The Girl With the Botticelli Eyes (34 page)

“I can tell you this,” she whispered, her eyes scanning the gallery, “the
Centurion
is locked up in one of the storerooms.” She’d made her choice, settling on a wise but craven middle course. “That’s all I know.” She turned to go, but his hand encircled her upper arm.

“Just one more thing. How do you know it’s in one of the storerooms?”

“Helen Mirkin told me,” she said in a near whisper, then turned and fled the place.

Helen Mirkin was Walter Van Nuys’s administrative assistant.

T
HE TASK BEFORE HIM
was daunting. Search each storeroom, each containing upward of a hundred paintings, all part of the Met’s permanent collection. The reasons for mothballing a painting were manifold, but chiefly it came down to two. things: either the canvas was awaiting restoration or no appropriate setting, historic or thematic, could be found, in which to display it.

As a senior curator, with special administrative privileges, Manship held a master key to all the twenty-seven storerooms scattered in various locations throughout the museum. In the few hours remaining until dawn, he would have to tear around to each, fly through the hundred or so paintings stacked in deep wooden racks, then, assuming he found nothing, tear around to the next.

It seemed futile. He’d been up since three the previous morning and he was bone-weary from the relentless stress of last minute activity surrounding the show.

There was no thought of going home now. Rest was out of the question. The injustice of the thing, as well as the petty, narrow-minded motivation behind it, made him seethe. He felt betrayed, not merely by Van Nuys and Klass but by everyone around him.

Before he did anything, he decided to check his office to see if Foa had tried again to reach him with news of Isobel. He hadn’t. He noted with a sinking heart that his desk was entirely clear of messages. What does it matter? he asked himself. Why should I care? Surely his feelings—whatever they were—were far out of proportion to anything he’d actually shared with her. The urgency, the irrationality of them seemed adolescent. On the other hand, he was grateful for the feeling. It was like sensation returning to a numbed limb. He’d felt nothing like that since the early days with. Maeve years before.

Then he was out of his office, slamming the door behind him. Determined to put everything out of his mind for the next few hours, he would now concentrate his last bit of energy on recovering the
Centurion.

There was little chance Van Nuys would have been foolish enough to remove the painting from the museum. In the first place, the museum didn’t own it. St. Stephen’s in Istanbul did. Even mutilated beyond repair, it was nonetheless a Botticelli, granted a virtually unknown one. The mindless destruction it had sustained at the hands of a madman had greatly depreciated its monetary worth, but it still had enormous historic value, if only as a link in the artistic progression of a great genius.

Secondly, in removing the ruined canvas from the premises, Van Nuys would surely forfeit whatever potential liability for theft or additional damage the insurance people still had. In matters of money, Van Nuys, headstrong as he was, would never be so rash as that.

Manship felt reasonably certain the painting was still somewhere on the premises. But where? The Met was enormous. Some two hundred thousand square feet. Taverner had said it was in one of the storerooms. She’d had that from Helen Mirkin, and in matters regarding Van Nuys’s day-to-day movements, no one knew better than she.

Forthwith, his ordeal began.

Since Van Nuys was the architect of this treachery, reason suggested that the search begin with the two storerooms closest to his office on the second floor. Manship was not greatly surprised, however, a short time later, to discover that what Van Nuys had done with the
Centurion
had little to do with reason. It was far more concerned with self-esteem and other factors born in the darker regions of the soul.

It had taken him the better part of an hour to cover three storerooms. Of necessity, his examination of the canvases contained in those three could be no more than cursory. A sloppy fly-by was the best he could manage under the circumstances.

He reasoned that if all he could cover were three storerooms per hour, he would need close to eight hours to complete the remaining twenty-four. It was now slightly past 3:00 A.M. Under the most ideal conditions, he could not hope to finish before 11:00 A.M. By then, the full daytime staff would be in. There would be those who would set off alarm bells immediately. Van Nuys would be informed and an awful row would follow. The police would be called in and Manship, no doubt, would be put off the premises. Whatever hope he still had of recovering the
Centurion
would be lost forever.

If he hoped to do what he’d planned, the deed would have to be accomplished between 3:00 A.M. and 6:00 A.M., roughly three hours away.

