The Girl With the Botticelli Eyes (18 page)

That night, while he lay in bed upstairs in the dark, the eyes appeared on his wall. He watched them float past him—large, staring, disembodied. They would glide so close, he could see the hairs on the lashes and brows. A pale bluish aura seemed to emanate from somewhere within them, and as they dipped and swerved past, he could feel the cool trail of air left behind in their wake.

The first time he’d seen the eyes, as a small boy, not quite ten, it had frightened him. But over the months, then years, it occurred with increasing frequency, and by now he’d gotten used to it, actually come to like it. He even looked forward to their next appearance.

T
RUE TO HIS WORD
, old Torelli came through with a timely delivery of the newly restored paintings. They arrived a full eight days before the scheduled opening—plenty of time to hang and light them.

The uncrating of the paintings themselves had something of the breathless drama of a bomb being defused. A small, select group had gathered early in the room where the crates had been delivered by a handpicked unit of the premier art-crating specialists in Florence—people whose sole job was limited to the crating and uncrating of priceless objects of the most fragile nature.

Among the group gathered there were Osgood, Emily Taverner, Pat Colbert, curator of Early American art, and Rene Klass, curator of Impressionist painting (thought to be Manship’s only two serious competitors for the directorship of the museum), and, of course, Manship himself.

Silent, Manship watched crowbars and claw hammers applied to the tough wooden packing containers. Reluctant to speak lest he interrupt the concentration of the unpackers, he appeared to wince with each groan and ripping crack of the wood.

When at last both paintings were out, propped up against the walls of the room, a hushed awe had fallen over the assembled audience. Shortly, they began to tiptoe around the canvases, checking each from various perspectives.

Osgood was the first to venture an opinion. “Damned if I can see a seam or a telltale line in that
Transfiguration
to show where they sewed it.”

“It was in shreds a few weeks ago,” Manship said. “Take my word for it.” To himself, he recited a paean of gratitude to old Torelli and particularly to Signor Panuzzi, whose eyes had filled with tears that morning in Florence as they viewed together the awful desecration visited on the two Botticelli paintings.

It was when they turned to the
Centurion,
which had been savaged in Istanbul, that things got sticky. In accordance with Manship’s instructions, no effort had been made to repair the damage. The canvas simply hung in strips.

“Good God,” murmured Rene Klass, a small, dashing, high-energy type.

“Pretty, huh?” Manship remarked bitterly.

Emily Taverner shuddered.

“Bizarre,” Osgood murmured. “Simply bizarre.”

Pat Colbert stared down at the ruined
Centurion.
“I’m surprised Torelli didn’t try to repair this. Surely there are some decent photographs of the original from which to work.”

“There are,” Manship agreed. “And he wanted to. But I wouldn’t let him.”

Manship’s sudden revelation was met with a mystified silence.

“What are you going to do, then?” Klass asked.

“Surely you’re not going to hang it this way,” Colbert added.

A small, bitter smile flickered at the corners of Manship’s mouth. “Why not?”

“You’re kidding,” Klass said.

“I’m perfectly serious.”

Silence followed—this time not merely mystified but uncomfortable as well. Feet shuffled and awkward gazes were exchanged. The air grew thick with tension.

“But why?” Klass demanded. “What’s the point? It’s grotesque. People will be upset by it.”

“That’s the point. I want them to be,” Manship countered. “I want everyone to see and understand just how irreparable the loss every time a work of art is savaged in this manner.”

For the moment, Manship’s argument appeared to have squelched the potentially dangerous skirmish that had nearly broken out between the two curators.

“What about the missing Chigi sketches, Mark?” Colbert asked.

“What about them?”

“How do you intend to handle that?”

“We’ll have photographs of the missing originals, along with an explanatory note off to the side providing background on the situation. If we can’t show all of the original works just as Botticelli sketched them, at least we can supply an idea of the order in which they evolved in his mind.”

Once again, Manship won the day. Even Klass, who felt obliged to be combative in the presence of his younger, more controversial colleague, thought it prudent, at least for the moment, to back off.

“Good afternoon, Captain.”

“Good afternoon, Mr. Manship.”

