chapter 20

Using the small brass key, Matt wound the clock. One last click and it was done, and he hung the key on its hook on the side of the delicate frame. He lowered the glass dome over the works, silencing the faint whir of the spinning gears, and then used the old polishing rag to remove any trace of smudges or fingerprints from the glass. Chin in hand and elbows on his raised knees, he sat, watching the tiny wheels winking in the fading light.

“Matt,” Charles said from the door.

“Hello, Charles,” Matt said, without turning.

“I have something you might like to see,” Charles said, coming into the office. “Do you mind if I turn on the light?”

“Not at all.”

Matt slid the clock back over to the side of the bench as Charles set a package down in front of him. Flat and rectangular, about the size of a large serving tray, the air courier and customs clearance stamps almost obscured the label. The Fleigander Foundation. It must be from Klein. Matt had tried calling him after he had gotten home from the hospital, but the phone had rung, unanswered. That hadn’t come as a surprise, for he knew the scientist traveled frequently, and had homes elsewhere. Matt opened the thick cardboard lid and then the lighter one inside, under a layer of bubble wrap, and lifted out a painting from the foam bed it was nestled in.

A swallow, its wings arched, rose into the sky. The delicate gray of the bird, the pillowing eddies of the cloud and the reaches of empty blue beyond, all had the liquid depth of oil paints, layered and glazed. But on a panel, not canvas.

“Aren’t you pleased?” Charles asked, as Matt studied the picture.

“It’s very nice.”

“Very nice? It’s the missing painting, the one you said would be there. The series is complete.”

“Yes, I know.”

“Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”

“It’s good to have them all together.”

“Good,” Charles repeated. “Matt, I don’t know what to say. You’ve been back for almost a month. And all you’ve done, as far as I know, is wind your clock. Have you even been up to see the portrait? No. I didn’t think so.”

Matt didn’t know what to say either. That his dreams were more real than his waking life? That somehow he had fallen down in a small room only to wake up—where? Here? Everything was so familiar, so much exactly the same, but it was as though none of it really existed. Even Charles, standing next to him. He could have been painted by Paolo Uccello, Matt thought, looking at him. His beard had taken on the tone of the silver Paolo had used, tarnished to a dark gray by time, and his figure had the same ageless solidity, a study in perspective. But it isn’t just Charles, he thought. It’s everything. Like a painting in reverse, the world around him was slowly, almost imperceptibly, losing color and form. And what did he remember? Not falling down. Nothing. Except his dreams, and the problem with them was not remembering, but escaping them. They had all the color and the vividness, like the painting Charles was holding—

“Let me see that,” Matt said, and took it out of Charles’s hands. He turned it around to see the back. Verso paintings, usually of a family crest or motto, were commonly found on panel portraits of the Quattrocento, and this one was no different. Three irises were tied together by a silver ribbon, and on the ribbon in the rich blue of true ultramarine, three words were inscribed: “Amor omnia vincit.”

Matt looked at the flowers. He touched one of them, the paint soft and ribbed with brushstrokes under his fingertip. It had been real. It had happened. They were memories, not dreams, and now, set free, they came flooding back, like the sun burning away the mist that morning, long ago in Gubbio. Like the sun rising over the ridge across from the villa. He saw Anna’s hand, saw her loading the brush, rolling the tip in the paint, descending to the panel. He saw the studio in the cloister, and the church and the garden, and the fountain in the sunlight with the villa up above. He heard the water splashing, and her voice, and he remembered what it was she had asked him, the last time he had seen her. Valor, wisdom, and faith—which was the most important? He was holding the answer in his hands. Faith.

Matt thought of Anna, day after day bringing the painting to life, and then when it was done starting anew on the back, finishing where they had, with the three simple words he had asked her to remember. And she had, but it had been an empty victory, for he had never come back. He had never returned from the hunt. The hunt. A shadow, a blade silver and black, the world spinning and darkening, the sound of the wolf, shutting everything out—

Matt turned the painting face up. He could hear himself saying it, his last words to her, “You’ll do fine,” and he had been right. Her hand was unmistakable in the graceful arch of the bird as it reached skyward, in the delicate shading of the clouds. She had mastered the use of oils.

“So this came from Klein,” Matt said.

“It’s from the Fleigander Foundation in Prague.”

“That’s Klein.”

“Klein who?”

“The foundation,” Matt said. “You told me his family set it up, or something like that. Come on, Charles. Klein. He brought in the other painting.”

“Which one?”

