Michelangelo_s Notebook fr-1

by Paul Christopher

  “Oh, for God’s sake! I’m not a child. I can take care of myself, all right?” It was taking everything in her power to hold back a flood of tears. All she wanted right now was to curl up in her bed and go to sleep.

  Delaney stood up. “Well then,” he said quietly, “I’d best be on my way.”

  “Yes, you’d best.”

  Delaney took a couple of steps toward the door, edging around the bloodstain. He turned. “You’re sure it was a Michelangelo, aren’t you?”

  “Yes,” she said flatly. “It was a Michelangelo. I don’t care what Crawley said or why he said it.”

  “Maybe saying it is what got him killed,” said Delaney. “Did you ever think of that? And your knowing about it might have gotten your friend Peter killed instead of you.”

  “You’re just trying to scare me.”

  “Now why would I want to do a thing like that?” He turned back to the door and let himself out. A few moments later she heard the thump of the elevator arriving and then it was gone. She was alone. She stared at the dark stain and then looked away. Why would he want to scare her, and why was he so interested in a drawing that perhaps wasn’t by Michelangelo at all?

  Finn climbed wearily to her feet, double-locked the door, put the chain on, edged around the carpet stain and went to her bedroom, leaving the living room light on; there was no way she was going to be able to sleep in the dark tonight.

  In the bedroom she stripped off her clothes, found a long “Ohio-Home of Elsie” T-shirt with a huge illustration of the daisy-necklaced cow on the front and slid into bed. She turned off the bedside lamp and lay there, light spilling over the end of the bed from the open doorway. She could hear the city around her like a huge storm of energy that never ended. The building creaked, there were strange echoing sounds from the elevator, a scream from the projects behind her, the rumble of somebody dragging open a window downstairs. Maybe she had been stupid to stay here tonight.

  She could remember when her father had died. She’d been fourteen. When her mother had told her that Dad had died from a massive heart attack in some godforsaken place in Central America while on a dig she’d lain in bed just like this, staring up at the ceiling, listening to the night sounds, wondering how things could go on without the slightest acknowledgment that her father had died-that he was gone and would never be back, that he’d been totally removed from the entire scheme of things, exiled from the universe. Peter was dead; she’d never hear his voice again, feel his lips on hers, never even get the chance to choose whether she’d make love to him or not.

  She listened hard, squeezing her eyes shut, trying as hard as she could to sense some remnant of his being still lingering in the apartment. She could feel the tears coming again; it hadn’t worked when her father had died and it didn’t work now. He would come to her in haunting visions instead.

  She knew that like her father, she’d see Peter for weeks, just turning a corner, a passing glimpse in a crowd on a busy street, a face in the window of a cab, the sound of a whispering voice that wasn’t there, and then slowly, over time, it would all fade away like the rustle of old dead leaves in the wind, and then it would be gone for good. Memories and old bones-in her father’s case, lost in a jungle cenote, lying in the cold stony depths of some black, bottomless well.

  Finn lay there for a long time and finally sat up in bed. She knew her mother was off in the Yucatбn digging up the royal tombs at Copan but the crazy old girl had been known to pick up her messages from time to time and Ryan really did need to talk to someone, even if it was by voice-mail proxy.

  She switched on the bedside lamp, picked up the phone and began to dial her mother’s number in Columbus from memory. She waited, listening to the ring, and as the recording of her mother’s smoke-splintered drawl started, her heart almost stopped in her chest. Bile rose like hot acid in the back of her throat as she sat up, gently putting down the phone, not wanting to scare her mother with a message in her panic-stricken voice, because right now she knew that’s how it would sound.

  The doodle she’d made of the Michelangelo drawing was gone from the pad beside the telephone. She reached out gingerly and picked up the pad, rubbing her fingers across the blank page. Whoever had taken it had torn off several pages under it because there wasn’t the slightest impression. It was as though it never was.

  Had never been. Like Dad. Like Peter. Like she might be too, if the killer hadn’t panicked. She twisted herself around and dropped her bare feet onto the cold wood floor. Crawley dead, Peter dead, the drawing she’d made gone. Somebody was trying to make it seem like the page from the notebook had never existed, but why? A forgery? Something that the Parker-Hale was trying to offload on some poor unsuspecting curator at another museum? It didn’t seem likely, not for a single misfiled drawing, not to mention the fact that a museum with a reputation like the Parker-Hale’s wouldn’t put everything on the line for a single possible Michelangelo drawing.

