A Con Artist in Paris Read online

  “And if Georges was able to hide his alter ego from you . . . ,” I began, giving Cyril a chance to connect the dots for himself.

  “He could have hidden his knowledge of mine as well,” he conceded.

  Cyril picked up the photograph of Ratatouille. “He’s been flaunting it right in my face. He’s practically bragging about making a fool of me.”

  “I don’t think that’s all he’s bragging about,” Joe said, pulling out his phone. A second later he was on Instagram, typing the #ratatouille hashtag into the search bar to pull up pics of all the artist’s latest pieces. “He’s been flaunting it in everyone in Paris’s face.”

  The first image that popped up was of Ratatouille’s smirking face on the Mona Lisa, and I realized that Joe was dead-on. “It’s like the self-portrait. All the Ratatouille street art we’ve seen tells a hidden story, only none of it seems suspicious on its own until you know to look for it and start adding up the pieces.”

  I looked at the post’s date and location. “I don’t think it’s an accident that this one showed up right around the corner from the Louvre two days before the Mona Lisa hoax.”

  “There’s also the one we saw this morning of him as the Sphinx on the bus stop across the street from the museum. It even incorporates the glass pyramid so it looks like part of the composition. It’s like he’s crowning himself king of the Louvre,” Joe said, scrolling farther down the screen.

  There was another new one we hadn’t seen before of Ratatouille dressed like the famous fictional detective Sherlock Holmes, bending over with a magnifying glass to examine a rodent-size door by his feet, revealing a sign taped to his back that read KICK ME.

  “That one’s on the wall right behind our hotel, where all the detectives from around the world are staying for the IPAD convention!” I announced, recognizing the street name that the Instagram user who posted the pic had tagged as the location.

  “He’s been using his street art to boast about the crime he was planning—stealing Napoléon’s pen,” Joe stated confidently. “Scaling the pyramid at the Louvre, the vanishing Mona Lisa hoax, taunting the detectives staying right across the street to try and catch him. He’s staking his claim to all of it through his art.”

  “Even the first one we saw when we arrived in Paris was of him stealing something,” I said, thinking about the stencil of Ratatouille sneaking off into the sewer with a baguette. “He’s advertising to the whole world that he’s a thief.”

  “A rat burglar,” Joe spat.

  “Georges always did like to remind people he thought he was smarter than everyone else,” Cyril seethed.

  “It must have really irked him, then, knowing your work got all the acclaim while Ratatouille was still a small-time street artist,” Joe speculated.

  Cyril gave a bitter little laugh. “Georges has been going on for years about how simplistic and obvious he thought Le Stylo’s artwork was, and I’d told him I thought the same of Ratatouille. I guess he got the last laugh.”

  “Not yet he hasn’t,” I reminded him, turning to Joe. “Can you map where all those pictures were taken?”

  Joe found an Instagram account dedicated to Ratatouille’s work and tapped the location icon that showed where all the pictures were taken around Paris. There were little image icons spread all over the city, but the majority of them were clustered in two places.

  “It looks like almost all his work appears either right around the Louvre where the theft of the pen took place, or . . .” Joe dragged the map down to the second cluster and zoomed in. “Montparnasse.”

  “Where we are,” I proclaimed.

  “But the crime didn’t take place here.” Cyril frowned.

  “It looks like most of the ones around here are concentrated by the Catacombs.” Joe went back to the account page to find a new picture, and this one looked like it was close enough to Cyril’s secret office that you could hit it with a croissant.

  Joe quickly tapped the little picture icon to expand it. It was time-stamped 1 minute ago and the caption read, Brand-new Ratatouille piece just spotted in Montparnasse! #NapoleonRataparte #streetarthuntparis.

  The three of us stared at the picture of Georges St. Ratatouille’s newest work of street art. It was a cartoon of a classic portrait of Napoléon with Ratatouille’s—aka Georges St. Denis’s—smug face. He had a hand tucked in his shirt like Napoléon used to, and, if you looked extra closely, Le Stylo’s signature pen in his pocket.

