Chapter Text
When he first heard about the case, Albert actually thought it would be a straightforward heist. In hindsight he could have kicked himself.
His informants had just sent him an urgent update on the Lille trafficking ring. The Lille gang mostly dealt in counterfeit goods, and operated between northern France and England with a few ties to Paris. Albert had never liked to have them on his doorstep: because they operated across the Channel, he didn’t trust them not to dab into human trafficking, and who knew how that could blow up in all kinds of gruesome ways, and ultimately splatter him.
It had been an on and off project for the past two years to keep tabs on them and see whether he could sabotage them. So far it hadn’t been worth the risk: the Lupin the Second syndicate was much smaller than its rival bands, and relied a lot on secrecy and bluff to survive. Confrontations had to be carefully orchestrated. He and Gaston had agreed to watch them from a distance until further notice.
Except, now, they were getting ambitious.
Gaston greeted him in the workshop one summer morning with a cup of coffee, a large envelope of reports, and a foreboding grin.
Lupin was there too, sprawled across the old sofa and engrossed in a compilation of painter biographies. His presence gave Albert a mild shock –when had he gotten back to France?– before he schooled his features back into indifference.
Lupin had been harder and harder to pin down lately. He became restless the longer things in the syndicate stayed quiet. Albert had thought he was still in Siberia or Uzbekistan, or some of the other places he had mentioned. He was always evasive about his destinations: it was like he wanted to reassert his place as a freelance associate within the syndicate. Make sure they knew he answered to no one.
Whether he was truly doing solo jobs, or whether he was wandering aimlessly through small villages and deep woods hoping he would stumble upon a treasure, Albert couldn’t tell. He seemed to rely a lot on luck to guide him to a heist. It yielded the benefits you could expect.
And, whenever he did those disappearing acts, he always came back to Gaston first. It pinched at Albert’s temper, ever so slightly.
Well, no matter. If he wanted to boast that he would be the greatest thief in the world and then do piss all to get there, the more power to him. It wasn’t Albert’s job to be his life coach.
Lupin’s eyes fleeted to the other thief, but he didn’t put down his book. Albert pointedly returned the lack of greeting and made straight for the reports.
There had been repeated contacts between the Lille gang and Russia. Their informants had investigated further with some string-pulling and well-placed phone-calls, and soon enough they had the name of the Russian interlocutor: Pietr Ivanovich Varkov, patron and self-proclaimed connoisseur of theatre and the fine arts, a bit of a dilettante writer, composer and stage director himself. Insanely wealthy, way beyond what his nebulous profession as a finance consultant could account for. Suspect in various cases of trafficking, but all previous investigations had aborted quickly and without ripple.
Sure enough, the Lille traffickers were trying to score a deal.
Albert was already frowning and muttering to himself – was he seriously going to have to handle the Russian mafia now on top of everything? Didn’t they have better things to do than team up with some small fry from Northern France? He had enough work as it was keeping an eye on people from his own country...
Then, he got to the part that detailed the nature of the deal. His eyebrows shot up.
“A play? He wants to premiere his own play in Paris?”
“At the Palais Garnier to be precise,” Gaston said. “We have seen the Lille traffickers blackmail important Parisian figures before. My guess is they control the current director of the Paris Opera, or a relation. That would give them sway over the line-up of performances.”
“And they managed to find someone they can buy with that type of favor,” Albert completed. “Just our luck.”
He glanced over transcripts of phone conversations, and his scowl deepened at Varkov’s recorded words. The mafia moghul seemed to digress every other sentence, and Albert had to skim over entire paragraphs to dodge self-aggrandizing pedantic spiels about his artistic vision. Lovely. He really didn’t want that guy smarming about in his backyard, and not just because it would leave Lupin the Second caught in a pincer between two larger gangs.
The next document contained a blurred photocopy of a Russian newspaper clipping. It displayed a silver tiara with a flame-shaped diamond supported by two angels wrought from the silver – they appeared to be extracting themselves from the frame in an unnatural and slightly painful way. Along the tiara’s edge, at the angels’ feet, swirly clouds were carved into the frame. Long strings of tear-shaped diamonds hung from them to symbolize a curtain of rain.
