Quattrocento Read online

  “I’m here to see Dr. Klein,” he said.

  “Your name?”

  “Matt O’Brien. We’ve met before,” he said, remembering why she had seemed familiar to him. She was the girl who had been playing the harpsichord the first time he had been at Klein’s apartment, when he had seen the Leonardo drawing.

  “Have we? When would that have been?”

  “A while ago,” Matt said. When, indeed? A good question. Another lifetime?

  “I’m afraid I don’t remember. One moment,” she added, and left through a doorway behind the desk.

  Matt, waiting, looked about the reception area. Decorated with abstract monotypes on handmade textured paper, it might have been the office of a very successful and exclusive psychiatrist. On a table under one of the prints was a vase of irises, tall and fresh. The simple ribbed glass was the same, Matt realized, as the one that he had awakened to find in his hospital room.

  “You asked for Dr. Klein?” A slender man not much older than he was, dressed in a somber gray suit with a handkerchief in the breast pocket as precisely arranged as his hair, approached Matt from behind the desk. The woman returned to her seat and began typing again.

  “Yes,” Matt said. He had seen this man before, too. At the reception for the opening of the studiolo, when he had mistakenly thought the man was Klein.

  “May I ask what this is in regard to?” The man’s demeanor was polite but noncommittal, like a banker interviewing an applicant for a loan.

  “I’m from the Metropolitan. We received a painting from you.”

  “Yes. I trust it was satisfactory.”

  “It was exactly what we were hoping to find.”

  “Very good.”

  “And Dr. Klein?” Matt asked. A telephone began ringing on the secretary’s desk, a soft double tone.

  “He is unavailable,” the man replied. The phone stopped in midring, unanswered.

  “When might I expect to see him?”

  “I can’t say.”

  “I’d like to speak to him personally.”

  “I’m afraid that would not be possible.”

  “He’s a friend. I know he would want to hear from me.”

  “Even so. Unfortunately, we have no way of contacting him.”

  “But this is his office, isn’t it?”

  “I wish I could be of some assistance.”

  “I know you do. And I thank you for all your help. But if he’s not available, then he’s not available. Oh, if I might ask you one more thing,” Matt said, taking out the glass prism that had been hanging from his hospital window. “What do you think of this?”

  “It’s beautiful,” the man replied, lifting it as Matt held the chain. “Excellent workmanship. It appears to be very old. Interesting touch,” he added, fingering one of the curved rays.

  “Isn’t it? I thought you might have seen it before.”

  “No. Not to my knowledge.”

  Matt slipped the prism back into the inside pocket of his coat. “I’ve taken enough of your time,” he said. “Thanks.”

  Matt threaded his way through the crowds milling across the Charles Bridge, oblivious to the carnival atmosphere as he thought of what he had found and what to do next. Leaving the guitars and mimes behind, the soft choruses of “All we are saying is give peace a chance,” and the fake Prada bags set out on blankets, he wandered into the narrow, twisting alleys up the steep hill on the other side of the river. He had run into a dead end. His interview at the foundation was added proof that Klein did exist, but how could he find him? There had been no Johannes Klein in the city directory, when he had asked at the desk, and none in the Czech Republic. But when he went back to his room and searched on his laptop through an Internet directory the drought had turned into a deluge, yielding hundreds across Europe. He could see himself becoming the Diogenes Rodrigo had mentioned in jest, searching not for porcinis but the real Dr. Klein.

  Matt climbed the hillside as the light faded and the crowds thinned and vanished until only an occasional solitary figure passed in the shadows. Reaching the top he looked down on the city, shadowed in a dusky purple as the sun, which had come out from the clouds for a last moment of glory, touched the horizon. Impossibly real fairy tale spires reached up to the clouds hanging low over the city, their soft gray shining with a rainbow of colors, glowing in the last rays of the setting sun. Facets of a jewel, Matt thought, remembering what Kalil had said, and took out the prism. He held it up by the chain, the beveled glass sun with its flame-shaped points sparkling dully as the light, fading, was unable to break free in a rainbow of its own. He thought of Kalil’s television, of all the different versions of the trolley and the street scene that he had switched through, all different and all almost exactly the same. But, like the captive colors hidden in the prism, they were all there, in the vibrating air that was all around him.

  Kalil had been right, Matt thought, descending into the welcoming dark. He had spent all his time and energy thinking about how to get back. His mind couldn’t help going from now to then. But wasn’t that exactly what Kalil had said was not the case? There was no now and then. There was a world he belonged to, but it was not in the past. He was walking through it right now, if he could only see it. A longing came over him that was almost magnetic in its intensity, pulling at every atom of his being as though it would gather him up and dissolve him into the invisible air.

  Time was a variable, Matt realized, but it was not all that mattered. If it did, then this was the best place to be. With streets that hadn’t changed since they had first been built centuries ago, Prague at night was a city outside of time. The present retreated as silently as the tide, revealing the forgotten shore that lay beneath the reflected light of day where the past survived, unseen. He crossed the river in the pale light of the rising moon, almost full, the Charles Bridge to the north bathed in yellow lights like a stage set. On his meandering journey through the city he had passed through every age from the medieval to the Baroque, but none of them had pulled at him the way the studiolo had, or the portrait, or now with an overwhelming power, Anna and the Quattrocento.

