Quattrocento Read online

  “You know him?”

  “Yes, he was at the Institute for Advanced Studies when I got there. But that’s got to be … what? Thirty years ago.”

  “Do you know where he is now?”

  “Probably pushing daisies. He’s ninety, if he’s still alive. The last I heard of him was a paper he published in the early eighties.”

  Through the paper Matt had traced Kalil to Birmingham, where he had been on the faculty, and then to CERN, the advanced nuclear research lab in Berne, Switzerland, and finally to the University of Istanbul, where he had served on the faculty until his retirement ten years ago. Discovering that he was still listed as professor emeritus, Matt had decided to take a chance and try to find him in person. He had no idea what he might be able to tell him, but he was standing next to Klein in the photograph, and just the chance that there might be someone else alive who had known his friend was enough for Matt to make the journey. If he couldn’t find him he could always go on to his original destination, Prague, and the Fleigander Foundation, the address of which he had copied down from the box that had held the last of the swallow paintings. If it was indeed there; he had tried calling the number he had found listed in several Internet telephone directories, but, as with Klein’s number, the phone had just rung, unanswered.

  Matt, next in line, stepped through the gate. The high-pitched ring of the alarm began to sound.

  “Please step back through and empty your pockets,” the guard said.

  Matt, having tossed his change and keys into the small tray, stepped back through the gate. The alarm went off again.

  “Step over here, please,” the guard said, as another joined them. “Do you have any metal plates from operations?” she asked, passing a wand over Matt’s legs and then his arms.

  “No,” Matt replied.

  The wand began buzzing as it passed over Matt’s waist in his back.

  “Please remove your coat, sir,” the guard said, suddenly all business.

  “My coat?” Matt asked, shrugging it off. It was his old tweed, the one he had worn for years.

  A National Guard soldier in battle fatigues who had been watching them from his post nearby didn’t return Matt’s apologetic smile as the guard felt the hem of the jacket and then reached into one of the side pockets. “You’ve got a hole in your pocket,” she said, and wormed her hand along inside the coat until she found what she was looking for. She worked her hand free. “That’s beautiful,” she said. “You don’t want to lose that,” she added, handing Matt a small pin.

  Matt took the compresa, letting it dangle against his palm. The three irises, emerald and azurite, sparkled in their gold and silver setting. The coat, he remembered as the guard handed it back to him. He had been wearing it that day of the press conference, the day Anna had been unveiled to the world.

  The plaintive summons to prayer of the muezzin, amplified, rose and fell across the dusty roofs and alleys of the ancient bazaar quarter of Istanbul, tumbling down the steep hillside from the Suleymaniye Mosque to the turquoise waters of the Golden Horn, busy with shipping and ferries. Matt, after an hour of threading his way through streets choked with traffic and unending swarms of people, was relieved at the quiet he found within the tall house when his ring was answered and the servant had closed the door behind him. They stood in the hallway, cooled by the tile floor and plastered walls and the fan overhead, as Matt explained his intrusion, the woman’s stoical impassivity making him sound even to his own ears like a traveling salesman making a pitch. All the way from New York, tried to call but couldn’t get through, the head of the department of the university right up the hill had graciously given him the address, hadn’t he called? He had said he would—Matt finally ground to a halt, realizing that her expression was not one of skepticism but incomprehension. The woman didn’t speak a word of English.

  Matt started to give her his name but stopped. “Johannes Klein,” he said.

  The housekeeper disappeared into the recesses of the house, leaving Matt to wait. When she returned, he followed her along a passage, past rooms hidden behind dark screens of carved wood, onto a long, covered porch overlooking a garden that while small was large enough to shut out any traces of the city outside the walls. The housekeeper led him down the stairs into a miniature forest, a profusion of brightly colored blossoms, red and yellow and a luminous purple, under the arching fronds of palms and ferns. Dressed in a neatly pressed linen suit, Kalil looked up at him from under the brim of a Panama hat. The smooth face in the photograph, creased then only by a smile, had weathered into a geology of a life. His hands, one holding a cigarette that yielded a slight spiral of blue smoke, were brown and dry and deeply veined, but the black eyes that took in Matt shone with a concentrated vitality, like an oasis in the midst of the encroaching desert.

