The Skies Discrowned (7 page)

The meeting dragged on interminably, and just when Frank was convinced that he must fall asleep, a new figure appeared on the speakers platform. It was a burly old man with a close-cropped white beard, and Frank saw the other officials who were standing about bow as the old man nodded to them.

“Who’s that?” Frank asked.

“I thought you were asleep,” Orcrist said. “That bearded guy? That’s Blanchard. He’s the king of the Subterranean Companions. I expected to see him here. He must have heard about the palace rebellion—it’s only something big that brings him to one of these meetings.”

Blanchard now rapped the speaker’s table with a fist. The crowd quieted much more quickly than it had for Hodges.

“My friends and colleagues,” he began in a strong, booming voice. “I’m sure many of you have noticed evidences of a concealed crisis in the Ducal Palace.” There was a pause while the more literate thieves explained the sentence to their slower-witted fellows. “Well, I am now able to tell you what’s going on. Prince Costa has formed an alliance with the Transport Company and, day before yesterday, overthrown and killed Duke Topo.” There were scattered cheers and outraged shouts. “We now have a new Duke, gentlemen. It is too early to estimate the effects this change will have upon us and our operations, but I will say this: proceed with caution. The Transport spacers are no longer just drunken marks whose pockets you can pick and whose girls you can abuse. They are now our rulers. They will almost certainly function as police. Therefore I abjure you—” again there was a flurry of interpretation for the less bright thieves “—step carefully; don’t cause unnecessary trouble; and keep your eyes open.” The old man glared out at the cathedral-like hall. “I hope you ignorant bastards are paying attention. Maybe some of you remember Duke Ovidi, and how he hung a thief’s head on every merlon of the Ducal Palace. Those days, friends, may very well be upon us once more.”

On the way home from the meeting Frank’s ear began to bleed again, and he passed out on the Sheol Boulevard sidewalk. Orcrist carried him back to the apartment, changed his bandage and put him to bed.

Frank tossed a paintbrush into a cup of turpentine and ran his hands through his unruly hair. It’s going well, he thought. He’d been trying to get this painting in line for three days and had finally mastered Bate’s style. He raised his head and stared at his still-wet painting, then turned and studied the original, hung next to it. I’ll have this canvas finished this afternoon, Frank thought, which leaves the problem of darkening it and cracking it so that it looks as old as the original. But that was purely a technical detail, and he didn’t anticipate any trouble with it.

The front door swung open and Orcrist strode in. He took off his black leather gloves and tossed them onto a chair.

“By God, Frank,” he said, studying the forgery, “you have got the soul of Chandler Bate on canvas better than he did himself.”

“Thanks,” Frank said, wiping off a brush. “I’ve got to admit I’m pleased with it myself.”

“It was the philosopher Aurelius,” said Orcrist, sinking into his habitual easy chair, “who observed that ‘the universe is change.’ If he’d thought of it, he’d probably have added ‘and an art forger’s duties vary with the season’.”

“Ah. Are my duties about to vary?”

“As a matter of fact, they are.” Orcrist poured two glasses of sherry and handed one to Frank. “For three weeks now you’ve been working away here, and you’ve copied four paintings and eleven drawings that I’ve brought you. Where do you suppose those art works have come from?”

“Stolen from museums and private collections,” answered Frank promptly.

“Exactly. And whom do you suppose I had do the stealing?”

“I don’t know.”

“I’ll tell you. A cousin of mine named Bob Dill. And two nights ago he was stabbed to death by a zealous pair of guards at the Amory Gallery. They chased him all over the building, hacking at him, and finally brought him down in the Pre-Raphaelite room.”

Frank was unable to guess the appropriate response to this story, so he said nothing.

“What with one thing and another,” Orcrist continued, “I find it impractical to hire another thief. The fine art market is suffering these days; Costa’s damned taxes have taken up a good deal of the money that should rightfully go to people like you and me. The market isn’t dead, you understand, just a trifle unsteady.”

“So how will you get your paintings now?” Frank asked with a little trepidation.

“You and I will pinch them ourselves,” Orcrist announced with a smile and a wave of his glass.

Frank had a quick vision of himself bleeding out the last of his lifeblood on the floor of the Pre-Raphaelite room. “Make Pons do it,” he suggested.

