The Girl With the Botticelli Eyes (39 page)

M
R. TSACRIOS WAS SUPERVISING
the candlelight presentation of small, individual-sized peach soufflés when the lights came back on. There was a burst of cheers and polite clapping, followed by gasps of delight on seeing the soufflés. Swirled across the face of each in a raspberry ganache were the words “Happy 550th, Sandro.” Squadrons of waiters filed down the aisles with steamy pots of espresso and dark Darjeeling.

Sensing that he had obligations elsewhere, Van Nuys rose and excused himself. He was well aware he’d neglected many of the museum’s leading benefactors, and he now set out to redress those wrongs.

Watching him go with a sense of relief, it occurred to Manship that Isobel Cattaneo’s chair was still empty, and had been since even before the lights went out.

At the time she’d gone off with Mr. Tsacrios to take her phone call, Manship had thought nothing of it. Now, troubled by what seemed an overlong absence, a score of questions came to mind. Who, for instance, could be calling her here? Who even knew she was here? As far as he knew, she had no friends or family in the States. The only person in Italy who might know where she was that night was Erminia. But why would the housekeeper be calling her now? Was there some new trouble there? Or was it simply that Isobel was exhausted from the ordeal of the past several days and had gone back to the hotel to bed?

Then he recalled that Ludovico Borghini was still at large.

Looking up, Manship found Ettore Foa’s gaze fixed intently on him. From the way the deputy ambassador looked at him, he guessed that he was thinking the same thing.

They both rose at the same time, but Manship was faster. Going around the table, he pressed Foa back into his chair, bowing slightly and whispering into the Italian’s ear: “Where is she?”

“I don’t know. It’s a long time for just a phone call.”

Manship’s eyes scanned the roof. “I’m going to have a look around. Most likely, it’s nothing at all. Probably just powdering her nose.”

“I’ll join you,” Foa said, starting up.

“No. You stay. Don’t let on to the others. Just keep everything calm here.”

Sensing trouble, Maeve glanced up. “Problems?”

“Not really,” Manship said, affecting a breezy manner. “I have to go downstairs for a minute.”

She wasn’t buying his breeziness. Her eyes ransacked his for information. All he could manage was a shrug and then hurried off.

On his way out, he stopped at the front desk, where Mr. Tsacrios was issuing orders like a field commander to a battery of assistants.

“Miss Cattaneo …” Manship began a bit breathlessly.

Mr. Tsacrios beamed one of those professional head-waiter smiles. “Yes, sir. What about her?”

“She was here a few minutes ago at the phone?”

“Yes, sir. Just over there.” Mr. Tsacrios pointed to a phone a few feet away.

Manship looked across at it. There was no one there.

“You didn’t happen to see where she went?” he asked.

“No, sir. I didn’t. Hasn’t she returned?” The smile never left his face. He said something else, but Manship never heard it. He’d already started out, certain, even as he went, that something was wrong. Isobel was gone, under questionable circumstances. Her absence, he felt sure, indicated that something was amiss. It had something to do with Borghini and the Chigi sketches, he reasoned, and with no other plausible explanations at hand, it was with the sketches he intended to start.

For the duration of an elevator ride between the rooftop and the second floor, Manship’s head spun with half a dozen terrifying scenarios. When the doors of the elevator parted, he flinched from the glare of sudden light. Before him, and seemingly in every corner of the gallery, there was a great blur of motion.

Primed by his own overwrought imagination, Manship had fully expected to see something frightening—things overturned, paintings slashed, horrifying destruction.

To some extent, that’s what he did see. But within the space of seconds, his eye filled with far more specific detail. The first item was Roberto Santos. He lay prone on the floor, struggling to rise with the aid of one hand while the other flapped about trying to stanch the flow of blood that fountained from between his fingers.

The next thing he saw was Isobel Cattaneo. She was standing to the left of the
Chigi Madonna,
trying to squirm free of the person who held her, his fist coiled in her hair. Even from where he stood, Manship could see she was white as parchment, watching the knife blade scything above her head.

“Let her go,” Manship shouted across to him, trying to conceal the tremor in his voice. Instinct urging him forward to help her, he was keenly aware that to do so would endanger her even more.