  He listened to Matt’s introduction of himself and then nodded to the chair next to him. “A cigarette?” he offered as Matt sat, and waved to the pack of Lucky Strikes, half-empty, on the table by his elbow.

  “Thank you, no,” Matt declined, struck at how the man had aged, realizing that he had expected that, like Klein, Kalil would still be the same age as in the photograph, taken almost seventy years before. But he had traced this man through the years, while he had only known Klein in the present, without a past to place him in. Or a future, as it was beginning to seem. “I have to apologize—”

  “Not at all,” the man said. “I wasn’t expecting that you would be Klein. He was an old man when I knew him. But you used his name, obviously to get my attention. Why is that?”

  Matt reached into the inner pocket of his jacket and took out the photograph he had sliced out of the book before leaving.

  “Amusing, that I thought he was old,” Kalil said, looking at the photograph through a magnifying glass that he had picked up from the table. “He looks so young now. Yes, I remember that day very well. Was it at Tivoli? I tied Bohr for the lead. He would have won but he was more interested in perfecting his swing. A singular approach to life, to concentrate your attention solely on the things you can’t do and don’t know, but that was his way.” He chuckled. “He was a terrible teacher. He never wanted to talk about anything he knew, only those things he didn’t. And there is dear Werner. Herr Doktor Heisenberg had no such problem. If he didn’t understand it, it could not be understood. He was our bookmaker, kept a running assessment of the odds. You are a historian?” he asked. “Have I become a part of history? A footnote, I suspect.”

  “I’m interested in Klein. He was a friend of mine, and he’s disappeared.”

  “He had a way of doing that. He was an interesting man to be interested in. He worked with Rutherford at McGill and later in Manchester. That is where he met Bohr, who was Rutherford’s assistant at the time.”

  “I knew him in New York.”

  “Are you sure it was him?”

  Matt thought. There was no question at all that Klein was the man he had known. But Rutherford had been a professor at McGill before the First World War, so for Klein to have worked with him, then Klein would have been over one hundred twenty years old when Matt met him. And yet Kalil hadn’t said it was impossible. He had merely asked Matt if he was sure it was he. Matt reached into his coat and took out the other photograph he had brought with him.

  “Klein was there that day,” Kalil said, looking at the graceful biplane just taking flight. “He was a man of the most wide and varied pursuits I have ever come across. He had a degree as a medical doctor—a pathologist—and he was himself a photographer of no little merit, and a musician, too. He raced aeroplanes. He had one of those insane machines that were just flying engines, with the stubby little wings, that roared around and around in circles, scaring the living daylights out of those of us huddled in the stands below.” He shuddered at the memory.

  “I have to find him,” Matt said.

  “Mr. O’Brien, I’m afraid that I am fated to disappoint you. I do hope you have the time to buy a carpet while you are in town
. A fine kilim, perhaps? I know just the man to see, and at least then I won’t feel that I have completely failed you. But Klein”—he sighed and shrugged—“I haven’t seen him since the war. The Americans got him, from what I heard. They didn’t force him, you know, that isn’t their style. I would suspect they thought that they had made him an offer he couldn’t refuse, as they say. I’ve always found it amusing that the general wisdom is that it is typically nouveau riche behavior, to throw money around as though one had no sense of its value. I’m talking about the Americans. On an individual basis, perhaps this is so, but as a matter of national policy, it is actually diabolically ingenious. You might think it a strange inversion of the traditional way of exercising power, to enrich your subjects unnecessarily, when you could just waltz in and take what you want. After the war, who could have said no to the Americans? They could have taken anything they wanted. But outright taking produces resentment, the result of which, as we have seen without fail, is that sooner or later the victim shows up on your doorstep, ready to fight to take back whatever you might have made off with. But when the transaction is commercial, the act of submission is voluntary, and therefore completely emasculating. No, to pay for it is the perfect exercise of power; you get what you want, and your opponent, by his own act of complicity, is rendered powerless to object. But this is the sublime touch—by overpaying, you demonstrate that the money is essentially meaningless.

