The Girl With the Botticelli Eyes (28 page)

Manship’s fist clenched round the receiver. “But that woman may be in grave difficulty.”

“Yes, yes, I quite understand. If it’s of any consolation to you—”

“Very little of what you’ve told me consoles me at this point.” Manship could hear the edge in his voice and regretted it.

“
Giusto.
I understand. What I wished to convey, however, is that I have also been on the phone to your insurance underwriters, the Lloyd’s people in London. At our urging, they, too, contacted the police through their Rome office. They were put off in the same way by the Italian authorities, just as we were. The Lloyd’s people are understandably anxious about the damage already done to two of your Botticellis, and now with your show coming up, they are eager to forestall the possibility of any further incidents.”

“Do they believe there’s a connection between the Quattrocento gallery and the missing Chigi sketches?”

“They do, as well as the attacks on those two paintings. They’ve now applied directly to the office of the British ambassador in Rome to make specific inquiries along those lines.”

Manship gnawed the inside of his lower lip. “But how long will all this take? While these drowsy bureaucrats are pushing paper back and forth across the Continent, this poor woman’s life may be hanging by a thread.”

“I share your concern. The young lady must be a longstanding friend of yours.”

“As a matter of fact, I’ve met her all of two times.”

“Indeed.” Foa chuckled. “Those must have been two very memorable meetings. However, for whatever it’s worth, “the deputy ambassador hurried on, “I can tell you that in Rome a polite inquiry from the chief representative of the Court of St. James is more apt to rouse the drowsy constabulary, as you so aptly put it, than anything from a Roman official of comparable rank. Sad but true.” Foa sighed. “Stand by. I’ll call you as soon as I have something more concrete.”

Manship gazed at the receiver for some time after he’d put it down.

“What was all that about?”

Startled, Manship turned. He’d completely forgotten that Maeve had followed him into the library when the phone rang. “Oh, you still here?”

“How could I leave? I got caught up in the plot.”

Manship rose and started out.

“Aren’t you going to tell me what’s going on?”

“I’ve got to get back to the office.”

She tripped after him. “Does it have something to do with those missing Botticellis?”

“In a manner of speaking.’.’

“Oh, Mark. Don’t be so goddamned secretive. Who’s this woman you’re talking about? What’s happening to her? It sounds awful.”

“It could well be.”

Something about the way he’d said it alarmed him as much as it had her. When she spoke again, her voice was strangely tender. “Someone you met, Mark? Someone you care for?”

He would have liked to respond, to share it with her. But the pity of it was, there was so little to share. “Oh, I don’t know, Maeve. Run along. You’re going to be late for your lunch with Osgood.”

He let the knuckle of his finger graze her cheek. “Get on to the Stanhope now. We’ll talk tonight.”

“Will you be home?”

“I have to be. I’m expecting this important call.”

W
HEN THE EYES FLOATED
past him this time, he could feel the current of air left behind in their wake.

“I heard nothing. Papa.”

“When the police come …”

“Yes?”

“You tell them you were sleeping.”

“I heard nothing, Papa.”

Shouts. Screams. Terrible scuffling sounds. Pounding footsteps. The crash of something heavy toppling over. A ripping sound.

Standing in the doorway. A small child in a flannel nightshirt, a tiny, wraithlike figure. Wide-eyed, staring, silent. Eyes following the rise and fall of the bayonet blade. Strips of canvas peeling from the frame. The easel tilted. Descending with a crash. Mother’s slippers—velvet, mother-of-pearl fleurs-de-lis woven on the instep. He could see the sole and the bare calf of her right leg where her gown had slid upward above the knee, a faint blue tracery of vein scrawled across the milk white skin. The rest of her not visible; sprawled beneath the toppled easel.

“I saw nothing, Papa.”

In the morning, the house full of people. The hushed air of excitement. Uncle Adriano. Aunt Annamarie. Police coming and going. Prowling through the house. Poring through everything. Cars outside jammed into the driveway, out onto the boulevard. Papa in Mother’s room with the police. Coming toward him. Papa and a big, lumbering man with opera buffa mustachios. Signor Bollata, Papa’s attorney, ringed by carabinieri. Questions. Voices, hushed, respectful. Questions. Questions.

