Secret of the Forbidden City Read online

  We deposited five children’s admissions into a coin box and started examining the so-called “art.”

  “This is all about the paper clip,” said Beck, checking out one of the dusty glass boxes mounted on the dark walls. “Johan Vaaler, a Norwegian, invented the paper clip and received a patent for his design from Germany in 1899.…”

  “Fascinating,” said Storm, examining another of the miniature displays. “Here’s an exhibit about toothpick flags.…”

  “Here’s a bunch of cat hair balls,” I reported. “Very historical—not to mention hysterical.”

  Suddenly a creepy old couple, decked out in matching Oktoberfest costumes, marched into the gloomy room.

  “Vat are you children doing here?” asked the old man. He looked awfully grumpy for someone wearing embroidered shorts, suspenders, long socks, boots, and a feathered hat studded with pins.

  “Checking out your teeny-tiny knickknacks,” said Beck.

  “Zose are not knickknacks!” the woman bellowed ferociously. “Zat is art!” The elderly woman was wearing what Storm called a “dirndl,” a traditional Bavarian dress based on the historical costumes of Alpine peasants. To me, she sort of looked like the Swiss Miss girl after her cocoa curdled.

  “Children are forbidden in this museum,” said the woman.

  “Excuse me, alte Frau,” said Petra.

  Storm put a hand alongside her mouth and translated: “Petra just called the old woman an ‘old woman.’”

  “If children are forbidden,” Petra continued, “why do you have a children’s admission price?”

  The wrinkled old crone made a face like she’d taken a whiff of spoiled sauerkraut. “The stupid Bürgermeister made us do it!”

  “Well,” said Tommy, “if he’s the burger maestro, he must know what he is doing—and not just when he’s flipping burgers. Come on, you guys, let’s case this joint!”

  “No! You can’t! It is strictly forbidden!”

  We split up and took off. Beck, Tommy, Petra, and I bounded up the steps. Storm tore down a hallway on the main floor. The spooky old museum curators couldn’t keep up with any of us.

  It was like a huge art heist in the making. (I guess that’s why Beck drew us all like cat burglars, even though I had no interest in swiping the museum’s hair ball collection.)

  “Petra and I will take the second floor,” said Tommy. “You guys head up to three.”

  “Let us know if you find anything!” called Petra as Beck and I climbed the staircase to the top floor, taking the steps two at a time.

  Way off in the distance, I heard the old couple hollering “stop” and “children are filthy insects” a few times. But they never threatened to call the police. Probably because they didn’t want the police nosing around in their business.

  Maybe the creepy old couple was hiding something big and major in their “small and insignificant” museum.

  CHAPTER 70

  Beck and I searched every nook and cranny of the museum’s top floor.

  All we found were more display cases crammed with small, useless stuff. Pushpins. Spools of thread. Those tiny toothpaste tubes the dentist always gives you. The cheap, itty-bitty toys that tumble out of vending machines inside plastic balls.

  Nothing that would be considered masterpieces by anyone but the loony couple who worked here.

  It was enough to drive a pair of twins into another tirade.

  We stopped hollering when Beck stepped on something pale and squishy.

  “Gross,” said Beck. “What was that?”

  “Who knows? Maybe cockroaches are considered works of art in this ridiculous museum. They’re small enough.”

  As Beck was examining the sole of her shoe, something struck her.

  “Do you think Dionysus Streckting got here before us? What if he’s here right now?”

  Okay. That freaked me out. Slightly.

  Because it was a definite possibility.

  So Beck and I continued our search of the third floor on tiptoe. We both kept expecting some kind of Bavarian bogeyman to pop out of the shadows to make us listen to opera or eat sauerbraten again.

  We crept into every room.

  We examined every exhibit, every display.

  We found nothing.

  Except a sign alerting us that the museum doors closed at 1800, European for 6 PM.

  We had five minutes before the grouchy German couple could officially kick us out.

  “Let’s go find the others,” Beck suggested.

