Michelangelo_s Notebook

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.

Finn frowned and yawned. That sort of made sense, but the logic didn’t really hold up. Why come after her once she’d talked to the cop? And anyway, all Crawley had to do was hide or even destroy the drawing and the secret would have been safe, because the computer and all the material about the drawing’s provenance said it was by Santiago Urbino, a sixteenth-century secondrater. The only proof one way or the other lay in the digital chip in her camera. She stared into the gloom at her pack nestled at the end of the bed. Could that be it? Did Raptor Head or whomever he worked for know about the shots she’d taken? It was impossible; the file room at the gallery had been empty when she’d photographed the drawing and she hadn’t told anyone what she’d done, not even Peter. Finn yawned again. She had one last card to play, but that would have to wait for tomorrow. Next door she heard the sound of laughter and the sound of bedsprings creaking as one of the couple got up. She grimaced. At least someone had enjoyed their evening.