Winter Palace (26 page)

He shook his head. “Problems, problems. We drown in problems. I close my eyes and watch them dance before me in the darkness, and I find no solutions. None.”

Jeffrey hesitated, then ventured, “You could ask the Protestants to take over ministries that your church can't staff.”

The explosion he feared did not come. Instead, the priest sat with head bowed low. “In a perfect world,” he murmured. “In a world that truly followed the teachings of Christ . . .”

He lifted his head, the gentle light back in his eyes. “You have a gift of simple speech,” he told Jeffrey. “It makes the hardest challenge something I can bear to hear. For this, I thank you.”

“I haven't done anything,” Jeffrey replied.

To his surprise, the father smiled broadly. “No, perhaps not.” He leaned back in his seat. “So what was it you wished to discuss with me?”

Father Anatoli listened carefully until Jeffrey was finished with his account of the missing Ukrainian church treasures. Then he turned away and sat in utter stillness. Eventually he murmured, “A letter. Such a simple affair. Who could think that it would create such problems.”

Jeffrey showed confusion. “I don't—”

But Father Anatoli was already on his feet. “Come. Let us walk together to the cathedral. I must prepare for Mass. What are your own plans for the next week?”

“I leave for London the day after tomorrow, Monday afternoon,” Jeffrey replied, rising with him. “I'm not sure exactly when I will be back in Saint Petersburg, but it shouldn't be too long.”

“Then I suggest you leave this matter with me until your return. I will see what I can learn.”

The cathedral interior was rich with the cloying flavor of incense, and Jeffrey instantly felt a familiar unease. There
were no seats within the vast hall. Icons were everywhere, rising in great gilded frames ten and twelve high upon the walls. They rested upon the central pillars, they stood on huge bronze altars in the many alcoves, they bedecked the screen before the nave. Candles burned before them all. Hundreds of people were deep in prayer—standing, kneeling, laying prostrate upon the worn marble stonework. Each began and ended their petitions with multiple signs of the cross, some resting their foreheads upon the icons' glass enclosures.

Jeffrey and Father Anatoli paused together at the high-arched entrance to the central chamber. Eyes turned their way, examining the black-bearded priest standing beside the Westerner. Father Anatoli kept his attention focused upon Jeffrey. “You are uncomfortable with the concept of our icons,” he observed.

Jeffrey nodded. “It's something I just don't understand, I guess. Maybe it's my Baptist background.”

“The arguments and the issues and these icons date back almost two thousand years,” Father Anatoli explained, his voice pitched low. “The problems arose when some Christian first painted a picture of Christ in the catacombs and another called the painting an idol. Your word
iconoclast
came from that time and described one who destroyed icons. They also had a name for those who wished to see no picture of Christ, or even crosses. They were called puritans.”

He lowered his head so that the black beard fanned out and molded to his cassock. “There was a time in the eighth century when people found with a painting or tapestry depicting the Lord Jesus, or even a cross with a man's figure carved upon it, were tortured and put to death.”

“All in the name of love,” Jeffrey said quietly. “The same love that drives this wedge between us today.”

The light of approval was strong in Father Anatoli's eyes as he continued, “The Orthodox concentrates upon the
mystery
of faith. The
wonder
of the liturgy. Great emphasis is placed upon experiencing union with God. We seek constantly to
remind all believers of their responsibility to seek knowledge of the glory that comes through complete and utter surrender to Christ.”

“Everything I see here seems so alien,” Jeffrey confessed.

“Icons are not idolatry,” he stated flatly. “They are not the object of veneration, but a reminder. They point the direction only.”

Jeffrey watched a woman complete her prayers by leaning forward and kissing the jewel-studded icon's lower frame. “I'm afraid it looks awfully like idol worship to me.”

Black eyes leaned close and drilled him with their intensity. “Now who is the one who condemns with judgment?”

