The Girl With the Botticelli Eyes (40 page)

Several banquet guests, oblivious to the turmoil that had transpired there not more than a quarter hour before, had strayed back down into the gallery for a last look before calling it a night.

Rushing into the gallery and sweeping past several important patrons, Osgood barely acknowledged their greetings. He never paused or slowed once, coming finally to rest before the
Chigi Madonna
and the thirteen sketches. He stood rooted to the spot, scarcely breathing; all the while, his keen, well-practiced eye scoured the canvas for any signs of damage. Satisfied there were none, he moved next to the
Centurion,
several galleries away.

It hung there, roped off, in splendid isolation, in all of its tatters and ruins, unbowed. No one had tried to remove it; nor was there any sign of additional damage. A few more guests had garnered there behind him, awed, not speaking, the way one views the devastation of a car crash and finally grasps the meaning of loss.

When he turned, he found MacWirter’s anxious gaze on him.

“Is it all right, sir?”

“Looks okay to me,” Osgood murmured grimly.

They walked back together through the galleries gradually filling with returning guests. “What about this lunatic? This slasher?”

“EMS and the police took him off to hospital. Took four of our people to hold him down till they got here. Hauled him off, knife still sticking in his eye.”

“Any idea who he is?”

“Foreign national, sir. Italian passport. Name of—”

“Don’t tell me,” Osgood interrupted. “I’ll tell you. The name was Borghini.” That was the name Foa had given him upstairs.

“No, sir. Something else. Gaudio something. From Messina, he claims. Had seaman’s papers on him. Police can’t hold him indefinitely, being a foreign national and all. We’ll have to notify the Italian consulate, I think, sir.”

“It just so happens, Captain, the deputy Italian ambassador is our guest here tonight.”

MacWirter appeared to inflate. A delighted smile crimsoned his jowly features. “Pleasant coincidence, wouldn’t you say, sir?”

“I’d say so,” Osgood nodded.

“And the young lady, sir, Miss Cattaneo,” MacWirter went on, “what about her?”

“Mrs. Costain took her back to her hotel. Aside from being a bit shaken, she seems okay. Would you be good enough to send one of your people up to fetch Mr. Foa and appraise him of the situation here. If anyone wants me, I’m on my way up to Mount Sinai to look in on both Santos and Mr. Manship.”

From that point on, the night became a kind of phantasmagoria. A police officer took Osgood on a near-reckless ride in a patrol car, sirens screaming, tearing up to Mount Sinai, where he was taken directly to the Emergency Ward, there to find Manship, his face bandaged and twirling his thumbs impatiently.

“How bad is it?” Osgood asked.

“Nothing. Lost some blood is about all.” Manship’s thumbs spun faster. “I’m waiting for the chief resident to come up and discharge me. What about her?”

“You mean Cattaneo? Other than a few bruises, she’s fine. Maeve took her back to the hotel.”

“And Borghini?”

“He’s here, too. Surgeons are trying to save his eye. Foa’s on his way over to make a positive identification. According to his passport and seaman’s papers, his name is Gaudio something—”

“Favese.” At that moment, Foa strode in, all breezy efficiency. “Gaudio Favese,” he said. “The Faveses are closely related to the Borghinis. Our question is to determine whether we have here a Favese or a Borghini.”

“Ask Isobel,” Manship replied grimly. “She’ll tell you.”

“She doesn’t have to,” Foa said. “All I need is a quick peek at the fellow and I’ll know for myself.”

Shortly after, the chief resident bustled in, asked Manship several questions, studied the nurse’s chart, then signed him out.

The consulate must have called ahead to Mount Sinai. No sooner had Manship been released than a pallid young man hurried nervously forward, identified himself as an assistant administrator, then led them directly up to a small private waiting area outside the operating room.

“How long should this take?” Manship asked.

The young administrator seemed overwhelmed by what he took to be three important visitors. “I don’t know exactly what’s ailing this fellow, but I gather from the resident, it’s something pretty serious. He’s been in there an hour and a half already. I’d count on three, four additional hours at least.”

The waiting room had a couch, several plastic chairs, a large wall TV, and a table stacked with outdated magazines. The three of them took up their positions there.

