The Icon Thief

by Alec Nevala-Lee

  “It isn’t the police I’m worried about,” Wolfe said. “I’ll be keeping an eye on you.”

  Turning away, she closed the door in Powell’s face. A second later, she was gone.

  13

  “So I have considered the plan, and have decided to make one change,” Sharkovsky said. “Misha, as you know, has a bad leg. Better to go with a younger man. Zhenya, not Misha, will accompany you to the party.”

  Ilya, the sweat falling in pearls from his face, was surprised by this. They had been seated in the banya, eyes closed, for nearly an hour. Beside them, Zhenya, who had just poured more water onto the stones, returned to the bench. Taking a damp bundle of birch branches, he lashed himself with the switch, which made a soft whack each time it struck his shoulders, the leaves flying to either side.

  Looking down at the wooden floor, Ilya exhaled. Changing the plan now was asking for trouble, but he knew that he had no choice. It was not the first time he had remained silent. Killing the Armenians had been a mistake. With four men dead so close to home, it would not be long before the police came calling. But this was not something that he could ever say aloud.

  He brushed the fragments of leaves from his skin. “It makes no difference to me.”

  “Good,” Sharkovsky said. A moment later, as if he had only been waiting for the outcome of this exchange, Zhenya tossed his switch aside and slid off the bench, leaving his towel behind. The door opened and closed with a flash of white. Through the rectangle of glass that looked onto the main bathhouse, Ilya saw the young enforcer plunge into the pool without bothering to shower off first.

  He turned back to the old man. Naked except for a towel and hat of felt, his shoulders standing out like pinions, Sharkovsky was a poor forked thing, a pair of stars etched below his collarbone, a rose over his heart. Now he spoke without opening his eyes: “There is something I have wanted to ask you for some time. You were in prison. You have been with Vasylenko for years. So where are your tattoos?”

  Ilya looked away. “I had tattoos once. Vasylenko arranged to have them removed.”

  “I see.” Sharkovsky coughed. “I was wondering if it was because you were a Jew. I have known such men, brave ones, who refused to get tattoos because they said that the body was a gift from God—”

  “Some don’t get tattoos,” Ilya said. “Others don’t pierce their ears. Like my mother.”

  Sharkovsky’s eyes opened. “I didn’t know that Scythians had mothers. I thought they were raised on mare’s milk. She is alive?”

  Ilya shook his head, dislodging a cascade of drops. “Both are dead. Many years now.”

  The old man gave him a look of what might have been sympathy. “Your parents died when you were in Vladimir?”

  Ilya saw that he was being tested, although the terms of the examination remained obscure. There was a cult of motherhood within the bratva, and many of its men bore tattoos testifying to a mother’s love, in both the subjective and objective genitive, but it was an abstract devotion to the mother of thieves. Ilya had never known a thief who would give his own mother so much as a kopek.

  He decided to avoid the question. “When I met Vasylenko, he became my family.”

  Sharkovsky only grunted. Ilya looked at the floor again, fighting a wave of unwanted memories. Even if his words had been on the rhetorical side, they were close to the truth. During his first year in prison, Vasylenko had been nothing but a scarecrow at the edge of the exercise yard, wearing loose coveralls and a cross of pounded aluminum. Then, one morning, the vor had cornered him at the fence. Before Ilya could speak, Vasylenko had turned over his crucifix, revealing what was on the other side. Scratched into the metal had been a star made of two linked triangles.

  “For my mother,” Vasylenko had said, turning it over again. “You understand?”

  Ilya, astonished, had been about to reply, but the old man had silenced him. Later that night, a guard had brought him to Vasylenko’s cell, where the vor, hands tucked into his robe, had spoken softly:

  “I know about your parents. The snowfall, I hear, was heavy that day. When they lit the fire, they had no way of knowing that the flue was blocked. If it is any consolation, they would have died in their sleep, which is more than most of us are granted.” The old man had paused. “I imagine that you blame yourself.”

