The next two days were busy, and I didn’t let myself look at Rossi’s papers; in fact, I put all esoterica resolutely out of my mind. It took me by surprise, therefore, when a colleague from my department stopped me in the library late on the afternoon of the second day. “Have you heard about Rossi?” he demanded, grabbing my arm and wheeling me around as I hurried past. “Paolo, wait!” Yes, you’re guessing correctly—it was Massimo. He was big and loud even as a graduate student, louder than he is now, maybe. I gripped his arm.
“Rossi? What? What about him?”
“He’s gone. He’s disappeared. The police are searching his office.”
I ran all the way to the building, which now looked ordinary, hazy inside with late-afternoon sun and crowded with students leaving their classrooms. On the second floor, in front of Rossi’s office, a city policeman was talking with the department chairman and several men I’d never seen before. As I arrived, two men in dark jackets were leaving the professor’s study, closing the door firmly behind them and heading toward the stairs and classrooms. I pushed my way through and spoke to the policeman. “Where’s Professor Rossi? What’s happened to him?”
“Do you know him?” asked the policeman, looking up from his notepad.
“I’m his advisee. I was here two nights ago. Who says he’s disappeared?”
The department chairman came forward and shook my hand. “Do you know anything about this? His housekeeper phoned at noon to say he hadn’t come home last night or the night before—he didn’t ring for dinner or breakfast. She says he’s never done that before. He missed a meeting at the department this afternoon without phoning first, which he’s never done before, either. A student stopped by to say his office was locked when they’d agreed on an appointment during office hours and that Rossi had never shown up. He missed his lecture today, and finally I had the door opened.”
“Was he in there?” I tried not to gasp for breath.
“No.”
I pushed blindly away from them toward Rossi’s door, but the policeman held me back by one arm. “Not so fast,” he said. “You say you were here two nights ago?”
“Yes.”
“When did you last see him?”
“About eight-thirty.”
“Did you see anyone else around here then?”
I thought. “Yes, just two students in the department—Bertrand and Elias, I think, going out at the same time. They left when I did.”
“Good. Check that,” the policeman said to one of the men. “Did you notice anything out of the ordinary in Professor Rossi’s behavior?”
What could I say? Yes, actually—he told me that vampires are real, that Count Dracula walks among us, that I might have inherited a curse through his own research, and then I saw his light blotted out as if by a giant—
“No,” I said. “We had a meeting about my dissertation and sat talking until about eight-thirty.”
“Did you leave together?”
“No. I left first. He walked me to the door and then went back into his office.”
“Did you see anything or anyone suspicious around the building as you left? Hear anything?”
I hesitated again. “No, nothing. Well, there was a brief blackout on the street. The streetlights went off.”
“Yes, that’s been reported. But you didn’t hear anything or see anything out of the usual?”
“No.”
“So far you’re the last person to see Professor Rossi,” the policeman insisted. “Think hard. When you were with him, did he do or say anything strange? Any talk of depression, suicide, anything like that? Or any talk of going away, going on a trip, say?”
“No, nothing like that,” I said honestly. The policeman gave me a hard look.
“I need your name and address.” He wrote down everything and turned to the chairman. “You can vouch for this young man?”
“He’s certainly who he says he is.”
“All right,” the policeman told me. “I want you to come in here with me and tell me if you see anything unusual. Especially anything different from two nights ago. Don’t touch anything. Frankly, most of these cases turn out to be something predictable, family emergency or a little breakdown—he’ll probably be back in a day or two. I’ve seen it a million times. But with blood on the desk we’re not taking any chances.”
Blood on the desk? My legs were weakening under me, but I made myself walk in slowly after the policeman. The room looked as it had on dozens of other occasions when I’d seen it in daylight: neat, pleasant, the furniture in precise attitudes of invitation, books and papers in exact stacks on the tables and the desktop. I stepped closer. Across the desk, on Rossi’s tan blotting paper, lay a dark reservoir, long since spread and soaked and still. The policeman put a steadying hand on my shoulder. “Not a big enough loss of blood to be a cause of death in itself,” he said. “Maybe a bad nosebleed, or some kind of hemorrhage. Did Professor Rossi ever have a nosebleed when you were with him? Did he seem ill that night?”