  We darted quietly down the steps to the second floor.

  As we did, I could hear the old man announcing, “Zis museum closes in five minutes! Any meddlesome children, infants, or toddlers found on the premises after hours shall be dealt with most severely. Do I make myself clear?”

  We found Tommy, Petra, and Storm huddled in a dark corner behind a cabinet displaying “The History of Lapel Pins.”

  “What do we do?” I whispered.

  “We keep quiet,” said Petra. “And we hide.”

  “The museum is closing,” said Beck.

  “So?” said Storm. “We’re the Kidds. There are no ‘closing hours’ when we have more to explore. We’re Wild Things, remember?”

  We all nodded.

  “This way,” whispered Tommy, tapping the wall.

  A panel sprang open.

  “Petra and I found a secret staircase. It leads to the basement.”

  CHAPTER 71

  Through the basement’s sidewalk-level casement windows, we could see the odd old couple locking the museum’s front door.

  “Are you certain the nosy American brats left?” asked the sourpuss old woman.

  “Ja, Helga. The German girl, too.”

  “You are positive about this, Ludwig?”

  “Ja. Now can we please go home? My lederhosen itch. My stomach growls.”

  “If you are wrong…”

  “I am not! Come. We are late for supper.”

  What do you know? Ludwig was lying to Helga because he didn’t want to miss his potato pancakes and sauerkraut. Maybe they’d be chowing down on some of that spreadable sausage stuff, too.

  “We give them five minutes to make sure they’re gone,” said Tommy. “Then we tear this basement apart.”

  “But we do so carefully,” said Petra. “The art we are looking for is extremely valuable. Especially to the families it was stolen from.”

  “Chyah,” said Tommy. “So remember, you guys: Nice to touch, nice to hold, but if you break it, consider it sold.”

  Petra arched an eyebrow.

  “Sorry,” said Tommy. “I saw that in an antiques shop once. Dad and I were selling them a couple cannonballs. It sort of stuck with me.”

  “Like bubble gum on his brain,” added Storm.

  The dank cellar was full of cardboard boxes and wooden crates. Were any of them hiding looted masterpieces? Was this where the Nazis had decided to stash their cache of stolen art treasures? Had they hidden millions of dollars of art in the damp and dingy basement of a two-bit German gewgaw museum?

  Storm kept her eyes riveted on her dive watch.

  “Okay,” she announced. “Five minutes are officially up. It’s time to hunt some treasure.”

  Five hours later, we still hadn’t found anything bigger than a bread box.

  “This makes no sense,” I said, because I knew everybody else was thinking it. “Dad’s clues all led us to this location.”

  “Do you guys think Dad sent us on a wild-goose chase?” asked Beck. “Has he just been putting us through some kind of treasure-hunting drill like he used to do on board The Lost?”

  “No way,” said Tommy. “Not for something this important.”

  “If it’s so important,” said Beck, “why isn’t he here helping us?”

  I quickly leaped to Dad’s defense. “Because he’s busy taking care of something even more important.”

  “Like what?”

  “I dunno. Maybe he went to Cyprus to help Bela rescue
Mom.”

  “And maybe you should stop dreaming.”

  “You guys?” said Tommy. “Chill.”

  “We need to work the clues again,” said Petra. “Tell me everything that has happened on your quest.”

  With Petra as our audience, we started replaying our most recent Kidd family adventures. Before long, our stream of memories turned into a trickle of clues.

  Dad’s friend, the Chinese waiter Liu Wei, telling us, “Wise elders suggest that you move on to the bird’s nest soup and squab.”

  Storm informing us that “squab” was just a fancy name for pigeon.

  Dad, flapping like a bird, then disappearing on that Beijing street behind a flock of pigeons taking flight.

  Dad’s engineering plans for the S.C.U.B.B.A. drilling machine, written on the back of those folded origami—I mean zhézhî—birds, one of which, of course, was a paper pigeon.

  The pigeon wallpaper in the safe house.

