Grace glanced around the Internet cafe. A couple of backpackers, one or two poor-looking students, some elderly men and women. No one was interested in her. They were reading their e-mails, looking for aristocrats or convicts in their family trees. She returned to the history of the Krasnovs.
Mara’s grandfather Theodor was born in 1920, the son of a White Russian colonel who had escaped from Vladivostok in 1919 and married a young woman named Tatiana, a true Harbintsy, born and raised on the outpost, the daughter of a engineer on the Chinese Eastern Railway. The family had servants, wealth, influence. They prospered even during the Great Depression and the occupation by Japanese forces.
Wealth, thought Grace. Influence. How did they get it? How did they keep it? They even survived the Red Army liberation of Harbin in 1945, the year Mara’s father was born, although according to the website they were passionate anti-Reds. There were plenty of stories of treachery in Harbin. Some White Russians collaborated with the Japanese, others spied on and harassed anyone with Soviet citizenship or sympathies, and a handful robbed and kidnapped wealthy Jews, and even made their way west to help the Waffen SS fight the Red Army.
But at the war’s end the Krasnovs slipped through the net, and by 1949 were living in Shanghai.
So who did they pay off? Where did the money come from? Grace pictured the old couple in her photograph; nothing to their names but a few treasures from the motherland, some jewels, an icon. An old couple like that might fall into debt to a family like the Krasnovs.
What was the true story of the Krasnovs in Manchuria? She Googled a range of words and phrases but found only references to the family website and the North Shore gallery.
And the sugar-coated story of how, in the emigration wave of the 1950s, with time running out for the White Russians in China and most headed for Europe, Canada and the United States, the Krasnovs chose Australia. Theodor, by then in his early thirties, thrived as an art and antiques dealer-using valuables stolen from fellow Russians, guessed Grace-and set up the gallery, Cossacks. When he died his son, Peter, built on his success.
Not only that: Peter’s daughter, Mara, true to the traditions of her family, had branched out to establish a successful art and antiques business on the beautiful Mornington Peninsula in Victoria.
Blah, blah, blah.
It was almost 1 p.m. Grace paid for another half hour and gave herself a crash course in icons. Strange tingles went through her as she searched, ghost memories, trace emotions from her childhood, echoing the punch to the heart she’d felt yesterday, when she’d peered through Mara Niekirk’s glass wall.
First she tried to date the icon. More modern than the Kiev and Novgorod schools of the thirteenth century; smaller, too. Grace thought the icon hanging in the Niekirks’ walkway, like the one depicted in her heirloom photograph, was about 20 cm x 30 cm. Most of the icons she found pictured and described on the Internet were three or four times that size, but the later ones seemed to get smaller. She found a Simon Ushkarov from 1676, The Archangel Michael Trampling the Devil Underfoot that was 23 cm x 20.5 cm.
Subject matter. Usually the Virgin, or the Madonna and child. Painted on wood, the halo in gold leaf, sometimes the face and background too. Considered to be the Gospel in paint. Praises to the Mother of God, they were titled. The Softening of Cruel Hearts.
Then Grace found O All-Hymned Mother, created in the late 1700s in the Old Believers’ workshop in Holui village in the Volga River region of central Russia. It showed mother and child posing in vivid colours, a rich play in the folds of drapery, tender melancholy in the Virgin’s face. Decorated with gold leaf and a thin film of tempera, it glowed on Grace’s screen as if lit from within.
Not her icon, but pretty close; possibly from the same village.
‘Oh, that’s so beautiful.’
Grace turned carefully. An elderly woman was looking over her shoulder.
‘Don’t mind me, I’m just a busybody. You must be an art student.’
‘Yes,’ Grace said, and she reached, very carefully, for the mouse and closed down the site, sighing, ‘and I’ve got an essay to write.’
30
On Sunday morning, Pam Murphy propped herself on one elbow and said, ‘I could teach you how to surf. I’ve got a spare wetsuit.’
One of the many appealing things about Jeannie Schiff was her laugh. Raucous, appreciative, all-conquering, it started deep inside her and set up a tremble in her breasts and stomach.
Pam punched her. ‘What’s so funny?’
Stabbing a forefinger into her own breastbone, Jeannie said, ‘Me? Saltwater, flies, sand sticking where it’s not meant to stick? I don’t think so. The great outdoors, fresh air, sunshine? Not this cute little body.’
Pam stroked that cute little body with her free hand, watching the flesh give and restore itself under her touch. She stroked where sand was not meant to stick. Jeannie closed her eyes, moist and warm and ready to go again.
Pam leaned over and, with the tip of her tongue, picked a croissant flake from a nipple. ‘I could eat you up,’ she said, and immediately felt stupid.
‘As I recall,’ Jeannie said, ‘you already did that.’
Odd, thought Pam, how sleeping with a woman hadn’t been the momentous, earth shattering event she’d thought it would be. It was simply nice, greedy, appreciative sex with someone who happened to be a woman. No big deal. Flesh on flesh. Good sex, thoughtful, skilled; slightly different mechanically. But the feelings stayed the same. Why was that?
‘Or a walk,’ she said. ‘Bushranger Bay. Greens Bush.’
Jeannie Schiff stretched like a cat. ‘Honey, I don’t do the outdoors.’
Pam flopped back on her pillow. ‘Our first disagreement. It’s all downhill from now on.’
They seemed to click on many levels, including a sense of what was funny or absurd, but this time the sergeant from sex crimes didn’t laugh. Leaning on one elbow, stroking Pam’s inner thigh absently as if searching for the right words, Jeannie Schiff said, ‘I live with someone.’
‘I know, you told me.’
‘Just making sure.’
‘It’s all right Jeannie, honestly.’
‘Fun, right? We’re having fun.’
‘Fun,’ Pam said.
She smiled and they kissed and Jeannie went to pee, loud enough for Pam to hear through the open en-suite door. Jeannie Schiff wasn’t a man, certainly wasn’t mannish, with her softness, her curviness, her clothes. But somehow she wasn’t any different.
Pam thought about it. She’d slept with maybe ten men-be honest, she knew exactly how many-but didn’t think she was very good at relationships. She was frank, upfront, what-you-see-is-what-you-get. Not good at subtleties and games.
Not keen to be hurt again.
Was she setting herself up for that? Would sleeping with a woman mean there was more at stake?
She couldn’t see it, frankly. Pam Murphy was honest, open. Perhaps too trusting, but she was good at examining herself. She didn’t feel a scrap of guilt or shame or childish daring. She didn’t feel unmoored. No momentous shifting inside her head. She’d just had a few nights of great sex and companionship, that’s all. No big deal. And no false promises.
Jeannie re-entered the room, shaking water from her hands, a glint of mischief as she came bounding in and dived across the bed, her flesh flexing nicely here and there. They had the rest of the day together and they had maybe a handful of other times before the case was closed and she went back to her architect in the city.
Pam blinked, zoning out a little as a brain zap passed through her, but it was almost like a familiar companion and all she wanted to think about was kissing and touching. So they made love, and then they cuddled, and then Jeannie Schiff had to go and spoil it a little.