  “That rat!” Cyril snarled. “That’s right at the end of the street. You can see it from the window.”

  He stalked across the office toward the shuttered window to show us. Ratatouille almost seemed to be watching him through the lens. Cyril was about to yank open the shutters when something else occurred to me: Ratatouille really had been watching.

  “Don’t!” I shouted. “He’s been tracking your every move. He could be watching right now.”

  Cyril sagged in defeat. “He holds all the cards. We can’t prove he did it, and I can’t go to the police without exposing myself.”

  “We could go to the police, but without concrete proof, Devereux will just laugh us off again.” Joe sighed.

  “Well, I’m not going to sit by and just let him frame me,” Cyril declared, his old poise returning. “I’m going to confront him.”

  He marched back to his desk and picked up his phone just as it began to ring. All three of us nearly jumped.

  “Is it him?” I asked.

  Cyril shook his head no as he answered. “Oui . . . Maintenant? . . . Non . . . Oui. Je vais partir tout de suite.”

  He clicked off. “That was my butler. The police are suspicious, and Devereux is demanding to talk to me now. I have to sneak back through the tunnels to where I left the car before they find out I am gone. Please message me should you learn anything else.”

  Cyril wrote his number down, slid it across the desk, and then we were on our own, down the stairs and out the stationery shop door to Rue du Moulin Vert.

  As the door locked behind us, a flock of pigeons took flight, cooing frantically like something above us had startled them. When we looked up, the Parisian pigeons weren’t the only thing taking off from the roof.

  “The drone!” Joe shouted.

  “It’s seen us,” I said, then grinned. Thanks to the pigeons, we’d seen it too. “Let’s catch that flying rat!”

  The drone zipped off over the rooftops, and we took off running down the street after it.

  I called out to Joe as we ran. “As long as it doesn’t duck down behind the buildings across the street, we should be able to . . . oops.”

  “There it goes,” Joe grumbled as the drone did exactly what we didn’t want it to. “Look! lt’s descending. Maybe if we cut across that alley we can still intercept it.”

  I followed Joe across the street and down the alley.

  We ran around the bend and came to an abrupt stop. Not because of what we saw, but because of what we didn’t. We could see clear down the rest of the alley all the way to the next street . . . except there was nothing there.

  “Where could the drone have gone? We saw it descending down here.”

  Joe looked around, scratching his head.

  We stepped over an old sewer grate and proceeded cautiously down the narrow alleyway. I noticed the grate was off to the side, leaving an opening into the sewer below.

  “It couldn’t have just vanished into thin air,” Joe complained.

  “That’s it!” I said.

  Joe looked at me like I was crazy. “I think this case is going to your head, bro.”

  “ ‘Just vanished . . . ,’ ” I repeated, running back to the old sewer grate. “All of Ratatouille’s work reveals secret clues about Georges, right? Think about what Rat-Man was doing in the first piece we saw by the bakery when we got to Paris.”

  “He vanished underground!” Joe put the pieces together. “Of course. Just like he got away when he stole the pen from the hotel.”

  “W
hat better place to look for a rat than in a sewer? Give me a hand,” I grunted, straining to lift off the grate. It came free a lot easier than I expected, though, and I almost fell on my rump.

  “This must be one of his regular escape routes.” Joe peered into the darkness below. “And this time there’s no smoke bomb to hide his trail.”

  Joe switched on his phone’s flashlight, illuminating a trail of wet sneaker prints scampering off through the damp tunnel at the bottom of a rusty old ladder.

  I followed Joe down the ladder into the sewer. The trail of footprints didn’t go far before dead-ending at a huge pile of rubble blocking the path beyond. Some of the rocks had been pulled out about halfway up to create a gap big enough for someone to crawl through.

  “A lot of the old tunnels were sealed off by the city years ago because so many people kept getting lost or hurt,” I whispered. “I bet this is one of them.”

  Joe took a deep breath as he stepped forward toward the gap in the wall. “Let’s hope we don’t get lost or hurt either.”

  I took a deep breath of my own and joined him. The gap led to a crawl space through the rubble that went on for a few yards. I couldn’t see anything on the other side except total darkness.

