chapter 6

Matt, waiting for the signal, balanced lightly on the balls of his feet, legs flexed and body sideways to his opponent. The thin blades of the foils hung in the air, tips almost touching, a double image dressed in white with silver ovals where faces should be. At the harsh buzz the two men dropped slightly, testing their legs, the tips of their blades circling each other like dragonflies engaged in a mating dance. Matt let his adversary take the advance, short step by short step, ready for the lunge. When it came, a blur of silver, the sharp zinging of the blades as they sliced against each other raced up his forearm. A quick circle of his wrist threw the oncoming blade aside and then Matt was headed in, fast, only to find himself again turned aside just before touching home. With a quick circle his opponent disengaged his blade and then retreated. Matt, continuing the attack, lunged ahead in full extension, but with a deft movement his blade was deflected into the emptiness between his attacker’s torso and arm and Matt was brought to a halt by a dull point resting lightly on his pectoral muscle, a bare inch from his heart. The buzzer sounded.

Twice more the dance was repeated, each time ending as it had the first time, once with Matt’s blade being the one to make the touch. The final buzz caught him in the midst of a last desperate attack to try to even the score. He stopped, rose to his full height and saluted. The air felt cool on his drenched head when he took off his mask. Holding the foil and mask under his arm, he shook Klein’s extended hand.

“Next time,” Klein said.

“You haven’t even broken a sweat,” Matt protested.

“Economy of motion,” Klein replied. He glanced at the clock. “It’s still early. If you’re free, perhaps you might like to see that drawing I mentioned.”

“Sure,” Matt replied, his curiosity piqued. Klein hadn’t said anything more, just mentioned a drawing that he thought Matt might find of interest, whatever that meant.

The cold air outside the gym was bracing after the humid warmth inside. A light snow drifted from the enveloping black of the night sky, a fine white silt that vanished before it reached the sidewalk. As the two men descended the steep hill to Riverside Drive a breeze off the river ruffled through the tall trees of the park, making the snow dance and eddy through the luminous pools of light held aloft by the old cast-iron streetlamps.

Klein opened the door of his apartment to the sound of a piano. It wasn’t until a slight faltering of the tempo that Matt, taking off his coat, realized it wasn’t a recording. Like music remembered rather than heard, the notes had a dreamlike timbre, the faint dry echo of hail on a frozen field. The apartment, spare and modern, was almost devoid of furniture. The hallway was bare but for a series of photographs, chrome frames against a white wall, and a narrow carpet on the wood floor, the subtle pattern of blue on blue barely discernible. Matt, as he followed Klein into the living room, caught a quick glimpse of a pool table through a door opposite, the splash of black and white on the wall above it unmistakably a Jackson Pollock. The walls of the living room ended in the night, a curtain of glass that framed the lights of the city and the wide emptiness of the river. The snow transformed the view into a lithograph, a thickly textured abstraction of gray and black.

Seated at the keyboard, a young woman with short black hair, spiked and dyed silver at the ends, played with a delicate grace, barely touching the keys. Bach? Matt thought, knowing that he was probably wrong, that anything Baroque sounded like Bach to him. He realized why the sound had been so distant and ethereal, for the instrument was not a piano at all, but some earlier ancestor—a harpsichord, perhaps. The small oblong case of dark fruitwood had two keyboards, one over the other, the white keys not ivory but the honey yellow of old boxwood. Inside the cover, propped open by a stick carved in the shape of an elongated sylph, was a painted scene of sprites dancing in a sylvan glade.

As they paused for a moment, listening as the young woman played on, unaware of their presence, Matt gradually realized that something was out of place. What was wrong? Not false notes; while no expert, he could still tell that the music had the proper flow to it, that what he was hearing was what he was supposed to hear. It wasn’t the distinctive timbre of the sound, for he had quickly gotten used to that. It was out of tune. That was it—he could hear it right there, in a long scale, up the keyboard—the instrument was simply out of tune. Wincing, he glanced at Klein. Unbelievable. Head tilted to one side and a faraway look in his eyes, he was oblivious to the discordant notes.

The doorbell rang, and the music immediately halted, the player’s hands poised above the keyboard. She stood and turned, stopping as she caught sight of Matt and Klein.

“Excellent,” Klein said.

“I’m glad you liked it,” the girl said, and then left to answer the door.

Klein went to the keyboard and sat. He stretched, rubbed his hands together, and then attacked the keys. An explosion of notes poured forth, a cascading series of scales that finally resolved into a series of repeated eighth notes. Matt heard the door open and a familiar voice say, “Ciao, baby. Are you ready? Let’s go.” He watched Klein’s hands as they rhythmically stroked the keys, abruptly shifting to a crashing series of chords that shook the delicate case on its spindly legs in a quick closing cadence.

“Does our friend Charles know?” Klein asked in the ensuing silence, his hands still resting on the keys.

“He doesn’t want to know,” Matt replied. “He says that Kent is his own man.”

“I see.” Klein’s left hand began to sound a note that on each third repetition filled out with a chord. “Before I forget,” he said, as his right hand added a melody on top of the rhythmical base. “On the wall behind you.”

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.