The Whispering: A Haunted House Mystery(15)

I would have liked you, thought Michael, coming briefly up out of the narrative. Even though you were clearly a roaring snob and it doesn’t sound as if you had a moral to your name, whoever you were, I still think I’d have liked you. What your journal is doing in an English house in the twenty-first century though, I can’t imagine. But you knew Leonora – God knows how or where, but you did, and on that score alone I need to find out more about you.

He read on:

I have made something of what people would call a speciality in my work. The occasional painting, certainly, but more particularly the small and the exquisite. Silver snuffboxes, enamelled patch-boxes, jade figurines. Jewellery, of course. Icons, naturally.

One of my more cherished memories is of a visit to an exhibition of religious icons in Moscow. I had gone there in a professional capacity – which is to say I intended to liberate at least four of the choicest icons – and I had several discerning clients (I prefer to call them clients) eagerly awaiting them. None of the clients knew, not with any certainty, that I stole the objects they so greedily purchased, but most of them must have guessed. However, they all knew that if they were to inform the—

Michael had not been able to find an exact translation for the next word, but he thought it was a reasonably safe bet that it was intended to convey police, or the equivalent.

—it would have meant the end of their supply of jewellery and beautiful objects. More to the point, it would also have meant the end of my career and a sojourn in prison.

I found it very useful that in old Russia – by which I mean the Russia of the Mongols, the land of the Firebird – it had never been customary to sign icons. That often meant there was no provenance. My grandfather always held that if a piece did not have a provenance, then all that was needed was to create one for it, and the more exotic, the better. My father specialized in stealing jewellery, but my grandfather was a very good forger and he taught me something of the craft. He was also extremely skilled at replacing genuine artefacts with his own creations. If you’ve ever been in the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg, (although now we have to say Petrograd), and stood in front of a certain portrait with, let us say, Tzarist connotations … Let’s just say he fooled a great many people, my grandfather.

But that evening at the icons exhibition, as I walked through the warm, perfumed rooms, I overheard someone say to a companion, ‘A beautiful exhibition. Some very rare pieces.’

The companion replied, half serious, half jocular, ‘Let’s hope Iskander hasn’t heard about this evening’s display.’

The other man said, curiously, ‘Is that his real name?’

‘God knows. I’ve heard he has several aliases. They say he switches names to suit whatever villainy he’s currently engaged in. But whether he’s called Alexei Iskander or something else entirely, if he knew about tonight he’d have cleared most of the rooms inside ten minutes, and our exhibition would be over.’

I didn’t clear the rooms, but I did appropriate six icons, all of them beautiful, all of them highly valuable, although the speaker was wrong about the time it took me. It was a little under eight minutes.

And so I come to the real start of my story, which begins in the disastrous year of 1914.

1914. It’s almost like a milestone, that date. A dark, bloodied landmark jutting out of history’s highways like a shark’s tooth, warning the human race never to venture into that kind of darkness again. (I make no apologies for the extravagance or the emotion of that sentence; a man may surely succumb to emotion when describing the rising of the curtain on the most brutal, most wasteful war of all time.)

Censorship was still muzzling books and newspapers in Russia at that time, and thousands of people had no idea that Europe was a simmering cauldron, fast approaching boiling point. People in cities probably knew something of the situation, and because I was living in Moscow I suppose I knew as much as most of them – which is to say not very much at all. But I did know that the balance of power which several countries had striven to maintain was starting to crumble. That was hardly surprising considering the complexity of political and military alliances. If you pull out one strand of an intricate tapestry, the entire thing will unravel, and by the summer of 1914 several strands had been pulled with some force. I’ve never unravelled a tapestry (although I’ve acquired and sold a few most profitably), and I certainly never fully unravelled the tangled strands of Holy Alliances or Bismarck’s League or any of the Austro-Hungarian pacts.

I am still not entirely sure why I felt such a compulsion to become involved in those snarled strands. I wonder now if my profession had begun to bore me – even if it was becoming too easy. Perhaps I wanted a new challenge, or perhaps I simply wanted to be able, afterwards, to say that I had been part of it all, that I had been there amidst the tumult and the chaos, not exactly helping to make history, which would have been a massive conceit (even for me), but to witness history being made. Recording history for future generations. The more I thought about that, the better I liked it.

So I set about persuading several newspaper editors to take me on to their staff as a freelance war correspondent, because war there surely would be, even the optimists agreed about that. I explained to them that I would be a highly suitable person to send to the troubled areas of Europe to write about the unrest. Not only was I able to write interesting and informative prose, I said, but I had travelled quite extensively. I had reasonable proficiency in French, I could make myself understood in German and I even had a smattering of English as well. ‘Smattering’ was something of an exaggeration there, but they accepted my claim, (fortunately without putting it to the test). What really clinched the matter, though, was that without actually saying so, I managed to convey that I had the entrée to a number of privileged houses. I do think I did that rather well, and if they ended up believing I dined at the Kaiser’s table regularly and was on intimate terms with several members of the Imperial Royal House of Habsburg, it was entirely due to their own naivety.