By the time he had shown his last illustration—a whirlwind of leaves, containing the Cumaean Sybil’s prophecies—and wrapped up the lecture with Dante’s closing invocation to “the Love that moves the sun and the other stars”—he was determined to meet her. But when the lights came up in the exhibit hall, a bunch of hands went up with questions.
“How will you go about determining the illustrator of this volume? Have you got any leads already?”
“Was Florence as prominent a publishing center as Pisa or Venice?”
And, from an eager academic in back, “What would you say about Ruskin’s comment, concerning the flux of consciousness essential to the ‘pathetic fallacy,’ as it pertains to the Comedy?”
David did his best to field the queries, but he also knew that he’d been talking for over an hour, and that most of the audience would be eager to get up, stretch, and have another drink. In the lobby area just outside the exhibit hall, he could see waiters in black tie balancing silver trays of champagne glasses. The smell of hot hors d’oeuvres wafted in on the central heating.
When he finally stepped down from the dais, several members of the audience shook his hand, a couple of the older gentlemen clapped him on the back, and Dr. Armbruster beamed at him. He knew she’d been hoping he would hit one out of the park, and he sort of felt that he had. Apart from his initial anxiety, he hadn’t missed a step.
But what he really wanted to do was find the lady in black, who had apparently escaped the exhibit hall already. In the lobby, long trestle tables had been set up with damask tablecloths and silver serving dishes. The profs were already lined up elbow patch to elbow patch, their little plates piled high.
But the lady in black was nowhere to be seen.
“David,” Dr. Armbruster was saying, as she took him by the elbow and steered him toward an elegant, older couple holding their champagne flutes, “I don’t know if you’ve met the Schillingers. Joseph is also an Amherst man.”
“But way before your time,” Schillinger said, shaking his hand with a firm grasp. He looked like a tall and ancient crane, with a beaked nose and white hair. “I quite enjoyed your talk.”
“Thanks.”
“And I would love to be kept apprised of your work on the book. I lived in Europe for quite a while, and—”
“Joseph is being modest,” Dr. Armbruster broke in. “He was our ambassador to Liechtenstein.”
“And I started my own collection of Old Masters drawings. Still, I never saw anything quite like these. The renderings of the rings of Hell are especially macabre, to say the very least.”
David never failed to be impressed at the credentials and the backgrounds of the people he met at the Newberry functions, and he did his best to stay focused and courteous to the Schillingers. The former ambassador even pressed his card on him and offered to assist his research in any way he could.
“When it comes to getting access to private archives and such,” he said, “I still have some strings I can pull on the other side of the pond.”
But the whole time they were talking, David kept one eye out for the lady in black; and when he could finally break away, he found Dr. Armbruster again and asked if she knew where she might have gone, or who it might have been.
“You say she came in midway through your talk?”
“Yes, and sat all the way in back.”
“Oh, then I wouldn’t have seen her. I was off supervising the food.”
A waiter passed by, carrying a tray with one lone cheese puff left.
“I wonder if we’ll have enough,” she said, before excusing herself. “Those professors eat like locusts.”
David shook a few more hands, fielded a few more casual questions, then, as the last guests filtered out, he slipped up a back staircase to his office—a cubbyhole crammed with books and papers—and hung his sport coat and tie on the back of the door. He kept them there for those rare occasions, like the lecture, when he had to dress up. Then he pulled on his coat and gloves and went out by a side door.
Ex-ambassador Schillinger and his wife were just getting into the back of a black BMW sedan as a sturdy, bald chauffeur held the door. A couple of professors, deep in conversation, were still huddled by the stairs. The last thing David wanted was to have them spot him and come up with some other arcane question, so he put up the hood of his coat and set off across the park.