Death and Restoration (21 page)

Argyll nodded. Made sense to him. “But isn’t there a bit of a problem here?”’

“What problem?”’

“You’re dead, right? I mean, you’re pretending to be dead. Killed on the walls, and all that. If you are suddenly resurrected, who’s going to believe it? Won’t everyone say you’re just an impostor? And refuse to follow you? Following the Emperor is one thing; following a fake is another.”

Father Charles wagged his finger. “Very astute, young man. But not as astute as I am. Believe me when I tell you; this has been planned well. They will believe I am who I am, but it wouldn’t matter if they didn’t.”

“Why?”’

“Because they will follow her.”

“Who.”

“The Hodigitria.”

Argyll looked at him, and Father Charles chuckled, then turned deeply serious.

“You are stunned into silence. I thought you would be. Yes, young man. Yes. Rejoice at the news. She has survived. The holiest picture in all the wide empire, the Mother herself, painted by the hand of St Luke guided by God, and a true image of her likeness and that of her only begotten son. She lives and is here.” His voice fell to a hoarse whisper. “In this very building. All true Christians will follow her. He who has her blessing is destined to hold the Christian empire in his hands. So it is believed and so it will be. Now, guard my secret until we are ready to act.”

By the time he left Father Charles’s room, the return to sunlight and normality as sudden a shock as if he had suddenly been transported in a time machine across the centuries, Argyll was well off-track. He had found out what the picture was, or what it might be; that was all that was important. He should have got into a taxi and gone straight round to Flavia and told her.

But he didn’t. He was so bemused by Father Charles that he forgot all about what seemed to him now to be a somewhat parochial and trivial aspect of the whole business.

He didn’t even doubt it, or not much. He headed back to the university library for one reason only: to confirm Father Charles’s story. He knew it was true, or at least a reasonable interpretation of events. Father Charles was completely out of his mind, but he was still intelligent. Somewhere in his brain all sorts of connections had short-circuited, probably at the shock of the painting being stolen. The tale of the Emperor, the loss of the picture had all become jumbled up in his head, causing him to identify too much with those subjects he had studied in the past. But just because his method of telling it was a little unorthodox, didn’t mean the tale was senseless; it had just come out in an odd way.

But first he could at least see if there was anything on record which contradicted the story. He collected piles of books; built himself a small fortress of volumes in one corner of the library before opening them and starting to read. Ouspensky on Icons. Runciman on the siege. Pastor on the Popes, Ducas for an eyewitness account of the fall. Then dictionaries and encyclopaedias and digests. Enough to be getting on with.

He read furiously, then got up for more, and started again, reading incredibly quickly andwitha level of concentration he could rarely manage. An hour passed, then two, and still he found nothing, not a word, to make Father Charles’s madness seem impossible. The Emperor was said to have fallen on the last day of the siege, but no one ever properly identified the body. The Turkish Sultan Mehmet II impaled a head on a stake, then stuffed it and sent it round the courts of the Middle East to show his victory, but there was never the slightest proof it was the right head. The Emperor Constantine vanished, and was never seen again. There was no body, no eyewitnesses to his death. That didn’t mean that the Greek Brother Angelus was the Emperor, but it didn’t prove that it could not be, either.

So what about the painting, the Hodigitria. It was easy to establish that this was the most venerated icon in the whole of the east; a Virgin, left hand outstretched, with a child on the right arm. Paraded around the walls in 1087 and credited with saving the city from disaster, and brought out from the church in times of war and emergency. Traditionally said to have been painted, from the life, by St Luke. The special symbol uniting Emperor, city, empire and Christendom. The Turks had destroyed it, in the orgy of looting and violence that was their right when a city which resisted was taken by siege. But again, no witnesses. No one saw them do it. And on the evening before the final assault, the painting was not brought out and paraded around the walls as was the custom. If ever divine help was needed it was then. Her failure to appear would surely have demoralized the troops terribly. So why not? There could be no reason—unless it had already left the city, smuggled out on one of the Venetian galleys that were already slipping out of harbour and running the gauntlet of the Turkish siege to get to safety. Perhaps the Emperor had laid his plans well in advance, and realized that not even the Virgin Mary herself could save his city from its own foolishness. So he made sure she was safe, and set up his own last-minute escape, already thinking about his counter-attack. Then he came to Rome, to plot and wait.

