The Girl With the Botticelli Eyes (9 page)

“I see. Thank you,” he said, staring at the letter but not actually seeing it. He still hadn’t read it—only the signature at the bottom, which had been written by the clerk. Taking several steps backward from the desk, he turned toward the elevators. “Good night,” he said.

“Good night, sir,” the clerk replied, staring after him.

She’s changed her mind, he thought, and for some inexplicable reason, he felt disappointment. She’s thought things over and called to tell me she’ll be on the plane.

He’d deliberately put off reading the message until he’d undressed, washed, and slipped into bed.

Dear Mr. Manship,

I hope you will forgive me, but I cannot get your three stolen drawings out of my mind. You may recall I mentioned to you something about friends I had at university who were a part of those groups we discussed tonight at dinner.

I thought, if you had time, it might be useful to call on one of them, whom I occasionally still see. His name is Aldo Pettigrilli. I don’t have the number, but your concierge will get it for you. He lives in Rome, 18 Via Sestina. Tell him you are a friend of Isobel and ask if he won’t give you fifteen minutes or so. You’ll find him a bit odd, but in matters such as this, he’s quite knowledgeable. He may be able to help you locate those drawings. I feel I owe you this for having made such a pig of myself at dinner. Good luck with your show in September.

All best,

Cattaneo

Once more, he experienced that strangely ambivalent sense of annoyance—wanting her to go back to New York with him, yet impressed that she’d stuck firmly to her decision not to. He had no intention whatever of barging off to Rome on a wild-goose chase. For one thing, he hadn’t the time. The show was waiting to be hung. He was already seriously behind schedule, and here she was, offering him no more than some possibly diverting chat with her friend on the history of post-World War II neofascism in Italy.

He reached for the phone to call and thank her for her kindness. It was past midnight, but she would still be up, particularly since she’d dictated her message to him such a short time ago.

“
Pronto,”
the operator trilled.
“Numero, per favore.”

“This is Mr. Manship, room four oh three.” Then, instead of calling Isobel, he asked, “Would you kindly get me, in Rome, the number of Signor Aldo Pettigrilli, eighteen Via Sestina.”

Even he was surprised as the name leaped with astonishing ease to his lips.

That night the voices woke him again. He’d been dreaming of the eyes again, the empty, sightless orbs. But then upon waking, they seemed to recede into the distance, until only the voices remained. One was a man’s voice, the other a woman’s. They sounded as though they were engaged in some sort of row. The voices floated up from somewhere below. They were muffled as they poured through the plaster of the walls.

Borghini’s damp hand clutched at the border of his quilt. He shrank down deeper into his bed, trying to drown out the shouting. He felt small and lost and helpless. Once again, he felt the old tightening in his throat. It told him he was about to cry. But he knew he mustn’t cry. Papa hated it when he cried.

I
T WAS EASY, ALMOST
too easy, and Manship always distrusted the easy.

He’d spoken to Pettigrilli, who had reluctantly agreed to meet him for lunch in Trastevere. Taking an express train down from Florence early the next morning, Manship arrived in Rome at noon and took a taxi directly to the little trattoria Pettigrilli had suggested they meet at shortly after one o’clock.

Aldo Pettigrilli was a lean man—anorexically thin, with sunken cheeks—and strung tight as a wire. He had the sort of pale, translucent skin you associate with either stern asceticism or terminal illness. He walked stooped forward from the waist, as if he had back trouble. He seemed distracted, his eyes roaming restlessly around the small room as if about to discover someone there he didn’t care to see.

Exasperatingly, there were times during the lunch when Manship was certain he was on the brink of learning something of value. But then suddenly, so fleetingly that he thought he’d just imagined it, something like a cloud fled across the surface of the man’s eyes. He grew cautious, sullen, kept looking over his shoulder. When Manship introduced the subject of the missing Chigi sketches and revealed what he’d learned from von Marie in Berlin about the quasi-military Italian group suspected of stealing them, Pettigrilli grew strangely distant. Manship had the feeling that under different circumstances, less public and open, the man might have felt freer to talk. There were times he believed Pettigrilli might actually know something. But if he did, this was clearly not the place he was about to disclose it.

