Quattrocento Read online

  But enough to create a magnetic field? The vibration he had felt had been overwhelming, like being hit by a wave. A wave, he thought, remembering Klein looking at the series of swallows—quantum birds, he had said; a bird in the sky, like the collapse of a quantum wave. But nails, even thousands of them, wouldn’t be enough to create an effect like that. What else, then? Matt thought hard, drumming his fingers on the keyboard, but nothing came to him. Frustrated, he got up from the computer. He picked up the snow dome and shook it, the clown holding out his arms like a trapeze artist during an earthquake, his world suddenly topsy-turvy.

  “What do you think, buster?” Matt asked. “Maybe it really was exhaustion. Maybe it was all just a dream.”

  Beats me, the clown seemed to reply, his arms wide; your guess is as good as mine. The red stars glowed on his cheeks, his bright yellow coat shone merrily. Matt set him down. The drifting notes coruscated in a rainbow of colors. Colors, Matt thought. Wood. Nails are magnetic, glue is a conductor, that leaves wood. Electric wood? Impossible. He felt like the notes, drifting aimlessly in the tiny world of the glass globe. Red and yellow, green and blue, a blizzard of color.

  Colors. Minute pieces of wood, tens of thousands of them. All of them dyed, arranged in patterns. Charles had been very particular to analyze the dyes and re-create them as closely as possible for the replacement pieces. Matt had helped in the complex process. The source of the color, chopped roots or beets or even just straw, was boiled with water. The wood was boiled, too, but with lye to make it more receptive to the dye. Shaving soap, usually. And then came the most important part, fixing the color to the wood. A mordant was necessary for that, like flux in soldering. Zinc or tin chloride, or chrome, or ferric acetate—metal salts, chemists called them. And Faraday had already established himself as the leading chemist of the day when a friend had asked him to write an article on magnetism, turning his attention to physics.

  Matt had used them all, the mordants known to dyers since ancient times. With gloves, for they were as corrosive, some of them, as acid. Acid and base, he thought. Metal salts carried heavy electrical charges. Alternating colors, alternating charges. Faraday’s greatest discovery had been electromagnetism.

  Magnetism in the nails, glue as a conductor, and wood electrically charged. The panels had been batteries.

  And? So what? His elation quickly faded. It was still not enough. A battery was not an engine. Like a magnet, it was a force field, but a latent one. And the force that moved through him had been dynamic.

  Something was still missing. What was it? There was something else, something hovering in the shadows just beyond the edge of memory. He closed his eyes and thought back to the day of the press conference. He had left and entered the studiolo. Walked around. There had been the drone of Petrocelli’s amplified voice. The soft, barely felt whisper of the circulating air. He had reached the longer wall, was approaching the Garter and the vanishing point. His shadow had moved across the wall, finding the black circle of the inlaid shadow of the Garter. The vibration had begun, a slight tingle not in his feet but in his bones. Like an approaching train, sensed before heard, it had grown, swelled, thrilling through him, finally merging with the harsh dissonance of the amplified drone into the note, the wolf tone— And that was the last he remembered.

  No. He had again missed something important. Back. Walking: the wall, the vanishing point, his shadow sliding along the wall …

  The shadow, in front of him, and behind him …

  Light. He had felt it, as faint as the touch of the circulating air, on the back of his neck. Not from the window in the nook, which was the studiolo’s main source of illumination, but a shaft of light from the high clerestory window. Not as strong as the Umbrian sun, but light nonetheless. Through a pane of glass.

  The index of refraction, Matt thought. Was that what Klein had been trying to tell him with the glass rod? In his most famous experiment, Faraday had passed a beam of light through glass with a high index of refraction and discovered diamagnetism. A dynamic source of energy, light, interacting with a latent one, the electromagnetic field created by the intarsia and the nails. A force field.

