The Girl With the Botticelli Eyes (37 page)

“We here at the Museum feel strongly that we must put ourselves on the line,” Van Nuys proclaimed to a rapt audience. “As a foremost repository of much of the world’s great art, we must be leaders. We must join with other institutions …”

Sensing a public-relations triumph, Van Nuys grew rhapsodic over the spectacle of the ruined painting. The reporters encircling him dutifully scribbled his every word into their tiny pads.

“There were some of us here, well-meaning to be sure,” he went on, “who were dead set against a display such as this. In a setting ostensibly a celebration of the works of a great Renaissance master, they claimed such wanton destruction would be deeply disturbing, strike a note of discord. Possibly even encourage copycat behavior in unbalanced individuals. I confess I, too, felt reservations. But I also felt that we in the art world, directors, curators, conservators, and, especially, artists—we above all had a special responsibility to speak out. This morning, I personally made a plea to the Secretary General for the establishment of an international commission to enact a study into the subject of theft and the desecration of great art. The need to enact international policy, global laws …”

In that moment, Van Nuys’s gaze happened to fall on Manship standing there, along with Osgood and the two federal agents. His voice trailed off; his mind appeared to go blank. Most of the newsmen standing there were not immediately aware of it, but Manship was. He could see the flush rise in the old man’s jowls and hear the quaver in his voice as it struggled to regain its note of pious authority.

By then, both René Klass and Taverner had spotted Manship in the crowd and guessed the problem. In the next instant, Van Nuys flashed a queasy grin at Manship. His eyes made a silent plea, as if to say: Not here, not now. Please.

The fact that he’d reversed his position on displaying the
Centurion
and now appeared to be taking full credit for what had become hands down one of the dark-horse highlights of the exhibit hadn’t fazed Van Nuys in the least.

“He’s undergone a remarkable conversion in a short period of time,” Manship muttered.

“Hasn’t he, though,” Osgood replied, and shot him a knowing wink. “If I know him, he probably doesn’t even know he has.”

“What’s going on here?” One of the agents tilted his head at Van Nuys. “This isn’t Mr. Foa.”

“Foa?” Manship wheeled at the mention of the name. “What was that about Foa?”

“Our orders are to turn you over to a Mr. Ettore Foa from the Italian embassy. Not this guy here.” He shot a disparaging look at Van Nuys, who by then had recovered sufficiently to resume the press conference.

“Mr. Foa’s in one of the other rooms,” Osgood explained in a whisper.

Manship’s feet nearly left the ground. “You mean Foa’s here right now? In the museum?”

“Isn’t that what I just said?”

“Where? Where is he?”

“That’s our guy, too,” the agent added. “Can you take us to him?”

“He was over in gallery nine the last time I looked.” Osgood’s face wore a sly grin.

The galleries had meanwhile filled to near capacity. The throng of guests in evening dress, along with squadrons of waiters plying salvers of champagne gridlocked the aisles and made the going slow.

Manship chafed at Osgood. “Why didn’t you say anything?”

“About what?”

“About Foa.”

“I knew nothing about him. You said nothing about him. I only met the man a half hour ago.”

“A half hour?”

“That’s when he showed up. Apparently, you sent him an invitation. Nice chap,” Osgood remarked offhandedly.

It was perfectly true, Manship had to concede. He’d told him nothing about Foa, or why he’d gone barging off like a loose cannon to Rome on his opening night. He’d never mentioned a word of it to anyone, except to Taverner, and possibly Maeve.

Gallery nine, by contrast with the others, seemed relatively empty. Many of Botticelli’s sketches and drawings hung there along with some larger works. Rather than being filled by large, surging waves of people on a celebrity safari, this gallery appeared to be occupied by cozy little clusters of individuals, some actually more interested in the drawings and paintings than the power games and fashion shows under way in many of the adjoining galleries.

“This way,” Osgood cried out. “Over here,” he called over his shoulder, and plunged ahead.

Manship and the two agents staggered after him.

Osgood had stopped and was now chatting with a tall, thinly elegant man with wavy gray hair. He was pointing back to where Manship and the two agents were weaving their way toward them. The tall gentleman turned and peered directly at them. In the next moment, he disengaged himself from several other people with whom he’d been chatting and strode briskly toward Manship. He came on fast, hand outstretched long before they’d actually come anywhere close enough to shake.