When they parted, somewhere close to three, it was Pettigrilli who rose first from the table, as if he’d stayed too long and was expected elsewhere. He fumbled in his pockets as if intending to pay his share of the bill, but when Manship waved the offer aside, he barely protested, asking only to be remembered to Isobel. This was not the moment, Manship thought, to explain that he had virtually no expectations of ever seeing the lady again. They exchanged cards and promised to keep in touch if they had any information to exchange. Manship had little hope they would.

They said their good-byes outside the restaurant, with Manship shaking a limp, moist hand, then entering a taxi.

It was only after he’d settled back into the overheated black leather of the backseat that he glanced down at Aldo Pettigrilli’s card and noticed that something had been scrawled there in pencil above the printed address. Toward the end of lunch, when they’d exchanged cards, Pettigrilli had indeed scribbled something onto his card. Manship had thought nothing of it at the time. It was the sort of thing people typically do when they wish to make a correction or update information. What he saw there on the card now, however, looked like something else entirely.

It was an address: 14 Via Corso Margutta, in the Parioli district of Rome. Called Quattrocento, it appeared to be a gallery of some sort. Knocking on the glass partition separating driver from passenger, he handed the card through a money chute to the startled cabdriver and pointed to the address.

The window in front of 14 Via Corso Margutta identified the establishment within as an art gallery,
PURVEYORS OF FINE ART
, read the gold decal letters appearing in the lower-right glass pane of the window. But when Manship shaded his eyes from the sun to peer into the darkened shop, what he saw looked to be more on the order of a small picture-framing establishment.

The drafting tables, the coffered tin ceiling, and the carpentry tools—saws, chisels, and sharp cutting instruments suspended from a long trellis above the workbenches—all said as much. Pots of glue and sheets of glass sat everywhere, and then, of course, there were the innumerable empty frames stashed along the walls—carved walnut, ormolu, gold leaf, gesso, dark Bavarian elm bent into the rings of a cartouche for the framing of tondi. It was all quite familiar to him.

There were also, to be sure, some fine paintings in evidence. Even in that gloomy late-afternoon light, Manship’s well-trained eye picked up several decent examples of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century schools, mostly Italian and Flemish. But these did not appear to belong to the gallery; most likely, they were only there awaiting the skilled hands of the framers.

Manship had been around long enough to be able to distinguish framers of pictures from purveyors of fine art. There was a pretense of an art gallery here, but a feeble one at best. Moreover, the building situated at 14 Via Corso Margutta, although located in the exclusive residential district of Parioli, was tucked off in a side street that ended in a cul-de-sac. There was something vaguely louche about the place. Crammed in between a warehouse and several other shops of equally dubious character, the tiny establishment gave a distinctly down-at-the-heels impression.

The sign hanging lopsided from a rubber band on the front door bore the word
chiuso
scrawled in crayon on a piece of cardboard. But a light left on in the back suggested that someone might yet be in the shop.

When he yanked the little bellpull at the side of the door, he could hear its high, hollow jingle rattle through the dusty shop, but he saw no sign of anyone hastening to respond.

Several times, he tugged at the bell, with much the same results. At last, he concluded that the light had been left on more for purposes of security than illumination.

The desolation of the street and the light at that hour imparted an air of something vaguely disquieting. The few additional shops in the Via Corso Margutta all bore similar placards on their front doors, all with the word
chiuso.
It was, of course, August, and everyone in Italy was either off at the seashore or up in the mountains. The heat was suffocating and those few shops that remained open generally closed down between the hours of twelve and four.

Still, it was unusual not to see a soul about, as if the weather had chased everyone indoors. He followed a lank, sullen alley cat that limped around to the back of the shop as though eager to share with him some particularly fascinating sight. There, he found a pair of unemptied trash cans brimming over with cord and torn wrapping papers all heaped atop shards of broken glass.