But the counter-attack never happened. No massing of armies, no reunification of Christendom; nothing. Nobody lifted a finger, and Constantinople became and stayed Istanbul. Argyll began on his pile of books about the popes. The name was right, at least; Callixtus III was pope from 1455, and dedicated his papacy to recovering the east. But nothing came of it. The only attempt at reunifying Christendom had been years before, at the Council of Florence, and it fizzled out in mutual acrimony. And Callixtus himself died in 1458, to be replaced by a new pope more interested in building projects and artistic patronage. Certainly, if the Emperor had survived, then his chances of a revanche died with Callixtus.

One final question. Father Charles had talked of the last night in Santa Sophia, the Church of Holy Wisdom, before the final assault. Ducas had an account of it. How in the panic, the remaining population, knowing the end was near, went to the Church of Hagia Sophia to pray, and had to make do with whatever priests were around. Catholics submitted to Orthodox priests, the Orthodox to Catholics, neither caring which was which, for the first and possibly last time. The Emperor was there, before the battle trumpets sounded and summoned him to the walls. Perhaps such a sight could inspire a man; certainly he was right in saying it was too late. A few hours later the troops burst in; many of the congregation were killed, the rest enslaved, and the next day the most venerable church of all became a mosque.

Argyll yawned and looked at his watch, then started with alarm. Six-thirty already. He’d been there for nearly four hours; the time had passed almost without him noticing. As he came back to the real world, he realized his back hurt and his shoulder muscles were protesting at the insensitive treatment they’d received. He began putting the books back on the shelves, then picked up the phone to see where Flavia was.

He was in a taxi minutes later.

Argyll found himself oddly hesitant when he found her. Even though Father Charles was a lunatic, he had sworn to keep his secret. On the other hand, he saw no reason why this should extend to the icon as well. And perhaps his case would seem stronger if he left out the information that he had it from the horse’s mouth, so to speak. Flavia was unlikely to be impressed by being told his evidence came from a Byzantine Emperor who’d been dead for over four centuries. It cuts into your credibility. Come to think of it, and here Argyll did begin to think of it almost for the first time, it was a bit unlikely.

So he improvised a little. “I’ve been through the documents, and done a great deal of work on the side. In fact, I’ve done so much so fast my head’s spinning. And I think I’ve figured it out. The picture is—or at least your man believes it is—something called the Hodigitria. Does that mean anything to you?”’

Flavia shook her head cautiously. “I assume it’s an icon.”

“Yes. Mary. With child. That’s right. The distinctive aspect is that the child be on the left arm. There’s thousands of them, it seems. One of the most common formats.”

“So? What’s so special about this one?”’

“By tradition they all derive from a single original. Painted from the life by St Luke. So called because of where it was kept in Constantinople. It was the icon of the Byzantine empire. The protector, and the supreme emblem of the empire. As long as Constantinople had it, the city could never fall and Christianity would hold sway in the eastern Mediterranean. And had a right to hold sway there.”

“Didn’t work too well, did it?”’ Flavia commented drily.

Argyll almost felt offended at the aspersion. “Officially, it was destroyed during the final assault by the Turks. The important bit,” he said sternly, determined to make the proper excuses, “is that as far as I can see it wasn’t. It was taken out of the city to safety. So its miraculous powers were never tested. I’m sure it wouldn’t have made any difference, but there we are. It was brought to Rome by a Greek travelling under the pseudonym of Brother Angelus, and deposited in the monastery of San Giovanni, where it has stayed. Until a couple of days ago. That is what your man Charanis wants.”

“Is it the only contender?”’

“Oh, no. There are more paintings attributed to St Luke than there are to Vermeer. Three in Rome alone. From what I’ve read, the pedigrees of these others aren’t so good. Besides, that doesn’t matter. This is the only one which can claim to be the Hodigitria.”

