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The first thing Grace notices is the empty chair. There ought to be a security guard monitoring the small screens showing the feeds of the museum security cameras, but right now there is no one. Possibly the museum is short-staff, and the person who is meant to be watching is on a break.
It’s either luck, or lunch. Grace smiles. She’s always been rather good with timing.
The beret on her head artfully obscures her face from the camera over the entrance. She pays in cash for two tickets, one for herself and one for Paris, trailing silently behind her.
The assassin stalks the museum halls with the intensity of a shark, copying the cat burglar in deftly avoiding the gaze of the cameras. Paris is a quick study, even if she has yet to understand what thrill Grace gets from such an activity. It wouldn’t be difficult to acquire the painting she’s after another way, if one must really have such a frivolous thing at all, but Grace has something of an addiction.
They wander for a while, Grace at ease and happy amongst the paintings and statues on display, and Paris looking rather like she’s been dragged here by her ear. Not that anyone pays them much mind.
And if anyone sees them walking in an odd pattern, hugging certain walls and avoiding certain halls, well. Grace is gleeful, and looks younger than she is. Flights of fancy are nothing out of the ordinary for a young couple, and even a surly woman like Paris might oblige a fountain of sunshine like Grace every now and again. They pass through the museum unnoted by the other visitors, distracted as they are with the myriad displays of beauty surrounding them, and unmonitored by the cameras, ever watching with their recording glass eyes.
Grace enters the room displaying her prize with a sort of reverence. She pauses just outside of view of the camera winking in the corner, so suddenly it is as if she were a vampire stopped from treading on holy ground.
The painting is before them, a strangely whimsical scene. An apothecarist is tending the brewing of a potion, while a small crowd of children, cherubs, and animals watch on. Titled The Apothecary , the painting is charming and inviting, promising to reveal great secrets, if only one is attentive enough. Grace looks at it in a way that nearly twists Paris’s heart in jealousy.
Grace glances to Paris, a question. It’s a short, silent exchange. Paris nods once, the measured movement laden with meaning. It is safe. We have avoided the cameras so far. I am watching you. You may.
And Grace does. She crosses the space to the painting, hung neatly on the wall, and plucks it off. No alarms sound. She’d investigated the security measures of this museum before and found them to be fortuitously minimal.
It’s a simple thing to move to the side, keeping her head forward and her face out of view of the camera. Safely out of its range, she picks apart the frame, deftly snaps the brads away from the wood panel making up the painting, and hides it in her long coat.
Paris follows her through the halls, the pair taking a leisurely pace. Running gets thieves noticed. They avoid the cameras, and slip out onto the midday street.
The museum is left with an empty, discarded frame, and footage of the back of a short woman with a beret and mid-length mousy brown hair making off with a Van Mieris. In short, with nothing at all.
Later, on their couch, admiring
The Apothecary
with Grace in her lap and a glass of rich red wine in her hand, Paris thinks that maybe she might warm up to art theft after all.