The Girl With the Botticelli Eyes (25 page)

She heard the key fumble in the lock. The door swung open and there once again stood the boy. His face was different tonight, she noted. That nasty, bad-boy mischievousness was gone. In its place now, she thought she saw resentment.

“I do regret all this, Isobel,” he was saying as Beppe ladled steaming soup into their bowls.

Uncharacteristically casual in pale linen slacks, a silk ecru shirt open at the collar, with a foulard tied round his neck, Borghini smiled and appeared relaxed. “I’m sure you do, Ludo. And if, as you say, you regret it, then please forget all of this ever happened and let me go home.”

A weary, not unkind smile creased his face. “I’m afraid it’s not as simple as that.” He tapped the crystal decanter and tilted it toward her. “More wine?”

She shook her head and covered the top of her glass with her hand.

“It all seems so far away now.” Borghini peered into the deep garnet color of his goblet, watching the reflection of the dinner candles shimmer in the bowl of his glass. “When you first came here to this house, wanting to join our little group.”

“I was interested then.”

“And now no more?”

“The violence,” she said unhesitatingly. “I hated the violence.”

“Revolution is seldom peaceful.” He laughed wearily. “Was there anything about our program you liked?”

She thought a while, marshaling her thoughts carefully. “The emphasis on tradition, continuity, family,” she finally volunteered. “The notion that people had to earn their place in the system. Fair and square advancement based on real achievement. I like all that. I liked the fact that the movement stressed intellectual discipline, preservation of cultural values, and that it insisted upon a period of military service for young Italians—men and women alike. These things I admired.”

Borghini nodded and sipped his wine. “You avoided any mention of our racial theories, Isobel.”

“I don’t admire them.”

Borghini’s whiskered face crumpled into a soft smile. “At least you’re honest.”

Seeming to materialize out of thin air, Beppe appeared at the table, cleared the soup plates, and proceeded to serve the pasta course.

All the while Borghini talked, he observed the flash of fork and spoon as the boy served the cheese-drenched rigatoni from a deep peasant bowl that had belonged to the colonel’s mother.

“How old are you now, Isobel, if I may ask.”

“I’m twenty-nine.”

“So you were nineteen when you first came to me?”

“Yes.”

His eyes closed as he drifted back over the spate of years.

“What do you intend to do with me, Ludo?” she asked quietly when it appeared he had lapsed into silence.

When he didn’t answer, she started to ask again, but this time he stirred, shifting in his seat, then finally spoke. “Understand, Isobel. I have no wish to harm you.”

The words alone, by their very tone of conciliation, were alarming.

“You have no reason to. I’ve done nothing to you.”

“Oh, I can’t say I agree with you “there.”

“If you mean my sending Mr. Manship to Pettigrilli …”

Borghini nodded. “That’s exactly what I mean, Isobel. That was unwise. Unfortunate things have come about as a result.”

The more he spoke, the more cryptic and incoherent he became.

“Forgive me, Ludo. I don’t understand.”

He glanced at her out of the corner of his eye. “I would have preferred to have avoided all of this. I like you, Isobel. Believe me, I truly like you.”

The note of regret in his voice, she found unsettling.

“M
ISS TESSINO.
”

“Miss who?”

Taverner put a hand over the receiver and repeated the name, this time drawing the pronunciation out into discrete syllables. “Tess-i-no.”

“I know of no one by that name,” Manship said. “Where’s she calling from?”

“Long distance. Fiesole.”

That got his attention. He made an effort at recollection but failed, then reached for the phone.

“Hello. Mark Manship here. Whom am I talking to?”

There followed a stream of frantic Italian, barely half of which Manship could grasp. “Erminia. Oh yes. Of course. Miss Cattaneo’s maid. I remember now.”

“
Si,
Erminia,” she said in pidgin English. “Come quick. The signorina have trouble.”

“What’s that?”

“Come quick,” the girl repeated, this time with greater urgency, her English allowing no more elaborate explanation. “The signorina is with trouble.”

Unable to continue, she reverted to the Italian, from which Manship was able to gather that Isobel Cattaneo had disappeared.

By this time, he, too, was fumbling along in pidgin Italian.

“She go,” the girl repeated breathlessly.

“Go? Go where?”

