Anthology 2. Luminous [1998, 2010]

by Greg Egan

  As dusk fell on the first day of my allotted fourteen, I paced the office irritably, already feeling pessimistic. De Angelis’s image smiled coolly on the terminal; her grieving lover’s wine tasted sour in my throat. This woman was dead, that was the crime, and I was being paid to hunt for a faded piece of kitsch. If I found the killers it would be incidental. And the truth was, I was hoping I wouldn’t.

  I opened the blinds and looked down towards the city centre. Flea-sized specks scurried across the Piazza del Duomo, the cathedral’s forest of mad Gothic pinnacles towering above them. I rarely noticed the cathedral: it was just another part of the expensive view (like the Alps, visible from the reception room); and the view was just part of the whole high-class image which enabled me to charge twenty times as much for my services as any back-alley operator. Now I blinked at the sight of it as if it were a hallucination: it seemed so alien, so out of place, beside the gleaming dark ceramic buildings of twenty-first-century Milan. Statues of saints, or angels, or gargoyles – I couldn’t remember and, at this distance, I couldn’t really tell them apart – stood atop every pinnacle, like a thousand demented stylites. The whole roof was encrusted with pink-tinged marble, dizzyingly, surrealistically ornate, looking in places like lacework, and in places like barbed wire. Good atheist or not, I’d been inside once or twice, though I struggled to remember when and why; some unavoidable ceremonial occasion. In any case, I’d grown up with the sight of it; it should have been a familiar landmark, nothing more. But at that moment, the whole structure seemed utterly foreign, utterly strange; it was as if the mountains to the north had shed their snow and greenery and topsoil and revealed themselves to be giant artefacts, pyramids from Central America, relics of a vanished civilisation.

  I closed the blinds, and wiped the dead courier’s face from my computer screen.

  Then I bought myself a ticket to Zürich.

  * * *

  The databases had had plenty to say about Rolf Hengartner. He’d worked in electronic publishing, making deals on some ethereal plane where Europe’s biggest software providers carved up the market to their mutual satisfaction. I imagined him skiing, snow and water, with Ministers of Culture and satellite magnates … although probably not in the last few years, in his seventies, with acute lymphoma. He’d started out in film finance, orchestrating the funding of multinational coproductions; one of the photographs of him in the reception room to what was now his assistant’s office showed him raising a clenched fist beside a still-young Depardieu at an anti-Hollywood demonstration in Paris twenty years before.

  Max Reif, his assistant, had been appointed executor of the estate. I’d downloaded the latest overpriced Schweitzerdeutsch software for my notepad, in the hope that it would guide me through the interview without too many blunders, but Reif insisted on speaking Italian, and turned out to be perfectly fluent.

  Hengartner’s wife had died before him, but he was survived by three children and ten grandchildren. Reif had been instructed to sell all of the art, since none of the family had ever shown much interest in the collection.

  ‘What was his passion? Orthodox icons?’

  ‘Not at all. Herr Hengartner was eclectic, but the icon was a complete surprise to me. Something of an anomaly. He owned some French Gothic and Italian Renaissance works with religious themes, but he certainly didn’t specialise in the Madonna, let alone the Eastern tradition.’

  Reif showed me a photograph of the icon in the glossy brochure which had been put together for the auction; Masini had mislaid his copy of the catalogue, so this was my first chance to see exactly what I was searching for. I read the Italian section in the pentalingual commentary on the facing page:

  A stunning example of the icon known as the Vladimir Mother of God, probably the most ancient variation of the icons of ‘loving-kindness’ (Greek eleousa, Russian umileniye). It depicts the Virgin holding the Child, His face pressed tenderly to His mother’s cheek, in a powerful symbol of both divine and human compassion for all of creation. According to tradition, this icon derives from a painting by the Evangelist Luke. The surviving exemplar, from which the type takes its name, was brought to Kiev from Constantinople in the 12th century, and is now in the Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow. It has been described as the greatest holy treasure of the Russian nation.

