There was no answer.

Then I noticed the small but new-looking bronze plaque with a buzzer and an oval grating that appeared to be an intercom. I pressed it, waited, then tried again. Nothing.

I lifted the metal knocker and let it fall back.

Again nothing.

I tried calling Quattrocchi’s number, thought I could hear a muted ring from inside the house before I got his voicemail, said it was me, and that I was just outside his door.

I crossed the narrow street and looked up, the shutters closed, everything about the place still and quiet. It didn’t make sense, Quattrocchi disappearing without notifying the university or anyone, and it felt bad.

Without really thinking about it, I found the number of a nearby police station and called.

“Persona scomparsa,” I said.

The cop asked how long the person had been missing.

“Pochi giorni,” I said. “A few days.”

“Non abbastanza tempo.” Not enough time, he said and hung up.

I called back, got the same cop. “Can you at least check his house?”

The cop asked if I was a relation. When I said no, he hung up again. “Fuck you too!” I said to a silent phone.

Was I overreacting? It was possible Quattrocchi had gone away and wanted to be left alone. It was true he had been through a lot—though he had seemed okay at our lunch, friendly and eager to talk. So what had changed?

I looked back at his house, the shuttered windows, everything still. I’d always trusted my gut, and right now, it was telling me that something was wrong.

33

The gray-and-white marble room was square and austere, smaller than I had imagined from seeing it in photos, but taller and soaring, crowned by a perfect dome of circles and semicircles. I stared up as if looking into heaven, what I imagined Michelangelo had in mind when he had designed the Medici Chapel—the most famous tomb in the world, created for the Italian banking family who had ruled Florence for two hundred years and left their mark everywhere in the city.

After my futile search for Quattrocchi, I had come back to the library and read until the lunch break. I hadn’t planned on coming to the chapel until Chiara mentioned it was just around the corner. It wasn’t exactly—there were few actual corners in Florence—but all I had to do was follow the long wall of San Lorenzo back toward my hotel and there it was, in Piazza di Madonna, literally across the street from my hotel. How many times had I walked right by it, how many times had I noticed but not noticed the small modest plaque, Cappelle Medicee, and not given it a thought.

I stood practically alone in the center of the chapel—the only other person a guard seated in a far corner, typing away on a cell phone—and did a slow three-sixty, taking in the feeling of strength and monumentality Michelangelo had given the sculpture, the architecture, the blind windows that suggested there was no way out. There were no actual windows, a kind of glorious claustrophobia, and I had to wonder if Michelangelo wanted people to feel trapped here, as if in purgatory. I looked up at the more than life-size figure of Lorenzo de Medici, face hidden in shadow, a withdrawn and brooding quality that made me think of what I had just read—Vincent seeing his son for the first time in the hospital nursery, holding him and thinking he was all he had left of Simone, all he left in the world. Then Simone’s mother, Marguerite, had shown up in a fury, accusing him of killing her daughter, a terrible scene to read, and Vincent had spared neither reader nor himself, accepting the blame and powerless to stop Marguerite from taking the baby and telling him he would never see the boy again.