第42章 The Cistern

The dealer was not hard to find. Nikolai had spent twelve years in the trade, and he knew the rule: a man who sells wreck goods out of a shop in the old town is a man who is never far from his shop. Kapanadze was in the bar two doors down, drinking wine the color of the harbor, and when Nikolai sat down across from him and set the drawing of the iron box on the table, the dealer's face did a small, practiced thing — the thing a face does when it has decided, in half a second, that denial is cheaper than truth. "Nice drawing," Kapanadze said. "You want to buy it? I sell drawings." "You sold the box," Nikolai said. "The iron box with the lead lining. The one a diver named Luka Asatiani brought you three weeks ago. You opened it, and you found what was inside, and you sold that too, and I want to know to whom." The dealer looked at the drawing. He looked at Nikolai's face. He looked at the quiet, sun-burned calm of a man who has been patient for a long time and is not going to be patient forever, and he made the calculation that men like him have been making since the first wreck was looted: the truth, this time, was worth less than the trouble. "I sold it to a woman," he said. "Two weeks ago. She was not from Batumi. She spoke Russian with an accent I did not recognize — not Georgian, not Turkish, not Ukrainian. She paid in cash. She did not ask for a receipt. She did not ask what was inside, because she knew. She had been looking for this box for years, she said. She thanked me. She left." He spread his hands. "That is all I know." "What did she look like?" "Forty, maybe. Tall. Gray hair cut short. Strong hands — the hands of a diver, or a sailor, or a woman who has spent her life pulling things out of the water." The dealer hesitated. "She had a mark. On her wrist. A tattoo — a circle, with a line through it. Like an eye with a line across it. I have seen that mark before, years ago, on a man who came through here looking for the same kind of boxes. He had it on his neck." Nikolai felt the sphere go warm against his chest — warmer, as if it were listening. The mark with the line through it. He had seen it once, in an archive in St. Petersburg, in a classified folder that should have been burned, photographed on the wrist of a keeper who had gone missing in 1968. The mark of the circle-breakers. The ones who believed the spheres should not be kept, and then the ones who believed they should not be kept at all — that they should be broken, emptied, silenced, so that no one could ever again decide which memories mattered. The woman had been looking for Azarov's boxes for years. And she had just found one. It was Anya who found the second half of the answer, in the church records of a village north of Batumi, in the ledger of a priest who had died in 1998 and had kept, among the baptisms and the burials, a list of the things he had been asked to hide. The list was short. The last entry was the one that mattered: a lead cylinder, sealed with wax, given to the church in 1954 by a man who said it had come from a ship that had sunk in the war, and hidden, at the priest's request, in the cistern beneath the ruined church of St. Nicholas, in the flooded crypt, beneath the water. They found the ruined church at dusk, standing above a cove of black water, its roof gone, its walls cracked, its bell tower leaning like a drunk man at the end of a long night. The cistern was beneath the crypt, a stone chamber half flooded, reached by a ladder that had rusted to lace and a rope that was older than both of them. Nikolai went down first, with a dive light and a knife, the water cold and black around his thighs, then his chest, then his neck, and Anya followed with the second light, and they swam through the dark between the pillars of the flooded crypt, the beam cutting through the water, the silence pressing in. The lead cylinder was where the priest had left it — lashed to a stone shelf with rope that had rotted to nothing, held in place by a hundred and seventy years of stillness. Nikolai cut it free. They carried it up through the water, up the rusted ladder, into the last of the light, and they opened it on the grass beside the ruined church, with the sea below and the dark above. Inside the cylinder, wrapped in waxed cloth that crumbled at a touch, was not a sphere. It was a map. A chart, drawn on skin, two centuries old, the coastline of the Black Sea rendered in a hand that Nikolai knew as well as his own — the hand of the man who had carved the symbols on the wreck, the hand that had signed the letters, the hand that had written the cipher that had led him, twelve years ago, to the iron box in the hull of a sunken ship. Azarov had drawn the chart in his own hand, and he had marked it with seven circles, placed at intervals along the coast and the deep water beyond, each circle labeled with a number, each number corresponding to a page of the cipher, each page of the cipher corresponding to a sphere. Seven circles. Seven spheres. And one of the circles — the fifth, the one farthest from the shore, the one that lay in deep water beyond the Crimea — had been crossed through, struck out with a single firm line, as if the hand that drew the chart had decided, at the last moment, that one of the seven would never be found. The warmth against Nikolai's chest had climbed to a steady heat. The sphere was not pulsing now. It was holding, the way a breath is held. On the grass beside the ruined church, in the last of the light, Anya looked at the chart, and then she looked at the crossed-out circle, and then she looked at him. "Five of the seven were in the vault," she said slowly. "We know that. Six, if you count yours. The chart says seven were made. So one was never in the vault at all." She touched the crossed-out circle. "One is still out there." Nikolai looked at the chart. He looked at the crossed-out circle, the fifth, the one beyond the Crimea, in deep water. And the sphere against his chest, which had been warm for two days, went suddenly, unmistakably, cold.