A Con Artist in Paris Read online

  CONTENTS

  Chapter 1 Eek!

  Chapter 2 Bonjour, Boys

  Chapter 3 The Vanishing Smile

  Chapter 4 Now You See It . . .

  Chapter 5 Gossiping Gumshoes

  Chapter 6 The Lucky Lady

  Chapter 7 Altered Egos

  Chapter 8 Party Crashers

  Chapter 9 Famous Last Words

  Chapter 10 The Flying Detectives

  Chapter 11 UFO: Uncontrollable Flying Object

  Chapter 12 Pen Pals

  Chapter 13 Rat Burglar

  Chapter 14 City of the Dead

  Chapter 15 Cornered Rat

  Chapter 16 A Bum Leg

  Chapter 17 Mightier Than the Sword

  Chapter 18 Vive Les Hardys

  About Franklin W. Dixon

  1

  EEK!

  FRANK

  THE FIRST THING I SAW when I stepped onto the streets of Paris was a giant rat.

  “Sweet!” my brother Joe shouted, whipping out his phone to snap a picture of the impossibly large rodent climbing into a sewer in the middle of France’s capital.

  “I’ve never seen someone so excited about a rat before,” I said. “Or seen a rat wearing a red beret and a burglar mask, for that matter.”

  Lucky for us, this rat was a five-foot-tall cartoon character running off with a baguette, stenciled on the wall of a boulangerie—that’s French for “bakery.” The artist had layered three different stencils on top of one another so the rat, the baguette, and the beret and mask were all different colors.

  “All right! We haven’t even been here five minutes and we’ve already seen a piece by Ratatouille. He’s one of the coolest artists working the streets of Paris,” Joe gushed.

  From his reaction, you’d think we’d just won the tourist lottery.

  Our detective dad, Fenton Hardy, had been invited to speak at the annual International Professional Association of Detectives (IPAD) convention, and he’d invited us to tag along for a little sightseeing. We probably could have told all those professional investigators a thing or two about detecting ourselves—I mean, we are the world’s foremost underage amateur PIs. Well, at least the foremost in Bayport, our hometown, where we have a well-earned reputation as teenage detectives extraordinaire. Detecting runs in our blood, apparently. IPAD wasn’t interested in what Fenton’s kids had to say, though, so we got a week off to explore one of Europe’s most beautiful cities.

  Not even a sleepless nine-hour red-eye flight across the Atlantic could press the snooze button on my excitement level. All that classic art! Architecture! History!

  “A brand-new piece by Cosmonaute!” Joe had his phone aimed across the cobblestone street to a simple tile mosaic of a UFO landing on the top story of a brick building that had to be hundreds of years old. “I don’t think anyone’s even posted this one yet.”

  The artist had climbed all the way up to the top of the building and glued the square tiles to the wall in the shape of a flying saucer made out of old eight-bit video graphics, like the ones from the very first arcade games.

  Joe looked stoked as he uploaded the picture to his Instagram account, adding the hashtags #cosmonaute #streetart #paris and #streetarthuntparis so other street art “grammers” from around the world could see it too.

  “I can’t believe people come to a city with a world-class museum like the Louvre just to take pictures of cartoon rats and spaceships.” I rubbed my confused, jet-lagged eyes. “Here we are in one of the most historic places on earth, surrounded by amazing landmarks, and all my brother wants to see is the graffiti and arcade spaceships.”

  “It’s not just graffiti, dude,” he said seriously. “It’s street art. People like Ratatouille and Cosmonaute are creating original works of art, and they’re using the environment around them to tell a story at the same time. There’s an international pop art renaissance going on, and Paris is its epicenter.”

  My brother’s head was big enough already without me complimenting him, but I was impressed with how much thought he’d put into it. I was usually the one lecturing him on things like art appreciation!

  “I get it, but we’re in Paris! Some of the most treasured masterworks ever created are here. Van Gogh, Monet, Picasso, Dali. They all lived and painted right here.”

