The Body in Bodega Bay: A Nora Barnes and Toby Sandler Mystery

Chapter 10

134 10 THE NEXT MORNING a bleary-eyed Toby drove us into Berkeley, with the damaged icon cradled in my lap. Angie was off for another session with her angel reader. I hadn’t been in touch with Al since our previous visit, so we had some catching up to do. Sitting in his familiar living room over tea in china cups, Toby and I went over everything we had learned about the icon, while he peered at the damage, turned the panel over, and examined its back. Today Al was wearing a herringbone sports jacket and a bowtie. He was in his teaching outfit. “Well,” he said at last, “it can be repaired, but not by me. You need a specialist. I was right about the panel, though. It’s much older than the painting on it, at least sixteenth century, probably even fifteenth. The grooves, cleats, condition of the wood all point to its age, so that in itself makes it rare. There’s almost certainly an older image under Michael—or several. There’s no telling what you might have here.” “Maybe there is,” I said, surprising him. “Read this.” I handed Al a copy of the San Francisco Chronicle article from 1962, the one that recounted the legend of Rublev’s lost triptych. 135 His eyes widened as he read it. “Whew!” he exclaimed when he had finished. “Call me Ishmael.” He reached for his cup and took a sip of tea. “Huh?’ “Moby-Dick,” he explained. “You’ve been chasing the white whale of icon-hunting. You’re not the first to go running after that legend.” “But is there anything to the legend?” Toby asked. “There actually was a white whale in Moby-Dick. Ahab found it.” “And it killed him,” noted Al, a twinkle in his eye. He sighed and put down his cup. “About the legend—we all know it. It’s been around a long time, but there’s never been a reason to take it seriously. No grounds, no real evidence. Every once in a while someone claims to have traced the Rublev triptych through a reference in some arcane document, but it’s never turned up. I’ve always considered it a myth.” “But what if it’s more than a myth and someone found it,” persisted Toby. “What would it be worth today?” Al snorted and his tea sloshed dangerously. He steadied the cup and leaned forward. “What if Leonardo had made a small copy of The Last Supper to carry around with him on his travels and it showed up after having gone missing all these years. What do you think that would be worth?” “You’d put Rublev in the same category as Leonardo?” “In the history of Russian icon painting, he’s the equivalent. There are very few examples of his work, aside from a few undisputed masterpieces and fragments. But no one else had a greater influence on the genre. You must know something about him, don’t you, Nora?” He reached into his jacket pocket and brought out a meerschaum. I confessed I knew the name but not much else. “You should have taken my Russian icon seminar,” Al grumbled as he filled and lit the pipe. “I took your Giotto seminar instead,” I reminded him. “Why not both?” He blew out the match, then smiled. “All right, I’m teasing. Here, let me show you something.” Al got up, went to the 136 wall of bookshelves behind him, and returned with a large illustrated tome of Russian icons. His pipe clenched between his teeth, he thumbed through the book and then spread it open on the coffee table to display a full-page, color reproduction of Andrei Rublev’s Old Testament Trinity. He tapped the illustration with the stem of his pipe. “This is his most famous work, the one that, according to the legend, he duplicated as a small triptych.” The caption identified the icon as a large piece, some 56" × 45", painted in egg tempera between 1422 and 1427 for the Cathedral of the Trinity–St. Sergey Monastery in Zagorsk. “Originally, the panel was part of an iconostasis,” said Al, “consisting of several tiers of icons forming a wall between the altar and the main body of the church. They say it’s been restored so many times that there are hardly traces left of the original—much...