The Girl With the Botticelli Eyes (29 page)

The notion that she was in a cellar was heightened by the occasional passage of footsteps overhead or a door opening or closing. Later, she heard a phone ring, a burst of laughter, then someone talking softly above her in intimate, conspiratorial tones. Another door opened, followed by the sound of something heavy being dragged across a bare floor.

An hour passed. Struggling to move, she rolled her head backward until at last it hung half on, half off the edge of the cot. Looking behind her, upside down as it were, she glimpsed a pencil-thin stream of light sifting through a small aperture in an outside wall no more than ten feet behind her. Through it, the wind alternately whistled and sighed.

She lay like that for a time, strapped to the cot, eyes burning, her limbs inflamed by the relentless gnawing of burlap fibers against her bare flesh. Staring upside down at the tiny disk of white light like a star in the evening void, she wondered how she could reach it. She hadn’t the vaguest idea what she would do if by chance she did.

She’d long given up hope that Ludovico Borghini had any intention of freeing her. Nor had she any further illusions about why she’d been brought there, or how they intended to use her. The sight of Pettigrilli embalmed in that large glass box told her all she needed to know.

She flinched when something brushed against her bare leg. Her stomach shot upward into her throat and the sound of her muffled shriek seeped out from beneath the silk gag. She heard a purring noise and then she was staring into the face of a cat perched on her chest, regarding her curiously. Seeing it there was something of a relief. It could well have been a number of less pleasant things.

It was a dark, slatternly creature, underfed, with washboard ribs showing beneath its mothy coat. Nothing like her pampered and beloved Fanny. If she could have petted it just then, more for her comfort than the cat’s, she would have done so.

Lying there strapped to the cot and watching the cat mew at her, she recalled that when it first rubbed against her leg, her immediate reaction had been an involuntary lurch away from its touch. She’d felt her stomach and chest press hard against the middle belt, then, in turn, the belt exerting an equal and opposite flow of pressure downward against her. It had the feeling of a foot on her chest, but, in that instant, she was certain she’d felt the belt give.

Felt it and actually heard it. It was a creaking sound, suggesting that the leather was old, dry, and stiff. If so, it might well have loosened from the exertion of the strong, sudden pressure. Either that or, possibly, in her sudden lurch, the prong of the buckle may have torn one of the punch holes open wider.

To check whether it had been merely her imagination, she tested the belt again with another lurch upward. She felt the buckle strain against her chest. The leather indeed creaked and this time for certain slackened a bit more.

She repeated the movement several times, finding each time that with every additional thrust, her arms, bound beneath the belt, won a bit more purchase. The amount of it was begrudging, but it gave her something to think about other than herself. She was grateful for that. An additional bonus was that along with a slightly increased freedom of the upper arms came a similar increase in the movement of her hands. Bound together with thin, rough cord abrasive enough to tear the skin, her hands moved more freely with the few millimeters of space she’d won for her arms.

It was encouragement, if nothing else. Now she swiveled and twisted her wrists left and right, not caring that she was scraping skin from the back of her hands as she did so. After a while, her hands began to sting and burn, but it was nothing compared with the countless stings of the burlap biting at her bare flesh.

She kept up the action on her hands and arms, hearing from time to time a clock chime somewhere up above. The cat, which had slinked off into the shadows, returned. Sidling up against her flank, he purred, then sweetly shoved his forehead hard up against hers, as if inviting his new friend to scratch him.

All the while overhead, there was a constant shuffling of feet and a variety of ambiguous noises. Mostly, it was a bumping and scraping of heavy objects, sounding like something being drawn back and forth across the floor. There was a good deal of chatting and laughter, some hammering of nails. It all sounded quite harmless. It was only down there in the clammy darkness with no idea where she was or what fate awaited her that the true nightmare of her situation existed.