  Artist unknown. Ukrainian, early 18th century. Cyprus panel, 293 x 204 mm, egg tempera on linen, exquisitely decorated with beaten silver.

  The reserve price was listed as eighty thousand Swiss francs. Less than a fiftieth what Masini had paid for it.

  The aesthetic attraction of the piece was lost on me; it wasn’t exactly a Caravaggio. The colours were drab, the execution was crude – deliberately two-dimensional – and even the silver was badly tarnished. The paintwork itself appeared to be in reasonable condition; for a moment I thought there was a hairline crack across the full width of the icon, but on closer inspection it looked more like a flaw in the reproduction: a scratch on the printing plate, or some photographic intermediate.

  Of course, this wasn’t meant to be ‘high art’ in the Western tradition. No expression of the artist’s ego, no indulgent idiosyncrasies of style. It was, presumably, a faithful copy of the Byzantine original, intended to play a specific role in the practice of the Orthodox religion, and I was in no position to judge its value in that context. But I had trouble imagining either Rolf Hengartner or Luciano Masini as secret converts to the Eastern church. So was it purely a matter of a good investment? Was this nothing but an eighteenth-century baseball card, to them? If Masini’s only interest was financial, though, why had he paid so much more than the market value? And why was he so desperate to get it back?

  I said, ‘Can you tell me who bid for the icon, besides Signor Masini?’

  ‘The usual dealers, the usual brokers. I’m afraid I couldn’t tell you on whose behalf they were acting.’

  ‘But you did monitor the bidding?’ A number of potential buyers, or their agents, had visited Zürich to view the collection in person – Masini among them – but the auction itself had taken place by phone line and computer.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Was there a consensus for a price close to Masini’s final bid? Or was he forced up to it by just one of those anonymous rivals?’

  Reif stiffened, and I suddenly realised what that must have sounded like.

  I said, ‘I certainly didn’t mean to imply—’

  ‘At least three other bidders,’ he said icily, ‘were within a few hundred thousand francs of Signor Masini all the way. I’m sure he’ll confirm that, if you take the trouble to ask him.’ He hesitated, then added less defensively, ‘Obviously the reserve price was set far too low. But Herr Hengartner anticipated that the auction house would undervalue this item.’

  That threw me. ‘I thought you didn’t know about the icon until after his death. If you’d discussed its value with him—’

  ‘I didn’t. But Herr Hengartner left a note beside it in the safe.’ He hesitated, as if debating with himself whether or not I deserved to be privy to the great man’s insights.

  I didn’t dare plead with him, let alone insist; I just waited in silence for him to continue. It can’t have been more than ten or fifteen seconds, but I swear I broke out in a sweat.

  Reif smiled, and put me out of my misery. ‘The note said: Prepare to be surprised.’

  * * *

  In the early evening I left my hotel room and wandered through the city centre. I’d never had reason to visit Zürich before, but, language aside, it was already beginning to feel just like home. The same fast-food chains had colonised the city. The electronic billboards displayed the same advertisements. The glass fronts of the VR parlours glowed with surreal images from the very same games, and the twelve-year-olds inside had all succumbed to the same unfortunate Texan fashions. Even the smell of the place was exactly like Milan on a Saturday night: french fries, popcorn, Reeboks and Coke.

  Had Ukrainian secret service agents killed De A
ngelis to get the icon back? Was this the flip-side of all the diplomatic efforts to recover stolen artwork? That seemed unlikely. If there were the slightest grounds for the return of the icon, then dragging the matter through the courts would have meant far better publicity for the cause. Slaughtering foreign citizens could play havoc with international aid, and the Ukraine was in the middle of negotiating an upgrading of its trade relationship with Europe. I couldn’t believe that any government would risk so much for a single work of art, in a country full of more or less interchangeable copies of the very same piece. It wasn’t as if Hengartner had got his hands on the twelfth-century original.