  “Well, Snooty McArtFace, Ratatouille painting himself all over Paris turns the whole city into an interactive museum, and you don’t have to wait in line or go to a hoity gallery to see it,” Joe retorted. “Besides, some people think artists like Le Stylo are masters.”

  “I . . .” I shut up is what I did. “You got me there. I can’t talk smack about a guy who got away with turning the most famous clock tower in the world into a smartwatch.”

  Le Stylo’s handle meant “The Pen” in French, and he’d been making international headlines for all the crazy places his outlaw art installations had appeared. Like the time he projected digital numbers and icons over the Big Ben clock tower in London and then changed the sign so it said iBen as a commentary on historical preservation in a tech-driven society.

  The whole world was Le Stylo’s canvas, and he used it for activism, too. The saying that inspired his name—the pen is mightier than the sword—also inspired his art. His antiwar stencils of soldiers wielding his signature feather fountain pen instead of guns had appeared all over the world on government buildings, police headquarters, and even in war zones.

  “My favorite is when he used suction cups to scale that mirrored office building in Texas wearing a mirror-covered jumpsuit so no one would see him,” Joe said, referencing Le Stylo’s protest of a big oil spill the year before.

  “Stenciling a flock of oil-covered pelicans crashing into that big oil CEO’s window took talent and guts,” I agreed, wondering how terrifying it must be to climb a skyscraper like you were Spider-Man. That kind of daredevil stuff was definitely more up Joe’s alley.

  “I heard he donates all the money from his paintings to charity,” Joe shared. “I bet Vincent van Gogh didn’t even do that.”

  “He might have if he hadn’t died penniless and unknown,” I informed my brother.

  “Oh,” Joe said, looking up at the sky. “Sorry, Vince, my bad.”

  “Stylo’s definitely got VVG beat in the popularity-while-alive contest,” I observed. “It’s amazing how someone can turn themselves into just about the world’s most popular artist without anyone discovering their real identity.”

  Le Stylo wasn’t just an artist/activist/prankster. He was a mystery. And no one appreciates a good mystery as much as a Hardy boy.

  “I can’t wait to check out the exhibit with his new work at that Galerie Simone place near the hotel,” Joe said. “That’s one hoity gallery I don’t mind waiting in line for.”

  It was a different place near the hotel that I was excited to wait in line for. A medieval royal palace filled with over 650,000 square feet of France’s most priceless treasures.

  2

  BONJOUR, BOYS

  JOE

  OKAY, FOR A STUFFY OLD museum, the Louvre was pretty epic. The converted palace Frank kept blabbing about took up almost half a mile along the Right Bank of the Seine River. That’s what the Parisians call the north side of the river that divides the city in half. The museum may have been historic, but it wasn’t entirely old. The gigantic glass pyramid surrounded by triangle-shaped reflection pools in the outdoor square by the entrance gave the place a modern touch I appreciated.

  A street cut right through the square, and the whole outdoor part was open to the public without having to buy a ticket, so tons of tourists were taking pictures in front of the pyramid as we walked past. One family was even taking selfies with the security guard next to the little securit
y booth across the square.

  “Did you know the Louvre is the largest museum in the world, with over thirty-five thousand objects dating all the way back to prehistoric times?” Frank asked.

  “I do now.” I chuckled as we cut through the square to our hotel across the street on Rue de Rivoli (that means Rivoli Street).

  “Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa gets over eight million visitors alone,” Frank said, slipping into full tour-guide mode. He’d read so much stuff about Paris before our trip, he could have worked for the French tourism board. “The painting is so valuable, they keep it in an armor-plated steel display case behind multiple layers of impermeable glass. It’s practically theft-proof. But part of the reason it’s so famous is because it was stolen. A handyman actually walked off with it way back in the early 1900s.”

  “Uh-huh,” I mumbled, only half listening.

  “When they caught him, he rationalized it by saying that Napoléon Bonaparte, who had been the emperor of France in the early 1800s, soon after the Louvre became a museum, stole it first. Which was actually incorrect, because even though Napoléon had stolen a lot of art during his conquests, the museum had bought that one legally. And now it’s the most valuable painting in the world, worth about seven hundred eighty million bucks.”

