Michelangelo's Notebook Part 4

"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 a.s.s 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 s.h.i.+rt 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 h.e.l.l and not giving a d.a.m.n 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 sh.e.l.ls. She remembered the awful sound Peter had made just before he died and pedaled faster, the sweat running down her sides and between her b.r.e.a.s.t.s. 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 pa.s.sed. She heard screaming in Chinese as the clutch of a hand grabbed at her T-s.h.i.+rt and a bottle flipped by in front of her face, smas.h.i.+ng 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 b.u.t.t 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, pus.h.i.+ng 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, pus.h.i.+ng it through the creaking wooden double doors and finally came to a stop.

Eugene, skinny, dark and dressed in a poorly fitting s.h.i.+ny black suit and a white collarless s.h.i.+rt 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 b.o.o.bs.

"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 b.u.t.t of a cigarette floating in the toilet bowl and two c.o.c.kroaches 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 racc.o.o.n 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 G.o.d," 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 G.o.d" 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 h.e.l.l-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.

12.Finn knew she must have fallen asleep because she was suddenly awake. The sounds outside had faded to an occasional truck muttering its way across the bridge over her head. Thankfully her sleep had been deep and dreamless. She glanced at her watch, simultaneously aware that she'd slept in her clothes. She looked at the dial of the Timex and it took a little while for it to sink in. It was six in the morning and there was light coming in through the grimy window. "Oh Mama, oh G.o.d, I'm going to let it go" was quiet in the next room.

So what had woken her up? She stiffened on the bed, all her nerves jangling at full alert as she concentrated. Squeaks and creaks normal for an old building, rumbling echoes from the bridge, a distant siren and a scratching sound. Mice, or worse, in the walls? Rats? She'd heard of New York rats, even seen a few. Great big filthy things with yellow teeth sometimes so long they'd pierced their own lower lip. It was the stuff of bad horror movies at the drive-in.

No. Not a Hollywood rat. She let her eyes go wide and stared at a point in the air halfway between the bed and the ceiling, the same kind of thing she did in a life drawing cla.s.s, concentrating on nothing, waiting for the sound to come again. And it did. Not scratching, but an insistent rubbing sound, metal on wood. She sat up quietly and looked at the door. There it was-a square tongue of metal moving slowly up and down the crack of the door, looking for the hasp of the lock. A steel ruler. Somebody was trying to get in and she doubted that it was Eugene. Raptor Head? More likely. She swung her legs off the bed and reached out, grabbing her pack. Here was one of those situations you never see in movies: the woman is about to get raped or murdered by the guy with jackknives for fingers coming through the door and she has to pee so bad she knows she'll wet her pants in another second.

"s.h.i.+t," she whispered. She cleared her throat loudly and then thumped her feet on the floor. The scratching stopped, the gleaming end of the ruler frozen. On tiptoes she slipped into the bathroom and pulled down her jeans and panties. Without letting her b.u.m anywhere near the toilet seat she squatted over the bowl, peed and wiped faster than she'd ever done in her life.

She turned and flushed, pulling up her panties and jeans, watching the condom and the cigarette b.u.t.t swirl desultorily away along with the two c.o.c.kroaches who seemed to have moved into the toilet and formed a suicide pact while she was sleeping. She b.u.t.toned up her jeans, slipped out of the bathroom and grabbed her pack. Finn stared at the door. The straightedge was still there, not moving. She leaned over the bed and pressed down, making the bedsprings squeak, then heaved a dramatic sigh as though she were settling herself for sleep again. She moved over to the window and waited, her eyes on the door.

A full minute pa.s.sed and then the sawing motion of the ruler began again. Pus.h.i.+ng the pack up onto one shoulder Finn quietly pulled up on the window. She was surprised when it slid easily. She grabbed at the screen insert, easing it to the floor. With the window wide open she stuck her head out to see if there was any way to escape; if not, she'd have to stand by the door and belt the guy with her pack when he finally slipped the lock.

Outside the window there was a fire escape landing and another section of stairs that led to the roof. It wasn't much but it was better than nothing. She threw one leg through the opening, ducked her head and stepped out onto the fire escape. It seemed to s.h.i.+ver as she put her weight on it-she could actually see the rusty bolts pulling away from the brick wall. She began to climb as quietly as she could.

