MRS. MCCOOCH WAS JUST turning the key in the lock of 5 East Eighty-fifth when the cab drew up outside the front door. Foa exited first. Not recognizing the tall, imposing figure, she reared back, until she saw Manship stepping out behind him. Osgood followed.
At first, she frowned, wondering what on earth her employer was doing bringing home guests at this hour of the morning. Then she noticed the bandage on his face and nearly wept. She could barely get her key in the lock to get him indoors.
Twenty minutes later, they were sitting around the table in the cozy ground-floor kitchen while she and Mrs. McCooch fried bacon and eggs and served copious cups of steaming coffee.
Hearing noise below in the kitchen, Maeve came down in a robe, rubbing sleep-filled eyes. Then seeing Foa and Osgood, she fled back upstairs to put a comb through her hair and just enough makeup to appear presentable.
Shortly after breakfast, Foa was in the library, on the phone to Washington, speaking with his boss, the ambassador, at his residence. Foa advised the ambassador that Ludovico Borghini, of the illustrious Borghini family, had been apprehended in New York by federal authorities while attempting to destroy a priceless Botticelli at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He was also wanted by the carabinieri in Rome. After linking him to a long series of unsolved murders and disappearances of itinerants, they’d finally been able to secure warrants to search the Quattrocento galleries in Parioli and the Palazzo Borghini on the Quirinal, where they had uncovered the existence of a “house of horrors.”
Arrangements were set in motion then and there to extradite Borghini back to Italy.
While in Italy, Foa had learned that the carabinieri had picked up a young man by the name of Beppe Falco at the Quattrocento galleries. In an effort to reduce the charges against himself, the young man had led them on a tour of the cellar area beneath the galleries and then again of the upper floor of the Palazzo Borghini.
As things stood now, the story that would most certainly be breaking in the newspapers that day would involve an extreme right-wing Italian nobleman, a known neofascist from a splinter group of the National Alliance party, who’d been apprehended in New York just as he was about to mutilate one of the priceless Botticellis currently on exhibition at the Metropolitan. A major embarrassment for the Italian government, the most pressing task for Foa and the ambassador now came down to a matter of damage control. They would have to move quickly, since both the Italian and Turkish governments had already moved to extradite the colonel for similar crimes committed within their sovereign boundaries.
That morning, all of the major newspapers were full of accounts of the Botticelli exhibition. The TV showed extensive clips of seemingly endless lines of long black and gray limousines arriving and departing the museum.
The New York Times gave the show full coverage on their art page, comparing the scale and importance of the show to the Met’s big Degas exhibition some years before. Repeatedly cited as the coup of the evening were the thirteen preliminary sketches for the Chigi Madonna, never all seen together before.
The review ended with an anguished paean to the desecrated Centurion: “displayed in all of the savage, mindless rage wreaked upon it.” The shock of actually seeing the consequences of “such wanton idiocy” on display made a shambles of what most people had always assumed was a rational universe. Virtually all of the credit for making this point so tellingly was given to Walter Van Nuys, president and chief executive officer of the Metropolitan Museum.
No mention appeared anywhere of the attempted attack on the Chigi Madonna the night before, since all of the morning papers had already gone to press before the incident had actually occurred.
That night, however, the story exploded everywhere. The evening news and all the dailies featured the story of the “mad Italian Count” who’d not only attempted to mutilate the Chigi Madonna the night before but was now definitely identified as the destroyer of the Centurion at St. Stephen’s in Istanbul and the Transfiguration in the Pallavicini.
Roberto Santos, the plucky little security guard who’d had an ear severed holding off the crazed colonel until help arrived, found himself an overnight hero. Microsurgeons, working through the night, were able to reattach the ear, and Santos was expected to make a complete recovery.
Ettore Foa, back in Washington, was quoted at length. Van Nuys gave interviews and press conferences at the drop of a hat. Only Manship declined all invitations to appear on news shows and kept his silence.
In the days that followed, a flood of details emerged, revealing the character and past of the shadowy neofascist Ludovico Borghini. The reporters had by then dubbed him “the master slasher.”
The week following the opening, Isobel stayed on as guest of the Metropolitan, with Manship as an unofficial personal tour guide. Manship had naively assumed that, on her first visit to New York, she would want to see the sights, all the typical things and places first-time visitors gravitated to—the World Trade Center, the Empire State Building, the Statue of Liberty, Chinatown, Little Italy. In addition, he had planned a number of small dinner parties in her honor, inviting lively, amiable people, many from the theater, thinking she would enjoy that most.
He was relieved when she asked, almost apologetically, if they could “skip all that.” The itinerary he’d worked on so diligently had struck him as a bit trite, anyway. The World Trade Center and the Statue of Liberty, after the horrific ordeal she’d just been through, also seemed hopelessly inappropriate.
Though Foa had gone to some pains to apprise him in advance of the Roman horrors, Manship could only guess at the true depths of the ordeal. The young woman he saw before him now—subdued, withdrawn, just barely sociable—struck him as very sad. Hardly the feisty, self-assured young woman he’d met in Fiesole, she was in a state of shock and in the process of trying to heal.
She seemed most at peace when they walked out in the park together, or prowled the museum during off-hours, losing themselves in its endless wings and sparsely populated galleries.
She found it particularly pleasing to sit in the little garden out back of 5 East Eighty-fifth Street. She would perch on the tiny white marble bench beneath the pergola where Manship grew grapes, from which he occasionally made bad wine. It reminded her of Italy.
Sometimes she would go off with Maeve for an afternoon of shopping, or go with her to her small rented studio on Greene Street and marvel at her energy as she scrambled up and down ladders, dressed in paint-spattered jeans and sneakers, putting the final touches on paintings scheduled to be shown at her upcoming exhibition.
Isobel had been taking most of her meals at the hotel. Finally, Manship asked one night if she would consent to have dinner at number 5, where Mrs. McCooch would be happy to prepare a bird, or perhaps one of her savory Irish stews that they might eat before the fire in the library.
That was the first time he’d seen her light up since her coming to New York, and he felt encouraged. It was then he understood that it wasn’t he who was being rejected, but, more likely, noise, excitement, glitter. What she wanted now, needed more than ever, was calm.
One night toward the end of the week, Manship kissed her. Like a man long out of touch with romance, he had planned it. It was a clumsy kiss, occurring in the dark entryway of a dental office on the corner of Eighty-third and Fifth. A chaste, fumbling thing, it had taken her by surprise, and he regretted it the instant it was under way. When he attempted something more ambitious, she turned her head away and gently drew him out of the shadows of the doorway. She seemed miserable, utterly crestfallen.
He had the sense of a humiliating defeat. They were standing now on Fifth Avenue, just at the entrance to the Stanhope. Light from the lobby streamed across his anguished features.
“Tomorrow?” he asked hopefully.
“Do you really want to? Or are you just being kind? You don’t have to, you know. There’s no need—”
He watched her with a sense of infuriating helplessness. She was shaking her head back and forth as if she’d lost for the moment the power of speech. But it was her eyes that nailed him—the Chigi eyes, full of mystery and sorrow. They’d finally overtaken him, so slowly, so gently, he could scarcely recall the moment when he’d first succumbed to their lovely sadness.
“I do want to,” he said. “And kindness has never been one of my strong points.”
He kissed her again. This time, it went better. Deeper, harder, more satisfying. They’d both fallen into it, occasionally jarred and bumped by the crowds streaming in and out the revolving front doors as they spun past them into waiting taxis and the night.