Altar of Bones (47 page)

He huffed a little laugh. “Yes, horrified indeed. And they probably would have looked askance at this Virgin, too, for she’s not your typical, flat-faced saint who conforms to a dictated ideal. Rather, there’s a mischievous, whimsical quality about her, don’t you think? As if she has a secret she is teasing us with, only she will never tell. I have to believe the artist used a real person as a model. Her heart-shaped face and prominent cheekbones, the strongly arched brows. And her eyes, they are almost catlike—”

He stopped himself, looked up at Zoe, then back down to the icon. “How utterly extraordinary. The Virgin, she is … You two look enough alike to be sisters.”

Slowly, he raised his gaze back up to Zoe’s face, and she saw suspicion come into his kind eyes. “How long did you say this has been in your family?”

Zoe didn’t dare look at Ry. “Oh, a long time,” she said, her voice cracking hoarsely. “Grandmother never really said.”

Lovely stared at her for several interminable seconds, then said, “I wonder … Is it mere serendipity you look so much like her, Mrs. Carpenter? Or do you perhaps believe she was a real woman, from a real place?”

A real place
. Zoe looked down at the Virgin. She sat on a golden throne, and the throne floated above a lake that was shaped rather like a shoe. At the heel of the shoe was what looked like a pile of rocks. And at the toe end was a waterfall.

“Are you saying you think this lake really exists somewhere?”

“Indeed, I do.” Lovely made a little circular motion over the icon with his hand. “We see the lake, the rocks, the waterfall, as if from above, a bird’s-eye view. Yet the Virgin we see head-on, and out of perspective to everything else. It’s as if the artist painted a map of a place he knew, his home perhaps, and then placed the Virgin on top of it.”

“Did you hear that, honey?” Zoe said, turning to Ry. “He thinks the lake in my icon might be a real place. Wouldn’t it be cool to go there and see it?”

Ry shrugged. “Whatever.”

She turned back to the antiques dealer and beamed a smile at him. “Do you know where in Russia it might be, Mr. Lovely?”

Lovely smiled as well. “If the artist depicted the place where he lived, then it would be somewhere in Siberia. One can tell this from the paint he used, you see. The colors in the Virgin’s robe, for instance, orange, vermilion, and turquoise, are distinctly Siberian. And applied with a sureness of touch I’ve rarely seen surpassed. Indeed, in the hands of a lesser master such colors might easily have assumed a primitive garishness of the sort we often encounter in folk art.”

Zoe’s heart pounded so hard with excitement, she was almost dancing with it. The icon was a map to a real place, a lake somewhere in Siberia. If they found the lake, could they find the altar of bones?

“The colors really are beautiful,” she said. “And so vivid still, for being painted so long ago.”

“It is all rather wonderful, is it not? The amazing freshness of the color is due to a technique of great durability called encaustic, in which the pigments are suspended in hot wax. It is a technique, by the by, which helps us to date it to around the time of Ivan the Terrible. That is, the sixteenth century.”

Lovely stared reverently down at the icon, then he sighed. “The embossed silver overlay on the cup and the gold-leaf paint on the crown were added a couple of centuries later. Rather a pity, for it compromises the integrity of the piece.”

“But what about those jewels on it?” Ry said. “Those’ve got to be worth something, right?”

“Ah, yes. The jewels.” Lovely took a jeweler’s loupe out of his suit pocket, put it to his eye, and brought his face so close he was within a millimeter of brushing noses with the Virgin. “I see that we have a diamond, onyx, iolite …,” he said, as he moved the loupe from one jewel to the other. “Fire opal, aquamarine, sapphire …” He ended with the largest jewel, the one embedded on the forehead of the silver skull cup. “Ruby.”

He straightened, tucking the loupe back into his pocket. “Regrettably, they are all thoroughly modern. Post–World War Two, I would say, and of rather inferior quality and cut. The original jewels were probably removed by someone who needed the money.”

My great-grandmother
, Zoe thought. Lena Orlova. Had she sold the jewels to keep her and her baby alive in Shanghai during the Japanese occupation? Anna Larina had said Lena married a jewel merchant after the war. These later jewels had probably come from him.

But what had always seemed most strange to Zoe about the jewels was the way they’d been placed on the icon so haphazardly. Not only were no two of the jewels alike, but it looked as if they’d just been plopped down on a whim, with no thought for artistry or symmetry.

The Virgin’s gold crown, for instance—why no jewels there? Yet in the sky on either side of the crown, floating up among the clouds, the artist had put a fire opal and an aquamarine. No jewels were on the Virgin’s robe either, as you would have expected, but the iolite had been stuck in the middle of the pile of rocks, and the sapphire was in the waterfall.

It made no sense. The only jewel that seemed to be where it ought to be was the big ruby in the middle of the skull’s forehead.

“So what are you telling us?” Ry asked, shifting his weight and slouching even more to lean his elbows on the spotless glass countertop. “Is the icon worth something, or isn’t it?”

Lovely gave Ry’s elbows a scathing look. “It is virtually impossible to put a specific value on such a unique piece as this. I can tell you that a well-preserved Siberian icon, circa early seventeenth century, recently went at Sotheby’s for nine hundred thousand pounds sterling.”

“Holy shit,” Ry said, and Zoe almost laughed at the genuine shock she heard in his voice. Then she remembered her plunge in the Seine with nine hundred thousand pounds sterling worth of icon in her satchel, and that wild motorcycle ride through the streets of Paris, and she got a little queasy herself.