Matt laid the panel back in the box, careful to protect the verso painting, and went over to the wall where the series of birds hung. “This one,” he said. “You were here when he brought it. You came in for the folder on the Duccio Diptych, remember? He was standing right here.”

“We got that painting at Christie’s East, last November,” Charles said. “A phone bid, from my office. It barely made the reserve.”

“Johannes Klein,” Matt said. “He paid for the restoration of the studiolo.”

“Which one? The pope’s?”

“No.”

“The one in Urbino, then.”

“Ours. The one downstairs. From Gubbio.”

Charles looked away, but not before Matt could see the sadness and concern on his face.

“No,” Matt said. He leaped to his feet, his chair spinning away behind him, and then tore through the office and into the stairwell, taking the stairs two at a time, holding the banister as he spun in midair around the turn and sailed over the last three steps. Bursting through the door, he almost knocked over two visitors in his haste to get to the small gallery. Entering, he came to a dead halt.

A guard who had caught sight of him from another gallery ran up, seizing his arm. “Hold on, sir. Mr. O’Brien,” he said, seeing who he was. “Can I help you?”

“There’s nothing there.” Matt, shaking his arm free, walked up to the bare white plaster of the empty wall. No pilasters, no heavy carved oak doors, no elaborate lintel with the Garter incised in it …

“Sir …”

Matt stepped backward slowly. Anna. He turned and ran from the room, the guard following to the door and then taking out his radio. The crowd of schoolchildren in the hall of armor scurried out of Matt’s way like pigeons on the sidewalk outside. Up the stairs, through the musical instruments, past the silent keyboards, and then through the galleries one after another until he reached the one he was looking for. Panting from the exertion, he stopped in the doorway. Anna. She was still there. He leaned against the wall, almost overcome by the wave of relief sweeping through him, and held up his hand to the two guards who rushed up to him, their belts jingling and radios squawking.

“I’m fine,” he said. “It’s nothing.”

How many times had he seen her just like this? Her face was turned toward a small group of viewers, their backs to him as they intently read the lengthy posting on the wall next to her, and he thought of how he had once come upon her, greeting some friends of her husband from Venice, on their way to Rome.

Matt left. He pushed through the tall glass doors and stood at the top of the broad steps of the museum. Fifth Avenue stretched before him, the dark buildings rising into the mist and the rain. So he had gone back. It had not been a dream after all. And neither had been the studiolo. He remembered it perfectly, could see it, could see himself standing in it. Something had happened, he didn’t know what, but there was no denying that he had stood in it. And the feel of the sun—the real Umbrian sun—he could feel it warming the back of his hand, molding the veins and lines into a map of the new world. “Ercole …” He could hear the voice, hear the hooves down below on the paving stones, echoing up. And then he had opened the door and stepped out into the library. The library of the grand duke Federico da Montefeltro— Klein. Klein would know. He might have vanished from Charles’s mind, but he existed for Matt, every bit as real as the studiolo. But the studiolo was gone—

“Excuse me.”

Matt glanced up to see a man approaching, his large, friendly face apologetic. Behind him Matt could see his family, smiling. After five years in New York, Matt recognized the look; they’d spotted a celebrity. He looked around to see who it was.

“I’m sorry to bother you,” the man said to him.

Matt looked at him in complete surprise.

“You’re the guy …” The man unfolded the magazine he carried in his hand and offered it to Matt, who saw his own face under a larger image of Anna, next to the headline lost and found. “We just want you to know how impressed we are.” Matt found his hand being shaken as a camera clicked, a flash of brightness in the gray rain. “Would you mind?” he asked, holding out a pen.

Feeling slightly ridiculous, Matt took the pen. A couple walking up to the doors gave him a quick glance, trying to place him, turning the ridiculous into the absurd. Matt folded the magazine and, about to scribble his signature, stopped, thought, and then wrote a brief inscription before handing the magazine and pen back.

“Amor omnia vincit,” the man read aloud.

“What does that mean?” one of the children asked.

“Vincit,” his father said. “Da Vinci. It’s something about Leonardo,” he added, looking at Matt for corroboration.

“He’s right,” Matt said. And he was, Matt thought, walking down the steps, although not in the way he had meant. There were many ways to be right. The quote was from the Aeneid, but Leonardo, in trying out a new quill, had inscribed the saying many times in the upper corner of his notebooks. Tell me if anything’s been done, he also wrote, late in his life. Tell me if anything’s been done. I’ll find Klein, Matt thought. And I will return from the hunt.