Grisaille shrieked at the sound of the Pierrot breaking. She sank to her knees, her hands scrabbling on the floor, feeling for the shards.
“How could you?” she choked out, her head swaying like a silver pendulum back and forth. “How could you?”
“Careful, Maman—” Soufflé began, but Grisaille’s questing hand had already landed on a jagged piece of nose, and she hissed as its edge sliced open her palm. Shenanigan was surprised to see her blood was as red as everyone else’s. She had expected it to be a pale, watery pink, like the blood of a fish.
Grisaille tore off her blindfold, and the whites of her eyes were bloodshot.
“Do you know how much that was worth?” she rasped at Shenanigan.
“No,” said Shenanigan. “Pomme?”
“Not sure,” said Pomme. “Soufflé, how much does a good fake cost?”
Shenanigan had one rule: She did not lie.
It is difficult to go through life without ever telling a lie, unless you adopt certain methods. Shenanigan had considered writing a practical guide, with examples. It would look like this:
Method 1: Answering on a technicality
Example:
“Have you seen my microscope recently?”
“No, not recently.”
(Note: “Recently” is open to interpretation.)
Method 2: Providing a statement that sounds like an answer, but actually isn’t
Example:
“Have you seen my microscope recently?”
“Pretty hard to lose a microscope, isn’t it?”
Method 3: Not correcting assumptions
Example:
“You’d have told me if you’d seen my microscope, wouldn’t you?”
“Mmm.”
And finally,
Method 4: Omitting key information
Example:
“You haven’t seen my microscope, have you?”
“I saw it yesterday. It’s a lovely microscope. Why, do you think you’ve lost it?”
When Tyran Martinet—and later his daughter, Grisaille Martinet, and later still his grandson, Soufflé Martinet—was asked how the Family came into possession of so many of Pierrot’s works, they never lied. They said, “We purchased the building he used to live in, and became aware of him then,” or “A great talent! And if it wasn’t for Tyran he’d have been forgotten, you know!” and “We acquired his work after he disappeared. A shame he could never enjoy his fame!”
Shenanigan’s plan had hinged on two things: Grisaille’s blindfold, and her own ability to lie by omission.
When they had piled into the elevator to fetch Toujours j’attends from Grisaille’s room, Shenanigan had been a bundle of nerves. She had watched Grisaille as the elevator rose, grinding and scraping. Was it moving a little slower than usual? Was that noticeable to a person who rode it every day? When the car juddered to a stop, she braced herself for Grisaille to frown, but the old woman failed to realize that instead of stopping at its usual sticking place, the lift had ground to a halt early.
“This elevator,” tutted Grisaille, shaking her head as Souris opened the door at the top of the car and slithered out. They heard him tinkering, one foot swinging through the open panel and narrowly missing Shenanigan’s nose. “Always gets stuck between the fourth and sixth floors. Every time we try to fix it, it breaks again.”
“Mmm,” said Aunt Schadenfreude, eyeing the dial, which currently pointed to 3.
Don’t say anything, Shenanigan thought hard at her. Schadenfreude squinted up through the trapdoor at the three figures there: Souris, tapping his wrench pointlessly; Emil, kneeling on the roof; and Pomme, who had her frock coat on and a smile hidden behind her hand. Schadenfreude waved; Pomme waved back.
“Competent grandchild you have there,” said Aunt Schadenfreude, nodding to Pomme.
“Grand-nephew,” corrected Grisaille, assuming she meant Souris.
“Of course.”
The lift rose.
“You really do remind me of my Pomme,” Grisaille said to Shenanigan. “I hope you don’t go the way she did. She was always a troublemaker.”
Pomme made a rude gesture. Shenanigan bit her tongue.
“A bad apple, as it were,” said Aunt Schadenfreude.
“Yes. But there’s still time with this one,” Grisaille said, reaching out and patting Shenanigan’s hair. “You’ll want to watch her, Schadenfreude.”
Aunt Schadenfreude’s gimlet eyes fixed Shenanigan with a knowing look. “I feel I do little else.”