“No,” I said. “I never saw him—bleed—and he never talked about his health to me.” I realized suddenly, with appalling clarity, that I’d just spoken of our conversations in past tense, as if they were ended forever. My throat closed with emotion when I thought of Rossi standing cheerfully at the office door, seeing me off. Had he cut himself somehow—on purpose, even?—in a moment of instability, and then hurried out of the room, locking the door behind him? I tried to imagine him raving in a park, perhaps cold and hungry, or boarding a bus to some randomly chosen destination. None of it fit. Rossi was a solid structure, as cool and sane as anyone I’d ever met.
“Look around very carefully.” The policeman released my shoulder. He was watching me hard, and I sensed the chairman and the others hovering in the doorway behind us. It dawned on me that until proven otherwise I would be among the suspects if Rossi had been murdered. But Bertrand and Elias would speak up for me, as I could for them. I stared at everything in the room, trying to see through it. It was an exercise in frustration; everything was real, normal, solid, and Rossi was utterly gone from it.
“No,” I said finally. “I don’t see anything different.”
“All right.” The policeman turned me toward the windows. “Look up, then.”
On the white plaster ceiling over the desk, high above us, a dark smear about five inches long drifted sideways, as if pointing toward something outside. “This appears to be blood, too. Don’t worry; it may or may not be Professor Rossi’s. That ceiling’s too high for a person to reach it easily, even with a step stool. We’ll have everything tested. Now think hard. Did Rossi mention a bird getting in that night? Or did you hear any sounds as you left, maybe like something getting in? Was the window open, do you remember?”
“No,” I said. “He didn’t mention anything like that. And the windows were shut, I’m sure.” I couldn’t take my eyes off the stain; I felt if I stared hard enough I might read something in its horrible and hieroglyphic shape.
“We’ve had birds in this building several times,” the chairman contributed behind us. “Pigeons. They get in through the skylights once in a while.”
“That’s a possibility,” the policeman said. “Although we haven’t found any droppings, it’s certainly a possibility.”
“Or bats,” the chairman said. “What about bats? These old buildings probably have all kinds of things living in them.”
“Well, that’s another possibility, especially if Rossi tried to hit something with a broom or umbrella and wounded it in the process,” suggested a professor in the doorway.
“Did you see anything like a bat in here, ever, or a bird?” the policeman asked me again.
It took me a few seconds to form the simple word and get it past my dry lips. “No,” I said, but I could hardly make sense of his question. My eyes had finally caught the inner end of the dark stain and what it seemed to trail away from. On the top shelf of Rossi’s bookcase, in his row of “failures,” a book was missin
g. Where he had replaced his mysterious book two nights before, one narrow black crevice now gaped among the spines.
My colleagues were leading me out again, patting my back and telling me not to worry; I must have looked white as a piece of typing paper. I turned to the policeman, who was shutting and locking the door behind us. “Is there any chance Professor Rossi is already in a hospital somewhere, if he cut himself, or if someone injured him?”
The officer shook his head. “We’ve got a line to the hospitals, and we’ve done a first check. No sign of him. Why? Do you think he might have injured himself? I thought you said he didn’t seem suicidal or depressed.”
“Oh, he didn’t.” I took a deep breath and felt my feet under me again. The ceiling was too high for him to have smeared his wrist on, anyway—that was a grim consolation.
“Well, folks, we’ll be on our way.” He turned to the department chairman, and they went off in low-voiced conference. The crowd around the office door was beginning to disperse, and I moved away ahead of them. I needed above all a quiet place to sit down.
