The Girl With the Botticelli Eyes (38 page)

S
INCE SHORTLY AFTER 6:00 P.M.,
Borghini had been moving about the museum with complete freedom, observing much, staying out of sight. Having assumed the identity of one of the catering staff, he’d proceeded to play the part perfectly.

The staff was by no means permanent. Consisting mostly of private contractors hiring out for the night, the presence of a new face among them caused no stir.

Having carried his tray of canapés to the Temple of Dendur, where a bar had been set up for guests more eager for refreshment than for viewing art, Borghini then followed several of the waiters to the kitchen of the museum restaurant on the ground floor.

Most of the group had already assembled in the locker room, changing from street clothes into professional attire provided by the caterers for their personnel that evening. There had been a great deal of playful banter and horsing about as people donned smocks, toques, and the classic houndstooth trousers of the kitchen staff. Those at the more lofty levels of the hierarchy donned tails for the occasion.

Borghini slipped easily into the routine, even joshing with some of the more friendly types as he pulled off his street wear to slip into one of the waiters’ costumes piled in a stack nearby. But when the others had reported directly back to the bar to pick up trays holding flutes of chilled champagne, Borghini instead had peeled off from the group and ducked down a stairway into the basement of the building.

The colonel’s plan was to lose himself inside the vast sprawl of galleries and hallways until such time, he reasoned, he could blend in more easily with the gathering throng.

He idled for a while in the basement. Moving briskly through snaking corridors where generators, turbines, and transformers hummed with quiet authority, he looked like a senior member of the catering staff dispatched to the bowels of the building to carry out some highly critical function.

His eyes followed the unending lengths of wide-gauge pipe as they wound their way along the ceiling. At one point, he came to a wall of fuse boxes, literally hundreds of them, fastened by means of brackets into the concrete. A tangled maze of multicolored electrical wire sprouted from the tops of each box, shooting off in every conceivable direction. Each marked with a small white square of adhesive designated the specific area of the museum that particular box serviced. Borghini duly noted the place and location of the boxes that serviced the roof garden and second-floor galleries.

The sound of approaching voices and footsteps brought him around sharply. He had barely enough time to step into a nearby broom closet before a pair of security guards passed within two or three feet of him. He watched them through a crack in the door. They scarcely gave the closet a glance, then moved on, their lively talk fading into the distance.

Borghini groped for a light switch, quickly finding it on a wall to his right. Flicking it on, he found himself in one of those deep closets equipped with a sink used by porters. The floor was cluttered with pails and mops. The narrow space reeked of disinfectants. Flicking the light back off, he spent the next hour standing upright in darkness while soap fumes and detergents wafted upward all about him, causing his eyes to tear.

“What’s wrong, Mark?”

“Wrong?”

“You’re scowling. You ought to be delirious. I don’t think the Met has ever produced a show more spectacular or intelligent.”

“That’s very kind of you, Maeve.”

“I’m not saying it to be kind, you idiot. It happens to be true. Old Botticelli ought to be very pleased.”

They’d gone through the first two courses of Mr. Tsacrios’s projected six-course banquet. Across from them sat Osgood, Foa, Isobel, and Van Nuys who, uninvited, had appropriated a place for himself at their table. Short one setting, Mrs. Van Nuys had been fobbed off to some other table and apparently abandoned there.

Since the start of dinner, an endless procession of people kept filing up to the table, greeting Osgood, paying court to Van Nuys, but lavishing praise on Manship. The more praises lavished, the more he seemed to shrink.

“Really, Mark,” Maeve fretted as a couple departed their table. “You’re behaving strangely. What’s wrong with you?”

“Nothing’s wrong. I keep telling you. It’s just that—”

“It’s just what?”

“It’s all wrong. It’s not what I wanted. I had something else in mind,” he said gloomily.

“What’s wrong? You mean this?” Her hand swept around the glittering room with its dazzling array of the rich and powerful. A fanfare sounded and the sextet of strolling players entered in procession, playing Renaissance canzones on authentic period instruments.

Manship cringed. “All of this.” He nodded his head vehemently. “All this cheap theater. What the hell does it have to do with anything?”