“The Flame of Virtue, designed by Pietr Karkov and centerpiece of his play,” Albert read, frowning at the blurry characters as he tried to jog up his Russian. “It will be auctioned in Paris after the play. Bid starts at one million euros, but Karkov is clearly overpricing it. What a tacky mess.”
“Oooooh, gimme, I want a look,” Lupin piped up then, waving extravagantly from the sofa.
So that’s how he chose to acknowledge him for the first time today. Albert held up the newspaper clip and rose an eyebrow at his part-time associate.
“I am working. Are you planning on helping with this, or are you just clowning around?”
There was no immediate retort. Instead, Lupin stood up from his sprawled position on the sofa, and gave an exaggerated full-body shrug, as if to put all his limbs back into place.
He wore the same dumb sports jacket as always: you really never could tell, just from looking at him, whether he had spent his entire week watching TV in his ratty old studio flat drinking half-curdled milk, or whether he had caught a flight on a whim to trek across a frozen wilderness.
Finally, Lupin tossed his book aside and turned fully to seize Albert up. His hands were on his hips, an oddly defensive stance that made his shoulders look larger.
“I am working” He sniffed in an exaggerated Parisian accent, and squinted his eyes briefly to mimic Albert’s scowl. “Like you’re so special. What do you know, maybe I have been helping this whole time. I have a feeling about this job.”
He strode closer to peer at the clipping, though he didn’t go as far as reaching out to grab it from Albert’s hand. From across this invisible line between them, he gave a small huff of laughter.
“So that’s the headpiece made for the lead? Talk about style over substance! That poor girl will whip herself across the face with those diamonds every time she spins.”
“Every time she spins?”
“Well, yeah, it is ballet,” Lupin said. He grinned wider at Albert’s confused expression. “Haven’t you just read the transcripts? Karkov won’t shut up about it, he has choreographed it and written the music and everything. It says it right here. Looks to me like you’re the clueless one who is getting in the way of us making progress.”
“Gaston, who gave him clearance to be here?” Albert said, turning abruptly back to the table with a scowl.
“He says he gave himself clearance,” Gaston chuckled. “Who am I to argue with that logic? Besides, he has worked closely with you before, I didn’t think you would mind. Have you two been fighting again?”
From his peripheral vision, Albert saw Lupin move back one step and cross his arms tightly in defiance, a mutter of “hell, you tell me” on his lips.
Gaston watched them both glower with an enigmatic smile, like the tension between them was just a phase in some grander scheme he alone understood. Albert let the familiar spike of annoyance wash over him and didn’t let it show on his face. He knew from past experience that his uncle’s omniscient expression hid nothing but abject ignorance. After all, he had worn a very similar all-knowing smile on Albert’s fifteenth birthday, when he had winked and slipped him a porn magazine –a straight one.
“Crass and old-fashioned, why, thank you,” Albert had sneered and pushed the irrelevant article back towards him. “I’ll handle that aspect of my life on my own if you don’t mind.”
It had taken two extra years, and a five-month long relationship with a boy from the highschool drama club, for Gaston to get the memo at long last. Pretty amazing for a guy who liked to claim he was three steps ahead of everyone else. And then, instead of taking the news in stride, he had made Albert sit down to profess at great length how he accepted and was proud of him, and that his nephew should never feel like he needed to hide.
Albert could have pointed out that he had hardly been closeted this entire time –everyone in the drama club had known about the relationship for over a month, and Albert wasn’t even a member. Ultimately he hadn’t bothered: that whole mess of a conversation was already an hour of his life he would never get back. He saw no need to lengthen the ordeal.
Thankfully the subject hadn’t come up again. It was only every once in a while that Gaston made roundabout allusions to his sexuality with the same aggravating wink. Privately, Albert wondered whether his uncle had considered getting him a gay magazine as a show of support, but didn’t have the balls to touch one.
So for all his cunning looks, he doubted that Gaston actually knew much of anything about them. About Lupin and himself, he meant. Not that there was much of a them, not really.
