A Fatal Frame of Mind Page 8

  Despite Kitteredge’s insistence that the guise of museum docent provided a cloak of invisibility to rival the one elves hand out to ring-bearing hobbits, Gus and Shawn had felt that the European painting galleries were too well attended to make a safe hiding place. After a quick study of the museum map, they located the one spot in the institution that no one would ever walk into intentionally. And indeed, the Oceanic Arts and Crafts gallery was as deserted as any movie theater showing the second half of Funny People.

  Had Gus been in more of a cultural mood he might have stopped to consider the unfairness of this. It was true that a lot of the Micronesian wood carvings all began to look alike very quickly, but some of the Melanesian works carried a sexual charge that Fragonard could only have dreamed of achieving. Granted, erotic sculptures of fertility goddesses would never replace Cinemax After Dark, but Gus was surprised not to see more teenage boys loitering around down here.

  But right now, culture was the last thing on anyone’s minds. Even Kitteredge, who had started a brief discussion on the destruction of traditional art forms in the Oceanic cultures after World War II when they first entered the gallery, quickly wrapped it up as they began to focus on the difficulty of the task before them.

  “The problem is that we have to get into a gallery that’s under constant guard by an armed police officer,” Gus said. “Is there another way to look at that?”

  “There’s always another way,” Shawn said. “For instance, we could say that the core problem is that you haven’t come up with a solution.”

  “Me?” Gus said. “What about you?”

  “I don’t want to hog all the glory,” Shawn said. “Especially since you were the one Professor Kitteredge asked for help.”

  “I’m willing to give up some glory,” Gus said. “In fact, you can have it all. So solve.”

  “I can’t yet,” Shawn said. “Because we haven’t come up with the right way to ask the question. Once we do that, the answer will be obvious.”

  “So what is the right question?” Gus said.

  “That is,” Shawn said. “And now that you’ve asked it, the answer should be obvious to you. So go ahead and answer.”

  The only answer that Gus could come up with seemed inappropriate to use in a museum frequented by families, even if none of them happened to be in this gallery. “What if we set some papers on fire so the alarm went off?” Gus said.

  “Then steel doors would slam down on every gallery, and all the air would be sucked out to put out the fire and protect the art,” Shawn said.

  “That wouldn’t happen,” Gus said.

  “It did when Pierce Brosnan tried it,” Shawn said.

  “First of all, you’re not Pierce Brosnan,” Gus said.

  “I could be,” Shawn said. “I am wearing a tuxedo.”

  “And second, that was a movie,” Gus said. “No museum is going to have steel doors that slam down on galleries if there’s a fire. What if there are people inside? They could suffocate or burn to death.”

  “They’re extras,” Shawn said. “No one cares about them.”

  “Until their survivors sue,” Gus said.

  Gus knew there had to be a way to get past that cop. He simply had to visualize it. He cast his gaze around the gallery until his eye fell on a carved wooden figure about a foot high. It sat in a Plexiglas box standing on a narrow pillar. A card in front of the display case described it as a Melanesian fertility symbol from the early 1600s.

  “Okay,” Gus said, “let’s say this is the cop.”

  Shawn looked at the little figure, and then at the enormous priapus jutting out from its midsection. “If that’s the cop, he won’t need his gun to stop us,” he said. “He won’t even need a nightstick.”

  “Is this helping?” Gus said.

  “It’s helping pass the time,” Shawn said.

  “We don’t want to pass time,” Gus said. “Time is not our friend.”

  “Maybe not to you,” Shawn said. “But I’ve always felt that Pierce Brosnan was a much more compelling actor once he got a little age on his face.”

  Gus fought back an image of what he could do with that Melanesian fertility symbol and tried to refocus on the problem.

  “Okay,” Gus said, “we’re saying that this is the cop—and that’s all we’re saying on the subject. Our one goal here is to figure out how we can make him move away from the gallery he’s guarding.”

  Shawn stared at the wooden figure. Then his face lit up in a smile. “I’ve got it.”

  “Yes?” Kitteredge said.

  “I said I had the answer,” Shawn said. “Not that I feel like sharing it. Because just standing here chatting with you could be considered a felony, seeing as how you’re wanted for a bunch of terrible crimes. So before we go any further down the road to helping you, I think you owe us an explanation.”

  Gus was about to jump in to defend his professor, but before he could speak he realized that Shawn was right.

  Kitteredge looked from Shawn to Gus and saw the determination on their faces. “You’re right,” he said. “By helping me, you may have put yourself in terrible danger, and not just from the police. You need to know about the Cabal.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  “But before you can understand the Cabal,we have to go back a hundred and fifty years, to when Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his close friend William Morris were brilliant young men,” Kitteredge said.

