Chapter 30 The Forger's Choice

The woman from the photograph came to him at the corner of the Charles Bridge as the light went out of the sky, and she stood the way the man on the far bank stood, patient and flat-eyed, a figure who had been part of the city for longer than anyone had noticed. She was older than the photograph, and she carried a leather satchel over her shoulder and a face that had been built to give nothing away, and she said, in Czech with a Vienna edge to it: My brother carried a photograph of me in his breast pocket for eleven years. You have it. Viktor took out the Saint Christopher medal and the photograph and held them out to her, and she did not take them. Keep them, she said. They are the only proof you have left that he was real. She looked past him at the bridge, at the statues, at the river running gray under the arches, and she said: The ledger reached the right hands. The route is open. And the man in Moscow is not coming. Viktor signed: The Colonel says he is coming. Hana said: The Colonel has been told that a man is coming. The route was built to move one man, and that man was moved years ago, before my brother died, and the only reason the route is being opened again is that there are men who need it to be real. She looked at him then, and for the first time there was something in her face that was not a wall. My brother died because a man in the Colonel's house was afraid of what the wall would say when it was read, she said. The wall has been read. And the man who was afraid is going to have to come to the bridge tonight to make certain that the man from Moscow never arrives. Viktor stood very still, the initials G. R. burning through him, and he understood that he had been building the trap with his own hands for a week, and that Hana had come to tell him which side of it he was standing on. Come with me, she said. The file on Viktor Orlov the forger closes tonight either way. There is a train to Vienna at half past nine, a room in a workshop there, and a name that has never been written down, and you can be a painter again, the thing you have been forging for fifteen years. Viktor looked at the bridge, at the bench where Rooke had sat with the false painting on his knees, and he thought about the eleven pigments in the dead man's hand, about the two paintings under the floor, about the man who had handed him a key at the water's edge, and he understood that the choice had been made for him the night his handler died on his floor. He signed: I am going to finish the painting. Hana looked at him for a long moment, and then she nodded, the way a woman nods at a craftsman who has decided to keep a commission, and she said: Then I will be on the train, and if you are not there by half past nine, the file stays open. She turned and walked toward the Old Town, and Viktor stood alone on the bridge with the medal in his fist and told himself the name of his own game. He went to the room above the river and took down the final canvas, the true route, the map that crossed the city to the northern end of the bridge, and he carried it through the dark streets and set it on the bench where Rooke had sat, and he stood back and looked at it the way a painter looks at a finished work. The man with the face like a closed ledger came at nine, walking across the square with the unhurried stride of a man who owns the hour, and he stopped at the sight of the painting on the bench, and he looked at Viktor, and for a moment neither of them moved. You were supposed to be on the train, the man said. Viktor signed: The route is open. The man looked at the painting, at the nine lighter bricks, at the shadow crossing the second embrasure, and he smiled the smile of a man who has just been handed the receipt for a purchase made years ago. You decoded it, he said. You found my initials. Then he drew the gun from his coat, and Viktor stood very still and watched the hand, the hand that had ordered a shot through a dying man's rib cage, and he did not move, because a man who has finished his painting has nothing left to lose by standing still. The shot did not come from the gun in the mole's hand. It came from the river, from a launch that had come up under the bridge in the dark, and the mole went down on the stones with a look of perfect surprise on his face, the look of a man who has just understood that the trap was never meant for the painter. Sokolov 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 the fallen man and looked at him for a long moment, and then he looked at Viktor, at the painting on the bench, at the empty night, and he 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: You knew. Sokolov said: I have known for eleven years. I have been waiting for the man from Moscow to be ready, for the painter to be earned, and for the mole to come to the bridge, and tonight all three of them have arrived. He looked at the fallen man, at the initials on the painting, and he said: Take him. His men took the mole, and Sokolov stood on the bridge with Viktor and the true painting and the dark river running beneath them, and he did not reach for the painting, which was the second most surprising thing of all. I am not taking the painting, Sokolov said. I am taking the painter, and the route, and the ledger, and you will give me all three, not because you have been bought and not because you have been broken, but because the man who killed your handler is in my custody and the only protection left to you in this city is a coat that costs more than your rent. Viktor stood on the bridge and looked at the Colonel, and he understood that the choice had been made for him long before, on a floor that smelled of turpentine, and that the only real question left was how many more walls he would paint before the light stopped changing. He signed: The train leaves at half past nine. Sokolov looked at his watch, and then at the dark city, and he said: Then you have forty minutes to decide. Viktor picked up the painting and walked away from the bridge without answering, and behind him the launch turned in the river and went back under the arches, and somewhere in the city a clock began to strike the half hour. He went to the studio, and he stood at the window with the painting under his arm and the light of the city coming in over the rooftops of the Malá Strana, and he let himself believe, just for that moment, that the city was 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 a wall he had never seen and a single sentence in a hand he had never read: 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 it exactly where it had always been: the route was open, and the route was his, and the choice was still his to make. He folded the photograph into his pocket beside the Saint Christopher medal and the ace of spades, and he set the painting down on the easel, and he picked up his brush, and he began to mix the pigments for a wall he had never seen, brick by brick, shadow by shadow, waiting for the light to change.