Chapter 23
Angle, angle, angle, angle.
My mind is a skipping CD as I trudge up the steps of the uptown bus like a zombie. I can’t get the word out of my head. It’s important somehow. Something I learned last year in that architecture and design class I took at Senate . . .
I plop down onto the hard plastic seat. The bus is only half full, thank goodness. I need quiet time to collect myself before entering my apartment and squaring off with fussy cats and inquisitive parental units.
I’m really floored about the whole Alisha thing. Turns out she’s an undercover cop they placed in the operation a year ago. Bovano didn’t tell me much, only that she’s been posing as an art curator who is interested in making a few bucks on the side, and has been “helping” the thieves cook up a plan. According to her, she was at the Winston Café with a friend. Pure coincidence.
I’m not sure if I buy her story, but I do know this: if I put it together that Alisha is part of the case, then I am onto things, and am actually getting pretty good at this detective stuff.
I hop off the bus at my stop and walk two blocks to my apartment building. Leaves are popping on the trees, the flowery smell of spring in the air. I peel off my jacket as I go. It’s warm and I should be grabbing a Frisbee and meeting Jonah in Central Park, but all I can think is angle, angle, angle.
Dad is in his office and Mom is on the Internet. After a quick hello to both of them, I set up shop in the privacy of my room, spreading out the marked-up city map on my desk. I root through my drawers for architecture supplies from last year’s class and find a protractor, tracing paper, and triangular scales.
I line up the tools again and again. Nothing fits. Trace and retrace. Measure and angle and remeasure. Nothing. And then . . .
“No way,” I say out loud. The protractor is lined up with the Neue and the Jewish Museum, the other sites falling into a pattern of angles. A perfect pattern fit for the geometric obsession of Lars Heinrich.
“NO WAY!” My cackling laughter is a little too close to a mad scientist’s, but I don’t care. I’ve done it, I’ve done it—I’ve cracked Lars’s puzzle!
Grinning like a fool, I snatch the phone from my desk and dial Jonah’s number.
“Look,” I say to Jonah, leaning over his shoulder to draw lines through the different points on the map with a protractor. We’re in his bedroom, the map and my drawing supplies laid out on his desk. He’s hunched over the materials like a vulture.
I nudge him to the side so I can continue my illustrations. “If you draw lines at a thirty-, sixty-, or ninety-degree angle from each site on the map, they all intersect with the Guggenheim. The Neue Galerie and the Jewish Museum are at 180 degrees, flanking the Guggenheim on either side. Straight vectors through them. All is divisible into one eighty. Thirty, sixty, ninety.” I twist the protractor around on the map, making light marks with a pencil.
“It’s a special kind of right triangle,” I continue. “Thirty-sixty-ninety. All lines lead to the Guggenheim.”
I pause for dramatic effect, letting him absorb the information. He stares at the map, rocking in his seat. When he doesn’t comment, I add, “The cafés across the street must be meeting places. Drop-off zones for money, recon, who knows what else. They’ve been sending me to the wrong museums. The Guggenheim is where it’s going down.”
My sketch is actually quite beautiful, an intricate shower of fireworks raining down from the Guggenheim onto the city blocks.
Jonah frowns at the map. “Wow. Yeah . . . awesome,” he says in a flat tone.
My eyes narrow. “You don’t seem very excited.” Does he understand what I’m talking about? Or is he just jealous I figured it out before he did?
He scratches his head. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but it seems kind of easy.”
“Easy?” I splutter. “This took me all afternoon!”
He twists in his chair to look at me while chewing on a pencil. I’m growing more and more irritated, and the three-year-old inside me hopes he bites off a piece and swallows it by accident.
“Edmund, think about Lars in Paris. How complicated that design was.” He holds up his hands when I growl. “I’m not saying you’re wrong. I agree with you. I think you figured it out. But what if Lars did this on purpose? What if he designed this angle thing to throw the cops off the real crime?”
He turns back to the map, making marks of his own. “Also, if we take Alisha into consideration with the two sites of the Winston Café and the ice cream incident, then the whole vector thing is thrown right out the window. Those two blocks are over too far, not at significant angles to the Guggenheim . . .”
I leave him mumbling in his room so I don’t say something I regret. It’s almost dinnertime and I’m hungry and grumpy, so I root around in his kitchen for some snacks. He has way better food at his house. Corn chips sprayed with a variety of flavored salts, a crunchy goodness deemed Illegal by my mother. Jonah’s parents still aren’t home from work. I’m hoping they’ll walk in the door with Chinese food and invite me to stay.
I decide to take the high road and humor Jonah’s theory. What if Lars is misleading the cops on purpose? What else could be going on here?
I stare at the bright yellow and blue tiles of the countertop while I munch on Doritos. The question we haven’t been asking ourselves is, if they only steal Picassos, then why would we be at a stakeout at the Neue and Jewish Museum? There are no Picassos there. What is Bovano thinking? I try to put myself in his shoes, get into his brain. It’s an icky proposition.
The Neue Galerie contains only German and Austrian art. Picasso is from Spain. Is Lars sentimental for his homeland?
The Jewish Museum is a mystery as well. The only significant link I’ve come up with between Picasso and Jewish people is his famous painting Guernica. It depicts bombs being dropped by Nazis on a village in Spain, when the Spanish fascist government allowed Hitler to use their people as target practice. How nice of them.
Guernica is huge, though. Eleven by twenty-six feet. I’m having a hard time picturing a heist with a forklift. Plus, it’s in Madrid.
I’ve been doing a lot of research. I may be turning into my father.
Only ten more days of school until April vacation. We have a week off, which will be spent in major lockdown trying to figure this out. It has to be the Guggenheim. I’ll spend my entire vacation there, sleep on the floor if I have to. I wonder if I can ask to see the museum’s security tapes without raising Bovano’s suspicions.
Slowly I walk back to Jonah’s bedroom. He’s still muttering to himself and playing with my protractor, knees bouncing up and down and rattling the desk. I resist the temptation to throw my bowl of chips at his head.
I know I’m right about this. Lars is going to rob the Guggenheim, a museum full of treasure and priceless art and a lot of Picassos. He’ll be there, I can feel it in the very depths of my skinny bones.
Now I just have to prove it.