A Con Artist in Paris Read online

  There was a clicking noise followed by a whooshing noise, and I knew it was a mistake as soon as I said it.

  “Maybe you shouldn’t . . . ,” Joe began to protest, but it was already too late. The button had been pressed—the button that releases the collapsible paraglider wing we didn’t know was hidden in the back of the buggy!

  “Oops,” I squeaked, clutching my seat as the little car lurched off the ground and up into the sky.

  10

  THE FLYING DETECTIVES

  JOE

  I WATCHED IN THE REARVIEW mirror as the forty-foot-wide parachute unfurled from the back of the buggy and caught air, rising over us like a fabric wing on strings. I glanced down to see the wheels folding into the car. Before I could figure out how to stop it, we were airborne. Our midnight ride had turned into a midnight flight!

  “I’m usually the one doing boneheaded things like pressing the red button,” I yelled, frantically trying to figure out the controls as the car soared into the sky over the Seine.

  “I know,” Frank whimpered. “I’m sorry. It was just so red.”

  “Cyril saying the Sky Ranger could do a hundred fifteen miles per hour on the ground suddenly makes a lot more sense,” I reflected.

  “I don’t want to find out how fast it goes in the air,” Frank shrieked. “But I guess we know why they call it a Sky Ranger!”

  That’s when it clicked. “I knew I’d heard the name Sky Ranger before!” I called over the whoosh of the air and the whir of the rear propeller. “It’s one of the first flying cars! I saw rumors about it on online last year. People are paying a hundred grand just to get on a list to buy one, but it’s just a prototype. It hasn’t even gone into production yet.”

  “Cyril is full of surprises,” Frank croaked. “A flying car would definitely help explain how Le Stylo pulled off some of his other impossible stunts.”

  “I bet we’re the first teenagers in the world to fly a car over Paris,” I shouted, suddenly filled with excitement.

  “I’d rather be the first teenagers to safely land a car in Paris,” Frank moaned.

  My excitement turned back to fear pretty quickly when I looked down. We were still only a few yards off the ground, but the car was steadily gaining altitude, and nothing I did seemed to stop it.

  I also saw something else when I looked down—the thing the drone had been chasing. The drone had slowed to a halt and was hovering in the shadows over the Right Bank . . . where a small one-man submersible scooter rose to the surface!

  “Look down, bro!” I shouted to Frank.

  “I don’t want to!” he shouted back.

  “Trust me,” I said as the person riding the underwater scooter took off their scuba mask. Even from up here, I could tell it was . . .

  “Cyril!” Frank exclaimed. “Could he really be Le Stylo?”

  “I’ve seen submersibles like that online,” I said. “They’re great for shallow dives, and they let a diver cover a lot of ground quickly. He must have launched it from a secret portal under the houseboat.”

  “If Cyril is Le Stylo, that would explain how he snuck away from the houseboat to deliver all those paintings to the charities yesterday without the police seeing him leave,” Frank observed.

  Cyril stashed his scuba gear and was climbing up to the street, the spy drone trailing unnoticed at a safe distance, when I turned my full attention back to the Sky Ranger’s controls. The internal combustion engine had shut down when the buggy took off, and it was quiet enough that we might have been able to keep following Cyril from the sky, if:

  (a) we weren’t headed in the wrong direction, and . . .

  (b) I knew how to drive a flying car!

  “Can you swing around to follow him?” Frank asked.

  “No!” I shouted.

  “Do I want to know why not?” Frank asked more meekly.

  “No!”

  “You don’t have control over this thing, do you?”

  “No!”

  “Um, is that the Eiffel Tower we’re headed for?”

  “Yes!”

  11

  UFO: UNCONTROLLABLE FLYING OBJECT

  FRANK

  THE LE STYLO CASE HADN’T just taken a twist, it had taken a dive and a lift-off as well. Normally my mind would be racing to put the pieces together, but we had bigger things to worry about than whether Cyril was Le Stylo or who knew enough to follow him with a drone. Nine hundred eighty-four feet bigger!

