第23章 The Framer

The shop smelled of varnish and old dust and the particular sweetness of beechwood being cut, and Otto Bergmann was standing at his bench with his back to the door, a plane in his hands, the shavings curling like pale ribbons onto the floor. He did not turn when Viktor came in, and that was the first thing wrong, because Otto had always been a man who turned to face his visitors. Viktor closed the door behind him and stood in the light, and Otto said, without turning, I thought you might come before the day was out. His voice was flat, the voice of a man who has already decided what he is going to say and is simply waiting to be asked. Viktor signed: I found the message in the wall. Otto set the plane down and turned, and his face was the face of a man who had been expecting this conversation for a long time, and there was no guilt in it, only the tired patience of a craftsman explaining a flaw in the wood. I didn't know what it was, he said. I knew the frame was wrong, he said. The stretcher for the Vermeer was too deep for the canvas, half a centimeter too deep, and I cut it that way because I was told to, and I never asked who told me, because that is how we have always worked, you and me. A man who asks questions loses his hands. That was your line, Viktor. I believed it. Viktor stood very still and watched the old man's hands, the hands that had cut the too-deep stretcher, and he signed: Who told you. Otto shook his head slowly, the way a man shakes his head at a child who has asked for something dangerous. A Russian, he said. Not the fat ones, not the ones who come to the pawn shops. A Russian who speaks Czech like a book, who wears a coat that costs more than my rent, who knows my name and the names of every dead German who ever worked this lane. He came to me six weeks ago with money and a question. He asked who painted the wall. I said I didn't know. He asked again, and I told him the truth, because the truth was cheap and my granddaughter lives two streets from here. Viktor signed: You sold me. Otto looked at him for a long moment, and there was something in his eyes that Viktor had never seen in thirty years of dealing with him, something that was almost pity. I sold the name, he said. Not the painting. Not you. I didn't know the painting was worth a man's life. But you knew, Viktor. You knew the day you copied that wall, and you painted it anyway, and you never once asked me if the stretcher felt wrong. We both believed what was convenient, and now a good man is dead, and you have come to my shop to decide if I should be the next one. The voice from the doorway was soft and precise, and it spoke in Czech, and it said: He should not be the next one. The next one should be the man who cut the stretcher, but only after he has told us who he works for, and I suspect you have already answered that question, Viktor Orlov. The man who stepped into the shop was older than Viktor had pictured him, fifty or so, with gray hair cut short and the kind of face that could have been a bank clerk or a chess champion, and he wore a coat that cost more than Otto's rent, and he carried himself like a man who has never once in his life been surprised. He looked at the two of them the way a restorer looks at a damaged painting, cataloguing the damage before deciding what to save. Colonel Semyon Sokolov, he said, as if introducing himself to a mirror. And you are the painter of the wall, which makes you either my greatest asset or my neatest problem. He walked to the bench and picked up a length of moulding, turning it in his long fingers, and Viktor watched his hands the way he watched any hands that touched his trade. They were not the hands of a soldier. They were the hands of a man who had spent his life learning to recognize the real thing, which meant they were the hands of a man Viktor could not lie to with paint. I have seen the copy you made, Sokolov said. The blank one. It was clean work, honest work, the work of a man who has wasted fifteen years perfecting a talent he has never once been allowed to use for something true. Work for us, and the painting under your floor stays where it is, and the frame-maker keeps his hands, and the file on Viktor Orlov the forger becomes a file on Viktor Orlov the artist. You have one hour to decide. Viktor did not answer with his hands. He looked at Otto, at the old man's face, at the pity still standing in it, and he understood in that moment that Otto had not known the depth of the betrayal he was a part of, and that it did not matter, because the depth was the same. He turned and walked out of the shop without signing a single word, and Sokolov did not stop him, because Sokolov was a man who knew that the best traps are the ones that close on a decision. Viktor was at the corner of the lane when he heard the single muffled report behind him, not loud, the sound of a hammer wrapped in a cloth, and he did not turn around, because there was nothing left at that address worth seeing. Otto had been wrong about one thing. The Russian had never needed the stretcher to find the painting. The Russian had needed the stretcher to find the painter, and now he had him, and the only currency Viktor had left was the painting itself and the thirty-six hours before the clock struck twelve. He walked back toward the river with his hands in his pockets, and behind him, in the crooked lane, the lamp in the frame-maker's window went out, and somewhere above the rooftops the first gray light of the morning began to wash the color out of the sky, and Viktor Orlov understood that he had been wrong about the most important thing of all. He had believed the work was the trap. The work had only ever been the bait. ---