Checkmate in Amber Read Free

Catalonia. Everything that he bought with the gypsies’ help off the priests and bishops, he sold immediately at sky-high prices. And it just didn’t stop. Every single time the loaded trucks arrived at the finca, dozens of traders, dealers and collectors were waiting, desperate to buy whatever there was at whatever the price. One of those early collectors was Prince Philibert de Malgaigne-Denonvilliers, a French aristocrat who lived in a fortified château in the Loire Valley and ended up becoming my father’s best friend. It was Philibert de Malgaigne-Denonvilliers - aka Roi - who introduced my father to the Chess Group.
    ‘Are you going to be much longer?’ Juana asked me, all of a sudden, from the other side of the door. My aunt never ever put a foot inside the dungeon. See no evil, speak no evil - Juana-style.
    I took the leather bag off my shoulder and gently set it down on a plank. With the maximum possible care, I untied the knotted drawstring and pulled the top open to reveal a stunningly beautiful eighteenth-century Russian icon. With the same hands which had calmly and coolly unhooked it from the iconostasis in the little Orthodox church of Saint Dimitri, I caressed it now with loving care as if it was a defenseless new-born kitten. A Madonna and Child whose stylized and prayerful faces gazed at me in silence from across the more than two hundred years which separated us.
    The monk who painted them had carried out his task with tools and techniques which had remained strictly unaltered over the centuries. Painting an icon was by no means the same as producing a picture in the style of Zurbarán or Murillo. For an Orthodox monk, creating an icon represented a singular and sacred moment in his life, which required prayerful contemplation and fasting before he even began to prepare his glues and pigments. Tradition allotted each color its own particular significance: blue stood for transcendence, yellow and gold signified divine glory, while white meant righteous majesty. Before being considered worthy of using white, for instance, the monk had to devote many hours to prayer and penitence, as he also did before painting the faces and hands and feet, regarded as the icon’s most important features, not covered by clothing, the essence of its very sacredness. So even when, from the ninth century onwards, the custom rapidly caught on throughout Russia of embossing the whole icon with a coat of gold or silver, a finish known as
rizza
, these visible parts of the sacred body were left untouched.
    The sudden halt in icon production in 1921, as a result of Lenin’s edict banning it, only had the effect of awakening the voracious appetite of collectors for these treasures. And it was for one of these connoisseurs that I had robbed this particular beauty, which had been saved from the Leninist mass destruction and then resurfaced, thanks to
perestroika
. The buyer, a reclusive French multimillionaire, had offered $500,000 for the piece and, given the minimal risk involved, the Chess Group had happily accepted the job and carried it out with consummate ease. At this very moment, an exquisite and perfect replica of the icon I held in my hands was hanging undisturbed on the Church of Saint Dimitri’s iconostasis in Saint Petersburg, ensuring that the disappearance of the original would remain undetected for the next one hundred years. Donna’s forgery was, as ever, a masterpiece in itself.
    ‘Ana María, are you going to be much longer?’ repeated my aunt, at the limits of her patience.
    ‘No, no, I’m done,’ I answered, putting the icon down in a corner, covering it with a clean cloth and hurriedly gathering up my stuff.
    I checked the cell over with a final glance and brushed the dust off my hands on my jeans as I left. Juana shut the door, turned the lock and headed back to the cloisters in a tearing hurry.
    ‘Come on then. We’ve still got lots to do.’
    The entire Redemptorist community was waiting for us by