“Ludo.” Papa spoke softly, with a carefully studied kindness. “This is Inspector Bravazzo of the carabinieri. He wants to ask you a few questions.”

The inspector knelt. His big, meaty hand rumpled the boy’s hair. “Last night, Ludo … did you hear anything? Noises? Shouts? Anything?”

“I heard nothing.” The boy stared up at him blankly.

“Did you see anything? Don’t be frightened, Ludo.”

Puzzled, the boy looked up at his father for guidance.

“It’s all right, Ludo. Answer the inspector.”

He saw something flicker in his father’s eye and felt his bowel turn. “I heard nothing. I was asleep.”

The boy rubbed his eyes and started to cry.

Count Ottorino was mortified.

“That’s all right, Ludo.” The inspector patted him on the shoulder. “You can go back to your room now.”

“Can I see Mama?” the boy asked.

“Not now, Ludo. Do as the inspector says. Go back to your room, son.”

Hesitating a moment, the boy glanced back and forth from his father to the inspector, then turned and ran from the room. Outside the door, he hovered in the hallway, trying to hear what was being said.

“You see, inspector,” Signor Bollata was saying, his chest swelling with importance. “A robbery. It’s perfectly obvious.”

The inspector gazed for a time at the attorney. When at last he spoke, it was with a weary forbearance. “But if it was robbery, as you say, why was nothing taken? There had to be some other motive.”

“The robbery was interrupted while in progress,” Bollato persisted, a fixed little smile twitching on his face. “So, of course, nothing was taken. By then, the count was already there, fighting off the assailant.”

The inspector cocked a skeptical brow. “In his wife’s room? What of great value would a robber hope to find in the Contessa Borghini’s studio? And then, too, the murder weapon, the bayonet, belongs to the count.” “But the count has already explained.” Signor Bollato, still smiling, struggled to contain his exasperation. “The man no doubt entered at the ground-floor level, through a window. Somehow he got into the count’s gun room, right off the library. Got hold of one of the bayonets there.”

“This man … this alleged robber,” the inspector hypothesized. Signor Bollato’s eyes opened like huge blooming peonies.

“Alleged? Can there be any further doubt? What else would you call the fellow? A vagrant? A drifter? An
ubriacone
? They loiter like roaches by the dozens around the train station. They sleep on the ground and befoul themselves in the streets. Scum of the earth. A disgrace to the nation … Alleged?” The attorney gave a scornful laugh and flung his hand in the air.

The Inspector said nothing by way of reply, merely turned his back on the attorney and once again addressed the count:

“I’m sorry to have to persist. I know what a sad time this must be for you. Please understand, it is my responsibility.”

“Of course, Inspector.” Count Ottorino dabbed the back of his neck with a foulard he’d unwound from his throat. “Please continue.”

“You’re a trained soldier, Colonel. From what I can see, you appear to be in excellent condition.”

“I’m quite fit, if that’s what you mean.”

The inspector paused. His eyes narrowed as he framed the next question in his mind. “How, if I may ask, could a trained professional like yourself permit this homeless, pathetic drifter to get away?”

“He had a bayonet.” Signor Bollato thrust himself protectively in front of the count. “A twelve-inch blade. He’d already used it on the contessa.”

The inspector gave the counselor one of his most patronizing smiles. “But my good man, when the fellow fled here, he was not even armed. The murder weapon is still lying over there in the corner.”

“I heard nothing, Papa. Nothing …”

The words spilled from his lips. They came at him in waves, over and over again, echoing through the gloomy quiet of the dining room.

Beppe appeared at the door. Peering in to see if anything was amiss, he came forward into the room and began to clear dishes from the table.

“You were not hungry, maestro?”

Borghini mumbled something, then dismissed the boy with a wave. He rose stumbling from the table, then took his glass and grappa bottle and went lurching off toward the library.

For the last few days, ever since the girl arrived, the scene had played itself over and over in his head: preceded by an aura, a kind of warning signal, its symptoms a cold numbness at the center of his forehead, followed by a sense of dissociation from his immediate surroundings, as though he were no longer anchored to his own body.

