It doesn’t make him any less of a loser.
When I asked him which ones he’d recognized, though, most turned out to be ones I hadn’t known─so maybe it’s more accurate to call him a niche enthusiast than an ignoramus.
That stinks.
Anyhow, I could see how the highly cultured student council president would recognize eighty percent of the paintings, but it was a real surprise that Mr. Bare-Legs─whose only brush with culture was probably in his morning yogurt─recognized twenty-two of them, a full two-thirds.
Even if the reason he gave such a specific number was just that his knowledge was more concrete and less nebulous than my own, still, I was amazed to find his appearance belied not only unexpected athleticism but intellect as well.
As clever as he is beautiful, it seems.
“Uh, I’d hold off on the praise if I were you. Look, classic paintings are, like, all nudes. So I just end up absorbing the knowledge while I’m checking out the ladies.”
Yeah, forget the praise.
And he has the nerve to say it with that adorable, bashful smile!
But he was right, a lot of the originals these paintings were based on did feature naked women─so I suppose Mr. Bare-Legs started with a leg up on the competition (not that it’s a competition).
“I’m no match for Nagahiro, though. Guess dragging your first-grade fiancée to the museum every day pays off.”
“Hyota. I do not drag her to the museum every day. Please refrain from saying things that could be misinterpreted,” the councilman scolded him sharply. But he does do it every month or so, from what I hear─so I nonchalantly took a few steps back, putting a little distance between myself and the dangerous individual.
The taciturn child genius hadn’t revealed how many he knew, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he’d recognized all thirty-three paintings from the start, given that it’s his area of expertise─we were busy wracking our brains, but he probably hadn’t even seen it as a mystery.
The problem, however, was our leader.
Who’d recognized none.
I suppose that’s understandable enough for a fifth grader, but come on, he should at least know one!
“Unfortunately, you see, my mind is untrained─though my aesthetic eye is not.”
“Aren’t we talking about aesthetic eyes right now?”
Though he did say they were all beautiful, come to think of it, which I suppose qualified as discerning in its own way─after all, they were all based on timeless masterpieces.
Of course, I’m sure they wouldn’t measure up if you compared them to the originals.
Even without the effects of their poor storage conditions, subtracting all the people from great paintings was something of a debasement. At the very least, it couldn’t possibly be an improvement.
“Or is this a standard exercise for painters? They say all art begins with imitation, and I guess filling in the landscape where the humans used to be takes a certain skill…” I tacitly directed this at the child genius, only to be tacitly ignored─my suspicion that the younger student hated me seemed more credible every day.
“In my admittedly limited experience, I’ve never heard of any such exercise,” Vice President Sakiguchi, the conscience─or perhaps the criminal─of the Pretty Boy Detective Club replied in his stead. “By the by, the reproduction of famous artwork is strictly prohibited by law in some instances. One is not permitted to use the same size canvas as the original, for example.”
Very thorough of him to round out his response with an added bit of trivia.
Was that because some copies were so perfect that they couldn’t otherwise be distinguished from the originals? Though that didn’t apply to these paintings, of course─they had become entirely different works of art.
But then again, the quality was so high that it seemed unlikely they were done for practice. They would only look inferior if we placed them next to the originals.
And there was the real puzzle.
Why in the world had the artist created these strange paintings, and so many of them at that?
“Hmm… It’s almost as if the people imprisoned in the locked rooms of these canvases have all made a dramatic escape!” Sotoin exclaimed, his imagination running wild.
A true mental athlete.
Or would that be aesthete?
Though “locked room” did sound very much like something the leader of a detective club would say.
Then again, even though a canvas is certainly a sort of locked room, they’d vanished from the places they belonged, which really made it less like an escape…and more like a…
“Should we assume there was only one painter?” Sakiguchi asked of no one in particular.
“I sure as hell hope there aren’t more than one of these weirdos out there!”
The delinquent’s response was pure emotional reaction, but yeah, I had to agree.
“Wow, that’s the first time we’ve ever agreed on anything.”
“Cut the shit, Dojima. You’re not my rival.”
Damn, that was cold.
“You have a point, Michiru. The artist’s unique touch gives it away─I’m sure these paintings are as close as possible to the originals, but they share a certain character that can’t be concealed,” the leader said, like he was suddenly some expert on painting. His reliability was highly questionable, though. “Why make these paintings, and why hide them in the crawl space? Ah, how delightful! An endless font of mysteries!”
“But Sotoin, regardless of how many artists there were, how can we ever find out the answers to those questions?”
We’d ended up with an impromptu art show, but I thought we were lucky just to have been able to figure out why the thirty-three canvases had seemed so weird.
No way we were going to be able to pin down the details of these paintings that had been hidden away in the crawl space for…conservatively, I’d say three years, at the very least.
“Hmm. Then let us turn our attention to a different mystery.”
“A different mystery?”
There were more?
Apparently, the mysteries really were endless.
“Don’t tell me it’s another beautiful one,” I said, a tad sarcastically.
“No, you could call this mystery the very opposite of beautiful─and yet we absolutely must investigate it,” Sotoin replied bewilderingly.
The opposite of beautiful?
But we still had to investigate?
The real mystery was what in the world he was talking about.
“What do you mean, Mr. President?” asked Mr. Bare-Legs, who seemed as confused as I was.
“We will table the question of why the artist painted these pictures for the moment─but as for the question of why the artist didn’t paint that picture, well, that is a mystery the Pretty Boy Detective Club must face,” Sotoin replied.
That painting? What painting?
“The most famous painting in the world, so famous even an uneducated fellow like me knows it: Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa.” Sotoin cocked his head before continuing. “A student of beauty such as myself simply cannot accept that the artist painted so many canvases without including the Mona Lisa.”