  The light hadn’t been weak, though. Matt raised his right hand, studied it, turned it back and forth. I held it just like this, he remembered. When the wolf tone had stopped, when silence had flowed back into the studiolo, when the only sound was that of the dust drifting noiselessly through the square shaft of afternoon sun coming through the high clerestory window behind him, he had lifted his hand into the light. Feeling the weight of the sunlight, and the warmth as he turned it, he watched the shadows of the veins and the tendons, the creases of his fingers, the deep lines across his palm as it filled with light, spilling over the edge. From somewhere outside the open window there had come the regular clip-clop of horseshoes on paving stones, and then a high whinny. “Ercole,” a voice had called from far below.

  chapter 22

  The blade, motionless, extended in front of Matt like a reflection of the moon rising over still water. Eyes fixed on the unwavering tip, he kept his breathing regular and deep, only the rigid muscles in his arms and shoulders betraying the strain of holding up the long broadsword. As the afternoon light faded into dusk, shadows grew and settled on the derelict equipment and unfinished projects left stacked around the walls of the old loft by the former tenant, a welder of abstract sculptures and heroin addict who had locked the door one day and never returned. Matt, when the landlord had said that it would be his responsibility to clear the junk out, hadn’t told him that that was one of the main reasons he was taking the space. He had felt an immediate refuge in the abandoned world, with its air of time suspended, where only the shadows were alive.

  “Forty-eight, forty-nine, fifty,” Matt counted aloud, and then slowly lowered the broad tip until it touched the rough concrete floor. He relaxed his shoulders, rotating them like a gymnast, and bent forward, leaning his forehead on the braided steel of the hilt, warm from his hands. It might not work; it might never work. He felt like a blind man trying to grope his way out of a maze. But at least now he knew that there was a way out. Anna had told him so. She had sent him a message of faith.

  Matt, sifting through the detritus that had been left in the loft, accidentally bumped into a rusty steel bar leaning against an old lathe in the corner. Toppling to the floor, it had rung with a tone that resonated through him, a ghost of the last thing he had heard standing in the studiolo, and then again in the spinning shadow world of the forest. The wolf tone.

  Hanging the bar from a hook in the ceiling, Matt found himself time and again in the next few days standing in front of it and tapping it. As he felt the vibration enter him he just let the vague image in his mind grow and develop of its own volition without trying to force it along. He knew he could read about Faraday and all the rest of the history of physics, but that would not get him a single step closer to understanding how he had gotten from a room in the museum to a world that somehow existed—where? In the past? Within the room itself? He was not a scientist, and never would be. From his reading, though, it became clear that there was only one fundamental law in nature, and that was that nothing was unique. In fact, no phenomenon or event he read about was accepted as being true until it had been reproduced. It was simple logic, then; he knew that what had happened to him really had happened—Anna had sent him the proof of that. Therefore, all he had to do was reproduce the conditions, and it would happen again. It didn’t matter if he understood it or not. The studiolo might be gone, but what had it been? A set of conditions, and they could be reproduced.

  The image in his mind at last resolving into a definite idea, Matt had set to work with increasing determination and sense of purpose until he was stopping only to eat or snatch a few hours’ sleep when he could no longer stave off the need. And now it was ready, and so was he, if his plan worked as he hoped. The time had come.

  Matt straightened up, raising his head from the hilt of the sword. He fli
pped a switch at the side of the door into the enclosure he had built out of plywood to the exact dimensions of the vanished studiolo, as he had taken them from the floor plan of the ducal palace, and then walked in and stopped on the exact spot where the orthogonals had once converged on the shadow of the Garter. The vanishing point. He stared at the wall, covered in squares of paper he had printed out, an image pixilated to the point that it was more an intimation—a wave not yet collapsed, made real, fixed in time. Vibration, Klein had told him; everything is vibration, a continuum that bridged the seen and invisible, the heard and the unheard, the known world and the infinitely vast cosmos of matter and energy, of which time was only one aspect, like the shading Anna had added to give the clouds substance and weight, to make them real.

