Holding the leather pouch, I crossed the meadow and went up the hill to the pond. The policemen, the others were long gone. I walked up the terrace. The wind had eddied the fallen leaves of the overhanging maples into hassocks along the steps. Some battered yellow police tape still cleaved to the rails. Everything had been cleaned at some point, cleaned of the worst before being abandoned once again.
I looked up. Or to be more precise, something made me look up, an unfelt hand that lifted my chin, until my eyes saw the spot, the spot on the overhang of the terrace, a single spot that must have missed the high-power hoses.
How many wonders happen as if by magic? I don’t know whether it was gravity or another force—the apple in the leather pouch that had only recently been suspended between the figures of the man and the woman in the Villa Septimania, the attraction of the treasure and the seeker, but a moment later the Pip separated from whatever bit of Tibor had glued it to the overhang and was in my hand. Was it the Pip I had seen Tibor swallow at the edge of the pond? The Pip that had found its way upward out of Tibor’s blasted head to the roof of the overhang of the terrace? The Pip that, as far as I could tell, had waited while I hid unconscious in the forest, until I rewired myself and returned to find it?
But as it fell into my palm, as I closed my fingers around the Pip, I saw something else. I saw what my nightmares in the forest had been telling. I saw the airplanes, I saw the towers, I saw the flames, the ashes of incinerated words, the falling bodies. I saw the man I had seen at the back of the Seven Veils, the man who had wanted to attack Tibor. And I saw other men, other women, hundreds of them. I looked down from the terrace and I saw what Tibor must have seen in his final moment—an entire history, an entire empire. Thousands of people, perhaps more, filling every edge of the TiborTina, ordinary men, ordinary women, children ranked as neatly as convent girls singing backup to the Rolling Stones, standing waist deep in the pond, perched on trees, spreading into the shadows of the forest, nested atop isolated columns above the crumbling ruins of ancient cities like seagulls awaiting the decline and the fall, circle after circle, as many as the fireflies. And in front of me, as an invisible DJ rode his volume pods up to eight, four unimaginably kick-ass girls in thigh-high boots and PVC mini-dresses pounded out the opening chords to a song whose lyrics I didn’t know but in a key I recognized, as unimaginable as that might be.
“So …” the voice said behind me. “You found it.” I reached back without looking, unwilling to see the half-face I was sure would greet me. I grabbed a microphone from his hand and stumbled forward, still unclear, wondering what I was meant to sing. I looked up towards the audience of thousands and saw her. There she was in the front row, the blonde woman from the Farmers’ Market, the woman I had seen talking with Malory by the pond. She smiled at me and the Pip grew warm in my hand. The apple glowed in my leather pouch. Her head swayed, her shoulders rolled softly to the music. She knew the girls in the band and she knew the words. She was my mirror and my teleprompter. Microphone gripped tight, I stepped forward as the spotlight picked me out from an impossible angle on the rising moon and I sang.
3/3
ALORY STOOD AT THE GATE OF TRINITY AND WONDERED.
It had been twenty-three years since he last walked through Cambridge.
He had walked from the station, the towers of Addenbrooke’s Hospital at his back, dodging bicycles on Parker’s Piece—academics in their daily migration and townies on an early-evening forage for bitter and crisps. He had pulled his suitcase, his worldly belongings, down St. Andrew’s Street, through Lion’s Yard to King’s Parade. Malory had thought very little over the past quarter century of the hours, years he had spent with Chelsea buns and Cumberland sausages in the tea rooms and butcher shops, in the tie-dyed emporia or at the fruitmonger’s buying organic papadums or bruised Prince Williams. Gone, all of them. Gone were the stalls in the market, where E. Power Biggs rubbed vinyl with Billy Preston, and Telemann shared a rack with Telephone Bill and the Smooth Operators. The ghosts of the Taboo Disco Club, the Whim, the Eros had taken up residence in Top-shops and H&Ms. Malory’s own back was scarred from his journey. His feet shuffled down Trinity Street thanks only to the motor of memory, his suitcase trailing like a minor moon.
