第12章 The KGB

The enemy introduced himself with a chess problem, delivered by hand to Tomas's shop in an envelope bearing the letterhead of a Soviet cultural friendship society. The enclosure offered the framer's distinguished artist friend complimentary entry to a restoration lecture at the society's hall, enclosed the position from a famous study with white to play and win, and was signed, in a small careful hand, A. Volkov, attaché. Tomas brought it to Liboc wrapped around a consignment of glass, and watched Viktor go grey over the signature before asking whose name it was. Nobody, Viktor said, folding the paper along its creases until it was small enough to hate comfortably. Somebody who signed a train manifest once. The old fence looked at him for a long moment, then packed his tools, having understood more from the grey than from any explanation, and left the problem unsolved on the bench between them like an unexploded shell. His handler identified the man within a day, through channels that operated without telephones. Anton Volkov, the signs reported, had entered Czechoslovakia eighteen months earlier as second secretary for cultural affairs, a posting whose duties included exhibitions, exchange delegations, and the systematic mapping of every private hand in the art trade. Before that, Vienna, and before Vienna, Leningrad, where a very young Lieutenant Volkov had processed heritage crimes for an inheritance he never mentioned: among the papers photocopied into Viktor's brown folder, page four carried two signatures at its foot, one bureaucratic and forgotten, one belonging then to a lieutenant and now to an attaché. He has kept your father's file current, the handler signed, with something like professional respect souring into warning. Current files are instruments. Men who maintain instruments are expecting work for them. The lecture passed unattended; the invitation was a doorbell, not an event, and the summons proper came a week later through the leather trade, word reaching the schoolhouse that a motorcar would wait at a certain corner on a certain evening, and that refusal would be noted with sympathy. His handler argued against attendance with an economy that amounted to fury, laying out on the bench the three futures attendance permitted, none of them survivable as currently arranged. Viktor argued back with the single fact that outweighed the arithmetic: Volkov's office held the uncensored Pavel Orlov record, including pages the brown folder's compilers had copied but not included, including, whispered the leather trade's gossip, a final letter. For fifteen years the file had been a weapon aimed at strangers. Now its keeper offered to open it, and no amount of tradecraft could persuade Viktor that this differed materially from oxygen being offered to a drowning man. In the end his handler extracted terms instead of obedience: a fixed hour, a fixed room, himself parked outside with the engine warm, and a signal arrangement involving a window sash raised exactly nine centimeters, because even surrender, he said, should be conducted according to code. They met, formally enough, in the society's library off Nerudova, beneath portraits of writers nobody had read since their rehabilitation, and Volkov proved a man assembled entirely from patience: heavy, silvering, unhurried, with the eyes of someone who had spent decades watching interrogations conducted by lesser talents. Chessboard set mid-study, tea already poured, and on the side table, squared to the table edge, a gray folder that Viktor recognized the way one recognizes a coffin. The attaché spoke first about pigments, genuinely, at length, demonstrating a connoisseur's command of the difference between good restorations and quiet murders of canvases, and only when the tea had cooled did he move the folder six centimeters closer to his guest and remark, almost gently, that archives were the only honest biographies ever written, since nobody lies to a filing clerk. What followed was less recruitment than audit. Volkov knew of the Smíchov ribbon factory down to the clause numbering of the protocol; he produced the courier's bicycle-chain belt buckle from a drawer and returned it to the table with the delicacy owed to relics; and he recited the four-digit requisition code without notes, watching Viktor's face perform whatever it performed. One of the buyers, he indicated, sweeping the air above the chessboard, purchases pictures. Another purchases painters. His establishment belonged to the second category, and its offer ran as follows: the wall would be finished regardless, history being patient; the question was merely whose courier would eventually carry it south, and whether the carrying painter would survive the delivery's aftermath. Then he opened the gray folder, removed a single aerogram brittle with age and altitude, and slid it across, watching with total attention while Viktor read his father's handwriting for the first time in thirty years. The letter, dated from beyond the last telegraph pole, concerned small things by design. Pavel wrote that the hands remembered their trade, that larch forests made honest charcoal if one had winter to cure it, that a man should learn walls early because walls outlast testimony. In closing he mentioned, as if reporting weather, that the chapel at the camp's edge kept an icon behind its stove, painted over by some predecessor into a plain panel, and that he had begun, with permission indifferently granted, to uncover the face again for men who needed looking at. The letter ended mid-sentence, trimmed by a censor's blade with bureaucratic mercy, and below the fold the paper simply stopped, leaving the icon's fate and the painter's both to the archive's silence. Viktor read it twice. When he looked up, the attaché pushed the entire gray folder across the table, cover closed, and named his price, which was neither money nor treachery nor even the wall, but continuity: a standing acquaintance, monthly, over chess, during which nothing would be requested and therefore nothing refused, an arrangement whereby the institution would hold the relationship in reserve the way it held all its instruments. Viktor carried the folder out under his coat past a mirror he did not consult, raised the sash its nine centimeters, and rode south with the engine heat and the paper weight sharing his knees. At the schoolhouse his handler read the aerogram with the tenderness he reserved for evidence, then sat motionless long enough for the lantern to dim, and delivered the assessment that reframed the whole season. Volkov does not want you, the signs moved, slow and precise. He wants your employers to believe he has you, because a canvas delivered by a possibly turned painter is a canvas nobody trusts, and distrust between those two buyers serves Moscow better than ownership ever could. You have been converted from asset into rumor, and rumors are cheaper to run than men and cannot be shot. Then aloud, flatly, in the accent from nowhere, he added that corridors had schedules, that his own had just been revoked and reissued for dawn, and that Viktor should sleep dressed, since the war for the wall had entered the phase where witnesses were evacuated, expended, or exchanged, and no responsible professional leaves the sorting of such categories to other people's timetables. ---