The Girl With the Botticelli Eyes (33 page)

Manship muttered a few unrepeatables. It was just midnight in Rome. He had not the slightest idea where to begin to look for the deputy ambassador in Italy at that hour.

Another message in Mrs. McCooch’s spidery hand informed him that Emily Taverner had called, frantic to reach him—something about the florist and floral arrangements for the following morning. Would he please be sure to call her?

There was a third message, from Osgood, asking him to call first thing in the morning. He would be out for the evening.

A final message, this one scratched out in Maeve’s fierce, elegant cursive. Her letters, like her painting, full of mystical little glyphlike characters, informed him that she would be spending the night with an old friend in Scarsdale.

The message, by chance juxtaposed with that of Osgood’s announcing that he, too, would be unavailable till the next day, made Manship smile. He felt no bitterness, but, rather, an odd sense of relief. He wished them well. Nothing was worth getting too sad over. Life was short, everything impermanent, no loss so awful that it couldn’t be endured. All comes to naught. Everyone ends up essentially the same way. What’s to fret? What’s to grieve?

With still no word from Foa, he grew increasingly anxious over the fate of Isobel Cattaneo—to his surprise, far more anxious than over the fate of his show. Imagining several possible scenarios, none provided him much solace.

Later that night, too agitated to sleep, he tossed and turned for several hours, his mind churning with nagging suspicions regarding Van Nuys, as well as the myriad small details still waiting to be resolved at the museum.

Slightly past midnight Manship threw in the towel. Too keyed up to sleep, he rose and dressed, intending to steal across to his office and have a last look at the show before zero hour tomorrow. At the back of his mind was a fast-fading hope that he would find a message waiting there from Foa, reporting that he’d located Isobel and that everything was all right.

Fifth Avenue was remarkably busy for that hour. For late September, the night air had a silkiness that was almost voluptuous—more like May. A fragrance of twice-bloomed honeysuckle wafted about from across the way in the park. It was as though New York, unwilling to accept approaching winter, was reinventing spring. People in shirtsleeves were out strolling the avenue—out for a breath of air, giving the dog a final sprinkle for the night. Cabs and buses lurched along, brakes shrieking as they shuddered at stops to pick up or discharge passengers. Hordes of people milled about, looking intent, purposeful. Where were they going at that hour? Manship wondered. Did no one in the city go to bed anymore?

But it was the museum that truly surprised him. Fully expecting to find that long expanse of masonry plunged in darkness, with perhaps a sporadic light twinkling here and there along the great facade, he found instead the building emblazoned in lights all along the upper stories.

Mounted above the columned entrance, pennants and banners in cerulean blue, swelling outward like great spinnakers, rode the gentle midnight breeze. In yard-high letters, they proclaimed for all the world to see: BOTTICELLI. 550. It sounded like an Italian bicycle race.

His immediate reaction was embarrassment. It was too big, too showy. It bordered on the cheaply theatrical. But then again, much to his dismay, there was something in it to which he responded. He couldn’t bring himself to calf it pride, but after all, wasn’t it the culmination of a dream? Hadn’t it cost the better part of five years of his life to put it together; to assemble in some coherent order all of its multiple and diverse parts; to bring it to the point where banners could fly? Come December, early January, he knew all too well the show would close, the paintings would come down, all packed away, crated in excelsior and wood to be shipped back to their respective owners. Then it would all be history. Quickly forgotten.

Out front, up and down the length of the great stone stairway, people, mostly the young, squatting on knapsacks and book bags, sprawled about in untidy little clusters.

He threaded his way through recumbent forms, assorted soda cans, and candy wrappers, up to the entrance and let himself in with a passkey. Save for two or three security lights providing minimal illumination, the Great Hall, divested of its daily horde of tramping visitors, appeared to slumber in the partial dark. A pair of security guards immediately converged on him as he entered, then, recognizing him, murmured respectful good evenings and moved off in. the direction of the Sackler Wing on their nightly patrol.

Opposite him, in that cavernous gloom, the central stairway appeared to float downward through the airy silences of the main floor. At the very top of the stair, lights blazed and a low ham of activity filtered downward.