“Not on your life, Mr. Manship.”

The man’s use of his name came as a shock to Manship. “You can go at any time. I promise no one will stop you. Just leave Miss Cattaneo and go.”

The man he now knew to be Borghini laughed. “Only to have your police thugs leap on me the moment I step out the front door.”

“I promise. No one—”

“Damn your promises. Why would I believe the promises of someone who goes about looting the national treasures of other countries? Besides, Miss Cattaneo and I are old friends. We have some unfinished business to complete.”

“If you’re talking about those three Chigi sketches, Miss Cattaneo had nothing to do with their being here.”

“You’re a liar, Mr. Manship. I know very well the part Miss Cattaneo played in the removal of those drawings from my home. She and I will work that matter out together.”

They’d reached an impasse. Manship didn’t mind that. He was content just to keep the man talking. Talk was certainly preferable to something more destructive.

Borghini’s talk had gradually blossomed into a tirade. It was almost impossible to make any sense of what he was saying. Manship watched the count’s fist coil more tightly in Isobel’s hair. Each twist of his wrist had the effect of dragging her closer to him and bending her over, her head pointed at her assailant’s midsection. All the while, the long, curved blade of the knife kept scything ever closer to her, making a soft wooshing sound with each sweep.

Several times, Borghini feinted at her with the blade, stopping each time just short of her eyes, which seemed to be his principal target. He appeared to enjoy tormenting her, as well as taunting his attackers, daring them to make some foolish move.

Yanking cruelly at Isobel’s hair, he’d started to rant about racial mongrels, the desecration of civilization by “subspecies” befouling the world everyplace they went.

All the while he ranted on, he gave sharp twists to the knot of hair coiled in his fist. The tirade grew more irrational, disconnected, until suddenly he was talking about his mother, his voice grown strangely tender and caressing.

It seemed to go on and on—the tirade, the sweeping blade, Isobel bent over in a cruelly painful position. Manship kept looking round for MacWirter’s people, hoping they would soon show. Then it occurred to him with a sinking sensation that no one upstairs had the remotest idea where they were. At the moment, from where things stood, Borghini, holding both the woman and the painting, held all of the winning cards.

“Won’t you at least let me help this poor man?” Manship pointed to Santos, who was fading rapidly in a pool of his own blood. “If he doesn’t have medical help soon …”

Borghini, behind the Lucite screen, seemed puzzled. He kept looking around, expecting to find someone behind him. The knife with which he’d been menacing Isobel appeared to halt in midair, as though some invisible hand had momentarily stayed it. The effect of that action had freed Isobel. She stood there now, wild-eyed, hair streaming down her face, transfixed on the scene before her.

Never much for physical activity, and not fast on his feet, something amounting to overdrive kicked in, and Manship started to move. Borghini stepped out in front of the screen to await him.

They met in midair, both of them actually off the ground—Manship in a flying tackle, not quite horizontal to the floor, Borghini, stepping off the shallow platform on which he’d stood, appearing to drop through space. The sound they made on impact was a soft thud, followed by a gentle sigh of air, like a balloon emptying.

Manship had expected Isobel to flee, to seek help. Amazingly, she didn’t. Instead, she stood there, baffled, a deer frozen in the path of onrushing headlights.

“Isobel.” Manship’s half-smothered words rose from somewhere beneath Borghini. “Help. Get help. Quick.”

She started to go, saw the knife levering back and forth between the two, then waded directly into the fray instead. She kicked Borghini, aiming her foot for the hand holding the knife. But the lurchings of the two men had grown so frantic that her kick missed entirely.

“Isobel,” Manship gasped. “For Chrissake. Go.”

This time, the message got through. Making a soft half-moaning, half-apologetic sound, she wheeled around and fled.

Amid writhings and grunts, the two figures scuffled. Light on his feet, Borghini bounded up, turning his back on Manship, still scrambling on the floor. The tails of his raincoat flared outward like a cape, revealing beneath it the uniform of one of the Tsacrios waiters. Manship rose, wobbling to his knees. At that moment, a booted foot shot straight out, the heel of it catching him in the side of the head. Stars exploded before his eyes as he went sprawling.

