The Girl With the Botticelli Eyes (6 page)

Anyone perusing the small family photo would immediately have been struck by the resemblance of the son to the father. Not the son as pictured in the photo, to be sure, but the black-shirted fifty-year-old man of the present, seated that moment ramrod straight at his desk, affixing his tight, cramped, oddly runic signature to dozens of documents.

In the photographs, his father wore the uniform of an Italian cavalry officer of the crack Risorgimento Brigade. The ascot, the knee-high leather boots, and the peaked Tyrolean cap worn at a swaggering angle low over the forehead gave the impression of a vain man who took himself quite seriously.

As for the pale youth standing beside him, reaching barely to his father’s hip, that was a different story. Undersized for his age, he, too, wore a uniform—a custom-made exact replica of the count’s. Squinting into the sunlight, the child appeared to be making a heroic effort to appear taller than his barely three-foot frame. The cost of that effort could be read in the tense grimace of the youth’s face. From the photograph, it was at once evident how much the boy loved and feared the father.

Ludovico Borghini had never married. He never felt the need for wife or children. Such homely virtues clashed with what he thought of as his predestined calling. His only family were the men of the Pugno, his comrades in arms. Regarding the motherland, they were politically and philosophically like-minded. Feeling the same dissatisfaction as Borghini did with the sloppy, undisciplined tenor of life in Italy since the close of the war, Ferro Pugno had little use for democracy. Their concept of civilized life most closely resembled Imperial Rome under the Caesars.

In Count Borghini, present-day Italy produced something akin to nausea. To see the lawless, unkempt citizenry flowing like raw sewage down the streets of Italy’s most beautiful cities—prostitutes and drug peddlers; petty thieves battening on tourists, haunting the parks and boulevards; degenerate, indolent youth with far too much money in their pockets, devoid of any sense of national pride, reeling from drugs, lolling on the grassy slopes of the Borghese Gardens in various states of undress, copulating openly like dogs; women dressed as men and, worse yet, men dressed as women—in short, doing everything in their power to offend: It made him sick to his stomach.

It was close on to midnight when Borghini completed his paperwork. His back ached from having sat at his desk typing for several hours. Slipping off his eyeglasses, he rubbed the bridge of his nose between two fingers, then massaged his bleared eyes with the back of his fists in a slow circular motion.

He’d not slept for sixteen hours. He longed for bed but was determined to review his work once more before turning in for the night. Sighing, he pulled a heavily edited sheet of foolscap from the platen of an ancient typewriter, lowered his eyeglasses back onto his nose, and proceeded to read.

… and so, let no man doubt, the Fist has a long arm that can reach out wherever it wishes and squash the enemies of the motherland. Those enemies know who they are. They sit in the ministries and parliament. They think their exalted positions exempt them from retribution. To those benighted fools; the Fist wishes to disabuse you of all such notions. We will reach you anywhere—in your powerful offices surrounded by armed protectors; in the sanctity of your homes surrounded by friends and family; in the streets; in your fine chauffeured limousines; in cafes as you take your pleasure. The Fist can strike at any time. Betray your countrymen and you become the enemy of your country; hence, the enemy of the Fist. To defy the Fist is to do so at your peril.

In the matter of Proposition 13459, the Fist advises Parliament to say
no.

Finished, the Count lit a small di Napoli cigarillo, wafting the smoke ceilingward with an air of weary contentment. Almost as an afterthought, he withdrew from the bottom drawer of his desk a dark manila folder. Across the face of it, written in large red crayon letters, was the name Botticelli. Beneath that, in a small, cramped hand, was a subhead:
Exhibition, New York. Metropolitan Museum. Sept. 22, 1995.
The date had been heavily underlined in black.

Opening the folder, a sheaf of newspaper clippings slid out onto the desk. With a short sideward stroke of the hand, Borghini spread them out, like a casino baccarat dealer, into a rough fanlike arrangement.

The pile before him consisted of a stack of articles all taken from the Italian press. Arranged chronologically, some dated back two or three years. Their frequency increased as they proceeded forward to the present. On many of the clippings, the features of Mark Manship figured prominently. There were additional photographs of the curator that Borghini himself had taken surreptitiously.

