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-sided, 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.
“I didn’t know,” Malory said. “It must have happened when I was in the States.”
“There was something that Signor Settimio wanted me to give you,” the friar said, even more discreetly, “if you did not return in time.” He handed Malory a package wrapped in brown paper, no heavier than a suit and a change of shirts.