Quattrocento Read online

  Matt turned around and looked. A frame, but not a painting; a drawing, in brown ink. Patterns, but patterns that he had seen before. He moved up for a closer look, suddenly unaware of the music that had coalesced into a simple fugue. It couldn’t be, but he knew it was. He stood, enchanted by the curlicues, the swirling force of the pen strokes, sure and graceful, that created the tension and flow of what could easily have been mistaken for an abstract design. It was nothing of the sort, as he knew, but a precise record of the flow of water from a spout into a basin. But where had Klein gotten it? As far as he knew, none of Leonardo’s drawings of fluid dynamics were in private hands.

  Without pause, Klein gracefully segued from the fugue to a Beatles song: “What would you think if I sang out of tune …” The familiar melody and chord changes filled the air. The old instrument gave the song a poignant quality, as though it were being played on a wind-up music box. Matt searched Klein’s face. It’s a joke, he thought, the instrument’s so out of tune. If I can hear it, anyone can, and yet he doesn’t seem to even notice. Klein lifted his hand and the music stopped, immediately cut off. “Do you have dinner plans?” he asked.

  “No,” Matt replied. Sally was out of town. Not that it would matter, he thought; she had taken an active dislike to Klein. Sally, as perceptive as anyone he knew, could sense that as polite and attentive as Klein was to her, he found nothing in her to engage his attention.

  “I have some friends stopping by. You might enjoy meeting them.”

  “Thanks, that sounds great.”

  “I’m going to see what Tante Lisl left us for dinner,” Klein said. “I’ll be back in a moment.”

  Matt went to the window and stood looking out at the view. Washed of color, the room reflected back, floating transparently on the other side of the large expanse of glass in the snowy night. The lights of the city twinkled through the shadow that was him, suspended in the night, looking back at himself; I’m a constellation, he thought, an artificial superposition to give some semblance of order to the lights beyond that were the real world. Each one a star, a planet, with a world of its own in its circle of light, for whom he didn’t even exist. He was Orion, with the headlights of passing cabs down in the park as his belt, and streetlamps as his arms and legs, and for his crown an airplane, flying up the Hudson. A figure appeared, another constellation drifting through the night sky.

  Matt turned around. Klein approached with two glasses of wine.

  “I didn’t recognize your drawing at first,” Matt said, nodding at the Leonardo as he took one of the glasses. “It was the last thing I expected to see. Where did you find it?”

  “The result of a genealogical tontine, I’m afraid. I’m the last one standing, so it came to me. I’ve always been fascinated by it. If you look at water running into a basin, all you see is froth. I know, because I tried. You need a camera to stop the action like this. The eye is quite simply not fast enough. I can’t figure out how he did it.”

  Matt studied the drawing, moving up to the wall for a closer look, getting close enough so that it filled his field of vision. Water gushed from the spigot with a force that was almost palpable, landing and splashing deep in the basin, bubbling back up in foam to a surface choppy with broken waves. Circles and curlicues, lines bending and changing and following around and around, swirling away as his eye followed the motion.

  “You know his drawings of a gull in flight,” Klein said.

  “Yes.”

  “Same thing. A bird’s wing moves too fast to see it. And yet once again he has stopped it perfectly. Here,” he said, and led him out to the hallway to one of the chrome frames. “You see? Exactly the same.” It was a series of photographs, old and stylized, that traced the movement of a bird as its wings moved up and down through a full cycle. “He drew it to perfection, but it took Eadweard Muybridge and a camera to see it.”

  The doorbell rang again. “Excuse me,” Klein said, and went to answer the door. Curious, Matt looked at the other photographs on the wall. Next to the bird was another of a group of images, twelve in all. A salt print from the early days of photography, it had an almost lithographic texture, with heavy paper and dull black lines that had no semitones. There was an inscription across the bottom, elegant type set in italic. Faraday: Magnetic Fields of Disturbance, it said. A variety of strange geometric shapes, two-dimensional, they looked like an architect’s floor plans, but of rooms with no doors or windows. What appeared to be hair radiated out from their surfaces, a spiky fringe like cilia surrounding each one. Beginning with a perfect square at the top, the shapes became increasingly complex. Completely asymmetrical, with no true corners, one of them had a small square protruding from the longest of its sides. Where had he seen it before? As he looked, the sense of familiarity grew. He was certain he knew it.