There was a curved handle at the top. She grabbed it and pulled herself up and onto the roof. She'd been expecting some kind of doorway leading down to a stairway, but there was nothing-just a rippling, wobbly-looking expanse of tarred roof with puddles here and there.

There were half a dozen toilet standpipes and a curved vent stack, but that was it. She'd gone from the room below into the frying pan up here. There was no fire; things couldn't get any worse. Then they did. She clearly heard a loud clang as somebody stepped out onto the fire escape. It had to be Raptor Head. Finn figured she had about thirty seconds before he'd be joining her on the roof.

To the left, glittering in the early morning sun she could see the windows of the curving Confucius Tower. To the right was the dirty streak of the East River and the mosaic of rooftops between the river and the Coolidge. She could scream for help, it wasn't likely to get her any. She was on her own.

Five feet over her head were the lowest girders of the Manhattan Bridge. She ran to the middle of the roof, scrambled up the curving air vent and then reached up with both hands. She grabbed the broad girder, flipped her legs up and gripped the f.l.a.n.g.es on either side of the girder with her sneakers. Gathering her strength, she pulled herself higher, arching her back and then flipping herself over so that she was lying belly-down on the beam.

Once on the girder, she got up into a crouch and looked across to the fire escape. She could just see the top of the black helmet. She stood and ran, keeping to the center of the girder, drawing in her breath sharply as the Coolidge roof suddenly disappeared and she was four stories above the sidewalk.

Every now and again she ran into a vertical girder and had to stop and edge around it. The farther out over thin air she got the harder her heart beat and the more unsure of herself she became. The empty s.p.a.ce under the bridge was mostly a repository for abandoned cars, and if she fell now that's what she'd hit first. She risked a look back and to her horror saw Raptor Head playing acrobat on the girders as well, except he didn't seem even remotely nervous as he deftly made his way around the verticals, barely slowing down.

He was gaining, and Finn knew she didn't have a hope of reaching the far abutment to the bridge where she could finally climb down. It took him five minutes but he was eventually only a dozen yards behind her and moving fast. At the next vertical she'd have to slow down again and she'd lose even more time; they'd wind up being on the same girder. She heard a faint clicking sound from behind her, and terrified, she turned. She'd heard the sound before-last night, just before Peter had died.

Behind her the blank-faced man in the black helmet and skintight bicycle shorts was moving, poised and perfectly balanced along the girder, a long thin knife in his right hand, held between thumb and forefinger like a portrait painter's sable brush. He moved easily toward the last vertical between them and started to swing around it, one-handed. She heard a giggling, shallow laugh echoing from inside the helmet and something in her snapped. Instead of running from the dark, sinister figure in his obscenely revealing outfit she did the exact opposite, rus.h.i.+ng back along the girder, stripping off her pack with one hand, her fiery hair blowing wildly in the wind as she swung the pack as hard as she could, catching Raptor Head right between the legs as he swung around the vertical.

He screamed as the knapsack connected with his groin, losing his balance at the worst possible moment. He lost the knife, the blade twinkling in the sunlight as it twisted and turned its way toward the ground, bouncing off the broken winds.h.i.+eld of an old car before flipping off into a thin stand of weeds beside a tire. Raptor Head held on for half a second more before he found himself too overbalanced to pull himself back to the safety of the girder.

He fell, doing a slow half gainer with a twist, screaming all the way down and hitting the same winds.h.i.+eld as his knife, going through it instead of bouncing off. The impact cracked the visor on his helmet like a black egg and she saw his face, a young b.l.o.o.d.y horror, Asian-either Chinese or Vietnamese. He wasn't moving. Sobbing, half with fear and half with relief, Finn stared down at him, wondering how her life could have changed so quickly and so completely. She slipped the pack on her shoulders again then turned away and headed back along the girder and to the street.