Overhearing his plaint, Osgood glanced up sharply. Manship attempted a smile, then lowered his voice.

Puzzled and annoyed, Maeve shook her head. “Okay, I grant you, it is a bit glitzy. But part of your job is glitz. That’s how you hawk art nowadays. When will you learn that? Show business goes with the territory, or haven’t you heard? You don’t get to spend your life sequestered all day with great painting and get off scot-free from all the grubby striving of the commercial world. You pay a toll for that. The toll happens to be marketing. It’s the thing that makes your gorgeous show possible. How many people do you think will show up here tomorrow, line up to pay their seven or eight dollars to see your Botticellis? You think they’re coming to see Botticelli? They’re coming because the show’s been hyped to the sky—written about, spoken about. Those silly pipers in pantaloons will be all over the newspapers and television tomorrow. That’s what keeps museums open and crowds lining up outside. That’s what keeps people like you and me working. I love it. I love meeting my public at each opening. If that makes me superficial, so be it. Lighten up, Mark. Without them, we’re nothing—zero. So don’t sit there and whine to me about how your show turned out. It turned out precisely the way you wanted it to: a huge success. Just the way you planned it from the very start. Think how you’d have felt if no one had bothered to come.”

Crestfallen, he gazed around at the shimmering crystal and candlelight, taking her criticism with uncharacteristic docility.

A waiter had begun to serve portions of lamb mignonette; another removed goblets of white wine and replaced them with red. Off to the side, another waiter had appeared. Drifting beneath the archway of a shadowy alcove, he paused, as though counting dinner guests, then stooped over beside a nearby cupboard, sorting out additional silverware. The cupboard stood nearly twenty yards away from where the Manship party sat. From time to time, the waiter glanced around that table, studying faces, but by far, the major share of his attention was fixed on the striking young woman seated next to Walter Van Nuys. The waiter’s face was mostly in shadow, his features barely discernible.

His task of counting silver completed, he rose and moved off quickly. A short time later, Mr. Tsacrios himself appeared at the Manship table, his guest list unscrolled. “Excuse me, is there a Miss Cattaneo at this table?”

“Yes,” Isobel’s voice fluttered. “I’m Miss Cattaneo.”

“There’s a phone call for you. It’s just outside here. Come, I’ll show you.”

Looking somewhat rattled, Isobel rose. “Excuse me, please,” she murmured, and followed Mr. Tsacrios’s trim, brisk figure down the aisle.

Mellowed by wine and lamb, Maeve watched Manship’s gaze follow her receding figure. “I see now what sent you dashing back to Rome on the opening night of your show,” she remarked, more amused than disturbed. “If I didn’t have consolations of my own just now, I’d be a bit put out.”

“Oh, cut it out, Maeve.”

“I’m serious. I don’t think you ever looked at me that way.” Then, as if she didn’t think the subject worth pursuing, she changed it. “I spoke to Tom tonight. I told him I was delaying my return.”

“For how long?”

“Indefinitely.” Her fork speared a chunk of lamb and guided it to her lips.

“How did he take that?”

“Can’t you guess?” She moved the lamb around in her mouth. “Anyway, I’ll be here at least until Christmas. I’ve decided that the Cosmos gallery is either incompetent or completely crooked. I lean more to the less charitable explanation.”

“And you now conclude that your presence here at this time is indispensable?”

“Well, I certainly can’t trust them to mount my show by themselves. And you needn’t worry that I’m moving in on you for the next three months.”

“You’d be more than welcome if you did.”

“That’s sweet of you, Mark, even if you don’t mean it.” Her eyes drifted across the table to where Osgood sat deep in conversation with Ettore Foa. “And besides, his place is bigger and more comfortable than yours.”

“And the poor fellow has no one with whom to share it.”

“He does now.” She winked at him and speared another chunk of lamb.

It was at that moment the lights went out on the roof garden. It didn’t happen all at once, but in a slow, orderly succession, from one row to the next, leaving only the pale orange glow of guttering candles looking like fiery wraiths dancing across the sudden darkness. A collective gasp went up, followed by laughter and some scattered applause.