When the elevator stopped again, the view through the brass grille was of a dark, disused corridor. They had arrived at the place it had been trying to stop for years: the long-hidden fifth floor.
Ouvolpo had reached it the night before, passing one by one through Pomme’s secret passageway, up through the ceiling of Room 415 to Room 515 and the dusty, undisturbed corridors beyond. There hadn’t been time to pause at Pierrot’s skeleton, but they all had anyway. It felt rude not to pay their respects.
Outside Room 515, the fifth floor was sealed in time, perfectly preserved. They had assumed they would have to take a sledgehammer to the bricked-up opening of the elevator shaft, but in the end they didn’t need to. The mortar had crumbled long ago, and the bricks could be pulled out like loose teeth.
Now—or rather, later—Shenanigan, Souris, and Aunt Schadenfreude stared into the gloom. Shenanigan glanced up through the car’s maintenance hatch at Pomme and Emil. Standing on the roof of the elevator they were just at eye level with the sixth floor, and the Management Suite. They pried open the grille—timing it as best they could with Souris doing the same on the floor below—and Pomme pulled herself over the threshold. She set off down the corridor towards Grisaille’s room, number 604. Shenanigan longed to go with her. She had given Pomme the most exciting task to do, but her own was the most important. She couldn’t abandon it.
“Come along,” said Grisaille, as Souris scurried ahead of her. Had she taken off her blindfold, she would have seen a corridor that was dusty and unlit, unchanged since it was sealed up in the 1920s. Aunt Schadenfreude did see this, and hesitated. Shenanigan begged for silence with her eyebrows. It must have worked, because though Schadenfreude’s lip twitched, she said nothing, even when Emil slipped down from the roof of the elevator and followed them down the corridor on catlike feet.
As soon as she was inside, Grisaille wrenched the blindfold off her face.
It had taken Ouvolpo all night to re-create this room from Pomme and the children’s memories. The group were used to working fast, but they had never had to re-create something so exactly before. As Grisaille glanced around the featureless gray room, Shenanigan could only hope that their work was good enough, or that Grisaille was in too much of a rush to notice that the photographs on the walls were only painted, the features blurred and indistinct.
“That’s better,” said Grisaille, turning her gray eyes on Schadenfreude. She looked her cousin up and down. “You’ve got old,” she said.
“You’re one to talk.” Schadenfreude surveyed the room. “I love what you’ve done with the place. Very, ah, neutral.”
“I have kept it just as it was when I was a girl, other than the color scheme,” Grisaille said proudly. She really had, and this had worked enormously in Ouvolpo’s favor. The untouched Room 504 contained the same furniture, the same lavish wallpaper, the same silver clock ticking on the mantel. What had it taken, in the end? Some paint, some dye, some gray fabric. There had been only one real difficulty, and Grisaille approached it. The old woman huffed as she pulled back the only real frame in the room, the one holding the “photograph” of her father, Tyran, on the Hôtel’s opening night. Behind it, in a hole Chad had knocked through the wall (the sledgehammer had come in handy after all), was the dense black beast that was the Le Chiffre.
Or a Le Chiffre, anyway. Shenanigan watched carefully as Grisaille twisted the dial on the safe Ouvolpo had bought to practice on. It was unlocked, and had she but pulled, the door would have opened without protest. But Grisaille didn’t know that, and her lips moved as she entered the combination. When Shenanigan saw what the numbers were, she had to breathe hard to keep the anger in a small, tight knot inside her.
She took a felt-tip from her pocket. On a scrap of notebook paper Phenomena had given her, she wrote: 31 12 19 26.
She opened the safe, and breathed a sigh of relief when she saw the box was still there.
“Great, let’s go,” said Shenanigan, turning on her heel.
“Hold on,” said Grisaille sharply. “Let me be sure.”
Shenanigan made a show of sighing. She handed the piece of paper through the half-open door to Emil, who winked. He snatched it and ran, fleet-footed and silent, back to the elevator.
