Chapter 17
“Who’s going to tell me what’s going on?” asked Chad.
The boys looked at each other.
“C’mon,” said Chad, “y’all look like you’ve been dealt your last card and now it’s getting on to clobberin’ time. If you’ll pardon the mixed metaphor.”
“I’m not sure you want--” said Jack.
“Well I am,” insisted Chad, “if I had just one strand of hair for every time I bailed you guys out of trouble, I wouldn’t have to wear this all the time.” He pulled off his lush toupee and tossed it on the counter revealing his shiny bald scalp beneath. “So who’s talking?”
“It’s kind of convoluted,” said Quinn.
“Good,” said Chad. “I like convoluted. And I haven’t been involved in one of your little capers for a long time. Who can I be? Comic relief? Tough guy? You need a romantic lead to handle the smoochy-shoochy for you?”
Jack grinned. “Alright. Alright.”
“Good,” said Chad. He went behind the counter and picked up the stool. Then he stood up, set the stool upright and held up a stuffed squirrel in his other hand. “Check it out,” he said. He put it on the counter next to his toupee. “Are you guys related? Harry meet Mr. Squirrel. Mr. Squirrel meet Harry.”
“Berkeley!” exclaimed the boys in unison.
“Wowsers,” said Chad.
“Give him to me,” said Cable. He grabbed the squirrel from the counter. Without hesitating, he held it around the middle and snapped its head off. Chad stared in astonishment. Cable looked inside the squirrel. Then he turned it upside down and shook it. A small USB memory stick clattered out onto the counter.
Chad snatched it up before any of the boys could.
“Stop!” said Chad, ”hold the mayo. I refuse to enter the story at the point where Cable breaks the head off the squirrel and then sit here not knowing what’s going on while you guys plug this into the computer and have a conversation that I don’t understand. Savvy?”
“Chad, give it,” said Cable.
“Once upon a time…” prompted Chad.
“Chad!” repeated Cable.
“Aaah,” Chad opened his mouth wide and threatened to put the USB stick in it.
“For Christ’s sake Chad,” snapped Cable, “you’re like fifty years old. Just give it to me. This is serious.”
Chad’s face underwent a visible spectrum of reactions. Finally he simply lowered the memory stick and handed it to Cable.
“So it’s like that, is it?” he said dryly.
Cable picked up the stick and went around to the computer. While he was plugging in the keyboard and the memory stick, Jack and Quinn brought Chad up to speed as quickly as they could on what was going on. Chad listened intently, looking from one boy to another as the tale unwound. Cable had opened the memory stick and all four of them crowded around the monitor to look at what they’d found.
The memory stick contained scans of dozens of letters and copies of emails. The first and longest of the files was a journal. They read the first entries. They were written earlier that same year. In the first entry Souvlakis wrote down everything that happened before February. The Mammal Hall was scheduled for renovation, originally; not the gem hall. Souvlakis had originally thought the Smithsonian was trying to cut costs by having the projects overlap. He later found out that Franklin and Rogers had offered to do the two projects for the price of one, if they coincided. Souvlakis wrote that he was concerned early on that the company did not have a long resume, but that the decision was out of his hands. He’d been assigned to work with the contractors on the Mammal Hall. In January, the contractors – the man in charge was Franklin – approached him with preliminary plans for the pedestals for the mammal displays. The pedestals had storage compartments in them and Souvlakis objected to that. The contractors insisted, saying that without compartments it was wasted space. Souvlakis persuaded them that if they must have the compartments, they should at least make them hidden, so the visitors weren’t distracted by them. They came back to him a week later with much more sophisticated designs. The compartments were very well hidden, but they were much to small to be of any use anymore. At the same time, Franklin told Souvlakis that he shouldn’t mention the compartments to anyone at the Smithsonian. When Souvlakis asked why, Franklin’s answer had been vague. That was the day that Souvlakis had begun the journal.
Entries were sporadic after that. Sometimes he would write three times a week. Then he’d skip a month. Franklin became more and more paranoid about the compartments. Souvlakis noticed that there were two sets of plans being used. Some showed the compartments and some did not. Meanwhile, though he wasn’t involved with it directly, he was aware of the fact that the work on the gem hall was progressing oddly. The displays were meant to be quite straightforward – just cabinets and cases with lighting and glass, really. But Franklin’s crew was making very little progress.
One day in May, Souvlakis wrote that he’d been approached by his counterpart in the gem hall renovation, a man named Meyers. Meyers, like Souvlakis, was a long-time Smithsonian employee. He had come from the Development Department, so his specialty was raising money, not conservation science or construction. He called on Souvlakis down in the taxidermy lab to express his frustration with Franklin and his crew. Why was it, Meyers wanted to know, that Franklin wanted the actual gemstones turned over to them before the cases were even complete? Had Souvlakis, Meyers wanted to know, run into similar procedural conflicts with Franklin?
