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Authors: Sarah Rayne
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or the equivalent.
âit 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 â by which I mean the Russia of the Mongols, the land of the Firebird â 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 youâve 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 ⦠Letâs 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, âA beautiful exhibition. Some very rare pieces.â
The companion replied, half serious, half jocular, âLetâs hope Iskander hasnât heard about this eveningâs display.â
The other man said, curiously, âIs that his real name?â
âGod knows. Iâve heard he has several aliases. They say he switches names to suit whatever villainy heâs currently engaged in. But whether heâs called Alexei Iskander or something else entirely, if he knew about tonight heâd have cleared most of the rooms inside ten minutes, and our exhibition would be over.â
I didnât 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. Itâs almost like a milestone, that date. A dark, bloodied landmark jutting out of historyâs highways like a sharkâs 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 â 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. Iâve never unravelled a tapestry (although Iâve acquired and sold a few most profitably), and I certainly never fully unravelled the tangled strands of Holy Alliances or Bismarckâs 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 â 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
âit 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 â by which I mean the Russia of the Mongols, the land of the Firebird â 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 youâve 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 ⦠Letâs 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, âA beautiful exhibition. Some very rare pieces.â
The companion replied, half serious, half jocular, âLetâs hope Iskander hasnât heard about this eveningâs display.â
The other man said, curiously, âIs that his real name?â
âGod knows. Iâve heard he has several aliases. They say he switches names to suit whatever villainy heâs currently engaged in. But whether heâs called Alexei Iskander or something else entirely, if he knew about tonight heâd have cleared most of the rooms inside ten minutes, and our exhibition would be over.â
I didnât 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. Itâs almost like a milestone, that date. A dark, bloodied landmark jutting out of historyâs highways like a sharkâs 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 â 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. Iâve never unravelled a tapestry (although Iâve acquired and sold a few most profitably), and I certainly never fully unravelled the tangled strands of Holy Alliances or Bismarckâs 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 â 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
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