  She swore she could hear the creaking step of somebody on the fire escape outside her kitchen window. She knew it was locked, but she also knew that a shirt wrapped around the hand and a single punch could break the glass. She looked around the bedroom frantically, saw her softball bat and glove in the corner near the door and flew to them, grabbing the bat and charging out into the living room. She turned to the kitchen alcove, stepped up to the sink and took a roundhouse swing at the dark reflective glass. It shattered into a thousand pieces as the blow struck, but there was no sound from the fire escape except the pattering of broken glass as it rained down five floors and eventually crashed into the Dumpster in the alley at the bottom.

  Finn didn’t waste time thinking about what she’d done; there could have been someone out there, and if Delaney was right about the man who had killed Peter and possibly killed Crawley too, eventually there would be somebody coming after her. Hanging on to the baseball bat she hustled back into the bedroom, grabbing her knapsack from beside the couch as she went.

  She emptied her books out of the pack, strewing them across the bed, leaving only her digital camera and the makeup bag she carried with her everywhere. She went into the bathroom, loaded herself down with everything from shampoo to tampons, jammed it into the knapsack and then threw in four or five pairs of cotton underwear, two bras, half a dozen T-shirts and some socks.

  She pulled and pushed herself into a skintight pair of black Gap jeans, slid on her sneakers and jammed her baseball cap on her head. A minute later she was out the door and taking the stairs instead of waiting for the elevator. She reached the bottom a little out of breath, unlocked her bike from its place behind the stairs and pushed out into the night. She checked the glow on her Timex: quarter to two. Hardly the best time of night to be on the run, but she didn’t have much choice. Between Peter’s death and Crawley’s murder in his office she was feeling more and more as though she had a target painted on her back.

  She dropped the pack into the big front basket, climbed onto the bike and pedaled herself up Fourth Street to First Avenue, got off her bike and went into the pay phone. She pulled her little black book out of the back pocket of her jeans, threw a quarter into the slot and dialed. It was answered on the third ring.

  “Coolidge.”

  “Is that you, Eugene?” His real name was Yevgeny but he’d Americanized it.

  “Is me. Who is this, please?” He sounded a little concerned, as though the KGB or his mother were calling him.

  “It’s Finn Ryan, Eugene. I’ve got a problem.”

  “Feen!” the young man exclaimed. He was one of Finn’s ESL students and he had a fixation on her breasts-or her ass, whichever happened to be facing him at the time-even though he’d denied it several times. “What is this problem you are having? I fix for you, no swee-at.” Yevgeny was the night manager at the Coolidge Hotel.

  “That’s sweat,” corrected Finn. “I need a room for the night.”

  “Here?” said Eugene, horrified. Finn smiled. She’d seen the Coolidge Hotel. It w
as a four-story, brick pigeon roost lurking under the Manhattan Bridge approaches on the tail end of Division Street, as if trying to distance itself from the flop-houses on the Bowery. It was ungentrifiable and it didn’t look as though anyone had even thought of trying.

  “Yes. There. Don’t worry. I’ve got a credit card. I can pay.”

  There was bitter laughter from the other end of the phone. Outside her phone booth half a dozen black teenagers were chasing an old man on a bicycle who seemed to be throwing old phone books at them, pulling them out of a frayed mail-bag he wore across his shoulders. New York. She had to get undercover, fast.

  “We don’t take no credit cards here, Feen-cash only.”

  “We don’t take any credit cards here,” she said, correcting him automatically.

  “Yes, any. That’s right.”

  “But I don’t have any cash.”

  “I do,” said Eugene. “You pay me back later, yes?”

  “Yes,” she answered, not sure if she wanted to be indebted to an eighteen-year-old Russian boy with zits on his chin and designs on her body.

  “You come now,” urged Eugene. “Not good for pretty girl like you to be out this late.” He laughed again. “Not good for ugly girl to be out this late.”

  “I’m on my way. If I’m not there in twenty minutes, call the cops.”

