Chapter 62 The Crate from Vienna

They opened it in the gallery cellar at four in the afternoon, with the notary present, the curator hovering, Jenda holding the ultraviolet lamp the way acolytes hold candles, and the police, notified by a curator suddenly enamoured of procedure, sending one sergeant who stood by the coal bins and looked at the painting the way honest men look at sums that refuse to total. The crate was museum grade, batten by batten, each screw counted on the manifest, and the straw packing had been laid by hands that understood compression the way organists understand pedals. The false second wall lay face up on the trestles by half past four, sixty-one by eighty-six centimetres, and the cellar went quiet around it the way rooms go quiet before weather. It was better than the Brno variant. Viktor made himself say so inwardly first, because analysis begins where flattery stops. The plaster texture had been built in translucent greys over a warm ochre ground, course over course, with the patience of someone who had decided to spend a season where other men spent an afternoon; the damp stain in the lower left corner bloomed and feathered with the exact treachery of real water finding real lime; and along the margin, small enough to want a loupe, ran thirteen names in the private script, letter by letter correct, each abbreviation placed where the family grammar would place it. Twelve names from the archives. And between the seventh and the eighth, where no archive on earth recorded anything at all, the thirteenth name, spelled with the old final character that had dropped out of usage decades ago, written as if the writer had learned it from the hand that invented it. "He copied the true one," Nikolai said hoarsely. He had seen the second wall once, as a boy, in his grandfather's keeping. "Or he copied descriptions of it." "Descriptions cannot teach a hand this grammar." Viktor worked the raking light slowly across the surface, low, then lower, letting the weave testify. Machine pitch, bank to bank, no hunger in the linen. Cold modern gesso under the violet beam. Phthalocyanine asleep in the shadow passage like ice in a road. And the hesitations — the thoughtful stumbles of the brush pretending to doubt — placed, stroke for stroke, identical to the manufactured hesitations of the Brno fake, the same pauses in the same order, the way a pianist repeats himself when he believes no one is comparing performances. "He quoted himself. That is the seam, and I can drive a wedge into it in front of any camera in Europe. But understand what else this canvas is, because the paint is only the envelope." He straightened and looked round the cellar, at the sergeant, the notary, the curator, the boy with the lamp. "The true second wall named thirteen men, and the thirteenth name freed my grandfather's brother, and the archives say twelve because the thirteenth bought his freedom by vanishing from paper. If the world accepts this forgery, the thirteenth member becomes whatever this canvas says he was — a fiction with a forged face. And when the forgery is exposed, on schedule, at Hartmann's symposium, the exposure falls on the idea, not the object. Doubt does not need to win. It needs only to make surety expensive. Either way, the man who painted this owns the thirteenth name's afterlife." He set the lamp down. "He has not forged a wall. He has forged the argument about the wall, in advance, and mailed it to us to hold for him." The curator asked, faintly, whether the gallery ought to refuse the delivery, and the sergeant answered before anyone senior could, with the flat wisdom of his profession: refused crates go back into bonded storage, bonded storage has keys, keys have cousins. Better, he said, that the thing stood in a cellar full of witnesses with a number on its lid and a notary taking photographs every twenty minutes, because an object nobody admits to wanting is an object nobody has to explain. The curator looked to Viktor, who nodded; whatever else the crate was, it was now also bait in a well-lit room, and bait kept where the enemy can see it fishes more honestly than bait hidden. The sergeant, who had followed perhaps a third of it and resented none of the remainder, cleared his throat again and pointed his pencil at the manifest. "Excise stamps are genuine. Cleared Vienna Friday, bonded transit, released Saturday morning through the customs house on Hybernská. Somebody's cousin works the stamp desk, if you want my trade's opinion." "Somebody's institution," Nikolai said, copying numbers. "Men get tired. Desks get told." It was Jenda, gathering straw into the crate for the notary's photographing, who found what the packing had been arranged to hide, and his gasp brought them all around. Screwed inside the lid, flat against the wood, lay a sealed envelope of the fine treaty paper, and pressed into the red wax that closed it, deep and clean as a signature bitten into a seal ring, was the device they already knew: a brush crossed with a key. Hana slit the wax with a palette knife. One card, one sentence, in English, in ink the colour of iron: Thursday, at dusk, the old bathing jetty below the bridge; come alone, reader, bring nothing but your eyes, and we will discuss which of us the night belongs to. Below the sentence, where a signature goes, the wax had been echoed in the ink — brush, key — and beneath that, small, unhurried, almost courteous, a single line more: I will return what I borrowed. You will bring what I asked for. Neither of us calls it theft, because neither of us is lying. The cellar held its breath around the card. Down the street a tram tore its paper, and the sound came down the areaway faintly, like a rumour of the ordinary world continuing without permission. Viktor read the card three times, then handed it to the notary for the record, and felt the week tilt its weight forward onto Thursday evening, the way an easel tilts when the canvas is larger than anyone has admitted. "Then we have three days," he said, "to learn who I am going to meet."