“Disappear.”

“You mean not return?”

“Si.”

“Are you sure she’s not off on a job? Perhaps visiting friends for the weekend.”

“No job. No visit friends.”

“There was no note? No message …”

“No message, signor. Someone take her.”

“Take her?”

“Si. Someone take her.”

Manship was certain he’d misunderstood. “You don’t mean by force?”

“Forza. Si, Forza.”
The girl shot back.

It was going on 4:00 P.M. New York time, nearly 10:00 P.M. in Italy. Though the connection was perfect, Manship found himself shouting into the phone. At one point, he could hear her agitated breathing.

The story that gradually emerged, if true, was disturbing. It seemed that the housemaid had returned from a weekend at her family’s farm in the hills above Arezzo and found the door of the Villa Tranquillo standing wide open. There was broken crockery around and overturned furniture.

She’d called the police as a matter of course, a formality, the way one reports a robbery or an accident. The police came at once. They filled out reports, then left. She’d heard nothing since. She’d tried next to find some closer connection. She looked in her mistress’ personal address book on the phone table and found Manship’s business card where Isobel had left it, along with several others.

Isobel had no living parents, no relatives, no brothers or sisters, no close friends, and no significant other, as they say. Erminia had remembered Manship from his visit to Fiesole several weeks before. She recalled having spoken to him on one or two occasions over the phone in connection with seeing the Signorina Cattaneo and imagined that he was a friend. Finally, she called him in New York because there was simply no one else to call. She was frightened for the signorina and had come to the end of her rope.

“Come, Mr. Manship.” she said. He could hear the catch in her throat and the onset of tears. “The signorina is with trouble. Please. You come.”

Manship glanced up, to find Taverner’s puzzled frown still fastened on him.

“You come quick, Mr. Manship.” the woman rattled on.

Manship shifted uncomfortably in his chair, all the while watching Taverner as he spoke. “I can’t. I’m sorry. You see, there’s the show …”

“Show?”

He was about to explain, then realized how empty excuses about having to attend an art show would sound in the face of the situation the woman had just described, assuming it was true, and he had no reason to believe that it wasn’t. What he did doubt were the dire circumstances in which Erminia had chosen to cast it.

There had to be some plausible explanation for Isobel’s disappearance. She was not an irresponsible woman. She wasn’t the sort to run off half-cocked, leaving no message or telephone number where she could be reached. Still, the broken crockery, the overturned furniture, the open door, and what not—all that was a bit troubling. At any rate, even if there was some emergency, he couldn’t possibly leave now. There was the show, a million and one details still to be attended to. Besides, it wasn’t his place to interfere. This was doubtless some personal matter, something to do with the painter chap he’d seen briefly on his visit to the villa. He had no wish to get between that. And, anyway, who was Manship to her, or she to him, that he should be expected simply to drop everything and barge off across the ocean on a wild-goose chase.

“Perhaps after, Erminia,” he heard himself say with feeble conviction.

“After?”

“After the opening.”

There was a pause as she tried to fathom the words.

“Oh, yes. After,” at last came the crestfallen reply.

She sounded defeated, so at a loss that against his better judgment he found himself casting about for ways to make more palatable his declining to help.

“Now listen to me, Erminia. The signorina is probably fine. Stay right where you are. In the event she shows up, call me at once. I’m going to give you my home phone number. He paused, heart pounding unaccountably. “As I said, I don’t think she’s in any great danger, but to be on the safe side, I’m going to call friends of mine here with contacts high up in the police. Now don’t worry. Be brave. Take care of the house and the cat. I’ll call you as soon as I know anything.”

When he hung up, he could barely meet Taverner’s gaze.

“What was that all about?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” he replied after a while. He tried to tell himself that he really didn’t know, but the words had a counterfeit ring to them. Ever since they’d spoken, about seventy-two hours before, Manship had been dogged by a nagging suspicion that Isobel Cattaneo was in some sort of difficulty. More troublesome was a dim but growing sense that she’d incurred this difficulty because of him.

