by Betsy Draine
“Which is?” queried Toby.
“Russian decorative arts—silver, jewelry, Fabergé eggs, pre-Revolutionary objects. And religious art,” he added, narrowing his eyelids meaningfully. “I have a small but to me very precious collection of Russian icons.”
Toby tensed. “And you’ve dropped in today because you happened to be passing by?”
“Not exactly. I saw a story on the news last night in San Francisco about the murder of your partner. It mentioned the robbery of your gallery. I’m very sorry. You have my condolences.”
“Thank you. So the story made the TV news in San Francisco,” said Toby, angling for additional information. “I didn’t know that.”
“Yes, and there was mention of a Russian icon that might have been the object of the robbery,” continued the stranger. “That was the first time I was made aware that any gallery outside the city handled material of that nature, so I drove up for the day to see what else you might have along those lines. Again, I’m very sorry for your loss.”
“I see. Then I have to disappoint you. I don’t have anything else at the moment that would meet your needs.”
“Nothing at all in the category of Russian icons or antiques? Imperial porcelain, perhaps?”
“I’m afraid not. We don’t usually carry items of that description. The icon was a one-off find. A chance purchase, you might say.”
“Oh. Well in that case, I must be disappointed. May I ask if you were the one who made that purchase?”
“No, my partner did, and as a result, I know very little about it.”
“Ah. Out of curiosity, can you describe it? What was the subject, for example?”
“It was an icon of St. Michael, I believe,” answered Toby, “but I only glanced at it when my partner brought it to the shop. I know almost nothing at all about Russian art, to tell you the truth. I’m afraid I can’t tell you much about it.”
“St. Michael, you say? A pity it was stolen. I have a special feeling for St. Michael. I would have liked to see it.”
Toby nodded.
“Are there any other galleries in Sonoma County I may have overlooked that carry religious icons or Russian objects of historical interest?”
“Not that I know of,” replied Toby. “But it might be worth your while to look around in Guerneville or Graton. Even Sebastopol. You never can tell what might come into a shop from week to week.”
“Yes, you’re right. You know, I may spend a day or two more in the area. Let me give you my card. In case you do come across any Russian objects that might interest me, would you be so kind as to give me a call?”
“Of course.”
“And in the event that the missing icon is recovered, I would be extremely interested in seeing it. As I’ve said, I have a special reverence for St. Michael, and I won’t quibble about price if I find a piece I like.” He extended his card to Toby, who slipped it into his shirt pocket without reading it. “Thank you,” said the stranger, and with that, he exited the shop, with a quick, polite nod in my direction.
I had felt a growing sense of unease during this conversation. Now Toby walked back to where I was sitting, withdrawing the card from his pocket. As he gazed at it, he stopped abruptly, then looked up.
“What’s the matter?” I asked.
Wordlessly, he handed it to me. It was a plain white business card bearing a name, an address in San Francisco, and a phone number. There was nothing particularly interesting about the card except the name.
Andrew Federenco.
5
THE COUSIN? The man Peter feared? I called Rose right away, but the best she could do was confirm that Andrew might have been the cousin’s name. Honestly, she couldn’t remember. Still, it was enough of a reason to call Dan. He picked up the phone on the first ring. He had just been reading my e-mail, and now with this piece of news, he decided to swing by to see us. He was at the shop within twenty minutes.
“Hey, guys. Thanks for the Cassini notes. Let’s review them step by step.”
In answer to his methodical questions, we walked Dan through our interview with Rose, relating her conversation with Charlie and her tales about the past. We concluded with Andrew Federenco’s recent visit. Toby handed over Federenco’s card, and Dan studied it. “Address and phone number, that helps,” he said. “I’ll have somebody get on it right away. Good job, you two.”