  Matt had quickly abandoned the idea of trying to recreate the intricate patterns and images of the original walls, knowing he would never be able to remember them in enough detail to be convincing. By the time the walls were built and he was ready to finish them with an image, the choice of what to use was clear; like the solution to an equation, there was an inevitability to it, as though it existed before the problem did. He had taken a scan of a painting of the swallow—he had chosen the one Anna had done for him, the one in oil on panel—and, having enlarged it on his computer, printed it out square by square to reassemble on the wall.

  Clearing his mind, Matt stared at the wall. He felt the back of his neck grow warm from the August sun shining through the carefully cleaned part of the window, high up, that he had left uncovered when he had masked all the rest. It was like the hand of a friend, resting on his shoulders, telling him not to give up; a reminder that he was finding not a way out but a way back.

  The timer ran down and the vibration began, generated through the walls and the floor by the induction transmitter Matt had attached to the steel bar. It slowly grew, climbing through Matt, branching out and suffusing him like water drawn up through a tree, and as it did, it slowly dropped in pitch, reaching its maximum intensity just as it found the frequency of the wolf tone. Matt, resisting the impulse to tighten up in anticipation, in hope or fear, forced himself to relax and let go, to let the vibration surge through him, as he focused on the suggestion of motion on the wall, of wings seen and not seen, of clouds there and not there.

  Nothing. Matt felt the sun slip from his neck, the vibration fade like a sunset, the warmth disappear. The image in front of him became a random collection of squares. It hadn’t worked. He slowly walked out of the room, trying to rally himself from the disappointment that had taken the place of the vibration. He picked up the sword again, telling himself it would work, that he would find a way, and when he did, he would be ready. But his mind rebelled. Now, he thought, now, not tomorrow. There is no tomorrow, no future, there is no time to lose, nothing to wait for—and as the anger surged through him he lifted the sword and slashed at the bar again and again, taking a savage pleasure in watching it jump until it was thrumming with the blows. The wolf tone awoke, low at first, then growling louder and louder as he attacked, throwing every ounce of his strength into each vicious stroke, as though with each one he could cut the bar in two and force his way out of the shadowed limbo to the place he belonged. Again and again, harder and harder, until with one last terrible blow he staggered back, exhausted, the heavy tip dragging a pale line on the scuffed wooden floor.

  Unaware, he bumped into a pedestal, turning just in time to see the old jar rock back and forth in slow motion and then, teetering on edge, topple over, sailing through the air to smash on the floor. The irises lay in a tumbled pile, their petals glistening blue and yellow in the light of the lamp and the last rays of the setting sun. Serves you right, he told himself, all his anger spent, and put the sword down to pick the flowers out of the water and broken glass. A pile of books between the pedestal and the old chair had also fallen over and now lay scattered in the puddle of water. He knelt down, taking the top one and brushing the water off the cover. Seeing they had all gotten wet, he grabbed an old shirt to wipe them dry.

  He stopped, hand raised with the crumpled shirt in it, feeling a faint stir of air against his face. Suddenly alert, he focused all his senses. There, by the door—the scrape of leather on the floor. He stared into the concealing darkness. A shadow moved. Leandro, he thought, it had worked after all! With a convulsive lunge he kicked the books and flowers away, grabbing for the sword, scrambling to gain his footing in the slippery wetness.

  “Matt?” Sally asked, coming forward into the fading light. “Are you …” Her voice trailed off as she stared at him.

  Matt stopped, half up and half down, on one knee like a Knight Templar caught in his devotions. He began to laugh. The sword dropped with a clang as he settled back onto the floor, laughing even harder. “It’s okay,” he said. “I decided to be an artist. It’s what you always said I should do.”

  “This isn’t exactly what I had in mind,” she said, awkwardly walking past him to look at the enclosure he had built. “You’ve let your hair grow,” she said, coming back to him. “I like it.”