  “In the case of Klein, though, any attempt to buy him would have been laughably unnecessary. Aside from the fact that he had no need for money, he would have gone anyway. Klein—how do you say it? He always went where the action was, and it was clear that the future lay on your side of the Atlantic. My apologies,” Kalil added. “I forget that you are yourself an American. But now everyone, it seems, is becoming one. All of our aphorisms have become lines from movies. What used to be ‘Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose’ is now ‘I’ll be back.’ ”

  “You’ve been of enormous assistance, Professor Kalil,” Matt said. “I can’t thank you enough.”

  “If I might ask, Mr. O’Brien: why is it so imperative that you find our mutual friend?”

  “Professor, do you believe in time travel?”

  “Isn’t that what we are doing right now? Traveling through time?”

  “Yes, but I mean back, into the past.”

  “You traveled through time to get here. The world you left, New York, is six hours behind us.”

  “That is only a matter of convenience, though. If I called a friend of mine it might be midnight there and after dawn here, but we would be talking at the same time. We’re still in the same world.”

  “Are you? Hang up the phone and where are you? Not in the middle of the night in Manhattan. It ceases to exist. You are here, regardless of what is happening there. Time is only one aspect of things. The least important. This notion of yours, traveling back and forth in time, is quaint, but completely misleading. If you want to have any understanding of what you experienced, you must leave behind this notion of time being sequential, like station stops on a railroad line.”

  “How do you know what I experienced?”

  “Mr. O’Brien, please. I may be old but I have not completely taken leave of my senses. It is obvious from your question that you are the one to tell me about traveling between worlds.”

  “Yes,” Matt admitted, and went on to tell him about the studiolo and all the events that had ensued since then.

  “You see?” Kalil asked. “I haven’t taken leave of my senses, and neither have you. But that is precisely our problem, that we are captives of our senses. It is what we wrestled with in Copenhagen: the behavior of matter at a subatomic level does not correspond to our experience of the physical world. Newtonian physics is perfect for us. We see a tiger coming toward us, we run away. My car hits yours, mine is bigger, you die. I shoot a mortar and the shell goes up and then it comes back down. But this has no relation to the way matter really behaves. What our senses tell us bears no relation to the way the world works or is constructed. Except for one, of course. Our sense of humor. That is the only direct apprehension of the real world we have.

  “Matter is energy. It’s a particle and a wave, all at the same time; it’s everywhere and nowhere, it’s everything and nothing at all. And the underlying reality is that there is not just this one world we know, but an infinite number, all existing simultaneously. That’s not a theory, Mr. O’Brien, it’s the true nature of things, independent of what we see or think.”

  “Like the Parthenon.”

  “If you like. But it would be a grave error to think of these worlds as parallel universes, like books on a shelf. They are the facets of a jewel. Each one distinct and equally real, but each refracting the same essential reality. A man walks along a street on a sunny day. He glances at a shop window—a large plate glass window polished to perfection. You have done this many times, haven’t you? In it you see a world of infinite detail. Bright, as real as real can be. But then you notice shadows moving in the background. You adjust your focus, and suddenly the bright and sunny world that seemed so real becomes only a reflection, an illusion that you now see beyond to what is really there.”

  Kalil reached for the pack of cigarettes. He struck a match several times until it finally flared into life. He lit his cigarette and then exhaled, shaking out the match. “Air, Mr. O’Brien,” he said. “The sea in which we swim. And like water to a fish, it’s invisible to us. But think of the worlds to be found, right here.” He cupped his hand. “What time is it?” he asked.

  “Five o’clock,” Matt replied.

  “Ah,” Kalil exclaimed. “Time for my show!” He picked up the remote control next to him and clicked it. As a wide-screen television blossomed to life in the verdant growth the familiar theme of the I Love Lucy show blared into the courtyard. Rapt, Kalil was soon shaking with laughter, trembling like an old tree in a windstorm. Matt, thinking that his audience was over, got up as unobtrusively as he could.