Peering into the back door through dusty windowpanes, he saw more frames stacked against the walls, along with more paintings, prints, and watercolors. The single burning light he’d seen through the front door, he now saw from the perspective of the rear. It was a naked bulb dangling at the end of a long, frayed wire. It cast a pale bluish light onto the head of a stairway that appeared to lead down into a basement.

Nothing unusual, he thought. But somewhat odder, from where he stood peering through dust-clouded glass panes, was the peculiar odor seeping out from the crack beneath the door. At first, he assumed that it was the fumes of trainer’s glue.

For some reason, he grasped the doorknob. Despite the great heat of the day, it was cold and clammy to the touch. He experienced the curious sense of watching his own wrist, as though it were someone else’s, make a half rotation to the right. He felt the bolt click beneath his hand, drawing his arm forward as the door unexpectedly opened.

It didn’t open fully. His arm checked it at a point just wide enough for him to poke his head forward and in. Like the doorknob, the air inside was unnaturally cool—even cold, though Manship could see or hear no sign of an air conditioner. And there was that smell, acrid, medicinal, like ether, or possibly formalin.

“Hello,” Manship addressed the shadows. His voice in that chill sepulchral silence seemed a desecration. “Hello. Anyone here?”

It crossed his mind that he might enter, look around. After all, why had Pettigrilli sent him here if he hadn’t felt that some clue to the missing Chigi sketches might be found on the premises?

Then he thought of burglar alarms—not only the irksome ones that make loud whooping noises but also the silent ones preferred by so many of the better galleries in the States, with direct hookups to the police. He imagined himself trying to explain, in his barely serviceable Italian, his presence in the empty shop to some frowning carabiniere. A shop so obviously closed. Why would the police believe him? If he were the police, he certainly wouldn’t believe him.

Something about that chill, cluttered space just beyond the door unnerved him—the naked lightbulb glowing dim blue at the end of that long, frayed wire; the utter desolation of the place; that indefinable air of something menacing, something instinct urged one to get away from as quickly as possible.

When at last he did leave, he moved quickly.

In his haste, his hand hit the top of one of those brimming trash cans, dislodging a bit of torn wrapping paper. It drifted idly to- the ground. Curious now, he stooped to retrieve it. It was a badly torn brown manila envelope. It bore the postmark Linz, sterreich, dated a full month ago, and was franked with Austrian postage stamps picturing views of the Tyrol. The name of the addressee was still intact. The name was Borghini.

Once in a cab, he realized he was quite shaken. He could still smell that unpleasant medicinal odor. It seemed to cling to his clothing and skin. He knew now what it was. Not glue. Not ether. Not formalin. It was asafetida, a smell he associated with the small midwestern pharmacies of his youth, where he’d jerked phosphates and ice cream sodas to pick up a bit of extra cash. Its principal use was as a disinfectant, to control germs in places where the sick and ailing were known to be. It was used not only in pharmacies but also in hospitals and doctors’ office, and, of course, funeral homes.

H
IGH AT THE UPPERMOST
point of the Palazzo Borghini, Count Ludovico Borghini stood in the center of a room, staring upward. The place in which he stood was not actually a room, but a glassed-in cupola turned into an office. From the colonel’s point of view, the office provided two highly desirable features: One was the splendid prospect of Rome as seen from the top of the Quirinal; the other was the total isolation from the rest of the house, providing a privacy indispensable to his work.

As elsewhere in the palazzo, the furnishings were spare. Other than the fine old Second Empire pear-wood desk and a tall upholstered chair that looked like a medieval throne, there was nothing. Entering the room, one had the impression of a monastic cell occupied by some silent, uncomplaining penitent who’d given over his life to meditation and self-denial.

That impression was heightened by the single decorative note permitted there. On the wall above his desk hung a full-scale reproduction of Ghirlandaio’s rather forbidding portrait of Savonarola.

Borghini often thought that had he lived in Florence during the fifteenth century, in that troubled time, he would have been proud to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the mad monk and die with him in the flames of the auto-da-fé. One of the
piagoni,
one of the mad monk’s weepers.