Chapter 7 The Handler

He never learned the man's name, because the man drew names from the calendar the way other draws draw keys from a board. In their first season he was August, then September, then October, each month worn briefly and set aside unmarked, so that asking who he really was became grammatically impossible, a question about a tenant who had moved on. Viktor came to think of him simply as the visitor, and later, when the full shape of the arrangement had hardened into routine, as his handler, though neither of them used the word aloud even in the privacy of signs. What he was, functionally, was the human surface of the folder: the institution given eyes, hands, and, unexpectedly, a sense of humor dry enough to strike matches on. The visits settled into metronome. Every second Thursday he climbed the lane stairs at an hour chosen from a rotating table, never twice the same, and stayed between forty minutes and three hours according to the work. He brought commissions sealed in brown paper and took away deliveries wrapped the same way, inspected the studio with a professional's wandering attention, and paid in the mixed, tired currency that had become the enterprise's signature. Between visits he was unreachable, which Viktor tested exactly once, through an emergency card left at the lion, and the test returned a lesson: eleven silent days, then a visit off schedule, then a gentle demonstration of how a telephone can be made to ring in a neighbor's flat. Messages traveled. Answers arrived. The system worked precisely to the degree that it could not be hurried. What made the association bearable, and then strangely valuable, was the second language they built together. The sparrow alphabet had begun with danger and money and the unsayable thing, but the visitor expanded it hungrily across that first year, inventing signs where the old code fell short, borrowing grammar from railway porters and deaf typesetters until the vocabulary ran past four hundred entries. They held entire negotiations while a hidden ear heard cutlery and weather talk. It occurred to Viktor more than once, with an irony he kept folded away, that his father had constructed this instrument against one secret police, and that it now served the daily business of another, history being a restorer who keeps the ground and repaints the figure. The visitor earned a claim on more than obedience one raw evening in November, near the end of his nominal month. Viktor had been walking home along the river parapet below the bridge when two uniforms stepped out of a kiosk ahead of him with the loose, hopeful posture of men fishing for papers. His documents were perfect, manufactured by himself, which is its own terror, since only the forger knows every flaw stitched into a forgery. Before the check began, a third man detached himself from the balustrade, displayed a wallet that stayed shut longer than courtesy allowed, spoke four sentences about municipal electrical inspections, and walked Viktor through the cordon discussing lamppost wiring at a volume calibrated to make eavesdropping tedious. At the first corner the stranger clapped him on the shoulder like a colleague, crossed the street, and dissolved into tram crowds. That evening the visitor arrived early and signed, without preamble, that the river route was closed to Viktor for a season. Nothing was explained. Everything was understood. There were also, rarely, evenings that belonged to no tradecraft at all. Once, after a delivery of unusual difficulty, the visitor produced a bottle of tokaji, dusty at the shoulder, poured two measures into laboratory beakers because the studio owned no glasses, and drank a toast to competent hands wherever they survived. Conversation drifted onto Weiss and the needle tapped against craquelure, and the visitor listened with the particular stillness he could assume, asking one question and then another, a man mining experience with great patience. Institutions keep originals, he said at last, turning his beaker so the candle burned amber through it, but people are permitted only copies, of places, of persons, of their own younger faces, and the art lies in making the copy generous where the original was stingy. Then he rinsed both beakers at the sink, dried them, and was once more entirely furniture. Viktor assembled the portrait slowly, from shavings rather than timber. The winter-colored eyes never warmed, but the hands told stories: old burn scars across the right thumb webbing, the sort paint thinner gives no one, a habit of standing where walls meet, sightlines covering doors. He ate nothing in anyone's kitchen and drank little anywhere, yet he carried sweets for the landlady's grandson on the floor below, unwrapped so the boy could see there were no papers inside. He never wrote a word in Viktor's presence and never asked a question whose answer he could count. Once, hearing the name Pavel spoken during a story about Leningrad stairwells, he went so quiet that the lamp seemed to dim, and afterward he signed a sentence Viktor turned over for weeks: archives outlive their subjects, which is why careful men die quietly. The arrangement held for nearly a year, through Biedermeier panels and manufactured family albums, until the October envelope changed its temperature. This commission did not arrive through the visitor at all. It reached Tomas directly, typed on paper like currency, with materials specified by name and a completion window fixed in weeks, and everything about its manner broke protocol the way ice breaks, suddenly and with cracks radiating outward. At the next Thursday visit Viktor laid the typed sheet on the bench and watched his handler read it twice. The man's face performed its usual economy, but his thumb whitened along the paper's edge, a tell so small that only someone fluent in him would have caught it, and when he finally signed, his hands moved slower than usual, choosing each shape the way one steps across rotten flooring. Not from my desk, the signs said first. Then: I was shown this order after it existed, which has happened to me once before, and that time people disappeared. Then, after a pause long enough for the stove to tick twice, aloud, in the accent from nowhere: paint it better than they deserve, and finish before the deadline, because deadlines in this trade are usually obituaries written in advance. He refused his usual fee for the visit, which he had never done, pocketed nothing, and stood at the head of the stairs for a moment looking down into the lane as if memorizing it. Goodbye was not a word either of them trusted, so he offered none. The door closed behind him with the softness of a thing deciding to stay shut. For a long time that night Viktor sat before the half-built wall, the photograph sleeping behind its Vermeer disguise, the forty-one tonal staves ranked like a choir awaiting instruction. Until tonight the work had possessed a single geometry: client above, courier between, painter below, all channels converging somewhere unseen but presumably coherent. Now a second geometry announced itself, some current running beneath the institutional floorboards, strong enough that a professional of the visitor's grade marked its existence and feared it. The commission had been ordered over his handler's head. Whatever wanted forty meters of Kremlin masonry rendered brick-perfect had gone shopping outside its own household to do it, and purchases made in that manner are always deniable, and things that are deniable are eventually disposed of. He trimmed the lamp, selected the stave for weathered lime, and painted on into the morning, faster now, because the visitor's parting arithmetic had converted craftsmanship into countdown. ---