  “Sacré bleu!” I exclaimed. I thought that meant “sacred blue”—I didn’t speak much French, but I’d seen enough movies to know that’s kind of like the French version of “holy cow.” I’d totally been kind of zoning out, like I usually do when Frank starts rambling, until he got to the part about 780 million bucks. “Le Stylo’s most expensive painting only sold for five hundred thousand dollars. Talk about a million-dollar smile!”

  You don’t have to be an art scholar to know about the Mona Lisa. The painting of a smirking Italian woman still shows up in pop culture over five hundred years later. Even Ratatouille and Cosmonaute had Mona Lisa street-art mash-ups. There was a kind of rivalry between the two street artists, and I’d seen both of their Mona Lisa spoofs in my Instagram feed just recently. Cosmonaute’s was another simple mosaic made out of square tiles so she looked like a character from an old-school arcade game. Ratatouille’s Monatouille Lisa looked a lot like the original painting, actually; well, if the original had a smirking rat wearing Ratatouille’s signature red beret. They’d both also done versions of Monet paintings, which were pretty cool. Monet was a French Impressionist painter famous for making pictures out of thousands of little dots.

  • • •

  “Bonjour, boys,” a familiar voice with a Bayport accent greeted us as we walked into the hotel lobby. We turned around to see Bayport’s top cop, Chief Olaf, talking to a pudgy older guy holding a fancy carved box. I didn’t know who his new friend was, but it sure was odd seeing the chief dressed as a tourist in a floral shirt instead of his normal uniform. Maybe he thought the conference was being held in Hawaii instead of France.

  “Hey, Chief!” I said. “Nice fanny pack.”

  “Thanks, Joe! I got it at . . .” The chief must have figured out I was joking, because he suddenly started growling.

  “I think in France it’s technically called a sac banane,” Frank translated helpfully.

  “Grrrr,” the chief growled again. “It’s bad enough you boys make my job harder in Bayport; at least let me enjoy my vacation in Europe.”

  “Oh, I thought you were here attending the detectives’ conference for work, Chief,” Frank reminded him. “Don’t worry, we won’t tell the rest of the department you’re taking a vacation on taxpayer money.”

  “What’s French for ‘I’m going to lock you up and throw away the key as soon as we get back to Bayport’?” he deadpanned to Frank.

  “Hmm, I’m not sure,” Frank said, checking the translation app on his phone. “I think it’s, Je vais vous . . . ohhh.”

  “Good one, Chief,” I said. “You’re catching on.”

  “Touché, as the French say.” Chief Olaf beamed proudly. “It’s a shame about your dad’s flight getting canceled. I just hope that storm lets up in time for him to make it for his lecture in a couple of days.”

  “Us too,” Frank said. “Dad’s really been looking forward to it.”

  Our pops had been wrapping up a case and was supposed to fly out that morning, but all the flights after ours had been grounded.

  “I figure it’s my job to keep an eye on you boys until he gets here,” the chief said pointedly. “You stir up enough trouble in little ol’ Bayport; we don’t need you causing an international incident with a whole other country.”

  I’m not sure I agreed with the chief’s definition of trouble, but our investigations did have a habit of stepping on the police’s toes back home.

  “No worries, Chief,” I assured him. “We really are here on vacation.”

  “You better be, because if you think I’m a grump, wait till you meet Chief Inspector Devereux.” Chief Olaf nodded to a tall, stern-looking man talking to a group of guests across the lobby.

  “Oui, l’inspecteur has a ferocious reputation, which I, for one, take great comfort in,” interjected the pudgy Frenchman.

  “Joe and Frank Hardy, meet Monsieur Plouffe,” the chief said, introducing us.

  “It’s a pleasure to meet you, sir,” Frank said, shaking his hand. “Are you one of the detectives here for the IPAD conference too?”

  “Ah, non, I may be the only guest at the hotel who is not,” Plouffe said in his thick French accent.

  “Monsieur Plouffe is a collector of historical French art and antiques,” the chief filled us in.