That was their customary greeting, a tacit pact between the two, stipulating that Manship must address Chief of Security Leon MacWirter by his former army rank of captain, for which in turn MacWirter would agree never to address Manship as Dr. Manship.

“Everything shipshape with you, Captain?”

“Couldn’t be better, Mr. Manship. We’re just now finishing up installing more cameras for sweeps and bumping up those electronic systems already in place.”

“Fire and panic controls?”

“Likewise. All covered,” MacWirter explained as darkness crowded up against the office windows. He raised a clipboard to eye level and proceeded to read aloud from it through a pince-nez perched at the tip of his nose. A pince-nez on a retired U.S. Army captain in the final decade of the twentieth century spoke volumes regarding the idiosyncratic nature of the chief of security.

“We’re installing a dozen or so more photoelectric eyes,” he went on. “And we’ll be running closed-circuit TVs throughout the second-floor galleries.”

“Glass-breaking sensors, microwave motion detectors, infrared devices?”

“All in place, sir.”

Manship massaged the small netsuke monkey on his desk. “I trust we won’t be relying too heavily on velvet ropes as barriers this time, Captain.”

“No, sir.” MacWirter laughed at some private joke between them. “For the most part, we’ll be going to laminated safety-glass screens.”

“That laminated stuff, how effective is it?”

“Not a hundred percent, I’m afraid. As barriers, they’re mostly a psychological deterrent. Let’s put it this way. A real four-star nutso with mischief on his mind could get around it easily enough.”

Manship stroked his chin thoughtfully. “That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.”

MacWirter cocked a caterpillar brow.

“Your people,” Manship went on, “You feel they’re up to speed?”

“You know them all well, as I do, sir. They’re a good bunch.”

“Is good good enough? Are they good enough to catch certain mannerisms in visitors?”

“Mannerisms?”

“Characteristics of potentially dangerous types—something that would alert you before they do harm?”

MacWirter’s brow cocked higher. He put aside his clipboard and leaned forward. “You’re trying to tell me something, aren’t you, Mr. Manship?”

Manship sighed and rose. He proceeded to pace around the office. “This Botticelli exhibition, Captain. It should be treated much like any other important exhibition we’ve done before. There are, however, a few things, details, that make this show a bit different.”

In the next several minutes, Manship proceeded to inform the chief of security of his experiences on his recent trip abroad, particularly those in connection with the stolen Chigi drawings. Lastly, he described in minute detail the mutilation of the two Botticellis destined for the show.

MacWirter appeared more impressed by that final disclosure than by anything that had preceded it. He shifted uneasily in his seat. “Was anyone hurt during these two incidents, Mr. Manship?”

“One guard was severely injured.”

“Do you know the weapon used on them, sir?”

“The same used to mutilate the paintings.”

MacWirter’s beetling brow lowered. “I appreciate your apprising me of the matter, sir. I take it, then, you’ve been considering laying on some additional outside security people for the run of the show.”

“I confess, the thought crossed my mind.”

Manship could see that the man was clearly troubled, as though his own performance had been called into question. “There’ll be close to two hundred works of art.”

“One hundred and ninety-six, sir.”

“Precisely—and I gather you can only spare ten of your people to cover the show. That’s roughly twenty paintings per man. Far more than anything they typically do.”

“Yes, it is, sir.”

“In addition, more than ninety percent of the show is made up of loans from the most influential collections in the world—the Prado, the Louvre, the Mellon, the National Gallery, the Getty, the Uffizi, and so on. You get my drift, Captain. Imagine if anything were to happen to any one of these paintings. They’re priceless. Irreplaceable.”

“I’m well aware of that, Mr. Manship.”

Manship dropped back into his chair and folded his arms. “Look, I don’t want you to take any of this personally.”

“No, sir.”

“I have the highest regard for you and your people, Captain. You know that. But I’ve asked the board, and they’ve agreed to pony up an additional two hundred and fifty thousand dollars to hire a bit more security for the duration of the show.”

“How many additional would that be, sir?”

“Ten,” Manship said, the figure at the tip of his tongue.

“That’s a bit more than a bit.”

Manship rubbed the netsuke. “Given the fact that the Botticellis are irreplaceable on the open market, wouldn’t you rather err on the side of too many than too few?”

