Chapter 6 Blackmail

Memory does not queue politely, and in the sleepless geography of that night the true beginning kept forcing its way ahead of the photograph. Before the envelope with its typed materials list, before the stone lion and the oilcloth bundle of mixed notes, there had been a brown folder with no label at all, and it had arrived a full year earlier, in the spring, on a morning when the chestnut trees along the river stood lit like candelabra. Everything that followed, the fee, the linen, the eleven-night cycles, rested on that folder the way a cathedral rests on its crypt, and so Viktor made himself descend and look at the thing again. The trouble had begun, as troubles did in his trade, with someone else's honesty. In February he had delivered to Vienna, through channels he believed were clean, a portrait in the manner of the Haarlem school, an officer laughing against a leaded sky, painted on genuinely old canvas with grounds cooked from recipes out of burned workshops. The buyer was Stefan Brandt, a dealer with beautiful manners and a mortgage disguised as a gallery, who swore the destination was a private Japanese collection and paid in used Swiss notes. Instead, some hunger or hubris steered Brandt toward Munich and a collector with a public conscience, and the laughing officer crossed into print, reproduced under the word authentic by an expert whose reputation required it to be true. Within six weeks another scholar had dissented in writing, laboratories had taken samples with drills no larger than mosquitoes, and the portrait's provenance had begun unraveling backward toward Vienna with the unhurried certainty of a tide. Brandt faced exposure, bankruptcy, and the particular hospitality that Austrian courts reserve for art fraud, and a man in that position buys relief wherever it is sold cheapest. Viktor heard the first tremors through Tomas, packed the studio's incriminating quarter for a midnight departure, and reviewed his rules for vanishing, which he had maintained like fire drills for a decade. Accounts under two names. A cousin's boat ticket waiting in Trieste. Nothing in the apartment bearing his handwriting except cookery notes. He believed himself a man who could be gone between supper and sunrise, and this belief sustained him until the folder came. It arrived, like everything that mattered afterward, without warning or return address, pushed flat beneath the studio door sometime before dawn. Inside lay a typewritten inventory of his sins assembled with archival patience: photographs of the laughing officer at three stages of creation, including one he had never seen, taken through his own north window while the underpainting dried; the Vienna delivery manifest in his own disguised hand; a laboratory report on the pigment samples, annotated in red where his materials betrayed him; and, as if all that were merely the coin of the realm, four photocopied pages of a much older dossier. He recognized the fourth page before he understood it, because the denunciation of Pavel Orlov bore a date he had carried since childhood, and beneath the bureaucratic prose ran the transport number of a train that went east beyond the last telegraph pole and stayed there. The covering instruction occupied half a page and wasted none of it. No money was demanded. Nothing was demanded, in fact, beyond continuation: he would go on working exactly as before, through channels yet to be indicated, accepting commissions and delivering them without inquiry, and he would speak of none of it to anyone, most particularly not to old men who framed pictures behind the ceremonial hall. Compliance required no signature. Noncompliance also required no signature; it required only that certain complete files find their way to three museum boards, two prosecutors, and the editorial desk of a Munich illustrated weekly, while a second set traveled, with condolences, to whatever remained open of his father's record. The folder closed upon that arithmetic and lay on the workbench like something surgical. What he felt first was not fear but a craftsman's appalled admiration. Whoever assembled the pages owned two kinds of reach that should never meet in one pair of hands, the modern apparatus that photographs a studio window from a rooftop, and the older apparatus that keeps a dead conservator's file warm for thirty years. Those hands belonged to different countries, historically enemies, and their cooperation told Viktor more about his new employers than any introduction could have done. He was not being robbed by criminals. He was being conscripted by an institution, and institutions do not extort for profit; they extort for continuity. For two days he conducted the audit of his capture with a professional's thoroughness, because despair organizes itself better when given procedures. The typing, he established through the Vinohrady photographer, came from a machine common as rain, its faults deliberately blurred by retouching. The paper stock traced to a wholesaler with four thousand clients between Hamburg and Trieste. The photographs of his window had been shot from the bakery's own roof, meaning his watchers had climbed over him monthly while he slept, and the humility of that discovery taught him more than the trail's cold ending. There was no trail. There was only the fact of the folder, and dossiers of that quality are produced by organizations that do not lose their appendages. He obeyed, and obedience once initiated developed a momentum he had not anticipated. The commissions reaching him through intermediaries in the following months were modest, almost respectful: documents aged to order, a family archive of photographs manufactured for a man rebuilding a burned past, two small panels in the taste of the Biedermeier, each paid in the same used polyglot currency. He performed them cleanly and asked nothing, and the asking-nothing became its own muscle, strengthening week by week until refusal would have demanded more strength than remained. Somewhere in those months he stopped calculating escape routes at night, not because hope died but because attention, that finite lamp oil, had been fully committed elsewhere. One page of the folder he returned to more often than all the rest, though it concerned him least directly. It showed the framing shop from across the street, Tomas's bow window crowded with moulding samples, a customer's bicycle leaning against the kerb. Nothing in the image threatened. Its menace lived entirely in implication, in the patience of a camera that had chosen to include a shop rather than a studio, and Viktor read it as the single sentence of mercy in an otherwise fluent language: cooperate, and the old man remains furniture. He examined his conscience for any temptation to warn Tomas and found, on honest inspection, nothing grander than the wish to, which surprised him by its modest size. Affection had evidently grown in the shadow of all that caution, rooted somewhere beneath the ledger where he had assumed nothing of his survived. The answer to his compliance came eleven days after the folder, in person, at dusk, with a knock he did not expect because nobody knocked yet. When he opened the street door the stairwell held a man he had never seen, tall, wrapped in a coat older than the decade, with eyes the color of a January sky over flat country, and instead of speaking the stranger raised one hand and made two quick gestures, palm flattening, fingers walking. The signs were rusted but exact, the alphabet of sparrows his father had invented against the listening walls of Leningrad, and the shock of watching them move across a stranger's hand went through Viktor like cold water finding a crack in plaster. Your father's system, the visitor signed, when he saw recognition arrive, we keep complete collections. Then aloud, in German accented by nowhere Viktor could name, he added that they had a great deal of work ahead of them, and stepped inside as if the room expected him, which, in every way that mattered afterward, it had. ---