  Dad’s text message, the one where he suggested we send our Chinese handlers off to the pigeon races.

  In that same text, he also wrote:

  pigeons r key.

  Pigeons are key…

  CHAPTER 72

  One second later Beck was hiking up her foot to check out the bottom of her shoe.

  A gob of chunky white gunk was trapped inside the grooves of her right boot.

  “That wasn’t a cockroach I squished upstairs,” she announced. “That was a squishy pile of pigeon poop. Third floor. Now!”

  The five of us hustled up the ancient staircase and raced to the spot in front of the toy-car collection, where Beck had stepped in the bird mess.

  Petra raised her hand in a signal.

  We all froze.

  She put a finger to her lips.

  We didn’t make a sound.

  “Hear it?” Petra whispered, cupping her hand to her ear.

  “Yeah,” said Tommy. “It’s you. Whispering.”

  “No. Listen again.”

  Now we were all tilting our heads sideways. Listening hard.

  And we heard it.

  A soft “coo-coo-coo” sound.

  Roosting pigeons.

  “The attic!”

  Yep. We all said it together, again.

  Then we took off running.

  CHAPTER 73

  Tommy spotted it first: One of those pull-down ladders in the ceiling.

  He yanked it open.

  The five of us scampered up the rickety rungs into the dirtiest, filthiest, featheriest attic imaginable. In the dim moonlight shining through a gable window, it looked like a dozen pillows had exploded. Ratty pigeon-down pillows.

  Storm started sneezing. Petra started wheezing. I also heard a lot of heavy cooing and feather flapping.

  Tommy tugged the chain on a naked lightbulb dangling just above the attic ladder.

  Fluffy white flakes fluttered through the air.

  Fifty, maybe sixty, pigeons were roosting in the rafters. Gray, white, speckled, black. The museum’s attic was a huge pigeon coop where we’d ruffled a few feathers and stirred up quite a chorus of coos.

  This flock wasn’t very particular or tidy about its potty training, either. White goo drizzled down from the rafters and oozed across the floor like somebody had dropped a couple of gallons of gunky white paint. Some of the bird poop had, obviously, leaked through the floorboards and dribbled down to the museum room below where Beck stepped in it.

  “Look,” said Petra, gesturing toward a relatively un-bird-pooey corner. Old wooden crates lined up in tidy rows under the attic’s eaves.

  And they had Nazi swastikas painted on them.

  “This is why your father sent us here,” said Petra, sounding like she might cry. “We have finally found the missing art! We have fulfilled my family’s mission.”

  “Bick?” Tommy said.

  “Yeah?”

  “Run back to the basement. I saw a couple crowbars stowed in the corner.”

  “Aye, aye!”

  I raced down to the basement to grab the tools.

  It was time for the five of us to start ripping open Herr Hitler’s packing crates.

  CHAPTER 74

  It was around midnight when we wrenched open the first wooden box.

  Inside was a Picasso.

  “Easy with that crowbar,” Petra coached Tommy.

  “Sorry,” he said, yanking down on the steel rod in a way that definitely showed off his bulging biceps.

  We all laughed. It was probably the happiest night any of us had had in a long time.

  We’d found the treasure! The same one Mom and Dad and Petra’s parents had been hunting down for decades.

  Sure, Dad was the one who had pegged its hiding place, but we kids were the ones who actually followed the “map” and “dug up” the treasure. For all five of us, there was no better feeling in the world.

  So we kept going.

  “Wow!” Beck gasped every time Tommy pried the squeaking nails out of a crate to reveal another hidden masterpiece.

  “That’s a Caravaggio!” she said. “A van Eyck! Monet! Matisse! Another Picasso. Le pigeon aux petits pois!”

  “The Pigeon with Green Peas?” said Storm, skeptically translating Beck’s French. “Seriously?”

  “Yep,” said Beck, grinning. “Looks like Dad knew all sorts of ‘pigeons’ were roosting up here in the attic!”

