The Girl With the Botticelli Eyes (22 page)

“The work’s got to get done.” Manship started to rise, then sat back down. “There’re a million and one things left to do and not enough hands to do them. I sandbagged poor Taverner tonight. She didn’t deserve it. She’s been working like a dog. There’s just too goddamned much for the both of us.”

“It’ll get done,” Maeve said.

Osgood splashed another two inches of Riesling into Manship’s glass. “Had another dustup with Van Nuys, too, I gather.”

“That was only this afternoon. How did you hear?”

“News travels fast, old buddy. The tom-toms were still beating in the PR department when I left tonight He still wants you to move up the opening date?”

“Sure he does. And the way things are going right now, I’m inclined to ask for a week’s postponement.”

“You didn’t say that, I hope.”

“I sure did.” Manship gave a short cheerless laugh. “He got red in the face. His wattles quivered like some old turkey’s—you know the way he gets.” Manship did a passable imitation of the board chairman working up to apoplexy.

Shortly, they were all in stitches.

“Frankly,” he went on in manic fury, “I was hoping to prod the old boy into a stroke. Nothing serious, mind you. A small aneurysm. A mild cerebral hemorrhage. Something to disable him temporarily until after the opening.”

“You’ll have one before he does,” Maeve said. “You look awful.”

Osgood studied him a while. “Looks better than when he came in. The wine’s put some color back in his cheeks.”

“I’ll say one thing.” Manship dabbed a napkin to his lips. “The moment this show is launched and up on its feet, I’m gone. Out of here.”

Removing soiled dishes from the table, Maeve stopped dead in her tracks, gaping down at him.

“You don’t mean that,” Osgood said. “I sure do. Van Nuys and I are rapidly approaching the time where we’re going to have it out. He’s packing bigger guns than I am, so I’m not looking for any victories. I just want to get out of here with what’s left of my sanity and stomach lining.”

“You’ve given the place twelve years,” Maeve argued. “You’ve done so much for it.”

“What a waste. What a god-awful waste,” Osgood muttered.

Manship’s fork fiddled idly in his salad. “I’ve been mulling this thing a long time now, Bill. I really don’t belong here. It was fun for a while. It’s not fun anymore.”

“As you know,” Osgood went on in his slow Texas twang, “my term is up here next fall. I’m going home to Texas after fifteen years in the big city. Looking forward to doing nothing more for a long time than maybe some part-time teaching at the university, and lots of tarpon fishing down in Baja. All of which suits me just fine.”

Manship had heard this sort of thing before. It was pure Osgood, doing his Lyndon Johnson imitation at its most treacherous best.

“I’ve already notified Van Nuys in a notarized letter that you’re my personal choice to replace me as director. I won’t pretend that he was overjoyed with my selection, and, to be absolutely frank, I, too, have reservations about it. He prefers Klass or Colbert, and I can see why; Colbert’s about as amiable as an ice pick. Doesn’t stand a chance, far as I can see, Klass is amiable and very corporate; you’re not. He’s, political; he plays the game; you don’t. He does what he’s told. He’s a good soldier, a team player. You’re none of the above. And, most important to the bean counters in charge around here, Klass has a healthy respect for money—how to get it, how to spend it. You, my friend, are a walking budget deficit.”

Manship took the criticism with good grace. “In that case, Rene should have the job. He’ll enjoy it far more than I ever could.”

“But
you’re
the better man for it,.” Osgood countered. “Better qualified. A far wider range of expertise. Less academic than either Colbert or Klass, with far more vision of what this institution is and where it should be going. And, of course, temperamentally you’re far better suited to take on the constant bickering of the board. Rene will cave in to anything they want. But most important, you’re better suited for the job of putting the business of this museum, which is Art with a capital A, before a wider public. Call it flare, if you like. Panache. None of the others have it.”

Manship sat quietly, hands on knees, listening. It was his future that was being discussed. At his age, in that highly specialized field, one could not bounce around too much without raising eyebrows, not to mention questions as to one’s professional steadiness.

When at last he rose, his eyes were fixed straight ahead. He started toward the study.

“Mark,” Maeve called after him, a faint quaver to her voice. “How about a slice of nice fresh cobbler for dessert?”