  Who, then? Another collector, another obsessive hoarder, whom Masini had outbid? Someone, perhaps, unlike Hengartner, who already owned several other baseball cards, and wanted a complete set? Maybe Masini’s insurance firm had the connections and clout needed to find out who the true bidders at the auction had been; I certainly didn’t. A rival collector wasn’t the only possibility; one of the bidders could have been a dealer who was so impressed by the price the icon fetched that he or she decided it was worth acquiring by other means.

  The air was growing cold faster than I’d expected; I decided to return to the hotel. I’d been walking along the west bank of the Limmat River, down towards the lake; I started to cross back over at the first bridge I came to, then I paused midway to get my bearings. There were cathedrals either side of me, facing each other across the river; unimposing structures compared with Milan’s giant Nosferatu Castle, but I felt a – ridiculous – frisson of unease, as if the pair of them had conspired to ambush me.

  My Schweitzerdeutsch package came with free maps and tour guides; I hit the Where am I? button, and the GPS unit in the notepad passed its co-ordinates to the software, which proceeded to demystify my surroundings. The two buildings in question were the Grossmunster (which looked like a fortress, with two brutal towers side by side, not quite facing the river’s east bank) and the Fraumunster (once an abbey, with a single slender spire). Both dated from the thirteenth century, although modifications of one kind or another had continued almost to the present. Stained-glass windows by, respectively, Giacometti and Chagall. And Ulrich Zwingli had launched the Swiss Reformation from the pulpit of the Grossmunster in 1523.

  I was staring at one of the birthplaces of a sect which had endured for five hundred years, and it was far stranger than standing in the shadow of the most ancient Roman temple. To say: Christianity has shaped the physical and cultural landscape of Europe for two thousand years, as relentlessly as any glacier, as mercilessly as any clash of tectonic plates, is to state the fatuously obvious. But if I’d spent my whole life surrounded by the evidence, it was only now – now that the legacy of those millennia was beginning to seem increasingly bizarre to me – that I had any real sense of what it meant. Arcane theological disputes between people as alien to me as the ancient Egyptians had transformed the entire continent – along with a thousand purely political and economic forces, for sure – but, nevertheless, modulating the development of almost every human activity, from architecture to music, from commerce to warfare, at one level or another.

  And there was no reason to believe that the process had halted. Just because the Alps were no longer rising didn’t mean geology had come to an end.

  ‘Do you wish to know more?’ the tour guide asked me.

  ‘Not unless you can tell me the word for a pathological fear of cathedrals.’

  It hesitated, then replied with impeccable fuzzy logic, ‘There are cathedrals across the length and breadth of Europe. Which particular cathedrals did you have in mind?’

  * * *

  De Angelis’s colleagues had provided me with the name of the taxi company she’d used for her trip from the bank to the airport – the last thing she’d paid for with her business credit card. I’d spoken to the manager of the company by phone from Milan, and there was a message from her when I arrived back at the hotel, with the name of the driver for the journey in question. He was far from the last person who’d seen De Angelis alive – but possibly the last before she’d been persuaded, by whatever means, to take the icon to Vienna. He was due to report for work at the depot that evening at nine. I ate quickly, then set out into the cold again. The only taxis outside the hotel were from a rival company. I went on foot.

  I found Phan Anh Tuan drinking coffee in a corner of the garage. After a brief exchange in German, he asked me if I’d prefer to speak French, and I gratefully switched. He told me he’d been an engineering student in East Berlin when the Wall came down. ‘I always meant to find a way to finish my degree and go home. I got sidetracked, somehow.’ He gazed out at the dark icy street, bemused.

  I put a photo of De Angelis on the table in front of him; he looked long and hard. ‘No, I’m sorry. I didn’t take this woman anywhere.’

  I hadn’t been optimistic; still, it would have been nice to have gleaned some small clue about her state of mind; had she been humming ‘We’re in the Money’ all the way to the airport, or what?

  I said, ‘You must have a hundred customers a day. Thanks for trying.’ I started to take the photo back; he caught my hand.

  ‘I’m not telling you I must have forgotten her. I’m telling you I’m sure I’ve never seen her before.’

