第21章 The Note

He had believed it because belief was the cheapest thing a man could buy with his own life, and the handler had paid for it with his. Viktor read the note twice before he understood what he held. It was a list of pigments in the handler's tight, sloping hand, quantities in grams, a deadline scratched in the margin, eleven names that any restorer would have recognized and any policeman would have ignored: rose madder, emerald green, alizarin crimson, Davy's grey, titanium white, Hooker's green, Egyptian blue, Winsor blue, Antwerp blue, lead white, lamp black. Viktor read the first letters in sequence, once, twice, a third time, and the floor of the studio tilted under him. READ THE WALL. Not any wall in the city, not the plaster of his ceiling or the brick of the bakery below, but the wall he had spent eleven nights copying from the satellite photograph brick by brick, the wall he knew the way he knew his own knuckles, every crack and shadow and lit window. The message had been inside the reference all along, hidden where only a painter's eye would find it, and the handler had carried the key to it here, bleeding, to the only man alive who could read it. Viktor looked down at the dead man, at the paper, at the canvas on the easel, and understood with the flat certainty of a man watching a door close that he was no longer a forger. He was a witness, and witnesses did not last long in the economy he had chosen. He worked the way he had been taught to work over a failed canvas, without hurry and without noise. He rolled the Vermeer off its stretcher with the same two-handed care he used on a client's prize, laid it face down on the workbench, and slipped it into the false panel beneath the floorboards, the one his father had cut forty years ago in a different country for a different set of reasons. The satellite photograph went in beside it, wrapped in oilcloth, and the panel went back with a tap of his heel that sounded like nothing at all. Then he set the stretcher on the easel and stretched a fresh, blank canvas over it, because a room with an empty easel was a room with a story already told. He scrubbed the floorboards with turpentine and then with bleach, working the stains out the way he worked pigment out of an old brush, until the wood was pale and honest and the smell of the dead man's blood was gone beneath the smell of his trade. The body he wrapped in a drop cloth, the way he would have wrapped a wet canvas for transport, and he carried it down the narrow stairs to the cold cellar beneath the bakery, where the ovens had been silent for a year and the flour sacks were furred with gray. He did not know who would come for it. He left the door unlatched and drew a chalk mark on the bakery's shutter, the old sign, the sign that meant the house is empty, take what you must. It was the first time he had ever used it for a corpse. He could have walked out of Prague that night. He had no family, no lover, no lease that could not be broken, nothing but a room full of paint and the kind of reputation a man could sell in a dozen cities under a dozen names. He had enough money sewn into the lining of his coat to reach Vienna, and enough skill to vanish into any workshop between there and Amsterdam. He did not move. He stood on the cobbles with the Saint Christopher medal in his fist and the list of pigments in his pocket and understood that the man who had died on his floor had not died for a wall or a message or a network. He had died trying to keep a promise, and Viktor had been the promise, and a man who walked away from that could no more call himself a forger than a painter who walked away from a half-finished canvas could call himself honest. He would see the wall read. He would see the name in the bricks. He would finish the thing that had been started in his studio, because that was the only way he knew to pay a debt that had already been paid for him in blood. The papers were in his pocket. The handler had carried a Saint Christopher medal in his breast pocket, tarnished past all reading, and beside it a photograph of a woman he would never know the name of, and a Czech passport that identified him as Tomas Marek, a man who had probably never existed. Viktor stood on the cobbles of the Malá Strana with the medal warm in his fist and thought about the year of visits, the every-second-Thursday knock, the patient hands that had taught him the dead-drop signals and the chalk marks and the safe-house rules. He had never asked the man his real name. In his line of work, names were the fastest way to make yourself a widower. He wanted to believe that Marek had died for something clean, for a shipment, for a defector, for a reason a man could hold in his hands. But he had read the initials, and he knew the difference between a reason and a trap. He walked to the river and crossed the Charles Bridge with the night crowds, a man carrying nothing but his hands in his pockets, and he did not look back at his own window until he was standing on the far embankment under the chestnut trees. The light in the studio was on. He had not left it on. A shape moved across the glow, tall, unhurried, a man with a key to a door that no one had a key to. Viktor stood in the shadow of a saint's statue and watched a stranger move through his rooms, opening drawers, lifting the stretcher on the easel, tapping the walls with the knuckle of a man who knew where panels hid. He watched for twenty minutes, until the light went out, and then he watched the stranger leave by the back stairs and vanish down the lane toward Nerudova, carrying something flat and rectangular under his arm. The decoy. The blank canvas he had stretched, which a careful man would pry from its frame and study and find nothing but gesso and good intentions. Viktor let out a breath he had been holding since the cellar and told himself the name of the game. They had taken the bait. The real painting was under his floor, and the real photograph was wrapped in oilcloth, and he had eleven pigments' worth of initials burning a hole in his memory. He turned his collar up against the cold and walked to the tram stop, and for the first time in a year he chose a seat with his back to the door. He was a witness now. Witnesses watched their own shadows. ---