The image of a woman lying in a field, cut in half at the waist, ran briefly through her mind. “So where do the Rosicrucians come in?”
“It’s no coincidence that the Holy Vehm used a red cross to mark the doors of their victims. When it became too dangerous for them to continue under the old dispensation, they resurfaced under a new name. And their legacy was of interest to many men. Do you know Proudhon? He was the first man to call himself an anarchist, and was obsessed with the Holy Vehm. For a time, he considered reviving it as a form of people’s justice. These plans never came to pass, but it’s likely that he discussed them with his closest confidant. It was, of course, Gustave Courbet.”
Maddy’s eyes returned to the drawn curtain. “Courbet and Proudhon were friends?”
“Is it so surprising? Courbet was a leading member of the radical scene in Paris. And it was their shared interest in these underground movements, as well as the occult, that inspired The Origin of the World. It’s a curious fact that this painting, as well as its copies, has always been displayed behind a curtain or screen, like a parody of the Holy of Holies. What’s the origin of the world? See for yourself. It isn’t God. It’s what an alchemist would call the bride.”
Maddy thought of Walter Arensberg, who had seen a vulva in the gravel strewn on a cathedral floor. “That’s your reading. But why should anyone else interpret it in the same way?”
“The best way to discover a painting’s true meaning is to see who paid money for it. The original version passed through the hands of many collectors, and was even seized for a time by the Soviet army, but in the end, it was sold to Jacques Lacan, the psychoanalyst, who hid it behind a sliding panel. His wife, Sylvia, had previously been married to a charming fellow named Georges Bataille. And if you want proof that Lacan bought the painting for esoteric reasons, you should look into what Bataille was doing before the war.”
A flashbulb went off inside Maddy’s head. “You’re talking about Acéphale.”
Lermontov smiled. “Very good. I always knew that you paid attention in class.”
Maddy, thinking back to graduate school, wondered if the impulse that led Lermontov to indulge in these speculations was also the urge that had caused him to reshape his own life, transforming himself from a drugstore heir into a worldly dispenser of wisdom. “But I still don’t understand why Archvadze would care, unless it has something to do with the Rose Revolution.”
“The rose is only a symbol,” Lermontov said. “I’m more concerned with what a man must do to effect change in that part of the world. One secret society is often built on the ruins of another, even if they have nothing else in common. And if I were trying to start a revolution in Georgia, I might find it useful to learn more about the forces that were already in place.”
“But what could a collector learn from Duchamp that he couldn’t learn elsewhere?”
“Great artists are sensitive instruments, tuned to the subtlest currents of their time. If Archvadze is as intelligent as he seems, he’ll seek insight from them, not from more mediocre minds. There’s a reason, you see, why his assistant wears red heptagrams on his cufflinks. They’re an air force roundel, yes, but they’re also the seal of the Ordo Templi Orientis.”
Lermontov rose and led her to the entrance of the gallery. “Bataille was another such instrument. Once you’ve considered this carefully, come see me again. And if you need anything else—”
“I’ll be all right,” Maddy said quickly. “I’ve had some bad moments, but things are under control.”
Lermontov smiled. “Control is the easy part. There’s no shortage of ambitious young women with veins of ice.” He glanced at the gallerina at the front desk, who was typing something with her headphones on. “The hard part, as Bataille knew, is knowing when to embrace the irrational. If we’d had more time together, I might have taught you this, too. There’s always a place for you here, if you want it—”
A few seconds later, before she had a chance to say goodbye, Maddy found herself on the sidewalk. It struck her, belatedly, that Lermontov had been offering her a job. A week ago, she would have dismissed the idea at once, but these days, the prospect of returning to the gallery was disconcertingly seductive.
In any case, there were more important matters to consider. Lermontov had given her an idea. There were two forces at work here. One was the art market; the other, the occult. For the most part, these groups occupied separate worlds, but there were areas where they might intersect. And it was precisely on that common border, Maddy told herself as she pulled out her cell phone, that the collector she was seeking was most likely to appear.
Tanya, to her credit, seemed to know precisely what Maddy had in mind. “Acéphale is easy,” Tanya said after Maddy had explained the idea. “I can pull together the material tonight.”
“Good,” Maddy said into her phone. As she went up the block, the distant prospect of the park reminded her of another possibility. “One more thing. I’d like you to look into Monte Verità. Have you heard of it?”
“Sounds vaguely familiar. Some kind of health resort in Germany, wasn’t it?”
“Actually, it’s in Switzerland. It’s only a hunch, but it might be useful. I’ll give you a call later to tell you more.”
After exchanging goodbyes, Maddy hung up. She was about to head for the subway, her mind already turning to this new plan of action, when she saw a familiar figure standing across the street.
She sucked in air at the sight. It was the man with the blond ponytail. She had nearly managed to convince herself that her stalker had been nothing but her imagination, and seeing him now, in daylight, seemed like an active act of defiance. Staring at his face, she felt, not fear, but an unexpected sense of anger.
Opening her purse, she removed her camera. Before the man across the street could react, she took his picture. He blinked, his brow creasing with dismay, and turned aside, limping rapidly up the sidewalk. She had intended to let him go, but instead, she found herself running after him, pushing aside the shoppers and tourists who were blocking her way.