  Ilya had said nothing. He had not spoken of the circumstances of his parents’ death to anyone in the prison, and was not pleased to learn that Vasylenko had been looking into his past.

  “But it wasn’t your fault that you weren’t there,” Vasylenko had continued. “I know how it begins. You make a few deals on the black market to feed your family. Then, one day, some shit of a cop is killed when a deal goes wrong. The Chekists arrest you, decide that you are the perfect one to take the fall, and with that, your life is over. So much wasted potential—”

  Ilya, thinking of the star scratched into the cross, had found his voice at last. “How do you know this?”

  Vasylenko had smiled. “Do you know the story of the tzaddikim? They are the thirty-six righteous men for whose sake God permits the world to endure. They live in poverty, unknown, unhonored—”

  “Yes, I know,” Ilya had said sharply. “Some even sin, to avoid the charge of vanity.”

  “Or, perhaps, to secure a greater good. You see, there are many kinds of oppression. The oligarchs are as bad as the Chekists. They would replace wolves with foxes. They fail to see that the idea of order itself is to blame, which is why the righteous men have always labored in secret.”

  “But none of the tzaddikim knows who he is. And you still say you’re one of them?”

  “No. But they do exist, under other names. Men like us have been victims for far too long. I am offering you a chance to restore the balance.” Vasylenko had studied his face. “I see promise in you. You have the eyes of a Scythian. A wanderer of the steppes. But even he needs a home—”

  Ilya’s head jerked upward. For a second, he had felt himself in Vladimir again, and was surprised to find himself in the banya, years removed from prison, with another old man watching him from across the bench.

  Sharkovsky was regarding him with evident curiosity. “Come. Let’s talk outside.”

  They rose, the sweat pouring down their bodies. Outside, the bathhouse was clean and bright. Framed hockey jerseys hung on the walls, along with admonitions not to run by the pool. A handful of bathers lounged in plastic chairs, paging through newspapers or watching the plasma screens mounted to the ceiling. Zhenya had left a few leaves on the water, but was nowhere to be seen.

  A whisper of cool air caused Ilya’s flesh to prickle. At his side, Sharkovsky stretched, his ligaments creaking. “You seem displeased that Zhenya will be playing a larger role. Does it bother you?”

  Ilya’s eyes fell on the leaves drifting on the mirror of the pool. “He’s inexperienced.”

  “Yes. And he’s no genius. But every wise man was once a young fool. And I have an old friend who says that even you, once upon a time, were not so different.” Sharkovsky finished his stretch, then padded over to the cold plunge. “But you still haven’t told me why you removed your tattoos.”

  Thinking of Vasylenko, Ilya reminded himself that these two men, for all their visible differences, were not so dissimilar after all. “For my work. The man who stands out gets killed.”

  “Which is something that not everyone understands.” Sharkovsky’s eyes flicked toward the nearest television. “You see?”

  Ilya followed his gaze. On a news broadcast, a man was being interviewed about the rumors of war in South Ossetia. Although the volume was turned down, Ilya recognized the speaker at once, and experienced a moment of almost tender recognition, as if it were a dear friend. He felt the past fall blessedly away, replaced by the necessity of what was to come. It was Anzor Archvadze.

  14

  “Never trust anything you read online,” Tanya said, pushing up her shutter shades. “I’m not just talking about the web, either. A scanned
book is easy to search, but you lose crucial information. When you see a book in a library, you can tell if it’s been read to pieces or never been touched. You can see which pages have been thumbed the most. And you can see other things, too. Here, smell this.”

  Taking a folder from her purse, Tanya withdrew a yellowed sheet of paper, which she thrust into Maddy’s hands. They were seated together at a café table in Bryant Park. The lawn itself was closed for reseeding, so they had claimed a spot at the edge of the grass, among the flocks of office workers.

  Maddy glanced doubtfully at the page, which was covered in faded copperplate. At her friend’s urging, she raised it to her nose. Beneath the odor of old dust, she caught a whiff of something acidic. “Vinegar?”

