Quattrocento Read online

  “You had a dream, huh? You and everybody else,” Esperanza said with a laugh. “Oh my,” she exclaimed under her breath, as she opened his gown. “These ribs of yours. What’d you fall on, the New York Giants?”

  “How long have I been here?” Matt asked.

  “A week.”

  “A week?” It didn’t seem possible. A week, gone from his life, and he had no memory of it. A complete blank, like the copper panel, primed and ready—primed, he thought. White. He could see it—covered in white lead, smooth and pristine, waiting for the underdrawing. How did he know it was copper? “Did anyone come to see me?” he asked, pulling himself away from his dream.

  “Your boss has been in a few times. He calls every day. Such a nice man! And a girl called. All the way from Japan.” Esperanza picked up the pad on the table next to the bed. “Sally Thorpe,” she read aloud. “She left a message. ‘Bill and I are thinking of you, glad to hear you’ll be okay.’ And she’ll see you as soon as she gets back.”

  Bill? Matt, still too tired to think, had no idea what it meant, but he was glad to hear that Sally was all right. He turned his head sideways on the pillow. There was a postcard on the table, an old black-and-white photograph, that he could just see. Reaching for it, he gave an involuntary groan.

  “Let me,” Esperanza said, and handed him the card. A biplane rose from the sand, white wings against a gray sky.

  Matt turned the card over. It was blank.

  “That came with the flowers,” Esperanza said. “The man who brought them didn’t leave his name. He said he was an old friend. Is he a musician?”

  “No.”

  “I thought maybe he was a rock star. He had that long hair. They’re all getting so old. But then, who isn’t?”

  “Not you,” Matt replied.

  “Aren’t you sweet. He also brought you that,” she added, pointing to the prism hanging in the window.

  “May I see it?” Matt asked, conscious again of the faint pull of recognition as she unhooked the ornament and handed it to him. A sun with curved tongues of fire, no bigger than his palm, it was made of leaded glass, like a pane from a stained glass window. The chain was silver, double links finely woven. Tongues of fire, silently burning. He had seen this sun before. The memory of where came to him—it had been in the studiolo, inlaid in the decorative borders of the panels. Federico, as a student in Venice, had joined a fraternity of young men who had taken the flame as their compresa, to represent the way they burned with love. A compresa. Light as it was, the prism grew too heavy for him to hold and he let it fall, still clasped in his hand, onto the white sheets.

  chapter 20

  Using the small brass key, Matt wound the clock. One last click and it was done, and he hung the key on its hook on the side of the delicate frame. He lowered the glass dome over the works, silencing the faint whir of the spinning gears, and then used the old polishing rag to remove any trace of smudges or fingerprints from the glass. Chin in hand and elbows on his raised knees, he sat, watching the tiny wheels winking in the fading light.

  “Matt,” Charles said from the door.

  “Hello, Charles,” Matt said, without turning.

  “I have something you might like to see,” Charles said, coming into the office. “Do you mind if I turn on the light?”

  “Not at all.”

  Matt slid the clock back over to the side of the bench as Charles set a package down in front of him. Flat and rectangular, about the size of a large serving tray, the air courier and customs clearance stamps almost obscured the label. The Fleigander Foundation. It must be from Klein. Matt had tried calling him after he had gotten home from the hospital, but the phone had rung, unanswered. That hadn’t come as a surprise, for he knew the scientist traveled frequently, and had homes elsewhere. Matt opened the thick cardboard lid and then the lighter one inside, under a layer of bubble wrap, and lifted out a painting from the foam bed it was nestled in.

  A swallow, its wings arched, rose into the sky. The delicate gray of the bird, the pillowing eddies of the cloud and the reaches of empty blue beyond, all had the liquid depth of oil paints, layered and glazed. But on a panel, not canvas.

  “Aren’t you pleased?” Charles asked, as Matt studied the picture.

  “It’s very nice.”

  “Very nice? It’s the missing painting, the one you said would be there. The series is complete.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”

  “It’s good to have them all together.”

