The Girl With the Botticelli Eyes (32 page)

“I’m afraid so.”

Manship struggled to absorb all that was coming at him so quickly. “Where do you suppose he is?”

“Borghini? With his resources and large circle of sympathetic friends, he could show up in any one of a half dozen places and find sanctuary.”

“New York?”

“Given his special antipathy to your exhibition, that would not surprise me.”

The decidedly pointed manner in which that had been revealed did not escape Manship. “And what about Isobel?”

“About her,” Foa said guardedly, “we can do nothing for the moment but wait for the warrants and see.”

B
Y THE TIME THE
boy was halfway down the stairs, Isobel was crouched behind a huge armoire at the far end of the cellar.

Starting down, he’d punched the light switch at the head of the stair, flooding the place with blinding illumination. That was to Isobel’s disadvantage. The place that she’d instinctively dived for was the darkest part of the cellar. Now it was no longer dark there.

To her advantage, however, was the fact that the cellar floor had been partitioned into at least a half dozen distinct areas, all set off by a maze of boundaries fashioned out of shelves, packing cases, and hulking pieces of discarded furniture. The arrangement offered opportunities to stay out of sight so long as one was quick on one’s feet and stayed close to the ground.

She was certainly not quick. Several slivers of glass, no more than a millimeter or so long, stuck in her bare feet and pricked cruelly whenever she put pressure on them. In addition, she was in a state of near panic.

From behind the armoire, she watched the boy bound off the bottom stair and plunge into the cellar, heading toward the place where he’d left her hours before. He no longer wore his harlequin costume. He was now just another young street tough, full of swagger and pose. She watched him weave in and out of the clutter, alternately losing, then regaining sight of him as his figure emerged from behind some bulky obstacle.

As he moved back into the cellar, she continued to creep forward in the opposite direction, toward the foot of the stairs. She had no more fixed plan in mind than to keep the farthest possible distance between the two of them.

She could tell the instant he’d discovered she was gone. Unable to see him, she heard his scraping footsteps come to an abrupt halt, followed by a cry, almost feral, like an animal suddenly wounded. After that came a stream of obscenities, then the resumption of footsteps, only this time the tread heavier and far more hurried.

His search started at the rear of the cellar, not far from where she crouched. She could hear him muttering—a soft, angry chant that grew angrier as he went.

He had little doubt she was still down there. The door at the head of the stair had been locked when he came back and there was no other exit from the cellar to the street. It was only a matter of time until he found her. Swiftly, methodically, he worked his way from the rear to the forward part of the room.

All the while he pressed forward, she did, too, moving stooped over, from one large encumbrance to the next, putting her foot down as lightly as possible to avoid the cruel bite of glass jabbing upward into her flesh.

The principal problem that lay before her now was how to cover the broad swath of open space running for approximately twenty feet from the head of the cellar to the bottom step of the stairway.

It meant coming out into the open. Reason dictated that if it was her intention to bolt for the stair; she’d best do it sooner than later, while he was still back some distance in the cellar.

“Bitch,” he called softly after her, his voice a caress. “Bitch.” He moved along like a terrier tracking a rat, running it to ground. She could hear the smothered rage in his voice, but also, oddly enough, the fear—not of her, but of Borghini, if by chance he’d have to explain her having slipped away.

Kneeling, she’d been dragging her right hand across the floor for balance when it inadvertently bumped into something cold and hard. Groping for it, she reached down and picked it up. It was one of those cheap ceramic dolls—a lurid cartoonlike figure with the face of a ventriloquist’s dummy, the sort of thing you win at carnivals for knocking over ninepins with a rubber ball. A child’s toy. She couldn’t imagine a more improbable place to stumble on such a thing.

He came faster now, arms swinging wildly, a small cyclone, leaving in its wake a trail of wreckage. Certain that she was hidden in one of the big storage cupboards, he flung open their doors, then slammed them shut, taking out his wrath on them as if they’d personally insulted him; It was a fearful racket. She flinched with each sharp crack. Half-paralyzed with fear, she inched forward, trying to keep him in view.

“Bitch. Bitch.” The half caress, half howl roiled the stale air. A cat, unlucky enough to get in his way, shrieked when he kicked it aside. By that time, he’d worked himself into a state of unreasoning rage.

