A Con Artist in Paris Read online

  “Like a rat,” Joe affirmed.

  “How do you think it felt living off the handouts of an inferior artist?” he snapped. “A few thousand euros here and there is like pocket change to him. He could have driven up the prices of my work like he does his own. No one would have paid a thousand euros for one of Le Stylo’s supposed masterpieces, let alone a hundred thousand, had the oh-so-wealthy art collector Cyril Brune not outbid himself to snatch them up at ridiculous prices.”

  I could tell we weren’t going to get anywhere trying to convince Georges that what he’d done was wrong. There was no longer any doubt who the thief was, but a large chunk of the mystery still remained unsolved.

  “Only you saw right through Cyril’s art collector facade,”

  I offered. Sometimes massaging a criminal’s fragile ego was the best way to get straight answers.

  “From the start! He thought he was so clever. All our other classmates fell for his little charade, but not I!” he boasted. “Cyril was never very good, but he did have passion, that I will admit. And the passion of an artist cannot simply be extinguished by a little discouragement like a weak flame in the breeze. The idea that he would never pick up a brush again was laughable. Once Le Stylo’s work began to appear on the streets of Paris, I recognized the style immediately. And do you know why I recognized it?”

  “No, but I have a feeling you’re going to tell us,” Joe mumbled.

  Georges didn’t even wait for Joe to finish before answering his own question. “I recognized it because I introduced him to it! Those simple two-dimensional stencils for which he is now so well-known are merely imitations of the street artists from England and America whose work I shared with my classmates. For me it was merely inspiration from which I evolved a new style all my own once I invented Ratatouille, but Cyril was obsessed. As soon as my old classmate began paying outrageous prices for a new artist named Le Stylo, I knew he’d simply rebranded his own tired artistic imitation under a new name. Then he got lazy. He became so sure no one suspected, it was easy to observe him and learn his secrets.”

  “I bet the high-powered drone helped too,” Joe suggested.

  I really liked Cyril, and the critique of his alter ego’s artwork stung because it was partially true. But even Cyril himself had been honest with us about his limitations as an artist. There was something else that made his art special.

  “His style may not be the most original,” I conceded, “but the bold way he installs his work in places no one else would imagine, to call attention to issues that are important to him, that shows real vision.”

  “And courage,” Joe added. “Unlike you and the selfish way you use Ratatouille’s work to brag to yourself about how smart you think you are.”

  As if to prove Joe’s point about courage, Georges suddenly turned ghostly pale and began to whimper. I followed his frightened gaze to the TV monitor showing the feed from the Skull-Cam. We’d been so intent on getting the truth out of Georges, we’d neglected to ask possibly the most important question: Why was he tied up?

  The answer had just stepped onto the screen.

  Simone.

  And the object in her hand wasn’t a pen.

  It was a gun.

  16

  A BUM LEG

  JOE

  SHE’S GOING TO TORTURE ME into telling where the pen is! You have to untie me!” Georges begged as Simone walked across the screen followed by my least favorite security guard, Ginormo Luc, headlamps lighting their way.

  “I think we may have overlooked a minor detail,” Frank murmured.

  “Did Simone figure you out or were you working for her the whole time?” I demanded.

  “No! Yes! Sort of!” he said in a panic. “It was my idea. I knew she was bitter that Le Stylo made her give her commissions to charity, so I proposed to her a way to even the score. She gave me the money to bankroll the hoax at the Louvre and the heist of Napoléon’s pen from Plouffe.”

  “And you double-crossed her,” Frank accused.

  “I wasn’t going to, but . . .” Georges looked away like he was ashamed. “Why does she need more money? Gallery owners like her are the reason true artists like myself starve in obscurity while commercial hacks like Le Stylo get richer. Now please untie me. She will be here any minute.”

  “He has a point about that last part,” Frank gulped. “And she has a gun.”

  He ran over to the door and gulped a second time. “And the door doesn’t have a lock.”

  “I never needed one before,” Georges squeaked.

  The door was the only exit I could see, and there was no way to use it without running right into her in the tunnels.