Some time later, possibly an hour or so, the cellar door opened and a shaft of light streamed down the string of rickety stairs. Footsteps clumped heavily down. Lights went on. The sudden illumination made her blink and close her eyes. When she opened them again, she flinched. There before her was the improbable sight of a figure got up in harlequin dress. It was a Pierrot, complete with dunce cap and a bell that jangled whenever he moved. The figure hovered above her, limp and rangy as a rag doll, with a face painted in white grease. Rouged and lipsticked, with a nose that ended in a cherry-colored rubber tip, the figure smiled down at her, alternately playful and menacing. The smile made her stomach turn. Even the garish clown mask couldn’t conceal the mocking, nasty grin of Beppe Falco.

Aside from the terror she felt, the sight of him there, prancing, jingling his mad cap, darting back and forth at her in oddly jerky crablike motions, sickened her. He saw her fright and he enjoyed it.

In addition to Beppe, she had the first fully illuminated view of her surroundings. The fact that it was a cellar came as no surprise; the size of it did. It was high and cavernous and appeared to reach back for great distances beneath the joisted ceiling.

Mannequins and old suits of armour stood about in a variety of frozen poses. From wood racks above hung a vast array of what appeared to be carpenter’s tools glinting like tiny stars into the shadows. Added to that were barrels and wardrobes, armoires crammed with all manner of strange objects.

But by far the most unsettling thing she saw was something she couldn’t identify at all. Out of the corner of her eye, she glimpsed the dark, smooth surface of something. Spreading out for an indeterminate distance behind the prancing figure of Beppe, this thing gave the appearance of a large stain. At first, she thought it might be linoleum or carpet or the cellar floor itself, varnished to a sleek, gleaming black.

That impression was quickly demolished when the stream of air that whistled through the tiny aperture behind her suddenly kicked up and the large stain, to her amazement, began to move. Starting as a ripple, somewhere near the center, then slowly gathering momentum, it traveled outward, finally reaching the edge of its border, where it made soft lapping sounds like that of a cat drinking milk.

If it had been the boy’s intention to frighten her, he’d succeeded. Strapped down to the cot, her mesmerized gaze followed the harlequin bobbing, spinning, feinting at her like a snake weaving toward a spellbound rabbit. On one level, she thought the whole thing silly, childish; on another, sickeningly sinister. What strange need did it fulfill in this boy? Was it some elaborately ritualized ceremony he had to carry out before he could do to her whatever it was he intended to do?

Several times during the course of this strange ceremony, he put his face close to hers—so close that at one point she could smell the oil base of the greasepaint smeared over his face, as well as the cloyingly sweet odor of cheap rouge that had been applied over the paint. With each pass, his face came closer to hers. She squirmed on the cot, trying to avert any contact with him.

She thought about screaming loud enough through the silk gag to be heard upstairs. Not an easy thing, but assuming she could, what reason had she to hope that the people up there weren’t aware of, and fully in accord with, what was going on down below in the cellar?

All of that whirled through her head with dizzying speed—three or four scenarios played out to their logical conclusions, one more unpleasant than the next. A certain amount of unpleasantness, she felt she could manage. But the sudden image of Pettigrilli and all the others frozen for all time in those cages of glass went far beyond mere unpleasantness.

When she looked again, the boy was standing above her. He had stopped his ceaseless moving and was gazing down at her, hands clasped above his chest, a look of curious sorrow on his face. For one cruelly hopeful moment, she thought that he was relenting, that he was about to release her. Borghini had thought the whole thing over and instructed the boy to give her a good scare, then send her home.

But in the next instant, without warning, he pounced. Pushing the gag up over her eyes and nose, he brought his mouth hard down on hers in a bruising kiss. The initial impact was so great, she thought for a moment he might have broken her tooth.

Struggling to avert her mouth, she felt him trying to cram his tongue between her lips. She clamped her jaws hard together. When he couldn’t open them with his tongue, he literally, pried them open with his fingers and this time plunged his tongue deep inside her mouth.

His breath was disgusting, a mingling of fish and cheap brandy. His hands were all over her. She flailed and writhed beneath the punishing weight of him. When it occurred to her that the gag no longer covered her mouth, she began to scream, then felt his thumb and forefinger clamp her nostrils together. With his own mouth mashed down hard on hers, he had effectively cut off her air. She began to gag and choke. Then, realizing her danger, she grew still at last.

