Chapter 22 The Underpainting

Josef let him in at four in the morning without a word, because that was the kind of favor a man owed who had once been saved from a forgery charge by another man's silence. Viktor spread the oilcloth on the restorer's table and unrolled the satellite photograph under the work lamp, and the two of them looked at the wall. It was the same green-tinted night image he had studied for eleven nights, the Kremlin wall curving away in its absurd detail, every brick recorded by a camera in orbit. But now Viktor knew what he was looking for, and his eye went to it like a needle to a compass point. In the topmost course of bricks, above the second embrasure, nine bricks had been painted a shade lighter than their neighbors, a difference so small that no man looking at the image as a picture would ever have noticed it, and exactly the difference a forger would notice, because a forger spent his life hunting differences that small. He had copied those bricks faithfully, without knowing he was copying them. He read them now, the way his father had taught him to read the grain of wood: long light, short light, short light, the rhythm of a hand tapping out a message. F. R. A. M. E. R. Six letters, and the ninth brick was the space between. FRAMER. He wrote it down, and Josef looked at it, and neither of them said anything, because there was nothing to say about a word that named the man who had made the frames in his studio. The shadow line came next. He had always believed the long diagonal shadow across the wall was a trick of the hour the satellite passed over, and it was, but not the way he had thought. Measured against the known height of the wall and the angle of the light, the shadow's edge fell exactly where it should fall at four in the morning in late February, and the point where it crossed the second embrasure was not a point on the wall at all. It was a bearing, and the bearing pointed across a thousand miles to a clock face in the Old Town Square of Prague, to the hour when the astronomical clock struck twelve and the twelve apostles filed past the windows of their little box. Viktor had painted that wall without knowing he was painting a map, and the man who had made his frames had known it, and that was why Tomas Marek was dead. The thought sat in him with the weight of a stone in a well. He had spent a year painting documents and artworks for a network he had never once asked to explain itself, and he had believed, with the lazy faith of a man paid well for his hands, that the work was honest. The work had never been honest. The work had been a wall with a message painted into its bricks, and the message was the name of the man he had trusted to cut his stretchers. He thought about the too-deep stretcher and the hands that had cut it, and about the eleven nights he had spent painting bricks that another man had already bought and sold, and he understood that he had been a tool for a year without once noticing the shape of the hand that held him. That was the particular genius of the trade Viktor had chosen. A forger learned to see the world through the eyes of the man he was deceiving, and he had spent a year seeing through the eyes of a dead man's enemies, and the skill that had kept him alive for fifteen years was the same skill that had nearly cost him everything. He had been too good at seeing what was in front of him to notice what was behind him. The lamp made the paper glow, and the wall lay across the table like a wound that had finally been shown to a doctor, and Viktor Orlov sat with Josef's slivovice untouched beside him and read the name in the bricks again, FRAMER, FRAMER, FRAMER, until the word lost its shape and became only a rhythm, the rhythm of a hand tapping out a name in the dark. Otto Bergmann had made every frame that had ever left Viktor's studio. He had a shop in a crooked lane off Nerudova, a Sudeten German who had stayed when the Germans left, a man of sixty with hands like the roots of an old tree and a way of standing in the light that made him look like a figure in a painting of his own. He had fitted the stretcher for the Vermeer six weeks ago, and he had stood in the studio afterward with his cap in his hands, admiring the satellite image pinned to the wall, asking the careful questions of a craftsman who wanted to understand the work. He had asked about the bricks. Viktor remembered the exact tone of the question now, the way a man asks about a detail he has already been paid to notice. He remembered the smell of pipe tobacco in his studio the week the handler had gone quiet, the week the visits had stopped being every second Thursday. Josef poured two glasses of slivovice and set one in front of Viktor without ceremony. You need to decide if the painting stays under your floor or goes into the river, he signed, and Viktor signed back: I need to decide which copy of it is going to be worth my life. He went back to the studio at dawn, keeping to the tram lines and the narrow streets where a watcher could not hold a clean line of sight. The door was unlocked, which it was not when he left it. Inside, the rooms had been put back so carefully that a lesser eye would have seen nothing at all, and Viktor saw everything: the drawer handles turned a quarter inch out of true, the rug napped the wrong way, the faint smear of a gloved thumb on the window latch. They had taken the decoy, pried it from its stretcher, and left the stretcher on the easel as if to say they knew a forgery when they felt one. Pinned to the stretcher with a sable brush was a playing card, the ace of spades, and beneath the card, in a hand that had never been taught to write by any school, one word: SOON. Viktor unpinned the card and the brush and stood very still in the middle of his studio, listening to the building the way a painter listens to a wet canvas, waiting for the surface to tell him what was underneath. The floorboard was clean. The oilcloth was under it, and the real painting, and the message he had copied into it without knowing, and the word FRAMER burning in his chest like a coal. He had thirty-six hours to the strike of twelve. He put the card in his pocket beside the Saint Christopher medal and went down the back stairs, because there was one man in the city who could tell him who had read his bricks, and that man had a shop in a crooked lane, and the lamp in the window was lit at six in the morning, which meant Otto Bergmann had not slept either. ---