The Monster of Florence Read Online Free

bequests so we’re rather working in the dark, contacting all the likely people, but if you can’t do with critics I suppose your relationship wasn’t what I thought …”
    “Ha! I like that. Yes. Well, Marshal, I don’t know whether our relationship was what you thought since I don’t know what you thought, now do I?”
    Those cold glittering eyes were so hypnotic that the Marshal almost found himself saying that he thought that he had something to do with that mysterious painting, especially as he felt quite sure of it by this time. He was also sure that if he did come out and say it Benozzetti wouldn’t care a bit. He was living on some other plane where it wouldn’t matter and where the Marshal couldn’t get at him. However, he didn’t say it. Apart from anything else he had a feeling that Benozzetti was quite capable of saying it himself. So he contented himself with murmuring, “Well, perhaps I’ve made a mistake and disturbed you for nothing …”
    “Not in the least. I didn’t mean to tease you. Landini was a friend and colleague and, yes, he was a critic but not so much of a fool as most of them. Ah, the experts, Marshal, the experts! Have you ever given them much thought?”
    “I—no, no. Art experts, you mean? No.”
    Benozzetti leaned forward and whispered fiercely, “Naked!”
    “What?” Was that why his eyes were so frightening? Was he a madman?
    “Stark naked! The Emperor’s new clothes! Naked as the day they were born. Naked in their ignorance and arrogance. Tell me, did you ever hear of a musicologist who couldn’t play a note? A literary critic who couldn’t even read or write? Even a football manager who’d never played a game in his life? Have you?”
    “I don’t suppose I have …”
    “And
I
don’t suppose you have, either. But the art expert, now, there’s a really special man. He can’t draw, he can’t paint and he can’t sculpt but he feels himself qualified to pronounce judgement on Leonardo, on Botticelli, on Michelangelo. A miracle of a man, wouldn’t you say? He can’t express the simplest concept with any visual or manual skill of his own but he can sit in judgement on genius. Ah, where would the world be without the expert—you know what he’s there for, don’t you? He’s there at the service of the art dealer, not art or the artist. Now Landini, not being the worst of them, knew that was true. He wore the Emperor’s new clothes with considerable panache and made himself a fine career out of doing it, but he had no illusions. And he had taste, he wasn’t just a cataloguer. The rest of them might as well make laundry lists since lists are all they know how to make—you don’t have a list of your own in your pocket, by any chance?”
    “A list?”
    “All right. I just wondered. If I’m not mistaken you people have a specialist group that takes something of an interest in paintings.”
    “Oh, I see … yes. No, no, I’m just—”
    “A friend of the family.”
    “That’s right,” said the Marshal, his gaze becoming duller andblanker in retreat from those glittery cold eyes. Once, long ago in the early years of his marriage, his wife had screamed at him in exasperation, “Can’t you even quarrel? Answer me! Don’t just roll over and play dead!’ And he had been amazed. By this time he had seen his plump, peaceable son Giovanni do just that when attacked by his quick and nervous younger brother, so now he knew it was true. He also knew it was effective. “Though, as I said, more of a friend of young Marco’s. Landini himself, now, I only met him once and that’d be over ten years ago. You’re not a married man yourself?”
    “No.”
    “No, I thought not. That would be something you’re working on, would it, under all that polythene? Clay, you said?”
    “A nude figure. That’s just one of the reasons why I never married. Everyone assumes that artists sleep with their models. A wife would have given me no peace.”
    “Yes, well,