by Betsy Draine
“‘Unsettled’ was the term Tom used,” I said. “I see what he meant.”
“You could say that. For now, the shop, my shop, was buying the items at Morgan’s.”
A thought occurred to me. “Let me see that bill of sale again,” I said, returning to the file drawer in Charlie’s desk, if indeed the desk was his. Sure enough, the bill was made out to the shop, a detail that hadn’t registered with me before. “So that icon and whatever else Charlie may have bought belongs to you.”
“I suppose so. But Tom Keogh won’t see it that way. Say, you don’t think it really could be worth something, do you?”
“The icon? I wouldn’t count on it.”
“After all, somebody went to the trouble of stealing it.” Toby raised his eyebrows, considering the prospect of a windfall. I’d seen that look on his face before, whenever he thought he was cadging a piece for his shop that he could turn around for a quick profit. When that happened, he usually was disappointed.
“Don’t get carried away,” I said. “Remember The Maltese Falcon? What was that line in it about greediness and dreams?”
Toby made a sound between a snicker and a snort. “‘The stuff that dreams are made of,’” he quoted, with a rueful grin.
3
IN EARLY MARCH, daybreak sometimes starts with a streak of rose over the dark Bodega hills. As dawn swells, I like to be seated in the kitchen looking out at our deck, so I can watch the sky shift from orange to pink, with a hint of green, giving way to daylight blue. Sometimes I just sit, soaking in the view. Other days I’m grading papers or answering e-mails but looking up every minute to catch the kaleidoscope of color before it’s washed out by the clear light of morning.
On this day, however, in the aftermath of Charlie’s murder, I rose late and sat in the living room brooding over a hot mug of tea and following the white sun as it hovered in the distance over Tomales Bay. Toby was sleeping in. He heals best by sleep. I cure what ails me by keeping busy, and now I was sketching out the best possible day. I would make some calls and then get the kitchen ready for a comforting breakfast once Toby was up. He and I were going to spend all day together. We’d made the plan in our exhaustion the previous night. We’d get a soft start to the morning, and then he’d drive with me to Berkeley, to consult with Al Miller.
Before Toby was up, I put in a call to my sister, Angie. Since she lives on Cape Ann north of Boston, she can take a call when it’s dawn in California. About then she’s due for her midmorning coffee break at the coolest beauty salon in Gloucester, where she’s made her way up from manicurist to top stylist in just three years. I texted her to call me when she was free from clients, and sure enough, she was back to me in five minutes.
“Hi, Angie, we’re still on for your visit,” I assured her. “But I want to let you know we’ve had an awful thing happen here. Toby’s business partner has been murdered, and I’m helping the sheriff’s department look into some art that’s missing.”
We took some time going over the story, and I accomplished what I’d aimed to do—warning Angie that I might be less available than we’d planned, but making her feel as welcome as ever. It was true what I told her. Toby and I were in need of those special gifts she always brings with her, a light touch and a shot of joy. It makes me happy that Toby delights in Angie’s zaniness as much as I do. You see, Angie, who is twelve years younger than I am, is a man-magnet. Since nursery school, she’s been attracting the opposite sex and finding that delightful. Unfortunately, her enthusiasm isn’t always matched by her discrimination. She’s been passionately involved with fellow students, a musician, a writer, a magician, a fashion photographer, a lawyer, a yogi, two grocery store clerks, one of her teachers, and a few first-class swindlers. Each time she’s convinced she’s found her soul mate.
Last summer, we helped extricate her from a relationship with a bored barista who wanted her to lend him money for a cockeyed business scheme. His idea was to buy a camper and convert it into a van for hauling motorcycles from New England to Florida in the winter. His premise was that bikers would pay to ship their cycles so they wouldn’t have to ride them down to Florida themselves—a dubious business plan, as Toby pointed out. There was supposed to be room left over in the camper for Angie and the boyfriend to travel with the motorcycles and thus benefit from a paid winter vacation. Of course, it didn’t happen. Angie woke up and smelled the coffee, and the boyfriend’s blend was bitter. So just before sinking her trust fund into the camper, she backed out, on her own accord. There may be some in my family who are more startled than amused by Angie’s unpredictable antics, but Toby and I are in the fan club, and we were glad she was coming.
“You’re going to bring your scissors, right? I haven’t had a haircut since the last one you gave me.”
“My God, that was Thanksgiving!”
“I know, but I don’t have much time for that sort of thing, and you’re the only one I trust anyhow. Let’s not even talk about how that diva in Santa Rosa scalped me last year.”
“Well, if you’d get your hair cut more than once every six months, the stylist wouldn’t be so tempted to shear you like a sheep.”
She could talk. Born with bones, as my mother used to say. That means the rugged jaw and high cheekbones that characterize the Boston Brahmins and signal “class” in our area of New England. Plus skinny genes, smooth blond hair that can be styled any which way, and, let’s face it, gloriously God-given beauty. I am five-five to her five-eleven (though her dating profile says five-nine), size 10 to her size 6, brunette to her blond, short-bobbed to her long-maned, and presentable-looking to her gorgeous. I can deal with that. She can’t. She’s always trying to make me over into her likeness, or maybe it’s some idealized vision of her beloved older sister.