  “Is there another way out of here?” I asked as I searched the room in vain.

  “There is a chute hidden in the corner behind the stencils,” he said. “It circles back to the chamber where the camera is. Please take me with you.”

  I exchanged a look with my brother. Georges was a crook, but we couldn’t just leave him there to be tortured.

  “Check out the chute,” I told Frank. “I’ll cut Rat-Man from the chair.”

  Georges gasped as I grabbed a utility knife from a cup full of paintbrushes and pencils on the shelf next to the TV.

  “Stop your squirming, I’m not going to hurt you,” I assured him as I got to work sawing through the thick cord.

  “Keep his hands tied,” Frank cautioned, hurrying over to the wall and shoveling stencils and pieces of poster board aside.

  Sure enough, there was a perfectly round human-size hole in the floor right where Georges said. Frank stepped forward to get a closer look.

  “It’s totally dark. I can’t see any . . . AHHHHHHHH!”

  And that’s when he slipped on a femur and went tumbling headfirst into darkness.

  17

  MIGHTIER THAN THE SWORD

  FRANK

  I DID MY BEST NOT to scream as I plummeted down the narrow stone chute.

  “Oomph,” I oomphed at the surprisingly soft landing about six feet below.

  I turned my phone back on and tapped the flashlight app. I’d never been so happy to see a bunch of cardboard and canvas. The stencils and discarded paintings that fell down the chute with me had broken my fall. I may have slipped on someone else’s thigh bone, but luckily, I hadn’t broken my own.

  Unluckily, I could hear Simone enter the room above before Joe and Georges had a chance to follow me through the chute. I couldn’t see anything looking back up the chute, but Simone’s voice carried clearly into the tunnel below.

  “This is a rather impressive school project you’ve gotten yourself into.” Simone laughed cruelly. “How nice of you to wander right into my trap. Now I have a rat and a mouse in one cage.”

  “You did not suspect the cats were lurking in another tunnel waiting to pounce,” Luc’s deep voice rumbled from above.

  “It was you with the drone? I wouldn’t have thought you could handle such a high-tech device,” Joe shot back.

  I could hear Luc’s voice rumble again.

  “Where is your brother, little mouse?” Simone said. “Luc saw you both exit the stationery shop through the drone’s camera. We were expecting to catch Le Stylo, but perhaps a pair of nosy so-called art students will lead us to him.”

  “He, uh, he went back for the police,” Joe bluffed. “They’ll be here to arrest you any minute.”

  There was an agonizing moment of silence as Simone considered my brother’s threat.

  “Then we had better make Georges talk quick,” she finally replied. “Unless, of course, he wants to be a good little rat and tell me where he hid Napoléon’s golden pen without coercion.”

  “I—I—I—” Georges stammered. “I lost it.”

  “You spent thousands of my money to steal a millioneuro gold pen, and then you lost it?” Simone hissed. “That is very unfortunate for you. Luc, retrieve the knife from the boy. Start with his painting hand.”

  “No!” Georges screamed.


  “Not a chance,” Joe said calmly. My brother’s bravery made my heart beat even faster. It was up to the law to punish Georges, not Simone—but sometimes standing up for justice is dangerous business.

  “Don’t make me shoot you, boy,” Simone said.

  “Fraud, larceny, and kidnapping are bad enough. Do you really want to add shooting a teenager to the list?” Joe asked, stalling for time.

  “Kidnapping.” She laughed. “I was perfectly happy to help Georges get rich off Plouffe’s pen until he got greedy.”

  “You already profited from selling the pen to Plouffe. It is not fair you get to sell it twice,” Georges whined, using his own twisted logic.

  “What’s fair is me evening the score with Le Stylo for robbing me of my commissions. That’s what you proposed to me, remember? We had a deal. I front the money, you steal the pen, I fence it on the black market, and, to borrow an American expression”—I could just see her pausing to sneer at my brother—“we both ‘make out like bandits.’ ”

  “You had a deal with Le Stylo too. A legal one,” Joe reminded her.