  “Good,” Charles repeated. “Matt, I don’t know what to say. You’ve been back for almost a month. And all you’ve done, as far as I know, is wind your clock. Have you even been up to see the portrait? No. I didn’t think so.”

  Matt didn’t know what to say either. That his dreams were more real than his waking life? That somehow he had fallen down in a small room only to wake up—where? Here? Everything was so familiar, so much exactly the same, but it was as though none of it really existed. Even Charles, standing next to him. He could have been painted by Paolo Uccello, Matt thought, looking at him. His beard had taken on the tone of the silver Paolo had used, tarnished to a dark gray by time, and his figure had the same ageless solidity, a study in perspective. But it isn’t just Charles, he thought. It’s everything. Like a painting in reverse, the world around him was slowly, almost imperceptibly, losing color and form. And what did he remember? Not falling down. Nothing. Except his dreams, and the problem with them was not remembering, but escaping them. They had all the color and the vividness, like the painting Charles was holding—

  “Let me see that,” Matt said, and took it out of Charles’s hands. He turned it around to see the back. Verso paintings, usually of a family crest or motto, were commonly found on panel portraits of the Quattrocento, and this one was no different. Three irises were tied together by a silver ribbon, and on the ribbon in the rich blue of true ultramarine, three words were inscribed: “Amor omnia vincit.”

  Matt looked at the flowers. He touched one of them, the paint soft and ribbed with brushstrokes under his fingertip. It had been real. It had happened. They were memories, not dreams, and now, set free, they came flooding back, like the sun burning away the mist that morning, long ago in Gubbio. Like the sun rising over the ridge across from the villa. He saw Anna’s hand, saw her loading the brush, rolling the tip in the paint, descending to the panel. He saw the studio in the cloister, and the church and the garden, and the fountain in the sunlight with the villa up above. He heard the water splashing, and her voice, and he remembered what it was she had asked him, the last time he had seen her. Valor, wisdom, and faith—which was the most important? He was holding the answer in his hands. Faith.

  Matt thought of Anna, day after day bringing the painting to life, and then when it was done starting anew on the back, finishing where they had, with the three simple words he had asked her to remember. And she had, but it had been an empty victory, for he had never come back. He had never returned from the hunt. The hunt. A shadow, a blade silver and black, the world spinning and darkening, the sound of the wolf, shutting everything out—

  Matt turned the painting face up. He could hear himself saying it, his last words to her, “You’ll do fine,” and he had been right. Her hand was unmistakable in the graceful arch of the bird as it reached skyward, in the delicate shading of the clouds. She had mastered the use of oils.

  “So this came from Klein,” Matt said.

  “It’s from the Fleigander Foundation in Prague.”

  “That’s Klein.”

  “Klein who?”

  “The foundation,” Matt said. “You told me his family set it up, or something like that. Come on, Charles. Klein. He brought in the other painting.”

  “Which one?”

  Matt laid the panel back in the box, careful to protect the verso painting, and went over to the wall where the series of birds hung. “This one,” he said. “You were here when he brought it
. You came in for the folder on the Duccio Diptych, remember? He was standing right here.”

  “We got that painting at Christie’s East, last November,” Charles said. “A phone bid, from my office. It barely made the reserve.”

  “Johannes Klein,” Matt said. “He paid for the restoration of the studiolo.”

  “Which one? The pope’s?”

  “No.”

  “The one in Urbino, then.”

  “Ours. The one downstairs. From Gubbio.”

  Charles looked away, but not before Matt could see the sadness and concern on his face.

  “No,” Matt said. He leaped to his feet, his chair spinning away behind him, and then tore through the office and into the stairwell, taking the stairs two at a time, holding the banister as he spun in midair around the turn and sailed over the last three steps. Bursting through the door, he almost knocked over two visitors in his haste to get to the small gallery. Entering, he came to a dead halt.