Jeffrey tried not to flinch under the man's gaze. He kept his disquiet hidden until the father nodded and said, “I must go. Come to my chambers immediately upon your return to Saint Petersburg. I should know something by then, if there is indeed anything for me to know.”

Two cultures moved within the church, the tourists and the penitents. Jeffrey felt like a stranger to both.

Those who came in prayer remained utterly blind to the others, displaying a single-minded focus that Jeffrey found awesome. They represented every age, every walk of life. The young and successful in suits or fresh new dresses. The old and bowed, clinging to canes and crutches. Mothers with children, husbands with wives, teenagers in groups and alone. And as he watched their coming and going, Jeffrey found a trait utterly lacking in the outside world of Saint Petersburg. Here were gentle smiles and unstrained voices. Eyes held a simple, open quality. Hearts could be seen in many gazes. Not all, but many.

Jeffrey stood beside a pillar, out of the way of those kneeling in prayer. As he stood and watched, a pair of male voices began a chanted prayer from somewhere above his head. The first, a light tenor, sang a swift chant upon one single note. The second voice was very deep and very rich. His words
rose and fell in slow, steady, deliberate tones, like the tolling of an unseen bell.

Jeffrey found the atmosphere utterly alien, yet comforting, like the making of a new friend who somehow greeted him with the ease of a trusted brother.

As Jeffrey turned and left the church, it was this feeling of calm acceptance that troubled him most of all.

Chapter 25

Peter the Great housed his art collection in one small extension of his winter palace. His successor, Elizabeth, gave little thought to art, and left the collection where it was. The next ruler of Russia, the Empress Catherine the Great, found it necessary to build an entire new palace to contain her acquisitions. Yet she continued the practice started by her great-uncle Peter of allowing only a privileged handful of outsiders to view her collection. Over the years, the halls of art and treasures became known as “The Dwelling Place of the Hermits.” As French became the language of royal culture, the name was translated to L'Ermitage.

Ivona entered the Hermitage museum and walked down the long Hall of Eighteen-Twelve, lined with over one thousand portraits of officers who had fought in the war of that year. Those who had died in the field and left no record of their faces had empty frames, with their names embossed beneath, to commemorate their sacrifice.

The hall gave way to the Outer Chamber, where dignitaries had waited—sometimes for weeks, sometimes for years—before being escorted into the smaller Throne Room beyond.

Ivona then entered the Pavilion Hall, and found her contact awaiting her beneath one of Russia's few remnants from the rule of the Mongol Khans. Eight centuries before, the Khan had traveled to Poland on a diplomatic mission, fallen in love with a beautiful Polish princess, and made her his fifteenth wife. The first wife, bitterly jealous of the Khan's evident love for his new bride, had arranged for the girl to be murdered. In her memory, the Khan had designed a pair of matching wall fountains where water trickled down in unending streams, from one onyx half-shell to another, representing the continual cascading tears of his heart.

Ivona strode toward the slender man who stood beside
that weeping fountain. “Ilya, I bring the heartfelt greetings of Bishop Michael, as well as those of your beloved parents.”

He said nothing, only took her hand and guided her away from the tourist hordes. Twice he paused and scanned the crowd while pretending to point out treasures for her inspection. The third time she asked, “Is there something wrong?”

“If there is,” he replied, sweeping his hand out in a grand gesture to present a treasure neither of them saw, “you will know of it when I disappear.”

The Hermitage administrator seated her in an unobtrusive corner and searched the throngs once more with worried eyes. “Tell me why you are here.”

“Word has come to us of your difficulties. The bishop asks for details.”

“Word?” He showed real alarm. “What word?”

“Through your mother,” Ivona soothed. “She told us only after hearing of our own troubles. And only after the bishop gave his solemn word that the information would go no further.”

The Hermitage administrator subsided. “You, too, have something missing?”

Ivona nodded slowly. “Tell me. Please.”

