Ginny eyed me silently. “Cut and print,” she repeated. “The end of Martha. I’m beginning to understand.”
“What?”
“Nothing. So . . . Mona. How do you know she’s even still alive?”
“When I left Berkeley I asked her to write in her will that I be informed when she dies. What? Why are you looking at me that way?”
“Reb, you’re not kidding, are you?” Ginny gaped.
She leaned forward, laid her chin on her palm, her eyes probing me.“Martha died so you just deleted that section of your past? You had Mona, someone who cared about you, write that in her will?”
I didn’t answer.
“Jesus,” she said.“How do you know where to find her?”
“She sends me cards. They have a return address.”
“Which you, of course, don’t answer.” There was no malice in Ginny’s tone. Just rueful comprehension. I hated the feeling of being ruefully comprehended.
“Where are Mona’s cards postmarked from?”
“Outside of Mendocino.”
“You’ve never been there,” she added. It wasn’t a question.
“Okay, now say something clever and pithy,” I said, trying to regain control. “Like you would if you were analyzing a painting. Be literary and poetic. Tell me the seeds of connection lay unsown on my barren soil.”
There was a pause.
“I don’t have to, Reb,” Ginny said softly. “You just did.”
The whine of the jet engines was the only sound. Carefully removing her page of Leonardo’s notes from her bag, Ginny abruptly swiveled her seat away from me and set about her task. Lying back, I closed my eyes and pictured burning leaves and barren soil. I fell asleep.
Somewhere over the Atlantic I heard Ginny laugh. “I ought to be bronzed.”
She slapped two pieces of paper in my hand and clicked her compact shut, dropping it into her bottomless bag. “Now, why couldn’t I have finished this last night? Read it, Reb.”
I blinked, shaking myself clear, and looked first at Ginny’s Italian.
I focused my overhead light on the second page and read her translation:
Why am I not allowed to work? Why? He who should treasure me denies me my precious studies for his stomach is weak. And this has made me ill and how that vexes me for what is this man if he cannot do that for which God has tasked him?
For twenty-one years I have kept this thing and no other man has seen it not even Giovan. He is gone now back to dust and in this moment I have just determined where and how it shall rest.
My fury burns as the light of a million candles and its brilliance illuminates the way. The twenty circle path which none but the most mighty traveler will ever follow. Out then in back and forth one to the other the seer will wander the path and the truth of the past will lead the wise one to the dagger.
I felt my skin prickle as the ghosts of Leonardo’s innermost thoughts fluttered across my mind. “The twenty- circle path,” I said. “Circles of Truth One and Two do fit together somehow.”
“Yes they do, mighty traveler,” Ginny said. “You were absolutely right. But that’s not all. Do you get it? Do you see what I see?” She was jumping in her seat.
“Who’s Giovan?”
“Aaagh, Melzi, of course,” Ginny blurted. “That was his first name. Giovan Francesco de’Melzi.”
“Leonardo’s adopted son,” I said.
“Yes, now c’mon, move along. God, I’m so cool I want to kiss myself.”
“Okay,” I told her, “But I’m confused. ‘Gone back to dust’? Died? Melzi didn’t die before Leonardo. He outlived him by, I don’t know, fifty years.”
“That ain’t the meat of the matter,” she said, resting her chin on her palm Jack Benny style. “Don’t get hung up there. Melzi was obviously still alive, so we can only infer that Melzi actually went to dust— like the furniture.”
“Get out. Leonardo would write about that? Right next to the Circles of Truth?”
“This was a free-form journal,” Ginny said impatiently. “Leonardo wrote about everything. Grocery lists next to sketches for
