COLONEL LUDOVICO BORGHINI SAT at his desk, affixing his signature to a stack of documents. He sat stiffly and scarcely moved his hand. Mostly, the papers were solicitations for funds, addressed to a well-guarded list of private benefactors who contributed substantially to his work.
A direct descendant of the powerful Renaissance family of Sforza, Borghini never used the title Count, to which he was fully entitled, but insisted on being addressed by his military rank of colonel—to which he was in no way entitled, since he was not, nor had he ever been, a member of any official military body recognized by the Italian government. An incorrectable astigmatism had kept him from a career as a professional soldier, a fact he looked upon as the central sorrow of his life.
Instead, he was a full-time member of some vague paramilitary group made up of disaffected middle-aged men and a smattering of aimless youths, all of whom seemed to enjoy getting dressed up in surplus army fatigues once or twice a month and strutting about like soldiers.
More zealous than the others and therefore willing to work harder, Borghini was given the title Colonel and some nebulous authority to act on the group’s behalf.
Self-denying by nature, the colonel was a man who scorned physical comfort and made few concessions to adversity. The office he occupied was small and windowless, its walls constructed of plain concrete block, unadorned by anything that might possibly be construed as decorative or frivolous. The few bits of ornamentation permitted there fell more naturally into the category of official furnishings. These consisted of a signed photograph of Benito Mussolini to Borghini’s father, Count Ottorino; a photograph of Ludovico Borghini and his father taken at the family villa on Lake Maggiore; and, centered on the wall directly above the plain pine desk, a black banner upon which the insignia of a mailed fist of iron appeared to rise high in an attitude of threat. Above the fist, woven in gold, were the words Il Ferro Pugno. Below the fist, set in flowing cursive on an arc, was the motto: Tutti per la Patria.
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.