The more he considered the recent news from Fiesole, this nagging suspicion grew into an alarming probability. It was not only the fact that Isobel appeared to be missing. The reasons for that could be entirely innocent. But now there was also the business of that strange fellow, her friend Pettigrilli, in the little hosteria in Trastevere. Manship had a sudden image of the man forking food into his mouth like a hungry ferret, all the while glancing nervously over his shoulder, afraid to speak. And then, of course, there was his own misbegotten little side trip to the framing gallery in Parioli and also what he’d learned in Berlin about the stolen Chigi sketches. That, coupled with the growing conviction that Isobel Cattaneo had been the key link in this complicated chain all made for a rather dire picture.

The moment he’d hung up on Erminia, he was on the phone to a close friend at the Italian consulate in New York. He’d got the poor man out of a departmental meeting and then on the phone to the Italian embassy in Washington. His friend at the consulate in New York must have been convincing. Manship had a call back from Washington in less than an hour.

The embassy man in Washington, a deputy ambassador, was very good, very thorough. Exasperatingly, he made Manship repeat everything twice—spelling names out carefully. Manship kept apologizing for all the bother, laughing nervously at himself, certain he was making a mountain out of a molehill. The deputy ambassador tended to agree, but when Manship mentioned the name Cattaneo, the conversation took an entirely different turn.

As for the Cattaneos, he didn’t know them personally, the deputy ambassador said, but the family was very well known throughout Italy. Wealthy Genoese merchants, patrons of the arts, cultured, civilized—all those good things. Most of the Cattaneos were dead now. No, he didn’t know Isobel. The Simonetta, who of course was a Cattaneo, any educated Italian would know. As for the upcoming Botticelli show at the Metropolitan, he’d read about it in
The Washington Post
and
The New York Times
and was flattered to accept Manship’s personal invitation to the opening.

Manship and the embassy man (by then they were on a first-name basis), exchanged telephone and fax numbers at home and at work. His name was Ettore Foa.

He promised to call back the next day.

“O
TTO. NO …”

“I warned you, Mathilde.”

The child cringed in bed, curling the ends of the pillow up around his ears to muffle the sound.

“I warned you. Didn’t I? It’s not my fault. Not my—”

Out in the corridor, bare feet running. A rectangle of bright light. Mother’s room. Not running towards sounds. Running from them. On the stair, counting banister posts. Hands banging each other as he sped past. Once in the country at Nana’s house, outside his window at night, the sound of a fox killing a rabbit. Panicked. Squealing. Strangely excited as he tried to visualize it.

“Otto, no. The child. Dear God, no—”

Tearing sound. Ripping sound. Loud crash. Something toppling. Papa roaring something—not words, only sounds. Then silence.

Standing there halfway down the stair. Pajamas wet. One foot starting back up, the other frozen to the riser beneath. Hands bleeding, ringing from banging banister posts. Eight. Eight posts. Nine:

Coming back up, one stair at a time. Something pulsing in his throat. Stuck in his throat. Waiting in the dark for the next scream. Loud crash. Then silence. All silence. Creeping back up toward the bright square of light.

Toppled easel. Papa’s shadow big and reeling on the wall. Something long and sharp in his hand. Arm rising and falling, rising and falling. Slashing at Mama’s canvas. Eyes. Eyes. Eyes. Empty spaces. Vacant holes staring out. Bright, shiny thing. Sound of ripping. Muttering. Not words. Sounds—awful sounds. Canvas opening—strips of canvas peeling from frame. Peel an orange. Peel a fig. Peel-apig. Bare ankle, sticking out from bloody hem. Legs splayed open between legs of easel. Small red ribbon seeping out beneath easel. Faster. Faster. Eyes. Eyes. Eyes.

Papa looking up. Shiny red-streaked thing in hand. Cuffs of shirt red. Red smeared across forehead. Red splashed all about. Papa gaping at me. Me running. “Ludo … Ludo. Come back here, Ludo …”

Running downstairs again. Banister posts flying. Footsteps pounding behind.

“Ludo … Ludo.”

Sound of voice roaring from behind. Rabbit screaming in fox’s jaws. Duck into pantry. Dark. Crashing into chair. Pain stabbing up leg. Lights on. Flooding darkness. Trapped in scullery. No place to hide. Crying. Crying. Hates me for crying. Papa lurching toward me. Holding shiny red-streaked thing at hip. Clothing splashed with red. Face awful to behold. Hates me for crying.