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 the 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.

But was Sally so far off the mark after all? She had loved him once, there was no question of that, and he had loved her, too, so the least he owed her was to consider what she had said. As he looked, he made himself think about what it was that he was seeing. Was it just a painting? He looked at Anna, and as he did, he forced himself to look, as impartially as he could, at what he felt. No. As hard as it was for him to admit, Sally was right. It wasn’t a painting of a woman he was seeing, it was a woman herself—a person, a real person who had once had a name, a life, a past and a future. A soul. Anna. No one falls in love with a woman in a painting, he reminded himself. So what does that make me? No one.

Matt reread the letter. It was what he had feared. He had known from the very first moment he had seen the panel, even under the harsh lights of the basement stacks. And then, over the months as he worked, he had ignored the mounting evidence. The hard data of the panel and the analysis of the paint, the intuitive sense of technique and modeling—he had used his professional skepticism as a shield to deflect it all. But this last piece of evidence established the authorship of the panel beyond the shadow of a doubt. There could be no question, even to the most cautious. The painting was genuine. And there could be no avoiding what lay ahead, and just the thought of it filled him with sadness.