“Now, Frank, I know you don’t mean that. I knew when I first saw you that you had an adventurer’s heart. ‘The lad’s got an adventurer’s heart,’ I said to myself.” Frank looked closely at Orcrist, unable to tell whether or not he was being kidded. “Besides,” Orcrist went on, “I once gave Pons a chance to … prove himself under fire, and he absolutely
failed to measure up. He’s a fine doorman and butler, but he does
not
have an adventurers heart.”

“Oh,” said Frank, wondering how adventurous his own heart really was.

“At any rate, Frank, we’ll begin tonight. Since it’s your first crack at this sort of thing, I plan to start with the Hauteur Museum. It’s an easy place.”

“I’m glad of that.”

“Relax, you’ll enjoy it. Now go get something to eat. We’ll leave at ten.”

As Frank crossed to the door, he heard a soft creak behind it, and when he stepped into the hall he saw the door of Pons’s room being eased quietly shut.

The Hauteur Museum had once been Munson’s pride, but with the building of several new theaters in the Ishmael Village district to the north, the Hauteur found itself no longer the heart of metropolitan culture. It was still well-thought-of when anyone did think of it, and it could still boast some influential paintings and sculptures, but its heyday was passed.

At eleven o’clock Frank and Orcrist entered its cellar, having wormed their way up a laundry chute that had once, when the Hauteur had been a hotel two centuries before, emptied into a now-abandoned sub-basement. Orcrist had carefully lifted off the mahogany panel that hid the forgotten laundry chute. “We want to replace it when we’re done, you see,” he told Frank in a whisper, “in case we ever want to come back again.”

They stole silently up the carpeted cellar stairs. Their way was lit by moonlight filtering through street-level grates set high in the walls, and Frank realized with a pang of homesickness how long it had been since he had seen real moonlight. I hope the museum has windows, he thought.

The door at the top of the stairs was unlocked, which Frank thought was careless of the owners. The two adventurers swung it open as quietly as they could. Orcrist motioned Frank to wait while he padded off into the darkness of the museum. Frank waited nervously, only now beginning to realize just how much trouble this night’s enterprise could lead to. Holy saints, he thought with a chill of real fear, if I’m caught they’ll send me back to Barclay! I’ve still got that tattoo on my chest.

After a few uneasy minutes he heard a thump, then a multiple thud like a bag of logs thrown on a floor. God help us, he thought. What was that?

“Frank!” Orcrist’s whisper cut the thick silence. “It’s all clear! Carefully, now, go down the aisle on your left!”

When Frank did as he was told, he found himself in the main room. Paintings hung on every side, and he saw with delight a window opening on a quiet street and a deep, starry sky.

“Get away from the window, for God’s sake,” whispered Orcrist. Frank turned back to the room to see the older man standing over an unconscious uniformed body. “Come on,” he hissed to Frank. “There are two paintings over here we ought to get.”

Working in silence, Frank helped Orcrist unframe and roll two mediocre Havreville canvases. Orcrist thrust them inside his coat. “See anything else worth carrying?” he asked.

Frank was beginning to relax, and he strolled up and down the dim aisles, peering at paintings and statues with a critical eye. Not bad, most of it, he thought, but none of it seems worth the trouble to forge. I’m not even very impressed with those Havrevilles. As he turned to rejoin Orcrist he noticed, with a thrill of recognition, a small portrait hung between two gross seascapes. He stared intently at it, remembering the hot July day on which it had been painted. His father had been very fond of the model, and had frequently sent young Frank out for coffee or paint or simply “fresh air.”

“Anything?” Orcrist inquired impatiently.

“No,” whispered Frank in reply. “Let’s clear out.”

The Schilling Gallery, on which they made an assault four days later, was “not such an easy peach to pluck,” as Orcrist was subsequently to observe to Frank. They failed to locate the drain that Orcrist swore would lead them directly into the gallery’s office, and they had to bash a hole in the tile floor from beneath with an old wooden piling they found in the sewer. The noise was horribly loud, and they weren’t in the gallery five minutes before armed guards were pounding at the doors. Orcrist refused to flee, though, determined to make off with a genuine Monet, which the Schilling had on loan from another planet.

“Let’s get the hell
out
of here!” pleaded Frank, who saw the doors shaking as they were battered by boots and sword hilts on the other side. “One of them may have gone to get a key! We don’t have thirty seconds!”

