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thing.”
    “They’re all the real thing, aren’t they? Until invariably, they’re proved not to be.”
    “For Christ sake, Mark. Don’t give me more hassles. I don’t need that now. I’ve had a shitty day. My stomach lining is in shreds. The old man’s been on my back all week. You know what this little beano means to him. As of the close of the fiscal year in July, we’re running a deficit of three million dollars. The board’s not in the best of moods. If this show’s as much of a flop as the last two, Van Nuys is out. And if you ask me”—his voice dropped to a harsh whisper—“so are we.”
    There was a pause as both men listened to each other’s breathing. When they spoke next, they did so simultaneously, their words colliding over the crackling phone wires.
    “Well, what does he want?” Manship had begun to simmer dangerously. “Wait—don’t tell me. I’ll tell you. He wants me to go to Florence and bring this lady back alive. Right?” Not waiting for an answer, he plunged straight on. “Then, on opening night we’re supposed to get her all gussied up like the Primavera in a diaphanous tunic, weave cornflowers through her hair, and have her stroll among the distinguished gathering, followed by an ensemble of lute and sackbut players from Local Six oh two, in velveteen leotards, while the TV cameras lunge after the procession like famished piranha, snapping photos for the six o’clock news.”
    “Shit,” Osgood muttered.
    “My sentiments exactly.”
    It wasn’t that Manship didn’t understand the mentality behind that sort of thing. On a practical level, he understood it only too well. On some other level, deeper, more visceral, he hated it with every bone in his body. But, of course, there was the inevitable budget crisis. Year after year, it was always the same thing—the harangues, the binges of penny-pinching, the veiled threats, the hand-wringing that usually foreshadowed draconian layoffs. They’d been in budget crises for the last six out of seven years. Each fiscal year began with some new cloud hovering above them.
    There was the guaranteed donor money; it came from the city, from corporations and foundations, and from a grudging pittance from the federal government. It could cover just so much. The rest had to come from subscribers and people walking in off the street. You had to get people into the museum some way. A megashow was one way to do it. The Simonetta was the hook.
    It had a certain kind of romantic, if not tacky, appeal—one of the great beauties of all time, a mistress of prominent Medici and great artists, the source of court and papal scandals. Savonarola, the mad monk, believed her to be the pure incarnation of evil. She was believed to be Botticelli’s probable model for the Birth of Venus and the Primavera, and, what’s more, the Chigi Madonna. And all of this set against the splendor and pageantry of medieval Tuscany. It was the stuff advertising copywriters and public-relations hacks dream of just the sort of thing to catch the interest of a bored and jaded media.
    Manship could see the press releases now being cobbled together by the publicity wizards; some spicy tale, mostly apocryphal, about the great-great—whatever she was— granddaughter of Isobel Cattaneo, known to history as the Simonetta. What was the matter with him? Couldn’t he see it was box office?
    “Bill, I’m up to my ass in problems here. There’s a million and one details still left …”
    “You don’t want to go to Florence,” Osgood bellowed into the phone, “don’t go.”
    Manship had to hold the receiver away from his ear while the rest of the tirade blew on.
    “What if she refuses to come?”
    The pause that followed told him that Osgood had never seriously entertained such a possibility. “She’ll come, all right,” he finally said, full of brash assurance. “She’s broke and alone.”
    “So am I.”
    “The difference is, you have an expense