  There was a snorting sound from the other end of the phone line. “Eugene Zubinov never call for cop in his entire life. Not about to start, even for pretty girl like you, Feen. You hurry up your ass and get here quick so Eugene no worry no more, capiche?”

  Finn smiled into the phone. “Capiche,” she answered. She hung up the phone and got back on the Schwinn Lightweight, pausing for a moment to figure out her route. First was one way the wrong way and there was no way she was going to try riding on the sidewalk at this time of night. She could go over to Second, then down into the Financial District, but she’d be heading into a dead zone this late at night; if anything happened to her down there she’d never get help. Instead she turned the bike around and went back down to Avenue A, pumping the pedals full tilt as she sped past her building, then hanging a right, the fat tires hissing on the pavement as she stood up in the seat, getting as much speed as she could. She turned onto Houston and into heavier traffic, even at this time of night, keeping as close to the curb as she could, watching for parked cars opening their doors and keeping her eyes peeled for the dangerous yellow rush of taxis playing thread-the-needle on her left.

  By the time she reached Eldridge Street and turned left, heading toward the bottom of the island, she sensed that someone was on her tail. Every time she zigged or zagged around a car she’d catch a brief glimpse of another bike a hundred yards behind. In the streetlights it gleamed, sleek and expensive-looking, its gold and black molybdenum frame with rams’ horn handlebars and razor-thin racing tires ridden by someone in the full package: skintight black racing shirt with dark Spandex cycle shorts, jet-black riding shoes and a black Kevlar raptor-style helmet, pointed down the back with an opaque angled visor in front. The kind of getup you saw on top-end bicycle couriers during the day running packages and envelopes all over the city, driving like bats out of hell and not giving a damn for anyone else on the road, from buses and garbage trucks right down to other bicycle couriers and even pedestrians.

  He stayed on her tail, never gaining and never falling back, and by the time she got as far as Grand Street she was starting to get frightened. At first she thought the rider’s presence had been simple coincidence-two people going in the same direction-but what bicycle courier is still working at two in the morning? It might have been a cop, but she knew they rode mountain bikes and wore easily identifiable, bright-colored nylon shells. She remembered the awful sound Peter had made just before he died and pedaled faster, the sweat running down her sides and between her breasts. There had to be some way to lose him.

  The best way to lose him was to lose herself. Without pause she swung the bicycle to the right, suddenly finding herself in a dangerous maze of delivery trucks around the big residential block of Confucius Square, known to the people who traveled through it as Confusion. She skidded around a man carrying the gutted corpse of two pigs, threw herself down a narrow alley piled high with boxes of rotting vegetables, then turned again down an even narrower alley packed with wooden crates that went flying as she passed. She heard screaming in Chinese as the clutch of a hand grabbed at her T-shirt and a bottle flipped by in front of her face, smashing loudly into the brick wall on the far side of the alley.

  Sobbing, she swerved, tires almost slipping out from under her as she made the turn onto Pell Street and into the thick of the late-night Chinatown trade. Slaloming around cars, she bounced the old bicycle up onto the sidewalk, sideswiped a display of mysterious fruits and vegetables outside a tiny storefront then cut in front of an old man in a black cap and bedroom slippers, coming so close her shoulder actually brushed the butt end of the hand-rolled cigarette from the man’s slack lips, sending up a trail of sparks.

  She came out onto Doyers Street and pulled hard left, still seeing her pursuer’s reptilian helmet out of the corner of her eye. He was closer, less than a hundred feet, and now he was making no pretense about following her. Directly ahead of her was the intersection of Doyers Street and Bowery, the lights at the corner just going from yellow to red. Heart pounding and lungs aching she put out her last bit of strength, pushing as hard as she could on the pedals. Reaching the intersection just as the light went to red, she squeezed her eyes tightly shut, said a quick prayer and sailed across the opening. Eyes still closed, she heard the screaming of brakes and blaring horns followed by the satisfying crush of metal against metal. Without the time or the inclination to look back and see what kind of havoc she had wreaked, she kept on going across Kimlau Square and onto Division Street, then turned onto Market, following it down toward the East River in the shadow of the bridge, finally turning directly under the giant structure and in front of the grimy front entrance of the Coolidge Hotel. Panting hard, she dropped down off the bike, pushing it through the creaking wooden double doors and finally came to a stop.