Next came the eyes floating in midair, then distant cries and the sound of something ripping. Finally, the half-painted Madonna would come into view, his mother’s Madonna. He could see isolated parts of the face—a nose, an ear, the right quadrant of the head. Thin strips of canvas drooping from a wood frame; everything slashed, cut loose from everything else—and there, the eyes, gouged from the canvas and dancing like spirits before his dazzled gaze.

Each time the scene replayed itself, it returned with additional details. His memory of that morning decades past grew sharper, more vivid with each passing year. His father, now dead, was never prosecuted for the murder of his wife, but was later convicted of treason by a war crimes tribunal and imprisoned. Inspector Bravazzo, now dead, had been swept off into some bureaucratic backwater in malarial Calabria, dying young, more out of disappointment than infirmity. And, finally, there was the bewildered Neapolitan drifter, seized in a reeking
gabinetto
at the bus station, arrested, and convicted for the murder of the Contessa in the Palazzo Borghini on the Quirinal. No one had ever questioned the legitimacy of the charges that had been fabricated against him.

Four years later, Ludovico Borghini, all of ten years of age, killed the first of what was to be long line of homeless, basically defenseless people. The first time he did it, he was with several other youths, prowling the streets after school. In a mean section of the city, they came across a man lying drunk in an alleyway. Barely conscious, singing softly to himself, his shirtfront covered with vomit, he drooled spit. Trembling with fear and a strange excitement, young Ludo carried out the execution with a can of lighter fluid and a match.

From that time on, he acted alone and his preferred method of execution was a bayonet—one he had lifted from his father’s prized collection of military memorabilia. Frequently, after the deed was done, he would render the victim’s face unidentifiable by carving it into a thatch of fleshy strands peeled back from the bones beneath. Sometimes he would excise the eyes. The exercise, which over the years had taken on the form of a ritual, invariably left him in a state of exhilaration.

S
HE WOKE IN THE
dark and thought she was home in the big four-poster bed in her sun-drenched upstairs bedroom in Fiesole. But the air she breathed gave off a close, rank smell. When she inhaled, she felt a stinging in her nose and mouth. Behind her, she could hear the soughing of a clammy wind pouring through a hole somewhere.

Then she remembered.

First Borghini, then the boy. Then the big glass case, three sides of it encompassed by a scene of medieval Tuscany, and opposite her in a loose white gown, a dead, smiling Aldo Pettigrilli, extending an apple toward her. At the memory of it, a bubble of sour chyme rose in her throat, along with the nagging doubt whether she’d actually seen it.

She had no idea where she was, nor any recollection of how she’d gotten there. It appeared to be a cellar, a rather large one, and she was lying on a cot that smelled faintly of cheese. Attempting to rise, she discovered that she was strapped to the cot by what felt like heavy leather restraints—belts, no doubt, three of them. One was wound around her ankles, one across her chest, and one girded so tightly over the abdomen, it made breathing difficult. Resting on her chest, her hands had been clasped together and bound with cord in an attitude of prayer.

Next to her skin, she felt a coarse, scratchy fabric. Even in the dark, she knew it to be burlap—a kind of rough-hewn, makeshift thing that may well have been originally a sack for flour or vegetables. With a rush of shame, she realized she was completely naked beneath it. The shame was slight compared to the anger she felt over the cruelty of her captors. It took a certain exquisite perversity to put someone naked, bound head to toe, in raw burlap. The sensation, she felt, was comparable to having a thousand fire ants crawling over one’s naked flesh, all biting and tearing at you at the same time. It made her want to dive into ice water or walk through flames.

Movement to scratch herself was impossible. Within limits, she could move her head and neck, and with a slight, begrudging leeway in the belts, she could move her arms and legs just barely enough to maintain circulation. Something large and silky, like a scarf, had been tied across her mouth and around the back of her head to gag her.

To add to her discomfort, she became aware that her eyes were burning and had started to tear. She attributed that to the same thing—the sharp, almost onionlike smell, that burned the inside of her nose and mouth.

The place was full of a whole range of nondescript but highly suggestive sounds. The sort of creaking, ambiguous scurryings you’d expect in a cellar. Periodically, she’d hear what she thought to be a lapping noise she associated with an animal. The sound was sporadic. It came and went. The next time she heard it, it sounded to her like wind passing lightly over the surface of a pond. She had no idea what the sound might be and was left with a disturbing range of possibilities as to its source.