Chapter 26 The New Client

The light changed at dusk the way the envelope had promised, a long amber collapse over the rooftops of the Malá Strana, and Viktor Orlov stood at the water's edge below the bridge with his hands in his pockets and watched the launch come out of the shadow of the arches. Sokolov was not on it. The launch carried a man Viktor had never seen, a man of forty with a face like a closed ledger, and the man handed him a key and a folded photograph and a scrap of paper with one sentence written in a hand that was not the Colonel's: The room is above the river. The wall is in the photograph. Bring the brush at dawn. Viktor took the three objects the way he took everything now, as a painter takes a commission, weighing what was offered against what was owed, and he did not ask where the launch had come from or why the Colonel had not come himself, because a man who asks questions loses his hands, and he had come to understand that his hands were the only currency he had left that anyone still wanted. The launch turned and went back under the bridge. Viktor stood alone on the stones with the key cold in his palm and the photograph heavy as a stone, and he understood that he had crossed some line in the night without noticing the moment of crossing, the way a forger crossed from imitation to invention without ever being able to say which stroke had made the change. He was Sokolov's painter now. The question was only what he would paint, and for whom, and what he would keep for himself. The room above the river was a painter's room the way an empty cell was a monk's cell: the shape was right and the life was gone. There was a window that looked out over the water, a workbench scarred by a hundred solvents, a single easel that had been new within the last decade and used by no one, and a smell of fresh plaster and someone else's tobacco. Viktor locked the door and laid the photograph on the bench under the single lamp and looked at the wall. It was the same wall. He had known it would be the same wall before he unfolded the paper, the same curving red brick of the Kremlin, the same absurd resolution, the same night-green cast of a camera in orbit, and yet it was not the same, because the angle was different, the shadow fell long from the other side, and the embrasures stood in an order his memory refused to confirm. He had spent eleven nights learning the first wall the way a man learns a face he is about to be examined against, and now he stood over its twin and felt the particular unease of a painter confronted with a portrait painted by someone who had studied the same model. He stretched a canvas with the careful ritual of his trade, the rabbit-skin glue, the gesso laid in thin honest coats, and he began to work the way he had worked all his life, without hurry and without noise, and it was in the second hour, with the river dark beyond the window and the lamp burning down, that his eye caught the thing in the mortar courses that the first wall had not had, the small rhythm that was not masonry but handwriting. He set down his brush and stood back and read it the way his father had taught him to read the grain of wood, long light, short light, the pulse of a hand tapping. Six letters this time, tucked into the courses between the bricks, a difference so small that no man looking at the image as a picture would ever have noticed, and exactly the difference a forger would notice, because a forger spent his life hunting differences that small. VIENNA. He wrote it down, and the word sat on the paper and looked back at him, and he understood that he had been given the second piece of a map. The first wall had named a man. The second wall named a place. And a man and a place were not a map; a man and a place were a route, and a route was a thing that moved, and the only things that moved across the frontier without papers were people and paintings, and Viktor Orlov had spent fifteen years learning which of those was easier to make disappear. He stood at the window with the word burning in his memory and thought about the dead man on his floor, about the eleven pigments and the acrostic that had cost a life, and he understood that Marek had not died to protect a wall. Marek had died because the wall was a door, and someone had wanted to be certain it stayed closed forever, and now Sokolov was opening it again with Viktor's hands. He painted until the light came up over the river, and he painted the way he had been taught to paint over a failure, without emotion, without attachment, laying the truth down brick by brick because a man who wanted to keep a secret must first make himself indispensable to the men who thought they owned it. When the dawn came he stood back and looked at the wall he had made, the second map, VIENNA, hidden in the honest bricks, and he knew that Sokolov would read it and that the Colonel would believe the route was his. Viktor had not yet decided whether the route would be. He cleaned his brushes with the old patience and went down the stairs to the river, and on the far bank under the chestnut trees a man stood with his back to the water, a man in a coat too warm for the season, and he was not looking at the river. He was looking at the room above the river, at the window where the lamp had burned all night, and Viktor stood in the doorway and looked back at him for a long moment, and neither of them moved, and then the man turned and walked away toward the Old Town, and Viktor understood that the game had three players again, and that the third player had never left the board. He went back to the bakery by the back stairs, and the studio was exactly as he had left it, the floorboard sealed, the panel silent, the smell of turpentine and old wood holding the morning like a frame holds a canvas. He knelt and lifted the board and took out the true painting, the first map, the one with the true bearing, and held it up to the window light and looked at the nine lighter bricks and the shadow that crossed the second embrasure, and he told himself the name of his own game. He had one map that Sokolov had read and one map that Sokolov had never seen and a word in his memory that the Colonel did not know he possessed, and he was going to need all three, because a route was only a route while no one else knew where it ended. He wrapped the true painting in oilcloth and put it back under the floor, and he took out his father's knife and cut a fresh canvas for the next commission, because a commission was a promise, and a promise was the only thing in his trade that a man could not forge.