“Wait, I found it!” called Orcrist. He carefully took the canvas out of its frame and rolled it. He was sliding it into his pocket when the east door gave way with a rending crack of splintering wood. Four yelling, sword-waving guards raced toward the two thieves.

Frank leaped sideways, grabbed a life-size bronze statue of a man by the shoulder, and with a wrenching effort pulled it over. It broke on the tiles directly in front of the charging guards, and one of them pitched headlong over the hollow trunk, which was ringing like a great bell from the impact of its fall. Frank snatched up a cracked bronze arm and swung it at another guard’s head—it hit him hard over the eye and he fell without a word.

“Come on, Frank!” called Orcrist, standing over the jagged hole through which they’d entered. Frank impulsively picked up one of the statue’s ears, which had broken off; then he ran toward Orcrist. The other two guards were also running toward Orcrist from the other side of the room, their rapiers held straight out in front of them. Orcrist’s hand darted under his cape, and then the front of the cape exploded outward in a spray of fire, and the two guards were slammed away from him as if they’d been
hit by a truck. They lay where they fell, their faces splashed with blood and their uniforms torn up across the front. The harsh smell of gunpowder rasped in Franks nose as he leaped down through the hole after Orcrist. Twenty minutes later, as they caught their breath in Orcrist’s sitting room after a furtive race through a dozen narrow, low-ceilinged understreet alleys, Frank showed Orcrist the bronze ear he’d stolen.

“And what do you mean to do with that?” asked Orcrist, painfully flexing his right hand.

“I’m going to run a string through it, and wear it where my right ear used to be. Like an eye patch, you know.”

“An ear patch.”

“Exactly,” agreed Frank. “Hows the Monet?”

Orcrist gingerly pulled the canvas out of his jacket and unrolled it. “No harm done,” he said, examining it. “Monet is a durable painter.”

“I guess so. Oh, and what the hell was that weapon?” Frank asked in an awed tone.

“That impressed you, did it? That was a two-barreled twelve-gauge shotgun, barrels sawed down to six inches, and equipped with a pistol grip. I think I broke my hand shooting it. Ruined my cape for sure. We’re lucky I didn’t put the canvas in the line of fire.”

Frank sighed wearily. “Mr. Orcrist, in honor of our coup tonight, do you suppose a bit of scotch would be put of order?”

“Not at all, Frank, help yourself.” Frank opened the liquor cabinet. Orcrist sat silently, massaging the wrist and fingers of his right hand.

“Oh, by the way, Mr. Orcrist…”

“Yes?”

“What becomes of the paintings once they’re duplicated here? Do you sell both the original and the copy to collectors?”

“Uh … no. If I steal one painting and sell two versions of it, the word would eventually get around. I only sell the forgeries.”

Frank waited vainly for Orcrist to go on. “Well,” he said finally, “what do you do with the originals?”

Orcrist looked up. “I keep them. Tm a collector myself, you see.”

During the following week Frank worked on the forgery of the Monet. It was difficult for him to assume the impressionist style, and he tore up two attempts with a palette knife. As the second imperfect copy was being hacked into ragged strips, Orcrist, sitting in his easy chair, looked up from his book.

“Not making a lot of headway?” he asked.

“No,” said Frank, trying to keep a rein on his temper. What a cheap
waste of good canvas, he thought. Dad never would have behaved this childishly. Where’s my discipline?

“What you need, Frank, is a bit of recreation. Go spend some of your wages. You know the safe areas of Understreet Munson—go have some beer at Huselor’s, it’s a good place.”

“Yeah, maybe I’ll do that. Say, what’s the date?”

“The tenth. Of May. Why?”

“The Doublon Festival is going on in Munson! On the surface, I mean. I haven’t missed it in the last six years! Why don’t I take my wages and spend the evening there?”

Orcrist frowned doubtfully. “That wouldn’t be a good idea,” he said. “You can’t really afford to be seen topside yet. You’re wanted by the police, you know. Stay underground.”

“It’ll be all right,” Frank insisted. “I’ll go when it’s dark; and everyone wears masks anyway. You’ve shown me a couple of safe routes to the surface streets, and I’ve been to the Doublon Festival a dozen times, so I won’t get lost. I won’t do anything foolish.”

“I’ll send a couple of bodyguards with you, anyway.”