Up until then, she’d been lucky. But now, he’d covered a great deal of territory in short order and was closing in on her fast. Her task was clear—keep the greatest distance between herself and the boy. The job was made more difficult by the fact that she had to move crablike, crouched over on all fours so he couldn’t see her. Moreover, putting pressure on her foot, no matter how slight, was sheer agony, like walking on needles. Whenever she stepped down, she wanted to shriek. Wherever she moved, she left a spoor of bloody footprints behind her on the floor.

If she was fading, not so the boy. The zest for the hunt seemed to have quickened his adrenaline flow. He sought her now with a demented glee, whistling slightly as he swung in and out of those cluttered aisles.

He was no more than some fifteen or twenty feet from her when he must have spotted one of those blurred red outlines of her bleeding feet. From where she crouched, she heard him come to a shuddering halt, panting rapidly as he stooped to examine the print. Sensing the closeness of his prey, he yipped with excitement. It was at that moment she hefted the ceramic doll in her hand and, without a second thought, hurled it. It was as though someone else were guiding her hand. She hadn’t tossed it at him, but, rather, lofted it over his head into a shadowy corner behind him. What followed was a dull, percussive thud. The boy wheeled instantly and plunged back in the direction of the sound. The moment he’d reached the place where the doll had landed, she rose and bolted for the stairs.

He saw the movement out of the corner of his eye and grasped at once that he’d been duped. Like an enraged panther, he came tearing out of the shadows, bellowing at the top of his lungs. It was a deep, hoarse, terrifying sound she could feel in the pit of her stomach—a sound full of rage combined with a strange, joyous excitement.

The distance between her and the stair was no more than twenty feet. He was nearly twice that distance back from where she stood, but the sound of him bounding after her was paralyzing. Moreover, each step she took on her bleeding feet was unbearable.

The open doorway at the top of the stair seemed light-years away, and she didn’t know what she would find once she got beyond that door. No doubt more Beppes, and worse even than what she might have expected had she been content to lie below there in the dark, strapped to the cot, submissively accepting her fate.

He was halfway up the stair when she crossed the threshold, flung the door shut behind her, and threw the bolt. The full weight of him going flat out hit the opposite side of the door. With a terrible fascination, she watched the wood buckle down the midline, then bulge outward.

A succession of deafening cracks followed, like rifle shots, both fists impacting so rapidly on the door that the sound of each separate blow merged into one prolonged, unbroken hail. With each crack of his fist, she could see the door hinges straining from their anchors in the wall.

T
HEY FINALLY FOUND THE
hotel after circling the waterfront in the Battery Park area for well over an hour. The cabdriver, whose name on his livery license appeared to consist of nothing but consonants, spoke only marginal English. The colonel’s English was accomplished, but he couldn’t make head or tail of the driver’s contrapuntal Arabic-English, thus turning their search into something of a shouting match.

The place they were looking for wasn’t a hotel in the strict sense of the word. It was actually a home for retired seamen that happened to also let rooms out to merchant sailors in port for a night or two and in need of lodgings while their vessels took on or discharged cargos. Borghini had learned of it from a distant cousin whose political activities made it imperative that he remain in no locale for more than two days at a time. The same person had helped him acquire the forged passport and seaman’s papers he’d used to enter the country on a Pakistani airliner late that afternoon.

The ride in from Kennedy had been uncharacteristically trouble-free—little traffic and no half-mile backups at the toll plazas. Once down in lower Manhattan, however, where the simple, logical grid system of midtown streets and avenues gives way to a labyrinth of demented traffic patterns, communication between passenger and driver broke down entirely.

Shortly, they were barking at each other, but in different tongues. In the end, of course, they found the place, called, somewhat unimaginatively, Harbor Rest. They didn’t actually find it; they stumbled on it by accident when they asked directions of a homeless man who insisted on wiping their windshield with a soiled Kleenex. For the modest fee of a dollar, he literally walked them the distance of twenty paces to the front door.

