A Con Artist in Paris Read online

  “Thanks, Chief,” I said. “We were planning to spend the day exploring the other side of the river, but if we end up in the neighborhood, we’ll let you know.”

  “Stay out of trouble.” The chief held up his phone to remind us he had a trace on us. “I’ll be watching.”

  Frank and I shared a huge sigh of relief as we headed for the café. Even if the chief was tracking our movements, there was nothing suspicious about that.

  We passed a couple of more pieces by Cosmonaute and Ratatouille on the way, but my mind was focused on another street artist—Le Stylo. Both pieces made really cool use of the environment, though, so I made a mental note to come back and take pictures later. Cosmonaute’s was a series of mosaics showing a police chase moving down the street, from the top of one building to the next. Ratatouille’s was another self-portrait, and this time it was as the Great Sphinx, the huge statue of a lion with a human head next to the ancient pyramids in Egypt. Instead of his usual red beret, the Sphinxatouille wore a red Egyptian headdress. But the coolest part was how he’d positioned the stencil on a glass bus stop across from the Louvre, so the museum’s pyramid could be seen in the background, turning the Paris street corner into his own 3-D version of Egypt.

  I’d picked a café far enough from the hotel that we wouldn’t accidentally run into one of the IPAD detectives grabbing a quick bite. We got there early, took a table in the back where we could still see the door, ordered a couple of fancy French sodas and a plate of mind-meltingly tasty pastries, and waited. And waited. And then waited some more.

  “He’s a no-show,” Frank said after an hour, checking his watch for the twenty zillionth time.

  I sighed in agreement and signaled the waiter for the check. He brought something else instead.

  “Un message pour les garçons Hardy,” he said in French as he handed us a sheet of paper.

  “He said he has a message for the Hardy boys,” Frank translated, picking up the paper as the waiter walked away.

  “I got that part. What does it say?!” I urged.

  “It’s an address . . . 31 Rue du Moulin Vert. The road of the green windmill.” Frank dropped the paper and mapped the address on his phone. “It’s near Montparnasse, not far from the Catacombs.”

  “Looks like Cyril decided to change the location,” I said.

  “I guess we’ll be in the chief’s neighborhood after all. I hope he won’t be offended if we don’t call him.”

  A half-hour Métro ride later and we were standing in front of a nondescript gated apartment building on a nondescript street without another person in sight.

  “I don’t see any green windmills,” I quipped.

  “I don’t see where we’re supposed to go,” countered Frank. “There are probably fifty different apartment units at this address and no call box with the people’s names.”

  I took in the rest of the sad little street. It wasn’t nearly as nice or bustling as any of the other Paris neighborhoods we’d seen so far. The only things there besides neglected-looking apartments were a few town houses with boarded-up storefronts that looked like they’d been closed for years. The one across the street had been a butcher, and the one next to number 31 had a faded sign that said PAPETERIE, with pictures of fancy paper, pens, and notebooks.

  “An out-of-business butcher and a stationery store,” Frank said, reading the signs and tugging uselessly on the locked stationery store door. “Not that that does us any good.”

  And that’s when it clicked.

  “A stationery store! Where they sold pens! I bet this place is a front for . . .”

  And then something else clicked.

  The door.

  “Le Stylo,” Frank finished my sentence.

  He looked around to make sure the street was still empty and tried the door again. This time it opened. Someone had buzzed us in.

  We stepped cautiously inside the empty shop, stepping over the discarded boxes littering the dusty floor. The door clicked locked behind us.

  “I hope this isn’t a bad idea,” I whispered, checking my pocket to make sure my cell phone was still safely inside. The idea of the chief being able to track our location suddenly seemed a lot less annoying now that we were locked inside a criminal’s secret hideout.

  A disembodied voice broke the silence through the old intercom mounted on the wall above the broken cash register.

  “Third floor,” Cyril said calmly. “The stairs are to your right.”