  “It’s good to see you,” Matt said, seeing from her belly, big and rounded under her open coat, why she was walking so heavily. On her finger was a gold ring.

  “Charles called, he was worried about you. He said he hasn’t seen you for over a week, and thought I might know where you were. I meant to call you when I got back from Japan, but I’ve been so busy, and my leave starts next week. There’s just so much to get done before then.”

  “How did you find me?”

  “Credit card.”

  “What?” he asked.

  She shrugged. “Okay, so it wasn’t strictly legal. A friend in our research department owed me a favor. He ran a check on you. So that’s what you wanted all that plywood for. Twenty bucks, the delivery guy was almost willing to carry me up here.”

  “You’re in the wrong line of work,” he said.

  “What do you mean? That’s just called due diligence. I do it all the time, just not usually in East New York. You should keep the door locked, you know. It was wide open. Anyone could have walked in.”

  “So how are you, Sally?” Matt asked, turning back to the mess on the floor.

  “I’m fine. What happened?”

  “I lost my balance,” Matt said. “Here,” he added, handing her an iris. “Time is a flower.”

  “Oh, bullshit,” she said. “The last of the romantics. You’ll never change. Let me help.” She picked up the rest of the flowers and then, looking around, found an old can to put them in. “Are you living here?” she asked, adding water from the tap of the tiny sink, heavily frescoed in splattered paint and resin.

  “I’ve been working,” Matt answered.

  “On what?”

  Matt didn’t reply. He was looking at a book he had picked up that had landed facedown and splayed open when the pile had fallen over.

  “What is it?” Sally asked. “Matt!” she pushed his shoulder.

  “Sorry?” he asked, looking up. “Nothing. Just a picture.”

  Sally looked over his shoulder. “What is that? Some guys playing miniature golf? What kind of book is this?” She flipped to the cover, the book still in Matt’s hands. “The Copenhagen Group and Quantum Physics,” she read aloud. “Jesus. Something light, to while away the time, huh? Isn’t that Einstein?”

  “Looks like him,” Matt replied. A row of men in three-piece suits grinned up from the page, brandishing their putting irons like weapons of valor from days gone by. One of the men had a mustache and short hair, famously tousled but still jet black. “That one on the left watching the rest play is Heisenberg,” he said, reading the caption. “Then Pauli, Bohr, and Gamow.” He fell silent again.

  “Matt?” Sally nudged him.

  “I’d better get back to work,” he said.

  “Me, too, I guess. Well, I’m glad to see you’re all right. I’ll let Charles know.”

  “Sally,” Matt said. “Take care.”

  “
You, too.”

  Matt watched her go, thinking that he would never see her again, and wondering who it was she saw when she looked at him, what past they shared that he didn’t even know about. He sat down and began to read the book he had found. Hours later, when he had finished, he looked back at the photograph. Einstein, Pauli, Gamow, most of all Bohr and Heisenberg: the men who had invented quantum mechanics. But there were two others in the background, unidentified. One, with the fresh, open face of a student, bore a striking resemblance to Kamal, as he might have looked, very young, and without a beard. It was the other one, though, that had stopped Matt. Almost hidden in the shadow behind the solid, phlegmatic presence of Bohr, in half-profile and slightly blurred as though he had been moving—still, there was no mistaking who it was. Klein. Klein, as Matt had known him, not a day older or younger.

  chapter 23

  Matt, waiting in line to pass through the metal detector at the departure gate of the American Airlines terminal at Kennedy Airport, thought about the encounter that had led him to be boarding a plane to Istanbul instead of Prague. The photograph in the book had taken him to its author and a Princeton laboratory tucked into grounds so well groomed that Matt at first mistook it for a golf course. The author, initially curt and dismissive, had become more accommodating when Matt had taken out his book.

  “I have no idea,” he replied, when Matt pointed to Klein in the photograph and asked who he was. He had been much more helpful, though, with the man standing next to Klein.

  “That’s Kalil,” he said.