“No thanks. I’ve got some work to finish up.” He was aware of their eyes following him as he closed the door behind him.

Seated at his desk, a stack of advertising rush copy before him, there was the taste of something bitter in his mouth. That silly talk with Maeve about museums, then that pious lecture from Osgood, ending with a report card scoring his strengths and weaknesses and outlook for the future. How he hated it all, the striving and the nauseating business of getting ahead. And now, suddenly, Maeve and Osgood. Why did that rankle so? Clearly they’d struck up something that night. More power to them. Both were trapped in unsatisfactory situations—hers dying, his already dead, with batteries of divorce lawyers gorging avidly on the corpse of the marriage. Why not reach out if they both felt something?

Toward dawn, sheer exhaustion took him up to bed. Shortly after he’d fallen asleep, he was awakened by the sound of an ambulance siren whooping its way uptown to some dangerous precinct farther north. The room was still dark and he’d been dreaming of a pale, golden-haired creature skimming toward him over the surf in a huge mollusk shell. Why in heaven’s name had he called her? What a fool he must have sounded like. Hemming and hawing and bumping along, he’d carried on like some pimply adolescent making his first call to a girl.

Trying to reconstruct Isobel Cattaneo’s features in his mind, he found, to his surprise, that he couldn’t. Physically, she remained a vague, shadowy outline to him. Yet how similar in outlook they were, the two of them. Both alone in the world, unsettled, unanchored to anything, still en route somewhere, both dissatisfied with the progress of their journeys to date. Was that the reason behind his strange affinity for her? As discouraging as their talk today had been, he was certain he’d not seen the last of her. And in the back of his mind lurked a sharp, inescapable sense of some impending danger hurtling toward them.

“I
WANT TO GIVE
you the benefit of the doubt, Isobel: But you make it hard for me.”

He sat at a large desk in his study. The chair she sat in was small, low to the ground, very much like a child’s chair, so that she had to sit with her knees up. For contrast (and to make a point), Borghini sat in a large, imposing chair. Attired in freshly starched and ironed army fatigues, he conducted the interview in his grand, inquisitorial manner. The child’s chair had been his own nursery chair almost fifty years ago.

His last words resonated with an ominous ring—“you make it hard for me”—her panicky thoughts had been racketing ahead at a dizzying speed. She still wore the simple skirt, blouse, and sandals she had been wearing in Fiesole when they’d taken her.

The irony of it all was that the last time she’d seen him was right here in this dark, sprawling palazzo on the Quirinal—ten years ago.

She marveled at his youthfulness, his unlined face. But now, behind that grand, self-important desk, he looked smaller to her—almost doll-like. Morbidly sensitive about his height, she recalled, he always wore elevated shoes adding at least three inches to his frame. Today, she noted, he wore combat boots, spit-polished and buffed to a high sheen, trousers bloused into them in military fashion.

His gaze fastened on her, full of patience and bogus sorrow. On first meeting him, that expression could be extremely appealing. But to know Borghini was to know never to take what you saw for granted. Behind that gentle, pitying gaze lurked stratagems and treachery, secret agendas, far too byzantine to imagine.

“I was fond of you, Isobel.” He shook his head regretfully. “I had hopes for you.”

Above and just behind her, she could sense the other one, an unseen presence whose slow, regular breathing she could feel at the back of her neck. She knew it was the. boy. That’s all he was, a boy, seventeen or eighteen at most, with a pink-skinned baby face as of yet untouched by the razor. Rarely, she noted, did he leave his master’s side.

Nor did she fail to note how he looked at her. She’d seen it the night before when she’d discovered him in the front hallway of the house. He crouched then like a cat on its nocturnal prowl. Unpredictable, he could pounce at any moment. There was something deeply unsettling in his eyes.

“Why did you send that man to me, Isobel?”

“I didn’t, Ludo. I told you that.”

He waved a scornful hand at her. “No, you sent him to that scum Pettigrilli, who sent him to me.”

“How was I to know that Aldo would send him to Parioli? I thought he might have some clue as to the whereabouts of those drawings.”

“Which is as good as sending him directly to me. Where else would that rodent turncoat send your American friend for information of that sort if not to me? Not very subtle, Isobel. I would have hoped for better from you. More coffee?”

She shook her head wearily.