We thanked him. Dan was now following several lines in the investigation. He’d discovered that Charlie had been a regular at a high-stakes poker game run by a gambler named Arnold Kohler, who moved the game around from place to place in the county. It was rumored that Charlie owed him a bundle. Kohler’s alibi for the night of the murder was strong, but he was known to have unsavory associates. Dan was also looking into Tom Keogh’s affairs.
Toby mentioned that Tom had come to the shop and complained about his interrogation.
“Upset, was he?” Dan said, with a shrug of dismissal. “That’s too bad.”
“Is he a suspect?” I asked.
“At this stage of the investigation, he’s a person of interest. We don’t have any evidence to hold him, but he did have a motive. You were right about there being bad blood between the two of them,” he said, looking at Toby. “Tom was jealous of Charlie playing around, and that’s why they broke up. In fact, Tom threw him out of the house.”
“I guess I heard that from Annie when I stopped in for a beer,” said Toby.
“According to friends, they had a couple of loud fights in public about Charlie’s infidelities before Charlie packed up and left. Tom admitted that much, though of course he denies having anything to do with Charlie’s murder. Plus, he claims to have an alibi for that night, which we’re still checking out.”
“Charlie owed him some money, too,” Toby added. “Did Tom mention that?”
“He didn’t volunteer it, but it came out during the questioning.”
None of this felt right to me. “Tom Keogh didn’t kill Charlie. He seems really broken up by Charlie’s death.”
“That doesn’t mean he didn’t do it. I’ve seen other cases of jealousy leading to violence, and it’s not uncommon afterward for the attacker to feel remorse. In fact, that’s fairly typical in a crime of passion.”
Toby looked annoyed. “Aren’t you jumping to conclusions?”
“No, I’m just speculating. Now I’ve asked you this before. Can either of you tell me what Charlie was doing on a lonely stretch of road leading out to Bodega Head at one or two o’clock in the morning?”
We couldn’t.
“Because that’s where he was murdered, on land, not on that boat. We’ve marked out a crime scene on Westshore Road between the marina and the turnoff to the housing for the marine lab.”
Dan’s reference was to a desolate stretch of road that runs along the harbor from the marina leading out to Bodega Head. There’s a research center out there for the study of marine life, run by the University of California–Davis. But aside from a driveway to a few small dormitories that provide housing for the lab workers, there’s nothing along the shore but scrub brush and a few stands of cypress.
“We found an area of matted grass with scattered blood traces near the water,” Dan continued. “There was a struggle there. And there’s a clamdigger’s rowboat tied to a tree, which is what I think the killer used to transport the body. I’m guessing that he didn’t intend to kill Charlie on that spot, but when it happened, he improvised disposing of the body by using the rowboat to haul him out to the grounded sailboat. Could be he figured that nobody would find the body for a while if it was stashed in the cabin. It was a moonless night and high tide around the time Charlie was killed, which made it easy enough for the killer to move the body without anyone seeing or hearing anything.”
“What about the people from the marine lab dorms?” I asked.
“We’ve talked to all of them who were there that night. No one heard or saw a thing—didn’t expect anyone would, unless one of them happened to b
e out for a stroll. But we’ve got bloodstains on the rowboat, and I’m betting they’ll match the stains found in the grass. And there’s something else you should know. Someone broke into Charlie’s apartment on the night he was murdered. Threw stuff around. In anger, maybe? That would fit a crime of passion. So I’m thinking, what if Charlie was on his way out to Bodega Head to hook up with some guy for a nocturnal tryst, and what if Tom caught him at it, followed him, say, and flew into a jealous rage? Let’s say he didn’t mean to, but he killed him, panicked, hid the body on the boat, and then trashed Charlie’s apartment. It’s a plausible scenario.”
I shook my head. “I don’t know, Dan. If Tom killed Charlie and trashed his apartment in anger, are you saying he’s the same one who ransacked Toby’s gallery? That won’t wash. Whoever went through the gallery did a careful search. Things weren’t tossed around in anger. The person who did it was looking for something, not just vandalizing property. Maybe when Charlie’s killer didn’t find what he was looking for in one place, he went looking for it in the other—isn’t that a more likely scenario?”