Captain MacWirter, chief of security, and his deputy assistant, Roberto Santos, were just leaving the American Wing, making their rounds and heading toward the Lehman Collection, when Santos’s beeper sounded at his hip.

“Lights seem to have blown on the roof, sir,” the young man reported.

“Probably a fuse. Notify the electrician’s office,” MacWirter snapped, then tugged Santos back by the elbow. “What am I saying? The chief won’t be here at this hour. I’ll go down, have a look myself. You go on up to the roof. Make sure everything’s okay up there.”

Santos moved smartly out toward a nearby staircase.

“Take a few of the others with you,” MacWirter called out after him. “It’s probably nothing. But just to be on the safe side.”

He turned and started down the stairs into the basement. “Damn. Wouldn’t you know it? Right in the middle of Mr. Manship’s wingding.”

Passing through the galleries of medieval art, Santos’s footsteps echoed like rifle shots across the cold tile. Paintings of icons and triptychs of angels and saints with their sad eyes stared down at him. They caused in him a sense of growing unease.

Santos saw no sign of the sixty or seventy security guards on special duty that night. Most, he knew, were stationed at the main entryways and exits, or upstairs, on the roof garden, monitoring the movements of several hundred guests. For all of the human presence in the museum that night, the young man may as well have been on Mars, such was his sense of isolation.

Coming into the Great Hall, he turned and started up the Grand stairway. At the top of the stairs, he found himself at the entrance to the galleries of European painting, where an immense blowup of the
Primavera
marked the entrance to the exhibition.

Intending to continue on up to the roof, something stayed him. It was nothing he saw, but, rather, something he heard—nothing emphatic, but subtle and suggestive, a muffled sound like the movement of a curtain or a heavy fabric falling.

Fully expecting to see a guard, Santos ducked his head into the entryway of the first gallery. There was none. He thought that strange until he recalled that whatever security had been posted there had no doubt left in response to reports of the power failure.

At a quick glance, he could see nothing out of the ordinary. His inclination was to turn and get up to the banquet, where he felt he might be needed.

Then he heard the sound again. This time, it came from someplace farther back in one of the more distant galleries. As with the first sound, he couldn’t quite put his finger on it, uncertain whether or not its source was even human. This time, it had about it a padded, muffled quality, quick, like a cat scurrying over the floor. His curiosity piqued, he moved slowly in the direction of the sound.

Roberto Santos was Catholic, not especially devout. But at the sight of scenes portraying Mary and the infant Jesus, the Magi, Peter denying Christ, Carafas and Herod, Christ, wreathed in thorns, stooped beneath the crushing weight of wood, walking the Stations of the Cross, a quiet awe descended upon him.

It was precisely that slowing of the senses that caused his usually keen eye to pass over the improbable image of a figure standing motionless beneath a painting some forty or fifty feet dead ahead of him. The figure was cloaked in a full-length garment open down the front. Possibly a raincoat, it was made of a shiny fabric that reflected light. It was the light flashing off of that fabric that first caught Santos’s eye. The second thing that caught his eye was that the figure was not alone. Another figure stood—or rather, crouched—beside the first, hands outstretched as though tethered to him.

What he saw made scarcely any sense, at least not in the context within which he viewed it. The figures were standing behind a large, protective Lucite screen, which had the effect of magnifying them, distorting their shapes grotesquely. One figure, Santos now saw, was a man, the other a woman. The man stood with one hand upraised toward the painting, while with the other he appeared to hold the woman by her hair, all the while looking over his shoulder at the guard. In the next moment, the man’s right arm moved. Santos watched it climb upward, something shiny glinting in its fist.

One part of Santos told him that whatever he was seeing wasn’t real; another part said that it was. All too real. What would a man and a woman be doing behind the Lucite screen? The man was neither a guard nor a workman. And why was he holding the woman by the hair?

Suddenly, the man turned and faced him. That movement had the effect of turning the woman as well, so that she saw Santos for the first time, then screamed. It was then that Santos had a glimpse of the painting just behind them. It was the
Chigi Madonna.

The next thing Santos heard was a hoarse growl. It took a moment before he realized that the sound had come from somewhere deep within himself and that he was charging toward the painting with the gathering momentum of a runaway locomotive.