Malory stood at the gate of Trinity and wondered whether he dared go inside. Henry VIII still guarded the entrance with a stone sword or chair leg or hank of mutton in one hand. The remnants of Newton’s garden sat between the gate and the chapel. Above and to the right, his windows—Newton’s windows, Malory’s windows, inset between the chapel and the bay window that had once been Newton’s loggia—still looked out on Trinity Street, still felt the shade of the anniversary apple tree. For seven winters and seven summers, Malory had sat behind those windows. He had read and he had thought. He had written nothing. Seven autumns of wood fires and moldering leaves, seven springs of thaw. Seven years of paths worn between those rooms and the chapel, the tea room of the University Library, the weekly bicycle ride to Whistler Abbey, and the occasional journey to organs on other greens, in other fens. There had been the High Tables, of course, and pints in the Portland Arms and the Eagle, Sunday lunches at the Spade and Beckett, long afternoons cross-legged on the carpet at Heffers or eating buns in the steamy intimacy of The Whim, and Saturday night Herbie Hancock marathons upstairs on Rose Crescent—the naïve entertainments of a student who might have had a special facility for organs and the history of science, but was otherwise just a normal lad who wanted to fit in, to be coupled to other pipes and sing less solo.
Newton, of course, was a resident of those windows for much longer than Malory—over thirty years, even if one subtracted the months that Trinity closed for the Plague and Newton traveled with his friend, the King, the Queen of Septimania. For the first time Malory wondered—was it mere coincidence that had brought him those two windows in Trinity? Or were all the other tenants, from Newton through the eighteenth, nineteenth, and much of the twentieth centuries also direct descendants of the Great Sir Isaac? Were they all kings of Septimania? Had they all been expelled from Paradise?
It had been seventy-two hours since Malory flew back from New York to Rome. International flights began again on September 15, only four days later than Malory had intended to return to the Villa Septimania. But intention no longer had much connection with what Malory experienced. For three days and three nights, Malory sat in the Good Knight’s Inn, fed, watered, and generally supervised by the Driver. During the days, the image of Louiza’s face from across the pond seemed no farther than the other side of the motel window. Malory felt certain that all he needed do was open the door to the room and she would be on the other side. But every time he turned the deadbolt with the intention of stepping out to find Louiza, to rescue her from whatever terror or loneliness she was facing, a magnetic force, as strong as the one that had pulled him to her that afternoon so long ago in the organ loft of St. George’s, turned on its pole and pushed him back into the room. Don’t, it said. Stay away. And at night, the red-bearded face of MacPhearson would blink with the regularity of the digital alarm clock. I’m watching you, Malory, it said. If you look for her, if you find her, I will take her from you. For three mornings, Malory awoke convinced of an awful truth—as long as he didn’t look, Louiza would stay alive. And Ottavia. Was MacPhearson looking for her too?
On the fourth day, the Driver drove Malory to Newark. He saw him up to Security, handed him his ticket and passport. Private planes were still grounded, but the Driver, on instructions from Settimio presumably, was able to find a seat in Business Class, if only for Malory himself. It was the first flight back to Rome. From his seat in the relative tranquility of the front of the plane, Malory could see lower Manhattan still smoldering below. Tibor was dead. Louiza, Ottavia, and perhaps even Cristina had disappeared. Smoke covered New York, clouds covered the Atlantic, and even gatekeepers like MacPhearson were confused.
But Malory hadn’t expected the destruction to reach as far as Rome. Outside
Customs, he waited ten minutes, an hour for a driver, any driver, even Settimio. He joined the queue in the September heat and sat in the back of a Roman taxi for the first time in his life. Ruins. All he saw from the back seat were ruins, from the aqueducts to the Aurelian walls. The taxi drove past the Mattatoio in Testaccio, the crumbling slaughterhouse along the river, where once upon a time all the cattle of the Romans were carved and sliced to feed the imperial belly. There too smoke, if only from the afternoon dust. The taxi driver deposited Malory at the base of the Clivo di Rocca Savella. Malory pulled his suitcase up the cobblestones between the high walls that hid the villas on either side from the alleyway. He hadn’t walked up the Clivo in many years, had never noticed the scars of ancient wounds, the bricked-up archways of centuries, the rubble-filled omegas that had once led to other villas, other gardens perhaps. He passed a pair of Japanese girls heading down from the Aventino to the Tevere, to the Bocca della Verita, most likely, to pray to the goddess Audrey Hepburn. At the cancello to the Villa Septimania he stopped and rang the bell. He rang again. All was dark.
