The Girl With the Botticelli Eyes (26 page)

“Sorry, Papa … Sorry.” Wipe tears from eyes. Grinding knuckles into eyes. Dizzy red pinwheels spin before eyes. Eyes. Eyes.

“Forget what happened, Ludo. You saw nothing. You hear? Nothing. If ever you say anything, I’ll cut your head off.”

“Heard nothing, Papa.”

“You tell police, robbers.”

“Yes, Papa. Robbers. Robbers. Heard nothing. I swear. Nothing; Please, Papa. You’re hurting me. Papa. Noth—”

Borghini woke, shaking his head. Eyes fled across the wall of his bedroom. The house was deathly quiet. He was in a cold sweat—blankets kicked off, coiled about him; his mouth dry as sand. For one fleeting moment, he was six years old again, his tiny, quaking body too small for the bed he was in. Trembling, terrified his father was about to appear.

“I heard nothing, Papa,” he heard a voice say in the high fluttery voice of a child. He didn’t even know he was crying.

That morning directly after breakfast, there was a sharp rap at her door. Before she could respond, she heard the dull chink of the key turn in the lock. In the next moment, the door swung open and the boy stood there, scowling at her across the threshold.

He swaggered toward her, the strained, unnatural deference of days before no longer in evidence.

“Follow me.”

The brusqueness of his manner alarmed her.

“Do you have any idea why?”

“You’ll know soon enough. Sit, please.”

With something of a flourish, he whipped a dark bandanna from his pocket and proceeded to wind it tightly around her eyes.

“Why is this necessary?” She was determined to control her mounting fear. The boy didn’t answer. She tried again.

“Where are you taking me?”

Still he didn’t answer.

“Will Signor Borghini be present?”

For reply, he yanked her back up on her feet.

“I demand to know where you’re taking me.”

She made a valiant effort to project authority, but the dark, coarse fabric wound around her eyes served only to heighten her growing sense of helplessness and panic.

She felt his hand. It was soft, yet strong, and overly warm—actually hot. It was buried like a knot in the pit of her arm and he was yanking her across the room.

“Move.”

“I can’t see.”

One hand thrust deep in her armpit, he proceeded to guide her.

“You’re hurting me.” She tripped and stumbled before him. “You’re going too fast.”

He neither slowed nor eased his grip beneath her arm. The back of his hand kept grazing the side of her breast. At first, she thought that was accidental, until the pressure against her breast became persistent.

They were moving fast, far too fast for someone blindfolded. Several times, she tripped, nearly went down, but the hand cupped inside her armpit steadied her and prevented a fall.

“There’s a stair here,” he said. “Lift your foot.”

She did, and stumbled. This time, the hand cupped her breast and squeezed hard—almost as punishment for stumbling. She gasped. The pain took her breath away.

“Please. You’re hurting me.”

“When I say lift your foot, lift.”

The hand gripping her breast moved back under her armpit. “Now lift. Good. Again.”

It was a laborious climb, taking several minutes, and all the while the boy grew increasingly impatient.

“Quick.” His voice was a hiss.

Two, three steps more and they were at the top of a landing. It was much cooler there than where they’d just come from—unnaturally cool. Her bare arms were goose-pimpled and she could hear the low, unbroken hum of an electric motor, probably a generator.

She felt the boy sweep past and move ahead of her. A doorknob turned: hinges squealed open. From the sound of them, she imagined a large, heavy door, not necessarily wood—more probably metal.

A firm shove at her back and she stumbled forward.

“All right, Beppe. You can take the blindfold off now.”

It was almost a relief to hear Borghini’s voice.

It took her a moment to realize that the blindfold was off. Her eyes, adjusting to the dimness, gradually took in more detail. The first impression she had was that of a long, narrow corridor with what appeared to be glass walls on either side. The glass was not continuous, but set in large panels.

“Come in, please, Isobel.”

She heard him but couldn’t see him. The voice sounded as though it came from the far end of the corridor.

“Come in. Come in. Don’t be afraid.”

She took a tentative step in the direction of the voice and, in that instant, a switch was thrown. Lights suddenly went up behind the glass walls. Above her, a spatter of multicolored shadows swam across the ceiling.