  We emerged from the stairwell into a large, well-decorated office that looked totally out of place with the neglected building and vacant stationery store.

  “I thought my private office might be a quieter place to chat,” Cyril said from behind the desk.

  “I take it the police don’t have any idea you’re here,” I prompted, wondering just how safe we were if Cyril decided to turn on us. You never knew what a cornered criminal would do, even a nice one.

  “The police are intently watching the office building across town where I parked my car two hours ago,” he confirmed. “Paris is full of wonderful old tunnels. It’s easy to get from one place to another unseen if you know where you’re going.”

  “Like the manager’s office at our hotel,” Frank suggested.

  Cyril frowned. “I found out that was there when the news of the theft of Napoléon’s pen broke, just like the rest of Paris.”

  “Do you have an alibi?” Frank pressed him.

  “No, and that should be proof enough. Had it been me, I certainly would.” He gestured to his secret office. “You should know by now that I’m quite skilled at accounting for my time whenever I’m somewhere I’m not supposed to be. You’ll also find I have rock-solid alibis for every other stunt Le Stylo has ever pulled. It’s what’s given Devereux such fits. If I’m Le Stylo, as you suggest—not that I am, of course, but just supposing—then why would I slip up this once?”

  He had a point. I’d never met someone so good at being in two places at the same time. He’d been sneaking all over Paris for the past two days while the police twiddled their thumbs watching empty houseboats and office buildings.

  “Being good at deceiving the police is an odd way of trying to prove your innocence,” Frank baited him. “And Le Stylo has been provoking the authorities for years.”

  “Theft goes against everything I stand for!” he shouted. Frank had pushed a button. It was the first time we’d seen Cyril lose his cool.

  “And by you, you mean Le Stylo?” I nudged.

  “I . . .” He stopped and took a deep breath to compose himself. “You boys are much better detectives than my dear friend Inspector Devereux.”

  Cyril might have been too clever to come right out and say it, but it was as good as a confession.

  He held up the note we’d left for him in the Sky Ranger. “You are a step ahead of me, and a mile ahead of the police.”

  “We usually are,” I told him. “Some things are pretty much the same in any country.”

  “Which is why I want your help finding out who framed me,” Cyril declared.

  “Why should we trust you?” Frank asked.

  “For the same reason I’m trusting you,” he answered. “Because I believe you are decent young men who care about doing the right thing. Otherwise you’d be at the police station ratting me out to Devereux instead of here, giving me a chance to explain.”

  Frank and I exchanged a look. I could tell he was thinking the same thing I was. Our dad had a saying: Never trust a suspect. Trust your instincts. And my instincts were saying . . .

  “We’ll see.”

  Cyril nodded. “Thank you. That will have to be good enough.”

  “So you’re saying you didn’t pull off the Mona Lisa prank either?” I queried.

  “That part of it I almost wish I had. It was brilliant. And it mimicked Le Stylo precisely. It’s as if someone’s been studying my every move,” he mused.

  “Because they have,” I told him.

  “Apparently we’re
not the only ones a step ahead of you,” Frank said. “Someone else followed you last night as well. They had a drone camped out on top of the houseboat, waiting for you to launch that slick submersible scooter of yours. It must have been a really good one too, since it was able to follow you all over the city.”

  Cyril jerked back like he’d been slapped. “But who would do that?!”

  “We were kind of hoping you could tell us that,” Frank said.

  “I thought the thief was merely a copycat,” Cyril said in disbelief. “I am very careful to keep my secrets to myself and have been since the beginning.”

  “In our line of work, you learn that there are no safe secrets when it comes to breaking the law,” Frank said.

  Cyril’s cool facade had crumbled. He slumped in his seat and looked nervously around the office like the bad guy might be hiding behind the blinds at that very moment.

  “Can you think of anyone?” Frank persisted. “What about Simone Lachance? She handles both Le Stylo the artist and Cyril the art buyer.”