Anyhow, I realized we’d better change the subject before she started in on my list of chronic grooming errors. “You’ve rented a car with GPS, right?” I asked. “It’s a winding road to get here, but it will be really pretty.”
“Yeah, the car has one and they’re usually fine right up to ‘You have arrived at your destination.’ What does your place look like?”
“It’s the cedar-sided ranch house at the top of the hill, and there’s nothing but pebbles and poppies in the front. Yellow ones.”
“Sounds nice. I’ll call you when I leave the airport.” Only two days till the sisters would be reunited. It had been a long time since Thanksgiving.
I made a second call that morning, to Rose Cassini, the woman who had consigned the icon that Charlie bought at the auction. We were discussing a time to meet when Toby emerged from the bedroom. Eavesdropping on the call, he pointed to his chest to say that he was coming along. So I set our arrival for eleven the next day, allowing for Toby’s slow mornings.
Two hours and six pieces of French toast later, we were on our way down the coast to meet with Al Miller. Al lives in a cozy Victorian on a crowded street in the Berkeley Hills. It was difficult, as usual, to find a parking space in his neighborhood, and once we did, it was a bit of a hike to his address. As we climbed the familiar wooden stairs to his front porch, I found my thoughts drifting back to my graduate school days. Al always invited his seminar students to his home, and I had happy memories of evenings sitting on his living room floor and joining in earnest debates fueled by generous amounts of wine and cheese. I was in his Giotto seminar, but he also taught a seminar on Russian icons, and though the subject itself wasn’t a draw, he had a devoted following of graduate students who prized his irreverence and wit. I remember the laugh he got one day when he was lecturing on Michelangelo’s statue of David. Michelangelo posed David in the nude, with a slingshot on his shoulder as he faces off against Goliath. But the great artist made a blunder, claimed Al, because why would David show up on the battlefield without his pants?
Al liked to shock us with his views on religion. He maintained that theology was a form of literary criticism, since its arguments were chiefly about works of fiction (the Bible, t
he Koran, and so on). And he was fond of saying that if you picked a group of kids at random hanging around a street corner, any one of them could have designed a kinder universe than the one we’ve got. Yes, Al enjoyed getting a rise out of us.
I once asked him why he had chosen to specialize in early Christian art, given his irreligious views. Would anyone, he replied, expect him to be an animist if he taught Aboriginal art? Half-seriously, he added that his field was less crowded than some others and so he felt he could make a mark in it. In fact, he was an excellent scholar. “But the real reason, Nora, is that religious art can be just as beautiful as other kinds of art, and beautiful is what art history is about. Everything else is secondary.” I’ve never forgotten that.
Still, he was an odd member of his field. Usually faculty gravitate toward subjects that are in sync with their beliefs. Most professors of medieval art I’ve known have been believers, while those who teach contemporary art have not. You might ask, what about folks like me, who teach Impressionism? Considering my colleagues, I’d say we’re all over the map. As for myself, I had a traditional Catholic upbringing, but while I still attend the occasional Mass and sometimes even take communion, my views on religion are, well, flexible. Toby, now, is the real skeptic in the family. His parents are mainline Protestants, but he jokingly refers to himself as an “Orthodox Reprobate.”
Those were some of the stray thoughts running through my mind as Toby and I stood waiting on the porch for the doorbell to be answered. We weren’t kept long. Al hadn’t changed much in the years since I’d been his student. He was short, slim, and still dapper, with a full head of curly hair now gone silver and a trim white beard that reminded me of Civil War portraits. In class, he used to favor sports jackets and bow ties, but today he greeted us wearing khakis and a bulky hand-knit sweater. His wife, Irma, knitted.
“Come in, come in,” he said, beckoning. “I can’t wait to hear more about your missing icon. You’ve got my curiosity up.” He gave me a hug and shook Toby’s hand. “So good to see you both. Make yourselves at home.” He led us into the living room, where a cozy fire crackled in the hearth. Offering us the couch, he pulled up a wooden chair for himself. The room was furnished just as I remembered, with Arts and Crafts–period furniture and oriental carpets, much to Toby’s liking.
“How are your courses going, Nora, and your work?” We made small talk as we settled in. “Will you take tea?” A tray with a steaming pot was waiting for us on the coffee table.
“Yes, that would be lovely.”
“Now, what’s this all about?”
Toby recounted the events surrounding Charlie’s death and what was known so far about the missing icon, while Al fussed with the tea cups and pouring. “Charlie bought it at auction for only eight hundred dollars,” I added, “but we think it may be more valuable than that.” I pulled the auction catalog out of my bag.
Al cast a disdainful glance at it. “Never mind the catalog. If it’s Morgan’s, the description won’t be worth a damn. You mentioned photos. May I see them?” He placed his porcelain cup on its saucer.
Toby took an envelope out of his jacket and pulled out the photos for Al, who spread them out on the coffee table. He set aside the one of the back of the panel and glanced quickly over the others. “The archangel Michael, yes. Commonplace treatment, early modern period. Might be worth something to a believer but not much to a collector. Eight hundred dollars? Fair enough. Disappointed?” He raised his eyebrows.
