Chapter 14 Dead Drop

Winter tightened its grip on Malá Strana through the second week of December, and with it the shape of Viktor's obligations altered the way ice alters a downpipe, gradually and then catastrophically. The corridor south was shut; his handler had made that plain on their last evening together with a flat of the palm against the air, a gesture that closed borders more efficiently than wire. But the work had grown to the size where it demanded an audience, and the audience lived west. Two finished sections lay rolled on their rack like sleeping courtiers, and the photographs of them, thirty-six exposures taken under the north light with the densitometer's grey card standing in every third frame, formed by now the only part of the enterprise that could travel. Paper, the handler had signed across his own palm during the autumn, weighs nothing until suddenly it weighs everything. The season's assignment was therefore to teach thirty-six exposures to go on weighing nothing across a frontier, a customs shed, and the sustained attention of two governments. The dead drop selected itself, as honest places do, from the city's inventory of indifference. Where the Čertovka slides beneath a footbridge that tourists crowd in July and nobody contests in January, the lock-keeper's retaining wall carried a drainage aperture stopped with a wooden bung, and behind the bung a cavity the width of a forearm, dry at ordinary water and reachable from the downstream side by anyone prepared to lean. The handler audited it one colourless morning in the character of a sketch artist defeated by the weather, and passed it fit with a single annotation: the bung's fit should be eased by one turn of a knife blade, so that swollen wood would never defeat frozen fingers. Signals ran on chalk, which was already the house grammar. A restorer's soft white stick, drawn at knee height on the bridge's upstream parapet, meant cargo was waiting. The same mark smeared to a haze meant collected and clear. Any other condition of the parapet meant stay home and be dull, and dullness, both men agreed without discussing it, had become the rarest commodity either of them dealt in. The first run fell on a Thursday of hard blue cold. Viktor left before the lamplighter's opposite number had finished his rounds, took three trams in a sequence that visited his own route nowhere, and walked the last stretch along a wall of frosted advertisements with his collar turned and his mind set to the pitch of a man auditing gutters for a landlord. The consignment rode inside his coat in its travelling disguise: oilcloth, wax seal, and a label in fair commercial script declaring an assortment of window quarries for a glazier in Linz, which enjoyed the advantage of being almost true, since glass was the trade that sheltered everything else he did. At the footbridge he waited out a woman with a pram, leaned over the race on the pretext of inspecting the ice, thumbed the bung loose, seated the tin, restored the bung with its single preparatory turn, and drew the chalk mark at knee height without appearing to have touched anything older than frost. Sixty-one seconds, he made it afterward, standing in the studio with the stop-watch he kept for varnish. A craftsman times everything, including his own innocence. The city tested him gently that first month. On the third run a man stood feeding pigeons where pigeons had nothing left to eat, and stood there again two mornings later, and a third time after that, wearing a coat too good for crumbs and shoes too bad for idle strolling. Viktor amended his approach without conceding that any amendment had occurred, doubling once through the market halls among the sauerkraut barrels and once through a passage between courtyards that smelled of pigeons for reasons unrelated to pigeons. The verdict arrived a week later inside a returned invoice from the leather trade, where three mis-set commas spelled out, for anyone fluent in the shop's private dyslexia, that the fancier had been noticed, identified to nobody's satisfaction, and classified as a mapper of habits rather than a follower of packages. Mappers could be endured indefinitely. Followers required explanations, the commas implied, and the winter was not yet cold enough for the kind of explanations that end conversations permanently. By the new year the routine had acquired the dignity of a liturgy. He learned the footbridge's moods, which plank rang hollow under frost, where ice thickened first along the race's quiet edge; he learned to read the parapet from thirty paces, so that no reconnaissance ever required him to stop; he learned, above all, the craft of being forgettable, which turned out to be less a performance than a subtraction, the systematic removal of everything worth remembering until what remained walking home across the bridge was a middle-aged restorer thinking about glue sizes. The bakery below kept its ovens warm through those dawns, and the smell of the first batch climbed the stair to meet him like a dog that could not tell time but always knew him. The aperture worked in both directions, which was its elegance. On the occasions when Viktor drew the smear and reached in gloved, he found more than instructions. Once, a folded programme of the society's spring lectures, useful chiefly as evidence that somebody wished him seated in the third row. Once, banknotes so elderly they might have been retired from a museum of currency, crisp in the manner of money that has been ironed rather than spent. And once, wrapped in waxed paper like a relic, a cake of true ultramarine the size of a soap bar, the stone-ground article that no shop in the republic stocked and that no honest invoice could have explained. He stood holding it up to the north light for a long time, watching the blue throw its small ocean onto the wall. It was, he understood at last, a salary, an apology for the pigeons, and a compliment rendered in the only dialect his correspondent fully trusted, all of it pressed into four hundred grams of crushed sky. On nights when the third section's ground repairs were done and the brushes slept in their jar, Viktor permitted himself the observation window, five minutes at the dark glass with the lamp banked low. Above the weather, invisible and tireless, the machine continued its cartography of walls, assembling evidence that grown men would one day die disputing over the reading of. Everything he shipped west travelled inside that dispute as a footnote travels inside a verdict, unquoted and indispensable. He banked the stove, checked the chalk stub in his pocket out of pure superstition, and went upstairs persuaded that the system around him was sound, the timetable sound, the aperture sound, the grammar sound. That persuasion was, although the season did not know it yet, the most expensive thing a man in his position could buy, and he bought it gladly, the way his father had bought lottery tickets, out of loyalty to the only future available. ---