“Uhhh, a scavenger hunt,” she says, eyes glittering.
Just the thing I needed: a scavenger hunt through a museum with an art thief by my side.
“Do you believe it references another artifact?” I ask. It’s the first idea that comes to me.
“I am certain,” she says, “And I know where to look.”
She walks us the entire way to the other wing of the Met to the Egyptian Art Gallery.
“There,” she says as she comes to a halt in front of a stone stela. It’s called the Stela of the Steward Mentuwoser.
“Hmmm,” she says as she looks over the stela. I watch her very closely. She stops, glances around, tilts her head, and moves directly next to the stela.
“He’s pointing towards it,” she finally says, and points at the engraving of a man on the stela.
“Give me a torch,” she says and holds out her hand. Apparently, I am her butler now.
She puts it directly onto the hand of the engraved man. The light shines into nothingness.
“No, it wasn’t,” she says, walks over to the wall, caresses it, pushes, presses; nothing happens. I am getting slightly annoyed because none of it makes sense to me.
Maybe she’s orchestrating everything to distract us.
She leans against the wall, makes herself slightly smaller, and glances into the room.
“There,” she says, and points somewhere behind me.
“There what?”
“I have to revoke my statement from earlier,” she says without answering my question. “Those stolen objects weren’t a random distraction; they are a map.”
“What?” I ask incredulously.
“What exactly was stolen?” she asks, and Rachel hands her a list.
“What the hell is going on?” I ask, but she doesn’t answer. Instead hunts through the entire museum with us for over an hour. She calls someone to open a display, robs over the floor, and when we reach the seventh room, after she touched the balls of a bust, stuck her fingers into the mouth of a mask, lay on the floor, and glanced at an empty ceiling. I am close to losing my mind entirely.
“Okay, you tell me right now what you are doing or?—“
“Psst,” she hisses at me as she stares at a painting close to where the violin was taken.
“Listen,” I begin, and build myself up.
“Three,” she says, interrupting me again. “Its coordinates.”
“Coordinates?” I ask incredulously, all grudge forgotten.
“Yep,” she says, “40°46’14.4” N 73°58’17.3” W"
“How—“
“Every piece, every object held a number or pointed to one,” she says.
“You consolidated that all in your mind?” I ask her incredulously.
“Of course I have,” she says in her arrogance. “Don’t tell me you can’t remember a sequence of numbers.”
“Of course I can,” I say, enter the coordinates into my phone, and think the rest I want to say to myself.
