• Ticolat cuts Peruggia’s hours.

• Simone’s cold gets worse and she is unable to work.

• Funds getting low.

• Peruggia meets Valfiero.

I was trying to get a timeline that had led up to the theft, though how much actual time had passed between the events, I couldn’t be sure.

I got up to wash the pizza grease from my fingers and caught a familiar glimpse of Kill Van Kull etched in inky blue just below the sleeve of my T-shirt, a memento from my former life, the Bayonne Bridge etched above it. At the time none of us had any idea of Kill Van Kull’s Dutch colonial roots, only that we liked the name because it sounded menacing and cool, like so many things do when you’re fifteen. I remembered the day my five Kill Van Kull brothers and I got inked, too high on booze and weed and feeling even cockier than usual, the watch-out-world attitude we displayed indelibly engraved on our arms.

I made a muscle and watched the crisscross design of the bridge expand, something I had thought way cool back then, now glad I could hide it under long sleeves. The linked chain that circled the top of my other bicep was easier to conceal and did not require much explanation.

I could hardly remember who I was back then, the school suspensions, joy rides with my buddies in stolen cars, all those drunken nights. Not that my posse was all bad. We hid behind the idea that we were modern-day Robin Hoods, seeking revenge for those who deserved it—though we made the rules and decided who deserved what.

I read a few pages of a new biography of Leonardo I’d brought with me, the author going into detail about the fact of Leonardo being left-handed, and fell asleep thinking about how Leonardo drew from right to left so he wouldn’t smudge his drawings, then dreamed of wrenching Peruggia’s journal from the grip of an old man who lay in the street, bleeding, Alexandra watching from the curb, calling to me, then disappearing.

In the morning, I awoke shivering, the room freezing. I got up and tapped the radiator—it was stone cold. I played with the knob, twisting until the steam came on with a hiss. But when had I turned it off? I tugged on jeans, unable to shake the feeling that someone had been in my room yesterday. The stale smell of cigarette smoke still lingered.

The library was not yet open, so I checked my email, one from my TA saying the department chair had sat in on my class. He thought it had gone well and wanted to let me know. I pictured the chair, a sour look on his face, making notes about the class and the fact that I wasn’t there or, worse, that my TA taught the class better than I did. I considered sending him another note saying that my research was going well, but was it? Would I really have anything to show for my time here? There was an email from my sculptor cousin too, the one living in my loft, saying he was having a great time in New York and had connected with a gallery in Chelsea that wanted to give him a show. I wrote back “great” and closed my laptop, trying hard not to feel envious that my cousin—who had spent less than a week in the city—was going to get an exhibition when I had just lost my gallery.