He had almost made his escape through the mountains with his prizes when he lost control of the car. A sharp turn through a patch of ice sent the car skittering across the frozen road toward the shoulder. Through the windshield Markus saw the world slant to the side and then vanish like dirty water draining into a gutter. Metal groaned, the roof bulged, and he felt the seat belt tighten around his body to keep him from crashing onto the roof.

When the world stopped tumbling, Markus realized that the car had flipped upside down. He felt blood rushing to his head and saw the loose change from the ashtray scattered over the dome. He unfastened the seatbelt, fell to the roof, then squirmed onto his back so he could kick at the passenger-side door. The door tore off easily and the gray light of the sky burst in. Markus clawed across the stick shift and wormed out onto a snowdrift. He dragged his body only five feet from the wreck before he flopped in the snow.

“Maybe I’ll make snow angels while I’m here,” he thought out loud. He wanted to make a joke of the disaster. It was pretty damn funny. Something as simple as frozen water on the road had wrecked his plan. A white pawn had checked him into a corner.

But it wasn’t checkmate. Not yet. He wouldn’t resign. He remembered the Lisas. He still had them. As long as they were safe, the game went on.

He got up and sloshed over to the metal carcass of the car. The right front wheel still spun lazily, its bare surface reminding Markus that he had passed up a chance to buy snow tires in Denver because he thought he could beat the storm in the pass and get to Wyoming in one day. There was no point torturing himself over the mistake now. As long as the contents of the trunk had survived, nothing else mattered.

The trunk looked undamaged; the lock still held it shut. For a brief moment he debated leaving it that way, letting his treasures stay locked inside the trunk while he fled into the woods. He could bury as much of the car as he could, and if the plows came through they might hurl enough snow off the road to bury the car even deeper. If the brutal weather continued, a few days might pass before someone noticed the accident.

Markus checked the thought right away. Too many ‘ifs’ and ‘mights.’ It took only one person to see the car to bring the police or the mountain patrol to investigate. They would open the trunk and take his Lisas.

He had no choice. He had to take his treasures with him into the wilderness to hide. They were a heavy burden, but he loved them so much that it didn’t matter. They were the dreams of a lifetime. He had sacrificed friendship, love, a career for them. He wouldn’t abandon them. He’d die with them if that were the only way.

He slipped on the gloves stashed in his parka’s pockets and fumbled with the trunk key. The early winter cold was starting to get to him. His ears stung and his thin jeans gave little protection against the sharp wind gusts. A thick fall of flakes was already laying a shroud over the undercarriage of the wrecked car.

He unlatched the hood. Gently, like placing a newborn in a crib, he lowered it open. A large brown parcel tied with twine slid into the snow at his feet. He dropped his keys into the drift so he could lunge for the package and keep it from the touch of moisture. He left the keys buried in the snow when he walked away. He had no use for them any more. He had his whole world tucked under his arms, eight small pieces of history, each no larger than a notebook, clasped to his parka.

* * *

The first theft had gone so smoothly that Markus knew afterwards that he could do it again and again without much risk.

The only difficult part about that first grab was the anxious waiting in the roasting Italian sun. When he sat outside the lavish villa he kept a blanket wrapped tightly around his body so passing villagers wouldn’t notice anything strange about his clothes. He didn’t have time to manufacture an early sixteenth-century Italian peasant’s outfit, and he didn’t plan on staying more than a few minutes. All he expected was a simple grab and run. But he misjudged his arrival time and ended up waiting an hour for the lady to leave the painter’s studio. Fortunately, no one came down the country road that afternoon, not a single traveling merchant or farmer, and it was too hot for the workers in the villa to be outside. Markus endured the heat and bided his time.

Through the studio window, Markus heard two people stirring. He listened to their voices, even though he didn’t speak a word of Italian; he could guess from the attitudes in their words that the session was ending. Markus crouched deeper into his blanket to hide until she was gone.

The lady left the studio and walked down the tree-shaded path to the front gate where her carriage waited. Markus peered over the edge of the blanket and caught a glimpse of the woman’s profile. It disappointed him. Plain, dull, maybe a touch ugly. But he smiled thinking of the masterpiece the painter had created from that face and immortalized in oils on poplar wood. Who the subject was didn’t matter. Just as letters in the alphabet don’t matter until the poet arranges them into odes.