The articles with rare exception dealt with the forthcoming Botticelli retrospective to be mounted by Dr. Manship at New York’s Metropolitan Museum. In the articles, he was quoted liberally, providing such information as his plans for the show, which works he hoped to purchase outright for the occasion, and those which he hoped he could secure on loan. In addition, many of the journals had presented in meticulous detail Manship’s itinerary while in Europe. Much of this data was underlined in heavy red crayon.

The colonel lingered a while over the clippings, reading and rereading several of them, and growing increasingly angry as he did so. By the time he was ready to leave, he’d worked himself up into fairly high dudgeon.

Abruptly, he rose, turned out the light, and stomped out of his office.

M
ANSHIP WAS SCARCELY PREPARED
for what followed after he tugged the pull-chain bell at the front door of the gray, somewhat down-at-the-heels Villa Tranquillo in the Via Prospecta in Fiesole.

It was the woman herself who came to the door. He had no idea why he’d assumed that someone else would appear or, for that matter, what had made him think that the great-great—whatever she was to the Simonetta—would be a fortyish, somewhat drab spinster getting through life, trading on whatever benefits might accrue from being a direct descendant of the exalted Vespuccis and Cattaneos.

Far from it. Isobel Cattaneo was a much younger woman—Manship estimated somewhere in the late twenties to early thirties. She was unmarried, to be sure, but hardly drab. Nor was she especially beautiful, at least not in the sense in which that word is generally understood. He could see the resemblance to her illustrious forebear at once, but if he had not been forewarned to look for it, chances are that he would have missed it.

For one thing, she did little to call attention to the similarities. If anything, she went out of her way to play them down. Instead of the flowing gold tresses of the Primavera, Isobel Cattaneo’s hair was pulled back and pinned up almost mannishly. She used little in the way of cosmetics and dressed as though she hadn’t given a moment’s thought to what garment she’d put on that morning.

Overall, the effect was somewhat slapdash. Further, it was clear she’d made no special effort to put on appearances for him.

She met him at the door in a long flowered skirt, a loose peasant blouse, and a pair of thong sandals that flapped disconcertingly on the cold tiles as she walked.

She apologized for not having been in when he called, shooed a drowsy cat from a tatty armchair so he could sit, and offered him tea.

“I’d love a cup,” he said, gazing about at the dilapidated interior while she fussed about somewhere in a distant kitchen. He heard the clank of pots and pans, followed shortly by the whistle of a teakettle down a darkened corridor. Moments later, she reappeared, carrying a tray, and beckoned him to follow.

“Outside is better.” She glanced over her shoulder at him, an oblique apology for the widespread disorder of things. “The housekeeper.” She sighed and rolled her eyes. “She’s young and a bit scatterbrained. Her family’s been with us for years.”

They turned a corner and went out through tall French doors into a garden. It was bounded on either side by a pair of high stucco walls squared off at the bottom of the lawn by a stand of tall, feathery cypress. The fourth side, where they now stood, was a stone patio at the rear of the villa, where a cast-iron table and a pair of canvas lounges sagged in a state of shabby disrepair.

Highlighting the garden at its center was a narrow, rectangular reflecting pool, its shallow water scummy and choked with lily pads. Clay pots of tangled agapanthus sat along its granite coping and, in the center of the pool on a pedestal, a moss-stained marble cupid with a shattered nose plashed a lazy stream of water through its genitals into the pool below. All about the place, unattended beds of irises and yellow ranunculuses thrived vividly despite near-total neglect.

“I still have no idea what you want of me,” she said, pouring steaming water into a majolica pot when they’d settled on the patio.

“Mr. Osgood told you nothing—”

“He said something about an art show. It was all a bit vague.”

She spoke a perfect unaccented English. For their purposes, he thought, that wasn’t good. The American media idolized the foreign and mysterious.

“This is to take place at the Metropolitan Museum in New York,” he explained. “Botticelli. Five hundred and fiftieth birthday. He didn’t say anything to you about that—Mr. Osgood?”