Looking back, their relation had been a matter of circumstances. The murder attempt against Albert in the spring, and the unexpected, near-miraculous role Lupin had played in his rescue, had snapped them together like an elastic band. They had spent heady weeks zigzagging through Italy, eluding their enemies, plotting revenge, and celebrating their victory together like Paris was ablaze under their feet.
But soon enough, when they were left without a common enemy to rally against, all of their differences and the various ways they got on each other’s nerves had started creeping back in. From how little contact they had had lately, it was reasonable to assume that the bridge that had formed between them had faded away for good.
“Like I care enough to get in a fight,” Albert replied at last. “But if he is going to hang around at headquarters he should pull his weight. You speak Russian, don’t you? I hope you like translating transcripts.”
“Don’t boss me around, you jerk,” Lupin warned through gritted teeth. “I told you, I am well ahead of you on this one.”
“Are you? You better not be planning something flashy, then. We want to kill this partnership in the egg, not provoke them so they will gang up against us.”
Lupin shrugged stiffly.
“It is pretty obvious what the plan should be, isn’t it? We pocket that virtue tiara before Karkov gets to show it off in his play and sell it. If we do it on French soil, it will get him mad at your guys from Lille, and bam, deal is off.” He broke into a challenging grin. “Stop pretending this crime lord shtick of yours is difficult.”
Albert frowned at the defiance in Lupin’s stance and tone. He felt his own shoulders grow tense in response, as though they were both gearing up for a fight, but he nodded reluctantly at his words.
“That’s the gist of it.” He conceded; Lupin’s frame eased; the tension between them passed like a shadow, and Albert could turn away to tap the transcripts with one finger and elaborate his thought.
“The security is bound to loosen while the tiara is in transit from Russia. Especially if Karkov gets distracted by his little vanity project. We will wait for the tiara to be authenticated in Paris. We replace it with a fake as soon as convenient. Then we arrange for the swap to get discovered just before the play’s opening night and we let the media run wild. That should do the trick.”
Lupin hummed.
“Sure, something like that.”
He sounded blatantly underwhelmed. Albert felt another brief flush of annoyance. Well fine, it wasn’t like his opinion had ever mattered. If he didn’t consider that job worth his time, and if he would rather waste entire weeks gallivanting in the wild, this heist was nothing Albert couldn’t handle on his own.
But before he could quite finish that line of thought, Lupin did something unexpected. Instead of plopping himself back onto the sofa, he strode over to the table, grabbed himself a seat and gestured Albert over:
“What are we waiting for then? We’ve got stuff to translate. And let me tell you, I don’t want to badmouth your informants but their Russian is pretty broken, so it’s gonna be a ride to make sense of their notes.”
He pointed a finger at Albert, the gesture a bit sharp for his alleged good humor.
“You can stay in here and help if you want, but I get to pick the background music.”
“Spare me,” Albert bit back, and sat down across from him at the other end of the table. Gaston glanced at them both with a barely-concealed laugh, and passed them the stacks of paper.
Two weeks later, it was getting clear Albert was going to intensely hate this job.
He was rubbing at his temple and staring accusingly at his empty coffee cup. The almost-translated transcripts were spread out over the table. The notebook he had been using to draft heist plans had entire pages crossed out in deep, angry lines. Gaston was in the other room brewing some more coffee: Albert could hear him chuckling at something in the newspaper as he waited for the water to boil, completely untouched by the sour mood. Even Lupin was more invested than he was.
To be fair to him, Lupin was remarkably invested for once. You could recognize the pages he had translated by the inky thumbprints that smudged the lines like an infestation of damp beetles: they covered a good two-third of the table. He was the more fluent of the two, and he worked fast when he put his mind to it.
Lupin was hunched over his latest page with his head resting on his fist, deep concentration in his eyes. It would have been a strikingly mature look on him, too, if he hadn’t managed to smear his entire face in ink smudges like a toddler. The tips of his fingers were black. He had rubbed dark blue stains over his cheek, his forehead and the bridge of his nose. He was currently nibbling at his dying pen and leaving fresh ink smears at the corner of his lips. If he kept at it, Albert mused, he was going to bite through the tube and poison himself.