  “He’s probably far enough ahead by now that we can’t see whatever light he’s using,” Joe guessed. “Unless I’m wrong and he’s waiting on the other side to ambush us.”

  I gulped. “Maybe we shouldn’t . . .”

  But the top half of Joe’s body had already disappeared into the crawl space.

  “Wait for me,” I said, climbing in after him and hurrying to catch up. I didn’t want to be in that crawl space any longer than I had to.

  The “ceiling” was nothing but packed rubble, and I wasn’t especially confident it wouldn’t cave in on us. The crawl space was just big enough for me to squeeze alongside Joe, and I had to fight back claustrophobia as we crept the final few feet. I didn’t think it could get any worse than being trapped inside. I was wrong.

  Our flashlights finally pierced the darkness and I choked back a scream. Someone was waiting for us in the next tunnel after all, and it wasn’t Georges St. Denis.

  My eyes went wide—but not as wide as the thousand unseeing eye sockets gaping back at us.

  14

  CITY OF THE DEAD

  JOE

  I GRABBED ON TO MY brother’s arm and he grabbed on to mine, both of us frozen with terror as we crawled out of the rubble into the land of the dead.

  Disembodied skulls seemed to be pushing their way out of the walls all around us. Fighting living bad guys was hard enough; I had no idea how to fend off an army of dead ones. It took me another panicked minute to realize these particular dead people weren’t on the attack.

  “We’re in the Catacombs!” Frank exclaimed.

  The chamber before us wasn’t just filled with bones, it was made of them. Thousands of bodies must have been stashed down there, their ancient skulls neatly embedded in walls and pillars made entirely of stacked skeleton bits.

  “This must be one of the secret sections of the original Catacombs,” Frank said as he caught his breath. He’d gone so pale he looked like a ghost himself! “They moved the bodies into mass underground tombs like this one in the 1700s after they dug up all the graves when the cemeteries got too full and started to cave in. Only a small part of the Catacombs are still open to the public, though. Most of them were closed off and forgotten about years ago.”

  “I’m just glad it’s full of old bones and not actual ghouls,” I said.

  “Um, Joe . . .” My brother’s voice quivered as he pointed across the chamber. “I think you may have spoken too soon.”

  I followed his finger to the wall by the arched stone doorway—where the eyes of a cracked yellow skull began to glow bright red.

  “Ahh . . .” A scream welled up in my throat, but it didn’t get far. “Hey, that looks a lot more like an LED light than an evil zombie light.”

  I crept cautiously closer and looked deep into the skull’s eyes. This time the skull really did look back—or at least the tiny spy camera hidden inside did.

  “It’s a Skull-Cam!” I peered in at the palm-size remote control camera. “And that’s a low battery warning light, not an undead eyeball. Somebody’s watching, and I’m pretty sure he isn’t from the beyond.”

  We gave the chamber a closer inspection. Our suspect was long gone, but it was clear from the Skull-Cam and the oil-filled lanterns hanging on the wall nearby that someone had been using these tunnels regularly.

  “The old lanterns make sense down here,” I observed. “You don’t have to worry about batteries, bulbs, or corrosion.”

  “Got a match?” Frank asked, grabbing one of the lanterns. “Might as well save the batteries on our phones as well.”

  “Good call,” I replied, looking down at my phone, where I now had a low battery warning of my own to go along with the no-service icon at the top of the screen. It figured there wouldn’t be any cell phone signal this far underground. Suddenly visiting the catacombs with a police chaperone seemed a lot more desirable, but we couldn’t even call for one if we wanted to. We’d come this far, though, and I wasn’t about to turn back.

  I pulled out the little emergency kit with strike-anywhere matches I always carry with me and lit our lanterns. Casting a glance back at the Skull-Cam, I stepped through the doorway to whatever lay beyond.

  “Stay alert,” I whispered. “We know someone is watching.”

  The doorway led to an underground crossroads with three different tunnels, although it wasn’t hard to figure out which one we were looking for: the one where the walls, bones and all, were covered in Ratatouille’s artwork.