  The flying car soared higher and the Eiffel Tower loomed closer, its impossibly tall steel legs rising into a sky-high spear of death ready to pulverize us if Joe didn’t figure out how to steer this thing quick. I’d wanted to see the Eiffel Tower while we were in Paris, but . . .

  “This wasn’t the kind of sightseeing I had in mind!” I screamed. “Do something!”

  “I’m trying!” Joe screamed back, yanking hard on the wheel and working the pedals like mad.

  We were so close I could see the pins holding the beams together. And then the weld marks. And then . . . we were out of time. The buggy was moving too fast. I shut my eyes, unable to watch the moment of our—

  “Yes!” Joe shouted.

  I felt the car jerk hard to the left and opened my eyes in time to see the tower’s steel beams whoosh past close enough to touch.

  “Way to go, Joe!” I cheered as the buggy zipped around the Eiffel Tower with Joe now firmly in control.

  “Dude, did you ever doubt me?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said, barely able to hear my voice over my own thumping heart. “Absolutely.”

  “Me too,” he said with a grin. “But now that I have the hang of it, this is amazing!”

  I looked down. The view was beyond amazing. All of Paris spread out below us in a sea of lights. You could see everything at once. The Seine aglow in the reflection of the streetlamps as it snaked through the city. The Louvre pyramid and all the other famous landmarks shining with light. There was one thing we couldn’t see, though.

  “There’s no way we’re finding Cyril or that drone now,” I said.

  “Well, we definitely learned one thing tonight . . . ,” Joe began.

  “Don’t drive a flying car into one of the most famous landmarks in the world?” I asked.

  “That too,” he agreed. “But with his flying Batmobile buggy and secret alter ego, Cyril is practically a French Bruce Wayne.”

  “Either he’s Le Stylo, or he’s going to an insane amount of trouble to defend whoever is,” I asserted.

  “Either way, I’m starting to think what Cyril insinuated at the gallery could be true,” Joe shared. “Maybe Le Stylo didn’t pull the Mona Lisa stunt and the Napoléon pen heist after all.”

  “Do you think it’s whoever was piloting that drone?” I asked. “It sure didn’t seem like Cyril knew it was following him.”

  “Whoever was behind that drone knew enough about Cyril’s secrets to spy on the houseboat and wait for the submersible to launch,” Joe went on, keeping the theory cranking. “Which means if Cyril really is Le Stylo, then the spy also knows enough about his methods to convincingly make the Louvre hoax look like Le Stylo’s handiwork.”

  “And frame him like a painting,” I added.

  I looked back down at Paris glowing beneath us. Our villain was down there somewhere.

  “Any chance that Cyril is Le Stylo and did do it?” I theorized. “He could have given away all those paintings as a publicity stunt to save his image and still get away with it.”

  “But why?” Joe wanted to know. “What would he have to gain by stealing Plouffe’s pen? We know he doesn’t need the money, not when he turned right around and gave away over a million dollars’ worth of his own paintings the next day.”

  “Speaking of Plouffe, if Simone Lachance is right about him profiting off the theft through his insurance policy, then that gives him a motive too,” I said, trying on a new theory. “If he stole the pen from himself, he’d make back more than he spent to buy it and also get to keep it for f
ree.”

  “He really did seem distraught, though. He’d have to be a really good actor,” Joe pointed out. “And he couldn’t have stolen it by himself, because he was with us when the thief took the safe. So he’d have to have an accomplice.”

  “If he did, we can be pretty certain it wasn’t Simone. If she was his partner, she wouldn’t have drawn attention to him by talking about his insurance policy,” I said, chipping away at the proposition of a Plouffe conspiracy. “He also didn’t know anyone was listening when we overheard him on the phone asking for her help finding it. He wouldn’t have been crying about his stolen treasure to the person who helped him steal it.”

  “What about Ginormo Luc?” Joe shuddered.

  “As much as I dislike the guy, what’s his motive?” I asked. “Even if he had one, he’s got to be three hundred pounds at least. Whoever scaled the pyramid in that mirrored suit would have to have weighed a lot less.”

  “Yeah, and the police definitely would have noticed him on the security cameras if he visited the Mona Lisa when the projector was planted,” Joe agreed.