Dan grinned. “You know, I can walk and chew gum at the same time. If theft was the motive for Charlie’s murder, that opens a different line for the investigation. That’s why I’d like you to follow up on Rose Cassini’s story about the boyfriend who gave her the icon and this cousin of his who was involved in a family feud. Didn’t she say that an article appeared in a newspaper that spooked the boyfriend into giving her the icon for safekeeping? Let’s find out what that was about. Is there any chance you could dig up that story for me? I’ve got enough on my hands. That kind of research is more in your line of work than mine.”
I had already thought of doing a newspaper search. “Sure thing. I can start going through the archives of the Chronicle tomorrow.”
“Good. You look for that story and I’ll look for”—he glanced down at the card in his hand—“Mr. Andrew Federenco. Plus I’m still talking to Arnold Kohler. Then we’ll compare notes.”
“Dan? One more thing,” said Toby.
“Yes?”
“What about Charlie’s next of kin? Does his family know?”
“There’s just the brother. I’ve been in touch with him. He’s asking when the body can be released for a funeral. I think that can happen in another day or two.”
“I’d like to know about the funeral,” said Toby. “I want to be there.”
“I’ll keep you posted. You liked Charlie, didn’t you?”
“Yeah, I did.”
Dan got up to go but paused and turned in the doorway. “I’m not finished with Tom Keogh yet, either.”
The public library on 3rd and E Street is a wonder for a city the size of Santa Rosa. I was there when it opened the next morning, and when I inquired about back issues of the San Francisco Chronicle, I was told that the library housed an extensive archive. Recent issues were available in digitized form, but issues dating from the ’60s were stored on microfilm. A chatty librarian led me to the area where the files were stored, around the corner from the information desk. These occupied a good part of a wall, offering pull-out trays arranged by date, each containing a fairly sizeable spool of film. Two huge gray microfilm readers, antediluvian machines, were at the patrons’ disposal.
I had used microfilm before, so I was comfortable with the process. The spools of film are cylindrical in shape and designed to fit over a little spindle that holds them in place. You thread the film under a glass screen and attach it to another spindle on the opposite side. Then you simply turn a crank, and the magnified images flit across the screen. To stop, you stop cranking. To go faster, you crank faster. There are no electronics involved at all—only a projector bulb that occasionally needs replacing. The technology is antiquated but still quite serviceable.
But what was it I was looking for? According to Rose, Peter Federenco had spotted a story in the newspaper, presumably the Chronicle, that had stirred the pot of an old family quarrel about an icon. What would be the nature of that story? Would it be about the family, about a court case, about Russian immigrants, about—what exactly? The only way to proceed was to scroll through the headlines of each day’s paper, hoping that something would catch my eye. That might seem an impossible task, except that Rose had given me boundary dates that limited the search. The period in question, she recalled, would have been around April or May 1962. Scanning two months’ worth of newspaper headlines would be manageable.
Make it three months, starting with March, I said to myself, selecting the appropriate tray from the files and threading the first spool onto the machine. As I cranked, the headlines flew by with remarkable speed, and I found it hard to resist pausing to read various tidbits that had nothing to do with my search but drew me in simply because they came from a bygone era. Even the ads were fun to read. They seemed so understated, given the kind we’re blasted with today. I stopped to read a couple of stories that covered the protests against the nuclear power plant proposed for Bodega Bay, and another on Alfred Hitchcock’s coming to town to film The Birds. One of the stories on the protests contained a profile of their leader, Rose Gaffney, the woman who had taken a kindly interest in Rose Cassini. According to a neighbor, Gaffney “was a wonderful friend but a wretched enemy, so you always made sure she was a friend.” The irascible Gaffney was quoted in the story as saying that Bodega Bay “was a village of 350 souls and a few heels.” She must have been quite a character.