13.Lieutenant Vincent Delaney stood on the sidewalk with his hands stuffed in his pockets, looking up at the building on the corner. The street in front of him was littered with fire trucks, paramedic units and squad cars. Lights were flas.h.i.+ng everywhere. There was crime scene tape all over the place and a lot of people in bathrobes and slippers behind it. Most of them had been there for several hours and they weren't looking too pleased about it. Sergeant William Boyd, his partner, rolled around the corner, two Styrofoam cups of coffee in his hand and a greasy bag held between his teeth like a St. Bernard. He reached Delaney, handed him one of the coffees, then transferred the paper bag to his free hand. He popped the top off his coffee, shook the bag open and offered it to Delaney.

"Doughnut?"

"Sure." Delaney peered into the bag, found a chocolate glazed and lifted it out. He took a bite, then washed it down with some coffee. Boyd chose a banana cream. Delaney stared up at the building again. The entire top floor was a charred ruin. "What did you find out?"

"Fire started around four thirty. Apparently you can smell gasoline on the fifth floor landing, so it's definitely arson." Boyd finished the cream doughnut and dug into the bag for something else. A maple walnut this time. He chewed and slurped.

"Anyone up there?"

"Old guy in 5B. He gets up early so he smelled it first. Called it in and then got out himself. He doesn't know about 5A. Says the whole back part of the building was where the fire was." Boyd washed away the last of the maple walnut with the last of his coffee.

"Firemen been in there yet?"

"Yup."

"Find anything?"

"Nope." A cinnamon this time. The bag was now empty so he dropped his coffee cup into it, scrunching the whole thing into a sticky wad.

"Your flair for description is amazing, Billy, as is your appet.i.te."

"Well, they didn't find anything. You want me to lie?"

"What about the canva.s.sing?"

"The old guy in 5B says he heard someone go down the stairs at a little after two."

"He see who it was?"

"No."

"Anything else."

"The pay phone at the corner."

"What about it."

"I had the LUDs checked just in case," he said, referring to the local use details. "There was a phone call made about two ten."

"Interesting."

"Yeah, well, what's more interesting is where it was made to."

"Don't be coy, Billy. It doesn't suit you."

"The Coolidge."

"That flophouse by the bridge?"

"That's the one. I got a uniform to drive over and talk to the night manager about the call. Turns out the night manager's behind the counter with his throat slit. About ten minutes later some old wino comes in and says a black devil came through the window of his house and got blood over everything."

"What the h.e.l.l's that supposed to mean?"

"Some Vietnamese punk in black bike gear got tossed off the bridge or something and came through the window of an old Chevy the wino was sleeping in. Messy. Funny thing is, a switchblade was found just outside the car in some weeds." Billy looked up at the building. "Think there could be a connection?"

"Yeah, Billy, I think there just might be. Maybe we should get over there and take a look."

They climbed into Delaney's unmarked Crown Victoria, Boyd behind the wheel, and drove against traffic up Sixth past the looming Village View project to the corner. Delaney glanced out at the phone booth and Boyd gave a whoop on the siren behind the grill, clearing the way across First Avenue. They continued along Sixth Street, Boyd's big red nose actually twitching as they went by the half dozen restaurants that made up Little India. Doughnuts or tandoori chicken, Boyd welcomed it all with a totally unprejudiced gullet.

The big unmarked G-car swung south down Second Avenue. They reached the corner of Second and Houston and Boyd was about to turn west when Delaney screamed at him.

"Stop the car! It's her!"

"Who?"

"Just stop the G.o.dd.a.m.n car, will ya!?"

Just as they'd gone into their turn Delaney had seen a flash of bright red hair coming up out of the Second Avenue subway station on the south side of Houston Street, the figure resolving itself into Finn Ryan. The tires on the Crown Vic screeched in protest as Boyd jammed on the brakes, and for some reason his hand jabbed out and pushed the siren b.u.t.ton. The horn whooped and moaned as Delaney wove through the traffic.

Finn turned at the sound and saw Delaney pounding across the six lanes of Houston Street traffic toward her, dodging taxis and delivery vans like a running back trying to avoid being tackled. She stood for one frozen instant at the top of the subway stairs, then turned and ducked down into the darkness again. By the time Delaney reached the south side of Houston Street she was gone. He stood panting at the subway entrance. She was lost and he didn't have the slightest idea where she was going.

