Equanimity returned to the old man’s face after several moments.
“The air is lovely today, is it not, my boy?”
“Do you want to sit?”
“A few minutes, perhaps.”
They shuffled to a bench set back from the water’s edge, a little past where the hawk watchers huddled about their telescopes. Fotis sat heavily. Concerned as he was, Matthew said nothing more. This was not the first time he’d seen these symptoms, and questions would only make the old man retreat. His pain was his own, as jealously guarded as his other secrets. The pond’s surface was a dark glass, reflecting a shadowland version of the brick boathouse across the way. Behind that, tall trees, just touched with lime green, soared up well past the level of the street behind them, and above the trees the square stone towers of Fifth Avenue were bathed in yellow-white light.
“Can I get you anything?” Matthew asked, but Fotis waved him off.
“Fate is a peculiar thing. We believe that we command our own lives, but events will occur, again and again, which lead us in a certain direction. Do you not find this to be true? We can resist. We can go along, pretending we are still in control. Or, we can try to determine what fate wants of us, and help to make it happen.”
“I’m not much of a believer in fate.”
“That is because you are young. One must believe in one’s own power at your age. In another time, however, the young sought advice from the old. The old were understood to hold wisdom from experience. This is no longer the way.”
Matthew took the hint and shut up.
“You have said some interesting things today,” Fotis went on. “It is possible that your unconscious already perceives a dilemma which your conscious mind has not grasped, because a choice has not yet been put before you. So. I was contacted a few days ago by a highly placed official of the Greek church. Regarding the icon. They are very much determined to acquire the work, and they want help from me in the matter.”
A rush of anxiety coursed through the younger man. He sat forward on the bench, both disbelieving and struck by a strange sense that he had expected something very like this.
“Why would the church contact you? How do they even know about the icon?”
“The church has many resources, and I have many friends within the church. They place a high value upon recovering stolen art treasures, especially those of great religious significance and power. Kessler’s ownership of the icon was not a secret.”
“You only conjecture that it’s stolen.”
“No,” the old man countered instantly, then seemed to restrain himself. “You must have seen documents from the lawyer. What do they say of its provenance?”
“It’s more or less in line with the work you and I have discussed.”
“The Holy Mother of Katarini.”
“They don’t use that name, but it’s an obvious match. Preiconoclastic, original source unknown. The last few centuries in a church in Epiros.”
“And how did it come to be in Kessler’s possession?”
“He claimed to have purchased it from a fellow Swiss businessman.”
“So that fellow is the thief. Or the one before him. What does it matter? Somewhere along the line it was stolen. What Greek would have willingly parted with it?”
“Maybe one who needed money after the war.”
“It was taken during the war, I tell you. The Germans took it with them when they left.”
Now we’ve arrived at it, Matthew thought. His godfather had been hinting about something for weeks.
“How do you know that?”
Fotis sighed, smoothing his hands out across his gray pleated pants.
“Very well. Very well, I told you I had seen the work before.”
“Yes. That’s how we got talking about it in the first place.”
“I didn’t tell you everything. It was during the war that I saw it, in that church in your grandfather’s village. It was your Papou, in fact, who arranged for me to see it. I have never forgotten that time. Less than an hour, but I was completely possessed by its beauty, by the power emanating from within it. You know I was with the guerrillas. I was in charge of the resistance in that area, and I sent a man to get the icon from that church. Before the Germans took it, or burned the place without knowing what it was. They burned so many villages, churches and all.”
The old man paused, lost in a vision of houses aflame. Matthew watched the men who watched the birds. He sensed that this story would end up troubling him, and not just because the museum would never touch stolen work. The information, which he was hungry to learn, would come at the price of his neutrality. Every word got him deeper into whatever it was his godfather had planned. Yet how could he resist? These old guys gave up their secrets so infrequently.
“What happened?”
“Yes, what. I’m still not sure. The man I sent was my best man. To Fithee we called him. We all went by different names, so the Germans could not get information about our brothers, or our families. It must sound foolish to you now.”
“To Fithee. The serpent.”
“The Snake, if you like. Because he was so good at slipping into and out of places. And for other reasons. He had his own ideas of how best to do things, but I trusted him.”
“And he failed.”
“No, he succeeded. Too well. He understood the icon’s value even better than I did, and he decided to take it at all costs.” Fotis wet his lips with his tongue. “He killed a priest.”
Matthew sat back on the bench. This was uglier than he would have guessed.
“Why?”
“I speak too quickly. I do not know for certain that he did it. The priest intervened somehow, and he died.”
“What happened to the icon?”
“The church was burned, by the Germans, I think, though he might have done that also. At the time, I assumed the icon burned with it. Later I learned that my man had given it to a German officer.”
“Given it?”
“Traded it, for guns and ammunition. To fight the communists. Once we knew the Germans were beaten, that became the priority. So you see, he was not being a thief, but a patriot. For all I know, he was under orders from someone above me.”
Matthew tapped his feet to drive out the chill, as well as quell his agitation. The icon was suddenly marred, as if blood had been flicked across its surface. He would not be able to see it in the same way. Fotis seemed to read his thoughts.
“Many have killed for this work, and others like it, over the years. It should not surprise you, my boy. Or are you shocked to find blood on your godfather’s hands?”
“You didn’t send him to kill the priest.”
“No. But I commanded him, controlled him, I thought. He had his own game; everyone did. It’s a sad story. I am sorry to upset you. You would like to see the work in a purely artistic way, but since you are a kind of historian, I thought you should know.”