“Come. Come.” Borghini’s voice was closer now, coaxing her forward with disarming warmth.

The first thing she saw was to her left, a kind of boxlike compartment, perhaps twenty feet by fifteen, it contained what appeared to be a number of stiffly awkward life-size figures. They wore rich period costumes of silk and velvet brocade. The wall behind, serving as a backdrop, showed a view of what was clearly Florence, with the dome of the Basilica dominating the skyline. The forefront was a crowd scene in a busy marketplace, where people costumed in fifteenth-century dress mingled among food stalls and bargained with merchants. What came to mind was that she’d been brought to some sort of wax museum.

“Do you recognize it?” Borghini called out from the shadows.

She knew it was a kind of
tableau vivant.
There were vague similarities to paintings she’d seen elsewhere.

“No. I’m afraid I don’t.”

“It’s a re-creation of a Botticelli.”

She thought she detected irritation in his voice.

“Oh,” she said. “I see.” Not seeing that at all, although it was obvious now that the backdrop was, in fact, as she suspected, a detail of a fine old Botticelli, photographically enlarged many times.

“Come on. Come ahead.” Borghini’s voice crackled with impatience. “See the next.”

She moved uncertainly into the aisle, her heart thudding, the boy moving behind her, uncomfortably close. She noted that he now hung behind, no longer daring to touch her. She attributed that to Borghini’s presence. Otherwise, there was no telling what he might try.

Electric fans whirled in the ceiling, and there was an odd odor as they penetrated deeper.

The next diorama was a Madonna. The foreground consisted of a woman on a grassy hummock; she was praying above an infant. Nearby stood a young shepherd. In the background were pomegranate trees and the outline of a distant chapel, above which storm clouds appeared to be gathering.

“Do you recognize this one, Isobel?”

Mystified, she peered at it for some time. Aware that what she’d seen moments before was a life-sized re-creation of a Botticelli, she assumed that this, too, was some sort of re-creation. They were playing a kind of game.

“I want to say it’s also a Botticelli,” she announced almost plaintively, “a Madonna, but I’m not sure.”

“If you said that, you’d be right.” Borghini could hardly conceal his delight. He seemed almost grateful to her. “It’s the
Madonna Adoring the Child with Infant St. John and Two Angels.
Come on. Come on. Let’s do another.”

The next was the Botticelli
Venus and Mars.
Then
Pallas and the Centaur.
She guessed one, then missed the next. They hurried on.

“What about this one, Isobel? Do you know it?”

Desperately, she ransacked her memory, for by then she realized that his greatly improved spirits were in direct ratio to how many of the dioramas she could identify. When at last she had to concede that she was unable to identify this particular re-staging, his brow lowered, and she was terrified.

On they went from one presentation to the next—the
Temptation,
the
Annunciation,
a portrait of Lorenzo Tornabuoni. Fortunately, she recognized most of them, getting better at the game as they went along.

As a student at Bologna, she had majored in art history and, doubtless due to her family background (the Cattaneo and Vespucci families had been enthusiastic patrons of the arts from the fourteenth century on), she had literally grown up surrounded by some of the finest examples of Italian medieval and Renaissance art.

There was no mistaking the big Botticelli diorama of the
Primavera.
It had been given more than twice the space of the others. Recognition in this case was hardly an accomplishment. So world-renowned was the painting, any fool would have known it at once.

That didn’t seem to occur to Borghini. He was far too intoxicated with the heady business of exhibiting his work.

Finally reaching the last diorama, she found Borghini himself standing there. His slight doll-like figure, half-eclipsed by a bluish luminosity cast from inside the glass case, heightened her sense of impending danger.

He smiled mischievously, as though about to share with her a pleasant secret.

“Are all of these yours, Ludo?”

A shy smile creased his features. “In a manner of speaking—yes, I suppose I did make them.”

Pleased she’d asked, he flushed with pleasure. “But I had excellent primary material to start with.”

“Primary material? You mean your models?”

“Yes.” He smirked. “I had first-rate models. That, of course, is critical with this sort of thing.” He winked at Beppe, who laughed. “I always look for models who bear a strong resemblance to the original.”