Ilya was quiet for a very long moment, then said, “There are so many treasures on display here that no one thinks of what remains hidden. So much rests in our warehouses, more than you can ever imagine. The authorities just leased to us the former Military College to use as storage space. This is distant and harder to keep secure, but anything is better than the damp confines of our basements. I have six hundred thousand etchings baled together and stored in closets.”

“And in the process of this transfer,” Ivona guessed, “you have found items missing from your inventory.”

“Not for certain,” Ilya replied. “Certainly none of the most valuable articles, for which we have records in duplicate. But every day another three or four articles are not to
be found—sketches,
objets d'art
, small paintings, religious artifacts, anything.”

“You are sure?”

“I am sure of nothing anymore,” he replied resignedly. “Even within the museum itself, the halls closed to visitors are stacked with boxes. The papers listing their contents are lost. Security is declining as the government allocates us fewer and fewer militia guards. Do you know what we are paid?”

“I know,” she replied quietly.

“Twelve dollars per month,” he persisted. “The most qualified museum staff in all Russia, and we can barely feed ourselves and our families. How can you blame those who turn to accepting bribes and looking the other way?”

“I blame no one,” Ivona replied.

“There is more. The Golden Treasury has been closed for renovation. We are not sure,” he said, then hesitated.

“Sure of what?”

“There are over twenty thousand items in this collection alone,” he continued. “If it were one crown, yes, of course, we would prize it. But with seven hundred? So what if one is lost? Could we not have loaned it to a regional museum? Twice we have almost sounded the alarm for missing items, only to find records that twenty, thirty, forty years ago they were loaned to a provincial museum for some exhibition.”

“And never returned,” she finished.

“Why should they be, when we never asked for them back?”

“But you do think items are missing,” she pressed.

“Nothing certain, and nothing of first order.”

“Relatively speaking.”

“Exactly.”

“Their value?”

“In the West?” He pursed his lips. “Who can say? And once again, the museum is not even sure that anything is gone at all.”

“We speak not of the museum,” Ivona replied. “Official
announcements can be kept for the press. I ask for your opinion.”

“Candelabra,” he relented. “Gold chains, emblems, boxes, a few icons. From the other departments, any number of items. Possibly. I repeat, nothing is certain.”

She thought in silence, then asked the inevitable. “The same is occurring in other museums?”

“Rumors,” he replied. “We are feeding on rumors only.”

“Yet again—”

“What could they do with so much?” he demanded, his voice rising in painful frustration. “If even a tenth of these rumors are true, we are speaking of thousands of objects.”

“Perhaps a bit more quietly,” she cautioned.

“Tons
of valuables,” he continued. “Where could they be taking it all?”

“There is no reason to shout,” she said.

Ilya sank back. “There are too many rumors for the stories to be smoke alone. There must be a fire. A hundred fires. Yet the government refuses to listen.”

“They have other problems,” Ivona stated. “Other crises.”

He nodded. “You realize, of course, that such thefts have occurred before.”

“Yes.” Such stories had circulated for years.

“One of the largest collections of Impressionist paintings in the world currently occupies the Hermitage's former attic servant quarters,” Ilya went on. “It was collected by two merchants. They presented these treasures to the czar as a bribe for safe passage when they and their families departed westward the year before the October Revolution.”

“This much I have heard,” Ivona said.

“When the Communists came to power,” Ilya continued, “the paintings were condemned as degenerate and made to disappear. For decades it was rumored that Party officials had destroyed them all—Matisse, Van Gogh, Degas, Pissaro, Monet, Renoir, Cezanne, Gaugin, three
rooms
of early Picasso. Then in the late fifties the Party line changed, and
Impressionists were declared to be compassionate painters of the common man.” Ilya snorted. “The exhibition then reappeared without fanfare, as though closed only for cleaning. Yet dozens of the paintings, perhaps even hundreds, were not to be found. Investigators were met with unofficial warnings, and the persistent found themselves granted postings to museums in Siberia. Eventually all records of the missing pictures also disappeared.”

“Who do you think is responsible,” Ivona pressed. “Not for the paintings, that is history. For your current thefts.”