Malory sat for a good hour on a bench beneath the bitter oranges of the Giardino degli Aranci above the Villa. As the lights came on in St. Peter’s, he stood and wheeled his suitcase over to the parapet and looked down on the Tevere. The view wasn’t dissimilar from the view from the hidden garden of the Villa Septimania below. Except the view was public, open to anyone who turned right in front of the shaded portico of Santa Sabina and followed the gravel past semi-spliced teenage lovers and the occasional grandmother looking for a bit of orange zest for a torta. Below Malory, the late-summer plane trees shaded the sidewalk by the river. To his right, the Ponte Rotto and the arse end of the Isola Tiberina. How many times had he looked down at the hospital from his garden, the hospital where Louiza had given birth to their daughter? And for how many years had Malory neglected to see what was behind him—the massive buttress of Santa Sabina, whose cloister had housed that daughter, their Ottavia, for her first ten years.
Depending on how you looked.
Wasn’t that the way that MacPhearson had put it? Depending on how you looked, Ottavia was either his daughter or Tibor’s. Did that mean either Louiza’s or Cristina’s as well?
Was anything that MacPhearson said to him worth believing as gospel? Or was MacPhearson willing to say whatever if only Malory could lead him to the lost Louiza?
Wouldn’t Malory do the same?
An hour’s walk later, down from the hill of the Aventino, Malory sat in Santa Maria sopra Minerva—the church that the Dominicans had raised above the ancient Roman Temple dedicated to the Goddess of Wisdom. He took a seat in the second pew away from the altar—the nineteenth-century loincloth still hiding the operative bits of Michelangelo’s Savior from the worshippers—and thought about all the knowledge spinning away from him like the blades of so many windmills. Louiza gone, MacPhearson using him as bait to find her when he hadn’t the slightest clue where to look. Septimania dark and barred, no sign of Settimio—and he didn’t have the slightest idea why.
“Signore?”
“Sì?” Malory looked up. A white-robed friar, possibly the same age as the long-gone Fra Mario who had greeted Malory when he first walked into Santa Maria twenty-three years earlier, possibly wearing Fra Mario’s steel-rimmed glasses.
“Siamo pronti.”
“Pronti?” Ready for what? Malory was grateful, at least, that someone recognized him, that the past twenty-three years hadn’t been a tale within a dream within the filigreed lantern of some Arabian djinni. He picked up his suitcase and followed the friar past the Michelangelo Salvatore, past the tomb of headless and thumbless Santa Caterina into the Carafa Chapel. All was familiar. Filippino Lippi’s Annunciation, with Thomas Aquinas introducing the scrofulous Cardinal Carafa to the Virgin Mary. Above, the angels greeted the rising Virgin. To the right, Thomas Aquinas gently but firmly defeated a rogue’s gallery of heretics. Here in a yellow robe was Arius who said there was only one God and Jesus was just a very talented little boy. There in scarlet was Sabellius who preached that Jesus was just one of many blinks of God’s eye. Between them Mani, a Persian in the days before the Shah and Khomeini, who believed in Good and Evil, which was one god too many for some. Dante led a chorus of others who denied the laws of the Church and the truth of the Trinity as strenuously if with less discretion than Isaac Newton. Chief among them—the real serpent that Aquinas had to crush beneath his feet—was a white-haired, white-bearded old man holding a scroll. “Sapientia vincit malitia,” it read—Knowledge conquers evil. His entire mission, the mission of the Dominicans, was to show that knowledge alone was powerless against evil. There was something greater than knowledge.