Near dawn, a harried-looking young man, gowned and capped in hospital green, stuck his head in the door Osgood had dozed off but woke the instant the fellow appeared.

“Which one of you gentlemen is Mr. Foa?” the young man asked.

“I am.” Foa rose and stepped forward.

“I’m Dr. Kramer, the resident surgeon. Are you related to this man?” He glanced down at the hospital admittance card. “Mr. Favese?”

“No, I’m not,” Foa explained. “This man’s an Italian national. I represent the Italian consulate here. What’s the fellow’s present status?”

“Guarded. But he’ll live.” The surgeon studied them warily, as if he resented having to say anything.

“How badly was he injured?” Manship asked.

“He enucleated himself.”

“He what?”

“He plunged a knife into his eye. Severed the optic nerve. Yanked the pupil out. He’ll be all right, but we couldn’t save the eye.”

The young man looked at them again, this time as if they were all not only suspicious but possibly felons. “You know the guy at all?”

None of them replied, thereby raising the young resident’s suspicions even more.

“What did he do?” the surgeon asked. “The place is crawling with cops.”

“He tried to destroy a very valuable painting,” Manship replied.

“Where?”

“At the Metropolitan Museum,” Manship said. “When can we see him?”

The surgeon shook his head wearily. “You can see him now. They have him down in the recovery room. But he won’t be out of the anesthesia for at least another hour.”

“That’s all right.” Foa swept past him. “We don’t have to talk. We just need to look.”

It was nearly 6:00 A.M. when they left the hospital. Already the big sanitation trucks were creeping down Fifth Avenue like prehistoric insects, spouting jets of water on the curbs and sidewalks, their huge, twirling brushes pushing mounds of trash before them. Manship hailed a cab and invited Osgood and the deputy ambassador back to 5 East Eighty-fifth Street for a spot of breakfast.

“How did your reunion with Miss Cattaneo go last evening?” Foa made pleasant talk as they glided south along Fifth Avenue in the first pale pink streaks of morning.

“Reasonably well, under the circumstances.”

“You can’t really know the circumstances, my friend. Horrific. Truly horrific. Has she told you anything?”

“Not yet, I had the distinct impression she’d prefer to leave that to you.”

Foa gazed out the cab window, staring ruefully at the long column of plane trees whirring past their branches still swathed in rags of morning mist.

“I suggest you fortify yourself with two very strong martinis before you face that,” he said. “The name Borghini in Italy would be like the name Rockefeller or Kennedy here. The name was exalted during the Renaissance, identified with wealth and privilege. However, since World War Two, it’s been somewhat sullied by the colonel’s activities.”

Manship sat grimly, staring straight ahead as they rambled southward.

“It’s common knowledge to Romans of a certain class that Borghini is a bit unbalanced,” Foa went on. “What he put Isobel through, you could not begin to imagine. She told me everything on the plane coming over. When the carabinieri searched Borghini’s residence, they found hundreds of photos of her. Candid shots—all taken without her knowledge. Something of. a voyeur, he’d been following her about everywhere, taking these pictures. Had his eye on her for years. There were newspaper photos of you, as well—and clippings from the Italian press, describing your show, your activities in Europe, what paintings you were seeking to take home with you, where you were going next, a complete itinerary of your trip. You can’t imagine the detail.”

Manship gave a weary wave of the hand. “I’m afraid much of what happened to that poor woman is my fault.”

Foa appeared puzzled by his remarks. “Ah, you mean your pursuit of those three little sketches?”

“Yes. She more or less told me where to find them, or at least she sent me to the man who knew where they were to be found. Her friend, Pettigrilli—it was he who sent me to the Quattrocento, which, I’m certain, set the whole awful thing in motion.”

Osgood pondered that a while. “I wouldn’t be too hard on myself for what happened to Isobel, old buddy. Sounds to me as if this Borghini was only looking for an excuse. If it hadn’t been you, it would have been someone else.”

They rumbled past the massive gray facade of the Metropolitan, where a crew of sanitation workers was already sweeping up the mounds of litter left behind by the crowds from the night before.

“Tell me one thing.” Manship turned to the deputy ambassador. “How the hell did you get her to consent to come over here?”

