Chapter 3 Underworld

Dawn came slowly to Malá Strana, grey seeping through the north window the way water finds the low places in a wall. Viktor did not turn on the lamps. He sat on the stool with his back to the easel, because looking at the fresh canvas stretched there was easier than looking at the cellar door, and he let his memory walk backward down the years to find the road that had brought him to this room, this night, this silence with a body in it. Every trade has an entrance, he thought, and mine was painted. He had been born within sight of the Neva, in a Leningrad courtyard where the snow lay yellow until April and the stairwells smelled of cabbage and carbolic. His father, Pavel Orlov, was a conservator at a museum whose name Viktor was taught early never to say aloud in the street. Pavel cleaned varnish off dead men's pictures and put cracks back into living saints' faces, and in a city where everyone watched everyone, he had invented a private language to survive the listening. It was a system of hand signs, quick as sparrows, borrowed partly from the deaf fishmongers on Sennaya Square and partly from his own invention: a flattened palm for danger, two fingers walking for money, a circle of thumb and forefinger for the thing that must not be said. He taught the signs to his son as a game, over boiled barley and black bread, and the boy learned them the way children learn songs, without knowing they would someday need every verse. The denunciation, when it came, concerned an icon. A Smolensk Mother of God, nineteenth century, school of Palekh, had left the country in a diplomat's suitcase and returned as a photograph in a ministry file, and someone remembered that Pavel Orlov had handled the frame. He was not accused of anything so dramatic as theft. He was accused of insufficient vigilance, which was the era's gentler word for ruin. He lost his workshop, his ration category, and finally his name, and in the winter Viktor turned nine, a train took his father east beyond the last telegraph pole and did not bring him back. His mother lasted four more years on copies and mending, sewing for the wives of men who had signed the paper, and then her heart simply stopped mid-stitch, as if even it had grown tired of pretending. At sixteen Viktor crossed into Finland on a timber manifest that listed him as packing straw. He carried one suitcase, his father's brush box, and a hatred of paperwork that never left him. Vienna taught him German and hunger in equal measure, and an old restorer named Weiss took him on to scrub rabbit-skin glue from lining canvases, then let him grind pigment, then, one evening without ceremony, let him paint a sky. Weiss had one lesson worth the whole apprenticeship. Real age, he said, tapping a hairline craquelure with a needle, is a diary written in the only ink that never lies, and a faker who forgets this has produced not a picture but a costume. Viktor was twenty-two and understood instantly that he had been given a profession. Prague found him the way weather finds a traveler. He came for a weekend in the spring the borders loosened, to see the city his mother had described from a prewar guidebook, and he stayed, first in a room above a laundry in Smíchov, then in better rooms as his circumstances improved, which they did quickly, because Prague in those first lawless seasons was a vault with the door standing open. The state galleries were cataloguing losses no one would ever investigate. Private collections were surfacing from cellars and attic trunks, owned by heirs who could not prove provenance and buyers who did not care to ask. Between the two stood men like Tomas Hruby. Tomas kept a framing shop in Josefov, behind the old ceremonial hall, a premises so narrow that two customers constituted a crowd. He was sixty, built like a barrel stave, with a gold tooth he flashed when arithmetic favored him and a memory for faces that made customs officers seem absent-minded. He saw the quality of Viktor's hand before Viktor showed him anything finished, merely from the way the young man squared a frame against the wall. Within a month Viktor was restoring for Tomas's clients. Within a season he was improving on restoration, adding a signature here, a credible century there, and discovering that the difference between repair and invention paid in different currencies entirely. Tomas taught him the grammar of the shadow market the way his father had taught the hand signs, as a survival code. Never sell in the city where you live. Never offer two works to the same buyer inside a year. Never let your name travel with the object; let the object travel alone and let brokers argue over whose hand it was. Above all, never learn why a man buys. Greed he could understand, Tomas said, and vanity, and love of beauty, even fear, but purpose was a country he did not issue visas to. Viktor took the rules as scripture and broke only the last one, quietly, because his eye could not help reading what clients thought they had hidden. By his thirtieth year the trade supported him comfortably and invisibly. He lived above the shuttered bakery on a lane where the landlord asked rents in cash and memories, the baker having gone west and left ovens cold and a cellar dry as a crypt. Collectors from Nuremberg to Turin bought his seventeenth-century interiors, his minor Dutch harbors, his saints with plausible cracks. Museums hung him unknowing. Two experts cited his brushwork in print as evidence of a school that had never existed, and Viktor clipped the citations and kept them in his father's brush box, not from vanity, he told himself, but as a craftsman keeps gauges. Yet the underworld that fed him had begun, in that same season, to change its nature. The old fences like Tomas, who priced everything in crowns and caution, were yielding ground to newcomers who talked of routes instead of prices, of corridors instead of sales, men whose money arrived from capitals rather than collectors. Objects stopped moving for beauty and started moving because someone wanted them to move. Viktor felt the shift first as a change in the questions brokers asked, no longer whether a canvas was right but whether it could be carried rolled, whether it could pass a cold-room inspection, whether its back was as convincing as its face. He answered in the affirmative because the fees doubled, and he told himself the answers meant nothing. On an ordinary Tuesday in October, an envelope had come to the framing shop wrapped in brown paper and addressed in a hand so neutral it might have been typed by a machine wearing gloves. Inside lay a photograph and a single sheet listing materials: Belgian linen, aged, lead white in quantity, cold-pressed linseed, amber varnish. Tomas slid it across the counter without expression, the gold tooth nowhere in sight. Your client has upgraded, the old fence said, or your client has been replaced by something that wears his coat. Either way, this is no longer buying and selling. Viktor looked at the materials list again and understood that the underworld had finished changing while his back was turned, and that he had been standing inside the change the whole time. Now, on this dawn after death, the memory played to its end and left him in the cold room with turpentine fumes rising off the scrubbed boards. He had entered the trade through a painted door believing he would always be able to leave by the same exit. The man in the cellar had come through that door ahead of him, and had died with his hand pressed flat against his ribs, the sign for danger held to the last. Whatever waited in this new country of purpose, Viktor decided, watching the grey strengthen over the bakery roofline, he would meet it with his father's alphabet on his fingers and his own rules burned behind him. He rose, mixed fresh medium, and turned to face the blank canvas, because a hand that hesitates writes confessions. ---