  A guard who had caught sight of him from another gallery ran up, seizing his arm. “Hold on, sir. Mr. O’Brien,” he said, seeing who he was. “Can I help you?”

  “There’s nothing there.” Matt, shaking his arm free, walked up to the bare white plaster of the empty wall. No pilasters, no heavy carved oak doors, no elaborate lintel with the Garter incised in it …

  “Sir …”

  Matt stepped backward slowly. Anna. He turned and ran from the room, the guard following to the door and then taking out his radio. The crowd of schoolchildren in the hall of armor scurried out of Matt’s way like pigeons on the sidewalk outside. Up the stairs, through the musical instruments, past the silent keyboards, and then through the galleries one after another until he reached the one he was looking for. Panting from the exertion, he stopped in the doorway. Anna. She was still there. He leaned against the wall, almost overcome by the wave of relief sweeping through him, and held up his hand to the two guards who rushed up to him, their belts jingling and radios squawking.

  “I’m fine,” he said. “It’s nothing.”

  How many times had he seen her just like this? Her face was turned toward a small group of viewers, their backs to him as they intently read the lengthy posting on the wall next to her, and he thought of how he had once come upon her, greeting some friends of her husband from Venice, on their way to Rome.

  Matt left. He pushed through the tall glass doors and stood at the top of the broad steps of the museum. Fifth Avenue stretched before him, the dark buildings rising into the mist and the rain. So he had gone back. It had not been a dream after all. And neither had been the studiolo. He remembered it perfectly, could see it, could see himself standing in it. Something had happened, he didn’t know what, but there was no denying that he had stood in it. And the feel of the sun—the real Umbrian sun—he could feel it warming the back of his hand, molding the veins and lines into a map of the new world. “Ercole …” He could hear the voice, hear the hooves down below on the paving stones, echoing up. And then he had opened the door and stepped out into the library. The library of the grand duke Federico da Montefeltro— Klein. Klein would know. He might have vanished from Charles’s mind, but he existed for Matt, every bit as real as the studiolo. But the studiolo was gone—

  “Excuse me.”

  Matt glanced up to see a man approaching, his large, friendly face apologetic. Behind him Matt could see his family, smiling. After five years in New York, Matt recognized the look; they’d spotted a celebrity. He looked around to see who it was.

  “I’m sorry to bother you,” the man said to him.

  Matt looked at him in complete surprise.

  “You’re the guy …” The man unfolded the magazine he carried in his hand and offered it to Matt, who saw his own face under a larger image of Anna, next to the headline lost and found. “We just want you to know how impressed we are.” Matt found his hand being shaken as a camera clicked, a flash of brightness in the gray rain. “Would you mind?” he asked, holding out a pen.

  Feeling slightly ridiculous, Matt took the pen. A couple walking up to the doors gave him a quick glance, trying to place him, turning the ridiculous into the absurd. Matt folded the magazine and, about to scribble his signature, stopped, thought, and then wrote a brief inscription before handing the magazine and pen back.

  “Amor omnia vincit,” the man read aloud.

  “What does that mean?” one of the children asked.

  “Vincit,” his father said. “Da Vinci. It’s something about Leonardo,” he added, looking at Matt for corroboration.

  “He’s right,” Matt said. And he was, Matt thought, walking down the steps, although not in the way he had meant. There were many ways to be right. The quote was from the Aeneid, but Leonardo, in trying out a new quill, had inscribed the saying many times in the upper corner of his notebooks. Tell me if anything’s been done, he also wrote, late in his life. Tell me if anything’s been done. I’ll find Klein, Matt thought. And I will return from the hunt.

  chapter 21

  Out of the subway, one block south, down the hill—how many times had he walked the same route? Rounding the corner the river came into view, dull gray under the overcast sky, with New Jersey beyond it, the color of car exhaust. Flanked by weathered granite, the stark simplicity of Klein’s apartment house stood out like a destroyer among a fleet of ocean liners, mothballed at the end of the great age of ocean travel. The lobby, sleek mirrored glass and travertine marble polished to a high gloss, was reassuringly familiar to Matt.

