Chapter 24 The Switch

He built the false painting in a rented room above a tobacconist's on a street whose name he did not bother to learn, working by the light of a single lamp with his back to the window. It took him two days and eleven hours, and it was the finest forgery of his life, because it was not a forgery of a painting. It was a forgery of a message. He stretched a canvas to the exact dimensions of the one under his floor, aged it with the same tea and the same coffee and the same patience, and then he painted the wall again, the wall he knew by heart, brick by brick, shadow by shadow. He painted the nine bricks in the topmost course a shade lighter, exactly as the photograph had shown them, and then he painted the shadow line crossing the second embrasure at an angle that was a fraction of a degree different from the truth. The difference was smaller than any man could measure with his eye and larger than any man could ignore with his memory, and it pointed the bearing not at the Old Town Square but at the river, at the northern end of the Charles Bridge, at a bench where the statues stood shoulder to shoulder like men waiting for a verdict. If the message was ever decoded, it would say that the drop was on the bridge. The message under his floor said the drop was at the clock. He had one true painting and one false one, and both of them were his, and the question of which one any man took from him would tell Viktor everything he needed to know about which man he was dealing with. At midnight the square was nearly empty. The astronomical clock's face hung above the crowd of statues like a great gold eye, and the twelve apostles filed past their little windows with the mechanical patience of men who had been making the same walk for six hundred years, and Viktor stood in the shadow of the Týn Church with the two paintings wrapped identically in brown paper and identical twine, and he watched the square the way a painter watches a model, looking for the one thing that did not belong. The first man to arrive was not the man he expected. He was young, blond, dressed like a student, and he walked straight to the bench beneath the clock and sat down and lit a cigarette, and Viktor felt the bottom of his stomach drop out, because the student had been standing at the tram stop when Viktor had gotten off the tram, and the student had followed him through two streets and a church porch, and Viktor had watched the student and the student had watched the wall. He had walked into the square with the false painting under his arm and the true painting under his coat, and he had planned to give the false one to whoever came and keep the true one to bargain with, and now he understood that whoever had come had known exactly which arm the false one was under. He had misjudged the depth of the trap, and the depth was the same. The second man arrived at five minutes past twelve, walking across the square from the direction of the Old Town Hall with the unhurried stride of a man who owns the hour. He was tall, in a long coat, with a face that Viktor had seen once before, a year ago, in a car outside his studio on the night the blackmail had begun. Daniel Rooke looked older than the face in the memory, which was what a year of running a war out of a rented capital did to a man, and he came to the bench and sat down beside the student and said something that made the student laugh, and the two of them sat together like friends, which was the moment Viktor understood that the young man with the cigarette was not Sokolov's watcher at all. He was Rooke's. Viktor stood in the shadow of the church and watched the man who had blackmailed him sit on a bench in the Old Town Square with a man half his age and laugh at a joke, and he felt the true painting burning against his ribs, and he understood that the trap had closed around the wrong person. He had come to the clock to give the false message to a traitor and keep the true one for himself. He had not counted on the traitor being the man who had first put the brush in his hand. He walked out of the shadow with the false painting held out in front of him like a peace offering, and Rooke stood up and took it without a word, the way a man takes a package he has been waiting for, and it was in that moment, with the paper in Rooke's hands and the square holding its breath, that the shots came. They came from the direction of the Týn Church, three of them, flat and hard, and the student went down without a sound, and the square came apart like a sheet of glass. Viktor dropped and rolled behind the bench and came up with the true painting still against his ribs, and he saw Sokolov's men in the arch of the church porch, three of them, moving with the calm of men who have done this before, and he saw Rooke running across the square with the false painting clutched to his chest, running the way a man runs who has just understood that he has been given a gift that will kill him. Viktor did not run after him. He ran the other way, down a lane so narrow the buildings almost touched above his head, and he heard the feet behind him and the soft Czech voices calling to each other in the dark, and he came out at the river and went down the stone stairs to the water's edge and stood in the cold of the Vltava up to his knees while the voices passed overhead and died away toward the Old Town. He climbed out shaking, the true painting soaked through its paper against his chest, the false painting gone with Rooke across the square, and he understood that he had won and lost the same hand at the same moment. Rooke had the false message, the bearing that pointed at the bench on the bridge, and Rooke would decode it and go to the bridge to collect a message that did not exist, and Sokolov would follow Rooke, and the two of them would meet on the Charles Bridge at dawn with nothing between them but the cold and a bench and the memory of a painting neither of them truly owned. Viktor stood on the embankment with the water running out of his coat and the true painting pressed to his chest, and he thought about the man who had blackmailed him, the man who had laughed on a bench in the square, and he understood that the last brushstroke of the night belonged to him. He had one painting that told the truth and one that told a lie, and both of them were out in the world now, and the only man alive who knew which was which was standing in the cold on the bank of the Vltava with the dawn an hour away, deciding whether to let the two wolves meet on the bridge or to put himself between them. ---