  The next photograph was one Matt had seen before. Falling sideways, his arm flung out and the rifle just out of his hand, a Loyalist soldier in the Spanish Civil War had been caught by the camera at the very moment a bullet had found him. The last photograph on the wall was even more familiar, so much so that in different circumstances Matt might not even have seen it, ignoring it the way he would have an advertisement in a magazine. A biplane, listing slightly to one side with white wings delicately feathered, was just rising from a narrow wooden rail laid in the sand at Kitty Hawk. Frozen in the air, with the figure lying at the controls also motionless, all movement was concentrated in the man who stood to the side, black against the gray sand and the featureless sky. Wilbur Wright, leaning forward after he had let go of the wing, willing the fragile plane aloft: watching it rise from one world to land in the next.

  chapter 7

  Matt listened as the notes rose from one of the pianos arrayed in the long gallery of the museum’s hall of musical instruments. As the pianist’s long fingers carved and molded the music, drawing some of the notes lightly from the smooth keys, pounding others into shape, Matt wondered how it could be that in a building with thousands in it at any given moment, most of whom were there for the art, there should be only one other listener, and that a dog? The pianist’s hands, long apart, finally found each other, and the piece came to a graceful conclusion.

  “Beautiful,” Matt said, after the last note had faded to silence.

  “Thank you,” the pianist said.

  “Was it Brahms?”

  “A good guess. No, it was one of the impromptus by Sibelius. Ironic, isn’t it? He hated the piano. But then Mozart detested the flute, and two of his best pieces are for flute quartet. Good, this one’s done.” He put his tools away in the box next to him on the bench and stood up, one hand still on the keyboard. The dog raised his head and cocked his ears. Holding his toolbox, the man guided himself by running his fingers lightly along the side of the ebonized case as he headed for the next instrument in the line, a massive Busendorfer piano.

  “I wondered if I might ask you a question,” Matt said. “I asked my friend Walter in the department here and he said I was in luck, that you were here today and would be able to give me the best answer to what I want to know.”

  “I’ll try,” the pianist replied, lifting the music rack of the piano to expose the heavy brass frame. He took a tool shaped like an oversized key and fitted it onto a peg around which the end of one of the steel strings was wound.

  “Why would someone deliberately have a piano out of tune?”

  “That’s easy enough to answer. All pianos are out of tune.”

  “That’s what Walter said. But when I asked him what he meant, he started in on Pythagoras and the monochord and some mathematics that left me completely confused. He said I should ask you.”

  The tuner laughed. “Thanks, Walter. I can explain what’s going on, but that’s different from really understanding it. The problem is that music is mathematical, but the musical scale violates the most basic law of mathematics. The whole doesn’t equal the sum of its parts. It’s because— Boy.” He thought for a second. “Here, let me just show
you.” He stood and lifted the full lid of the piano, propping it open before sitting back at the keyboard. “Now watch,” he said. He played a note, holding the pedal down so it kept vibrating. “Do you see the string?”

  “Yes, it’s this one here,” Matt said.

  “A low C. Now this,” he said, playing another note. “That’s the next C up, an octave. See it?”

  “Yes.”

  “About half as long, isn’t it? The fact is, it’s exactly half the length of the lower one. That’s where Pythagoras comes in. What you see right there is the foundation of modern science, the first discovery that a natural phenomenon, in this case the vibration of a string, has a mathematical basis. A string half as long vibrates twice as fast.” He played the two notes together. “An octave.”

  “They sound perfectly in tune,” Matt said, watching the strings vibrate.

  “They are.”

  “So what’s the problem?”