  Tanya took the letter back. “Exactly. In the eighteenth century, in towns where there were cases of cholera, vinegar was used to disinfect correspondence. A graduate student I know is assembling a map of outbreaks using letters at the Frick. He goes through our archives and smells the pages one by one. You can’t get that kind of information from a scanned file.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” Maddy said. “So what exactly do you have for me?”

  Tanya handed her a sheaf of photocopies. “A lot of the material is vague or contradictory, but as far as I can tell, the Rosicrucians first appear in two pamphlets printed in Germany in the early seventeenth century.”

  Maddy found the title pages. “The Fama Fraternitatis and Confessio Fraternitatis.”

  “That’s right. They tell the story of Christian Rosencreutz, who, two centuries earlier, had traveled through the Middle East to study alchemy and magic. When he returned to Europe, he founded a secret brotherhood of learned men. At first, there were eight members, all bachelors who took an oath of celibacy. Later, their numbers increased to thirty-six. They were called the college of invisibles.”

  “Okay. So we’re talking about a secret society. But what were they trying to do?”

  “Nobody knows. The manifestoes hint at a great secret, but they don’t say what it is. The usual explanation is that they wanted to reform the state using alchemical methods. The goal of the alchemist isn’t to transmute base metals into gold, but to transmute himself into a higher level of being. That’s one possible meaning of the rose and the cross—life arising from lifelessness. The Rosicrucians, if they existed, may have been trying to do something similar for all of Europe.”

  “So it’s a political organization,” Maddy said. “They’re trying to start a revolution.”

  “But not in the usual sense. Remember, this is only a century after Luther, whose coat of arms, incidentally, was a rose and a cross. People are disillusioned by wars of politics and religion, so the Rosicrucians propose an alternative reformation. A secret one. Which is ultimately the only kind that works. Revolutions, like Saturn, tend to devour their own children.”

  Maddy saw this quotation scrawled in the margin. “Let me see if I understand. Most revolutions end up repeating the mistakes of the regime they try to bring down. But a secret revolution—”

  “—is harder to corrupt. Yes, that’s one possibility. And there are precedents for this. There was a real vigilante group, the Vehmgericht, that operated in Germany in the years before the manifestoes appeared, conducting secret tribunals and executions. It was based on the premise that underground justice is the only kind that won’t become compromised. And its symbol was a red cross.”

  “But that’s what I don’t get. If secrecy was so important, why did they go public?”

  Tanya slid closer, the metal legs of her chair leaving grooves in the gravel. “I agree. It’s strange. And no one knows why the manifestoes, if they were real, were published in the first place. Some think that they were meant to introduce certain ideas into public discourse. If so, it worked. Rosicrucian fraternities were founded in every country. And they had a real influence on the history of art.”

  “This is what I’m especially curious about,” Maddy said, recalling her conversation with Lermontov. “I know that Joséphin Péladan, the founder of the Rosicrucians in Paris, commissioned paintings with mystical themes—”

  “Which isn’t even the most interesting part. André Breton, the founder of Surrealism, repeatedly mentions what he calls the great invisibles, a secret society that has shaped the course of history while hiding in plain sight. The Surrealists, it seems, required an existing grammar of myths for their paintings and poetry, and these stories offered exactly the kind of system they needed.”

  “And what about Duchamp?” Maddy asked. “Where does he fit into all of this?”

  “He’s right in the middle of it. We already know that he was friends with Erik Satie, the chapel master of the Rosicrucians in Paris, but his connection with these movements goes back even further. Look here.”

  Tanya turned to a reproduction of The Large Glass, Duchamp’s first mature work, which looked like a freestanding window that had acquired a web of cracks and ominous encrustations. “You have two vertical panes of glass, one above the other. In the upper pane, there’s the bride, like an angelic insect, and in the lower pane, the bachelors, nine cylindrical forms surrounded by alchemical pumps, grinders, and tubes. Remind you of anything?”

  “The original members of the Rosicrucians. But weren’t there eight bachelors?”