They had both migrated to the same corner of the table as the days wore on, and were now sitting almost forehead to forehead. Their elbows had just enough space between them to accommodate an overflowing ashtray and a pack of cigarettes they kept passing around – Albert had smoked so much over the past few weeks he could no longer taste the difference between his brand and Lupin’s. He could hear the thoughtful tapping of Lupin’s foot whenever he started fidgeting, close enough to feel the vibration against his own leg. When one of them slumped, sometimes the other gave a small shoulder nudge to coax him back to work.
They had made up. Sort of. It had involved a strange talk on a bridge, an emerald necklace and a dating site, and Albert did not want to talk about it.
Not that bringing his attention back to the task at hand made anything better.
“Damnit!” Albert snapped and threw himself back against his chair. “What is this cretin’s problem? Does he think this stupid eyesore of a tiara is his child or what?”
“That would be creepy,” Lupin interjected with a half-smile. “Way to keep your kid shut in.”
Albert fisted his hand in his hair.
The defense was airtight. The Flame of Virtue would only be brought in Paris on the morning of the play. It would travel in a private plane, in a sealed box under the protection of four guards. It would be authenticated with X-rays without letting the box out of sight of the goons for a single minute. Said goons would be backstage and personally fit the tiara to the lead dancer’s head before each of her entrances, and wrench it away again the minute she stepped off the limelight. The whole rehearsal period would be done using a Flame of Virtue replica, even during the dress run.
He had run a number of the syndicate’s usual tricks in his head, to no avail. Try to alarm Karkov with a warning note to announce the theft, confuse him with contradictory rumors, then impersonate some detective to lead him and the tiara to a trap… Send a fake claim that the tiara had already been replaced by a fake, and use the chaos of an urgency authentification to do the swap…
Whichever page from the original Lupin’s playbook they chose, their window of opportunity was much too small. There would only be two performances, and the auction would be organized almost immediately after the last curtain fall. That gave them only one night between when the tiara would land on French soil and when it would be sold off, and the deal with the Lille traffickers would be sealed.
There wasn’t much chance of a slip-up from the guards during that single night, either: they would sleep in turns if at all. Their food would be tightly controlled. Deeper research had told them that they were part of the inner circle of Karkov’s organisation, and had known each other for over a decade. Impersonating one of them was out of the question.
Honestly, Albert would have given up this job as a lost cause days ago, if by doing nothing he didn’t expose himself to even greater danger down the line. There was no telling how big of a threat the Lille gang could become with a new, powerful ally abroad.
Also, the smugness that bled from Karkov’s every sentence was slowly driving Albert insane. The urge to mess with his affairs and knock him off his high horse was almost physical.
“Are you boys hitting a wall?” Gaston said as he walked in with a steaming pot of coffee.
“If there’s wall, there’s always a gate,” Lupin said without lifting his head. He was smiling distractedly even as he worked, as though following some deeper train of thoughts.
“That’s not much of a saying, and it’s not even true,” Albert grumbled back. He pushed back his stack of translated transcripts in disgust. “What a bunch of idiots anyway. Karkov is splurging so much on security and com, there is no way he will break even, no matter how many bootlickers show up at his auction. There’s no way we will break even if we steal it. Why don’t we sabotage his dumb play and call it a day?”
“Now, now”, Gaston chuckled, “don’t get ahead of yourself; getting the play cancelled could damage his relations with Lille a little, but if we don’t get our hands on the tiara…”
“You know,” Lupin said over Gaston, his eyes catching the light as he met Albert’s, “I think you are on to something here.”
Albert held his gaze, keeping his own expression cool and unimpressed.
“Is that so,” he deadpanned. “You have been brewing something, haven’t you? Come on, out with it.”
His partner immediately broke into a mischievous grin. He pushed his chair back with a long, extravagant flourish of his hand. Albert recognized the gesture as a misdirection only half a second too late: when he snapped his attention to Lupin’s other arm, the thief had already cleared his section of the table, and a freshly typed document had appeared in front of him.
