organized effort, a blitzkrieg
of some kind. But why? What are they after?"

"Some enormous ransom, I suppose. And we'll pay it, of course. They're terribly
smart, these people, Graves. I don't think you have a chance against them. You
say you've retired? Take my advice, and stay retired."

He sat down. The word "crumpled" flashed through Mason's mind. He wanted to ask
more questions, but Barrows seemed like a man without answers. Mason turned and
left.

In the anteroom, the elegantly dressed man on the bench rose so hastily that his
attache case slid off his lap. In the moment it took to recover it, Mason
recognized Werner Kempel. Werner obviously recognized him, because his heels
clicked down the marble corridor like the sound of a fast metronome. Mason ran
after him, but Werner made it to the exit first. He was soon mingling with the
traffic on Trafalgar Square, and Mason knew he was no match for an experienced
fugitive. Instead, he hailed a cab and gave the driver the address of the
rooming house.

Werner didn't return until three hours later, and gasped when Mason stepped out
of the shadows to drop a hand on his shoulder.

"Is that any way to treat an old friend?" Mason asked.

In his room, Werner assumed his usual imperturbable air, but Mason wasn't
fooled. Werner had been shocked to see him; Miyako had failed to warn him of
Mason's imminent arrival. And finding the thief in the anteroom of Hugh
Barrows's office required explanation.

Werner's wasn't convincing.

"It was business, Graves. The same business you and I have done. You might say I
was 'consulting.'"

"About the missing Rembrandt?"

"Yes."

"Barrows said no one knew about the Rembrandt yet."

"Maybe it wasn't the Rembrandt. Maybe it was something else."

"You're a wonderful thief, Werner, but a terrible liar. You better work on
that."

Werner said something in German, and it was obviously so unpleasant that Mason
was glad he didn't understand the language.

"Why can't you leave me alone? You told me you were retiring! It must be three
years since we saw each other!"

"It's five years, Werner -- time flies. Except, of course, when you're in
prison. I'm sure you don't want to go back there too soon, do you?"

"Why should I?"

"And why should you be waiting to see Hugh Barrows, if not to make a deal with
him for that missing painting?"

"Leave me alone!" Werner shouted. "This has nothing to do with you. Find your
Cellini, Graves, that's what they hired you for!"

Mason felt as if his forehead had been tapped with a small hammer.

"How did you know about that? You're better informed than you ever were, Werner,
and you haven't been out of prison more than three weeks!"

Mason extracted a billfold.

"All right. I'm prepared to pay you five thousand U.S. dollars, or the
equivalent in marks or pounds or Euros or whatever you like .... No, we'll make
it ten, if you can also tell me something useful about the Rembrandt portrait.
I'm sure I can get my money back, if the Gallery gets its picture back."

Werner's color was changing. He had obviously sought out a tanning machine after
his prison stay, but it was losing its potency.

"I can't tell you anything. I can't, Mason. They'll kill me."

"You were never afraid of 'them' before, Werner. Why now?"

"Because...it's not the same 'them.'"

"You mean there are some new players in the game?"

"Very strange players!" Werner said, his eyes round. "You wouldn't believe who
they are, Mason. And if you ever found out, I think they would kill you, too.
One life doesn't matter to them. A thousand lives! They've said it to my face.
And yet, they're not criminals. I don't know what they are! I don't know why
they're doing this!"

"Doing what, for heaven's sake?"

Werner almost seemed relieved to have made even this obscure confession. He
stood up and went to a bureau. He rummaged among his boxer shorts until he found
a folded sheet of paper. He handed it to Mason.

It read:

Van Gogh - Sunflowers

Picasso - Guernica

Renoir - Boating Party

Degas-Foyer of the Dance

Manet - Balcony

Matisse - Dinner Table

Botticelli - Birth

Rembrandt - Syndic

Chagall - Village

El Greco - Baptism

The list continued, but Mason stopped reading, awed by the implication. He look
at Werner, whose face reflected something like pity.

"Who are these madmen, Werner? What makes them think they can get away with
this?"

"They've already succeeded," he answered. "By now, there have been a dozen other
raids on the museums. They had to move quickly, you see, to make sure security
precautions weren't altered, tightened up."

He reached for the list, but Mason snatched it back for one last scan of the
targets. Sure enough, there it was: Da Vinci - Mona Lisa

"It was the first to be taken," Werner said. "It was only an experiment, a trial
balloon, they called it. They substituted a copy to allay suspicion until they
were ready to strike."

"Jean Paul Mattrey said it was the original. Mattrey could never be fooled."

"Someone became nervous, afraid the discovery might alert too many museums. They
replaced the original only a week ago."

"So you're a 'consultant' to this gang."

"They gave me no choice!" Werner said. "I helped them or I died. They offered to
pay me, of course. They were indifferent about money, too. They didn't seem to
care about either money or human life. I've met cold-blooded men before, but not
like these people. Never!"

"Give me a name," Mason pleaded. "One name!"

Werner shook his head.

Mason moved closer, only inches from his haunted eyes.

"Then I'll give you one," he said. "Hugh Barrows."

He saw the flicker in Werner's gray pupils, and knew he had scored. He didn't
feel surprised. Barrows was an icon of the art world, but gods have fallen to
earth before, and Mason had witnessed corruption in high places more than a few
times.

"Barrows took the Cellini, of course. It was easy enough for a man like him. He
probably arranged the Rembrandt heist, too. And what about the Prado, and the
Louvre? I'm sure they were both 'inside jobs,' too. Only the 'insiders' weren't
guards or custodians, they were people at the top..."

"I can't say any more, Mason!"