MacWirter brooded on that a moment. “I see.” None too happy, he sighed and slapped his knee. “I’ll call the Pinkerton people first thing in the morning.”

“They’re the best?”

“Top-notch, sir. Sticklers on every detail. Right down to the candidate’s attitude.”

“Attitude toward what?”

“People, museums. They check each candidate for evidence of antisocial behavior.”

“Police records all checked?”

“Obviously that. Temperament’s very important, too. They look for people who can act calmly in emergencies …”

“What about individuals who can sustain power of attention over long periods of duty?”

“Very much so, sir. Also people accustomed to dealing with children and unruly teenagers.”

“People bent on mischief,” Manship added pointedly, “what about those?”

“Yes, sir.” MacWirter nodded. “Particularly those.”

B
OTH MEN WORE APRONS
and rubber gloves. Each had a surgeon’s hat (a sort of snood) on his head. Added to that, Borghini wore a pair of high-magnification surgeon’s glasses. They had small black cubes affixed to the lenses. The two worked quietly, the colonel hunched over his work, Beppe hanging back, ill at ease, but overcome with the heady sensation of donning apron and robes. A bead of sweat glistened on the boy’s forehead, his eyes were riveted on the object splayed out on the surgical table.

The only sounds to be heard in the damp, winding cellars of the gallery in Parioli were the steady drumming of water streaming from a spigot into a steel sink and the high snipping sound of shears. In addition to the scissors, laid out on a narrow rectangular table at right angles to the operating table was an array of surgical instruments and esoteric tools. They included a claw hammer, a tack hammer, a crosscut saw, a ripsaw, a paring knife, tweezers, a pair of side-cutting pliers, a pair of wire cutters, a surgeon’s bone snip, a surgeon’s cartilage knife, a scalpel, a butcher’s skinning knife, a quiver of stainless-steel needles of assorted sizes, a hacksaw, a small ball-peen hammer, a drill set, an upholsterer’s regulator or spindle, various sizes of small files, one medium-fine wood rasp, and one skin scraper for use on large skins.

With his boxy black surgical spectacles jutting forward from the bridge of his nose, Borghini’s latex gloved hands moved swiftly up and down the length of the cadaver. Working with bone snips in one hand and a cartilage knife in the other, he alternated both with deft skill.

Already the top of the skull had been trepanned by means of the circular handsaw. A mass of cortical matter was exposed just beneath the cut, and the skin of the scalp had been pulled forward and down over the face, in much the same way a glove is stripped from a hand. The three-day bath of lye had done much to loosen the skin and subcutaneous tissue from the bony frame just below. By means of scissors, tweezers, and bone and cartilage cutters, Borghini now completed the task of separating the skin from the skeletal structure.

He’d already separated the skin from around the neck and was working with utmost precision to do the same with the skin around the throat and clavicle.

While the colonel snipped and sawed, it was young Beppe’s job to pull back, exerting a gentle but constant downward pressure on the skin just freeing up as the maestro sliced it away from the carcass. The beads of sweat on the boy’s forehead were not the result of exertion. They were a mixture of keen excitement and fear—fear that if he pulled too hard, or not hard enough, the skin might snag and thus tear, an outcome the maestro cautioned would not be tolerated under any circumstances. The maestro was at great pains to stress that at the conclusion of that day they must have a complete skin from head to toe, unbroken and in perfect condition.

Beppe’s eyes burned from the lye fumes wafting upward off the surface of the pool. His discomfort made him focus all the harder on the swift flashes of the maestro’s knife as it went about its work.

In the days following, Borghini seldom left the galleries in Parioli. Working upward of seventeen hours a day on one of his “re-creations,” he would practice what he’d come to think of as his great “alchemical” skills—the art of transforming death into life.

With a complete skin separated from its carcass, the remaining skeleton would then serve as the foundation for constructing a framework.

During that crucial period, Beppe never left the maestro’s side. Initially queasy from the scissoring of flesh and laying back of skin, in a short time he’d become remarkably adept at carrying out his master’s directions. Not only had he a natural finesse, Borghini observed, but he had overcome his first few qualms as well.