Chapter 58 Atelier Bruckner

The atelier stood on the canal side in Landstrasse behind a door that had been a stable door when the Habsburgs taxed horses, and it kept banker's hours because counterfeiting empires keep banker's hours: dark by six, silent on Sundays, watched from a first-floor window across the lane where a man read newspapers and never finished them. Nikolai mapped the rhythm for two days while Viktor sat in the bookshop flat with the city's trade registers open around him like fallen cards. Bruckner & Co., Konservierungswerkstatt — registered 1963 by a real Bruckner, dead 1977; licence renewed ever since by an agent in Schaan; clients, per its own letterhead, museums, monasteries, and private collections from Lisbon to Helsinki. A workshop that had spent sixty years being respectable at exactly the height required to see over walls. They went in on the third night, through the coal chute that had fed the stoves when the building heated itself honestly, Viktor first because his whole life had trained him for the geometry of other men's workshops, Nikolai after because he had insisted and because someone trustworthy had to hold the light. The ground floor was shipping: crates, excise stamps, a ledger of deliveries in which Prague appeared three times in the last year under the initials of galleries. But the first floor — the first floor was the church of it. Racks of stretchers stood against the north wall sorted by period, cedar and pine and oak, each tagged in pencil with a century and a city. Drawers held nails — actual hand-forged nails — arranged by decade, oxidised in ovens to order. Along the long bench ran the pigments, and Viktor walked the bench slowly with his hands clasped tight behind him, reading labels: lead white ground in linseed to three viscosities; smalt from a supplier in Bohemia who sold to no one else; bone black burnt in-house, the smell of it still faint under the lamp oil. An aging oven the size of a coffin breathed warmth into the corner. And on the easel nearest the north light, half-finished, waiting for its century, lay a canvas sixty-one by eighty-six centimetres, museum grade, stretcher cut too deep in the old style — unshipped from Friday's crate to Prague and shipped back, or cut twice; either way, the same dimensions as the first wall. "He works alone," Nikolai breathed, somewhere behind him among the shelves. "One stool. One set of brushes cleaned like surgical steel." "One teacher's habits," Viktor said quietly, because the bench told a longer story than any single hand. He had found the ledgers. They sat open on the lectern by the window, two of them, bound in grey board, and their system of entries stopped Viktor as if he had met a relative in a foreign street. Commissions were recorded not by client name but by chess openings — Sicilian Defence, Caro-Kann, Queen's Gambit Declined — each opening a buyer, each variation a commission, dates in one hand, steady, small, unhurried. The same system Volkov had used thirty years ago to send him an encrypted invitation across half of Europe. The Teacher had learned his bookkeeping inside the attaché's world — pupil to master, master to institution — or he had been audited by it so often he had absorbed its grammar. In the margin of the most recent page, beside an entry reading Lot 47: oklad — open, reseal, facsimile film, deliver Vienna, someone had written in the private script, the family script, four words that turned the room cold around Viktor: FOR THE READER'S EYE. Below it, dated last week, one more line: W.I. — second wall, canvas 61×86 — Praha — after Friday. "They are not only erasing the icon," Viktor said. His voice stayed level because his hands were governing it, but the studio seemed to tilt very slightly, the way rooms tilt when a wall turns out to be a door. "They are making a second wall. A fake of the second wall — the wall behind the plaster, the one that named thirteen men and freed my grandfather's brother. They will exhibit it, or leak it, or sell it, and when it is exposed as forgery — and it will be, that is the entire mechanism, Hartmann's samples exist to detonate it — every descendant of every name on the true second wall becomes the descendant of a lie. Meridian does not need to buy our truth, Nikolai. They mean to marry it to a counterfeit and let the scandal divorce us from it forever." From the yard below came the sound everyone who enters buildings dishonestly learns to hear in his spine: keys. They went out the way they had come, but the chute's mouth had acquired a padlock since dusk — small, new, professional — and above them, through the floors, footsteps descended with the unhurried tread of a man who has done this many times and knows the building speaks to him in creaks. Viktor put out his hand and found, where memory said a workbench should be, the rack of drying grounds, and lifted free a palette knife, and set it in the jamb of the coal-room door at the height where a bolt shoots home, and then they were through the yard and over the wall into the lane while behind them a light came on in the atelier and a voice — low, calm, unhurried, speaking Czech with an accent Viktor could not place and would remember all his life — said, not loudly, to whoever had followed him down: "No matter. He has seen what I wished him to see." They did not run until the corner. In the car, three streets gone, hands steady on his knees, Viktor made himself review the night like a canvas examined raking-light, hunting the seam in his own evening, and found it where the cold had been sitting all along: the padlock was new, but the chute's inner grate had been unbolted from within. The door had been open for them. The ledgers had been open for them. The easel with its sixty-one by eighty-six canvas had been angled toward the stair as deliberately as a portrait is angled toward its light. He showed us the room, Viktor thought, as Prague's spires rose out of the motorway dark ahead of them. Every drawer, every ledger, every word in the margin. Either the Teacher is careless — and no hand that lays craquelure stroke by stroke in sable is careless — or I have just spent two hours inside a painting whose composition I did not choose, hung exactly where its painter wanted the reader to stand.