My favorite bench in the nave of the old university library was still being warmed by the last sun of a spring afternoon. Around me three or four students read or talked in low voices, and I felt the familiar calm of that scholar’s haven soak through my bones. The great hall of the library was pierced by colored windows, some of which looked into its reading rooms and cloisterlike corridors and courtyards, so that I could see people moving around inside or outside, or studying at big oak tables. It was the end of an ordinary day; soon the sun would desert the stone tablets under my feet and plunge the world into twilight—marking a full forty-eight hours since I’d sat talking with my mentor. For now, scholarship and activity prevailed here, pushing back the verges of darkness.
I should tell you that usually when I studied in those days I liked to be completely alone, undisturbed, in monastic silence. I’ve already described the study carrels I often worked in, on the upper floors of the library stacks, where I had my own niche and where I’d found that weird book that had changed my life and thoughts almost overnight. Two days ago at this time I’d been studying there, busy and unafraid, about to sweep up my books on the Netherlands and hurry toward a pleasant conference with my mentor. I’d thought of nothing but what Heller and Herbert had written the year before on Utrecht’s economic history and how I might refute it in an article, perhaps an article filched efficiently from one of my own dissertation chapters.
In fact, if I had imagined any part of the past at all, then, I had been picturing those innocent, slightly grasping Nederlanders debating their guilds’ little problems, or standing, arms akimbo, in doorways above the canals, watching some new crate of goods as it was hauled up to the top floor of their houses-cum-warehouses. If I had had any visions of the past, I had seen only their rose-tinted, sea-freshened faces, beetling brows, capable hands, heard the creaking of their fine ships, smelled the spice and tar and sewage of the wharf and rejoiced in the sturdy ingenuity of their buying and bartering.
But history, it seemed, could be something entirely different, a splash of blood whose agony didn’t fade overnight, or over centuries. And today my studies were to be of a new sort—novel to me, but not to Rossi and not to many others who had picked their way through the same dark underbrush. I wanted to begin this new kind of research in the cheerful murmur and clang of the main hall, not in the silent stacks, with their occasional wearily treading footsteps on distant stairs. I wanted to open the next phase of my life as a historian there under the unsuspecting eyes of young anthropologists, graying librarians, eighteen-year-olds thinking of their squash games or new white shoes, of smiling undergraduates and harmlessly lunatic professors emeritus—all the traffic of the university evening. I looked once more around the teeming hall, the rapidly withdrawing patches of sunlight, the brisk business of the doors at the main entrance swinging open and shut on bronze hinges. Then I picked up my shabby briefcase, unsnapped the top, and drew out a thickly full dark envelope, labeled in Rossi’s handwriting. It said, merely: SAVE FOR NEXT ONE.
Next one? I hadn’t looked closely at it two nights before. Had he meant to save the information enclosed for the next time he attempted this project, this dark fortress? Or was I myself the “next one”? Was this a proof of his madness?
Inside the open envelope I saw a pile of papers of different weights and sizes, many dingy and delicate with age, some of them onionskin covered with dense rows of typing. A great deal of material. I would have to spread it out, I decided. I went to the nearest honey-colored table by the card catalog. There were still plenty of people around, all friendly strangers, but I looked superstitiously over one shoulder before drawing out the documents and arranging them on the table.
I had handled some of Sir Thomas More’s manuscripts two years before, and some of the elder Albrecht’s letters from Amsterdam, and more recently had helped to catalog a set of Flemish account books from the 1680s. I knew, as a historian, that the order of any archival find is an important part of its lesson. Digging out a pencil and paper, I made a list of the order of the items as I withdrew them. The first, the topmost, of Rossi’s documents proved to be the onionskin sheets. They had been covered by the neatest possible typing, more or less in the form of letters. I kept them carefully together without letting myself look closely.