  “Duchamp’s original proposal had eight. He added the ninth later, to represent himself. Some critics even believe that the readymades are alchemical symbols. The urinal, the bicycle wheel, and the hanging shovel stand for the alembic, the wheel of life, and the pendulum. Duchamp was also fascinated by the alchemical concept of the androgyne. He posed in drag for his friend Man Ray, and signed his works with the name of a female alter ego. You know what that name was?”

  “Rrose Sélavy,” Maddy said, struck by the coincidence. “What about Étant Donnés?”

  “This is the strangest part. According to the manifestoes, when Christian Rosencreutz died, the location of his tomb was lost. A hundred and twenty years later, the Rosicrucians were renovating their palace when they uncovered a secret door behind a wall. Inside, they found a vault lit by an artificial sun, as well as Rosencreutz’s miraculously preserved body.”

  “So you’re saying that the installation is a reference to the tomb of Christian Rosencreutz.” Maddy weighed this for a moment. “But it doesn’t fit Duchamp’s personality. He was a skeptic. He wasn’t part of any movement. He’s the last person who would buy into any form of mysticism.”

  “I know. And his own statements on the subject are inconsistent. Sometimes, in passing, he seems to admit an interest in alchemy, but when the topic is raised in more formal interviews, he denies it. Which, of course, is exactly what you’d expect a real Rosicrucian to say.”

  Maddy flipped through the rest of the file. “What about the stuff involving Russia?”

  “Here, for once, we’re dealing with verifiable facts,” Tanya said. “Russia has always been mad for secret societies. The Rosicrucian order in Moscow was the first such group to use code names and systems of confession, which were later imitated by the Bolsheviks. In the end, they were crushed by the Soviets, although there are rumors that they only went underground. And the rose remained a symbol of revolution.” In the margin of the page, Tanya quickly sketched a fist with a rose. “You know what happened in Georgia, right?”

  “So what are you saying? The Rose Revolution was influenced by the Rosicrucians?”

  “I don’t know. But if I wanted to start a revolution in that part of the world, I’d take a long hard look at what had been tried before.” Tanya glanced at her watch. “Listen, I’m going to be late. Are we good?”

  “Very good.” Maddy handed her an envelope. It contained a hundred dollars in cash, leaving her with something less than seventy in her checking account. “For your trouble. Buy yourself a real bike.”

  Tanya accepted the honorarium with a smile. They parted ways at the corner, where Tanya climbed onto a fixed gear bicycle and Maddy took t
he train back to work. As she rode, she turned her friend’s argument over in her head, concluding that it was highly unlikely. Collectors didn’t buy art for political reasons. They bought it out of vanity, greed, and, occasionally, genuine aesthetic pleasure. The idea that anyone would pay eleven million dollars for a painting because of a secret revolutionary tradition struck her as inherently absurd.

  Back at the office, she turned to a more promising line of research. A few phone calls had established that Archvadze was indeed throwing a party for his girlfriend’s birthday. As she dialed the first number on her list of possible guests, she reminded herself that she was acting for the fund. She would see Archvadze and take a few photos of his collection. That was all. If she had yet to tell Reynard, it was only because she didn’t want to oversell herself. Or so, at least, she tried to believe.

  Her first two conversations were dead ends. The third was with the editor of an art journal in which the fund occasionally planted stories to influence the value of its portfolio. In response to a leading question and a few tidbits about an upcoming sale, the editor revealed that Griffin Wainwright, one of the journal’s senior critics, was attending the party at Archvadze’s mansion that weekend.

  Maddy pumped a fist in the air. Griffin was unfailingly savage in his opinions, single, and painfully shy. Hanging up, she checked a few details on her computer, then dialed the critic’s direct line.

  Griffin seemed pleased to hear her voice. “How’s life among the money changers?”

  “Same job, better view,” Maddy said, one eye out her office window. “In fact, there’s something I’d like to talk to you about. The fund is looking into some pieces at the Vered Gallery in East Hampton, but we need an expert’s opinion, and so of course I thought of you. I know that you’re going to be up there this week, and was wondering if you’d like to have a drink on Saturday.”