Chapter 55 The Attaché

The knock came at nine the next morning, which told Viktor everything before he opened the door, because institutions keep office hours even when they are threatening you. Hana was at the market. Jenda had been sent to the guard's room above the clock shop with a parcel of tea and instructions to stay until called, and Nikolai stood in the passage with his coat still buttoned, watching the stair through the peephole of an ordinary morning. Viktor opened the door on a man assembled entirely from patience. Volkov had aged the way cathedrals age — slowly, and into something more imposing. Heavier now, whiter at the temples, unhurried as weather, with the same eyes that had once sat across a society-library table off Nerudova and reframed a season of Viktor's life over the board of a chess problem. He carried no briefcase. He held a flat package wrapped in brown paper and tied with string, and he stood in the doorway of the studio above the bakery as though doorways were waiting rooms he had outgrown decades ago. "You have been busy," Volkov said. "A foundation, a fake, a forger with a teacher's name. My colleagues in Vienna are beside themselves, which for my colleagues requires chemistry." He looked past Viktor into the room, at the easels, at the jars of pigment ranked like a choir, and something almost like nostalgia crossed the heavy face. "May I? I have come a long way to say very little, and I say it better sitting down." They sat at the work table among the brushes. Volkov declined tea with the small ceremonial regret of a man declining everything on principle, laid the package on the boards between them, and kept two fingers on it the way a man keeps fingers on a thing whose weight he is still deciding to hand over. "In 1952," he said, "a conservator in Leningrad wrote a report about an icon. You know this story better than I do — or you think you do. His denunciation, his train, your childhood. What you do not know, because the file was sealed twice over, is what happened after the train. His report was read by four men. Three filed it. The fourth was my first chief, who had spent the war cataloguing what armies carry in their luggage, and who understood within one reading that the conservator had seen something he should not have seen and been ruined by someone who needed him never to see it again. That fourth man kept a copy of everything — the report, the denunciation order, the transport manifest of the icon itself. When he died I inherited his safe the way one inherits a disease." Volkov's fingers shifted on the paper. "And three years ago, when your exhibitions began pulling threads out of the world's seam, I did what careful institutions do with loose threads: I followed them. Which is how I came to be reading, last spring, a carbon copy of a border lieutenant's private notebook, describing a crossing on the ninth of February, 1947, and how I came to understand — before your Meridian friends, if we are honest, though they were not far behind — that the road your family built has a paper twin sleeping in an archive, and that whoever wakes that paper owns the story." "The Sorokin report." "The Sorokin report," Volkov agreed, without surprise. "I offer you its location, freely, as a gift. It is not in Prague, it is not in Vienna, and it will not remain where it is beyond the winter, because archives are only as loyal as their budgets." He pushed the package an inch across the table, then stopped it again. "In exchange, I ask for one thing, and it is not money, and it is not the panels, and you may believe me because lying to you would cost more than the thing is worth. I ask that the authentication of the Artists' Line corpus pass through one pair of hands before the world receives it. Yours. A standing authority. Certificates, examinations, a seal — call it whatever the museums will accept. Your service already does half of it informally; I am proposing you let an institution wear your face while you do it." "And the face reports to whom?" "To no one. To history, if you like." Volkov smiled for the first time, and it was the smile of a chess problem being enclosed in an envelope. "Consider what you refuse. Without a single arbiter, every wall becomes an argument, and arguments are exactly what Hartmann's samples were purchased to feed. With one, doubt dies in committee. You would be trading a lifetime of suspicion for certainty, Orlov. Men have made worse exchanges for less." Viktor looked at the package under the attaché's fingers, at the string knotted the way diplomatic couriers knot string, and he thought of his father Pavel, who had spent his life putting cracks back into painted saints and had been destroyed by a file he never knew existed; and he thought of the file clerk upstairs in Malá Strana learning, at ninety, that his guilt had been furniture; and he heard himself answering in the voice his grandfather used for weighing things, head slightly to one side. "No," Viktor said. "You are offering me Sokolov's chair with softer cushions. One man's word becomes the wall the truth stands behind, and walls behind truth are what our whole story exists to tear down. The reader must be everyone, or there is no reader at all." He rose, crossed to the window, looked down at the street where nothing moved except the light. "But I will take the gift, and pay for it honestly. Not with authority. With labour. Come spring I begin teaching authentication publicly — materials, methods, the tells of every trick I have ever known, taught to any curator, student, or policeman who walks in. In five years a hundred people can read these paintings as I read them. Doubt will not die in committee. It will die of starvation." For a long moment Volkov studied him the way he had once studied a position before choosing between two winning moves. Then he lifted his fingers from the package, turned it, and pushed it fully across the table. "Then take your father's file," he said, standing, settling his coat with two precise tugs, "and read what your silence cost him. The fourth man's copies include the pages your brown folder lacked. Conserved icons have long lives, Mr. Orlov, but some of them are longer than others — and one of them, I am told by the trade, is currently catalogued for sale in Vienna. Lot forty-seven. Ask yourself why a foundation that buys walls is suddenly bidding on a Smolensk Mother of God." At the door he paused, hand on the latch, and delivered his farewell to the room rather than to its occupant, as if to the profession itself: "Your grandfather built roads. Meridian builds mirrors — objects that show each man the lie he prefers. Do try to tell them apart before Friday."