  “Stay, stay,” Kalil ordered. “Here,” he said, handing him the remote. “Choose something you want to watch. A satellite dish,” he confided, and then settled back into the wicker armchair as Matt reluctantly sat down again. “I don’t even know how many channels there are. Go on.”

  Matt clicked the channel. A news show in Turkish was followed by a soap opera in Spanish. Scowling faces hectoring each other on politics came and went in a flash, replaced by a squad of men, in black and white, cautiously patrolling through a field of tall grass. Whales and dinosaurs and satellite weather images and then faster and faster he clicked, mesmerized, image following image with increasing speed until they all blurred together. He lifted his thumb and the blur resolved, like a slowing roulette wheel, into the random pattern of multicolored sticks and bars that stirred a memory before recognition settled in like the wheel coming to rest: the studiolo, the borders of the inlaid cabinets. The pattern dissolved into a scene of prosaic simplicity; a street, with carriages, and people strolling along the sidewalks. For some reason—the cafés, the streetlights, the paving stones—he thought it must be someplace in Europe. Scandinavia, perhaps, the way the light was so clear, or northern Germany.

  Matt switched the channel. The same street, the same people. A streetcar turned the corner, a woman with a perambulator talked to a friend, the shadow of a cloud drifted across a façade. He clicked and again found the same scene; the streetcar was farther along. As he clicked, it moved along the street as though in an early movie, jumping slightly as the channel changed, otherwise exactly the same. Was it? He stopped. The woman with the perambulator. She was gone. He clicked back. She was there. He clicked back again; here was a man hanging on the streetcar, about to step off, who hadn’t been there before. He clicked ahead and the man stepped off and walked away unconcerned right by the place where the woman had been talking—back and forth Matt went, channel after channel, comparing details. The light was different; not the time of day or the shadows, but the qua
lity of it. The streetcar had reached its stop and come to a halt, passengers getting off and waiting to board, and at the café a waiter was clearing the table. Matt clicked ahead several channels, holding each just long enough for the image to form. Always the same street and the same scene, but slightly different each time.

  Kalil’s housekeeper reappeared, giving Matt a severe look as though he had overstayed his welcome. The old professor was sound asleep, folded back in his chair. Matt laid the channel selector on the photographs he had shown Kalil and then followed the woman up the stairs and back through the dark and quiet hallway to the bustling street.

  chapter 24

  The building was not what Matt had expected when he checked into the hotel and showed the address to the clerk at the desk. “This street is not far,” she told Matt in careful English, tracing the route from the Hotel Europa on a map. “I think to walk there would be best, if that is fine with you.” It was certainly fine with him. After the endless delays in what should have been a short flight from Istanbul to Prague, he was more than ready for a walk. As with Kalil, he didn’t want to call ahead; if there was anything to be found at the Fleigander Foundation, then the best chance of finding out was in person. He felt, as irrational as it might be, that he was on the trail of the elusive scientist, who had been resurrected from memory to a blurred image in a photograph and now to a real person. Klein was somehow intimately connected to the foundation, and he was Matt’s best hope of finding his way back to the Quattrocento. How, he had no idea, but Klein would know. All this had happened because of him. From the restoration of the studiolo to the completion of the series of swallow paintings, Klein had played a key role. The answer lay with him, and he was out there somewhere.

  He stood on the quiet street on the south edge of the Nove Mesto district, past the green oasis of the park at Charles Square, and looked up at the plain white Cubist façade of the building, or as much of it as he could see behind the gauzy curtain of the scaffolding. The houses on either side were halfhearted Baroque pastiches in a pastel pink that in the flat light of a gray afternoon could be seen to be peeling and crumbling, like decorations at a party that has gone on too long. A directory in the lobby had Fleigander—just the single name, nothing else—on the top floor. Matt climbed the stairs, circling up around the central atrium, past doors of dark smoked glass that gave him back an attenuated version of himself and offered nothing else. The door, FLEIGANDER again alone on a small plaque to one side, opened when he tried the knob; he had half expected it to be locked, no one there. Inside he found a modern office, sleek tubular furniture and a desk behind which sat a girl whose hair, short and black, was dyed silver at the ends. She paused in her typing and looked at him.