His mother told reporters that he was just sick, a good kid with some mental problems. His brother Keith, however, said he understood ‘the logic involved’ in the attack on the police, whom he branded as ‘devilish’ and he spoke with contempt of the ‘white’ statue, which suggested that the Daveys were black, though at first I had presumed it to be an Irish name. It transpired that their father was a subway preacher who had issued a homemade DVD which included rants against the Bush administration, the police, and white people in general. The parishioners were particularly upset because the attack occurred on the first day of a Novena — nine days’ solemn prayer — to St Anne, who is specially revered as the mother of the Virgin Mary; St Joachim, the other dedicatee of the Queens church, is her father, and together they are a holy family, precursors of the Holy Family of Joseph and Mary and Jesus. A poignant photograph in the New York Post showed the parish priest, Monsignor Joseph Malagreca, cradling the decapitated head of St Anne, whose lips and jaw had been shot off. I have this head in my room, he said, I picked it up out of the bushes, and what am I supposed to do with it?
As I read this bizarre account of modern iconoclasm I was reminded of the icon of the Holy Family — a Nativity scene — which I bought when I was with you in Paris, Nina. You remember? We had wandered into the Marais, which at that time was not the fashionable quarter it has recently become. Down a crooked alleyway we found an antique shop, or junk shop. A bell tinkled as we pushed open the door. The proprietor, an old man in his seventies or eighties, gloomily returned our ‘Bonjour, monsieur’. The place was crammed with the usual stuff, moth-eaten Persian rugs, brass kerosene lamps with etched glass chimneys, old tobacco tins, biscuit tins, rickety cane-backed chairs, kitchen implements, wooden printing blocks, scuffed leather-bound books. I lifted a rust-pocked enamel sign for Ricard pastis from a shelf and behind it I discovered the icon: a pocket-sized wooden panel some five inches by four, featuring the Holy Family and the Three Wise Men, done in dark ambers and blue-greens and blacks that seemed to glow in the dark shop interior, the Holy Infant at its centre swathed in a creamy white cocoon of supernatural light. The paint was wrinkled with age, its layers worn away in some areas to reveal the underlying smolt-grey and ochre ground, its three-dimensional quality palpable when I brushed it gently with my fingertips. It exuded mystery, reverence, antiquity. It’s beautiful, I whispered to you. But I hesitated to buy it; I felt there was something immoral in buying icons, pieces which had very probably been looted or stolen from those who held them dear for reasons which had little to do with our modern conceptions of art. And, as if to confirm my unease, the proprietor suddenly said, Not for sale. It is a personal thing, you know? And we began to make some small talk with him.
When he discovered I was from Ireland, though, his attitude changed. Now his story was that he was waiting for the right person to buy it, he’d been waiting years. But most people, he said, were tourists, they did not appreciate these things, they did not esteem their proper value, which was not monetary, it was not even artistic, but spiritual. And he knew the Irish to be a spiritual race. You are Catholic? he asked. I nodded and shrugged uncertainly. Of course he’s Catholic, you said. He brought me to Easter Sunday Mass in Saint-Eustache, and you waxed lyrical to the old man about the ceremony, the incense and the music, the shafts of sunlight falling through the gloom from the tall high windows. And you are not Catholic? he asked you. No, you said, but I’m thinking of becoming one, it’s such a beautiful religion. Such a true religion, I mean, because it is true to our feeling that there is a world beyond this one, it has the beauty of truth, you said. Yes, said the old man, you will be a Catholic, and you will marry this fine man, and your first child will be a son, and may the Holy Family look kindly on his birth. Alas, I never married myself, he said, and I have been waiting for this moment, for such a fine couple to discover this icon. And by now I was so implicated that I had to buy it, and I was happy to find an excuse to do so. The old man named a price: it did not seem exorbitant for something that was priceless, and I didn’t haggle. And when we examined it together in the light of day, its colours seemed to glow even more, with an undeniable authenticity, and we were proud of ourselves at having been the recipients of such a gift.
After Paris you had to go to London for a few days; I went on to Belfast, and the next morning I wrapped the icon in a silk handkerchief, put it in my pocket, and brought it to Beringer for him to see. I never told you this until now. Without saying anything, I took off the silk handkerchief, and handed him the precious object. Mm, he said, and looked at it carefully. Very nice, very nice indeed, he said, and he took out his loupe and went over to the light of the window, and looked at it again, examining it in detail. Then he looked at the back, and at the front again. Yes, he said, lovely, masterly, I might say. Beautiful work. I was smiling proudly. But of course, he said, and he paused before delivering the blow, it’s a fake. The smile fell from my face. Oh, don’t be too hard on yourself, Mr Gabriel, it’s still a lovely piece of work. Whoever made this, he did everything right, proper techniques, done in the old style, well, except for a few little things. And he held the icon up. See the way the panel is convex? Yes, that’s because it was cut from an oak barrel-stave, I said. It was one of the things which had convinced me about it. Oak barrel-stave, correct, said Beringer, that’s what it is. But look at this, he said, and he showed me the back of the panel. What? I said. Well, said Beringer, if you look at the saw-cuts, they’ve been made with a modern power-saw, a circular saw, and they didn’t have saws like this in when, oh, 1700 or so, whenever this might have been made, were it the genuine article. And here’s another thing. He turned the panel over to show the image. See this strip of paint running around the edge? Yes, I said. I’d loved that little detail, a strip of dark rust red that framed the scene and somehow lifted it into another dimension.
Well, said Beringer, and he took a long, nicotine-stained thumbnail to it, and lifted off a tiny piece of the paint — Don’t worry, he said, the whole thing’ll come off by itself anyway in a matter of months, here, feel this, he said, and he passed me the tiny rust-red flake. Feel it, he said. Doesn’t it feel like a plastic film? Yes, I said reluctantly. That’s because it is, said Beringer, it’s modern acrylic paint. But outside of those little details, why, it’s a lovely piece of work, you have to admire the man that made this, oh, he knew what he was doing. And for all we know, maybe it was made for a genuine market, for a true believer. What does it matter if it’s old or new, so long as it’s done in the right way? I nodded ruefully. And might I ask, Mr Gabriel, how much you paid for it? I named the price. Oh, good price, good price. Though of course were it the real McCoy, you could maybe multiply that by ten. Or twenty. Still, you can consider it a bargain. You’ve got yourself something special. You’ve gone with your instincts, and that’s what you should always do, you have to trust yourself, said Beringer, even if you’re wrong. Because if you don’t trust yourself, who will?