14.Finn rode the F train one stop to Broadway-Lafayette, changed for a downtown G train and then changed again for a Brooklyn-bound 4 train, which she rode all the way down to Bowling Green. She stood rigidly, her hand wrapped around the pole, staring at the doors and not really seeing anything at all or anyone around her. Seeing Delaney had been the last straw. The look of the man as he came hurtling across the street wasn't that of someone willing to offer a helping hand. He already thought she was somehow implicated in Peter's death and probably had something to do with Crawley's murder as well. Adding Raptor Head to the body count wasn't going to make him any less suspicious even if it had obviously been self-defense. She didn't even know who the Asian kid was, for crying out loud! Suddenly she was a suspect in multiple murders with cops chasing after her up and down New York streets and into the subway.

The train rolled into the Bowling Green station at the southern tip of Manhattan and Finn snapped out of her fugue. According to the map the next stop was Borough Hall in Brooklyn. She'd had a hard enough time learning how to navigate around Manhattan; this was definitely not the time to start on a new borough. When the doors slid open she stepped out along with a couple of dozen bright young things, male and female, out to make their mark on Wall Street, no doubt.

Finn climbed up to the surface, glanced briefly in the direction of where the Twin Towers had stood, then turned away and crossed over into Battery Park. She found a bench down by the jogging path that ran right around Manhattan's big toe and stared downriver at the Statue of Liberty, a distant ghost in the morning haze. She stripped off her knapsack, put it on the bench then sat down beside it, curling one long leg underneath herself, thinking out her options.

Her name was Fiona Katherine Ryan from Columbus, Ohio, and she was an art history student at NYU. She'd slept with fewer than half a dozen guys, she liked Haagen-Dazs better than Ben and Jerry's and she didn't really believe anything she heard on Howard Stern or saw on s.e.x and the City reruns. She'd traveled to Italy, spent a little bit of time in Amsterdam and Paris and she'd been well and truly drunk about three times in her life. She didn't smoke dope or take drugs except for Extra Strength Tylenol when she had especially bad period cramps. She worried about zits in the winter. The biggest secret she had was the knowledge that she would have s.e.x with Johnny Depp in the middle of Times Square if he asked her to, which wasn't likely. She knew she was fairly intelligent, maybe a little smarter than average. She knew she was pretty, but not beautiful, which was fine with her. She liked small animals, especially cats. She didn't much care for spiders or anchovies.

In other words, she was completely normal. So what was she doing being homeless, chased by cops and guys with great big knives? She was caught in the middle of something but she didn't have the slightest idea what. All she knew right now is that she wished she smoked. She sighed and stared at the ripply patch in front of her where the waters of the East River and the Hudson met. That was kind of how she felt right now-swept along.

She had a twentieth-century English lit prof they called the Bald Bear because he had hair all over his body and none on his head. He was in his forties, wore argyle socks and shorts to school in the middle of February and talked on endlessly about the Ambler theorem. Eric Ambler was an early thriller writer and all of his books followed the same pattern: an ordinary person suddenly finds him- or herself in an extraordinary, and usually dangerous, set of circ.u.mstances. The Bald Bear had all sorts of his own theories about why Ambler wrote this way, but Finn was pretty sure he did it because he knew that spies and murderers weren't going to be reading his books-ordinary people were, so why not deal them into the game?

Well, that was her, and for the moment she couldn't see any way out. And in this case it was no game. If she went and handed herself over to Delaney she'd have to start everything by explaining why she ran. She had visions of Law & Order interrogation rooms, being interviewed by Lenny Briscoe and being thrown into some women's jail. The only other option she could see was simply getting out of town and going back to Columbus. She had a key to the house, a bank account and friends. She could camp out there forever, or at least until her mother got back from the Yucatan or wherever. At least she'd be safe there. Or would she?

Someone had been waiting in her apartment and had slashed Peter's throat. Probably the same person who had killed Crawley and had tried for her again this morning. She didn't kid herself that the Asian kid on the bicycle was anything else but hired help. Crazy as it sounded, someone wanted her dead because she'd seen, or simply knew about the drawing from Michelangelo's notebook, and they weren't going to stop chasing her now. How difficult would it be to find out who the nude model with the red hair was at the New York Studio School, or Cooper Union? Not to mention NYU. She wouldn't be difficult to trace back to Columbus at all.