“Bernini’s elephant knew, Minerva knew, before they dropped a basilica down on top of her.” Tibor had jerked his chin in the direction of the piazza on Malory’s first trip to the chapel many years before. “There’s knowledge and there’s knowledge.” Malory’s mission at the Villa Septimania, and perhaps even before, was to prove Aquinas wrong. There was a knowledge, hidden somewhere in the trinity of Newton, Louiza, and the Pip, that would—if not raise the dead and the Twin Towers—show the One True Rule that guides the universe.
Two pews had been set up for a service. The friar showed Malory to a seat in the second, his back to the altar. With the Annunciation on his left, the Triumph over the Heretics rose directly in front of him. Malory wondered whether any of the kings of Septimania thought of the Triumph the way he did. Not just as the triumph of the Dominican way of thinking over the Arian Heresy, the Gnostics, the Manicheans. It was the triumph of the artist, the triumph of Lippi—the illegitimate product of a friar and a nun. It was the triumph of perspective—the desire to fit within a single frame both the big picture and the little, the cosmology of galaxies millions of light years in diameter and the quantum theory that mumbles about things too small to mumble about. It was a two-dimensional solution to a three-dimensional problem, a painted path to distant solutions that one could enjoy from the comfort of a bum-polished pew. Perspective was the discretion that Settimio had preached to him for more than two decades. For several minutes, Malory let himself relax beneath the illuminated splendor of the fresco of his friend Aquinas, with all its little details and symbols that made it feel like a member of the family—as complex as that concept might ordinarily seem to Malory.
And then Malory noticed other people in the chapel.
Malory noticed the coffin.
Malory thought back to the last funeral he had attended—twenty-three years before in the Church of St. George, Whistler Abbey, the moment before the adventure began, when he was still so full of the discovery of Louiza that he had improvised a love duet on the organ at the funeral of his own grandmother. And although he wondered—perhaps for one of those unmeasurable quantum moments—who was in the coffin beneath the fresco of Thomas and the Heretics, in short order he knew. No driver at the airport, a locked gate at the Villa Septimania.
Settimio was dead.
Settimio, who had guarded almost every movement since Malory first straddled the Driver’s Vespa for his extraordinary maiden voyage from the Ospedale Fatebenefratelli to the Cappella Sistina. Settimio, who had awakened Malory and bid him goodnight for twenty-three years. Settimio, who had fed him tea and scones for breakfast, who had ordered books and computers, had overseen the cooking and the cleaning, the weeding and the waxing of Septimania. Settimio who had devised his own algorithm to filter out the unnecessary and bring Malory only what he wanted before he knew that he wanted it. Settimio, who had imported the distant world into Malory’s Sanctum Sanctorum.
Settimio who had kissed him on both cheeks only the week before.
Malory’s world was losing perspective.
In the pew in front of Malory sat an old woman, a younger man, and his wife and young child. Settimio’s family? Had he never wondered whether Settimio had a family? Would this young man be assuming Settimio’s duties? From his quarter-side
d, rearview angle, Malory tried to read the grief on the face of the wife and the son. But much had been hidden from Malory for the past twenty-three years—perhaps for much longer. I want to tune the world, he had told his mother before she died. What had he told Settimio? Settimio was as far from the father Malory believed he’d had, that amorous Irish sailor with more passion than perspective. Settimio was perhaps the only father Malory had known. And yet what had he known? Looking at the family, Settimio’s family, so close, so perfectly attuned to their grief, Malory realized that no matter how much he knew about music, he knew little about harmony.
There was no music in the ceremony. Few words were said, and all of them by the white-robed friar in a Latin pitched at too low a volume for Malory to make out much. The family rose and left the chapel. Malory thought about approaching them, thought about giving his condolences, asking about their welfare, taking the young man aside and ensuring that he knew Malory, Septimania would provide for them. But the coffin, or maybe it was merely the presence of Settimio, even dead inside the coffin, reminded Malory that discretion would be the best way he could memorialize Settimio. And he sat.
“Signore?” The white-robed friar returned to the chapel. He took a seat next to Malory on the pew and looked forward.
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