“Hey,” Maddy said, her voice rising. “Who are you? Why are you following me?”
The man glanced back, his face unreadable, but did not slow his pace. A second later, he rounded a corner onto Columbus Circle. She followed, impeded by a sea of bodies. When she reached the intersection, he had vanished.
37
The following day, a clerk at the hotel recognized Ilya’s face on the news. An hour after the tip was called in, a tactical response team was assembled in the stairwell of the hotel’s seventh floor, along with Powell and Wolfe, who felt hemmed in by agents in hardshell vests.
Propping the door open with a rubber wedge, the unit poured silently into the corridor. The agent at the head of the line swiped a card through the lock of the hotel room, swearing under his breath when the green bulb on the keypad did not light up at once. When he swiped it a second time, there was a low electronic tone, and the door finally unlocked.
At a shout from the commander, a swarm of tactical agents entered the room. Powell and Wolfe followed close behind, only to find the unit looking around, disappointed, at nothing. The room was empty.
As the agents continued their sweep, Powell, whose arms and knees still ached from climbing the fence two days before, tried to infer as much as he could about the room’s absent occupant. In the bureau, there lay several neatly folded changes of clothes, their tags still attached. A receipt on the bedside table indicated that Ilya had paid in cash. “Looks like he has a lot of money to throw around.”
“And he paid cash for the room,” Wolfe said. “He wouldn’t have been carrying this much at the mansion.”
“Check for burglaries on the night of the heist. Look for houses within walking distance of the vineyard.” As he spoke, Powell searched the rest of the bedroom. The wastebaskets were empty, but on the carpet, something had been missed by the cleaning staff. He picked it up. It was a sliver of cardboard, curved like a potshe
rd, as if sliced from a length of tubing.
Looking at the piece of cardboard, he thought back to the scene in the study, remembering the camera bag that he had found wedged behind the shelves. He went over to the bureau, pulling it away from the wall. In the space behind the bureau, along with some scraps of plastic and cord, a frame and wooden armature had been concealed. It was the stretcher from a painting.
“Here we go,” Powell said quietly. “See what he did? He took the painting apart.”
Wolfe picked up the stretcher, which was very light. “So what did he do with it?”
Powell showed her the scrap of tubing. “He rolled it up. Which means that he probably had it with him at the courthouse. We thought he’d stashed it elsewhere, but he was carrying it the entire time.”
Feeling crowded by the tactical unit, they went into the hallway. “So he paid cash for the room, but used a stolen license, which means that he doesn’t have a passport,” Wolfe said. “Now that the license is blown, it’ll be hard for him to travel. He’s on his own. So he should be easy to flip.”
“Maybe,” Powell said, although he privately doubted that it would be so simple. “But he’ll go after Sharkovsky first.”
“Then he’ll come right to us. We’ve got men posted at the club around the clock.”
“I know.” Powell headed for the stairwell, going past the elevator, which had been disabled by the tactical team. This was something else to keep in mind. Barlow wanted to move against the club soon. In the confused aftermath at the courthouse, Sharkovsky had slipped away, but there was no doubt that his suspicions had been aroused. The criminal division was already transcribing tapes to prepare a warrant for a raid, possibly within the next few days.
In the meantime, there was nothing to do but push forward with the murder case. An hour later, they were at the ballet studio where the dead girl had worked, speaking with the head instructor. A glass partition in her office looked into the studio itself, its sprung floor streaked with chalk, where ten children were doing exercises at the barre, their daypacks heaped against the mirrored walls.
“Yes, I remember Karina,” the teacher said, removing the cotton gloves she had been wearing. She was tall and angular, her hair shot through with gray. “At the time, we had only seven principal dancers, so when she vanished, it hit us hard. We all hoped that she had gone home, but in my heart, I knew the truth.”
“She danced at a club in Brighton Beach,” Wolfe said. “Did she ever talk about this?”
“Only in passing. It wasn’t something she liked to discuss. Maybe she was afraid that we would disapprove. But I know very well what it takes to keep dancing.” The teacher looked out at the class in the next room. “I kept some of her things when we cleaned out her locker. Would you like to see them?”
When Wolfe said that they would, the teacher produced a carton from under her desk, removing the lid to reveal a folded leotard and a roll of surgical tape. Underneath, there lay a bottle of mouthwash and a package of antacids, along with a stack of photos and a clay figurine. Powell picked up this last object, turning it over in his hands. “What’s this?”
“It’s a toy from her hometown,” the teacher said. “Kargopol is famous for them. I believe it was made by her father—”
Powell examined it. The clay had been painted and fired into the image of a fairy with tangled green hair. For all its crudeness of execution, there was something uncanny about the figure. Its face had been shaped with nothing more than a few quick movements of the sculptor’s fingers, but it had an expression of sly seductiveness, a cross between a succubus and a mermaid.
He turned his attention to the pictures. There were twelve photos in all, their corners marked with adhesive from where they had been taped to the locker. Most were pictures of students and dancers. Karina herself appeared in a few of the shots, brooding and blond, with attractive, faintly oversized features.