Mason knew he meant it. His sorrow was almost palpable. Mason started to put a
comforting hand on his shoulder, but changed his mind. He pocketed the list, and
went out.

The fog in Knightsbridge was like a steam bath. The sky above London was now
yellow, the color of decaying egg yolks. It hurt to breathe. Werner went to look
for a taxi, but there were none in sight. He began to walk.

When a black Bentley with outsize headlights drove up alongside, he thought the
taxi had found him. Then he saw the two men in front, the third man in the back
seat. It was almost comic, he thought, a scene from a gangster movie, until the
man in the rear rolled down his window and smiled toothily.

"Can we give you a lift, Mason ?" Hugh Barrows said, pressing the door latch.

Mason hesitated only a second too long. The man beside the driver was out of the
car, a large man practiced in the art of forcible abduction. Without any
struggle, Mason found himself in the back seat, confronting Hugh Barrows, no
longer smiling.

"My friend Werner wasted no time," Mason said. "What are you going to do to him?
Or me, for that matter?"

"Not what you think," Barrow said, with weary patience. He tapped the burly
shoulder in front of him and the car drove on.

Mason tried not to think at all. If he took Werner seriously, he was headed for
the countryside, to be shot and buried under dry leaves. He had obviously peered
under the cover of a conspiracy, and he was a danger to the conspirators, but by
the time they reached the small redbrick house on a quiet lane in Tottenham, he
realized there would be an alternative.

A woman in a sloppy cardigan answered the door, and it took a moment for Mason
to recognize the art critic Mildred Lucas, who looked as if she hadn't slept in
days. He was brought into a kitchen where three large fans were going full
blast, battling the miasmic heat. Three men in shirtsleeves sat at the
butcher-block table and sipped cold drinks. They were unkempt and unshaven, but
Mason was sure that one of them was Termson, the brilliant forger who should
have been serving out his last sentence.

To his surprise, it was the burly driver who took charge of the meeting, first
ordering two of the electric fans shut off to reduce the noise; the request
produced a rumble of complaints. He stripped off his jacket and threw it over a
chair. Despite his bulk, Mason saw that he had tired, intelligent eyes.

"My name is Conrad," he said, the accent American. "Just for your information,
I'm the only person here without any art education, and almost as little
appreciation. For some eighteen years I was a director at NASA. I left to become
an independent consultant in 1991. I have a son age twenty-nine who works for
the EPA. I also have two daughters, two grandchildren." He swallowed suddenly,
and Mason thought he saw tears welling up in the intelligent eyes. Or was it the
bad lighting?

Mildred Lucas offered him a cold drink, and Mason accepted it gratefully. "I
won't go into detail," he told Mason. "Time is short, and the details hardly
matter, but I'm sure you've heard of something called the greenhouse effect.
Just a year or two ago, the rate of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was greater
than at any time in 160,000 years, and continuing to increase. The same was true
of other gases, like methane, gases that trapped heat on the planet the way a
greenhouse traps warm air. It was alarming, but it was also controversial, since
not everyone agreed on the ultimate effect. It was much easier to go with the
positive predictions. I did. You probably did. Most of us did. We all knew the
Earth was forever.

"Well, three things happened this year. The rate of gas accumulation doubled in
the first three months and doubled again in the second quarter. A Greenland
project called GISP3 reported changes in the ice core so precipitous that they
kept it secret until the top officials of the U.N. and three governments decided
how much would be revealed." He stopped.

"The third thing?" Mason asked

"There was a meeting of scientific specialists in Denmark. It was billed as an
innocuous conference on the environment. Its actual purpose was to decide if the
accumulated facts pointed to only one conclusion. That within four, perhaps five
months, there would be no more Rembrandts, Vermeers, Picassos, Goyas, museum
directors, art critics, private investigators, ex-NASA
officials...grandchildren."

He didn't wipe away the tear on his cheek.

"Men couldn't escape what was coming, the ever-increasing heat, the melting of
the polar caps, the swelling of the oceans, the drowning of the cities and
plains. Announcement of the end would only make that end crueler, panic would
lead to desperation, riot, murder, misery beyond description. Oh, the world will
know soon enough. But before that awareness, some of us thought -- that even if
man couldn't be preserved, perhaps the best of him could be. The only thing
truly eternal about our poor species, Mr. Graves. Our art."

"The space station," Mason said.

"God knows who'll ever see our orbital museum," Conrad said. "Literally, only
God. What alien life, what resurrected Man. But some of us said, let's rescue
the art, whatever we can, without giving away the truth. Before desperate men
storm the space station, trying to escape. That's what we're attempting to do,
Mr. Graves, and we need friends, not enemies."

JEAN PAUL'S VOICE boomed in the empty gallery. He put his arm around the
khaki-clad man as they walked to the Louvre's most famous viewing station, where
only an hour before a small army of spectators had stood in awe of the world's
most famous portrait.

"There she is," Jean Paul said. "She's relying on you, Mr. Graves. Do everything
you can to assure her safety."

"You can count on me," the man said, placing his elaborate tool box on the
marble floor. "These lunatics won't ever get their hands on her, not after I do
my job."

The three museum directors, ten paces behind them, looked at each other in
satisfaction, pleased that America's most famous security expert had been called
in, relieved at the extra measures being taken to protect their priceless
charges. But the room was warm; too warm for comfort, and they were grateful
when Jean Paul Mattrey suggested a cool drink in his special apartment at the
museum.

Alone with the Mona Lisa, Mason Graves found the proper instrument in his
toolbox, and began the unhurried task of removing the painting from the wall.

"Come to me, babe," he said. "I'll show you the stars."