  “I was especially careful with Simone,” he said. “There’s no way she could have found out unless someone else told her.”

  “Maybe Mr. Nib is the weak link,” I suggested.

  He avoided answering the question directly. “I have a butler I trust implicitly. Even if I didn’t, his whereabouts are well accounted for.”

  “How about Plouffe? Simone hinted that he might have profited from the pen’s theft,” Frank said, running through our list of suspects.

  Cyril shook his head no. “I’ve never even met the man. His art circle and mine rarely overlap.”

  “And Devereux?” I asked, throwing him our wildest theory. “Sounds like you’ve been making a fool out of him for years. Getting in on the frame might be a good way for him to turn the tables.”

  “Devereux is a pompous bore and a downright mediocre detective, but he has never struck me as dishonest,” Cyril stated.

  “And you’re sure none of your friends or family know?” I asked, looking around at some of the photos decorating his office. He sure led a cool life. Black-tie parties with beautiful women. Schmoozing with painters and sculptors in their studios. Captaining a yacht during a sailing regatta. Standing on top of Mount Everest posing with his climbing buddies.

  “My parents died when I was young, and there’s no other family I like enough to stay in touch with,” he shared. “I am a very private person with many acquaintances and few real friends. I do not let anyone know more about me than I want them to know.”

  A flash of red in one of the pictures caught my eye. Cyril was in a big art studio with a bunch of artists, only this one was different from the other pictures. For one, Cyril was a lot younger—in college from the looks of it—and he was surrounded by friends the same age, all of them paint-splattered and happy. And I recognized one of them. Or his hair, more precisely. I walked over to the wall to get a closer look.

  Cyril had his arm around a short guy with bright red hair, a face like a rodent, and a camera around his neck. The same guy who had been talking trash about Le Stylo’s work at Galerie Simone and arguing with Simone herself at Cyril’s party. He looked so familiar, but I still couldn’t put my finger on where else I’d seen him.

  “Who’s this guy with the red hair?” I pointed.

  Cyril got up and stood beside me to look at the picture. “My old classmate Georges St. Denis. That was taken right before I got kicked out of art school.”

  “Georges St. Denis the photographer from Galerie Simone?” Frank clarified right away. That explained the connection between the redhead and Simone.

  “Yes. I got him that show, in fact,” Cyril revealed. “His career’s been in need of a boost, and I always try to support my former art school colleagues. Not everyone’s as lucky as I am to be able to fund their own artistic pursuits. I’ve purchased a number of his photographs as well. I just brought one back from the gallery to hang here, actually.”

  He gestured to a framed picture still wrapped in brown paper, leaning against one of the walls.

  “You know he’s not Le Stylo’s biggest fan, right?” I asked, thinking about how bitter he’d sounded about the outlaw artist’s success.

  “Did you overhear one of his rants at the gallery?” Cyril chuckled. “I actually agree with some of it. I was honest with you when I said I wasn’t sure what I thought of Le Stylo’s work. I’ve never been very confident in my own skill as an artist; but I’d like to think the message and presentation make up for any shortcomings in talent.”

  “So you don’t think Georges has an ax to grind?” Frank pressed further.

  “Oh, Georges was always a sourpuss when it came to other artists’ success, but I don’t take it personally. It’s not like he thinks he’s criticizing me,” he said confidently.

  “But it’s not like your cover is without cracks, right?” I asked. “I mean, the police suspect that you’re Le Stylo. And so does the media. Maybe Georges agrees with them?”

  “No, he would think that it’s all rumors. As far as Georges or anyone else from art school knows, I never picked up a paintbrush again after getting kicked out of school my freshman year. Everyone assumed I was a spoiled rich kid who was more interested in having fun than hard work, so I let them. Truth was, my dreams were bigger than any of theirs, although not the kind I wanted to attract attention to myself for. I knew art school wasn’t for me that first semester. We were all captivated by the street art scene back then—not that our teachers thought much of it. As soon as inspiration struck for my, shall we say, alter artistic ego, I decided to let my formal education be a short one and made a public show of my career as an artist burning out before it began.”

