The Girl With the Botticelli Eyes Read Online Free PDF Page A

Quotidiano, Venezia

Four
    “W ELL, THERE YOU HAVE it, and I’m glad to be rid of it. Phuh.” Monsieur Etienne DeMornay rubbed his hands vigorously, as if washing some unpleasant substance from them. He was a small, nervous man with an unnaturally high color. He talked expansively, using his arms. “I don’t mind telling you, it hasn’t been easy.”
    That was the Frenchman’s code language for, I think you owe me more than the price we originally agreed upon.
    After years of dealing with DeMornay, Manship knew the code words only too well. “I didn’t expect it would be,” he said.
    “I’ve given the better part of a year to locating this.” DeMornay pointed to the small pencil drawing mounted on an easel. “Through Italy, Holland, Canada, and, finally, the unnumbered account of some ponce in Switzerland …”
    “A gangster?” Manship inquired.
    “Worse. All you had to do was look at the man. Phuh.” He made that curious sucking sound again to convey his disgust. “It’s cost me the friendship of several researchers and a top-notch restorer. Wait till you see his bill.”
    Manship could sense his own bill mounting by the minute.
    “And then to have that—that creature barge in here to my gallery. Right in broad daylight. I thank God there were no people here. I run a respectable establishment.”
    “It must have been awful.” Manship took a stab at commiseration.
    “I want it out of here now. Take it out.”
    DeMornay was one of those individuals who go about with a look of chronic injury. Only when large sums of money crossed his palm did the expression change, usually to that of a kind of religious transport. It was almost beatific. Manship often wondered if there was a Madame DeMornay and, if so, what ghastly indignities she was forced to endure each day at the hands of her husband.
    “He didn’t actually lay hands on you?” Manship asked.
    “My dear, he didn’t have to. It wasn’t necessary. His eyes were hurtful enough.”
    “His eyes?”
    “Horrible,” DeMornay snapped in French. “Mad. Cruel. Horrible. Phuh.”
    They were standing in a private room located in one of the many wings of DeMornay’s renowned galleries on the Boulevard Raspail. Just outside this room were halls and corridors, individual salons crammed with superb paintings, statuary, silver, gems, porcelain, medallions, rare first editions—a treasure-house of the ages. But the room in which they stood was a simple affair, virtually unfurnished except for a half a dozen Louis Quinze chairs arranged in a semicircle on a fine old Savonnerie. The walls were bare and stark white. There were several powerful halogen lights placed on tracks high up on the ceiling. They all pointed to a single spot at the head of the room. Above them was a clear skylight, through which the brilliant sunshine of a Parisian August streamed down upon them. A Botticelli drawing, the object that morning of Manship’s business at the galleries of DeMornay, had been set up before them on a small easel. Not a particularly fine example of the master’s hand, it nevertheless represented the fourth Madonna of the Chigi series and thus, in the light of Manship’s thinking, took on special importance as a curiosity, if not as great art.
    Manship lit one of his panatelas. “You say he did offer to buy it?”
    “Yes. For fifty thousand francs more than I’m getting from you. But I stuck to my deal.” DeMornay’s voice was an irritating mixture of wheedling and self-righteousness. “I told him very clearly that I had a written commitment to you and that I intended to honor it.”
    “What did he say to that?” Manship asked.
    The Frenchman thumped his head with a pudgy fist. “What did he say? I told you what he said. Merely that if I sold to you, I’d have cause to regret it.”
    “Was this person French?”
    “He spoke French. Rather good French at that. But with an Italian accent,” DeMornay added almost as an afterthought.
    The story bore