Michelangelo_s Notebook fr-1

by Paul Christopher

  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 amp; 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 Yucatбn 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, splashing the rabbi and narrowly missing the Torah he was supposed to be reading from. The Weenie was now a space 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 cafйs. 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 Prick?” she muttered.

  “That’s fine, sweetheart, but I really would appreciate a smile.” The answer came back almost immediately and Finn jumped back, blushing furiously.

  “Step closer. You’ve gone out of range of the camera,” said the voice.

  Finn stepped forward again. “I phoned you but there was only a message.”

  “That’s all there ever is. The number’s unlisted. How did you get it?”

  “Uh, my mother gave it to me.”

  “Your mother’s name is ‘Uh’?”

  “My mother’s name is Amelia McKenzie Ryan.”

  There was a brief silence. “Your dad was Lyman Andrew Ryan?”

  “That’s right.”

  “He had a nickname.”

  “That’s right. He did.”

  “Tell it to me.”

  “Why should I?”

  “Because if you don’t, I won’t open the door so you can tell me your problem.”

  “Why do you think I have a problem?”

  “Don’t be irritating. Your mother didn’t give you this number because she thought you and I might sit around and have tea together. She gave it to you for extreme emergencies.”

  “Buck.”

  “Good girl. That makes you Fiona.”

  “Finn. And I’m not a girl.”

  “You’re not a boy-that’s for sure.” There was a buzzing sound and the door popped open. “You’ll see a freight elevator at the end of the hall. Take it. Press five. Close the door firmly behind you, please.”

  Finn did as she was told, making sure the door was shut tight. She walked down a narrow hall, brick on the left side, unpainted sheetrock on the other. She reached the oversized freight elevator, stepped in and pulled the knotted rope that brought the gate down. She pressed five on the old black control panel and the elevator began to creak its way upward.

  What she saw through the slats of the gate as the elevator rose was nothing short of amazing. Each floor looked like a library envisioned by Ray Bradbury as channeled by the Collyer brothers: metal grate floors with endless rows of tall gray bookcases and filing cabinets stuffed to overflowing, turns and corners indicating that there were secret depths to the maze you couldn’t see from the elevator, all of this lit by dim bulbs in green pan-shaped fixtures hanging down out of the darkness. Once or twice she thought she saw movement among the seemingly endless stacks, like a giant shadowy rat, but she was pretty sure the image was caused by the state of her nerves and the gloom. The fifth floo
r was no different from the others. The elevator came to a smooth stop and she pulled on the rope, raising the gate. She stepped out of the elevator and brought the door down behind her. The elevator automatically moved down again, leaving a deep empty shaft behind. Finn took a step or two forward and looked down between her feet. The holes in the grated floor were large enough to let her see all the way down to the bottom floor. Once upon a time the building had been completely gutted of its interior walls and floors and replaced with a gigantic cage of mesh and struts that now made up the inside of the building.

  She turned to the left and looked at the bookcase beside her. Konstructive theoritsche und experimentelle Beitrag zu dem Probleme der Flussigkeitsrakete: W. Von Braun-1934. The title had been hand-typed and then glued onto the spine. A university dissertation maybe? She reached out to pull it from the bookcase for a closer look. A voice stopped her.

  “Don’t touch the material, please. We don’t want to disturb Enkel. He’s very possessive about the material.”

  “Enkel?” she said into the gloom.

  “Enkel Shmolkin. My archivist. I’m not sure where he is right now-somewhere in the stacks. Maybe you’ll run into him.”

  Finn looked for a camera lens but this time she couldn’t find it. “Where are you?”

  “Straight ahead until you reach the end of the row. Then turn left. You’ll come to a door eventually.”

  Feeling a little bit like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, Finn went forward, her feet ringing dully on the metal floor. The cases left and right seemed evenly divided between library-width bookcases eight or nine feet high and equally high file-drawer stacks. The file drawers each appeared to be fitted with a sturdy-looking steel Yale lock. The whole place was like the Fort Knox of libraries.

  She reached the far end of the passage, turned left and kept walking. Eventually she reached a plain white door with no knob or lock. She put up one fist, preparing to knock, and there was a small clicking noise. The door slid open. It was metal, about three inches thick and had a piano hinge running all the way down one side, like the door to a bank vault.

  The room beyond looked like something out of Dickens. It was a sitting room fitted out with several comfortable-looking club chairs, a table cluttered with several newspapers and a narrow, coal-burning fireplace. On the mantel of the fireplace there was a coal scuttle with a leather pouch in it, a violin standing on end and an old-fashioned-looking meerschaum pipe. Over the mantel, drilled into the pale striped wallpaper were the initials V.R. Finn smiled. It wasn’t out of Dickens, it was out of Arthur Conan Doyle. The only thing out of place was a coffeemaker, cups and cream and sugar on a side table along with a plate piled high with what appeared to be freshly made Toll House cookies. “Enkel makes them,” he said, noticing her glance. “Oatmeal and peanut butter too. We’ve both got a bit of a sweet tooth.”

  The man seated at the table smiled. He looked like a cross between John Malkovich and Willem Dafoe: high forehead, chiseled cheekbones, broad chin and big sexy mouth. His eyes were black, deep-set and intense. He looked to be in his mid-forties with just enough gray in his hair to make him look a little less dangerous than a younger version of the same man would have been.

  “Finn Ryan,” he said. “You don’t look anything like your old man except for the hair.”