  I said, ‘Last Monday. Two twelve p.m. Intercontinental Bank to the airport. The despatcher’s records show—’

  He was frowning. ‘Monday? No. I had engine trouble. I was out of service for almost an hour. Until nearly three.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  He fetched a handwritten log book from his vehicle, and showed me the entry.

  I said, ‘Why would the despatcher get it wrong?’

  He shrugged. ‘It must have been a software glitch. A computer takes the calls, allocates them … it’s all fully automated. We flick a switch on the radio when we’re unavailable – and I can’t have forgotten to do that, because I kept the radio on all the time I was working on the car, and no fares came through to me.’

  ‘Could someone else have accepted a job from the despatcher, pretending to be you?’

  He laughed. ‘Intentionally? No. Not without changing the ID number of their radio.’

  ‘And how hard would that be? Would you need a forged chip, with a duplicate serial number?’

  ‘No. But it would mean pulling the radio out, opening it up, and resetting thirty-two DIP switches. Why would anyone bother?’ Then I saw it click in his eyes.

  I said, ‘Do you know of anyone here having a radio stolen recently? The two-way, not the music?’

  He nodded sadly. ‘Both. Someone had both stolen. About a month ago.’

  * * *

  I returned in the morning and confirmed with some of the other drivers most of what Phan had told me. There was no easy way of proving that he hadn’t lied about the engine trouble and driven De Angelis himself, but I couldn’t see why he would have invented an ‘alibi’ when there was no need for one – when he could have said ‘Yes, I drove her, she hardly spoke a word,’ and no one would have had the slightest reason to doubt him.

  So: someone had gone to a lot of trouble to be alone in a fake taxi with De Angelis … and then they’d let her walk into the airport and phone home. To delay the moment when head office would realise that something had gone wrong, presumably, but why had she gone along with that? What had the driver said to her, in those few minutes, to make her so cooperative? Was it a threat to her family, her lover? Or a bribe, large enough to convince her to make up her mind on the spot? And then she hadn’t bothered to cover her trail, because she knew there’d be no way to do so convincingly? She’d accepted the fact that her guilt would be obvious, and that she’d have to become a fugitive?

  That sounded like one hell of a bribe. So how could she have been so naı¨ve as to think that anyone would actually pay it?

  Outside the Intercontinental Bank, I took her photo from my wallet and held it up towards the armoured-glass revolving doors,
trying to imagine the scene. The taxi arrives, she climbs in, they pull out into the traffic. The driver says: Nice weather we’re having. By the way, I know what you’ve got in the attaché case. Come to Vienna with me and I’ll make you rich.

  She stared back at me accusingly. I said, ‘All right, De Angelis, I’m sorry. I don’t believe you were that stupid.’

  I gazed at the laser-printed image. Something nagged at me. Digital radios with driver IDs? For some reason, that had surprised me. It shouldn’t have. Perhaps movie scenes of taxi drivers and police communicating in incomprehensible squawks still lingered in my subconscious, still shaped my expectations on some level, in spite of the kind of technology I used myself every day. The word ‘auction’ still conjured up scenes of a man or woman with a hammer, shouting out bids in a crowded room, though I’d never witnessed anything remotely like that, except in the movies. In real life, everything was computerised, everything was digital. This ‘photograph’ was digital. Chemical film had started disappearing from the shops when I was fourteen or fifteen years old, and even in my childhood it was strictly an amateur medium; most commercial photographers had been using CCD arrays for almost twenty years.

  So why did there appear to be a fine scratch across the photograph of the icon? The few hundred copies of the auction catalogue would have been produced without using a single analogue intermediate; everything would have gone from digital camera to computer to laser printer. The glossy end-product was the one anachronism – and a less conservative auction house would have offered an on-line version, or an interactive CD.

  Reif had let me keep the catalogue; back in my hotel room, I inspected it again. The ‘scratch’ definitely wasn’t a crack in the paintwork; it cut right across the image, a perfectly straight, white line of uniform thickness, crossing from paint to raised silverwork without the slightest deviation.