Smith added the recent emails to the file. He found the number for the Carabinieri Comando Provinciale in Florence to inform the local Italian police, as was procedure, the way things were done at INTERPOL. He began to press it into his cell phone and stopped—a brief moment to consider the consequences—then called the Lyon airport and booked a flight to Florence.

4

Florence, Italy

At the end of the cloister, I headed through the open door, then an enclosed stairwell to the upper level of the loggia, all that pent-up energy propelling me forward. At the top, a faded fresco of the Annunciation caught my eye but didn’t stop me. A guard, sitting at the library’s entrance, a woman in plain clothes, went through my backpack, then waved me through.

The Laurentian Library’s famous five-hundred-year-old vestibule was much smaller than I’d imagined, but it hardly mattered. All I could see was Michelangelo’s grand freestanding staircase and the way it filled the room like a living, breathing thing. I imagined the stone in liquid form spilling forward like waves of lava, hardening and taking the shape of stairs, the movement trapped within.

The center staircase was cordoned off, so I took a smaller, flanking one and mounted the stairs slowly, one step, then another, as if I were not only walking up but into the past.

The library stretched out in front of me, long and rectangular, awesome and reverential. I was careful to stay on the rug that protected the delicate mosaic floor as I headed down the aisle, glanced up at the coffered wooden ceiling, then the stained glass windows that filled the room with warm natural light, which spilled over pew-like wooden benches. A childhood memory: crammed in a pew between my father and mother, the after-odor of beer, my father’s breakfast chaser, loitering on his breath as he read responsively and I dreamed of getting out.

It was then it hit me that the benches were cordoned off and I was alone, not a single scholar nor visitor in the room. Then a moment of confusion followed by panic: would the journal really be here, in this mausoleum? Did anyone read in here? Had Quattrocchi made the whole thing up?

I reversed my steps, stopping by a young woman at a small desk hidden beside the entrance, and leaned over. “Scusami…” The word amplified, echoing in the space. “How do I…request books…papers?”

“In here?” Her face screwed up. “Is not possible. This is a monument. No longer a functioning library.”

“What? Since when?”

“A long time. My mother studied here, but it has been thirty years.”

“No, that can’t be. I’ve come all this way—” I tried to think, got my backpack off, found the permesso and the letter. “But…I have this.”

The young woman looked the papers over. “Is okay.”

“Is it? How? If the library is closed—”

“Devi calmati, signore. Calm down.” She reached out and patted my arm. “You want the research library. Next door. Just outside. Ask the guard in front.”