The carriage wheeled away. Markus threw off his blanket and walked up the path into the tiny studio. Light poured through a westward facing window that gave the artist the best light for working. An aging man with a heavy beard and a handsome wrinkled face stood in a shaft of amber afternoon light and admired the panel on his easel. The painter was so lost in the curious smile of his painted lady that he didn’t see the intruder at first.

When the painter finally noticed the man dressed in twenty-first-century clothes, he leaped back into his paint stand and muttered something fearful in Italian. Markus gave the man only a quick look. What did the painter matter to him? When the old man died people would only remember him because of the painting on his easel. Only the painting mattered. Markus plucked it from the easel and sprang out the door.

He ran down the garden path, alert for the sound of feet on gravel following him, but he heard only his own footsteps. Surprise had worked in his favor. He leaped through the villa gate and ran for a cart of hay overturned by the road. He wriggled under the stack and touched the levers on the machine. Just a twist and a pull—and he appeared back in his room in Aurora, Colorado. His prize lay tucked under his arm.

Markus set the portrait over his fireplace mantle and stared at it for hours. The most valuable painting in the world, the most legendary work of art in history, a puzzle to all men who wondered what really went through a woman’s mind…it hung there above his fireplace, staring back at him. It was better than any painting in a museum: clean and fresh, the oil damp, the scent of the poplar wood still noticeable.

When the sun sank so low that he could no longer see the painting in the natural light, Markus turned to his computer terminal to make certain that the machine had worked the way it was supposed to. He checked the website at the Louvre. The Mona Lisa still hung in the prize collection as Painting #779, smiling from its gallery for tourists to ogle every day. Markus clicked on the link to see a larger picture of it. Even seen on the pixels of his screen and faded from hundreds of passing years, the Lisa still cast an enchantment.

But now there were two Lisas in the world. He had the superior one, the one that was more real. He had stolen it right before Leonardo Da Vinci’s shocked eyes. The Louvre had an aging relic. Markus had living history.

The next day he returned to Renaissance Italy and stole it again. And the next day. And the week after that. Four beautiful new portraits now lined his mantle. He reclined on his leather couch for hours and stared at his pretty chorus line of Lisas, each one smiling at him with that daring, daunting mouth, those teasing eyes. He admired them until the sun set. It seemed heretical to stare at those fresh masterpieces beneath the harsh glare of electric lighting, so Markus covered the Lisas and went to the garage to tinker with the machine that had made his collection possible. It was a miraculous device, as small as a tricycle and almost as light, but he had no love for it. He recognized it as a metal tool. But its power brought him so much beauty. He touched the cold levers and thought of other magnificent paintings he wanted in his private gallery: The Last Supper, Starry Night, Guernica (a little big, perhaps…), a Rembrandt self-portrait, the Albrecht Durer rabbit that looked so detailed that staring at it felt like stroking fur….

Later, later. First, he had to get another copy of that smiling, beautiful tart. The first four were lonely and needed company.

Markus trudged through the snowdrifts, weaving between trees like a drunk so to leave a pattern that no sane man could follow. He had no time to cover his treads; he could only count on the falling flakes to erase his trail and confuse his pursuers.

His skin cracked whenever he squinted his eyes, and he had not felt sensation in his toes for hours. They might have fallen off, but he didn’t care. His Lisas were tucked safely under his parka. They were too bulky to fit all the way beneath it, but the coat provided shelter enough to keep the falling snow from sticking to them.

He crossed over a steep hill, using his free hand to balance himself as he scrambled up the icy slope. At the crest he saw an opening in the rocks. He peered inside and saw a large dry cave, apparently uninhabited. He scrambled into the opening and threw himself down on the dry floor. He laid his precious parcel down first however, making sure it sat in the driest part of the cave.

He was safe. He could hide here forever and protect his Lisas from the elements. He could sleep with them at his side. He didn’t need food or warmth. He had their beauty, their freshness, to keep him alive.

He tugged the parka tighter around his shaking body and curled into a ball around the parcel. He closed his eyes and reached out to rest a gloved hand on his prizes. Even through the insulated layers of his glove and the wrinkled brown wrapping he could feel the peaks and ridges of Da Vinci’s oils on the top painting. # Nine would be too many. Markus knew it and vowed to stop after he stole the eighth. They were becoming drugs to him, and the more days he spent staring at them, the more he got enraged with himself for his addiction. He had to move on and find new treasures. There was so much beauty in the past for him to take.