She stared back at him, uncomfortably aware that he was playing some sort of game with her, that his words conveyed an additional meaning beyond their merely literal intent.

“For instance,” Borghini rattled on, “this one behind you …”

She turned and gazed on a scene of ancient Tuscany. The background was a terraced hillside, beyond which meadows rolled gently toward a distant sea.

The foreground of the scene was comprised of two figures. One, a fair-haired man in a pale blue tunic, had the raiment and otherworldly look of an angel. Her impression was confirmed by the second figure—a plump and rosy holy infant. The angel held out a bunch of grapes in his hand. The infant appeared to reach for it.

The mood of antiquity in the scene was broken by the appearance of a starkly modern chair between them. On its leather sling seat and stainless-steel frame had been posed a wire armature of what appeared to be a female figure.

“It isn’t quite finished, as you see,” Borghini hastened to explain. “Do you recognize it?”

“It’s the
Chigi
, isn’t it?”

He beamed. “It’s the beginning of it. But I’ve been unable to find just the right model for my Madonna.”

She recalled suddenly the sketches he’d shown her before—the ones the American fellow from the Metropolitan was so eager to locate.

All the while he spoke, he gazed at it with a kind of fierce regret. “The painting was a great favorite of my mother’s. She copied it several times. Her great sorrow was that she’d never got it right. I’m doing this as a kind of tribute to her.” He took her gently by the arm. “Come. I’ll show you.”

They entered a small door just to the right of the diorama. She had to duck her head. From there, they walked down a narrow passageway, emerging on the other side into the scene itself.

If she’d found it cool outside the diorama, inside it was frigid. Fans whirred overhead with a low roar. That odor she’d smelled outside was suddenly sharper, more pungent. It was chemical, medicinal, something like mold or wet earth. She couldn’t say what.

All she knew was that she was uncomfortably cold and trying to fight back the panic she felt slowly rising in her. The scene itself made her uneasy. She had an impulse to run. Outside the glass the boy was grinning and peering in at her as though she were some sort of window display.

“Could you sit down in that chair for a moment, please, Isobel?”

Borghini seemed almost courtly as he hurried to lift the wire armature aside and with his handkerchief dust the flakes of plaster from the seat.

Her mouth was dry and she was trembling from the cold. She took a step toward the chair, then turned back toward him.

“What do you want of me, Ludo? You have no right to keep me here like this. I want to go.” Tears welled in her eyes.

“Sit down now. Sit,” he said, his manner grandly sympathetic. He guided her to the chair.

“I’ve done nothing to you. Why are you doing this to me?”

He ignored her, his mind intent upon the empty chair. “Would you sit there a moment. A bit to the left. Now look toward me. That’s it. That’s it. Perfect.”

She kept talking while he settled and posed her in the chair. “I have a housekeeper. She’s due back tomorrow. If I’m not there she’ll be very anxious.”

“Yes, of course,” he said, unpinning her hair, letting it fall about her neck and shoulders.

“I’m scheduled to report to a filming tomorrow. People will start calling around and asking questions.”

He stepped back to study his arrangement more critically. Increasingly excited he moved back and forth, viewing the composition from inside and outside the diorama. He tried several different positions. Then, at last, finding one that appeared to suit him, he stepped away again. Arms folded, head cocked sideways, one eye shut tight, he studied the sight lines with the sort of absorption one sees in a chess player moments before he makes his move.

“Ludo, I’m cold,” she said, rubbing her arms. “May we leave now?”

Just as she said it, she realized that in the new arrangement with herself on the chair, she was staring up into the face of the angel and that the face of Aldo Pettigrilli was smiling radiantly down upon her.

The room seemed to tilt, and just as everything went dark, she could hear herself screaming far, far away.

“I
S THAT YOU, MARK?
”

“Of course it’s me. Who else would it be? Unchain the door, for God sake.”

He heard the whoosh of her slippered feet scurrying down the stair, then next the chain sliding through the bolt on the other side.

“Why do you chain it?” He swept past her into the house.

“This is New York. Aren’t you supposed to do things like that in New York?” She rechained the front door, then followed him into the study, “What are you doing home at this hour?”