Chapter 10 Blood on Canvas

The instruction arrived in the seventh week, typed as ever on currency-weighted paper, and it ordered what he had been dreading since Vienna: physical delivery of the finished left section, unstretched, rolled around a wooden core, to be handed over at a place and hour specified with railway precision. Until then everything had moved by proxy, paper and money traveling through lion mouths and culverts while he remained the fixed point of the compass. Now the compass itself was being sent into the field, and no amount of reassurance in the flat institutional prose could disguise the fact that a man carrying two meters of painted Kremlin under his coat was carrying either a fortune or an execution, depending entirely on who else read the schedule. The venue chosen was a disused ribbon factory in Smíchov, a cathedral of roof trusses and pigeon dung where the Vltava fogs came to die, and the protocol ran to numbered clauses. He would enter through the loading yard at twenty-one forty. A single inspector would meet him inside the weaving hall with a shaded lamp, a loupe, and an instrument Viktor recognized from his own borrowings, a densitometer, which told him more about the client than any introduction had managed. Payment would follow inspection. He was to bring no one, tell no one, and depart by the canal gate whatever he observed, the last clause underlined twice in a manner that struck him less as caution than as prophecy wearing italics. The courier who collected him was a young man he had seen four times in a year of Thursdays, narrow shouldered, soft voiced, with a bicycle chain worn as a belt and hands that smelled always of machine oil. They traveled separately and met, as arranged, at the mouth of the coal yard adjacent to the factory, and Viktor remembered afterward how the youth had stood a moment listening to the river fog, head tilted like a heron's, before signaling the yard clear. That small competence was the only eulogy Viktor would later be able to give, so he stored it deliberately, the way he stored tonal values, against a poverty of words he could feel arriving. Inside the weaving hall the inspector waited precisely as advertised, a compact man with rimless spectacles and the patient hands of a jeweler, and the inspection that followed was the most humiliating professional experience of Viktor's life, because it was also the finest. The spectacles' owner worked through the rolled linen section by lamplight with cotton, calipers, and the densitometer, measuring window states against his own copy of the satellite print, which lay open on a trestle like scripture at the correct psalm. The duplicate photograph confirmed Vienna's lesson in ink and silver. But it was the man's questions, murmured rather than asked, that elevated the encounter into tribute: he wanted to know how the splice courses had been matched, why certain lime islands carried double grounds, whether the felt tools had been ground in-house, and each question proved he had lived inside Viktor's decisions with an intimacy no one shared except their maker. At the clause-bound moment he produced payment in a lawyer's case, counted nothing aloud, and signed a receipt with initials only. Then, folding the loupe, he said quietly that the second and third sections should be finished exactly so, because men like the two of them were rarely permitted to meet over honest work twice. The yard gate exploded inward before the case changed hands fully. What entered was not fog, though fog entered with it: three shapes in rubberized coats moving with the drilled economy of men who had rehearsed this geometry, and behind them the flat cough of a pistol fitted with everything except mercy. The courier died the way herons die, unfolding where he stood, his bicycle-chain belt catching the lamp light as he folded, and the inspector went down differently, sideways across the trestle, arm sweeping the duplicate print into darkness, spectacles spinning away into pigeon shadows. Someone seized the lawyer's case; someone else seized the rolled linen; and Viktor, moving on instinct older than both factions, dragged the canvas free of the reaching hands by falling with it, felt the impact jar his teeth, heard cloth tear somewhere harmless, and crawled with two hundred centimeters of Kremlin hugged to his chest into the drainage channel beneath the weaving hall's far wall, which his walk through the yard that evening had noticed and his trade had never taught him to ignore. Shots followed him into the dark in the desultory way of shots aimed at sound. He went through the channel on elbows and kneecaps, emerged through a grating into nettles above the canal sluice, and ran the towpath with the roll strapped across his back like a pilgrim's burden while Prague's industrial night swallowed the noise of his going. Behind him, once, a voice called out not his name but a number, four digits repeated twice with the cadence of an account being settled, and the strangeness of that, being pursued as a ledger line rather than a man, kept his legs working long after fear had spent its first installment. Dawn caught him in his own studio with the bar slammed and the lamps hooded, unrolling two meters of fortress wall across the floorboards to assess the damage. The canvas had survived the canal country almost insultingly well. The same could not be said of its upper margin, where a spray of the courier's blood had crossed the painted masonry in a fine arterial fan, droplets browning already at the edges, soaking the weave along one merlon's shadow until the fortress seemed to have sprung a leak in some subterranean chamber of its own. Viktor knelt over it for a long time without touching anything, reading the spatter the way he read craquelure, angle, velocity, distance of origin, a forensic sentence written in the one language whose grammar every painter implicitly knows. The young man with the heron's tilt had been standing between him and the door when the geometry collapsed. Every drop on this canvas had passed through the space where Viktor's spine had been an instant earlier. Cleaning took the rest of the morning and cost him more than any restoration ever had. Cold water first, blotting, never rubbing; then saliva worked into the worst blooms with a suede brush, the oldest gentle solvent in the conservator's kit, absurd and intimate, his own mouth dry as chalk while the stains lifted reluctantly from painted brick and would not lift at all from the raw margin beyond the turned edge. Where blood had soaked unstretched selvage he cut the strip away entirely and rewove the loss with thread and size, invisible mending practiced on evidence, until the section hung from the drying rack looking innocent again, its margin carrying a scar only its maker could find. The water in the bucket went the color of weak tea, and he carried it down himself, past the cold cellar door, and emptied it into the lane gutter with ceremony he did not examine. The handler broke his own dead-letter discipline within thirty-six hours, arriving at dusk through the courtyard with powder on his cuffs and judgment already formed, and he listened to the whole account standing, including the four-digit number, at which his face performed its most economical movement yet, a tightening no larger than a stitch. Those digits are a requisition code, he said at last, aloud, from nowhere in particular, and requisition codes mean the other side has stopped spying and started purchasing. Then he looked at the drying section, at the rewoven margin his fingers found without being shown, and signed the sentence that ended Viktor's tenure as a fixed point of the compass. You are leaving this studio tonight, the hands said, and the wall comes with you. ---