Souvlakis said that they had not, and that he’d been pleased with the expertise Franklin’s crews had shown building the complicated pedestals. Souvlakis didn’t mention the compartments, but it was the delicate construction of all of them that had impressed him most. Meyers then asked Souvlakis if he – Souvlakis – would mind taking a look at the plans for the gem hall to see what was taking them so long to build. He also wanted him to see what possible reason there could be for seeing the real gems. Souvlakis has been happy to oblige. Over the next couple days he looked at the plans. He wrote in his journal that they were entirely straightforward and that they should have been completed in no more than eight weeks. It had been 5 months, at that point. Souvlakis also wrote that he’d been given access to that upstairs construction site and from what he could tell, the crews were not doing anything except move drop-cloths around and waste time. He told Meyers what he’d observed. Meyers confronted Franklin and the two argued. Franklin insisted once again that without the actual gems, they couldn’t fine tune the displays or focus the lights. Meyers had threatened to get them kicked off the job. At that point, Franklin complained to Meyers supervisors that working conditions had become unbearable. He threatened to quit the job unless Meyers was fired. Instead of firing him, the head of the Buildings Division had promoted Meyers to the imaginary position of “Head of Physical Projects” and promoted Souvlakis to “Supervisor of Renovations.” In effect, Meyers had been transferred out of contact with Franklin and Souvlakis was forced to take over Meyers responsibilities in the gem hall, as well as finish the actual taxidermy of the specimens for the mammal hall.
Souvlakis wrote at great length about the fact that he did not get a raise for the extra responsibilities. In fact, he’d been treated as though they thought he’d be pleased at the honor of being given more work to do. All through June he complained about long hours and poor pay. Meyers, it seemed, was receiving the same salary despite the fact that he was not doing anything. The journal entries began to contain theories about favoritism. Then at the end of June, Souvlakis discovered that Meyers was a cousin of the head of the Board of Regents, the governing body of the whole Smithsonian. It seemed to validate all his bitterness, not to mention his conspiracy theories. He wrote with vitriol. His daily entries were about personalities, never about the work. This, despite the fact that the mammal hall was coming together beautifully and Souvlakis must have realized what a fine job he had done.
Then, on July 3rd, Souvlakis wrote that he’d had a long meeting with Franklin to discuss becoming part of ‘his team.’ He wrote that Franklin had made a ‘’proposal that was very interesting.” Conspicuously, Souvlakis did not say what that proposal was. After that, there was not another journal entry until the end of August, just a few weeks ago.
He wrote that he was resuming the journal because he was afraid for his personal safely and also for the museum’s. He wanted to get these things down in writing in case something happened to him. He wrote that Franklin’s plan had been to steal the gems, that what he referred to as ‘his Team’ was a smaller group within his company that was in on the heist.
The plan was this: to have both exhibits under construction at the same time so that Franklin could move his Team back and forth between the two exhibits without anyone noticing. He knew the security around the gems would be tight, but he assumed that eventually the guards would get used to them moving around and would eventually slacken the security. Franklin also assumed that he’d have access to the gems. After a couple months of building, Franklin and his Team would begin to move the gems out one or two at a time and stash them in the compartments hidden in the Mammal Hall below. Then, when the Mammal Hall was reopened to the public, they would be able to move the gems out of the building without attracting any attention. But the plan showed signs of failing when Meyers refused to give Franklin access to the real gems. He had to stall the construction project in order to keep the window of opportunity open.
When Meyers was transferred, Franklin bided his time and then approached Souvlakis with his ‘proposal.’ The proposal was that Souvlakis would become a part of Franklin’s Team, use his position as “Supervisor of Renovations” to get the gems released to into Franklin’s possession. Then, Franklin assured him, the project would be finished with great expedience and on the day of the grand re-opening, Souvlakis would receive a generous stipend from the company of Franklin and Rogers. If Souvlakis decided to refuse the offer, however, Franklin threatened to ruin Souvlakis career or worse.
That was 8 weeks ago. The last entry simply said that Souvlakis was receiving transfer of the gems that day and that he had come up with a plan of his own and the he hoped it would work.
The rest of the files were emails regarding the construction project. There were scans of handwritten notes that Franklin had written. The letterhead of the Franklin & Rogers stationery said, “There is no I in T-E-A-M.”
When they closed the files on the computer, the Bonney Boys felt a glimmer of energy where there had been none just a few hours earlier. Here, at least, was a record of what was going on. Here was a map that situated them in the geography of this hunt. On the day of his last journal entry or soon thereafter Souvlakis set his own plan in motion, or tried to. His rent went unpaid. The realtor called Riverby. And there they were.
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