After he acquired his first Van Gogh, Starry Night, he took down the Lisas and cloistered them in a broom closet, their faces turned to the wall so they would not have the indignity of staring into darkness. It felt hateful to imprison them there, but he had to wean himself from their mysterious smiles and coy eyes before he gave them a permanent place in the gallery. While they cooled off in a dark corner, he would give Vincent a chance to grow on him.

But those teasing tarts called to him each morning, and when he woke up he had to run to the closest and drag them into the fresh light. He poured over them all morning, sitting cross-legged in the hall, before he even permitted himself one glimpse of Van Gogh’s masterpiece that now hung over the living room fireplace.

He placed the Lisas in a metal trunk and snapped a fingerprint scanner lock on it. That only slowed him down each morning. He looked for diversions. He stole two more Starry Nights. He loved them, but he loved his Lisas more.

Desperate to cure himself, Markus wrapped the Lisas in plain brown wrapping and stored them in the trunk of his car. He would still pop open the trunk every time he came back from a drive and undo the wrappings for a few glimpses, but he so seldom took car trips anymore (the machine took him anywhere and anywhen he wanted, and the museum rarely needed him to visit in person) that this solution at last slowed him down. Starry Night had started to fascinate him, and he would soon have four in his personal gallery. He also had his eye on a Picasso, but acquiring paintings from more recent history—less than hundred years ago—could be risky since the TTEA patrolled the recent past frequently, looking for fugitives who wanted to hide in the relative safety of a familiar time period.

Thanksgiving family dinner at his sister’s home in Colorado Springs forced him to leave his personal gallery and drive into the normal world. Twenty-first-century people bored him and his sister had married a techno-engineering snore named Kevin who chattered about moon colony investments and futures in nanotechnology firms. Markus loathed gizmos and gadgets, except for the one in his basement that supplied his private obsession. Even that gizmo he had shoved up against the corner like a broken lawnmower.

At the family gathering, Markus tolerated Kevin’s techno-babbling and the kids screaming games and his sister’s saccharine family prayers because he knew when he went home late that evening he would have an excuse to pop the trunk of the car and ogle his painted ladies once more.

“How’s the museum these days?” his sister asked him in a quiet moment after Markus had at last managed to trade Kevin off onto a more tolerant relative.

“Fine,” he answered. “I don’t go to it much in person any more. The curator has a good handle on it, and I get regular reports from the accountant. It’s paying for itself.”

His sister raised an eyebrow. “That doesn’t sound much like you, Markus. Mom used to have to drag you kicking and screaming out of art museums.”

“Midwest museums don’t have anything interesting. The good work is all in New York and Europe. And even what they have looks faded and old.”

“Don’t they restore them? I think I saw a vid-special on that last year.”

“You can restore a painting, but that removes it one more generation from what it once was. It makes it something else, something modern. You can’t hold and touch real art anymore.”

His sister had heard Markus’s speeches before and didn’t understand them, so she changed the subject. She tried to get him to speak about his social life, but he had nothing to tell. She asked him about women he might be seeing, but he could not tell her the truth: that all the heartbreaks of the first fifty years of his life and the pain of two divorces were finally buried because he had found the perfect woman. A woman whose mystery and coquettish stares made her special instead of infuriating. He couldn’t tell her this, so instead he shut up and ate his turkey dinner and slipped away as soon as politely possible so he could get back to that perfect woman. All eight of her.

When he pulled up to his street a few minutes after one in the morning, his hands shivering in excitement with the promise of unwrapping the plain paper package in his trunk, he noticed three new cars parked in front of his house. He lived on a lonely street; no one drove down it by accident, and the people who lived there didn’t want visitors. Markus knew every car. One new car was acceptable. Two new cars was suspicious. Three new cars meant the police.

He switched off his headlights and juiced down the electric engine to its lowest level. He squinted in the dark at the upper windows of his house. Shadows passed back and forth on the closed blinds of his gallery room. The shapes of the caps each one wore gave away their identities: TTEA. men.

How had they discovered him? Where had he stumbled? He never tried to sell a single art treasure on the time-duple black market. He hadn’t told anyone what he was doing. He had never dropped a single hint in a casual conversation. He never had casual conversations; he had no friends, lovers, or business partners.

That left only one person. It must have been Loew. Had to be. Markus remembered a report on the news, which he heard out of half an ear one morning when he switched on the vid-screen in a weak moment when he wanted to remember the modern world.