  “Maybe Devereux had something to do with it.” I tossed out the name of our other least favorite person in France. “I don’t like to think about the implications of a police officer betraying his oath like that, but he has a motive. Chief Olaf said he’s been after Le Stylo for years. Showing up the police is Le Stylo’s specialty, and Devereux hates getting shown up.”

  “But if he was the one behind the drone, that would mean he already knew enough about Cyril to bust him. Why go to all this other trouble?” Joe wondered.

  “Unless he knew because he’d been spying illegally and needed legally admissible evidence to nail Cyril without nailing himself as a crooked cop in the process,” I suggested.

  “Hmm. I don’t know, bro, seems a little thin,” Joe said, steering the Sky Ranger back to Cyril’s houseboat.

  I sighed. We were running out of suspects and I was grasping at straws.

  “Do we know anything about that redheaded guy with the camera we saw arguing with Simone at Cyril’s party?” I asked. “They both had bones to pick with Le Stylo. I wonder what bones they had with each other. And all three of them seem to know one another.”

  “Yeah, but Cyril is a huge collector. He and Simone probably know a ton of the same art-world people,” Joe said, casting doubt on another of my theories. “We’d need to know more about him to see if there was a connection worth exploring. And all those other artists we heard talking around the Georges St. Denis exhibit seemed pretty sour about Le Stylo’s success too.”

  “Could it be another street artist, then?” I asked. “You said a lot of street artists have rivalries with one another, like how Cosmonaute and Ratatouille try to outdo each other with their imitations of famous artwork like Monet or the Mona Lisa.”

  Joe thought about it for a moment. “I don’t know. Le Stylo is on another level from those other guys, and I’ve never seen him bother with rivalries. Cosmonaute has spoofed Le Stylo with tile mosaics, and Ratatouille has burned Le Stylo pieces before—“burning” is when one street artist paints over another artist’s work. There’s one where he stenciled over Le Stylo’s soldiers carrying fountain pens to change the pens into baguettes and gave the soldiers red berets, whiskers, and rat tails. But it’s a pretty big leap from painting over someone’s work to pulling one of the most elaborate stunts in art history.”

  “Good point,” I conceded. “Well, tomorrow I say we dig up some more info on the redhead with the camera and those other artists from the gallery. And I think we should have another chat with Monsieur Plouffe to see if there’s anything to the insurance scam theory.”

  Joe nodded, his focus on directing the Sky Ranger back toward the houseboat.

  “I’m fresh out of ideas. You have any theories you want to share about whodunit instead of just shooting down mine?” I quipped.

  Joe shook his head. “But I bet Cyril does.”

  “I say we ask him.”

  “Good plan,” Joe said. “Just as soon as I figure out how to land a flying car.”

  “Ughh . . . ,” I moaned, my head swirling with vertigo as I looked down. Staying in the air was stressful enough; I hadn’t thought about landing!

  “Paris seems to be full of narrow, twisty old streets,” Joe observed. “They don’t exactly make ideal runways.”

  Fighting back my dizziness, I took in the city below. A glowing, super-wide thoroughfare north of where Cyril had emerged from the Seine grabbed my attention.

  “But that might.” Joe pointed to the Champs-Élysées—Paris’s most famous street, with ten beautiful lanes and not that much traffic late at night.

  “Absolutely not!” I yelled. “We’re just going to have to risk using one of the side streets. We can’t land this thing on one of the most famous landmarks in Paris and not get caught. And I have no idea how we would talk our way out of this one.”

  I eyed the ornate 164-foot-tall, 148-foot-wide stone arch in the middle of an immense traffic circle, where the Champs-Élysées intersected with ten other roads. The Arc de Triomphe might not have been as tall as the Eiffel Tower, but it was still breathtaking, even from this high up.

  “Okay, okay. I think I can manage,” Joe said, maneuvering the little car over the traffic. “But first, let’s check another landmark off your sightseeing list!”

  The Arc de Triomphe sped closer, but Joe maintained control. Just as we zoomed past it, Le Stylo’s name appeared projected in huge letters on the front of the arch. More words followed, spreading across the arch as if by magic: LE STYLO N’EST PAS UN VOLEUR.