Ettore Foa had the sort of eye-riveted-to-eye smile typical of people in the diplomatic corps. He looked older, too, Manship noted, than he’d sounded on the phone.

“Don’t tell me. I know. You’re Mark Manship.”

Foa’s hand was bony and dry, a thin patrician hand, smooth but at the same time strong. “You look just like you sound on the phone. I’d have known you anywhere,” he rattled on in his crisp, slightly accented English.

Just behind him and to his left stood two women. Both were approximately the same height, remarkably similar in build, but from that point on the resemblance ended. One was Maeve, looking breathtaking in emerald green. The other, he didn’t recognize at once, or rather, some part of him did, but his mind could not accept what his eyes told him; the sudden rush of blood to his head did.

“Ah, forgive me,” Foa said. Noting where Manship’s gaze had fixed, he steered him in the direction of the two women. “Mrs. Costain, of course, you know.” He made one of those ineffably Italian flourishes toward the other waiting quietly there. “And may I present Signorina Cattaneo …”

When at last he spoke, his voice made a hoarse, croaking sound. “We’ve already met.”

“Twice,” Isobel said.

Foa bowed his head deeply. For any other mortal, the gesture would have bordered on the ridiculous. But as executed by the Italian deputy ambassador, it was poetry.

“I hope you don’t mind that I came,” Isobel said.

“Mind? God no,” Manship blurted out. “A short while ago I was on a plane to Rome to …”

His voice trailed off, conscious of Maeve observing them, the trace of a smile playing wickedly at her lips.

“I decided to take you up on your invitation.” She looked pale and depleted. It seemed an effort for her to speak. “Your wife—”

“My wife?”

“Mrs. Costain.”

“Former wife.” Maeve smiled archly.

“Yes, of course.” The correction appeared to have flustered her. “Mrs. Costain … was kind enough to lend me something to wear.”

She laughed nervously and looked down at the dress as though seeing it for the first time. “I had to leave Italy rather quickly. I was unprepared for anything as grand as this.” She looked uneasily around the room.

The dress she wore was the plain black sheath Maeve had bought to wear to the opening. On Isobel, it gave the appearance of a light drape laminated to the hard angularity of her body.

“It took a bit of diplomatic doing to get her here.” Foa expanded on the adventure he’d been having. “Your FAA was not all that eager to order an Italian airliner down in Newfoundland. It nearly required an act of Congress, plus a very stern phone call from your Justice Department to send the FBI up there to fetch you. You’re still a free citizen, you know.”

“You can’t know how relieved I am to hear that,” Manship replied, his eyes fixed Isobel.

Foa breezed on. “I hope you’ll forgive me. The inconvenience I put you to. I didn’t care to have you go by yourself to Italy. Not at this time. For one thing, Borghini is still at large. For another, Rome is crawling with his people, who, as you know, are mostly demented. I wouldn’t depend much on their sympathy, if for some reason your paths happened to cross.”

Like most of his countrymen, Foa had that seemingly effortless flow of talk that everyone is grateful for at tense moments. “The signorina has had a bit of an adventure herself. But I’m sure she’ll tell you all about it, in her own good time.”

Manship’s gaze came back to the woman under discussion. She had worn her hair down, Simonetta-style, for the occasion, and he wondered if that in any way had been an olive branch to him. She was standing directly beneath the
Chigi Madonna,
which had been loaned by Boston’s Gardner Museum. Seeing her in juxtaposition to the full painting in all of its grandeur, his eye happened to stray along the wall to the series of Chigi sketches.

They hung there in such a pleasing arrangement that Manship failed to note that the deliberate gap he’d planned to leave open to indicate the three missing sketches was no longer there. For a fraction of a second, he sensed something askew, but he couldn’t say what. Then he understood. Instead of the ten sketches intended to hang there, the full thirteen now occupied the space.

His first impulse was to get up close to them, to feel—or even to smell—them in order to make certain his eyes didn’t deceive him. He moved from one to the other, his cheek at one point nearly brushing with his own flesh the pale gray tracery of the master’s line. It was as though he were trying to breathe in the essence of paper and lead, until at last he felt a shock of connection with old Alessandro himself. He felt his eyes moisten, and he turned away.

