“What do I care about that? Shit on your icon. If you are telling the truth, I want the bastard dead. Besides, it’s too late.”
The old man felt his eighty-six years like a weight on his shoulders, pressing down upon him. He had been young and strong when this chase began, but it had dragged on far too long, and he was tired. With all his other successes, why did he continue with this losing struggle? Because his spirit knew nothing else at this point. Once possessed, the icon lived within him, and he felt as though a part of his body were missing. More than fifty years now. There was really no choice. The tiredness was good, he decided. It hid his desperation.
“What must I do to convince you?”
Karov gazed at him carefully, trying to determine if this was a threat or opportunity. Van Meer was paying close attention also. They were beyond the possibilities they had mapped before the meeting, into tangled, dangerous territory. The Dutchman was freshly energized.
“You could give me that briefcase,” the Russian answered after a long pause. Jan had a good laugh at that.
“I think not,” del Carros responded.
“You owe me something for my trouble, damn it.”
“I owe you nothing. Dragoumis was toying with you. You were never in a position to deliver what I wanted, but I am willing to make some effort to maintain our cooperation.”
“What do you suggest?”
The Russian was an ass, but he would have to be given something or this would end badly. And he must be persuaded to call off the action.
“This isn’t the icon I wanted,” the old man mused, “but it is good work, and I am feeling generous. I’ll give you a hundred thousand for it.”
“That doesn’t even cover my expenses.”
“And fifty more when I know that Dragoumis is safe. A hundred more if you can deliver him to me, alive.”
Karov’s agitation had settled somewhat. He kept eye contact with del Carros as he slipped a bulky international cell phone from his jacket.
“If I can take him alive, we’ll talk then about what he’s worth. Let’s see your money.”
“Make the call. Time is precious.”
17
Matthew had been awake most of the night, and the few hours of sleep he’d stolen before dawn were troubled.
Shreds of dreams still floated past his mind’s eye: a darkened city, that other New York of his sleep, full of narrow, poorly lit streets, twisting unexpectedly, a dangerous encounter around every corner. He knew the place, had visited its docks, parks, and alleys across a hundred nights, always pursued, always seeking the safe corridor, the straight way home. This night he had been the pursuer, chasing the Holy Mother down dark passages, around treacherous corners, without hesitation or fear, fearing only the loss of it. Logic dictated that someone carried the icon, but he saw just the image itself, a face more like the Mona Lisa than a Greek saint, smiling at his desperation as it vanished through doorways, up staircases, into shadow. In the end, the black eyes alone bore through the total darkness around him, close enough to touch, but he could not grasp her, never would.
Half a day later, an unsettled feeling still enveloped him. He wandered through the great church of Saint Demetrios like a ghost, cut off from the other souls around him, mourning the Mother while they mourned the Son and looked forward to his resurrection. Huge chandeliers illuminated the place. The gold base painting of the rear wall and domed ceiling of the sanctuary, richly spotted with saints and angels, dazzled the eye, contrasting with the cool gray-white stone and marble of the interior colon-nades. Matthew visited Ephthimious’ chapel, with its red-haloed saints and ghostly, hooded figures. Time had not been kind to the frescoes, but their washed-out quality lent an air of mystery that appealed to him at the moment. He lingered, the cold leaching out sleepiness, forcing his blood and muscle to motion, his mind to consciousness. He had an hour or so before Fotis was to meet him, but he intended to be on watch before that. Who knew what surprises the old man had in mind tonight?
A service-the latest in an endless procession this Holy Week-had begun in the main body of the church, so Matthew took the side aisles around to the saint’s tomb, a tomb only in name. The body was supposed to have been stolen by the Crusaders. Something had been returned from Italy twenty years before and now resided in a silver reliquary in the nave. The so-called tomb was merely an empty marble coffin with an icon placed on top. He didn’t know why he always came here, except that the room was peaceful and contemplative. The fact that it was older than the earliest Christian construction, part of the Roman baths, and that the saint’s remains had rested here for 900 years gave the chamber a gravity missing from the rest of the church, reconstructed in the 1920s after a great fire. Matthew didn’t think that Demetrios would like his new digs; surely he would prefer to be back in this quiet place.
He crouched down next to the marble box, unwilling to place his knees on the cold floor, to assume the position of supplication. Prayer, for him, could never be so intentional or so self- surrendering. He closed his eyes and remembered the basilica from a child’s perspective, remembered the seeming vastness of it, and the grand old man, his Papou, tall as a god, showing him everything. The tale of each saint was recounted with a skeptical smile. Andreas had no use for religion, but he wanted Matthew to understand the culture from which he sprang, and his admiration for and explanation of the extraordinary, painstaking work of inserting thousands of tesserae to create a mosaic, of how certain pigments in the frescoes were achieved, even of the warped perspective necessary to make a curved dome painting look natural, was mesmerizing for a child. It would take years for Matthew to understand half of what he’d been told, but the seed was planted in early youth, and he had never escaped the intense fascination of this art.
Yet it was not the same. His memory of standing before these images twenty years earlier carried more emotional power than actually standing before them now. Something had changed within him. Why, and when? It could have been his father’s illness; so much had gone astray since then, his interest in his work, his relationship with Robin, his faith in the old men who had taught him so much. But blaming the illness seemed a poor excuse, and not even convincing, because two strong passions had come upon him in the meantime: Ana, and the damn icon. Crouching in the cold, Matthew felt it more likely that those new passions had blotted out the old, had become everything to him, and this sickness of the soul came from being separated from both. He did not know where the icon was; he could not go back to Ana without finding it. Yet the odds of that were very remote. Opening his eyes to make sure he was alone, Matthew began to quietly recite some words of Greek, a prayer perhaps, to the saint, the Son, the Mother, whoever was on duty at the moment. Let the icon be found. Let it be returned to its rightful place, wherever that was. Let troubled spirits, including his own, be at rest. The Greek served him as he imagined Latin did others, giving the words mystery and power, and creating a sense of ritual that removed the individual from the process. Using such words, one stepped into the ever-running river of the holy, and was submerged.
After some minutes he rose, went up the worn marble steps through heavy red draperies to the narthex and out into the cool dusk. The church’s facade stood in shadow, but sunset touched the square tower with orange light, bringing out the red of the roof tiles and making the tall cross glow. The chanting of the priest and psaltees within was audible. The congregants were few in number so far, exhausted no doubt from the emotional exertions of the last two nights. On Thursday, the plaster Christ nailed to the cross. On Friday, taken down, draped in cloth, and carried about the church three times under a hail of carnations and the weeping of the old women. Tonight, they would stagger in by twos and threes until midnight, when a vast horde would be gathered on the broad plaza before the church. Come, receive the light, and candles would ignite in every hand. Christos Anesti, the priest would call, Christ is risen, and the crowd would echo it back.