  Finn didn’t know how to answer that so she looked around the room instead. “Sherlock Holmes’s study,” she said finally.

  “Very good,” said Valentine.

  “Was it a test?”

  “Not at all,” he said. “I just like it when people are literate enough to know what they’re seeing. I just did it for fun. Next time I do something with it, I thought I might try Nero Wolfe.”

  “You’re not fat.”

  “I’d be Archie Goodwin.”

  “That might work.”

  “So what’s your problem?”

  “Murder, funnily enough.”

  “Did you do it?” said Valentine, waving her toward one of the club chairs.

  “No,” said Finn.

  “Then there’s no problem,” said Valentine. “There’s just a situation that has to be resolved.”

  “I think it’s a bit more than that,” said Finn.

  “Explain.”

  So she did.

  15

  Half an hour later, while munching on cookies and drinking coffee, her legs drawn up under her in one of the big club chairs, she had brought Valentine up to speed.

  “So what do you think?” he asked.

  “I think Peter got in the way and died because of it. I think Crawley died because I saw the Michelangelo and I think I’m next.”

  “Interesting.”

  “It’s more than interesting. It’s my life, Mr. Valentine.”

  “Michael, please. I didn’t mean that part of it was interesting. I meant the part about someone dying just because they saw a particular work of art. It doesn’t have any logical basis… yet.”

  “I don’t think it has a logical basis period. It doesn’t make any sense at all.”

  “It makes sense to whoever killed your friend and the director of the Parker-Hale.”

  “Why do I get the feeling we’re going around in circles?”

  “Because we are,” said Valentine. “The circles get smaller and smaller, and finally you come to the little point of truth right in the center.”

  “Way too Zen for me,” answered Finn. “My mother gave me your number if I ever got into real trouble, which is what I think I’m in right now. Aren’t you supposed to do something? We’ve been sitting around drinking coffee and eating cookies and we’re not getting anywhere.”

  “Depends on your point of view,” said Valentine. “I know a lot of things I didn’t before. I know what you look like, I know where you live, I know that among other things you’re a nude model, a teacher of English as a second language, a recently fired intern at a prestigious art museum and you’ve been involved in two violent deaths. Any one of those facts could be vitally important to the situation at hand.”

  “Why does everyone harp on the nude model part?”

  “Because it forces people to imagine you with no clothes on. For some people that’s probably very uncomfortable, for other people it’s probably a delight. It’s a lot different than saying you work as a waitress at IHOP, you’ve got to admit.” Valentine sighed. “My dear Finn, it’s my job to look at details, very small details. When I’m doing a valuation of a rare book for someone, the shape of a letter can mean the difference between the work being authentic or a forgery. If I’m advising somebody on a piece of crucial information, that information has to be exactly right. If you look closely at things you see the details, you see the flaws and sometimes you see the absolute perfection. They can be equally important.”

  “You mean the Michelangelo?”

  “As an example, sure. That may be the problem right there-it might not be a Michelangelo at all. It wouldn’t be the first time someone was killed over a forgery.”

  “It was the real thing. I’m sure of it.”

  Valentine smiled. “No offense, kiddo, but you hardly qualify as an expert.”

  “And you do?”

  “You told me you had a digital image of the drawing.”

  Finn nodded. She dug around in her pack, which was leaning by the chair, found her camera and handed it over to Valentine. He opened the flap at the camera’s bottom, withdrew the firewire connector and plugged it into the black, flat-screened IBM on his desk. Finn got up and came around to stand behind him as he worked the keyboard. She looked around but she couldn’t actually see the computer itself.

  “It’s a server down in the basement,” said Valentine without looking up from what he was doing, as though reading her mind. “It’s cooler down there.”

  “What do you have?” Finn asked. “A supercomputer or something?”

  “Not quite,” he answered. “But close. I do a lot of work for some people in California. They pay me in computer techno
logy.” He sat back in his chair. “There we go.” On the screen was the Michelangelo drawing, full size. The detail on the screen was flawless.

  “Well?” Finn asked.

  “I’ve got to admit it looks pretty good. Authentic at first glance, anyway.” He tapped some more keys and the drawing vanished.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Comparison test. I’ve got some material on file. If we need more, I can get it out of the stacks.”

  “Comparing what?”

  “The words in the corner there. See if the handwriting’s the same.”

  The screen stayed blank for a moment, then resolved itself into a windowpanelike alignment of four sections. Each one appeared to hold a small piece of handwriting. He then hit another key and a fifth pane in the window appeared with the Michelangelo drawing. After another keystroke, the drawing dropped away, leaving only the writing.

  “Now we’ll see,” said Valentine. He tapped keys with his long fluid fingers and for a moment Finn found herself thinking that they’d be very sensitive touching her. She wiped the thought out of her mind as quickly as the images on the screen disappeared. Now there were only two sections to the window-one on the left with a scrap of obviously very old handwriting in cursive Italian, the other a blown-up version of the writing on the drawing.

  Finn leaned over Valentine’s shoulder, her hair cascading down over his cheek. She read the lines easily:

  “What joy hath you glad wreath of flowers that is

  Around each hair so deftly twined,

  Each blossom pressing forward from behind,

  As though to be the first her brows to kiss.”

  Valentine picked it up at the beginning of the next line:

  “The livelong day her dress hath perfect bliss,

  That now reveals her breast, now seems to bind,