So without wishing to appear conceited, I will tell you, my unknown reader, that I only ever stole the very best. Almost always I was successful in my work, and at times I was even quite rich. There were other times, of course. Times when I had to flee a house or a city – once an entire country – for fear of creditors. As well as creditors there are other unpleasant people – the English have the word bailiffs for them, and they are a disagreeable species who actually move into one’s home and summarily remove possessions to pay one’s debts. I always avoided the ignominy of actually coming face to face with them, but there were occasions when I only avoided it by resorting to such ploys as climbing out of a window, or pretending to be an uncomprehending servant of the household. Once I feigned sickness, although on that occasion I narrowly escaped being taken to an infirmary where God knows what could have happened.
So I have been poor and I have been rich, and I prefer infinitely to be rich, for I have a great fondness for the good things of life. Well-cut clothes, silk shirts, good food and wine and a comfortable – if possible, luxurious – house or apartment in which to live. I like dining in the homes of the wealthy and influential, and I also enjoy the company of ladies whose lives allow them – by which I mean give them enough leisure – to be beautiful. Here I should make it clear that although I have bought many lovely things and stolen many more, I have never bought or stolen ladies. The many enjoyable associations I have formed have been entirely of the ladies’ free choice. I will admit to having a weakness for raven-haired, porcelain-skinned ladies, preferably of impeccable lineage. But I am a gentleman and I do not give names.
This weakness, however, made my association with Leonora Gilmore all the more surprising and also unexpected, since Leonora possessed none of those attractions. A strange little creature, with a face like a pixie from some painting depicting a fantastical scene. I once arranged for what I like to call the transfer of a Hans Makart painting – I think it was called Titania’s Wedding Feast or something similar – in which one of the attendant sprites resembled Leonora so greatly, she might have sat as a model for the painting. She did not, of course; apart from the fact that Makart was painting long before Leonora was born, her own upbringing would have stopped her. I never met her parents, but I formed an opinion of repression and coldness.
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.