“Stop,” Descartes ordered. A shadow had flitted across the screen, so swiftly as to be almost invisible. “Go forward, Pascal. Not so fast.” The guard reversed the direction of the playback. “There! Slow down, slow down!” A man entered the gallery, then turned toward the camera so that his face was clearly visible. “Damn,” said Descartes.
“Sorry,” Pascal shrugged. “Just me, making my rounds.”
“Okay. Scroll back the rest of the way. All the way to closing time.”
Pascal made two more cameo appearances on-screen, each time turning to face the camera. Otherwise the room remained empty except for the sundry saints and martyrs lining the walls.
Descartes turned to Mme. Clergue. “So what else might be especially tempting to an art thief?”
Pphhtt, she puffed again, shrugging. “We all have our own tastes.”
He cocked his head quizzically. “And what’s your taste? What would you steal, Madame?” She drew back, shocked, and searched his eyes for signs of accusation. He smiled and winked. “Me, I’d steal the sexy couple.”
She flushed slightly, a faint pink suffusing the parchment of her cheeks, but her eyes twinkled. “Oh dear me,” she fluttered. “Well, if I were shopping for my personal collection, I, too, might take the ... the couple that you like. But if I were hoping to sell it on the black market, I’d go for name recognition and pinch the Botticelli.”
Descartes’s eyebrows shot up. “Botticelli? The guy who painted Venus on the half shell?”
“Really, Inspector, have you no respect?” She made a piping sound that might have been either a wheeze or a giggle. “Yes, Botticelli was the guy—the artist—who painted The Birth of Venus. We have—I hope we still have—a lovely Madonna and Child by Botticelli. In Gallery Eleven.”
The guard was already on it. He’d barely begun to scroll backward when the screen flickered with motion. He stopped scrolling and reversed direction. For the fourth time, they watched as Pascal entered a gallery, faced the camera, and then strolled out of frame. Seconds later, though, he ran back in and—without slowing down or looking at the camera—sprinted out the doorway he’d originally entered. “That’s when I heard the alarm,” he explained. He pointed to the time stamp on the screen. “12:08 A.M.”
Descartes consulted his notepad. “Yes, that’s when we got the signal,” he said. He chewed on his lower lip. “Do you have a floor plan of the museum?” Pascal tapped the counter; pressed beneath a glass top was a diagram of each level. The detective studied it, then pointed with the tip of his pen. “So when you heard the alarm, you were here. Where were you just before that?”
“Directly above, in Gallery Twelve,” the guard answered. “The top floor. I came down the spiral staircase”—he indicated the stairs on the map—“and went through Gallery Eleven. When the alarm sounded, I ran back to the stairs and came down here, to see which alarm sensor had gone off.” He pointed to a bank of indicator lights—a row of steady green LEDs, broken by one blinking red diode.
Descartes nodded. “Okay. The video. Keep scrolling backward, please.” Pascal resumed, but he’d barely gotten beyond his own 12:08 appearances before another shadowy figure began darting across the frame. Pascal twitched the knob on the control panel. The video slowed, just in time to show the black-clad man walking out of the gallery. He was carrying a painting, and for a moment, as he passed through the wide doorway, the upper-right corner of the picture was visible. It showed the delicate face of a beautiful girl, who appeared to be looking down at the man abducting her.
Mme. Clergue gasped and clutched Descartes’s sleeve. “Oh dear God,” she whispered. “I think he’s got the Botticelli.”
Descartes tapped Pascal on the shoulder. “Go back. Play the whole thing in real time, start to finish.” The guard nodded and pressed a button. After a few seconds, the black-clad man entered the screen, moving in reverse, hugging the young woman to his chest. “No, no,” Descartes snapped. “Forward, forward. Start at the beginning and go forward.”
“I am going forward,” Pascal protested.
“Then why the hell is he moving backward?”
The guard shrugged. “I don’t know why, but he is,” he insisted. He tapped the corner of the screen. Sure enough, the time-stamp numbers were spinning up, second by second. “See?”
“I don’t understand,” Mme. Clergue fretted.
“He doesn’t want to show his face,” Descartes said. “Maybe he’s teasing us, too, knowing we’ll be watching. In any case, he knows where all the cameras are. He must be an insider.” Mme. Clergue started to protest, but the inspector raised a hand for silence. They watched with growing puzzlement as the man stopped and leaned the painting against the wall, fished an implement of some sort from his pants, and struck the wall three times. Then, to their utter astonishment, he hoisted the painting from the floor, hung it, and strode from the gallery.