It wasn’t long, six or so pages neatly stapled together. It was split in sections and short paragraphs like a theatre play transcript.
The title read “The Flame of Virtue: a contemporary ballet in three acts”.
“Where did you get this?” Albert said in wonderment. “The Opera de Paris knows nothing about the play. I thought Karkov hadn’t even finished the synopsis yet.”
“He hasn’t, but you can get a pretty good idea of how it will turn out based on his rambling,” Lupin said, his smile still showing all his teeth. “You know, all those bits you keep skipping, you slacker? He is pretty dead set on the overall plotline and the stage directions for some key scenes, so I pieced it all back together, no biggie.”
He flapped his hands and spread them as though to mime the opening of curtains:
“The Flame of Virtue, a symbolic tale of the decadence of our modern times and of the epic and ultimately doomed battle of Virtue to purify us all,” he said in one breath. “Poof, poof. The play is centered on this super-city that is held under the sway of Vice, who is some sort of evil wizard, and his evil underlings. Kind of Metropolis-y, but without the working class and upper class imagery, and more like a vague all-encompassing puritanical critique. I think there is something about publicity being evil, and also electro music?
“The character of the Flame of Virtue doesn’t actually show up until the end of the second act. In the third act, Virtue does some purifying dance and scares off a bunch of Vice goons, but then she falls in love with a guy sent by the Vice wizard, and that messes things up; she eventually sees through the ruse and destroys the Vice wizard, but dies of doomed love at the end. I think the city also blows up.”
Albert blinked a few times.
“Well, you can’t blame me for tuning out this crap,” he said at last. “Did you translate this out of sheer self-loathing, or are you actually getting somewhere?”
“Can’t you see it? This has got everything we need. Now we know exactly when the Flame of Virtue – the prima donna and the tiara – will be on stage.”
Lupin grabbed the script, slapped it against the table for emphasis, and continued triumphantly:
“That’s the one blind spot, that’s the one place Karkov can’t stuff full of guards. The tiara will be completely unprotected. We will get our hands on it and sabotage his play. We’ll steal the tiara on stage.”
Albert stayed silent for a while, as though he hoped Lupin would address the glaring flaw in his plan all by himself. When that didn’t come, he smiled dryly and said:
“Oh yeah. That’s just what we need to make this heist simpler. Two thousand witnesses.”
Lupin sighed and wagged a finger at him.
“Au contraire my friend; centre stage is the best place to go unnoticed. Theatre is all about smoke and mirrors, right? There will be light effects, dry ice, blackouts, you name it. We can steal the tiara right in front of the audience and they will only applaud the prestige.”
Albert settled back and, out of respect for the uncharacteristically hard work Lupin had clearly put into this, he considered the idea for about half a second.
“Look, I see the appeal, but it won’t work,” he said, shaking his head. “Even if we manage to sneak in disguised as stage hands –and Karkov is bound to get them checked thoroughly if his paranoia is anything to go by – we will still have to steal a tiara with jingling diamond beads from the lead dancer right in the middle of a ballet scene. Remember how the guards will be watching the whole play from backstage? They will have their eyes peeled on anyone who gets near the tiara. Stage effect or no stage effect, they will be on us in seconds. And then we will have to escape while surrounded by stage crew and extras. I know collateral damage is your bread and butter, but I didn’t think leaving dozens of potentially dead and injured in your wake would be your style.”
“Urgh, you really have to go straight for the worst possible scenario, don’t you,” Lupin winced. “Who talked about stage hands? You are making things harder than they need to be. If I want to grab the tiara in plain sight and make it look natural, there is only one role I can take. The person meant to wear it.”
And just like that, Albert brutally remembered an important detail, something he had somehow lost track of over the days they had spent working relatively comfortably together: Lupin was certifiably insane.
Lupin grinned at the dawning horror on his partner’s face.
“It’s fun, don’t you think? Karkov is going above and beyond to protect his tiara, but in the end, his guards will place it on my head themselves. Poetic justice much?”
