The Firebird

‘Russian, Yuri Stepanovich.’ Smiling, I said, ‘I’m in need of the practice.’

‘Then I will give you practice. Come up to the office, it will be better to speak there. More comfortable, and much more private.’

Privacy was something that the main rooms of the Winter Palace couldn’t offer. Built during the reigns of later eighteenth-century empresses, some years after the time in which Rob and I had just ‘found’ Anna, this was the largest of the six buildings that made up the State Museum of the Hermitage, and, inside, it held all the grandeur of a Windsor or Versailles. The ceilings soared, the windows turned the light to something magical, and every surface seemed to be in competition with the next – the painted murals gazing down, the polished columns, malachite and marble and rare woods and gold leaf everywhere. The whole effect was dazzling.

But it also drew enormous crowds each day, with tour groups jostling one another as they shuffled after their official guides, all giving scripted talks in a cacophony of languages while leading their own charges through the warren of the galleries beneath the watchful gazes of the women who sat hour after hour at the doorways of each room to see that no one broke the rules.

The Hermitage owned some three million artefacts and artworks, and even though the items on display were maybe only five per cent of that, I’d figured from my own past visits here that it would take me years to see them all, but every tourist I could see appeared to be making a brave effort to do just that. Some, who were clearly mid tour, looked exhausted. The noise and the heat and the bustle exhausted me more than anything else, and Yuri’s small office, tucked back in a non-public corridor, felt like a welcome retreat.

It had absorbed a little of his personality, and had a pleasant, rumpled and relaxed feel that invited me to simply shift the papers from a chair and take a seat.

‘Here.’ He passed me a catalogue for the exhibit itself, newly printed and smelling of freshly cut paper and ink. ‘I have sent one of these to Sebastian already, but this can be your copy. You’ll find your Surikov in there, on page thirty-three.’

I was still studying the cover. ‘This is beautiful. It’s by Polenov, isn’t it?’

‘Yes. From the time that he lived in his house in the forest, with Repin, in Normandy. He painted several like this, with the road through the trees.’

The detail they had chosen for the cover showed a solitary peasant strolling off along that road, seen from behind, with sunlight breaking through the rain-grey clouds ahead of him. I’d seen another painting by this artist, with a peasant and a donkey on the same road, but the solitary man did seem a perfect fit for the exhibit’s title: ‘Wandering Still: the works of the Peredvizhniki beyond Russia’s borders.’

As I started to search through the catalogue’s pages for page thirty-three, Yuri said, ‘We have put the exhibit itself in the Menshikov Palace. The official opening is not until Tuesday, so the big ceremony will be then, with the two curators from Paris and New York, and our director, but on Sunday there will also be a small preview reception for some of our international friends of the Hermitage, you should come to that.’

‘There’s no way I could meet Wendy Van Hoek before then, is there?’

Yuri smiled. ‘She does not arrive until later tonight. But tomorrow we’re hanging the final few paintings, your Surikov among them, and she’s asked to watch. It would be a good time for you to meet her. I’ll arrange it, if you like.’

‘That would be perfect. Thank you.’ I glanced at him over the catalogue. ‘What is she like?’

‘Miss Van Hoek? Like her father,’ he said. ‘Did you meet him? No? Well, he was passionate, very obsessed with his paintings. He viewed them as part of his family. And she has this passion as well. But,’ he added, as he swivelled back in his own chair, ‘she also loves living well, travelling, and this needs money.’

‘So you think she might be willing to sell this one painting, then?’

‘To the right buyer, I think that she might be persuaded, yes.’ Yuri half-smiled. ‘Only not to Sebastian.’

‘I gathered that.’

‘Ah, so he told you?’

‘He didn’t give details,’ I said. ‘All he said was that Wendy Van Hoek didn’t like him much.’

‘Not much, no.’ Yuri’s smile was so broad now that I couldn’t help but be curious.

‘What did Sebastian do?’

‘He didn’t tell me, either. I was hoping you would know. From the first time I met them, they’ve been on the knives,’ he said, using the Russian expression for people who shared a dislike for each other. ‘It can happen with people, sometimes. Anyway, it was a wise thing he did, sending you.’

I wasn’t sure ‘wise’ was the word that applied here, so much as ‘convenient’ or even ‘self-serving’, but I never questioned my boss’s decisions in public. Instead, I replied with a vague nod and flipped the last catalogue pages to see, close up, what I was meant to be buying for Vasily.

It wasn’t an actual painting, a full composition, but rather a ‘study’ of one of the faces the artist intended to paint in a larger work, rendered with great care in oil on canvas the size of a magazine cover.

Yuri, watching my face, knew that I’d found the Surikov. ‘It is incredibly beautiful, isn’t it?’

‘Yes. Yes, it is.’ My gaze didn’t lift from the face of the old bearded man on the page, his eyes downcast with dignity, and just the top edge of what I assumed was a scroll of some kind showing down at the bottom, as though he were reading from something. I said, ‘This is one of the bishops, then? From the mural he did of the … what was it, the First or Second Ecumenical Council?’