“Could you please tell me whereThe Three Shadessculpture is?” I ask the front desk person.
“The Three Shades?” The woman pauses for a moment, blinking. She snaps. “Oh, you meanThe Gates of Hell. Third room down that way. The piece is on your right, but trust me, dear, you can’t miss it.”
“Thank you,” I say again, placing the guide back on the desk.
I try to keep myself from running across the open hall. I make myself take in all the details—the lofty, vaulted ceilings and spiraling columns at every corner.
I step into the third gallery and immediately see a large bronze door towering against the wall. There are easily over a hundred figures sculpted inside the door in bas-relief. Figures falling, screaming, clinging to the edges. The whole thing makes my insides shudder. I findThe Three Shadespart of the sculpture at the very top, looming over the door itself. The placard next to the door explains that the sculpture—another one of Rodin’s—depicts a scene from Dante’sInferno.The Three Shadesrepresent the souls of the damned. In the scene, they’re all pointing to an inscription over the door:
Abandon Hope, All Ye Who Enter Here.
Immediately, my mind goes to Harvey and all the quotes and speeches I’ve ever read by him. If I had to associate his legacy with one word, that word would be “hope.”
You’ve got to have hope!
You gotta give ’em hope!
Hope will never be silent!
“Abandon hope,” I murmur out loud. Abandon hope. Abandon hope. There has to be something to work out from all this. I just don’t know what it is yet.
When I head to school on Monday, I have a fairly decent plan of what to do next.
I went back to the main library on Saturday—one of the people at the front even waved as I came in. I guess visiting three times in the span of a week does make me a regular.
The librarian in the basement helped me figure out the best way to digitize an image from a microfilm reel. Turns out, it’s a lot like taking a screenshot. You send the direct image on the reader as an attachment file to an email. When I get the email and open it, I’m disappointed by how similar it looks to the crappy picture Cam and I took with our phones on Tuesday. But I still have a few more steps to take.
If I can just get into the Bat Cave and log on to Gabriel’s computer, maybe I can use his programs to clean up the image the way he cleaned up the chapters fromGay Treasuresthat we found during the hunt. Technically, any student should be able to log on to any computer—we literally just took over the old computer lab for our club meeting space. But Gabriel’s downloaded a bunch of digital editing applications on this machine specifically, and I’m nervous they’ll only show upunder his student account. Fingers crossed I find Adobe Photoshop when I log in.
The plan, in short, is as follows:
Sneak into the Bat Cave.
Access Gabriel’s Photoshop program.
Fix up the photo from theChronicle.
Go back to the golf course at Lincoln Park.
Dig up the treasure.
Obviously, doing all this on my own isn’t exactly ideal. But if I can just get to Gilbert Baker’s treasure, if I can see this full hunt through, I feel like—somehow—everything’s going to turn out okay. Like winning can push some sort of reset button on my life.
I leave for school with high hopes for the day. But not even a block later, I see something that ruins my mood entirely.
At the corner of the first intersection, right next to the bodega my mom and I go to all the time, is a makeshift bulletin board—a wall that everyone tapes flyers to for band events, craft fairs, and dog-walking jobs. All those flyers look older and weathered now from the week’s past rain. All except the one crisp white page taped to the center of the wall.
WANTED: TREASURE-FINDING ASSISTANT
Chapter Thirty-Three
WANTED: TREASURE-FINDING ASSISTANT
Interested in taking on the seven seas next to Blackbeard?
In becoming the quirky Riley to an established Ben Gates?
There is a treasure buried within San Francisco.