One of the photos was much older than the rest. It showed a family of four standing before a house by a river. In the faded snapshot, Karina was no more than fourteen, bundled in a sweater and wool cap. Her younger sister’s hand was clasped in her own. Looming over the girls were their parents, the mother wearing a quilted jacket, the father in a flannel coat, his flushed face peering into the lens.
“It was taken in Kargopol,” the teacher said. “That was their house by the river.”
Powell checked the other side of the photo. It was blank. “Did she ever talk about her family?”
“Only occasionally. For the most part, she was very private, except—” The teacher hesitated, then said, “A few years ago, when she danced the lead in Coppélia, something in the role seemed to open her up. You know the story? An inventor builds a dancing doll, and a boy becomes obsessed with it, until his true love shows him what a fool he is by taking the doll’s place—”
Wolfe reached out and took the photograph from Powell. “What did Karina say?”
“As I mentioned before, her father was a toymaker. The girls would dig clay out of the riverbed so he could make it into figurines. When I looked at that toy, and thought of the things she said about her father, I used to wonder if he had done anything to those girls. If he dressed them up, or—” The teacher hesitated again. “I can’t prove any of this. But I always wondered.”
Wolfe wrote out a receipt for the photos and figurine. “What about the sister?”
“She vanished years ago. According to Karina, she ran off when she was a teenager. The rumor was that she had gone to Moscow. I don’t think Karina ever saw her after that.”
Something about this fact lodged in Powell’s mind as they wound up the interview. As they left the studio, Wolfe seemed thoughtful. “You know, there’s something I should probably mention. There were antacids and mouthwash in that box. You know what that says to me? She was bulimic. It’s a shame that her head is gone. I’d need to look at her teeth to be sure—”
Powell was surprised to hear Wolfe speak so clinically. “You’re serious about this?”
“It isn’t so unusual. Dancers can be monsters about their weight. You’ve got men lifting you overhead all day, and that darned Balanchine ideal. Swanlike neck, long legs. But the perfect ballerina, by those standards, has a short torso and a flat chest, so I don’t know why she got breast implants. Unless it was for her night job. You said yourself she was probably a prostitute—”
“I’m not so sure about that anymore,” Powell said, removing his glasses. “I’ve been looking at the record of prostitution in Brighton Beach, and the Russians have had trouble entering the business. They’ll import a few girls from overseas, and after a week, the local pimps tell the police, who shut it down.”
“But if Karina was nothing but a dancer, then why did she get her breasts done?”
Powell finished cleaning his glasses, then pushed them back up the bridge of his nose. “Conflicted body image, perhaps.”
As they neared the subway, Powell found himself thinking of the ways that a woman might try to reinvent herself. There was the body, yes, but there was also the mind. Karina had focused on transforming her body, much as a toy might shrink and harden in her father’s oven, a process that had not concluded until long after her lonely burial in the sand. Her sister had run away at an even younger age. And perhaps she had tried to transform herself as well—
These thoughts ran through his brain, ramifying and evolving, until they were on the train. Then, as they were passing through a darkened tunnel at the heart of the city, something clicked in his head, and he knew.
He rummaged in his briefcase, finally emerging with a copy of the coroner’s report. “Look here,” Powell said, showing the page to Wolfe. “According to the report, based on her pubic area and underarms, the dead girl had brown hair. But in her photos, Karina is a peroxide blonde.”
“So cuffs and collar didn’t match,” Wolfe said, looking at the report. “So what?”
“Let’s see how she might have looked as a brunette.” Powell took
a headshot from the file, uncapped a marker with his teeth, and used it to color in the dead girl’s hair and eyebrows. The changes subtly altered the character of her face, emphasizing its buried exoticism. “Remind you of anyone?”
Wolfe took the headshot from his hands. “Not really. What am I supposed to see?”
“The face of another woman tied up in this case,” Powell said. “Natalia Onegina.”
“Archvadze’s girl?” Wolfe frowned and looked at the picture more closely. “Maybe. But I don’t really see it.”
“It isn’t obvious. But it’s there.” From his briefcase, Powell removed the picture of Karina standing by the river with her family. He pointed to the younger sister. “I’m not entirely sure, but I think this is Natalia Onegina. She’s the sister who went to Moscow. Which means that these two cases are connected.”
The subway pulled into the City Hall station, disgorging its passengers onto the platform. Powell shoved the files back into the suitcase, keeping the family photo in one hand, and followed Wolfe to street level. “We need to delve more deeply into Natalia’s background. Every profile repeats the claim that she’s a niece of German Khan, but I don’t know how seriously anyone has ever looked into this. And there’s one more thing we need to check.”
Wolfe climbed the stairs to the crowded sidewalk. “And what would that be?”
Powell handed her the snapshot. Now that the connection was so clear in his mind, he was troubled by how long it had taken him to understand the dead girl’s importance, as if the lapse were a portent of a more permanent decline to come. “We need to find out the name of that river.”
They reached the granite chessboard of the Javits Building, which was guarded by a row of iron posts, like pawns. Caught up in his thoughts, Powell was a few steps from the entrance when he heard someone call his name.
The Icon Thief Page 19