The Harbor Rest sat square in the middle of a winding little ribbon of cobblestone called End Street, which served as a transverse between Holme Street and Battery Park. The structure itself was an anachronism—an 1840s farmhouse with a wraparound porch, upon which sat huge cast-iron urns overflowing with blood-red geraniums. The place, wedged in between a sooty row of warehouses and derelict tenement buildings, was easy to miss. The twentieth century itself appeared to have bypassed it entirely.

One end of the street sat in the perpetual twilight cast by the World Trade Center several blocks east; the other end trickled down to its terminus at the Battery promenade. The only association the old sailors’ Harbor Rest had with the sea was the thin patch of river barely visible between a pair of spavined Civil War brick structures listing dangerously toward each other from opposite corners of the street. The occasional moan of foghorns booming at night during the inclement fail and winter months was the extent of nautical atmosphere at the Harbor Rest.

The old Harbor Rest was like walking into something fixed in a distant time warp. Despite the rough surroundings of the neighborhood, the interior had a cozy farmhouse charm: rough pine furniture, overstuffed wing chairs, settees encased in badly frayed embroidered slipcovers, nests of tables upon, which sat neat stacks of well-thumbed vintage
Life
and
National Geographic
magazines awaiting the unhurried browser. Converted hurricane lights hung as sconces on the mottled plaster walls.

From a chair behind the desk, a solitary clerk with muttonchop whiskers and sporting sleeve garters, snored lightly, threatening to topple from his high stool at any moment.

Still ruffled from his encounter with the cabdriver, Borghini entered and set his bag down on the freshly polished wood floors. Noting the drowsy, unattended look of the place, the colonel was not greatly encouraged. He was pleasantly surprised, however, to find that the dozing clerk, once roused, not only had a record of his reservation in the name of one Gaudio Favese but had already taken the liberty of opening and airing the room to make it ready for his visit.

Ushered upstairs (there was no elevator) by a squat, burly figure whose bowed legs suggested that he’d spent more than his share of years negotiating slippery decks in storm-tossed seas, Borghini found the lodging as well as its out-of-the-way location increasingly to his taste.

On first arriving, he had the impression from the virtually empty lobby that the place was vacant. But by 6:00 P.M. the same lobby overflowed with lodgers and permanent residents come down to chat, smoke, quaff a mug of ale before the little combination breakfast-dining room in the rear opened at 7:00 P.M. for dinner.

Amid this odd assembly, the colonel felt slightly out of place. He began to feel more comfortable, however, when he saw that no one bothered to approach him with an eye toward companionship or small talk.

It could have been a page out of Conrad—a public room in Limehouse at the turn of the century; the noisy, boisterous fellowship of merchant seamen out for a few hours of relaxation. Swedes, Kanaks, Filipinos, dour Finns, and burly lascars, all of them carousing at the long plank tables, pewter mugs of ale and steamy plates of stew heaped up before them. Afterward, following the coffee and cobblers, pipes and cigarillos were lit. Shortly, smoke coiled upward like serpents intertwining in the chain-hung pewter candelabra overhead.

With a bit of supper and a cognac under his belt, Borghini began to let himself relax. He even struck up a conversation with a paunchy Dutchman who spoke a guttural but passable Italian. He was at the Harbor Rest, he said, while his ship, a freighter of Panamanian registry, took on cargo. In the morning, they were bound for Lagos and the west coast of Africa.

Later, upstairs in his room, in pajamas and seated on his bed, Borghini removed from his bag a set of sharp krislike knives of the type Used at the Quattrocento galleries for cutting canvas and mat. A wig of sandy-colored hair hung on the bedpost. A short time after, windows open, foghorns booming far out across the Verazzano Straits, he fell asleep while reading a fairly long article in
The New York Times.
It was a preview of the glittery opening to take place the following night at the Metropolitan.

It was a rare day that found Manship home by 6:00 P.M. Passing through the front door of number 5 East Eighty-fifth, he stepped into the narrow hallway. A single lamp glowed faintly on the telephone table and several messages were propped up against the rotary dial. The first was from Mrs. McCooch, who’d already left for the weekend, informing him that he’d had a long distance call from Italy—a Mr. Foa. (She apologized for the spelling of the name, despite the fact she’d had it perfectly correct.) She went on to explain that Mr. Foa and she had had a cordial conversation in which no information of any special note was passed.