  “I’m here to see Dr. Klein,” Matt said to the doorman, whom he recognized from his previous visits. What was his name? He tried to remember. “Is he in?”

  “Who?”

  “Klein. Seventeen F, the penthouse.”

  “You’ve got the wrong address.”

  “Klein,” Matt repeated. “Seventeen F.”

  “No one here by that name.”

  “That’s impossible,” Matt said. “I was here just a few weeks ago. He must have just moved, then,” Matt said, when the doorman didn’t respond. “Can you give me his forwarding address? Dr. Johannes Klein.”

  “You’ll have to talk to the building manager.”

  “Fine.”

  “He’s not here.”

  “Is there a number where I can reach him, then?”

  “Yeah. Hang on.” The man went to the small office. Matt followed, waiting in the door as the man wrote down the information.

  “Where did you get that picture?” Matt asked.

  “Which one?” the man replied, looking up at the wall. The biplane rose from the sand, watched by a solitary figure, leaning forward with his hand extended. “It’s always been there, as far as I know.”

  “I’ll buy it,” Matt said, taking out his wallet. “Here.” He held out all the money he had.

  “Get out of here,” the man said. “Are you nuts?”

  “Look, two hundred dollars,” Matt said, counting the bills. “It’s just a photograph. You didn’t even know it was there. Who’s going to miss it?”

  The man hesitated and then took the bills.

  Matt took the picture down. It was from Klein’s apartment. He remembered the frame, thinking of it hanging in the hallway, next to the soldier from the Spanish Civil War and the strange series of shapes, the Faraday salt print.

  “You don’t remember me, do you?” he asked at the entrance on his way out.

  “No. Hey …” the man added.

  Matt, walking away, turned around.

  “There is no Seventeen F. The building stops at sixteen.”

  On the second floor of the ducal palace in Gubbio, in the southeast corner, was a small irregularly shaped room, barely larger than a closet. Matt had seen it, stood in it, taken a quick glance around the bare walls. The terrazzo floor was all that remained of the studiolo, but the room was still there, as it was on the floor plan of the palazzo now displayed on his computer screen. Matt opened the scan he had taken from a text on physics. It was the same series of t
welve shapes he had seen in Klein’s apartment, the early salt print of the Faraday magnetic fields of disturbance. The sixth was the one he wanted, halfway down the page. Faraday, Klein had answered when Matt had asked him who, in physics, had had the same transformational impact as the use of oils in Quattrocento painting. He could see the print hanging on the wall, next to two men, one watching an airplane balanced between two worlds, the other at the moment of death. Transformations and force fields. And a series of paintings, from tempera to oil.

  Matt traced around the irregular shape and then, having cut it free, pulled it across the floor plan of the palazzo. After a brief moment of double image, it disappeared, merging with the outline of the room that had held the studiolo, leaving the spiky fringe he had noticed when he had first seen the photograph of the shapes in Klein’s apartment. He knew, from the text, that it was made by iron filings on paper, showing the force fields of the magnets underneath. Remembering the vibration he had felt deep inside, just before the sound of the wolf tone and his losing consciousness, he wondered if that was why Klein had restored the room, to re-create the force field. It couldn’t have been just to see it—Charles would have gladly showed him the stored panels.

  A field, but generated how? It couldn’t have been from the ground, some source deep within the steep hillside under the palazzo, for Matt had felt it resonate through him standing on the main floor of the Metropolitan Museum, on the other side of the globe from Gubbio. It had to be the panels. But, again, how? He had seen them laid bare on the workshop tables. The room was nothing more than wooden panels, glued together and held in place by nails. Iron nails, he thought. Hand-forged, thousands of them. Square, with flat heads, each one bearing the marks of a hammer. And he could see as though it were only yesterday Charles reaching for one and all of them rising from the box, clinging together like blue crabs tangled in a basket— magnetized.