Grisaille lifted out the case, the one Ouvolpo had used when they’d stolen the fake. She carried it to her table and opened it. The fake Pierrot looked out, his sad eyes staring from the pool of black velvet, and she caressed his cheek with one gray hand.
Shenanigan felt a curious doubling sensation, like her brain had gone cross-eyed. She didn’t know what was happening upstairs, though she knew what was meant to be happening.
Emil was meant to run back down the corridor and into the elevator, climbing onto the roof of the car and pulling himself up to the sixth floor. He was meant to join Pomme in Grisaille’s room, where she was waiting impatiently for the code Shenanigan had written down. Shenanigan imagined her face when she saw what it actually was: the date of the Hôtel’s Grand Opening, and the date of Pierrot’s murder.
She imagined her cousin turning the dial with shaking fingers, Emil hovering anxiously in the background. Maybe Pomme got the code right first try. Maybe she messed up, and had to start again. But Shenanigan knew that her cousin would open the safe, and lift out the case, just as Grisaille was doing now, and would open it to check that the contents were the original Pierrot. Unlike her grandmother, she would check the blue signature on the base. Shenanigan wondered if they felt it, Pomme and Grisaille—a shiver, as each performed the same action only a floor apart. Grisaille even looked over her shoulder, as if she felt someone copying her behind her back.
Then she closed the case with a snap.
“I knew those creatures were lying,” she murmured.
Soufflé was right. It was a good fake. Grisaille moved towards the door.
“You’re bringing it downstairs?” asked Aunt Schadenfreude, surprised. “Ouvolpo could still take it, you know.”
Grisaille shrugged. “That inspector is there, and I’m sure by now the police are on their way. The three we have will give up their compatriots, one way or another. It’s such a shame we don’t have the guillotine anymore. I would pay to watch their heads roll.” She sighed. “I would even endure the sight of all that red.”
What was happening upstairs now? Shenanigan could only imagine Emil, tucking the Pierrot’s case into his backpack, checking the rope round his waist, and preparing to leap from Grisaille’s balcony. Did he and Pomme shake hands? Did they wish each other luck? When they parted ways, Emil to the roof and then the van parked two streets away, Pomme to the elevator and her murderous Family, who was more afraid?
Souris retied Grisaille’s blindfold, and they headed back to the elevator. When Shenanigan looked up through the maintenance hatch, she saw Pomme crouched again on the roof. Her grin was fierce and victorious. It was only once the elevator started moving again that Shenanigan, who had made herself keep quiet all this time, spoke.
“You couldn’t have kept him in the dark forever, you know,” she said.
“I don’t plan to,” Grisaille said, surprised. She adjusted the knot on her retied blindfold. “I do think he should bring people joy. For the price of a ticket, split sixty–forty between the Musée Deburau and us.”
“I’m not talking about the sculpture. I’m talking about Pierrot.”
Grisaille’s smile wavered. Her head turned in Shenanigan’s direction. She couldn’t see her, but Shenanigan felt those gray eyes regardless. She almost hadn’t believed Pomme when she had told the children her suspicions about her grandmother. But Shenanigan had been right, that day in the Conversatoire. A secret like this had to be tended to over time, if it was to keep its shape. Like a hedge maze, or a family tree.
Arch-Aunt Schadenfreude, leaning into the corner of the elevator, watched the exchange with interest.
“Oh dear, Grisaille,” she murmured. “What have you been up to?”
The lift slowed to a stop. Souris opened the grille, and Grisaille’s smile was back in place. She held up the box containing the fake Pierrot.
“Here,” she said. “As I said. Safe and sound.”
And it was. It was in mid-air, or in a van, or underground. It was wherever Emil’s backpack was, which was wherever Emil was, and as soon as Shenanigan and Pomme negotiated their release, it was wherever the other members of Ouvolpo would be too. Throughout the ensuing chaos, the real Pierrot was tucked away, safe and sound, even as his false brother was released from Shenanigan’s hands and smashed irreparably on the floor of the Hôtel Martinet.