The second item was a map, hand drawn with awkward neatness. This was already fading, and the marks and place-names showed up poorly on a thick foreign-feeling notebook paper obviously torn from some old tablet. Two similar maps followed it. After these came three pages of scattered handwritten notes, in ink and quite legible at first glance. I set these together, too. Next was a printed brochure inviting tourists to “Romantic Roumania,” in English, that looked from its Deco embellishments like a product of the 1920s or ’30s. Next, two receipts for a hotel and for meals taken there. Istanbul, in fact. Then a large old road map of the Balkans, untidily printed in two colors. The last item was a little ivory envelope, sealed and unlabeled. I set it aside, heroically, without touching the flap.
That was it. I turned the big brown envelope upside down, even shook it, so that not so much as a dead fly could go unnoticed. While I was doing this I suddenly (and for the first time) had a sensation that would accompany me through all the ensuing efforts required of me: I felt Rossi’s presence, his pride in my thoroughness, something like his spirit living and speaking to me through the careful methods he himself had taught me. I knew he worked swiftly, as a researcher, but also that he abused nothing and neglected nothing—not a single document, not an archive, however far from home it was located, and certainly not an idea, however unfashionable it might be among his colleagues. His disappearance, and—I thought wildly—his very need of me, had suddenly made us almost equals. I had the sense, also, that he had been promising me this outcome, this equality, all along, and waiting for the time when I would earn it.
I now had every dry-smelling item spread on the table in front of me. I began with the letters, those long dense epistles typed on onionskin with few mistakes and few corrections. There was one copy of each, and they seemed to be in chronological order already. Each was carefully dated, all from December 1930, more than twenty years before. Each was headed TRINITY COLLEGE, OXFORD, without any further address. I glanced through the first letter. It told the story of his discovery of the mysterious book, and of his initial research at Oxford. The letter was signed, “Yours in grief, Bartholomew Rossi.” And it began—I held the onionskin carefully even when my hand started to shake a little—it began affectionately: “My dear and unfortunate successor —”
My father suddenly stopped, and the trembling of his voice made me turn tactfully away before he could force himself to say anything more. By unspoken consent, we gathered our jackets and strolled across the famous little piazza, pretending the facade of the church still held some interest for us.
Chapter 7
My father did not leave Amsterda
m again for several weeks, and during that time I felt that he shadowed me in a new way. I came home from school a little later than usual one day and found Mrs. Clay on the phone with him. She put me on at once. “Where have you been?” my father asked. He was calling from his office at the Center for Peace and Democracy. “I phoned twice and Mrs. Clay hadn’t seen you. You’ve put her in a big pother.”
He was the one in a pother, I could tell, although he kept his voice level. “I was reading at a new coffee shop near school,” I said.
“All right,” my father said. “Why don’t you just call Mrs. Clay or me if you’re going to be late, that’s all.”
I didn’t like to agree, but I said I would call. My father came home early for dinner that night and read aloud to me from Great Expectations. Then he got out some of our photograph albums and we looked through them together: Paris, London, Boston, my first roller skates, my graduation from third grade, Paris, London, Rome. It was always just me, standing in front of the Pantheon or the gates of Père Lachaise, because my father took the pictures and there were only two of us. At nine o’clock he checked all the doors and windows and let me go to bed.
The next time I was going to be late, I did call Mrs. Clay. I explained to her that some of my classmates and I were going to do our homework together over tea. She said that was fine. I hung up and went by myself to the university library. Johan Binnerts, the librarian in the medieval collection in Amsterdam, was getting used to the sight of me, I thought; at least he smiled gravely whenever I stopped by with a new question, and he always asked how my history essays were coming along. Mr. Binnerts found for me a passage in a nineteenth-century text that I was particularly pleased to have, and I spent some time making notes from it. I have a copy of the text now, in my study at Oxford—I found the book again a few years ago in a bookshop: Lord Gelling’s History of Central Europe. I have a sentimental attachment to it, after all these years, although I never open it without a bleak feeling, too. I remember very well the sight of my own hand, smooth and young, copying down passages in my school notebook:
The Historian Page 6