  “Wait, I’ll show you.” He played two more notes. “A major third. The most basic interval in music. The two notes are three steps apart, which is why it’s called a third. But there are also three of them in the octave, and that’s what causes the problem. Three thirds do not make a whole. This is where Walter’s math comes in.” The man played the two notes again, holding the pedal down so they went on vibrating. “You see them? The higher one is shorter, but not by much. To get it you divide the long string into five and take away one. That’s a ratio of five to four. So to get an octave you multiply that three times, which gives you 125/64. But an octave, as we saw at the beginning, is two to one, which is 128/64. You see the problem? Three thirds do not make a whole. There’s a missing 3/64th.”

  “I see,” Matt replied, even though he didn’t. But since he wasn’t going to be building a piano any time soon, the important thing seemed to be that it didn’t add up. “But that doesn’t sound like much.”

  “It’s enough to make some notes sound completely out of tune with the rest. A note like that is called the wolf tone, because it literally sounds like the howling of a wolf. Over the full range of a keyboard it turns up in the fourths and fifths, too. All sorts of things were done to try to eradicate it. You can just leave the offending notes out, of course, but that seriously limits the music you can write. You can bend a few notes here and there to distribute the inequalities so that the wolf notes aren’t so jarring. That’s called tempering the scale. You remember Bach and his well-tempered clavier? He wrote those to advocate a tuning system that he thought was the best. Mean tempering was another one used a lot, but there were as many tunings as there are keyboards in this room.

  “Equal temperament is what we use now,” the tuner said, taking out his tools. “Every note is slightly off so that none stands out. It has its advantages, because every note of every scale can be used. The wolf has been banished. It’s extinct. But we do pay a price. We live in a world that’s completely out of tune and no one even notices. It only sounds right to you because it’s what you know.” He struck the key again and, satisfied, moved the tool. “But now you’ve heard true pitch, you know what music really is. You’re like the man in Plato’s cave. You’ve stumbled outside and seen the sun and now even if you go back, you’ll know that what you’re seeing are only shadows. But beware of the wolf. The ancients knew its power. It was so strong that to play it or even speak of it was a sin. They called it the diabolus in musica.”

  “How bad could it be?” Matt asked. “I didn’t hear anything that sounded like the howling of a wolf.”

  The tuner smiled. Holding the handle lightly between his thumb and forefinger, he trailed his others lightly along the pegs to the longest strings at the bottom of the keyboard. Rather than striking the keys he stood up and reached inside. Plucking the string so lightly that Matt couldn’t hear the sound, the man made minute adjustments with the tool before moving to the next, and then the next. The dog suddenly raised his head from his paws. His ears cocked forward and he rose to his feet. Head lowered, he growled deeply.

  “Quiet, Pablo,” the man said. He adjusted a few more strings and then sat at the keyboard, his hands folded in front of him. After a brief moment he raised them and without any ceremony began to play.

  Matt, expecting something terrible, relaxed. It did sound strange, but the individual notes were wonderfully sharp and clear, like a polished window, and they resonated with each other in a way that was entirely new. Without sharps or flats, the melody had a modal tonality, like a song from long ago, passed down from generation to generation. Lulled into a feeling of relaxed enjoyment, he was completely unprepared for the modulation when it finally came. The tuner’s right hand moved slightly, the arched fingers descended, and the melody stopped as a single terrible note, alien to all the rest, rang in the air. Matt felt the hair rise on the back of his neck. The pianist played the note again, adding others to make it a chord, holding the pedal down so that it continued to resonate, the dissonance boring into Matt. Trumpets, deep in the woods somewhere out of sight, and in the shadows under the trees, the wolf—

  The urgent blare of the trumpets echoed through the woods, punctuating the muffled tumult of shouts and excited barking, the neighing of a horse as it forced its way through the thick underbrush. Moss underfoot, laurel, submerged in green and dappled in shadow, Matt followed the hunt. Thirsty, he hadn’t had a drink since they had entered the forest, high on the ridge past the fields above the villa. Up and then down, rocky defiles and sudden clearings and pools, dark and quiet under the overhanging trees, he was completely lost. He stopped, scanning the steep hillside ahead. A flash of color, of wings, the frenzy of the circling dogs—and then without warning he was on the ground, the moss under his cheek. Struggling to get up, winded, squinting against the sun overhead through the waving crown of leaves, against the branches a shadow and in its hands a sword, held high, descending—