  Eugene, skinny, dark and dressed in a poorly fitting shiny black suit and a white collarless shirt stepped out from behind the birdcagelike enclosure at the bottom of the stairs.

  “You are in trouble, Feen?”

  “Get rid of the bike for me. If a guy comes in here dressed in Spandex bicycle shorts and one of those dinosaur helmets, you never saw me.”

  “Dinosaur helmets?”

  “Stick with the Spandex.” She yanked her bag out of the carrier basket, still breathing hard. “Get me a key and I’ll love you forever, Yevgeny.” She held the fat-tired bike while the young man ran back to his cage, grabbed a key from the half-empty rack on the wall and trotted back to her, holding it out like one of the Magi bearing a gift. He was very definitely staring at the sweat stain between her boobs.

  “Fourth floor, in the back, very private.”

  “Thanks, Eugene.” She leaned over the bike, kissed him on the cheek, then left him holding the bike as she ran for the stairs. The young man followed her with his eyes, a small, happy smile lingering on his lips. After a few moments he sighed and wheeled the bicycle around in the tiny lobby of the hotel and pushed it through a doorway leading to the office behind his perch in the birdcage.

  “Feen,” he whispered quietly to himself, lost in some dreamy, damp-eyed adolescent fantasy. “Feen.”

  11

  Room 409 at the Coolidge was slightly larger than a prison cell and only a little better decorated. The room was roughly twelve by twelve with a single, small grimy window looking out into the tangle of steel supports for the bridge and a minuscule, cluttered view of the East River beyond. There was a faded square of blue carpeting on a wood floor, a brown metal bed and a beige three-drawer dresser with a crazed mirror.

  Through the wall she could hear somebody else’s bed squeaking and a headboard rhythmically striking
the adjoining wall between them as a male voice repeated the words “Oh Mama, oh Mama” over and over again. There was a small bathroom done in shades of orange, with a used condom and the fizzled butt of a cigarette floating in the toilet bowl and two cockroaches standing motionless in the bottom of the tub. There were two separate faucets on the old porcelain sink and both of them dripped.

  Finn dropped her bag on the narrow bed, went back to the door and made sure it was firmly locked. Then she went into the bathroom, ignored the toilet and splashed her face with lukewarm water from the taps. She looked at herself briefly in the cracked and chipped mirror on the front of the medicine chest then looked away again.

  Her boyfriend’s getting his throat slit and then her being chased halfway down the city in the middle of the night didn’t do much for her appearance. Tense and exhausted didn’t begin to describe it. She could probably pack a lunch in the bags under her eyes and imitate a raccoon while she was doing it. She used her sleeve to dry off her face rather than one of the gray Coolidge towels on the plastic bar beside the sink. Finn went back into the bedroom, flicked off all forty watts of the overhead light and lay down on the old iron bed. Light from a neon sign washed in the window, which was partially open with a screen insert in the bottom. “Oh Mama” next door had changed to “Oh God,” but at least Finn had to give him credit for stamina. Outside and over her head, trucks rumbled over the old steel bridge and cars made smaller, insectlike sounds as their wheels spun over the grated surface of the road. “Oh God” changed to “I’m gonna let it go!” And then he did, in a series of incoherent grunts and squeals, and finally he was silent. She fluffed up the tiny pillow behind her head and looked at her watch. It was three o’clock in the morning.

  According to her mother, anthropology and archaeology were guesswork and personal interpretation backed up by a smidgen of logic to make it look more scientific. She tried to apply the same system to her present situation. At first there didn’t seem to be any connection between Peter’s and Crawley’s murders, but the disappearance of the doodles beside the phone and being followed by Raptor Head had changed that. Following her meant that he’d been watching the apartment, waiting for her. He probably had been willing to wait for the entire night. Following her in the morning would have been easier with all the traffic, and there was a good chance he wouldn’t have been detected. The real question was why he was following her at all. The only connection she could see was the Michelangelo drawing: someone was so hell-bent on covering up the fact that it existed they were willing to kill-and more than once-to see that the secret was kept.