When he turned back, he was aware of all of them watching him. But he was watching Isobel.

Foa glowed. “That is Signorina Cattaneo’s little surprise for you. She told us where we could find them.”

A small crowd had gathered behind them, studying the preliminary sketches as they worked their way along the wall to the full glory of the finished work. In their perfectly fluid order and balance, they looked as though they’d always occupied that space. They gave no hint of the five years of anger, frustration, and occasional despair involved in bringing all thirteen sketches together in culmination of this moment.

It would be hard to imagine a jaded old city like New York stirred up over the presence of a direct descendant of Alessandro Botticelli’s favorite model. Nonetheless, the city roused itself to the occasion. In the mysterious way of such things, a combination of shrewd press agentry and word of mouth had suddenly put the name Simonetta on everyone’s lips.

In no time, photographers and reporters were nosing about, sensing a new angle. They found it in Isobel. Most of them hadn’t the faintest idea who the striking young lady was until her connection with the unforgettable countenance in such works as the
Primavera
and the
Chigi Madonna
was pointed out to them. From then on, the cameras clicked madly. Lights flashed. Questions were barked at her from every direction, and someone asked her to stand before the
Chigi Madonna
to have her picture taken. In that moment, the uncanny, eerily perfect resemblance to the famous face came home to Manship as never before.

Shortly, strolling musicians dressed in harlequin tunics and Tuscan pantaloons, strumming lutes and banging tambourines, came around, announcing that dinner was about to be served upstairs on the roof garden.

As they started up, Van Nuys and a stout woman Manship presumed to be Mrs. Van Nuys hustled up breathlessly. Van Nuys had heard that Signorina Cattaneo was there. He seemed miffed that he’d heard it by chance from an acquaintance and had not been officially notified.

Barely acknowledging the presence of anyone else, Van Nuys swept down on Isobel and proceeded to engulf her with unwanted attention. For some reason, he’d started to speak with a vaguely British accent as his conversation with her grew increasingly uplifted.

Isobel appeared to be embarrassed. Van Nuys took that to be a sign that she was flattered by the attentions of such a lofty personage as he. As for Manship and Osgood, the chief executive officer of the Metropolitan had completely forgotten the fact that the
Centurion
was at that moment, against his expressed wishes, on exhibition in gallery thirteen. In light of all the acrimony he’d whipped up over the painting, his attitude toward both men was remarkably benign. That may have had something to do with the fact that, having taken the unusual step of exhibiting a great painting irreparably vandalized, the museum had scored a sizable public-relations victory. Van Nuys bad already accepted an invitation to appear on the
Today Show
to speak specifically about the painting’s recent destruction in Istanbul and the museum’s courage and determination to bring it to the United States in order to tell its story.

Van Nuys had by then appropriated Isobel for himself, leaving Manship to escort Mrs. Van Nuys up to dinner. Maeve and Osgood fell in behind the little procession.

The elevator doors slid noiselessly open at the roof garden level and they walked out into the soft glare of flickering lights. Before them, candlelit tables set with silver and crystal and rich napery shimmered in a perfect grid of rows and aisles. Fresh flowers adorned each table, while all about the roof stood huge stone urns and terracotta pots full of flowers and trees brought in especially for the occasion. Mr. Tsacrios, resplendent in tails, stood beaming at the entrance, brandishing a large scroll listing table assignments.

The evening, for late September, was mild, even springlike. Heavy rains from the night before had swept the clouds out to sea, leaving in their wake an air quality of such clarity that the legendary skyline from river to river produced the optical effect of being far closer than it actually was. Looking south, the sky above the Theater District glowed a brick red. A delicate calligraphy of lights etched a spidery pattern of intersecting footpaths meandering their way west across the darkened park. Where they ended, the West Side began, all ablaze in the raucous nocturnal life of the great city. Lights glittered everywhere. A billion megawatts radiated power and indestructability. So gay and welcoming it was, like some huge amusement park, one would never suspect the human dislocation and social breakdown roiling on the darkened streets below.