A tug slid by, sending up a muscular-looking bow wave. So what did you do when you were drowning and going down for the third time? You screamed for help, that's what you did. Finn didn't have a bullhorn or a whistle but she did have a phone number.

"If it's really life or death and you can't get in touch with me for some reason phone this number." Her mother had given her the longest, dirtiest look ever and then scowled even harder. "And I mean real life or death, sister, or you can come back and finish college here and marry David Weiner."

The ultimate threat. David Weiner, aka the Weenie, had loved her since he was six years old and still carried a torch for her she could see from Manhattan on clear nights. He had been the only boy in Columbus to throw up during his own bar mitzvah, splas.h.i.+ng the rabbi and narrowly missing the Torah he was supposed to be reading from. The Weenie was now a s.p.a.ce architect, which wasn't half as exotic as it sounded. It meant he never actually designed anything; you told him how many people you had to fit into a building and he told you how many toilets you needed and how many cubic feet of air you were going to need so people wouldn't suffocate. David was, of course, now getting extremely wealthy, but was still dull as plaster drying. He had hair like a scouring pad and feet so big he could walk across Lake Erie and not get his ankles wet.

According to her mother the man at the other end of the phone number had worked with her father. Her mother had said it strangely at the time, as though her father had been something other than a professor of anthropology from Ohio State. Finn had quizzed her, but her mom had clammed right up. The look on her face said it wouldn't be wise to dig any deeper.

Her mother had used an indelible laundry marker to ink the number onto the inside flap of her knapsack, reversing the number and adding three extra digits to the left and two to the right. When she was finished doing that she made Finn memorize the number until she had it cold. Not the normal mother-henning you expect from a mom sending her daughter off to university, but then Amelia McKenzie Ryan was no normal mother hen. Whatever the case, this was the life and death situation she'd talked about. Finn lifted up her pack and walked back across the park to the pay phone at the edge of the sidewalk. She dug a quarter out of her jeans, dropped it in the slot and punched in the numbers. It rang three times and then anticlimactically it clicked over to an answering machine.

"This is Michael Valentine at Ex Libris, 32 Lispenard Street, New York. We are open by appointment only. Please leave your name, telephone number and any other particulars you want and hopefully I'll get back to you sometime in the near future. Bye." There was a beep and then nothing.

"Well, screw you too!" said Finn, racking down the receiver. Appointment only? Hopefully? Sometime? The near future? One thing this Michael Valentine was not, was a businessman. This was the guy who was supposed to help her out of a jam? On the other hand he did have a nice voice; mid-baritone, a little rough around the edges and with a sense of humor lurking in the background somewhere. The kind of person you hoped wound up looking like Al Pacino, except younger and taller. But they never did.

Since she didn't have the faintest idea where Lispenard Street was she hailed a cab and gave the driver the address. He had no idea where it was either, but at least he had a Hagstrom Five Borough Atlas to consult. After figuring out that it was close by, he did a circle around Beaver Street, went back up Broadway and let her out fifteen blocks later. It turned out Lispenard was a narrow street of old loft buildings that ran for two blocks between Broadway and Sixth Avenue. Halfway down the first block she saw an awning with Michel Angelo's Pizza on it and wasn't quite sure what kind of omen that was. The main floors of most of the buildings had been opened as shops, mostly galleries and cafes. Not 32 Lispenard; the windows had been boarded up and then covered with steel shutters all the way up to the roof. The only entrance was a plain gray door with a complicated lock and a faded business card thumbtacked at eye level.

Ex Libris Antiquaria. Research information.

By appointment only.

Please look at the camera and smile.

The camera turned out to be a small black box the size of a walnut in the upper left-hand corner of the doorframe. She looked up at it, stuck her tongue out and frowned. "How's that, Mr. Arrogant p.r.i.c.k?" she muttered.

"That's fine, sweetheart, but I really would appreciate a smile." The answer came back almost immediately and Finn jumped back, blus.h.i.+ng furiously.