“And Burckhardt knew this?”’

“So it seems. He was in the archives and even though I think he missed the whole story, he got enough to make some sense of it.”

“Is this thing real, Jonathan?”’

He shrugged. “Was it painted by St Luke? No; it seems to have been mentioned first in the eighth century. A Holy Fake, if you like. Whether it is the same painting, I don’t know; there’s a good chance. That’s the target, anyway. Have you found it? Come to think of it, has this Charanis man of yours?”’

She shook her head. “He’s still here, and still looking. Which gives us a chance of catching him. With Mary Verney’s cooperation.”

“She’s going to help?”’

Flavia grinned nervously. “I hope so. She doesn’t know it yet, though.”

“What’s her motive in all this?”’

Flavia shook her head. “Damned if I know. It’s not money, that’s obvious. This man seems to have a hold on her somehow. And it must be a tight grip for her to take so many risks. Do you feel like making yourself useful this evening?”’

“I’ve been useful all afternoon.”

“In that case a few extra hours won’t be noticed.”

“What do you want?”’

“Go and keep an eye on Dan Menzies for me. I’ll be round in an hour or so.”

Mary Verney was released by the police after about eight hours in the police station, and left the building with almost a light heart. She had withstood the pressure and kept her nerve. Initially she had been tempted to cooperate with Flavia; Mikis Charanis was a dangerous lunatic, and she was in too weak a position on her own.

But then Flavia overstepped. Once she knew they had no solid evidence against her, her hand was strengthened. And once she knew where the icon was, she had a motive. She could finish the job, with good luck. And surely she deserved some.

The problem, as far as she could see it, was perfectly simple. Charanis had her granddaughter and wanted the icon. She wanted her granddaughter, but didn’t have the icon to give in return. Menzies did have it—or might, she wasn’t so stupid as not to consider the possibility of Flavia being either wrong or devious—and so she would have to collect it from Menzies. Simple and easy. Just as well she had taken the trouble of finding out where he lived when she found out he was working in the church. And just as well he had never met her.

What was the alternative? Luring Charanis into a police trap? Fine; except his father would use every weapon in his considerable arsenal to get him released and would probably succeed. And even if he did go to jail, he still had his associates, and once it became clear that Mary Verney was responsible for his being in jail, then she and her granddaughter would pay a heavy price. She wanted no harm to come to her granddaughter, and did not want to spend the rest of her life looking over her shoulder.

She was not someone who was used to sitting back and accepting her fate; in her mind she saw her whole life as a struggle, to protect her and hers from the outside world. That was why she’d started stealing in the first place. She was used to doing things her way, at her pace, and for her own advantage. Being pushed and corralled by thugs on the one hand and the police on the other gave her such a feeling of being squeezed that she almost felt ill. Not that she had no sympathy with Flavia; one of the curiosities about her, so obvious that even she was aware of it, was that she generally regarded herself as a law-abiding citizen. And, apart from stealing for a living, so she was. She tutted over rising crime figures she read about in the newspapers, advocated stiff penalties for criminals and, generally, blamed the parents. Which she did in her own case as well. But, usually, she always managed to put what she did into a different category. Apart from the one occasion when she had been blackmailed, she hurt no one, and destroyed nothing. A redistribution of goods. She had few moral scruples about how she had spent her life; most of the people she’d stolen from could well afford their losses. But she had no illusions either, and had an odd sense of justice. Charanis offended that and there was nothing to be done about it.

She was pouring herself a drink when the phone rang. The porter downstairs. A visitor. Her heart skipped a beat. She listened for a while, then recovered slowly.

“What a surprise,” she said coldly when he’d finished. “Perhaps you’d better come up, Mr Charanis.”

Mary hadn’t seen him for years; not since she had personally delivered a picture, and ended staying on in his house for another month in what was one of the most delightful, if poignantly short, periods of her life. The most charming, and the most exciting, man she had ever known. And then he goes and does this to her; she was certain he must be behind this. She had only encountered his kind, personal side in the past; never before been in the way stopping him getting something he wanted.