  “Oui, and I just made a rather extraordinary purchase for my collection. So I thought, where safer to keep it during the remainder of my stay in Paris than the safe in a hotel full of the world’s best police detectives?” Plouffe gestured to the IPAD guests milling about the lobby.

  He held the carved box out for us to examine, then opened it so reverently I thought rays of golden light might come flying out while angels started singing. They didn’t, but the contents were pretty impressive.

  “Whoa!” Frank’s mouth dropped open. “That fountain pen must be over two hundred years old. And it looks like it’s solid gold, even the nib.”

  “Very good! You know your history,” Plouffe complimented Frank as he lifted the pen to the light. It was one of those old-fashioned pens from way back in the days when you had to keep dipping the pen in a bottle of ink to write. I may not know a lot about antique pens, but I could tell this one was special. It was embossed with vines wrapped around a stag’s antlers, and it had the initials N.B. carved in fancy script on the flattened gold tip (that’s the part Frank called the nib).

  “It was Napoléon Bonaparte’s, seized from the desk of a vanquished foe,” Plouffe continued, setting the pen back in the box next to a jar of dried ancient black ink. “The emperor used this very pen to write his last letters from exile before his death in 1821.”

  Napoléon was a big deal in France, and everywhere else in the world too, for that matter. I may not be a history nerd like Frank, but even I knew that Napoléon was one of the most famous military leaders of all time.

  “That, boys, is the most expensive pen you’ll ever see,” the chief said proudly, as if it was his own.

  “Nine hundred and fifty thousand euros, to be exact,” said Plouffe as he closed the case.

  “That’s over a million dollars,” Frank gasped.

  “And worth every penny for someone who values the preservation of France’s past as much as I do,” Plouffe said. “It sat on the desk of an emperor, and when I return to my château in the countryside, it will sit on mine.”

  “That’s a really cool pen, Mr. Plouffe, but for a million big ones, I’ll stick with my trusty ballpoint Bic.” I tried to stifle a yawn.

  “You kids look about as tired as I feel,” said the chief. “I say we all call it a night.”

  We’d somehow lucked out and had a room on the top floor overlooking the Louvre, but Frank and I were so tired
we both passed out before we got a chance to check out the view.

  I was in the middle of a dream about Napoléon fighting in battle when I realized those weren’t cannons I was hearing, they were fireworks. And they were coming from outside our window.

  “Is this how they wake up every day in France?” I groaned, squinting through bleary eyes to see the 5:01 A.M. on my phone.

  “Sumpnwerdsgonon,” Frank mumbled from his bed. Or at least that’s what it sounded like.

  “English, bro,” I said.

  He cleared his throat and tried a second time. “Something weird is going on.”

  We stumbled out of our beds and over to the window to see a huge display of red and blue fireworks exploding over the Louvre, illuminating the huge sign that now hung down the side of the seventy-foot-tall glass pyramid in front of the museum.

  “Uh, that wasn’t there yesterday, was it?” I asked.

  “Uh-uh,” he replied, mouth agape.

  The sign read BONJOUR, INSPECTEURS! above a thirty-foot-tall Le Stylo–style stencil caricature of the Mona Lisa holding Le Stylo’s signature feathered pen as if she had just finished drawing herself. Below that were the words, NE ME BLMEZ PAS. NAPOLÉON LA VOLÉ EN PREMIER.

  Frank was already typing away into his French to English translation app.

  “Don’t blame me,” he read. “Napoléon stole it first.”

  3

  THE VANISHING SMILE

  FRANK

  BY THE TIME WE’D MADE it down to the lobby, detectives in their pajamas had started pouring out of the hotel and across the street like a half-dressed herd of frantic international investigators. I noticed Monsieur Plouffe, the art collector, among them. A series of booms echoed from the hotel roof as we followed, showering everyone in French-flag-colored red and blue confetti shot from a confetti cannon somewhere on the hotel roof.

  “I think we’ve just become part of Le Stylo’s newest stunt,” Joe called as the confetti-covered detectives reached the foot of the Louvre pyramid.

  I looked up at the towering drawing of the Mona Lisa smirking with the outlaw artist’s pen in her hand.