第27章 The Route

Sokolov came at dusk and let himself in with a key that had been cut for a lock Viktor had not known existed, and he stood in front of the finished wall for a long time without speaking. He read the way a man reads who has been trained to read, by stillness rather than by movement, and when he turned there was no smile on his face, only the satisfaction of a collector who has just received the receipt for a purchase made years ago. VIENNA, he said, in his precise Czech. You found it. Viktor signed: I painted what the photograph shows. Sokolov nodded, the way a man nods at a craftsman he has decided to keep. This is the second piece of a machine, he said. A machine that was taken apart twenty years ago and buried in paintings, because paintings were the only things that crossed the frontier that no one thought to search. He laid a third photograph on the bench, and Viktor looked at it, and something in the room went very quiet. The wall was the same wall. The bricks were the same bricks. But the shadow fell differently, and the mortar courses carried a message that Viktor had not been meant to find. He did not reach for the photograph. He had spent fifteen years learning to read the moment before the canvas, and he knew that this was such a moment, that the Colonel was standing in the room the way a buyer stands in a studio, watching the forger's hands before the work begins. Viktor signed: This is not the same wall. Sokolov said: It is the same wall, at a different hour. The third piece of the route. Viktor picked up the photograph and held it to the lamp and read the message in the mortar, and the message was wrong. It said PRAGUE, and the hour was wrong, and the shadow that crossed the second embrasure could not exist at the hour the camera had recorded, because the light in the photograph came from the east and the shadow fell west, and no wall in the world cast a shadow against its own sun. He had been handed a lie to see whether he would swallow it or cut it open. Viktor set the photograph down and signed, carefully: The wall says PRAGUE. The hour says noon. Sokolov watched him the way a restorer watches a canvas, and after a moment he said: And if the wall said noon, what would the wall be telling you? Viktor signed: That the route ends where it begins. There was a long silence, and then Sokolov smiled, the first true smile Viktor had ever seen on him, and it was not a pleasant thing. You are more than a brush, he said. A brush can be bought. A painter must be earned. The test had a name, and Viktor gave it to himself in the dark of the room that night: the Colonel had planted a false third wall to see whether Viktor would report it true or correct it to save the man coming along the route. The man coming along the route was the question now. Viktor had not asked it, because a man who asks questions loses his hands, but he had begun to lay the answer out on the bench of his mind like a set of pigments. The route began in Moscow, crossed Prague, and ended in Vienna, and the only kind of man who traveled such a route on purpose was a man who could not travel any other way, a man being moved, a defector, a man with something in his head that three services wanted. Viktor thought about the photograph of the woman in Marek's pocket, about the word FRAMER, about the shot that had taken a good man down on a floor that smelled of turpentine, and he understood that the man on the route might be the only living witness to that shot, and that Sokolov wanted him for what he knew, and that the third player on the far bank wanted him for the same reason, and that Viktor wanted him for the only reason that mattered. He built his own third wall that night, in the studio above the bakery, with the floorboard sealed and the oilcloth safe and the true painting wrapped in brown paper under his coat. He worked by the light of a candle, because a man who is building a machine must not be seen building it, and he stretched a canvas and painted the route the way it truly was, the shadow corrected, the hour corrected, the crossing at the northern end of the bridge where the statues stood like men waiting for a verdict. When it was done he wrapped it in oilcloth and hid it in the false panel his father had cut forty years ago, and he stood back and looked at the empty easel and told himself the name of the game. Sokolov had given him a lie to test his loyalty. Viktor had answered with the truth and kept a truth for himself. The route was a machine, and the machine had three hands on it now, and Viktor Orlov had just learned to be one of them. Josef let him in at midnight by the restorer's door, and Viktor spread the three photographs on the table under the work lamp, and the two of them looked at the route the way two men look at a map of a country they have both fled. Josef's finger traced the line without touching the paper: Moscow, the first wall, the name of a man; Prague, the second wall, the name of a place; and the third wall, the false one, which pointed back where it had come from. The Artists' Line, Josef signed. That is what we called it, before. It moved paintings across the frontier, and sometimes it moved the men who had painted them, and once it moved a man who had seen something so large that he had to be hidden twice, once from the East and once from the West. Viktor signed: The man on the route. Josef looked at him for a long moment and signed: There is a man in Moscow who knows who ordered the shot that killed your handler. There is a man in Moscow who has been waiting twenty years for this route to open again, and he is the reason the Colonel has bought your hands and the reason the man on the far bank has never left the board. Viktor stood very still, and the word VIENNA burned in his memory like a coal, and he understood that he had been given the third piece of a map that was not a route at all. It was a verdict, and it was coming west, and the only question left was who would be standing at the crossing when it arrived. He walked back through the sleeping city with the photographs folded in his coat and the candle stub in his pocket, and the man on the far bank was still there, patient under the chestnut trees, a figure that had become part of the landscape the way a watcher becomes part of the street. Viktor did not approach him. He crossed the bridge instead, and stood for a moment at the northern end where the statues kept their old coats of soot, and he looked at the bench where Rooke had sat with the false painting on his knees, and he understood that the crossing would happen here, on his ground, at an hour of his choosing, with a message of his making. He had been a tool for a year without noticing the shape of the hand that held him. He would not be a tool again. The route was coming west, and the verdict was coming with it, and Viktor Orlov was going to stand at the crossing and decide which of them would pass.