He resumed the search, ratcheting up anger along with speed. Each department had a storage area; some, depending on their size and importance, had several. In rapidly fleeting minutes, he tore through department after department: Greek and Roman Art, Musical Instruments, Twentieth Century Art, the American Wing. By 4:00 A.M. he was in Medieval Art, then Renaissance Arms and Armor, in a lather, his flying footsteps clacking through the large galleries where figures in chain mail, mounted on noble steeds, paraded beneath walls covered with heraldic banners and brightly painted shields.

By 4:30 A.M., he was in a fever of sweat. He’d been to no less than sixteen locked storage areas, flying through each like someone with his clothing on fire. But at the storage room for Arms and Armor, he confronted a different situation. When he put his master key in the lock of the storage room there, he discovered to his surprise that the lock rejected it entirely.

He pushed the key in several times. Each time, the lock balked. On at least one occasion, twisting the key harden he nearly snapped it in half.

The clock ticked remorselessly onward. It was going on 4:45 A.M. The first gray streaks of dawn raked the sullen skies above the terraced rooftop gardens stretching north and southward along upper Fifth Avenue.

All the while he jiggled keys, he fumed, a stream of foul words sputtering from his lips. Then, by chance, he happened to look down at the lock he’d been contending with over the past quarter hour. Instead of the tarnished purplish patina of decades-old dirt characteristic of each of the other locks he’d tried, the face of this one was the fresh shiny brass of one newly installed.

Not only was he certain that the lock had been changed within the last several days, or possibly even the last several hours (the face was that shiny and new), he was even more certain his search was over and that his missing
Centurion
lay just behind that door. But
that
door was a thick two inches of sturdy oak, not easily forced. Several times, he tried, jamming his full weight against it, succeeding only in wrenching his shoulder.

He was at an impasse. In another two or two and a half hours, the daytime staff would start straggling in. They would be mostly kitchen, cafeteria, and janitorial personnel. That would also be the time when the night security force would shift to the day force—a fact, most definitely, to be factored into the problem.

He was completely stymied. He had no idea what he was going to do until he was actually doing it, walking, not only quickly but with the sort of brisk, lunging gait that prompts people to step quickly out of one’s path. His tread ricocheted off the cold travertine and boomed up into the high-groined arches above him.

At the elevator, he made a sharp left, rejecting it in favor of the stairs, ascending the half flight two steps at a time, then glided through the swinging glass doors and on into the museum’s executive suites.

Passing his own office, he moved straight ahead to a second half flight of stairs at the far end of the corridor. He bounded up it without so much as a break in stride. At the top of that flight, behind a tasteful but imposing set of glass doors, lay the four-room suite of offices occupied by Walter Van Nuys, chairman of the board of directors of the Metropolitan Museum.

The outer office, a kind of antechamber-cum-reception area was the domain of Helen Mirkin, Van Nuys’s personal assistant. Restrained in both layout and design, Helen Mirkin’s office had no door, opening instead directly off the corridor through glass dividers. Opposite her desk, Van Nuys’s office, with its authentic Corbusier furniture, rare Aubusson rugs, and priceless paintings, lay impregnable behind massive oak doors locked tighter than a bank vault.

Manship knew precisely what he was looking for but had no idea where to begin the search. Logic dictated that if the key to the storeroom was anywhere, it would be locked in a drawer or, possibly, a wall safe behind the stout oaken doors to Van Nuys’s office. He didn’t even wish to consider the possibility that Van Nuys might be carrying the key on his person, having taken it home for safekeeping.

His internal gyroscope took him on a beeline to Helen Mirkin’s desk, where his feverish, bleary eyes swarmed across the desktop in search of the key. He found nothing unexpected there, Helen Mirkin being a compulsively fastidious type. Nothing was out of place—desk blotter, desk calendar, Rolodex, appointment book, a toby jug jammed tightly with freshly sharpened pencils. For the touch of importance, there was a pen and inkwell set of fake chalcedony, only slightly better than the sort of things banks give away with great fanfare whenever someone opens a new account. The closest thing to hint at some sort of personal life was a framed desk photograph of a nondescript middle-aged gentleman in a formal blue suit. This, one presumed, was Mr. Mirkin.

