The Body in Bodega Bay (6 page)

“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.

“Quite possibly. Sometimes it's not easy to tell. In the nineteenth century they returned to the wedge-in-groove method, which is why panels made in the eighteenth century tend to stand apart. That's my clue as to this one's age.”

“And this coating on the surface was caused by the varnish they used?”

“Yes. Now watch what happens when I apply the lightest dab of sunflower-seed oil.” There was a bowl filled with clear oil sitting on the table alongside another bowl containing a darker, thicker liquid, and a row of small instruments lined up waiting to be used: a pair of scissors, tweezers, wads of cotton wool, and a thin scalpel. Al soaked a ball of cotton in the clear oil and very delicately swabbed the icon, using even, vertical strokes from top to bottom and bottom to top. He replaced the cotton ball several times during this operation. As soon as he had finished, I could see the figures in much clearer outline, as though I were looking through a transparent tinted glass.

“Now for the next step.” Al used his scissors to cut a small rectangle from a soft flannel cloth and soaked it, holding it by a corner with tweezers, in the bowl of the darker liquid. “The solvent,” he explained, “is specially formulated for this purpose. I'll start by applying it here.” He gently draped the patch of cloth over a section of the Virgin's robe, flattening it with a piece of glass of the sort commonly found in a frame for a photograph.

“Toby, would you bring over that dictionary, please?” Toby picked up a heavy book that was sitting on a chair and brought it to the table, where Al placed it atop the glass, as a weight. “Perfect. Now we give it a chance to work.” After a few minutes, he removed the dictionary and the glass, and, with the tweezers, carefully lifted the patch of cloth from the icon. A good portion of dark gook came up with it. Quickly now, he discarded the dirty cloth and applied a new cotton ball dipped in solvent. The result was astonishing: the remaining elements of black substance were absorbed by the swab and vanished as if by magic. A rectangle of bright color sprang to life.

Al pronounced the procedure a success. “Let's do the rest.” Meticulously, he repeated each step of the process, covering the surface of the icon with swatches of cloth soaked in solvent and pressed under glass by the weight of the book.

When each swatch was removed, the surface beneath it was covered with loose swirls and flakes. These were swabbed away by fresh cotton balls dipped in solvent, although here and there traces of varnish still adhered to the surface in the form of sticky moist tendrils. Working carefully, Al scraped away the remaining traces, using the side edge of the scalpel and additional cotton wads. Before long, the image was completely transformed.

Now the Virgin's robe appeared in rich purple, that of the baby Jesus in bright yellow clasped by a green sash. The Virgin stared directly at the viewer, with large, round eyes, her face meant to convey compassion, as she cradled Jesus in her right arm. She pointed to him with her left hand. His hand, in turn, rested on her neck. The colors, though bright, were flat, and the facial expressions, now that they were clear, seemed slightly forced.

“Much better,” said Al in a tone of satisfaction. “No masterpiece, but we're not finished yet. We've only taken off the top layer. Now comes the really interesting part.” Much to my shock, he began to repeat the entire process, this time spreading a section of solvent-soaked cloth right over the newly cleaned surface. “Underneath we'll probably find another layer of dried oil, and when that's removed, an older painting, and a more interesting one, unless I miss my guess.”

We looked on in fascination as Al continued his operation step by step. Gradually, as the newer paint dissolved, another layer of black varnish appeared, partially mixing with the surface pigments. Al treated the section again with solvent and replaced his plate of glass, now smudged and oily, on top, anchored by the weight of the heavy dictionary. “This time we wait a little longer. Do you mind if I smoke?”

“Not at all,” I said. Al is one of the few people I know who still smokes, in his case, a pipe. He owns a large collection of handsome pipes in all shapes and sizes, and they anchor him to an earlier time. After all, how many men smoke pipes these days? He walked over to his pipe rack, chose one with a well-chewed stem, scooped some tobacco into it from a pouch, tamped it, and struck a match. He slowly drew a few contented puffs. The aroma that filled the room was pleasantly familiar.

Toby meanwhile was looking closely at the icon under treatment. “When you talk about finding an older painting, how old do you mean? How far back do icons go?”

“To the beginnings of Christianity,” said Al, “but I'll spare you the lecture. ‘Icon' is the Greek word for image. The veneration of icons began in the eighth century and flourished under the Byzantine Empire, which in turn influenced the Russian tradition.” He blew some smoke toward the ceiling. “The ‘golden age' of icons dates from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, about the same time as the Renaissance in the West. The best examples from that period are worth a fortune.”

That didn't jibe with what Harry Spears had said. “Really? The auctioneer at Morgan's told me there isn't much of a market for icons. Was he wrong?”

“I'll say. That may have been true before the fall of the Soviet Union, but these days the new oil billionaires will pay huge sums for old icons, especially rare ones. Collecting is a mark of prestige. Even the Russian mafia is involved. Think about it. There aren't many new Leonardos floating about, but it's still possible to uncover icons from that era that have never been equaled in terms of color or line.”

“That's what's always puzzled me,” I admitted. “There doesn't seem to be much progression in the tradition. Why is there so little variation in the style of icon painting from one century to the next?” In fact, I had avoided studying icon painting precisely because the tradition struck me as repetitious.

“One reason is that the Church had rules as to what you could or couldn't paint.” Al peered into the bowl of his pipe, which apparently had gone out. It was always doing that. He relit it. “Another is that later painters were in such awe of the early masters that they imitated their compositions, so their work tends to follow set patterns. It's the quality that differs. It's true that by the time you reach the nineteenth century, much of the production is mechanical. That's why the excitement lies in peeling back layers of time. When you start cleaning an icon that's really old, say one from the sixteenth century, you may have to remove three or four layers of overpainting before you get down to the authentic work.” Al laid his pipe in an ashtray and reached for the dictionary he was using as a weight. “Now, this one here isn't as old as that, but I think it may be ready. Let's see what we have.”