  Shawn let out a groan. “Are we going to get to the point while some of us here are still young men?”

  Gus wanted to shush Shawn, but there was no point. Kitteredge didn’t seem to have noticed the interruption.

  “And as many brilliant young men have been throughout the years, they were dissatisfied with their country and their culture,” the professor continued. “They joined with a group of artists and writers called the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, who were attempting to reject several hundred years of art history and return to a style that was based on nature, that re-created the intense colors and abundant detail of paintings from the fourteenth century.

  “But Rossetti and Morris were more radical in their approach than the founding brothers. They were appalled by the ravages of the Industrial Revolution and yearned to bring back not only the aesthetic of the Middle Ages but many of its working practices as well. Morris, in particular, was obsessed with the idea of returning to the principles of hand-crafted furniture and objects instead of the mass-produced items factories were now churning out.

  “All this is accepted fact and not at all controversial.” Kitteredge stopped and fished in his pocket for his pipe, and then, apparently remembering what had happened last time, pulled his hand away.

  “That’s really interesting,” Shawn said as he stifled what Gus knew was a phony yawn. “Now I completely understand why you pulled a knife on a homicide detective.”

  “That was background you needed to know to understand what comes next,” Kitteredge said. “Because now we are moving into my own research. And that is far more dangerous. I spent my lifetime studying the works of the Brotherhood. And as I dug deeper I began to discover anomalies and lacunae in the works that often seemed to contradict their explicit meanings. Of course this was of great interest to me; how could it not be?”

  “I could explain,” Shawn said.

  “So I devoted myself to understanding what these little anomalies meant,” Kitteredge said. “At first, they seemed totally random. But then I began to notice a pattern.”

  Shawn gave Gus a significant look. Gus managed to ignore it.

  “It took me years to understand that the pattern was actually a code, and more years to work out what it meant,” Kitteredge said. “And even when I had succeeded, I couldn’t bring myself to believe what it was telling me. I went back and reworked all my research until there was no doubt in my mind.”

  Gus could feel his heartbeat rising with excitement. “No doubt about what?” he said. “What was the message?”

  “Morris and Ro
ssetti and a handful of others weren’t simply planning to bring back the artistic standards of the Middle Ages. They aimed to bring back the political system as well. They wanted to roll back the clock to before the signing of the Magna Carta. They believed that the only way to rescue Britain from the moral decline brought about by the Industrial Revolution, from the poverty that was destroying families and killing people, from the factory pollution that was fouling the air and the water, from the migration into the cities that was wiping out the rural way of life was to bring back the idea of the king as an absolute ruler who would have command over all things political, cultural, and spiritual. That king, needless to say, would have to be someone who understood the Pre-Raphaelite way of thinking and would return England to those glory days.”

  “Someone like William Morris?” Gus suggested helpfully.

  “Someone exactly like Morris,” Kitteredge said. “With Rossetti at his side.”

  “Wait a minute,” Shawn said. “I’m not exactly an expert on royalty, but I always thought that king was one of those jobs you couldn’t just apply for. That’s why I didn’t bother sending an application to Monaco. Because everyone kept telling me you had to be related to the last guy.”

  “Inheritance is the standard way of determining the royal lineage,” Kitteredge said. “But that line can be interrupted and replaced. It happened several times in England’s history, usually through violent rebellion or civil war.”

  “So these two painters were going to lead an armed rebellion so they could make themselves king of England?” Shawn said.

  “They were not violent men,” Kitteredge said. “They planned for a peaceful revolution. The British people would flock to their side and demand that Morris be installed on the throne.”

  “Why would anyone think that?” Shawn said.

  “Because they were going to have a symbol,” Kitteredge said. “The one thing that would prove to the world that William Morris was the rightful king of England. They were searching for—and I believe they found—Excalibur.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  Shawn and Gus stared slack-jawed at Kitteredge, although apparently for different reasons.

  “They thought he’d be crowned king of England because he drove a fancy sports car?” Shawn said. “And one of the ugliest cars ever made, at that?”

  But Gus could barely contain his excitement at Kitteredge’s words. “Excalibur was King Arthur’s sword,” he said. “The one he pulled out of the stone. And if I remember right, on the blade it said ‘Whoever wields this sword is the rightful king of all England.’ ”

  Kitteredge nodded, pleased. “That’s one of the legends,” he said. “One I’m sure that Morris and Rossetti embraced.”