He’d intended to go first to his office, but the steady din drifting down from above roused his curiosity. With a sense of mounting excitement, Manship made his way into the first of the twelve central galleries that now housed the Botticelli exhibition.

He was startled by what he saw. For one thing, there was far more activity than anything he was prepared for at that hour. Lighting technicians moved about everywhere, coiled in great loops of wire; picture hangers poised on ladders rushed to make last-minute adjustments; photographers, camera technicians, and personnel from the department of conservators all went about applying final touches to their work.

Manship threaded his way among the ladders. He watched security experts mount plates of see-through bulletproof glass before world-class paintings. Up ahead, a pale blur of motion swam before his dazed eyes. At the center of it stood Taverner in the midst of the fray, issuing orders to a crew of exhausted assistants. She, too, looked pretty much at the end of her rope. At that moment, she happened to turn and see him.

“Mark. Thank heavens! …”

“What’s going on here, anyway?”

“There’s still so much to do.” She came toward him, wailing a litany of complaint. “And then there’s the florist.”

“I know. I got your message.”

“They want to do the table arrangements first thing in the morning.”

“Impossible. Everything will be drooping by dinner.”

“Don’t even ask about Frettobaldi.”

“What about him?”

“He insists that the lighting over the Predella panels is all wrong. And the lighting over the
Primavera,
he says, turns the blue to purple. He’s had his people rip it out and do it over and over again. He stormed out of here an hour ago, and most of them are ready to snap.” Her chin sagged to her chest. “I can’t tell you how relieved I am you’re here.”

He thought she was about to cry, and he pushed a straying forelock from her brow.

“All these last details,” she went on, close to tears. “There was no one to turn to. You’d left for the day. Mr. Osgood had gone, too. Van Nuys is out of town till tomorrow evening …”

“I had some things to work out,” he offered by way of explanation. “Come, show me the problem with the Predella panels.”

They set off at once for one of the galleries farther back on the floor. She walked slightly ahead of him, still reciting woes while leading him. When they reached the wall where the panels hung, they found three of Frettobaldi’s assistants lounging on the floor, drinking coffee from a thermos.

“What are you gentlemen doing?” Manship inquired.

“We’re waiting for Mr. Frettobaldi.”

“You may have to wait a long time. I gather he’s having one of his creative blocks.” Manship gazed up at the panels. “What seems to be the problem?”

Sensing authority, one of them scrambled to his feet. “It’s the glare we’re getting when we reach the required brightness.”

“Show me.” Manship planted himself squarely before the panels, folded his arms, and waited.

The fellow proceeded to run his dimmers through several degrees of brightness. The other two, judging it politic, had shambled to their feet as well. Taverner hovered in the background.

“You see the glare,” the first fellow explained, “the way it comes off the glass?”

“I do, but it’s not all that bad,” Manship replied. “Bring the floods up to maximum and then lower them slowly.” Manship’s voice was remarkably calm, considering the depth of his irritation. “Down a bit more,” he called over his shoulder to the assistant operating the dimmer. “That’s it. Fine.”

The assistant came up from behind him. Along with the two others, they stood studying the effect of the lights and shaking their heads.

“There’s still glare there,” one of them said.

“Maybe,” Manship replied. “But we can live with it. Look okay to you, Taverner?”

“Looks fine to me.” She nodded.

“Mr. Frettobaldi will never approve—”

“He doesn’t have to.” Manship smiled frostily. “You can tell him Mr. Manship has approved it for him. You gentlemen are free to go now.”

One of them, the largest of the three, shuffled forward. “Beg pardon, sir, but we have our instructions. Mr. Frettobaldi told us to wait right here till he gets back.”

Manship shrugged. “Suit yourself. But as of this moment”—he glanced at his watch—“one-fourteen A.M., you gentlemen are off the museum payroll. The meter has stopped running. Taverner, will you please note that in your’ log.”

Manship nodded cordially to the workmen, then turned on his heel. Taverner scurried along behind while Frettobaldi’s three assistants, somewhat stunned, watched the two figures recede slowly down the aisle, then disappear.