  By three in the morning we had liberated enough stolen art to fill a museum wing, and we still had more packing crates to pry open.

  We’d also shooed most of the pigeons out of the attic so they wouldn’t, you know, “soil” anybody’s long-lost masterpiece.

  “So what do we do now?” Beck asked rhetorically. “Call the local police?”

  Petra shook her head. “We may not be able to trust them. The old couple who run this so-called museum may not be the only ones who know its true purpose.” She pulled out her cell phone. “On the other hand, Interpol, the International Criminal Police Organization, is extremely interested in Dionysus Streckting and his criminal activities. He’s high on its list of ‘Red Notices.’ In fact, he might be Interpol’s most wanted fugitive currently at large. Interpol is also quite concerned about finding the stolen Nazi art.…”

  “Good,” said Tommy. “We’ll call them. Whenever we ran across a dicey international legal question, Dad always trusted Interpol.”

  “Should we move the paintings first?” I suggested. “That creepy curator couple will be back. The pigeons, too.”

  Petra considered the idea. “We’d need a truck. Does your father have any CIA contacts here in—”

  Before she could finish her question, we heard wood creaking.

  But none of us was moving.

  Someone else was climbing the rickety ladder to the attic!

  CHAPTER 75

  Somehow, Dionysus Streckting had found us.

  Uncle Timothy, Franz Hans Keplernicht, and assorted thuggish goons were with him.

  All of them were armed.

  “How’d you know where we were?” asked Tommy.

  “Easy,” said Streckting. “A local couple, Ludwig and Helga Schupfnudel, posted your pictures on the ultrasecret NefariousNet Listserv, which seamlessly links together evildoers all across the globe. The Schupfnudels were complaining about four American brats and a German girl nosing around their museum in Neubiberg. So, I…”

  His jaw dropped.

  He’d just seen the stack of paintings lined up under the attic eaves.

  He clutched his chest. Caught his breath.

  “You found it?”

  “I told you these Kidd kids were good,” bragged Uncle Timothy. “Our people in China will be very pleased.”

  “Indeed,” said Streckting, rubbing his hands together, greedy raccoon–style. “After years of plotting, planning, and scheming, I am about to complete the largest art acquisition and sale in the history of the world! Am I not the most brilliant criminal genius in the universe?”

  “And the mos
t physically repellent,” I said.

  “Yeah,” said Beck. “Fortunately, the stench of pigeon poop up here almost covers up the stench of your breath. Almost.”

  Streckting raised a small pistol. “Step aside, children. That artwork belongs to me.”

  Petra raced to the paintings.

  Tommy stretched out his arms to shield her and block Streckting’s advance.

  More weapons were racked and raised.

  “Don’t be a fool, Tommy,” said Uncle Timothy. “Those old paintings aren’t worth dying for.”

  “Yeah?” said Tommy. “Try telling that to the Jews who lost their lives when the Nazis put together this little collection. So back off, all of you. You know the rules of salvage, Uncle Timothy.”

  “The rights to a treasure trove,” said Storm, “are typically treated the same way as any other found property. The finder is the keeper.”

  “And the loser?” said Beck. “He is the weeper.”

  “So,” I tossed in, “start weeping. Big-time.”

  “Children, children, children,” said Streckting, lowering his pistol, which really didn’t matter because all his thugs and even Uncle Timothy still had their weapons trained on us. “You have done your part. I will call my friends in Cyprus and tell them to set your mother free.”

  I played a hunch. “Aunt Bela already did that.”

  Streckting flinched. His eyes darted sideways to Uncle Timothy, who looked kind of queasy. Then Streckting composed himself. Smiled.

  “Of course she did. I told her to. Now then, if you will all step aside. I really don’t want my companions to splatter your gizzards all over my priceless paintings. It would be so difficult to wipe the artwork clean.…”

  Beck, Storm, and I bravely stepped forward to form a human wall with Tommy. We were protecting those paintings, no matter what.