Foa laughed. “Well, for one thing, it wasn’t the power of my considerable charms, if that’s what you’re thinking. And for another, Borghini was still on the loose when we reached her, and the thought of going back to Fiesole by herself could not have been all that appealing.”

M
RS. MCCOOCH WAS JUST
turning the key in the lock of 5 East Eighty-fifth when the cab drew up outside the front door. Foa exited first. Not recognizing the tall, imposing figure, she reared back, until she saw Manship stepping out behind him. Osgood followed.

At first, she frowned, wondering what on earth her employer was doing bringing home guests at this hour of the morning. Then she noticed the bandage on his face and nearly wept. She could barely get her key in the lock to get him indoors.

Twenty minutes later, they were sitting around the table in the cozy ground-floor kitchen while she and Mrs. McCooch fried bacon and eggs and served copious cups of steaming coffee.

Hearing noise below in the kitchen, Maeve came down in a robe, rubbing sleep-filled eyes. Then seeing Foa and Osgood, she fled back upstairs to put a comb through her hair and just enough makeup to appear presentable.

Shortly after breakfast, Foa was in the library, on the phone to Washington, speaking with his boss, the ambassador, at his residence. Foa advised the ambassador that Ludovico Borghini, of the illustrious Borghini family, had been apprehended in New York by federal authorities while attempting to destroy a priceless Botticelli at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He was also wanted by the carabinieri in Rome. After linking him to a long series of unsolved murders and disappearances of itinerants, they’d finally been able to secure warrants to search the Quattrocento galleries in Parioli and the Palazzo Borghini on the Quirinal, where they had uncovered the existence of a “house of horrors.”

Arrangements were set in motion then and there to extradite Borghini back to Italy.

While in Italy, Foa had learned that the carabinieri had picked up a young man by the name of Beppe Falco at the Quattrocento galleries. In an effort to reduce the charges against himself, the young man had led them on a tour of the cellar area beneath the galleries and then again of the upper floor of the Palazzo Borghini.

As things stood now, the story that would most certainly be breaking in the newspapers that day would involve an extreme right-wing Italian nobleman, a known neofascist from a splinter group of the National Alliance party, who’d been apprehended in New York just as he was about to mutilate one of the priceless Botticellis currently on exhibition at the Metropolitan. A major embarrassment for the Italian government, the most pressing task for Foa and the ambassador now came down to a matter of damage control. They would have to move quickly, since both the Italian and Turkish governments had already moved to extradite the colonel for similar crimes committed within their sovereign boundaries.

That morning, all of the major newspapers were full of accounts of the Botticelli exhibition. The TV showed extensive clips of seemingly endless lines of long black and gray limousines arriving and departing the museum.

The New York Times
gave the show full coverage on their art page, comparing the scale and importance of the show to the Met’s big Degas exhibition some years before. Repeatedly cited as the coup of the evening were the thirteen preliminary sketches for the
Chigi Madonna,
never all seen together before.

The review ended with an anguished paean to the desecrated
Centurion:
“displayed in all of the savage, mindless rage wreaked upon it.” The shock of actually seeing the consequences of “such wanton idiocy” on display made a shambles of what most people had always assumed was a rational universe. Virtually all of the credit for making this point so tellingly was given to Walter Van Nuys, president and chief executive officer of the Metropolitan Museum.

No mention appeared anywhere of the attempted attack on the
Chigi Madonna
the night before, since all of the morning papers had already gone to press before the incident had actually occurred.

That night, however, the story exploded everywhere. The evening news and all the dailies featured the story of the “mad Italian Count” who’d not only attempted to mutilate the
Chigi Madonna
the night before but was now definitely identified as the destroyer of the
Centurion
at St. Stephen’s in Istanbul and the
Transfiguration
in the Pallavicini.

Roberto Santos, the plucky little security guard who’d had an ear severed holding off the crazed colonel until help arrived, found himself an overnight hero. Microsurgeons, working through the night, were able to reattach the ear, and Santos was expected to make a complete recovery.

Ettore Foa, back in Washington, was quoted at length. Van Nuys gave interviews and press conferences at the drop of a hat. Only Manship declined all invitations to appear on news shows and kept his silence.