Renewing the attack, Borghini whirled, his outstretched arm inscribing a wide, clumsy arc. The bright point at the end of that arc glinted in and out of the beam of an overhead spotlight, then plunged swiftly.

Manship watched, transfixed, the bright point swoop through the air, soaring toward him. The point disappeared from his line of vision, then reappeared. In the next instant, he felt a faint nick above the cheek.

The colonel was moving toward him again. The full-length raincoat made a rattling sound, giving off a faint odor of rubber. Manship watched, mesmerized, as the blade of a knife, nearly six inches long, the last two inches of it angled at the tip, flailed in Borghini’s hand.

Manship’s immediate heed was for something with which to protect himself. His eyes swept around the room. It was in that first desperate sweep of the eyes, and with that gray blocklike shape hurtling toward him, that he felt something warm slowly descending the side of his face. His hand jerked up automatically, as if he were about to swat a fly. He felt his finger glide over something wet and slippery.

He glanced at his hand and for an instant thought it was someone else’s. It was smeared with blood. Next, he saw blood on his shirtfront and lapels, and then he realized the blood was his own.

The blur of the onrushing figure swarmed toward him again, gathering momentum as it came. The object nearest at hand was a vase of fresh-cut mums, hardly ideal as an instrument of self-defense, but by then there were no alternative choices. With one hand splayed across the side of his face to staunch the flow of blood, he hefted the vase with the other and flung it at the gray blur hurtling toward him.

The vase grazed Borghini’s head at the temple, barely fazing him. It didn’t stop him so much as slow him long enough for Manship to regain his footing and retreat, drawing the man away from the painting, Borghini’s blade switching in the air as he followed him.

By then, Manship was simply playing for time. Behind him, Santos lay on the floor, all color drained from his face, panting heavily from blood loss, going into shock.

Manship’s chief hope was that Isobel had found help and would return with it shortly. The person bearing down hard on him appeared to have divined that thought and was just as determined that this man whose recent activities had obsessed him would never live to savor the triumph of his dream.

In a half crouch, Borghini stalked Manship, slashing his blade through the air, trying to drive him into a corner from which there’d be no escape.

Bleeding freely, using himself as a lure, Manship attempted to draw the man out of the gallery, away from the paintings. But when he reached the gallery entrance and dashed from it, Borghini failed to take the bait Instead of following him, the colonel dashed back into the gallery, in the direction from which he’d just come. Manship had little doubt where he was headed—back to the
Chigi Madonna
to finish the job he’d come for. With the whole right side of his face drenched in blood, Manship lunged back into the gallery after him.

By then, characteristic caution and practical good sense had been replaced by a sense of outrage and plain injustice. Manship no longer thought of his own safety, nor of the safety of the painting that had been one of his principal preoccupations for the past five years. If he thought of anyone’s safety, it was that of the young security guard, possibly fatally disabled on the floor, with a demented madman careening through the galleries, waving a knife, slashing the air before him.

It was that madman Manship wanted. With every fiber of his being, he wanted to get his hands on that person. Looking for whatever was in reach, he grabbed a lightweight bridge chair that had been used by one of the ticket collectors at the door, then barged ahead.

The man was precisely where he’d found him the first time, standing on the shallow platform before the
Chigi Madonna.
His back was to the entrance, that curved, lethal blade of his again upraised. Flashing before Manship’s eyes at that instant was the
Centurion
hanging in limp, unrestorable strips, and the Pallavicini painting, the eyes gouged, horribly mutilated. “Sick. Sick. Sick,” he heard himself say; then something in him snapped.

Borghini must have sensed it, too. Momentarily distracted, he whirled around, a look of sharp annoyance on his face, to see the person he’d just driven from the gallery back again and rushing him.

Brandishing the bridge chair, its four legs thrust out before him, Manship roared at the top of his lungs and charged.

I
N THE BRIEF TIME
it took for the EMS technicians to fetch Borghini and whisk him, as well as Manship and Santos, off to the hospital, a squad of porters armed with pails and mops had swarmed into the gallery and restored the place to pristine condition.