Lucius Loew, famed U.S. physicist and time-travel advocate, dies suddenly and leaves behind vaults of suspicious documents concerning illegal activities.

Loew had promised that he had destroyed all records of the machine. Markus had pestered and needled the scientist, asking for reassurance that nobody knew that Loew had built a temporal transport. Loew clucked his shaggy gray head and said: “How can I show you proof that no one knows something exists if that proof destroys the whole purpose of not existing?” Markus had to be satisfied with that. Loew liked to talk that way, and working out what he meant took too long

But Loew must have either lied or he did not understand how difficult it was to cover up a machine of that power. The government must have requisitioned his files, sorted through them paragraph by paragraph, line by line, until analysts spied a hole in the reams of computations and figures. Then would come the background checks, everyone Loew ever met for lunch or at a conference, whose videophone calls he had returned, whose secretary he had harassed.

Markus, who prided himself on being a nothing, a museum owner who never showed up for work, would leap right out of an investigation precisely because he tried so hard to be a nothing. Nothings created too many questions when examined closely.

The agents had probably already destroyed the machine. Markus could live with that. It was only wires, switches, and a low-power reactor. But he shuddered to think that the agents had shredded and burnt his Starry Nights. Time Transport Enforcement Authority agents didn’t care about art; cultural idiocy was a prerequisite for their job.

As Markus gazed at the shadows on the blinds, he thought about what those anonymous philistines would do to him when they captured him. They’d strip him and drag him into a lightless room beneath the capital. Forced into a granite throne that prickled against his naked flesh, he would stare up at an interrogator wearing steel-rimmed glasses. Only interrogators wore glasses anymore: they loved the way their eyes changed into hawk’s eyes when they squinted through cold metal frames with the light from the single florescent tube shimmering on the surface of the glass. Markus imagined the cruelest science professor in the world staring down at a pupil caught cheating on an exam.

“Where did you get your transport?” the interrogator would hiss.

“You know that already, that’s how you tracked me down.”

“You are aware of the laws against these devices, aren’t you, boy?” The college professor again.

“But I haven’t done anything wrong —”

“You went back in time, didn’t you?”

“Yes, but what’s wrong with that? I can’t change the present. The past fixes itself, like a rubber band that always snaps back into place. I can’t hurt anything. It’s always the same when I go back.”

“You time-thieves, you’re all alike,” the interrogator would cluck. He was looking at a very naughty boy, one who needed a whack across his knuckles with birch rod. “If everyone was as selfish as you and played with time like a box of building blocks, what kind of world would we have? Don’t answer! I’ll tell you: criminals who can hide in the time streams, killers who slay anyone they want in the past for a thrill and never receive punishment, and crooks like you who want to raid the beautiful treasures of history so you can sell them like digi-paks on the street and spend the loot to get yourself some really choice hookers.”

Markus’s face would turn red. He would try to glare back at those hawk eyes through the reflections on the panes. “What do you know of the beauties of history? You’ve never seen them. I have.”

The interrogator would grin; he had lost a point in a debate, but in this stone vault he held the power of pain. He would nod to the grunts in the shadows, and the granite against Markus’s back would prickle with waves of cold that burnt his skin, tore off bits of flesh that stuck to the frozen surface.

The nightmare made his skin prickle as if it had already come true. He reached for the car door handle and prepared for the long walk to his front porch, the sudden bustle of activity, rough hands seizing him, a TTEA goon reading him his rights. But Markus never opened the car door. He could hear the Lisas calling to him from behind the seats. They were still with him. Those brutes had taken his machine, but he had his paintings.

He juiced up the engine and backed down the street, keeping his lights off. He had a chance to slip away. A storm was coming tomorrow, and if he crossed the mountains to the north, a direction no one would expect him to take, he might escape. The agents would assume he would flee toward New Mexico, but instead he would snake through the Northern Rockies and head to Wyoming. He had heard rumors there were people up there who hid in catacombs beneath farms and played with machines like his; less powerful, less dependable, but they did the same job. He would give the owners a few Lisas—he could maybe stand to part with two—to buy a machine. Then he would escape back ten years, maybe twenty, and never come back.

He stopped only once on his drive to charge up his car at a juice station. He looked around nervously, checking to see that no one was on the lookout for his car. Maybe the TTEA had not contacted the Aurora police yet. The delay might give him some extra time. He had only to beat out the storm and he and his harem would be safe forever.