At this stage, Albert would have preferred it if Lupin was leading him on to some big, stupid joke. This confident smile of his was somehow worse. There was that twinkling light in his eyes again, like the treasure was already in his hands, as good as stolen, and he found his rival’s disbelief privately hilarious.
Later on, perhaps, Albert would pick up that it was from that moment on that his partner had started using the first person to talk about the heist. He might even link it to their talk on the bridge and the brief, uncharacteristic solemnity in Lupin’s voice: no matter how absurd, his talks of fame and grand deeds were more than mere dreams to him. And it looked like he had chosen this one hopeless heist to start making them real.
Albert glanced desperately over to Gaston, perhaps the only person in the world who could give this fool a reality check, but the old coward had retreated to the sofa and was listening intently to both sides.
“I am sure it would be fun,” Albert said instead through gritted teeth. “In the parallel universe where people are blind enough to mistake you for a professional ballet dancer. A female ballet dancer. Have you looked in the mirror lately, or do I have to break it to you that you are the gangliest man alive? I assume you intended to pick up pointe work over the summer?”
Lupin chuckled and sauntered up from his seat, so that he could hover over Albert.
“Ha, good old pointe work,” he said casually, even as he brought his hands to his navel, palms inwards, arched his arms, and braced himself. Wait. Surely he couldn’t mean… “It has been a while. Maybe I’ll have to brush up a bit.”
And just like that, he sprang up on the tip of his sport shoes with his arms outstretched in fifth.
Albert gaped. Lupin should have looked ridiculous – no, he did look ridiculous: his dumb, ink-smeared hairy hands were held above his head in a gentle curl; he was straining so high his shirt had come out of his belt to expose his stomach; his whole body was pulled taut in an arc that almost convincingly imitated grace, but his toothy grin ruined the effect.
Yet somehow, the first thought that crossed Albert’s brain was brief alarm at seeing him stand so tall.
Lupin held the pose for a few seconds before he started wobbling and fell back on his soles. Albert faced him and his expectant smile in baffled silence, before a clatter of sound made them both jump: Gaston was clapping furiously behind them, his heavy features peeled open in a broad fit of laughter.
“Now, that’s some spirit! You never cease to amaze, my boy!”
Lupin brushed his shirt back into place with a sheepish shrug. For all his smarming confidence, the praise seemed to take him aback.
“That’s nothing,” he mumbled, “I can do way better with proper shoes. And I haven’t practiced in ages.”
“When did you even learn… no, never mind that, where the hell do you think you are going with this?” Albert said, hand clenching on the backrest of his chair. “We are talking about the lead of a National Ballet production here, not some amateur play! You won’t fool them even for a second.”
Gaston cleared his throat.
“Albert, Albert,” he interjected with a shake of his head, “your clear-headedness is welcome as always. But I am sure we can indulge in a little blue sky thinking for a minute. We are at an impasse, so this may be just the distraction we need to see this heist from a new angle.”
Albert was already swiveling in his chair to snap at him, but Lupin was the first to protest, puffing up in frustration:
“Hey, what do you mean a distraction? Do you both really think I brought this all up and I haven’t even got a plan? Come on, have a little faith! If we are clever about how we set this up, I won’t need to be anywhere near professional dancer level to pull it off.”
He shrugged and wiggled his eyebrows encouragingly at Albert.
“Smoke and mirrors, remember? We are going to cheat, that’s the whole fun of it.”
Albert blinked.
“You want to cheat. At ballet.”
“Yeah! All I’ll have to do is show up for warm-ups, and pretend to learn the heavy duty stuff from the back of the room. After all, no one really looks twice at the understudy, do they? And it can’t be too hard to fabricate an incident that will stop the lead from showing up at the play, so they will be stuck with me on opening night.”
“I… I suppose that’s feasible. Still, what about the show itself? The guards will know something is wrong as soon as you step up on stage and screw your part.”
“What if my part is really easy and very short? I told you, the Flame of Virtue’s grand entrance is right at the end of the second act. The city is full of vice and things are going to shit, there’s this flash of light, Flame of Virtue appears, and then we get the mother of all light shows with strobe lights and pyrotechnics, and finally a blackout. All I’ll have to do is hold a pointe pose for ten seconds, and then I will have all the distraction I need to run off with the prize.”
