Chapter 29 The Mole

He decoded the ledger on the fourth night, in the studio above the bakery, with the copy spread across the bench and the lamp turned low, because the decoding was the kind of work that asked for darkness the way a confession asks for it. The sums were in three currencies and four hands, and the names were the names of painters and restorers and couriers, men who had moved paintings across a frontier that no longer existed, and Viktor read them the way he read everything now, looking for the message underneath the message. It was the initials that gave it away. Every entry in Marek's hand carried, in the margin, the initials of the man who had authorized the crossing, and Viktor had learned to read the acrostics of a dying man's trade, and he read the initials now the way his father had taught him to read the grain of wood, and the initials of the last authorization, the one dated two days before the shot, were not the initials of any name in the ledger. They were the initials of a man Viktor had met at the water's edge, a man of forty with a face like a closed ledger, the man who had handed him the key to the room above the river. G. R. He wrote the initials down, and they sat on the paper and looked back at him, and he understood that the man who had ordered the shot that killed Tomas Marek had been standing beside Sokolov every day since, and that Sokolov did not know. He did not go to Josef. The restorer had been his only ally in the city, but the ledger had taught him the first law of the Artists' Line, which was that a secret belonged to the man who could carry it alone, and Viktor had decided to carry this one alone until he knew which way the room leaned. He worked the copy over a second time, reading every entry against the pigment list that had carried the acrostic, and he found the second layer: the sums were not sums. They were bearings, degrees of a compass, hidden in the figures the way the nine bricks had been hidden in the wall, and they pointed not to Vienna but to a place Viktor had never been, a town on the Austrian border where the Artists' Line had crossed for thirty years. He understood now what the route was for. The route was not a line on a map. The route was a chain of men, and the chain had a weak link, and the weak link had the initials G. R., and the man with those initials had killed to keep the chain from breaking where it touched him. The ace of spades was pinned to his door the next morning. It was the same card, the same slightly greased surface, the same shallow cut of the corner, and Viktor unpinned it with the care of a man lifting a trap, and he stood very still in the cold of the stairwell and told himself that he had been wrong about the geometry of the game. He had believed the mole was Sokolov's adjutant, a man hiding inside the Colonel's house. He had not considered that the adjutant might know he knew. He went back into the studio and locked the door and sat down at the bench, and he thought about the two paintings under his floor, about the ledger copy and the tracing paper, about the woman in the photograph and the word VIENNA, and he understood that he had one move left that did not end with his hands nailed to a frame. He had to give the mole a reason to believe the ledger had gone west with the painting, and he had to give the man on the far bank a reason to believe that Viktor Orlov was worth crossing the river for. He built the false ledger that night, the way he had built the false wall, with the same patience and the same care, copying the names and the sums and the bearings and leaving out one thing: the initials in the margin of the last entry. He aged it with tea and coffee and the flat of his thumb, and he wrapped it in oilcloth and buried it in the false panel beneath the floorboards, and he took the true copy and folded it into the lining of his coat, the way Marek had folded the list of pigments into the lining of his. When the dawn came he walked to the river, and he stood at the northern end of the bridge where the statues kept their coats of soot, and he placed the true copy in the dead drop he had been taught a year ago by a man who was now dead, the hollow in the wall behind the fourth statue, the one no one had ever seen him use. He did not look back. He walked to the tram stop and chose a seat with his back to the door, because witnesses watched their own shadows, and he had just made himself a witness to the thing that had killed his handler. The man on the far bank collected it at noon. Viktor watched from the window of the tobacconist's, from behind the sacks of tobacco and the dust, and he saw the man cross the bridge with the unhurried stride of a man who owns the hour, and he saw the hand go into the hollow and come out with the oilcloth, and he saw the man stand for a long moment with the parcel in his hands and then look up, directly at the window where Viktor stood, the way a man looks at the painter after he has opened the frame. Viktor did not move. The man did not move. And then the man tucked the oilcloth into his coat and walked away toward the Old Town, and Viktor understood that the message had been received, and that the third player was now in possession of the thing the route had been built to carry, and that the only piece of the game left on the board was the man with the face like a closed ledger, who did not yet know that the ledger had left the city without him. He went back to the studio and took out his father's knife and cut a fresh canvas, because the light changed at dusk and the Colonel had sent word that the route was ready, that the man in Moscow was coming west, and that the crossing would happen on the bridge at an hour of Viktor's choosing, because the painter had been earned. Viktor stood at the bench and looked at the fresh canvas and the empty easel, and he understood that he had one painting left to make, and that it would be the truest thing he had ever made, and that it would decide which of the three players walked away from the bridge with the thing they had all come to collect. He began to mix the pigments, the same eleven pigments, rose madder, emerald green, the pigments of a dead man's acrostic, and he worked the way he had worked all his life, without hurry and without noise, waiting for the light to change.