  Matt sat bolt upright. Sally, next to him, her face turned away and her hands under her cheek, lay still. Moonlight cast a faint shadow across the blankets, silvering her hair. He rubbed his face, wide awake. He knew there would be no getting back to sleep, so he eased his legs around and got up, careful not to wake the sleeping girl. He slipped into his robe, wondering as he did how she managed to get his pajamas away from him without his noticing. Only the tops, and he didn’t mind, really; they felt better on her, next to him.

  The apartment was silent, no sound from the deserted street outside. Long rectangles of pale white draped across the furniture, rested on the floor, moonlight mixed with the soulless glare of streetlights. What time was it? Matt had not the slightest idea, and didn’t care; too early for coffee, that was all that mattered. He didn’t want it to be morning, anyway.

  He sat at the desk and switched the computer on, yawning the last vestiges of sleep from the corners of his mind as the machine warmed up. A few clicks and there she was. This was Anna as she must have been, as she had sat for her portrait. Matt had mapped her onto a three-dimensional coaxial model, taking hours of work to get it just right. But it had been worth it. He moved the mouse and her head turned, lifted; she looked at him. She hadn’t smiled, yet; that would take time, and he wondered again what her voice would sound like. Buona sera, he thought, and grinned; that, truly, would be stepping over the line. A talking portrait? No. But like this, yes, that was fine.

  Matt logged on to check his mail. It was there, the letter he had been dreading as much as waiting for. He opened it.

  “Matt?” Sally stood in the door. “What time is it?” she asked, coming over to stand behind him. “Three-thirty,” she exclaimed, as she read the time on the screen.

  “I couldn’t sleep,” he replied.

  “Well, you should try. You’re going to be exhausted. The FBI?” she asked, a hand on his shoulder as she leaned forward, seeing the crest on the document on the screen.

  “A test on the portrait.” Anna watched from the corner of the screen.

  “She’s wanted by the FBI, too? So you’re not t
he only one.”

  “Sally—” His words were cut off as her hand reached up from his shoulder to the side of his face. Her hair, hanging loose, enfolded him as she bent down and kissed him hard. Her other hand slipped down his chest, inside his robe, and Matt leaned back, responding to her kiss and her touch. Her tongue held him, searching, probing, as she moved around and straddled him. He tried to speak but she pressed her mouth harder against his, rising up to guide him into her. Matt surrendered to her insistence, holding her waist as she rose and fell on him. Careless of bruising, her mouth covered his face, sliding over his mouth and eyes, her breath panting and wet as she rode him harder and harder, urging him on until he could hold on no longer and he let go, holding her tight against him. She relaxed, lightness taking form inside the familiar softness of his own pajamas, and dropped her head on his shoulder.

  “You’re looking at her, aren’t you?” Sally asked after a moment, as he stroked her hair.

  Matt dropped his eyes from the screen.

  Sally lifted her head and looked at him. “You bastard,” she said, when he didn’t answer. With a quick, fluid motion she rose and was gone, leaving him sprawled in the chair. When she emerged from the bedroom moments later, she was fully dressed, carrying her overnight bag. She left without a word, pausing only long enough to get her coat from the closet.

  “So that’s that,” Matt said aloud, after the click of the door closing behind her had faded into the silence. There would be no June for them, no trip to Gubbio. Fine, if that’s the way she felt. If she was so stupid as to be jealous of a woman in a painting, that was her problem, not his. And she was wrong, anyway. He hadn’t fallen in love with a woman in a painting. He might have fallen in love with a painting, yes, he was willing to admit that, but why should that be so strange? He had rescued it from oblivion, brought it back to life. He had spent months with it. It was like a child to him. But Anna herself? That was ridiculous. He knew better than that. No one falls in love with a woman in a painting, he thought, unless it could be said that one falls in love with his dreams.