“Yes, quite,” Lovely said. “And if you are interested in selling, then I might be able to put you in touch with a potential buyer. He lives just outside of Budapest, but he’s a serious collector of Siberian icons, and an expert in Siberian folklore and artifacts. In fact, he—”

Lovely caught himself up and looked off into the distance, seeming to think about whether he wanted to say more.

Zoe decided to take a chance on leveling with the dealer just a little. “Mr. Lovely, I would never part with my grandmother’s icon, any more than I would cut off my right arm and sell it, because it is a part of me, my heritage. But I would really like to talk to this man.”

Lovely hesitated a moment longer, then nodded. “I have his card here somewhere.”

He went to a drawer beneath the cash register and began to rummage through what to Zoe’s eyes looked like several hundred business cards. “The odd thing is, he asked me once years ago to keep him in mind if I ever came across a Virgin holding a skull cup in her lap. It seemed such a strange request that I utterly dismissed it at the time…. Ah, here we are.”

He brought the card to Zoe. “This should have everything you need. ‘Denis Kuzmin, Professor Emeritus, 336 Piroska U., Szentendre, Hungary.’ And a telephone number.”

Zoe tucked the card in her back pocket, while Lovely carefully wrapped the icon back up in its sealskin pouch. Then he presented the pouch to her as if offering the crown jewels of England.

“Thank you for allowing me the pleasure, Mrs. Carpenter.”

Zoe smiled back at him, feeling a little sad because she liked him, and yet she’d deceived him in a way, by not being herself.

“
WHOOH
, BOY
,” Z
OE
said, as the door to the Air de la Russie shut behind them with the tinkle of a bell. She was jazzed.

“The lake in the icon is a real place, Ry, way up in Siberia somewhere. And sixteenth-century. It’s weird to think there was a Keeper who looked like me yet lived so long ago. I feel like we’re finally getting somewhere, though. How did I do? Was I clueless enough?”

Ry drew in a breath to speak, but Zoe put a finger over his lips. “No, don’t say it, O’Malley. I know I just left myself wide-open for a real zinger of a comeback there, but you owe me a free pass, remember?”

He wrapped his hand around hers, but he left her finger where it was. His breath was hot on her skin as he spoke. “You did good. You charmed poor Mr. Lovely down to his toes, then wrung him dry.”

He kept hold of her hand, Zoe noticed, as they started to cross the street, heading back toward the café where they’d had breakfast.

She said, “And we also got the name of someone who might know even more. I hope Hungarian is one of your fifteen languages.”

Ry grinned at her and rattled off something that to Zoe’s ears sounded like the warble of a wren.

“Well, I trust that was at least polite—”

Zoe cut herself off, gripping Ry’s hand tighter and pulling him up short. She leaned in close to him, pretending to nuzzle his neck and whispered, “News kiosk. On the corner.”

He kissed her chin and tipped his head so that he could see the racks of newspapers out of the corner of his eye. “Oh, shit,” he said, kissed her nose, her cheek. “This is bad.”

Yasmine Poole had made good on her threat. Racks of newspapers ringed the kiosk, and every single one of them had their pictures plastered all over the front pages, beneath six-inch headlines that screamed
TERRORISTES
. They’d used her California driver’s license and Ry’s photo from his DEA badge.

Something like a premonition made Zoe turn just then and look back at the Air de la Russie. She saw Anthony Lovely pick up his coffee with one hand, while he shook open his newspaper with the other. The Starbucks cup stopped in midair, and his head jerked around to peer out the window.

“Really, really bad, Ry. Anthony Lovely just made us.”

“I know you’re scared,” Ry said, his voice calm, and he smoothed the loose wisps of hair off her forehead with his fingertips. “But there’s a metro entrance not far from here. We’re going to walk there as if we haven’t a care in the world, unless someone starts yelling. Then we run like hell.”

Z
OE HALF-EXPECTED
Anthony Lovely to run out of his shop after them, yelling, “Stop, terrorists!” but he didn’t.

They made it to the metro without any commotion at all. Ry stopped at one of the underground shops and bought her a large, plain black scarf—to cover her head, he said—but she barely registered what he was doing. She felt dazed. All those racks upon racks of newspapers with her face on them, branding her a terrorist. She wanted it to be happening to another Zoe, one whose troubles she could make go away just by turning off her TV set.

“We really need those fake passports now,” Ry said, as he helped to tie the scarf around her head so that it completely covered her hair. “This guy I know, Kareem, he’s got the soul of a Barbary pirate, but he’s the best there is at forging documents, and his mother Fatama is a master of disguise. Their lab, though, is near the Porte St.-Denis. It’s a Muslim neighborhood now, and it’s been declared a
zone urbaine sensible
—that’s a euphemism for a no-go zone, as in the cops won’t go in there anymore, because of the riots and car burnings they’ve had there lately. So we’ll need to take a few precautions, all right?”

“You take me to all the nicest places,” she said, trying to smile, but it didn’t come out right. She was scared, deep down scared. “Just don’t leave me, though, okay?”

He cupped her face, tilting her head back so he could look into her eyes. “I’m gonna be right beside you every step of the way, Zoe. All the way through to the end. And you know I can kick butt, because you’ve seen me do it, maybe even better than you.”

She managed to smile at that.

But when they came up out of the metro station, all her fear came rushing back, because it looked like a war zone. Blackened corpses of cars were everywhere, some still smoldering. Rocks, some the size of softballs, littered the street.

Zoe kept her head down and they walked quickly, Ry gripping her upper arm, and she knew his other hand was wrapped around the gun in his pocket.
This is his life
, Zoe thought.
This is what it’s like all the time for him
. How could he bear it?