  “Le Stylo isn’t a thief,” I translated.

  I looked back as a second sentence appeared projected in English on the other side: IMITATION IS THE SINCEREST FORM OF FRAMING ME.

  Joe read the message through the rearview mirror.

  “Well, now I guess we know what Cyril’s been up to since we saw him climb out of the river.”

  12

  PEN PALS

  JOE

  WE’D LEARNED A COUPLE OF nifty new details about the case on our surprise flight over Paris. Cyril was either Le Stylo or he was posing as him to advertise the artist’s innocence. And he had come to the same conclusion that we had: Le Stylo was probably being framed for the theft of Plouffe’s precious pen.

  Luckily, we were able to find and land on a deserted side street. It may not have been an expert landing, but I think I did pretty well, considering I had no idea what I was doing. And I’m almost positive no one saw us land. I made Frank sit on his hands so he wasn’t tempted to push any more buttons, and drove as carefully as possible back to the Pont Alexander III, where I parked the flying buggy right where we’d found it.

  “The lights are still out on the houseboat,” Frank observed. “No way to tell if Cyril has snuck back on board yet.”

  “And with the cops still watching, we can’t just go up and knock on his door,” I said, eyeing the unmarked cop car still parked on the corner.

  Frank smiled as he watched me pop Sky Ranger’s key back into the secret compartment. “We could always leave him a note somewhere the police won’t know to look.”

  “Good call,” I said, pulling out the small pocket notebook I carry with me to log case notes.

  We forgot our swim trunks, so we took you up on your offer to go for a spin. The ride was illuminating, I scribbled, tipping him off that we were onto his midnight dive to project Le Stylo’s message across the Arc de Triomphe. Leave the critics behind and give a couple of street art fans a private art history lesson . . . before they have to take their review public. Café Aventure @ 10.

  I folded the note and tucked it inside the hidden compartment along with the key.

  “Do you think he’ll show?” Frank asked.

  “Well, we know he won’t have a problem ditching the stakeout detail,” I replied. “And he probably knows he’ll get a fairer shake from us than Devereux.”

  We walked back to
the hotel and caught a few hours of shut-eye before our maybe-rendezvous. When we made it down to the lobby the next morning, all the IPAD attendees were buzzing, and this time it wasn’t about Le Stylo.

  “There is no such thing as UFOs!” a woman with a Spanish accent declared.

  “At least fifty people from all over Paris called the police last night to report seeing it buzz by the Eiffel Tower and head for the Arc de Triomphe,” countered our English friend Stucky. “I’m not saying it was aliens, but it was unidentified, it was flying, and it was an object. That makes it a UFO!”

  “Oops,” uttered Frank as we exchanged a guilty look. It looked like our late night flight in Cyril’s flying dune buggy had attracted some unwanted attention . . . from half of Paris!

  “If I didn’t know better, I’d say this alien business had something to do with you,” Chief Olaf prodded before we could slip by unnoticed.

  “Consorting with aliens?” I asked in my best shocked voice. “We’ve had secret sources on cases before, but as far as I know, they’ve all been from this galaxy.”

  “I wouldn’t put it past you after some of the crazy things you boys have gotten involved in back in Bayport,” he shot back.

  The chief kind of had a point—we’d had run-ins on recent cases with everything from sharks to cursed ancient underground cults to crazy mountain men.

  “We couldn’t have been the aliens,” Frank added a little too defensively. “We were in bed all night.”

  Chief Olaf eyed us suspiciously—but thankfully, the chief eyeing us suspiciously was a pretty much daily thing.

  He didn’t seem to have a clue we’d left our room the night before.

  He gave us a hard stare-down, but then his tone softened. “I’m going to take a tour of the Catacombs in the Montparnasse district after the morning IPAD lecture, if you boys want to join me for some sightseeing. Tickets on me.”

  It was really nice of him, although I had a hunch he just wanted to keep tabs on us. As much as I wanted to see the Catacombs—ancient underground tunnels full of millions of skeletons? Yes, please!—I’d rather see them on our own without a police chaperone.