The top desk drawer, left unlocked, presented nothing more exotic man had the desktop—compulsively neat little trays of rubber bands, paper clips, a stapler, a pronged device for removing staples, a handheld, battery-powered plastic computer. Finally, there was a key. It hung on a beaded brass chain, along with a small rectangular wood plaque on which was written: “Women’s Washroom. Staff Only. MMA.”

He muttered an obscenity, replaced everything in the drawer precisely as he’d found it, then rolled the drawer shut without making a sound. Above all, he had no wish to alert the security people, who patrolled the area on a strict regular basis.

Several drawers later, with hope fading fast, he found what he was looking for. It sat in the lower right-hand drawer in a little tin soapdish. His eye caught it at once, even though a somewhat halfhearted’ attempt had been made to cover it over with a small vest-pocket map of lower Manhattan.

His heart actually leapt as he plucked it out and held it up to the light. In the next moment, he was tracking at a near trot across the floor to the big oak doors leading to the chairman’s office.

He wasn’t prepared for what happened next. In his overwrought, overtired state of mind, it never occurred to him that the key he held might quite possibly
not
be the key to Walter Van Nuys’s office. Just as before with the lock downstairs, he stood there before Van Nuys’s doors, jamming this key into the lock, and just as before, he felt its immediate rejection, its clear lack of fit. He kept at it a while, a look of disbelief on his face, twisting hard, willing the tumblers to turn by means of oaths and a series of complicated body gyrations.

It was then that something shamefully obvious occurred to him. This key he was jamming and twisting, then fuming and cursing at was a brass key. It had the same bright, glittery, unmistakably new sheen to it as its counterpart, the lock face on the storeroom door.

He had no recollection of departing Mirkin’s office, storming back through the Greek and Roman galleries, past the Great Hall and the galleries of Egyptian art, finding himself at last standing before the storeroom door that scarcely less than an hour ago had denied him entry.

He laughed aloud at the ease with which the bright little brass key slipped into the shiny new face of the lock. A slight flick of the fingers and at once he felt the well-oiled tumblers mesh beneath his eager hand. He pushed, not with his hand but with the tip of a finger. The latch bolt clicked, slid backward into the frame plate, and. the short, heavy door drifted open with a soft sigh.

A musty breath of airlessness and the odor of machine oil wafted outward from the darkened interior. His groping fingers reached inward and to the right. He found first the switch plate, then the switch itself. Flicking it up, his eyes, accustomed to darkness and shadow, were momentarily blinded. Seconds later, he stood there stunned.

It was like entering the arsenals of Charlemagne or Frederick the Great. A treasure-house of armor and weaponry glistened from within. The original owners of all that fearful panoply had been emperors and nomads, pirates and knights. Some had been famous, like Richard I and Bobadilla. Most had been anonymous warriors or jousting knights who’d tilted with Vikings and Saracenes.

Like a man hip-high in heavy brush, Manship waded in, starting his search. He pored through helmets of burnished gold, inlaid with cloisonné; blades of steel from the fifteenth century, with grips of jade and jewels; from eighteenth-century Mughal, diamond-and-emerald-studded scabbards; and fierce weaponry of every imaginable kind, crafted by the finest gunsmiths in the Islamic world; firearms from Morocco and the Balkans, all part of the once-sprawling Ottoman empire. But of the
Centurion,
there was no sign.

With the coming of dawn, he’d begun to doubt his initial instinct. Panicked, he toyed with the idea of moving on to other storerooms. But still, he couldn’t overlook the bright little brass key and the freshly changed lock in the door. That had to mean something.

It was not until well past 5:00 A.M. that he found what he’d been seeking. It sat behind a stack of sixteenth-century German flintlocks; it was wrapped in chamois, like a piece of cast-off rubbish destined for burial in some landfill in New Jersey. When he lifted the chamois, the ruined canvas flowed outward in long, drooping strips. It had never been one of Botticelli’s great paintings. But when Manship first saw it in Istanbul, recognizing at once all of its flaws, along with its quiet grandeur, he’d fallen for it without qualification or regret.