The briefest eye contact and a nod. “The room charge, remember?”

I told her it didn’t matter. I’d have been happy to pay triple if she’d stay or at least not appear like she was dying to escape. I asked what she was doing today, and she said she had things to take care, evasive as always, but I didn’t pry. I had things to do I hadn’t told her about either.

49

“I’ve been waiting for your call.”

“I’m calling now.”

“How is Florence? Are you enjoying yourself?”

“What do you mean?”

“It was an innocent question.”

“Your questions are never innocent.”

“I want you to have fun, darling, as long as you don’t get too distracted.”

“Florence is a distracting city,” she said. “It has the best art in the world.”

“Some of it,” he said, glancing at a wall of his spotlighted paintings.

“I need more money.”

“Fine,” he said, examining the surface of a sixteenth-century oil on panel, The Holy Family, an elongated baby Jesus, the Madonna, Joseph behind her, the paint cracked badly over part of Joseph’s face, something that would surely affect the $15 million value attached to the painting, which, a decade ago, had been taken off the wall of Santo Spirito Hospital in Rome during a Madonna concert, the irony not lost on him. He turned away from the damaged Holy Family to look at his prize. “Same account?”

“Yes.”

“Same amount?”

“Yes.”

He moved closer to the painting, ran a finger run over the half-smiling lips, wondered if they were the real lips.

“I’ve got to go,” she said. “I’m meeting a friend.”

“I didn’t know you had friends in Florence.”

“A woman…I went to school with.”

“Really? How nice. Wait. You haven’t told me if you’ve discovered anything.”

Alex moved from bed to chair, glanced out at the balcony of her sublet apartment, checked the time, almost two hours since she had left Luke. She wondered what he was doing, wondered what the hell she was doing.

“Are you there?”

“Yes,” she said, debating, delaying, knowing she would have to tell him—and then she did, describing the page she’d found in Luke’s backpack and what it had said.

“Good work!” he said. “You are really earning your money.”

Alex hung up without saying goodbye. She felt dirty despite the hotel shower, slipped out of her rumpled clothes and decided to take another. But no matter how long she stayed under the hot water, no matter how much soap she used, she still felt dirty, and it had nothing to do with having had sex with Luke. She pictured him asleep, his bare chest rising and falling, his handsome face, the tattoos.

Like a tattoo, he’d gotten under her skin, had touched something unexpected, things she did not want to feel, and it made everything worse, not better.

50

Nothing I had read added to the explanation or secret of the missing pages, other than the repeated fact that I would need a magnifying glass to find out. I made a note to buy one and headed to the library. I needed to go through the journal again.