  “So these two guys figured they’d dig up an old sword and rule the country,” Shawn said. “It sounds kind of nuts, but okay—let’s go with it. Even if they’re still alive, they’ve got to be two hundred years old by now, and too weak to lift the sword, let alone stick it into Filkins’ chest. So how can they have anything to do with this murder?”

  “They don’t,” Kitteredge said. “Not directly. But there were others. It took a great deal of work to ferret this out, but I don’t believe Morris and Rosetti and those few of their Pre-Raphaelite brethren who joined in the search for Excalibur were working on their own initiative, nor did they come to the idea on their own. They were pawns of a greater force.”

  “What kind of force?” Gus said.

  “Call them what you will,” Kitteredge said. “The Templars. The Rosicrucians. Freemasons. Throughout history there have been shadowy forces working, and when some outsider gets a glimpse of them, they are always attributed to one group or another. I chose to call them simply the Cabal, because I have no idea with whom or what ideology they are associated.

  “But rest assured, they are wealthy and they are powerful and they never go away,” Kitteredge said. “They had hoped to use Morris and Rossetti to gain the sword and possibly the nation, but they failed. That doesn’t mean they’ve stopped trying. They have a man named Polidori, who has been leading their search. He was behind Filkins’ murder. I’m sure of it. But how many people are involved and where they are hiding I have no idea.”

  “And you think they’re so powerful they’ve infiltrated the Santa Barbara Police Department?” Gus said.

  “It’s impossible to know their reach,” Kitteredge said.

  “Wait a minute,” Shawn said. “I thought you said they found the sword.”

  “I believe Morris and Rossetti did,” Kitteredge said. “And then they hid it again, rather than turn it over to the Cabal. I believe that is why Rossetti made sure his last painting stayed hidden for all these years. Because it contains clues to Excalibur’s hiding place.”

  “But why kill Filkins?” Gus said.

  “I can’t say for sure,” Kitteredge said solemnly. “But I believe they were sending me a message: Stay away from this picture—stay away from the sword.”

  “Wouldn’t the message have been clearer if the sword had been poking through your chest?” Shawn said.

  For a moment, all the animation left Kitteredge’s face. Gus realized suddenly that the professor was much older than he’d assumed, close to sixty at least. But usually there was so much energy flowing through the man it was impossible to think of him as aging, let alone aged. Now, however, Gus could see all his years weighing on him.

  “It should have been me,” Kitteredge said. “I would accept death for myself before seeing an innocent killed because of my work. But I wasn’t given a choice in the matter. So all I can do now is work to avenge his death. The only way I know to do that is to find the sword and make sure it never falls into the hands of the Cabal.”

  The three of them stood in silence for a long moment. Then Shawn nodded his acceptance.

  “Okay, so my plan,” he said. “How we get into that gallery.”

  Kitteredge looked like he was about to throw his arms around Shawn in one of his bearlike embraces. “Yes?”

  Shawn walked over to the Plexiglas box housing the fertility sculpture and gave it a shove. The pedestal rocked slightly, and Shawn shoved it again. This time it tipped over and crashed to the ground.

  All around them, alarm bells started ringing.

  Chapter Seventeen

  If Shawn had been disappointed that steel doors didn’t slam down on all the galleries once the alarm went off, he didn’t show it. Maybe that was because he was too busy running.

  That course of action made sense for the three of them. They needed to get out of the Oceanic gallery before a squad of security guards arrived to protect the fertility figure.

  But it didn’t make a lot of sense for any of the hundreds of museum visitors who were also running as fast as they could for the museum exits. After all, it wasn’t a fire alarm that had gone off, just the theft protection system. But while whoever had designed the museum’s security had installed alarms with substantially different sounds for various kinds of disasters, he’d neglected to include a way to alert the public to the distinction. To an untrained ear the bells ringing throughout the museum might be signaling a raging inferno in the nearest gallery.

  And of course, even if that thought had not occurred to them individually, the sight of two young men in tuxedos shouting “Fire!” and racing toward the emergency exits certainly would have put it in many heads. Following their directions, the tourists blasted through doors wired to set off further alarms when opened.

  Moving as swiftly and efficiently as any male salmon who hasn’t gotten the memo that the way upstream has been blocked by a new dam, Shawn and Gus led Kitteredge back through the centuries of European paintings until they arrived at the vestibule of the special-exhibitions gallery where The Defence of Guenevere had been installed. The entrance was blocked off by yellow-and-black crime scene tape, but there was no one standing in front of the door.

  “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.