Picture This Read Free Page B

close, I could even smell her perfume: light, spicy. I wanted to press my face in her hair and—I resisted. “Why don’t you start at the beginning?” I said.
    She began to talk in a low, quick voice. She’d gone to work for Harold Green as his secretary when Green was writing a book. “It was about peace,” she said. “What a two-faced liar he is! A hypocrite! All he really cares about is being rich.” As she’d worked for him, she’d learned the routine of his house, and how the paintings were guarded.
    “Wait,” I said. “Back up a moment. How did you meet Green?”
    “I was born in Iran—well, we still like to think of it as Persia. I speak Farsi, the language of Persia, and so does Green, but he can’t write Farsi. He wanted a person who could.”
    “Did you live there? In the house?”
    “No, but sometimes I did stay overnight.” She looked at me. “No, it’s not what you think.” From the look on her face, I knew it wasn’t. For some reason, she hated Harold Green. I was curious. Why?
    “If the paintings are stolen,” I asked, “won’t he think of you?”
    “No. Not if we make it look like an ordinary art theft. Don’t people steal paintings? Yes, all the time. Besides, I’m a woman. Harold Green wouldn’t think a woman could be strong enough to do such a thing.”
    “Okay, so how can you do it?”
    She leaned closer to me. She put her hand over mine. That made listening hard, but I did my best. “The whole house is protected by alarms. But they are only turned on at night, at 11:30. The alarms are turned on by a computer in Green’s study, the room where he works. When Iwas with him, that’s where I used to work, too. I saw everything.”
    “But how can you stop the alarms coming on?”
    “Simple. Like all computers, this one has a clock. Before 11:30, you simply set the clock back. Then everything will seem to be normal, you see.”
    Victor looked at me. “You see how smart this young lady is?”
    “All right, but to get to the computer you have to get into the house—”
    “Every night, the man who looks after the house—the butler—takes the garbage out to a shed. His name is Bellows. He likes to smoke cigars, but he can’t in the house. It’s bad for the paintings. All over the house are smoke detectors. So, every night, Bellows takes out the garbage and smokes a cigar. Of course, he has to come back inside before 11:30, before the computer sets the alarms. But we can slip in ahead of him and change the clock. Then, he will come back in and go to bed, and we can take the paintings.”
    Victor said, “I watched him one night. He walks away from the house and behind the shed. If you’re quick, you’ll be able to go in the back door. He won’t see you. The next part is more difficult. That’s where you come in. I was going to do it, but you’ll do it much better.”
    I took a sip of my coffee. “So what’s this difficult part?”
    Zena leaned toward me. “The computer runs the house alarms. But each of the paintings has its own alarm, built into its hanger on the wall. These alarms work on a spring. If you take the painting away—remove its weight—the spring moves up and the alarm goes off. So here’s what we’ll do. We’ll slip a loop of wire over the painting so it catches on the hanger. Then we’ll run this loop to a turnbuckle, a gadget invented for exactly this job: tightening wires. We’ll attach the turnbuckle to an eye bolt we’ll screw into the floor. By twisting on the turnbuckle, we’ll tighten the wire so it pulls down on the spring. When it’s pulling down with the same weight as the painting, we can take the painting away.”
    I thought about it. “All right. That might work. You’d have to do it very carefully.”
    “Indeed, dear boy,” said Victor. “It will take young nerves and muscles, and yours are so much younger than mine. That’s why we need you—if I did it, those alarms would be ringing so loudly they’d wake the