“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 was 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.