“Beppe, fetch the Signorina another
caffe latte.
And for me, another grappa.”

She heard the boy’s padded footsteps withdraw behind her, followed by the loud click of a heavy door closing.

Borghini’s interrogation resumed. “Tell me again about this man, Isobel. What is his name?”

She looked away, gnawing the inside of her lip, determined not to show how frightened she was. “Manship.”

“Louder, please, Isobel. You’re mumbling.”

“Manship. Mark Manship.” She made an effort to enunciate each syllable.

“What exactly is this Mr. Manship’s game?”

“As I said before, Ludo, he’s a curator—for the Metropolitan Museum … in New York. Something of a scholar, I gather. He’s putting on an exhibition in New York.”

“Of Botticelli paintings.”

“And drawings, too. A big show. Something to do with the occasion of Botticelli’s five hundred and fiftieth birthday. Some such thing. He’d been trying to track down some drawings. The Germans—”

“Yes, the Germans? What about the Germans?”

“The federal police. In Berlin—or Leipzig. I’m not sure.”

“You hadn’t mentioned that before. You see, Isobel. That’s what makes me so uneasy about you.” His gaze pinned her. “What you
do
and what you
don’t
tell me. I can never be certain if that’s by accident or design.”

“I’m trying to tell you everything, Ludo. I’m sure you can appreciate that at the moment I’m a bit nervous.”

“Nervous?” He laughed disarmingly. “Why, in heaven’s name? What do you have to be nervous about?”

The boy returned, bearing a tray rattling with cups and saucers. He placed a steaming coffee before her and poured a full pony of grappa from a carafe for Borghini. He then resumed his position behind her.

“Unless, of course,” the Count continued, “you lie to me. You know, Isobel, how I despise a liar. Pettigrilli was a liar. He lied to me. That’s why he was discharged from the movement.” He watched the effect of his words register on her face. “Tell me again about the Germans. How are they connected?”

By then, she was close to tears.

“Well … they … he went to Berlin.”

“He?”

“This fellow, Manship. He went to Berlin because that was the last place these three lost Chigi sketches were reportedly seen.”

“And the Germans, I take it, knew about the sketches?”

“Apparently, they’d been stolen a few years earlier from the home of a man whose father was in the Gestapo; stationed in Naples during the war, I believe. This man smuggled them out of Italy shortly before the Allies landed in Anzio.”

She paused to see if her information had satisfied him. He gave her another of his impatient waves. “Yes, yes. Go on.”

“As I understand it, the police in Leipzig informed the Berlin police about the theft and they—”

“They?”

“The police in Leipzig, I suppose …”

“Yes?”

“They suspected that the theft was carried out by …”

His brow towered and he leaned slightly forward. “By some fascist paramilitary group centered in Rome? Is that what you were about to say, Isobel?”

She stared down at her hands and finally answered in an exhausted whisper. “Yes.” Seated so long in the child’s chair, her back and legs had begun to ache.

Borghini splashed another finger of grappa into his glass, the tip of his tongue sliding along his lower lip as he did so. “And so, of course, you assumed that this nasty little fascist group was your old friend Ludovico Borghini’s? Am I right?”

“Yes, Ludo.” She continued to stare down at her hands.

He paused, pleased with the way his mounting indignation was taking its toll on her. “And so you suggested, through Pettigrilli of course, that your friend come here looking for the so-called stolen sketches?”

“It wasn’t exactly that way,” she said, “but it worked out that way.”

“It worked out that way,” he mimicked her voice, a look of disgust on his face.

“Yes, Ludo. The answer to your question is
yes.
” This time, she said it louder, more emphatically, with an edge of defiance that made him smile.

“You note that I said ‘so-called’ stolen sketches? Have you any idea why?”

“I suppose to emphasize the point that the sketches taken out of Leipzig were not actually stolen, but merely returned to Italy, their rightful owner.”

“Bravo, Isobel.” The colonel applauded lightly. “Very gratifying. You see, Beppe? My teaching has not been entirely wasted.”

Once again, that small, fleeting smile swept across the lower half of his features. The upper half never moved. “In the case of these so-called stolen sketches, Isobel, I wish to make clear that I serve only in a custodial capacity—until such time as a new government can be formed …”