“Yes, he said something like that.”

“In September. About four weeks from now.”

“Yes, yes.” She placed two biscotti on a plate and handed it to him. “But I still don’t quite see what all this …”

The note of feminine helplessness struck him as disingenuous. She was anything but helpless.

“For one thing, I can’t afford …”

Ah, now it comes, he thought. The money thing, of course.

“There’d be no question of your paying,” he explained. “We’d handle all expenses, travel to and from Italy, lodging, food, all per diem out-of-pocket expenses, plus a small honorarium for your time.” (He was careful to use the euphemism for salary.) “It’s only a matter of your being there opening night and, possibly, a week or two after. You might be asked to sit for a few interviews.”

“Interviews.” She looked up warily. “My English …”

“Is fine.” He smiled. “Perfect. Believe me. Too perfect.”

She made an odd face at him.

A door slammed from somewhere inside. Moments later, a dark, surly-looking young man, a scurf of plaster powdering the shoulders of his denim shirt, stuck his head out through the French doors. He shot Manship a somewhat-disapproving look, then proceeded to ignore him.

They rattled off some Italian between themselves, from which Manship detected a note of strain. When the young man turned to go, he half-nodded to Manship before disappearing into the gloomy darkness of the villa.

She offered nothing by way of explanation for the interruption, but sat erect, teacup poised at chest level, waiting for him to continue.

“As I was about to say, it won’t be unpleasant. We’ll try to make it as painless as possible for you.”

If he thought he was winning her over, in point of fact, she’d grown markedly cooler.

“What will I have to do?” she asked, as though she suspected something illicit.

“Nothing much. Just stand around and look like your famous ancestor.”

“I don’t look like her at all.”

“There are some who’d dispute that,” he said, and sensed her annoyance. “Did I say something wrong?”

“It’s just that it all seems so …”

“Irrelevant,” he concluded for her. “Perhaps it is. What’s wrong with a bit of irrelevance every now and then?”

“Nothing at all, if you like that sort of thing.” Her irritation increased. “I hate this.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“This … this … connection to some famous ancestor who means nothing to me.”

“Like it or not, I’m afraid you’re stuck with it. It could have been a lot worse.” He laughed, but she didn’t. “What do you know about her?” he asked, changing the subject.

Her head came around, sending a rush of color to her cheek. “I know what everyone else knows, and that’s not much. Only that she came from Genoa. She lived in Florence in the final decades of the fifteenth century. Her beauty was celebrated, not only by the common folk but by the major artists and poets of her time.”

His confusion had been growing steadily. He’d been expecting an altogether different response to his invitation.

“The usual thing,” she went on. “I know what is common knowledge—her marriage to Marco Vespucci, her love affair with Botticelli, with Jiuliano de’ Medici, and all the others. She was not particularly discreet. What’s the big attraction anyway?” Isobel Cattaneo asked, the red flare at her cheeks deepening. “I fail to understand it. No one outside of Italy has ever heard the name Simonetta. Only here is she known; looked on as a sort of minor icon; celebrated because her face is immortalized in a few great paintings and also because she happened to be clever enough to sleep with the right men.”

She made a disparaging face, as though the whole thing was beyond her. Here, a direct descendant of the Simonetta was at great pains to distance herself from her famous forebear. It puzzled, irritated, and surprised him.

Manship’s head tilted slightly to the side as he studied her. “Have you had the connection traced?”

“My parents and grandparents have.”

“Through a certified genealogist?”

“Of course.”

“May I see the trace?”

She shrugged indifferently. “If you like.”

The expression on her face made him feel silly, so that he thought it wise to abandon the subject. “Would you take your hair down for me?”

“What?”

“Your hair. Would you take it down? Unpin it?”

“Are you insane?”

“A bit, I suppose. Anyway, please indulge me.”

She looked at him, not knowing whether to ask him to leave or to call her friend upstairs for help. At last, she shook her head and sighed, then slowly reached up and removed several bobs from her hair. In the next instant, it all tumbled round her shoulders like a shawl, the sheer volume of it far more than he’d suspected from the tight, severe upsweep with which she preferred to present herself.