The next gallery was devoid of workmen. A quiet, almost serene hush hovered over the space. Here resided the
Adoration of the Magi
from the Uffizi, the dazzling
Scant Sebastian
from the Staatliche Museum in Berlin,
The Virgin Teaching the Child to Read
from the Poldi-Pezzoli in Milan,
The Story of Nastagio degli Onesti,
only just arrived the day before from the Prado in Madrid. That was followed by the superstar, the
Birth of Venus,
carried across the Atlantic from the Uffizi in Florence by courier, then uncrated at the museum from specially constructed cartons with built-in humidity- and climate-control devices.

The Venus was bewitching. Any viewer, even a particularly acute one, could forgive the unnatural elongation of her neck, the impossibly steep fall of her shoulder, the queer manner in which her left arm is hinged to her body. Manship would have argued that all of those anatomical aberrations were intentional, that it was Botticelli’s way of heightening the beauty and harmony of the design, and that, in the end, all one saw were the eyes—sad, tender, infinitely wise.

Taverner behind him, he moved farther along, past
St. Augustine in His Cell, Christ on the Mount of Olives,
a
Portrait of Lorenzo,
and then an empty space.

It lay between the
Portrait of Lorenzo
and the
Annunciation
from the Met’s own permanent collection. More a gap than a space, it looked like a mismeasurement or an oversight on the part of the hangers. It called attention to itself like a missing tooth in an otherwise-lovely face.

He stood staring at it, a look of puzzlement on his lowering brow; then his expression darkened.

“What is this?”

“Mark—”

“What’s going on here?”

“Mark, please. I don’t want to get into the middle of anything.”

“Don’t worry. You won’t.” A line in his jaw began to throb. “Just tell me who’s responsible.”

“I had nothing to do with it. If you’d been here—”

“Was it Van Nuys? René? Where’s my
Centurion
?”

She stared down at the floor miserably, wringing her hands.

“Who took it? Tell me.” His voice was ominously soft. “You’d better tell me, Emily.”

She stood there, kneading her hands, as close to tears as she’d come that night. At last, she nodded. “Both of them—Van Nuys and René.”

Swallowing several times, she struggled for air. “They came around to your office late in the afternoon, looking for you. I told them you’d left for the day. I thought they’d be angry, but they seemed almost relieved. Then they left.”

“They left?”

“Not the museum, just your office.”

“Where’d they go?”

Her tear-rimmed eyes opened wide, brimming with anger. “Where do you think?” She pointed to the gaping void near the center of the wall.

“Who took it down?” Manship demanded. “Which one? Was it René?”

“One of the hangers. René directed him.”

“And Van Nuys?”

“Just stood there and watched. If you’d just been here.”

“I wasn’t. But I’m here now. Where did they take it?”

Taverner had been working fourteen-hour days throughout that whole week. She looked wobbly on her feet. She kept wringing her hands and shaking her head slowly back and forth. She was like a stutterer desperate to speak but unable to get words out.

“I don’t know,” she confessed at last.

“What do you mean, you don’t know? You followed them down from my office. You followed them here to this gallery. Why didn’t you follow them wherever they were taking the
Centurion
?”

She had the look of a child about to be punished, her head still shaking right to left. “Mark, I can’t … I don’t …”

“I know. You don’t want to get into the middle of anything. You’ve already said that.”

“I know I did. I just …”

She’d wadded a Kleenex in her fist, then crushed, it to her mouth, stifling her sobs behind it. Tired tears slid downward from her eyes.

“Just one thing.” He appeared to soften. “Just tell me one thing.”

Her eyes watched him warily over the Kleenex.

“Do you know anyone here, other than Van Nuys or Rene Klass, who might have some idea where they stashed my
Centurion
?”

In the moments just passed, the
Centurion
and its unusual cause had become exclusively
his.

It was common knowledge at the museum that Manship’s present status, for a variety of reasons, was shaky. It was the daily chatter of middle management, in cafeterias, rest rooms, wherever people who were apt to hear things gathered. Taverner, ambitious, and closely identified with Manship, had been forced to decide in a matter of seconds where to cast her lot.