  Matt looked up, hands deep in his pockets. Without thinking, he had found his way back to the quiet street he had been directed to earlier in the day. Klein, he thought; I am lost. This is all happening because of you. Why? Where are you? Matt, counting his options, realized they had dwindled to none. He couldn’t allow this to become a dead end, for he had no place left to go. What was his next step? He thought of Klein and the quantum birds, how the arc was made of a series of steps, each separate and each inextricably linked to the one before and after, forming a single graceful unbroken line leading up into the sky.

  With a gathered leap and a grunt Matt was up, resting on the wooden planks of the scaffolding that obscured the face of the building as he regained his breath. The rest was easy, and he was soon on the top floor. Hinged at the side, the windows were all securely fastened. Without a second thought now that he had made up his mind, Matt, one hand in the other, used his elbow as a battering ram. A solid rap, and the glass cracked; with another, more gentle, shards fell inside, and he could reach through and unlatch the window. From cleaning a picture to breaking and entering: not the career path he would have expected under normal circumstances, he thought, as he climbed into the office and stood, listening. But these were anything but normal circumstances. Would they ever be again?

  Satisfied he was alone but still afraid to turn on a light, Matt felt his way through the black, navigating out the door like a deep-sea submersible exploring a sunken ship. A hallway led him to the large open space of the reception room, where the windows shone with the unobstructed light of the moon, casting a pale glow on the quiet interior. Matt saw the irises in the vase by the entrance. He went over and lifted the flowers, holding them carefully so that the water dripping from the long stems ran back into the vase, and felt around with his free hand. It was there. His fingers closed around a slender glass rod. He pulled it h
alfway out and then let it drop, clinking against the side of the vase, before replacing the flowers.

  The index of refraction, Matt remembered mentioning to Klein. That had been the first day he had met him, when Klein had brought in the painting. Matt had been talking about glazes, and how walnut oil had a higher index of refraction, allowing some pigments to disappear and become pure color. The way glass disappears in water, Klein had said. Disappear. Find the right world and become a part of it. Is that what Klein was telling him? Was the message even for him? It had to be; he never would have thought to look, if not for the vase in the hospital, and Klein had brought that for him. But why?

  And why not. That was the real question, Matt realized, the one that he had been avoiding for too long. Ever since he had awakened in the hospital. He had found his world, but then lost it. He had been there and now wasn’t. Why not? Can loss ever fully be explained or understood? Matt thought of Masaccio, and the drawings that Anna had shown him. The angel with his sword, the two figures being driven from the Garden. They understood only too well, he thought. That was why they were forced to leave—they had sacrificed innocence for knowing. I, too, was expelled, driven out, he thought, feeling again Leandro’s hand closing on his neck, and the rising sound of the wolf tone. But now, in the shadows of the moon a world away from where he had begun and just as far from where he wanted to be, was the time for truth. And the truth, he knew, was that he had never fully been a part of that world he had found, for he had never entirely relinquished the world from which he had come. They had gained the knowledge that had lost them their world. He had never surrendered his.

  Part of it was how he had gotten there, Matt thought. He had sought refuge in the studiolo. He had been running away. But a refuge could never be a world, and if he were to disappear like glass in water, he would have to become a part of that world, not hide in it. Not out of fear or longing, but because there was no place else for him to be. Knowledge would not help, thinking was a dead end. There is no knowing, he thought. There is only becoming. That was the wolf tone, the irrational that was there, an essential part of every world, the thing that in a strange way gave it meaning. It was the irreconcilable that must be reconciled.

  Matt continued down the hallway past the reception office, in the direction the man had come from that afternoon, stopping at the door of the next office to the last. Different from the rest, it had the same window and desk but no computer, no file cabinets, no telephone console or organizer with paper clips and pens and photographs of the family. A blotter, edged in red leather, a single pen rising from a block of marble, an early Cubist lamp, a small book; the decor was spare and uncluttered, like Klein’s apartment had been. There were no cabinets to search, not even a shelf of books, so he sat at the desk, wondering what to do next.

  The problem wasn’t a lack of options, it was too many. There was an entire office suite to be explored, sifted through in the dark, and then all put back. It was already past nine, according to the clock on the desk, the hands like shadows in the moonlight. That gave him eight hours, at the most. He reached for the book at the side of the desk and opened it. A calendar, there were entries on every page, in the same hand but with a variety of ink from the spidery black of an old dipped nib to a blue felt-tip. Holding it in the direct moonlight, Matt riffled through the pages. September fourth through twelfth had the same entry, Kitty Hawk. The eighth also had Paris, lower on the page. Copenhagen, London, Paris again, and then New York on several days in January, then again in March and April. Every day was a different city, often two or three on the same date. There were names, too, after some of the places—Rutherford, Helmholtz, Atget, Bohr, Montgolfier, Lavoisier, Seurat, Turner, Vespucci.