  “When in reality you were secretly creating your own mysterious street art superstar,” I tacked on the part he hadn’t mentioned.

  Cyril just smiled.

  I picked up the wrapped picture frame and peeled back the brown paper to reveal the Georges St. Denis photograph Cyril had just purchased. It was the same one that had first grabbed my attention at Galerie Simone.

  Ratatouille looked back from the camera shop window through the lens of his own vintage camera as if the cartoon rat had taken the picture of himself in the window’s reflection. I read the photograph’s title, handwritten in French along the bottom border beside Georges St. Denis’s signature.

  “Autoportrait,” I read aloud. “What does that mean?”

  “Self-portrait, I think,” Frank replied.

  Cyril continued talking, unconcerned by the photograph. “There’s never been the slightest hint that any of my classmates suspected I was anything but what I seemed to be. And as generous as I’ve been supporting their careers, even on the off chance they had, why would any of them want to rat me out?”

  “ ‘Rat you out . . .’ ” I repeated Cyril’s words quietly to myself as I stared at St. Denis’s “self-portrait” of Ratatouille with a camera to his eye. And that’s when the missing piece of cheese fell into place. “I know why Georges St. Denis looks so familiar!”

  Frank and Cyril both looked at me as I looked from the photograph of Ratatouille’s human-size rat in his trademark bright red beret to the college picture of Georges, short and mousy-looking with a head full of bright red hair.

  “Georges St. Denis isn’t mousy-looking; he’s ratty-looking!” I shouted, unable to contain the excitement over my discovery.

  Cyril just stared at me in confusion. “He always was a little ratty-looking. Some of our classmates used to tease him about it even. What of it?”

  “Not just ratty-looking—he’s downright Ratatouille-looking!” Frank blurted, catching on.

  It wasn’t the type of thing you’d automatically notice if you weren’t looking for it, but now that I’d spotted it, the resemblance was unmistakable. The facial features were more exaggerated, of course, and the red hair had been replaced by a red beret, but . . .

  “Either it’s a huge coincidence or Ratatouille is a self-c
aricature,” I declared.

  Cyril still couldn’t seem to wrap his mind around it. “But that would mean . . .”

  He let the sentence trail off, so I filled in the rest for him.

  “Georges is Ratatouille.”

  13

  RAT BURGLAR

  FRANK

  LE STYLO DOESN’T HAVE A copycat,” Joe said, holding the framed photograph of Ratatouille looking through the camera up for Cyril. “He has a copy-rat.”

  Cyril’s unflappable Bruce Wayne meets James Bond mask flapped as he looked in stunned disbelief from the photo of Ratatouille to the college picture of Georges and back again.

  “I don’t think it’s an accident that Ratatouille is Georges St. Denis’s favorite photography subject,” I said as it dawned on me how clever Georges had been. “Joe is right. That isn’t just a photo of a stencil of Ratatouille taking a picture, it’s a self-portrait of the photographer. He’s hiding the clues right in his artwork.”

  “They’re even the same height.” Joe pointed to how much shorter he was than Cyril in their college picture. “Ratatouille may be a monster-size rat, but he’s pretty short for a grown-up dude. Just like your friend Georges.”

  “It has to be a coincidence. There’s no way it—it’s—” Cyril stammered, struggling to accept the possibility that he wasn’t the only street artist he knew with a shocking secret identity. “It’s uncanny. How could I have missed it before? A good artist is supposed to have the eye of an observer.”

  “Kind of like being a good detective,” I related. “A lot of time the truth is hidden right in front of you. You just have to figure out where to look.”

  “I’ve been so preoccupied protecting my own secrets, I never stopped to think other people I know might have secrets of their own as well. Could he really have been living a double life right in front of me this whole time?” From the tone of Cyril’s voice, he already knew the answer.