  “He can give away all his money if he wants to, whoever he is, but why should he make me give up mine?” Simone shot back. “Le Stylo would still be a nobody street artist like Ratatouille here if it weren’t for the exposure my gallery gave his work. He owes me.”

  “You really don’t know who Le Stylo is? Georges didn’t tell you?” Joe blurted.

  “No, though I have a feeling you might,” she said. “That was him you were visiting on Rue du Moulin Vert, was it not?”

  “Thanks for the drone, by the way, Ratty,” Luc interjected. “You were so busy spying on Le Stylo, you never noticed me spying on you this morning. I knew just where to fly your drone once we tied you up. If you weren’t going to tell us who Le Stylo was, I knew how I could find out. Looks like you’re not so smart after all.”

  “Whoa, Luc!” Joe laughed. “I didn’t know you had that long of a speech in you!”

  Luc’s growl vibrated through the ceiling.

  “I’m just impressed you didn’t get stuck climbing through the rubble to get down here,” Joe taunted Simone’s enormous henchman.

  I could hear the cold snap of a switchblade flicking open, followed by Luc’s voice. “You can keep your little knife, boy. I brought my own.”

  “I’d think twice about that if I were you,” Joe said. “The police are on the way, and things will go a lot worse for you if you’re caught torturing someone when they get here.”

  “He is right,” Simone agreed, and my heart lightened. But only for a second. “Maybe we should just eliminate the boy so there are no witnesses and take Georges with us.”

  I choked back a gasp. This time Joe’s bluff had backfired. His life was in danger, and I was the only one who could help him. But how?

  “Or you could bring him with us. Then there would be no bodies to leave behind,” Georges suggested timidly.

  “The rat has a point,” Ginormo responded.

  Wow, one point for Georges! But that still didn’t leave me with any options. They were about to be on the move, and I didn’t have a clue how to stop them. Even if I had gone back for the police, they never would have made it in time. I looked at the chute in the ceiling above me. There was no way to crawl back up. It wasn’t like I could defend us anyway; the only weapon I had was the little Swiss Army knife I carried in my pocket.

  But there had to be a way out of this. I just needed to calm down and think rationally. Joe would be okay. At least that’s what I hoped.

  I looked at the pile of cardboard and canvas lying on the floor. The first Ratatouille stencil we’d seen when we arrived in Paris looked uselessly back at me. Little good a cardboard cutout of a human-size rat carrying a baguette would do me against a gun and a switchblade.

  “Fine, but we’ll have to tie him up. Where did you put the rope?” I heard Simone ask Luc. A lot of confused shuffling followed.

  The stencil passed through the beam of my flashlight as I tossed it aside in frustration, casting a shadow of Ratatouille’s life-size silhouette on the catacomb wall. And that’s when it hit me. Maybe all this cardboard would help!

  I pulled out my Swiss Army knife, flipped open the little scissors, grabbed the stencil of Ratatouille, and started cutting as I ran.

  I had heard a lot of shuffling and angry French words as I left my hiding spot. Hopefully the rope was lost. I needed all the help I could get.

  Georges had said the chute circled back to the chamber with the Skull-Cam, and a couple of minutes later I was standing about twenty feet from the entrance. Staying far enough away so that my phone wouldn’t show up on camera, I flicked my flashlight on and off to see if it worked.

  It wasn’t a masterpiece, but it would have to do. I just had to hope I wasn’t too late.

  I turned off the flashlight and crept toward the chamber door. Standing out of view of the Skull-Cam, I propped my phone against the wall and turned the flashlight back on so the light spilled into the room. I then slowly walked the stencil through the flashlight beam, causing its shadow to move across the chamber wall right in front of the camera.

  As nervous as I was about Joe, I couldn’t help grinning at my handiwork.

  The five-foot-tall stencil had become a shadow puppet. Only it was no longer the silhouette of a giant rat in a beret carrying a loaf of bread. It was a policeman in a French officer’s cap carrying a gun that walked past the Skull-Cam.