  Matt checked the cover to find what year the book was from, but there was none embossed; none on the flyleaf or title page either. Berlin, São Paulo, London, all on the same date. Tokyo and Siena, both on the twenty-ninth of February. It was a book of hours, Matt realized, a lifetime of discovery and exploration, collapsed into a single voyage around the sun. Leafing further, a name caught his eye, and he stopped. November. What was the date that he had first met Klein? Now he knew. The fifteenth. There it was in black: NY MMA, Matt O’Brien. He kept looking. Prague was there, a number of times. After one notation of the city on October twenty-first, Klein had written the names Mozart, da Ponte, and Casanova, and then underneath, Don Giovanni, Stavovske Divadlo, eight-thirty. Curious, Matt moved on to the current date. Prague and Don Giovanni again, and the same theater and time. But instead of the other names, Mozart and da Ponte and Casanova, was once again his own: Matt O’Brien.

  chapter 25

  The soprano could be heard, muffled by the closed doors of the auditorium, as Matt walked into the deserted lobby of the theater. The box office was closed, a curtain pulled down behind the window. It was after the intermission, the opera already into the second act. One of the doors to the hall opened, held by an usher as a couple hurried out, the woman arranging an Hermès scarf over shoulders dark with a cruise-ship tan as her husband, a large, florid man with tooled snakeskin boots, propelled her along by the elbow.

  Taking in Matt’s plight with a quick glance, he reached into the side pocket of his green blazer. “You need this?” he asked, holding out his ticket stub.

  “Thanks,” Matt replied, not surprised that the man had assumed he was an American. Judging by what he had overheard all day the chances were better than even that anyone you spoke to would be an American, including the panhandlers and street musicians.

  The usher bowed as Matt entered and then, reading the ticket, gestured to the stairs. Up one flight, Matt hastened along the curved row of doors. Finding the box empty, he slipped into one of the plush velvet chairs, angled toward the stage. Absorbed by the drama, no one in the boxes on either side even glanced at him. The lighting gave the painted drops of the long dining hall the dreamy feel of a late-evening dinner party, as though the audience were sitting at one end of the table with the rakish Don at the other. He bantered with his manservant, Leporello, enjoying his feast as a band entertained him.

  The musicians could just be seen in the tiny pit, the silver buttons on their coats winking like coins. The theater was small, a jewel box of gilt arabesque against a rich olive gray. Four rings of balconies rose like terraces of a cake to a domed ceiling decorated with classical motifs just visible in the dark. Matt searched the audience, almost lost in the shadows reflected from the stage lights, his eyes sweeping the row of boxes across from him. He stopped at the sight of a woman intent on the opera, on her shoulder the hand of a man standing behind her, hidden in the shadows. Hair swept back in a French knot, with curls at the temples, she wore a dark blue dress that shone almost black in the dim light. The inclination of her head, the air of watchful repose as she listened—

  “Anna!” Matt called out, rising to his feet, leaning on the balcony. His cry was drowned out. As a tremendous chord crashed out from the orchestra, a massed roar of strings and horns and timpani that surged through the hall.

  “Don Giovanni,” a deep bass intoned, insistent and overwhelming. Buffeted by the harsh chord Matt hung on to the rail as the Commendatore, tall and gray as death, appeared against a new backdrop of wintry black.

  “Don Giovanni,” commanded the imposing figure again. The chord rang out again, its dark cadence washing against Matt, sinking deep inside until it vibrated in his bones. Anna was still there, but only faintly in the darkness across the hall, but she was looking for him, she had heard his voice.

  “Wait!” Matt called, but the chord sounded again. He held on to the rail as it dropped in pitch, flattening and slowing to the jarring discord of the wolf tone. Gathering his strength he struggled for the door. He had to get to Anna. And Klein; he knew that was Klein with her. Out of the box he forced his way along the hall, the chord resonating in the walls and the floor, boring into him from every side as it grew and grew. The hall was endless, the doors curving ahead of him as he fought his w
ay forward. Hanging on to consciousness against the gravitational pull of the dark he grasped at a door, hoping it was the right one. As he forced his way into the box the chord died away, leaving a silence like that after a tremendous clap of thunder.

  The box was empty, the theater pitch-black, silent. He felt his way forward into nothingness, stumbling against the chairs, and then his waist met the balcony. Beyond, in the blackness, he could sense a yawning emptiness. He held the rail, senses straining into the dark but finding nothing. The theater itself could be gone, he could be standing at the edge of the world, nothing left but a railing and a small piece of carpeting under his feet.

  Matt turned and felt his way out of the box, suddenly aware of material around his neck, the feeling an unpleasant reminder of a hand clutching his throat, lifting him off his feet. The deserted hallway was close with the heat and waxy smell of the hundreds of candles in the sconces and chandeliers, their flames motionless in the still air. Matt, unsteady, as though the deck of a ship were falling away under his feet, crossed the hall to a mirror.

  Around his neck was a white kerchief, wrapped several times and then tied in a wide bow, nestled inside the lapels of a long white double-breasted vest. Over it he wore a long black coat, with a collar turned high in the back and broad rolled lapels. His cream-colored breeches were buttoned and tucked into tall leather boots.