When she’d stopped struggling, made no further attempt to cry out, he unclasped his fingers from her nostrils, yanked the gag back down over her mouth, and rose from the cot.

He stood above her a moment, regarding her coolly. The clown no longer seemed quite so playful. From the pocket of his harlequin costume, he withdrew a small dark object and held it behind his back. Approaching in a mincing gate, he dangled something before her. It was a dead mouse. When he reached the side of the cot, he swung the small gray thing back and forth by its tail with a kind of pendulum motion. Then, stooping above her, he lowered it to her face, letting it graze her forehead and eyes, then inscribing with it slow, lazy circles on each cheek and around the sockets of her eyes. Full of childish glee, he lowered it until the dry little snout of the creature appeared to be balanced on the tip of her nose.

Through some act of sheer defiance, she never winced. She showed none of the terror or revulsion he so eagerly craved. Her intransigence excited him all the more, as though the battle lines had been drawn between two clashing wills. To demonstrate his complete command over her, he drew the dead rodent slowly across her lips, back and forth, over and over again. It had a sweet, rotten smell.

When he left, he lay the mouse on her chest and clumped heavily back up the stairs, turning off the lights behind him.

N
O WORK OF ART
, particularly those afforded the designation of “masterpiece” can be said to belong to any individual. Museum, gallery, corporation, or like institutions that happen to collect and exhibit works of that stature serve only a temporary custodial function in their care. Such masterworks belong rightly to posterity and to those who inhabit that time. The destruction, therefore, or disfiguration of any work of art is a crime against mankind …

Manship looked up from his typewriter. It was nearly 4:00 P.M. and still there’d been no word from Ettore Foa, the Italian deputy ambassador. In fact, with the opening of the Botticelli exhibition scarcely forty-eight hours away, Manship’s phone was conspicuously silent. That in itself was ominous.

He’d been working all day on his essay on theft and vandalism of art. When completed, it would be enlarged, reproduced on long mats, framed in plain aluminum strips, then hung alongside the painting of the St. Stephen’s
Centurion
with its irreparable gashes and horrific excised eyes. Distasteful as it was, he had to agree with Van Nuys and Rene Klass that the mutilated masterpiece would introduce a jarring note into an otherwise-celebratory event. But, hopefully, he told himself, the sight of this glorious painting reduced to shreds might just possibly serve as a sobering tonic to a complacent public that had come to take its great art for granted.

All the while he wrote, he kept glancing at the phone, willing it to ring—a silent plea to Foa to put him out of his misery of waiting.

Foa was not in Washington earlier that afternoon when Manship called. When he asked where the deputy ambassador was, he was brusquely informed that Signor Foa was out of town. Whomever it was he spoke to was not authorized to say where he was, or when he was expected back.

So the writing of the essay that he’d postponed far too long became therapeutic. It took his mind off of troubling events. Yet all the while he wrote about the missing eyes in the Botticelli
Centurion,
it occurred to him that what he saw instead were the almond-shaped sea blue eyes of Isobel Cattaneo, their rueful, piercing gaze coming to rest upon him. They bore precisely the same expression they had that night when she sat across from him at the tiny
enoteca
in Florence. He had a distinct, almost preternatural sense of her presence nearby, as though she were looking over his shoulder. At first merely transitory, the sensation persisted and grew more intense.

Anyone who politicizes a work of art to further his own political agenda …

His fingers stumbled over the keys of the ancient Royal as he attempted to recapture the thread of his thought.

… has probably subverted the intent of the artist. Once a painting is judged by posterity to be a masterpiece, it ceases to have any national identity, any territorial boundaries. Its subject matter has achieved universality and can no longer be said to belong to any specific time or be appropriated on behalf of any cause in which people may hope to enlist it. It may then be said to have entered into the history of civilization, thus becoming untouchable.