Neil Olson - The Icon

“No, time to walk again. I have kept you too long. Help me up.”

They continued north along the narrow path to the bridge below Cedar Hill, at ease once more in their manner, if not their minds. Matthew waited for a continued assault, but his companion was quiet, attention directed inward. Suppressing new pain, perhaps, or focusing his energy to finish the walk. Bright strips on the ceiling lit the short tunnel. A heap of clothing against the wall became, on closer inspection, a homeless man, sleeping or expired.

“If the church were to get it,” Matthew began in mid-thought,

“where would they put it?”

“We have not spoken in that sort of detail. I cannot ask them such things unless I am ready to support them if the answer is agreeable. And I cannot support them at all without you. So tell me what answer would make you happy.”

“I’d just want to be sure it wasn’t going to end up in a vault, or on some bishop’s wall. That it would be somewhere the public could see it.”

“Then we make that a condition of our involvement.”

“I don’t see how we can set conditions. I don’t intend to talk Ms. Kessler into anything.”

“But if she asks your advice, you will give it?”

“I have to think about all this.”

“That is the wise course.”

Dogs frolicked with their masters on the wide, sloping hillside above. To the north, through trees and across the Seventy-ninth Street transverse rose the massive concrete and glass south wall of the museum. A path bisected the one they were on, running up Cedar Hill to their left and out to Fifth Avenue on their right. Fotis would take this path to where his driver-one of the Russians, Anton or Nicholas-waited on the avenue. Obeying some unspoken rule, Matthew never accompanied him to the car, but did watch to see that he made it safely to the street.

“I will leave you to your work.” Fotis took both of the younger man’s hands in his own. “Do not let your thoughts be troubled. The correct decision will come to you if your mind is at peace. God keep you, my boy.”

“Take care, Theio.”

A squeeze of fingers and the old man was off, slow but steady in his gait, never looking back. Matthew stood fixed in that little intersection until long after his godfather was out sight.

Jan placed the guidebook, open to the section on Central Park, facedown on the bench and waited for the old man to pass by. The younger one still stood there, fifty meters away, looking in his direction. Unlikely that he had noticed anything, Jan decided, merely making sure the old fellow was all right. He reached into his pocket and put his hand around the cool metal object, slipped it out carefully. One shot would do it, but two or three were protocol, in the back of the skull and between and just below the shoulder blades. That is, if this were a gun and not a cell phone.

Of course this was a terrible spot, far too many people and no cover. One of the three short tunnels they had passed through would be a better choice, especially if it were a rainy or cloudy day, a good bet in April in New York. But he might have to take out the younger one as well. Better still would be between the car and the house out in Queens. Well, best to have several options. He could inform del Carros that it would be no problem. The dealer would assume he was being nonchalant, having already pronounced the Greek a difficult target, but in truth Jan anticipated little trouble, even with the Russian bodyguards. He wouldn’t mind adding them in; he hated Russians.

No messages. He put the phone away and picked up the guidebook again. Over 300 species of birds seen in the park every year, including the green heron and scarlet tanager. Amazing. Jan shook his head in wonder at the natural world.

Dust motes hung in the white shafts of light between the stacks, and Matthew had to work hard not to become hypnotized, not to let his imagination run wild with the strange reports on the pages before him. Down the hall in his office the red message light blinked on his telephone-the idiot lawyer for that potential donor in Chicago, no doubt. Memos from Nevins, the chief curator, from Carol and the planning committee, the director, Legal, all crowded his e-mail inbox, but Matthew was ignoring them. He was holed up instead in the department library, with the old volumes that held the few fragments of available knowledge on the Kessler icon.

An Internet search revealed nothing on so obscure a subject. There was nothing dependable from Byzantine sources, either, no way to trace the icon back to its place and moment of creation. The only clues were to be found in the image itself. The bottom of the work was so damaged that he hadn’t been able to tell for certain whether there might once have been a depiction of the Christ child there, to whom Mary’s badly chipped hands should be directing the viewer. This would place the image squarely in the hodegetria style, “She who shows the way,” one of the most favored and oldest iconic traditions, based on an original painted by Saint Luke himself, according to popular myth. But the placement of the hands and the half turn to the right of the entire figure-more likely to direct the viewer’s attention outside the frame-seemed to place the image more in the hagiasoritissa tradition. This series was associated with the relic of Mary’s hood or sash, brought back from the Holy Land by Saint Helena in the fourth century and placed in a reliquary, above which the prototype of this image would have hung.

There were some arguments against this identification. The Katarini icon looked the viewer dead in the eye, instead of following the hand gestures to the right, where an icon of Jesus would generally accompany it. However, Matthew knew other images in the tradition which also broke that rule. A bigger stumbling block was that the style hadn’t really become popular until the mid-tenth century, and the Katarini icon was certainly older than that, maybe much older. Yet who was to say the style hadn’t existed earlier? Perhaps previous versions had all been destroyed in the iconoclasm of the eighth century. Indeed, Matthew thought, allowing the long-suppressed conjecture which had been building within him all morning to come forward, who was to say this image was not the long-lost prototype itself? The first of its kind, the inspiration for all that followed?

A shiver passed through his arms as the notion seized him. He fought this sudden agitation, assuring himself that the religious significance of such a find meant little to him. It would, though, mean a great deal to others, like the church officials who had contacted Fotis. Even as an art historical identification it would be impressive indeed-career-making, perhaps. Alas, unless further evidence came to light from some hidden source, it would remain forever a theory. Meantime, if he would never know for certain from where the Holy Mother had sprung, or how it made its eventual way to Epiros, at least he could review the traces of evidence regarding its time there.

The catalogs of the great art critics of centuries past had little room for Eastern Orthodox, and when it was included, it was always the same handful of icons: the sixth-century Peter, Mary, and Christ Pantokrator at Saint Catherine’s in Sinai; some later pieces of Theophanes and Rublev in Russia; the Vladimir Virgin; a few others. Considering its placement in the rugged hills of Greece, not to mention the vast number of works in that country claiming special spiritual status, the Katarini Holy Mother’s becoming known at all had to count as nearly miraculous. The first mention Matthew could discover was from the English adventurer Thomas Hall, who traveled all over Greece and Turkey in the 1780s. Hall’s highly fanciful travelogues included, among many unlikely reports, one of the “Holy Mother of Epiros” (as if there were only one Holy Mother icon in the whole region), described as “more scratched wood than paint, except for the very lovely face of the Virgin” and as “curing blindness in true-hearted souls at a touch of its worn wood, but striking blind those of an evil or avaricious nature.” This followed the story of the levitating monks of Metéora and directly preceded that of the miraculous vision of Christ in the peasant wife’s washcloth. Matthew always had a good laugh reading Hall.