Markus’s body flinched in a seizure that jolted him awake. His eyes were open, but he could only see dancing spots in a gray mulch. He blinked and blinked. Ice cracked off his eyelids and painfully allowed them to open. Beneath his hand he felt the presence of his lovely girls sleeping at his side. But the paper covering that kept them snuggled together felt different. Markus lurched to his knees and bent over the parcel.

Something had torn it open. A Lisa stared up at him through the gash. Markus counted her sisters beneath. He found only seven altogether. One had left in the night.

Markus howled in pain, or thought he did. No echo bounced off the cave walls. The sound that returned to him was a whimpering, panting sound. It did not come from him, but from the visitor standing in the cave mouth:

The wolf looked husky and healthy. A Lisa dangled from its jaws and smiled at Markus across the cave. That smile that could mean anything now begged for help. She needed rescuing from the rending teeth.

“Put her down!” Markus shouted. He stumbled toward the wolf, almost tripping over the precious stack of paintings. They didn’t matter: only one of them desperately needed him.

The wolf backed away, its black eyes watching the lumbering man with lazy interest. Markus lunged, tripped, and fell face down. He inhaled snow through his mouth, coughed and spat it out. “Damn you, give it back!” he hollered, resuming his chase. “Don’t you know what you’ve got?”

Yes, yes, I do, the wolf nodded. It backed away from him. The Lisa now smiled in disappointment.

Markus crashed forward, rising and sinking through the drifts. He slipped and fell more than he moved forward, but the wolf never ran from him. It only backed farther away each time.

The wolf’s head disappeared below the slope of the hill that Markus had struggled up the day before. Markus pushed himself forward, forgetting the steepness of the grade. He tottered over, and the world flipped upside down just as it had yesterday when he slipped off the road and his great plan died in a roadside ditch.

He saw the wolf once, where it stood still on the slope watching him somersault down the hill. The Lisa now smiled in amusement, enjoying the clownish tumbling show.

As he rolled down the hill, Markus noticed other paintings were splayed over the snow banks. They created momentary flashes of beauty in the whiteness: Rembrandt’s Night Watch, a haunting Doré landscape, a junglescape by Henri Rousseau, Plato’s Academy by Raphael.

Markus’s body collided with a jagged stone at the bottom of the hill. The sharp edge pierced his back with a dagger of cold. It reminded him of the torture chair in the interrogation chamber. Only he had never been there. And he never would. He wasn’t going anywhere anymore.

As he lay immobile against the rock, he searched for the wolf. The hillside above him was bare. The furry thief must have gone back to gather the other Lisas so it could come back to gloat.

The wolf returned, and it brought company. Six TTEA agents in heavy coats, gold badges on their caps, laser flashlights in their hands marched behind it. The wolf stopped and let the men run past while it wagged its tail and let the Lisa smile down on Markus. Now the smile looked mocking.

“He’s finished,” said one of the agents. “He’s barely breathing as it is, and he’s already lost his nose and some of his fingers.”

“Even if he survives he’ll be paralyzed from this fall.” They spoke as if he were already dead. But one man, whose snow-goggles covered a pair of iron-rimmed glasses, bent over Markus.

“Can you hear me?” the interrogator asked. Even behind the muffle of his hood, his voice was piercing and demanding.

Markus nodded, then breathed: “Can you—get the paintings back from the wolf? Can you do that for me, at least? For them?”

“What wolf?”

“A wolf—stole one of my Lisas. Don’t you see it?” He pointed weakly at the animal on the hill. The Lisa in its teeth started to smile in a sorrowful way.

“The guy has lost his mind,” said another agent. “He’s going snow-blind.”

“How many paintings did you have in that cave?” asked the interrogator.

“Eight,” Markus mumbled. The snow around him began to feel relaxing, like a soothing bath.

“Then we’ve recovered all of them.”

“Good—good,” Markus managed to say. The light in the sky grew brighter, the world warmer. Even the Lisa’s smile changed from sorrow to hope.

“How much were you planning on unloading those paintings for?” the interrogator hissed, trying to have a small victory before he lost his victim. “Or maybe you were thinking of blackmailing the Euro government, trying to devalue the original?”

“No, no, nothing like that” Markus said. “I just wanted to know why she smiles the way she does.”

The Lisa smiled. Markus still didn’t know why she did, but at last he recognized what the smile meant: welcome home.

The End