Albert opened his mouth to give another retort. Closed it when nothing came to mind. Which was… slightly alarming, but certainly not an indication that this madcap plan had the faintest glimmer of a chance to get his approval.
Still, his own latest ideas had been just as hopeless – the more recent was a frustrated daydream of jigging the X-ray authentication room itself. They could use a pretty straightforward mirror trick to swap the box with an empty one even as the guards were watching. A fake scanner would be fun to build, and once everything was in place, it would be relatively risk-free, which suited Albert just fine. However, the technical difficulties and the number of people they would need to bribe in order to rig an expensive official scientific facility beggared belief. He had given up on that plan two days ago, and drawn a complete blank since.
Lupin’s idea was almost elegantly simple in comparison. He was right: understudies weren’t big names in the ballet world. They could create a fake identity and a cover story for him without raising suspicion. Then, it was just a matter of keeping up the charade for the months leading up to the play…
What was he even thinking, Albert thought hastily, this was suicide. Sure, Lupin was good at improvising and fearless in a crisis. He had brief flashes of inspiration, of brilliance even, that had saved them both from certain death. But that was all those moments amounted to in the end: flashes. He could swear to shake mountains and mean every word, but soon enough he would be back to square one: a hyperactive fool with a disastrous attention span and no long-term plan, no promise or commitment he could ever keep. Albert had made his peace with that fact, or so he firmly told himself.
There was no way he could keep up a con this long. He just didn’t have it in him.
Lupin had turned fully to him, he noticed even as he struggled with his own thoughts, eyes boring into him until Gaston faded in the background and it was just the two of them. The thief had simmered down from his previous mix of buzzing enthusiasm and nervous expectation. His face gave Albert another brief flashback of their talk, in the drizzling rain on the Pont Neuf, just a few days ago – it felt longer than that somehow. Eyes wide and grey as he looked up at a stormy sky with quiet yearning. Absurd promises of grand, impossible things he would soon achieve, uttered with a grave certainty that had made him sound almost convincing at the time. His breath on Albert’s neck, hot against the rain’s chill as he chuckled in his ear “Magic…”
Lupin shook his head when Albert failed to answer him:
“Hey, you know what? I don’t need you to agree with me. It’s not like I have seen you come up with a better plan, so I am calling dibs on this job. We’ve got a contest going on after all. Just go work on your school studies for a while, or whatever you like, I’ll handle this.”
Albert scowled, professional pride jostling through him.
“Don’t make me laugh. Like you can handle all the admin that comes with fabricating a proper alias. I better monitor the logistics to make sure you don’t expose us all.”
“So you want to give this a try after all?” Gaston said; he was still smiling and watching them both intently. “That’s unexpected from you, Albert. But you know I am willing to follow your lead.”
Albert re-settled in his chair and started arranging the papers in front of him, stacking them in meaningless piles just so he had something to do with his hands while he tried to regain his composure. He was acting flustered, it was stupid. He cleared his throat.
“Let’s say we can humor him until a more sensible solution comes up. If we infiltrate him in the cast, we might get some more inside knowledge on the play. Karkov is already late in getting his script finalized. Who knows? Maybe opening night will be delayed and the tiara will be stranded in Paris for longer than he meant. We will have to keep our eyes open, keep gathering intel and wait for our chance.”
Lupin was already bouncing across the room in triumph like a jack-in-the-box on the run. He went and grabbed at Gaston’s arm to pull him off the sofa as he babbled “Oh boy, right Gaston, let’s hit the workshop and work on my disguise, I’ve got this awesome idea to make fake boobs”. Albert jabbed a finger at him:
“But if you start screwing things over, or if a better opportunity to steal the tiara comes up, we are pulling you out, understood?”
Lupin stopped mid-rambling, and looked back at Albert with a crazed grin on his face. His hands were still grabbing at the front of his chest as though fondling imaginary breasts. Somehow, it made his answer sound a little ominous.
“It won’t come up. My plan is the one. I told you, I have a feeling about this job.”