Chapter 25 The Next Drop

He went to the bridge because that was where the story had to end, and because a painter finished what he started, even when the painting was a lie. The dawn came up gray over the river, the statues on the balustrade standing in their old coats of soot, and the man sitting on the bench at the northern end of the bridge was Daniel Rooke, alone, with the false painting unwrapped across his knees and a look on his face that Viktor had seen once before, in the face of a collector who has just discovered that the Vermeer he paid for is a copy. Viktor sat down on the bench beside him, close enough to see the decoding marks Rooke had penciled across the painted bricks, the little crosses and arrows that had traced the false bearing to this exact bench, and neither of them spoke for a long moment, because there was nothing left to say that the painting had not already said. Rooke looked at him at last, and there was no anger in his eyes, only the tired respect of a professional who has been out-professioned. You gave me the wrong one, he said. Viktor signed: I gave you the one you were sent to collect. The one that points at a bench. The one that proves you were willing to sell a man who painted for you. Rooke looked at the penciled marks, at the bench, at the empty river, and he laughed, a short flat sound with no warmth in it. You think that's a message, he said. You think that's the message. Viktor did not answer. He reached into his coat and brought out the true painting, still damp from the river, and unrolled it across his knees so that Rooke could see the nine bricks in the topmost course, lighter than their neighbors, and the shadow line crossing the second embrasure at the angle of the truth. I have both of them now, Viktor signed. I have the lie you chased across the square, and I have the truth that got Tomas Marek killed, and I am going to leave this bench with one of them, and you are going to leave with the other, and the only question is which of us is willing to be remembered the way we actually are. Rooke was silent for a long moment, looking at the two paintings as a man looks at two versions of his own life, and then he said, without looking up, What do you want. Viktor signed: I want the file. I want the blackmail gone, the threat gone, the name Viktor Orlov erased from every ledger your service keeps. I want to be a forger again, not a weapon. And I want to know who ordered the shot that killed a good man, and I want to know that whoever ordered it will answer for it the way a man answers for anything he orders. Rooke looked at him for a long time, and the gray light climbed the statues' faces, and for a moment Viktor thought the man was going to agree, and then he saw the shape behind the bench move, and he understood that Rooke had not come alone any more than Viktor had. The shape was the third man, the one who had been standing at the tram stop, the one who had watched the wall, and he was not alone either, because the far end of the bridge had suddenly acquired three men who stood the way Sokolov's men stood, patient and flat-eyed, waiting for a signal. Viktor looked at Rooke, and Rooke looked back with the flat honesty of a man who has just shown his hand, and Viktor signed: You were always going to kill me. Rooke said: No. I was always going to take the painting. Killing you was the third option, the one I was hoping not to use. And Viktor signed: Then we both brought wolves, and the wolves have met. The standoff lasted less than a minute. It ended when the first shot came, not from either of the two groups but from the river, from a launch that had come up under the bridge in the gray light, and the men at the far end of the bridge went down like scythed wheat, and Viktor understood that the river had been Sokolov's all along, that the Colonel had never trusted the bench or the clock or the square, that the Colonel had simply followed the one thing that could not lie, which was the painting itself. Rooke was on his feet, the false painting clutched to his chest, and the third man was down on the stones with his hands out in front of him, and Sokolov himself came up the stairs from the water's edge with the calm of a man walking through his own house, and he stopped in front of Viktor and looked at the true painting in Viktor's hands and said, in his precise Czech: You chose the true one. That is either very wise or very foolish, and I have not yet decided which. Viktor signed: The false one has already done its work. Sokolov looked at Rooke, at the false painting, at the penciled marks of the decoding, and he smiled the smile of a man who has just watched a trap close around someone else's feet. Take him, he said, and his men took Rooke, and the false painting with him, and Sokolov stood on the bridge with Viktor and the true painting and the gray dawn climbing over the city, and he did not reach for the painting, which was the most surprising thing of all. I am not taking the painting, Sokolov said, as if answering a question. I am taking the painter. The message in the wall is a map, and the map is mine now, and the map is worthless without the man who can read it and the hands that can redraw it. You will work for us, Viktor Orlov, not because I have blackmailed you and not because I have threatened you, but because the men who blackmailed you are dead or in my custody, and the only protection left to you in this city is a coat that costs more than your rent and a man who has never once been surprised. You have one hour to decide. He turned and walked back down the stairs to the launch without waiting for an answer, and Viktor stood on the bridge with the true painting in his hands and the city waking around him, and he understood that the hour had already been decided, and that it had been decided the night his handler died on his floor, and that the only real question left was how many more walls he would paint before the wolves grew tired of the game. He went home. The studio smelled of turpentine and old wood, the floorboard was still sealed, the false panel still held nothing but dust and the memory of a painting, and Viktor stood at the window with the morning light coming up over the rooftops of the Malá Strana and let himself, for the first time in a year, look at the city the way a painter looks at a city, as a thing he might one day be allowed to live in. The envelope was on the mat when he turned, white, unmarked, the kind of envelope a man received when the network wanted him, and inside it there was no paper, only a folded photograph of the Kremlin wall and a single sentence in the tight, sloping hand he had learned to read in a dying man's studio, the same sentence that had been slipped under his door a year ago: The light changes at dusk. Bring the brush. Viktor read it twice, the way he read everything now, looking for the message underneath the message, and found none, because for once the message was exactly what it appeared to be. He folded the photograph into his pocket beside the Saint Christopher medal and the ace of spades, and he picked up his brush, and he began to mix the pigments for a wall he already knew by heart, brick by brick, shadow by shadow, waiting for the light to change.