“I don’t know if I am or not,” said Toby. “We’re trying to figure out if it could have been a motive for murder.”
“But wait. That’s just what the front tells us, and it’s not the front that interests me.” Al picked up the photo of the back of the panel. Holding it between thumb and forefinger, he continued: “Do you see these horizontal bands of wood attached to the back? They’re supports to keep the panel from warping. The way they were made and the way they’re attached, as well as the patina of the wood, tell me that this panel is much older than the painting. How much older I can’t say. I might be able to tell if I had the actual panel. But I already know that this image of Michael might be covering something else, and if so, the question is, what? There’s no way of telling from a photograph.”
“You mean there might be another painting underneath this one?” asked Toby.
“It’s possible,” Al replied. “In fact it’s even likely that there are traces of an older painting underneath. But I can’t say anything about its age or condition or quality without examining the physical work.”
“But isn’t it possible,” I asked, “that the maker of this icon found an old panel to work on and that’s all we’re looking at, a recent painting on an older support?”
“Of course there’s a chance of that. But icons in Russia were never regarded as mere works of art. They were objects of devotion. No one ever discarded an old icon just because it had been discolored or damaged. They were conserved and used over and over again by the next generation of artists because the panels themselves were considered sacred.” Al finished the last few sips of his tea.
“You see,” he continued, “when a painting was no longer legible, another artist would paint over it, sometimes just to bring out the original by highlighting the lines and refreshing the colors, restoring what was in danger of being lost. Yet sometimes the old painting was too far gone, and when that was the case, the artist would start over again on top of the old, maybe even with a new composition.”
“How often would that happen?” asked Toby.
“All the time. The drying oil used by the old masters to fix and intensify their colors naturally darkened over the years. And if the icons were hung in churches, which most of them were, the soot from votive candles and incense was absorbed by the varnish, which only made matters worse. After eighty or a hundred years, the original painted surface became impenetrable.”
“You mean, the image would completely disappear?” asked Toby.
“That’s right. Today we know how to clean the panels to restore their original luster, but in times past the only solution was to repaint the original icon or to paint over it on a new background. That’s why some masterpieces of earlier centuries have come down to us in the form of weak copies of the originals.”
Toby edged forward on the couch. “So underneath the angel there could be a painting that’s centuries older.”
“As I said, possibly, but even if that’s so, what might be left of it can’t be determined without testing.”
“But if somebody had a suspicion there was a more valuable painting hidden under the angel, that could be a reason to steal it.”
“Perhaps so. Let me show you what I’ve been talking about. I’ve prepared a little demonstration for you.” Al got up and led us toward the back of the house, where he had set up his study and workshop, talking as we walked. “I’ve been examining an icon for the Berkeley Art Museum. It was donated by an alumnus. They’ve asked me to value it and, in response to my suggestion, to clean it, which, as you’ll see, it badly needs. I’ve done some preliminary tests, and now I’m ready for the next step. Unless I miss my guess, you’re in for a surprise.”
On a workbench in the studio, cushioned by a towel, a rectangular icon rested on its back. The central area of the panel was recessed. The board, including the frame, was carved in one piece. The icon may have been a foot long and almost as wide. At first glance, the central area appeared to be completely black, as if the surface had been expunged. However, when Al held it up at a slant under raking light, I could dimly perceive the outlines of a familiar subject, a three-quarter length portrait of the Virgin and Child.
“The Mother of God of Vladimir,” Al announced. The name, he explained, came from the city in which the original was painted in the twelfth century. The icon was said to produce miracles, and so the subject and its treatment were copied again and again on the same panel over the years, down to the present day.
“Although sometimes,
” Al remarked, “these so-called wonder-working icons backfired.”
“How so?” I asked.
“Take the Virgin of Vavarsky Gate, which was a famous wonder-working icon in Moscow. When a plague hit the city during the reign of Catherine the Great, crowds of sick people flocked around the icon to pray for relief. What happened was they just spread the infection. Poor bastards died by the thousands.” He shook his head in bemused disapproval.
“You can’t blame that on the icon,” I pointed out.
“I blame it on wishful thinking and superstition.” He raised an eyebrow. “Anyhow, as to this one,” he said as he redirected our attention to the panel, “it’s an indifferent version of the Vladimir icon, maybe mid-nineteenth century. But let’s look at the reverse.” He turned it over gently in his hands and pointed to the narrow strips of wood spanning the back and held in position by wooden pegs. “You see these? Before the fourteenth century, the support slats were fastened with pegs like this, and occasionally also reinforced by two additional slats set into the top and bottom outside edge of the panel.” He pointed out the vertical slats. “The practice was revived in the eighteenth century, and that’s what I think we have here.”
The back of Charlie’s icon looked different in the photo, and I said so.
“That’s right. The carpentry there is typical of the practice dating from the fifteenth century through the end of the seventeenth, when grooves were scraped into the panel and horizontal wedges were forced into them with a hammer.”
“So is that how old you think Charlie’s icon might be?” asked Toby.