  My idea had worked! Now I just had to hope that Simone and Luc were watching the Skull-Cam monitor—and that the distraction would buy Joe time to improvise an escape. I didn’t have to wait long to find out the first part.

  The boom of Simone’s pistol ripped through the stale air, echoing off the Catacomb walls from the direction of Georges’ lair. It was followed by a scream.

  18

  VIVE LES HARDYS

  JOE

  THINGS HAD BEEN GOING PRETTY well until the gun went off.

  My bluff about Frank going for the police bought Georges and me time, and I’d gotten a full confession from Simone in the process. If we managed to get out of the Catacombs alive, I’d be able to provide plenty of evidence to clear Le Stylo’s name and send Simone, Luc, and Georges to the French slammer.

  I was itching to know where Georges had hidden Napoléon’s golden pen, but I wasn’t about to let Luc torture him in order to find out. So I did my best to keep Simone talking while Georges mostly just sat there blubbering. He wasn’t only blubbering, though. He also kept casting nervous glances at the shelf with the Skull-Cam monitor every time someone mentioned the pen. The third time, I realized it wasn’t the TV monitor he was looking at. It was the cup next to it with the brushes, markers, and pencils. The one I’d grabbed the utility knife from.

  Simone hadn’t noticed, so I did my best not to let her catch me staring. She had just flipped the script on me and threatened to “eliminate” me when I finally realized why Georges had been so preoccupied with the cup. One of the drawing utensils in the cup didn’t quite fit in with the black pencils, colored markers, and paint-stained brushes. And this one was pristine gleaming gold.

  Like with Georges and his secret alter ego, Ratatouille, the truth was hidden in plain sight; you just had to know where to look.

  And at that moment what both Simone and Luc were looking at was the shadow of an armed police officer stalking across the Skull-Cam screen.

  “They’re here!” Luc cried.

  I had no idea how Frank could have gone for help so quickly, but I did know I might not get a better shot to keep myself alive. With my captors distracted by the cop on the Skull-Cam, I made my move. I dove for Simone’s gun.

  “Look out!” Luc shouted.

  She raised the gun and pulled the trigger at the exact same moment I went to slap it out of her hand.

  BANG!

  The handgun sounded like a cannon blast inside the underground chamber.

  TWANG!

  The bullet r
icocheted off the wall.

  “AHHHHH!”

  Someone screamed.

  Was it me? I tried to stay calm as I felt for the gunshot wound, adrenaline surging through me, my heading ringing from the sound of the blast. It was only when I saw Luc collapse to the floor clutching his foot that I realized the bullet had hit him and not me!

  I scrambled to the floor and knocked the gun out of Simone’s reach. She rushed for the door, her headlamp illuminating Les Ratacombes as she sprinted for the underground crossroads that led back to the surface. I sprinted after her.

  My heart leaped when I saw Frank racing toward her from the other direction.

  “Stop her!” I yelled.

  He was about to when the light from her headlamp caught him right in the eye. He shielded his eyes, trying to block the blinding glare. Simone took advantage of the distraction and shouldered her way past him, knocking him into the wall before he could recover.

  Frank was still blinking away the spots when I caught up to him.

  “I’m glad you’re not dead!” he said.

  “Me too!” I agreed, pulling him along after me. “Where are the police? I saw them on the Skull-Cam.”

  “Right there.” He pointed at the stencil of the policeman lying in the doorway. It only took me a second to realize how he’d tricked us with his shadow puppet police raid.

  “Good thinking, bro! That’s the best art installation I’ve seen yet,” I cheered as we ran back through the chamber to the hole in the rubble pile blocking the entrance into the sewer.

  When we made it through the crawl space into the sewer tunnel, Simone was already climbing up the ladder. We dashed through the tunnel and scrambled up after her.

  I poked my head out of the sewer in time to see Simone running down the alley toward the street. She was just a few feet from the intersection when a pedestrian turned the corner, accidentally blocking her path. Simone tried to put on the brakes, but it was too late. She slammed right into the startled man, knocking them both to the ground.