  “I think we just found Les Ratacombes,” I said, thinking about the vandalized Catacombs sign from the Georges St. Denis photograph at Cyril’s house.

  “I never thought a rat’s nest could look so cool,” Frank mused.

  We stepped inside past a rainbow of decorated skulls, swirling graffiti, and floor-to-ceiling murals. Stenciled on the scary-looking door at the end of the tunnel was a life-size dancing Ratatouille skeleton.

  The door had been left open just a crack. And there was something thumping on the other side.

  15

  CORNERED RAT

  FRANK

  THUMP-THUMP-THUMPTHUMPTHUMP-THUMPTHUMP-THUMP-THUMP.

  A shiver shot down my spine as I tried to imagine what might be making the noise. Listening closer, I could hear the sound of muffled moans as well, which definitely didn’t make me feel any better.

  Joe put his finger to his lips and blew out his lantern. I did the same and crept alongside him toward the eerie blue light spilling out of the cracked door. Very slowly, we peered around the edge into a cluttered catacomb chamber turned art studio. The dim blue light was coming from a small TV screen playing the wireless video feed from the Skull-Cam. And the thumping? That came from the person watching it.

  Because the person was tied to a chair, gagged, and frantically trying to free himself.

  “It looks like someone already caught Ratatouille for us,” Joe whispered as Georges St. Denis hopped around helplessly in the chair.

  He stopped hopping when he heard Joe and jerked his head toward the door, a look of sheer terror in his eyes. Terror turned to relief when he saw us, and he immediately started trying to talk frantically through the gag. We couldn’t understand a word he was saying, but the meaning was obvious. He wanted us to untie him.

  “Not gonna happen, Georges,” I whispered.

  “If we remove the gag, will you stay quiet?” Joe asked.

  “And are we alone?” I added.

  He nodded so vigorously I thought he might give himself whiplash. I nodded at Joe to untie the gag. He must have had a different interpretation of the word “quiet,” though, because he started gibbering uncontrollably in French the instant his mouth was free.

  My French was comme ci comme ça—that means “okay”—but it was n
owhere near good enough for me to translate the stream of rapid-fire panic spewing out of Georges St. Denis’s mouth.

  “How about a little slower, in English,” I said, knowing he was fluent in our language from the conversation we’d overheard at the gallery.

  “You must let me go! You must!” he begged.

  “We’re not letting you go anywhere, Rat-Man,” Joe stopped him. “Not until you tell us why you stole Napoléon’s pen and framed Le Stylo.”

  That clammed him up quickly.

  “I guess we should put the gag back in, huh, Joe?” I suggested.

  “Non, non, non, s’il vous plaît! Please don’t! I can’t take it anymore!” he pleaded.

  “Then you better start talking,” Joe told him.

  He sagged in the chair.

  “It is not fair,” he whined quietly.

  “And framing someone else for your crime so you can get away with stealing a historical artifact?” I shot back.

  “I was the first one in school to discover the art of the street, and Cyril stole it from me like he steals all his ideas,” he snarled. “He likes so much for his Le Stylo to take credit for others’ inspiration, I simply gave him credit for what he truly is. A thief!”

  “Street art doesn’t belong to any one person. It’s an artistic movement,” Joe argued. “Le Stylo’s using it as a tool for social activism to help other people, not trying to profit from it like you are.”

  “Social activism, ha! It is easy to pretend to care about the welfare of others when you have all the money in the world. He is able to buy his way to fame simply because he’s rich, while the true artists like myself are forced to eke out a living in the gutters, like, like . . .” Georges struggled to find the right word, so my brother helped him out.

  “A rat?” Joe offered.

  “Yes, like a rat!” he said proudly. “They are nature’s most industrious animals. They thrive in every environment even as they are persecuted unjustly and forced to survive on the scraps of those who do not appreciate their true beauty.”

  “From what we’ve heard, Cyril was giving you a lot more than just scraps. He was the biggest supporter of your photography. He even got you a show right along Le Stylo at one of the biggest galleries in Paris, and you turned around and betrayed him.”