Otherwise, the contents of the Chronicle for March offered no sign of the clue I was looking for. It wasn’t until I was midway through the spool for April that a headline flickered in the corner of my eye, prompting me to stop and rewind the film. The word “Russian” leaped from the page, so I backtracked until I found it again. The story was part of a series to mark the 150th anniversary of the founding of Fort Ross, a Russian trading post that was established in 1812 about twelve miles north of Jenner. The Russian presence left its mark in local place names like Sebastopol, Moscow Road, and the Russian River. In 1962 the site of the fort was designated a National Historic Landmark, and to celebrate the event, the Museum of Russian Culture in San Francisco sponsored a monthlong festival. The Chronicle ran a series of Sunday features on the festival, which included music, dramatizations, and lectures.
I read each of the stories, but it was the last article in the series that riveted my attention. It was titled “Hidden Treasures of Russian California”:
Just when you think you’ve heard it all, here’s a tale that may send local descendants of Russian immigrants straight to the family attic.
According to Professor Ivan Roskovitch, who spoke on Saturday at the Museum of Russian Culture, a hunt for objects from pre-Revolutionary Russia may turn up hidden gems. He regrets that today many younger Russian Americans have lost touch with their ancestral heritage. As a result, they may not appreciate the significance of the many heirlooms that their forefathers brought with them from the old country.
As examples, Professor Roskovitch mentioned the silver samovars and gilded icons that used to be given pride of place in immigrant homes but today are at odds with modern tastes. Roskovitch made a plea to his audience to dust off any neglected heirlooms and to donate to the museum those that were no longer wanted.
To spur this statewide treasure hunt, he spun a tale as marvelous as any fabled pot of gold. For if legend can be trusted, one of the most important icons in the history of Russia, missing for centuries, may have found its way to California among the belongings of Russian immigrants. The key word, of course, is legend, because it isn’t known for sure whether this wondrous work ever existed.
However, the story goes that Andrei Rublev, the most famous of all icon painters, was so pleased with his masterpiece, The Holy Trinity, made in 1427 for the Cathedral of the Trinity–St. Sergey Monastery, that he painted a smaller version for himself in the form of a portable triptych that he could take with him on his travels.
As Professor Roskovitch tells the tale, no one
knows what became of this famous work. According to one version of the story, Rublev’s images were later painted over and hidden by another artist. Some think they were spirited out of the country. Even so, there were rumors of the triptych being seen here and there in Russia until the 1860s, but never later. One variant of the legend has it that the icons were transported to America by a Russian family who never recognized their value. “Who knows?” concluded the professor. “They may be sitting in a trunk in San Francisco as we speak.”
Asked what Rublev’s icons would be worth today if they turned up in someone’s home, Professor Roskovitch replied, “They would be priceless.”
Was this the story that had sparked the Federenco quarrel? It seemed a likely candidate. To make sure, I marked my place by date and hurriedly read through the remainder of the newspapers for April and May of 1962. There were no other relevant stories, so I returned to “Hidden Treasures of Russian California” and read it once again. Yes, it was possible. What if two sides of the Federenco family had been arguing for years over an inheritance, more specifically, a religious object, and what if it became known at a later date that this heirloom might—just might—be far more valuable than anyone had thought? Wouldn’t that have been enough to fan the embers of their quarrel? A phrase that Dan used came to mind again. At least it was a plausible scenario.
I knew almost nothing about Andrei Rublev. As I’ve said, Russian icons are far from my area of expertise. It was enough for me to know that his works were sought after. My more immediate interest was the Federenco feud. How could I learn more about the family? On a hunch, I called the Russian Cultural Center in San Francisco. In response to my question, a knowledgeable receptionist suggested a check of the Fort Ross library, which contains material related to the settlement as well as to Russian immigration in the state. Better yet, she added, the catalog of the library is accessible online. Why not try a search? She provided the website address. I thanked her, opened my laptop, and logged on.
